Thus week: Tranströmer’s ten thousand insect wings, the high shriek of a nightjar, moving at summer’s pace, an animal made of departure, and much more. Enjoy.

I can’t let the longest day of the year pass by unmarked. In the winter, I like to bake something citrusy and light a candle, trying to summon back the sun, but I spent the last solstice in the emergency room, tethered to a heparin drip while souls in assorted types of agony cried out—literally—all around me. Talk about the longest night of the year. This morning I walked under the midsummer trees, listening to chickadees and catbirds and great crested flycatchers and Tranströmer’s ten thousand insect wings, so maybe I’m ready to call it even with the universe. It’s good, you know, to be here.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Every Riven Thing” by Christian Wiman

Salmonberry bubbles
of sweet red light
break on our tongues.
Shooting stars
in the flowerbeds,
pollen in our sheets.

Sharon Brogan, Summer Solstice

We’ll stay up
late, light lingering
the first day
of summer,
til fireflies flash the seconds
before bedtime’s hour.

*
Notes

A shadorma is a poetic form of one or more 6-line stanzas, each of which comprises 3 / 5 / 3 / 3 / 7 / 5 syllables per line, respectively.

Maureen Doallas, Solstice

longest day
a fly through the front door
exits the back door

Jim Young [no title]

Watching the 1971 movie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my children recently – a VHS favourite of my own childhood and far better than the clangorous Depp/Burton remake – I was struck by something in the dialogue I somehow hadn’t properly noticed before. Interesting to note that although Roald Dahl is credited with writing the screenplay for the film based on his own story, apparently he didn’t come up with the goods promptly enough and the American screenwriter David Seltzer was called in to complete the script, including much of the dialogue. […]

It’s in Gene Wilder’s ludic, ambivalent portrayal of Willy Wonka that Selzer’s dialogue really shines through. The element which surprised me in my recent viewing was the sheer number of literary references the film contains: Wonka’s exchanges with the children and their families are studded with lines of English poetry which invariably operate as puzzling non sequiturs, flummoxing the nosey vulgarity of the parents. I won’t list all the allusions here but, for example, there are half a dozen allusions to Shakespeare, including “Springtime, the only pretty ring time” from As You Like It, “Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?” from The Merchant of Venice and, in the remarkable final scene, “So shines a good deed in a weary world” (slightly twisted from “naughty world”, again from Merchant of Venice).

There’s also Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (the opening line of Endymion); a line from the anthology piece Sea Fever by John Masefield, “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by” and even an Oscar Wilde bon mot from The Importance of Being Earnest, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts.” Also in keeping with the film’s comic bravura is a line from Ogden Nash, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker” (in fact this is a whole four-line poem entitled ‘Reflections on Ice-Breaking’).

In the strange levity the film left me with, I began to see Willy Wonka in a different light. Rather than just the playful, eccentric ringmaster of the Chocolate Factory, the fanciful inventor of his own enclosed world and its fantastical confectionery, (even the trickster and conjuror emphasised in the recent Timothee Chalamet off-shoot Wonka), could he be read as a poet-figure in himself, a Wildean dandy as his velvet purple suit and frilly cravat might suggest? Suddenly the song which Wonka croons when the children and their parents first enter the Chocolate Room – “Come with me, and you’ll be/In a world of Pure Imagination” – took on a new resonance. It seemed to link back to the Romantics and their worship of the Imagination and its transformative power, set against the mercantile, avaricious cynicism of the outside world. Wonka’s song is ushering his guests into a sphere of imaginative liberty and sensory blurring such as we discover in poetry, a polymorphic zone in which the harmful impacts of contemporary life on the children might be tested and challenged.

Could Wonka even be seen as a Virgilian guide escorting Charlie and the others through an underworld whose circles embody four (if not Seven) of the Deadly Sins, with each child receiving the “poetic justice” appropriate to their vice – Gluttony (Augustus Gloop), Pride (Violet Beauregarde), Greed (Veruca Salt), Sloth/Wrath (Mike Teavee). The nightmarish ‘Boat Ride’ sequence sees the hallucinogenic magic of the Chocolate Room suddenly veer into a bad trip, perhaps prefigured by the earlier song ‘Candy Man’ with its familiar 70’s drug hint. The speeded-up boat ride seems like a spiralling catabasis, that descent into the underworld which was a recurrent trope in ancient mythology, notably in the myth of the archetypal poet Orpheus when he ventures into Hades. The lyrics of the song creepily intoned by Wilder hint at this interpretation – “Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?/ Is the grisly reaper mowing?”

Some further lines of poetry recited by Willy a little later not only seemed remarkably familiar to me, they also reinforced this sense of the narrative momentum of the film revolving around counterbalancing forces of, on the one hand, poetry and imagination, and on the other, moral transgression and penitence. “We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”. Where did I know this from, was it Wilde again – surely something from the 19th century?

Oliver Dixon, The Music Makers

Almost every night, I walk. The darkness and I are familiar with each other; I meet it on my own terms. With my headtorch on, the world is reduced to a circle of light. Sometimes I fall and no-one sees, no-one cares, though green eyes shine in the forest. Gate posts greet me like friends; sheep scatter as I walk. In the darkness, yarrow and ox-eye daisies shine. The wild ponies feed through the night; they barely glance in my direction. A curlew is sleepless; over the sound of my podcast, an owl. There are foxgloves lining my path to home.

Exercise:

What taste is Monday? Which tree has the kindest personality? What shape is your anxiety? What texture is thunder?

Clare Shaw, Neurodivergent in Nature

It was the flapping
of loose shingles and the high shriek of a nightjar
from dusk to dawn. A tangle of sweet potato vines
crept toward your feet as if to say You think
your grief is original but what do you really know
of how things learn to sweeten in the dark?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

In the last few days, I MC’d a reading at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville for their Wine and Poetry series, with poets Catherine Broadwall and Deirdre Lockwood, a local oceanographer. It was warm and sunny (you can tell I’m wearing sunglasses because there was so much glare inside!), but it was a good night AND Glenn did his first ever open mic performance, which I wish I had recorded, where he recited John Berryman’s Dream Song 14. I realized he is a better public speaker than I am, lol.

We also tried a real birdwatching trek because someone had posted about seeing a Lazuli Bunting at a local park. So, forgetting I don’t do well in heat, or sun, or, let’s face it, outdoors with hills and a lot of brush and non-paved pathways, we went on an adventure to a well-known birding trail at Marymoor Park. Despite wearing long sleeves, long pants, shoes and socks, plus sunscreen and two kinds of insect repellent, I still got attacked by a tick on my wrist while I was taking a shot (brushed it off within ten seconds, but still managed to leave a bite behind that required a doctor visit) and a black fly (which I am allergic to), so after an hour, I had to call it quits. It felt like nature had personally attacked me and told me I was an indoor cat, and keep to my own space, lol. On the birdwatching side, we saw about forty Great Blue Herons fly right over our heads, I saw Purple Martins and Tree Swallows and Yellowthroats, and multiple pairs of Lazuli Buntings (which is my first time ever seeing this dream bird). Oh, and did I mention my three-year-old Sony camera’s motherboard went out WHILE we were taking pictures? I didn’t get as many good ones, but it was still fun to see those birds.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Solstice! A New Poem in Crab Creek Review, Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, Birdwatching as Contact Sport, Cyclical Economic Misery

Turkey became the second team to be eliminated from the World Cup this week after registering a record sixty two shots on goal without scoring any of them. This, I regard, as a spectacular achievement, for it represents the endeavour of the poet. The very best of us do not concern ourselves with hitting targets or clocking up points or reeling away to an adoring crowd after sending a sonnet sweetly into the top corner. Some of us try overhead kicks and fall flat on our arses, others fail even with a simple tap-in, can’t manage, in endless attempts, to slot that last line home. We miss the wide open goal, don’t know where or sometimes even what the goal is. So bravo Turkey, bravo for shooting and missing and shooting again. Bravo for those sixty two attempts without finding the net. Bravo for not being the first but the second team to exit. We poets are not in the results business, we are in the business of scuffing the turf, of hoofing long balls up the park, we are in the business of vague and hopeful shots in the dark because there is more to poetry, much, much more to poetry than just winning cups.

Jan Noble, N°69 Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie

Worlds collide all the time.  This past weekend, it was Jewish poets at the Yetzirah Poetry Conference in the Blue Ridge Mountains doing their poetry hootenanny alongside hundreds of ROTC kids shouting theirs. It was Jesus Freak! JC rocks!, a Christian camp retreat with snaking lines of African-American kids in identical T-shirts.  

It was bears with their hulking, early-morning shadows at the garbage. It was yes, ma’am and no ma’am.  It was the delicate mourning of one poet’s lines about her single plate and single egg while one single syllable (Rah! Go! Sir! Shun!) uttered by hundreds of thundering voices.  It was the war machine alongside the poet machine.  It was a twilight shriek that brought me to the ill-fitting screen window to witness the violence of a hyena and a dog, a raven and a mouse, what turned out to be the other animal in their rituals of lethal bloodletting.  It was Jewish poets wrestling with unholy bloodletting. 

It was poets on a mission to speak through and in the context of ancient values, in the poetry of Song of Songs, of humanism, of universal values. A tradition that bases itself on multiple points of view, on those voices arguing, dialoging, constantly confronting and refining each other is a tradition we must put forward.  It was our own scratching itches. It was a world where a sweet Asian intern at the YMCA’s coffee bar asked, “You one of the Jewish people? What do you say? – oh yes, Shalom!” It was an easy Shabbat Shalom, y’all.  

Jill Pearlman, Yetzirah, ROTC & Jesus Camp

It’s done. I have completed running. Yesterday saw me tick off the last stage (I think) of my midlife crisis (sort of wish I’d got into affairs and motorbikes) by running 53K across some hills as part of the Race To The King Ultramarathon. I am in awe of anyone that started and/or finished any of the races happening yesterday. Some absolute loons were doing 100K. […]

[L]ast night after we’d got home (and thanks to my beloved wife for coming to pick me up from Chichester), I was continuing my read of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems while sitting in bed waiting for my legs to stop throbbing and for the painkillers to kick in.

I must confess to struggling with the book so far..I’m not sure if it’s the onslaught of a collected works that’s a bit much, some of if I’m just not connecting to, or if I’ve been distracted this week while reading it. I do intend to go back to some of it, but when I have connected I’ve really liked it.

Mat Riches, Running Up the (Tobias) Hills

Leave it to a sunny day to turn a boring chord progression into a bright war against imperialism.

A day that shimmers you pearl-promised, tranced in rays of purple unhazed, unfazed by the boom of doomsday’s drums.

Leave it to a sunny day to steam your third eye clean, to make you feel so far out you can hear the stars sneeze.

Rich Ferguson, An Eraser Big Enough for Misspelled Skywriting

I’ve just finally gotten around to reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, in which he writes:

…[A]rt challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify that art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art…clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies…without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. [Salman Rushdie]

There are others who’ve said this. I think immediately of Audre Lorde:

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

What makes a person really a writer, really an artist, is–in my mind–this quality of necessity. And of the right to exist, regardless of whether the nation, state, government, religion, or other ideology suggests that one ought to shut up. For many years, I questioned whether I was, or would ever be, “really a writer.” Now, I feel that I am. Regardless of what the academy, the current aesthetic, the powers that be might say. There’s a deep contentment that accompanies this feeling: somehow or other, I got here; it has little to do with publication or public acknowledgment, and even less to do with remuneration.

Maybe it’s age. (Crone wisdom, anyone?) So, for any of my readers who are younger people, by which I mean under 55, who feel like impostors or dilettantes or who question whether they deserve the title of “a serious writer,” I’m going to suggest that you keep writing and endure. And maybe stop asking yourself so many questions about your worth. You don’t have to be famous or acknowledged to be a writer, you just have to be dedicated to writing and to learning about writing. There’s value even in that, in looking hard at the “rock experiences” of your daily life and endeavoring to make something of those experiences. Stay curious, stay unorthodox.

Ann E. Michael, Not a luxury

Realistically I’m still very, very far away from the idealised life with its little house in the countryside and several books of published poetry and an income from writing that means I can choose when and how much I undertake socially demanding work (and yes there’s a whole other conversation here about how the journey is the destination, but I’m not going to get into that now). But where did me of a few years ago want to be?

She wanted a job, any job that meant she could pay the bills; she wanted to work in a climbing wall because she thought it would be fun and didn’t know then that she’s AuDHD and a socially demanding role would take it’s toll; she wanted to get into route-setting; she wanted to publish more poems; to get a first in her undergrad and get on to an MFA; to move out of a terrible, terrible house-share that made her miserable; she wanted a car; she was lonely socially and romantically; she wanted to be able to climb 7b; she wanted to get out into the poetry scene and start building a career…

I work at a wall, I route set, I climb 7b, I’ve had a few more poems published, I got a first in my undergrad, I’m doing an MFA, I live in a friendly house-share in a better part of town, I have some great friends who I see here and there, I have a wonderful and supportive partner who’s caring and kind and aware of my capacities and boundaries and meets me where I’m at, I go walking and birdwatching when I can and those things fill me with joy, I run this Stack and over 100 people find enough value in what I do here to subscribe to it, I host The Space Poetic and The Poetry Book Club and a series of workshops and clubs and there’s joy and community in all of them…

I am living exactly the life a previous me wanted so badly.

Rachael Hill, Opening up the timeline

Hard to build anything 
these days but golden calves and temples 
to avarice. Like Lot’s wife, I’m tempted 
to look back, but ahead is a small rabbit,
crouched, ears low, still as stone.

Sarah Russell, February 2026

All in all the week was gentle and quiet. Joys included delivering copies of the group poem to the residents at the housing association, feeling physically better after a recent hysteroscopy, drafting poems about said procedure so that it is set down out of my head, finding out during a conversation with a friend that there might be an audience for said poems even though I thought they were possibly a bit niche, getting back out into the garden. […]

There has also been time for reflection and I have taken time to reflect on the same experience through two different lenses … the lens of poetry and the coaching lens. When I write confessional poetry I love the cathartic nature of the setting down and the rawness. I hear the words reflected back and see the human experience of the moment. When I think about the coaching lens I think about the helpfulness of the forward-thinking nature of coaching. How saying things out loud to a thinking partner can be far more productive than listening to the repeated thoughts of an internal voice. Saying things out loud in a coaching space helps with a more efficient and proactive untangling of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It was the coaching lens that enabled me to swap months of dithering for minutes of action. And it’s the poetic lens that lets me set down the experience for others to read.

Sue Finch, A SLIGHTLY BLURRED MIDSUMMER RONNIE

I’m teaching a three-hour virtual workshop on underworld poetry next week, preparing in bits and pieces as I carve out time for new writing, news-reading, and visiting loved ones who are struggling through their own purgatories (and in some cases exiting triumphant–my sister has successfully divorced the toxic narcissist, and there are celebrations throughout the land). My hope is for real connection with other poets across the abysses that strand us. I love a seminar-style conversation about poetry: no small talk, just digging into what matters, which can range from the subjects themselves that engage us to poetic strategies that might carry a reader along. Whether what comes to mind is death and decay or transformation and emergence, underground spaces have weird power and potential.

Below (hah!) are a few of the poems I’ll share in the workshop–the ones that are readily available online, because living writers ought to be able to drive you to their books for satisfaction. Poets go to dark places, deliver treasures, and don’t get much love or money for that labor. I strongly recommend Deborah A. Miranda‘s books–her poems, such as “Mnemonic,” can be fiercely geological–and there are compelling caves and cenotes in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s new Night Owl. Here’s another good one in Amethyst Review: “Cloacina” by J. C. Scharl, whose work I don’t know at all otherwise, but it’s an appealingly filthy poem. I’d love to hear about the ditches and basements, bomb shelters and swimming pools that haunt you, if you’re able to join us on June 28th.

Even if not, enjoy the following subways, scuba dives, and bog archaeology of influential 20th century lyric spelunking.

Lesley Wheeler, Sneak preview of Poetry from the Underworld

I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy of Catherine Balaq’s new pamphlet, Some Dark God, which will be published by V Press on 3rd July.

As the title suggests, these poems are dark and chthonic – they get their hands mucky in the soil, pulling out all the blind, wriggling things to show us. Darkness here is a thing that attracts, intrigues and repels in one breath. It is the “very dark God who is watching you”, the “soul-thin drapes” of a widow’s kimono, the “kitchen sulk at parties”.

“A darkness lifting itself above, / leaving a darkness in its wake” (Ceridwen)

Catherine draws on Ceridwen and other mythological figures such as Persephone and Lilith to subvert notions of power, shame and propriety. You do not need to know the full stories of these myths to understand that the speakers of these poems are speaking back, reclaiming narratives that have through history been denied to them.

I was interested in the pervasive feeling of unsettled-ness running through the work. Catherine knows how to work the darkness into us, like a splinter we worry at, while we read. There is an ambivalence to poems such as Witch Fingers that resists a neat interpretation;

broodish with thumb buckles, tucks of knuckles.
Touch me, neat-scratch me in ticking stripes,
pull me and push me down on my knees.

The sonic patterning is fidgety, jumpy, and the reference to “ticking stripes” has that kind of (dark) cottagecore feeling. Pretty things but with an undercurrent. Elsewhere, a “ditsy Liberty’s hanky” is used to pocket a rather frightening toad.

Victoria Spires, Seeing in the dark

Bennett’s book […] opens with a page of “acknowledgements & process notes” and a three-page list of “influences, references, & sources,” material usually held for the back of any collection. As Bennett’s “acknowledgments & process notes” includes:

Many of these are ‘found’ poems using text from various sources. We had originally set out to write about the divine shadow feminine but She will not be intellectualized, only embodied. As various illnesses took away my ability to use electronic devices & think & speak & write with coherency, She invited me to turn inward, dance deeper into Madness, & to use unconscious analog art-making methods such as cut-up, collage, & chance operations. &—although I don’t love this term, it smacks of the hospital, preferring instead to be divinely guided rather than operated upon—as adaptation.

The result is this rough beast before you.

Thank you for reading.

Assembled across three sections, each of which are constructed as extended lyric sequences that interconnect—“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus,” “The New Bodily Ethos” and “Excavation of the Colossal Mother”—there is something interesting in how one might see Bennett’s prior engagement with the sonnet as attempting to find order within a particular kind of chaos. Through the use of found material set in collage, a different kind of order, Bennett works a lyric structure more overtly chaotic, or, more likely, one that allows for a coherence through the chaos itself. Working with, and not against, what Bennett’s own possibilities provide. And in which Bennett’s compositional approach evolves from composing a poem with one’s own material, to being able to discern where the poem might already exist, within that same material. The pastiche provides Bennett a way to think through their improvisations to achieve something entirely fresh. Or, as Bennett themlseves write, towards the end of the second section:

      I rise & become one
in new shapes

rob mclennan, Roxanna Bennett, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

It’s hard to think of a less fashionable English text than More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (except, I suppose, possibly Jonson’s Ars Poetica). More’s Dialogue endorses the most dreadful form of execution for unremitting heresy, and it’s written in a conversational form of English as it was spoken in the 1520s — there is no punctuation in the original apart from the virgule (/), which is more like a breath mark than modern punctuation. More than anything else, the dialogue is about speech — the power and danger and beauty of talking to one another — and about language as it is spoken, in the mouth and on the tongue, as it is chammed (‘chewed’, one of his favourite words) and corrupted and turned to wit or wisdom. It is one of the great love poems to the English language.

As he turns to consider the risks of translation into the vernacular, More makes a remarkable comparison between translation and the divine venture of the incarnation:

Whereof I would not, for my mind, withhold the profit that one good, devout unlearned layman might take by the reading [of scripture] — not for the harm that a hundred heretics would fall in by their own willful abusion; no more than our Saviour letted [refused] for the weal [benefit] of such as would be, with his grace, of his little chosen flock, to come into this world and be lapis offensionis, et petra scandali (1 Peter 2), ‘the stone of stumbling, and the stone of falling’ – and ruin to all the wilful wretches in the world beside.

Translating is risky and difficult; it never works perfectly and something is always lost. How far off it is! that state of grace. But on those rare occasions when a translation really works, how close to us it seems.

Victoria Moul, What is translation for?

Bill Lavender’s city of god is a kind of serial epic of our times that takes the form of a dialogue with St Augustine’s book of the same name in the translation of the Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A. In a Foreword, Lavender tells us that he started the work as a ‘spiritual exercise’, expecting City of God to be similar in nature to the saint’s Confessions. He was, however, to discover that it’s an entirely different kind of beast, ‘a viscous polemic delivered in a tone of cynical derision and condescending parody, reminiscent of the radical right-wing polemics we see in popular media today, like the (ostensibly) new movement of Christian Nationalism’.

To add to the effect, Lavender began the work on the 6th of January, 2021, with images of riot and pillage on the streets of Washington overlapping with similar scenes on the streets of 5th century Rome and the fact that Augustine was writing in Hippo, a city on the cusp of destruction. Unsurprisingly, the work that emerged folds a good deal of politics, current and historical, into its weave.

Billy Mills, city of god by Bill Lavender: A Review

In the six years I have been writing reviews, I have rarely encountered a collection of such epic ambition as Hadley-Jones Hoyles’ A Ministry of Light (The Candyman’s Trumpet, 2025). The collection focuses on three periods in the history of the ancient British territories we would now recognise as Northern England and Southern Scotland: 350 AD, 525 AD and 700 AD. These are eras of turmoil, upheaval and instability, in which competing tribes contest ownership and control of the land. Hoyles renders this world through anonymous period voices, in poems whose cadence, alliteration and use of kennings recall early medieval verse and lend those voices a persuasive sense of authenticity. Although the collection is rooted in the distant past, it offers a resonant meditation on colonisation and its effects on communities, making it a work with considerable relevance for contemporary readers.

The subjugation of any community is a violent act, and this is vividly realised in Hoyles’ visceral verse. This is not a world shaped by diplomacy or mediation: relationships between competing tribes are determined by unchecked violence. In Eel at the deli counter, the poet presents a landscape strewn with the bodies of the fallen: ‘Breastplates scattered/ like shards of crab/ some tasty meats are clinging/ though them crows it seems/ have had first dibs/ I still have the option/ of Roman cheek/ or sun-dried Thracian liver.’ The image of the eel relishing the prospect of feeding on human flesh is arrestingly horrific, recalling the traditional ballad The Twa Corbies, with its bleak meditation on death, abandonment and the indifference of nature. The eel becomes a recurring presence in the collection: an immortal, detached consciousness that comments on centuries of change while moving between river, sea and land, and between different historical moments. In this poem, Hoyles uses the eel to symbolise nature’s indifference to human conflict. Violence becomes little more than a local disturbance within a larger, enduring natural order; the eel’s appetite gives that indifference a memorably brutal form.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘A Ministry of Light’ by Hadley-James Hoyles

Decades of film noir explain
how he dreamed himself—

pure Forties Bogart,
dinner-jacket suave, a cool
hand gesturing smoke,

a smolder censing
rooms thick with urbanity.
Struck from the film script:

his wife, his daughters
cleaning bathrooms, tasting ash.

Maryann Corbett, For Father’s Day . . .

“Eating Air” is a celebration of food and loving family connections. Du Bois has deliberately chosen a conversational, colloquial vocabulary that mixes Malay words and customs with English as a reflection of the poems’ messages. The use of food is not to separate but to combine and explore the possibility of new flavours and new traditions. A successful blend of mixed heritages.

Emma Lee, “Eating Air” Suyin du Bois (Emma Press) – book review

Zoë Walkington’s Missing Person (smith | doorstop, available here) was my reading matter of choice on trains to and from Leeds on Saturday. It’s ground-breaking: a mash-up of poetry pamphlet and police procedural detective fiction, in which we encounter suspects, and police investigators in a case of child abduction from an underpass in York. The reader is invited to read the poems and solve the case. I’m glad to report that yours truly did indeed crack the case. (No wonder I bought a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the book sale at the Leeds Library.) The richness of Missing Person lies, though, in the details – I have to say ‘gritty’ details. ‘Black Gloves’ opens thus:

How much for these? I ask the bloke
behind the trestle, who looks like
he has just eaten his own young.
And he looks me up and down
and says Seven quid to you, and I say
I’ll give you three and he shakes his head
as though I’m asking him which of his
Alsatians he wants to have put down.

The (black) humour here will be recognisable to anyone who read Zoë’s marvellous I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This (smith | doorstop, 2023). I won’t spoil the surprise and cleverness of Missing Person any further.

Matthew Paul, Recent reading and an imminent reading

I have been saddened to learn of the death, early in May, of philosopher, writer, and professor at Penn State University — and a frequent contributor to this blog —  Emily Rolfe Grosholz.  (Here is a link to her informative obituary.)

In remembrance of Emily, here is the opening stanza of her poem “In Praise of Fractals” — posted in this blog at this link back in November, 2014.

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres, 
nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
so variously lie about each other
and lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.

from “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz

This link leads to a list of citations of Emily Grosholz and her work in this blog.

JoAnne Growney, Sadness — Math Poet Emily Grosholz has passed . . .

In hindsight, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) appears as literary runner-up in the Great American Poetry Pageant of the 19th century. The crown, of course, belongs to Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), with whom Hunt, exactly the same age, had played as a child and became reacquainted late in both their lives. But although Hunt’s reputation has waned, as it might have done even absent the overshadowing fact of Dickinson’s genius, her poems, with their quiet innovations on received forms and their complicated interest in perception, continue to reward a reader’s attention.

Like the late sonnet “February,” from her posthumously published Calendar of Sonnets, Today’s Poem concerns itself with the natural world, but also with the human impulse to impose meaning on that world and then to read the world through that meaning. “Poppies on the Wheat,” which appears in Jackson’s first collection, the 1870 Verses, gives us an Italian landscape, in which poppies grow among the summer-burnished wheat, but its real subject is human perception.

The farmer, with his prosaically “heavy feet,” looks at the growing wheat and sees his harvest. The present holds no particular beauty for him, except as it foretells the prosperous future. The poet-speaker, by contrast, envisions a future in which, stripped of all other nourishment, she may sustain herself on the remembered beauty of the poppies, which promise no outcome except the memory of their beauty.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Poppies on the Wheat

Like all good poems, […] ‘The Trees’ [by Philip Larkin] grows richer when it’s read in relation to other poems. Those relationships, in turn, makes the ‘horror’ both easier to recognise and to digest. In the original piece, I talked about Tennyson, because I was reading Tennyson. Henry spots T. S. Eliot, and as Victoria Moul points out, that grief / leaf rhyme is everywhere in English poetry. There are, as so often in High Windows, ‘“furtive memories of once having enjoyed some French symbolist poetry” (for which see Jeremy Noel-Tod here).

Then again, we don’t even need to look outside of the book. Perhaps the most obvious companion poem to ‘The Trees’, is ‘Cut Grass’, which is placed towards the end of High Windows. Both poems are made up of three four line stanzas. Both are about the seasons: ‘Cut Grass’ picks up in ‘young-leafed’ June where ‘The Trees’ left off in May).

In other respects, as David Rees notes, they couldn’t be more different. ‘The Trees’ is argumentative, where ‘Cut Grass’ is pure image:

Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Ann’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace.

This is so straightforwardly beautiful that I don’t think it needs much comment. But on we go all the same. There is an extended metaphor in the first few lines — grass as life and death — before the poem turn into a series of images, whiteness piled on whiteness. Larkin described the poem as ‘like music’ and said he heard a melody kicking in around line six. The chestnuts that were ‘unresting castles’ in May are simply flowers here. Nature isn’t threatening, perhaps because it’s dying.

‘Cut Grass’ is one of Larkin’s little Edens. The poem is steeped in an Englishness which is both nostalgic (those lovely ‘lost lanes’) and hierarchical: the lilac is bowing, the cow parsley has its folkish, regal name. In that sense, it is a deeply conservative poem, but the politics is itself in service of the poem’s deeper myth-making, which is more about coming to terms with ‘the changing of the seasons’ than submission to any kind of human order.

Jeremy Wikeley, The Trees, again

Poets have a very specific occupational hazard: the warped representation of ourselves that results from our shortfall in self-knowledge. The poem is, neutrally, the most self-conscious form of speech humans can make, and those shortfalls tend to manifest in the way our poems project our own neuroses. All poems are generally ‘revealing’ of their authors, and can be psychoanalysed. I love Sharon Olds, but I suspect her habit of relentless TMI disclosure and confession is partly there to shock her parents. In the late Cantos, I’d say Pound’s absurd who-is–the-smartest-poet–of-them-all shtick is manifesting a lifelong embarrassment over the extent of his own bluffed scholarship. I’m not sure the lad could really concentrate. There are drugs for that now. (Talking of drugs: Plath had no choice in her own terrible lie, that voice in her head which told her death was the only solution. She was unlucky to get landed with imipramine, an old tricyclic; it has the notorious side-effect of rapidly flipping the bipolar cycle from elation to psychotic plunge. It’s unbearably sad to think that today’s meds might have turned that voice off.)

To return to the subject of making it harder than it has to be – sue me, but I think late Geoffrey Hill suffers from an explicit projection of the class insecurity (British grammar school county scholarship variant) and terror of God that, despite all the alleged ‘jokes’, saw his compensating authoritarian fantasies run out of control. I think the idea was that we were supposed to be very afraid of him. (Late Hill gave full reign to his worst stylistic vice, namely melodrama: this had previously been reined in by the wise habit of slow composition, something his SSRIs had destroyed. One was pleased he was happier, as I was pleased to hear that X was now sober; but don’t force me to pretend it improved their poetry. Hill had always apparently pursued the dubious logic that to risk being easily understood was to risk simplicity, and to risk simplicity was to risk cliché, but his late work displayed a pretentiousness that could approach the inadvertently ‘Pythonesque’, in performances that forcefully implied that to fail to share his precise store of cultural signs – and therefore fail to follow the metonymic contraction this shared knowledge permitted – was to be a rube or a philistine. He was a quite extraordinary poet, but I saw few signs that he ever caught himself on. When I watch him read, I still see terrible, existential fear, and I want to hug the guy and tell him he’s not going to hell. Heaney was no less erudite, but he never bullied his readers to make himself feel better. Sorry; I’m only banging on about Hill as his best poetry means more to me with every passing year.)

OK: I think we can probably agree that this is more of an unethical parlour game. But ‘what is X getting wrong about herself?’ is as good a question to ask of a poet as of anyone else. It’s an especially good one for a poet to turn inwardly. We may all be liars, but we can’t tell an honest lie until we eliminate those we tell ourselves.

Don Paterson, POETS ARE LIARS

It’s officially publication day for White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology! Many thanks to my friend and co-editor, Megan Volpert, for going on this two-year adventure, Madville Publishing for agreeing to publish it, Donna Kile for incredible cover photography, and our stellar lineup of contributors. And, of course, to the original sister of the moon, Stevie Nicks, for inspiring us all.

If you couldn’t attend the virtual launch reading on May 26 – Stevie’s birthday! – hosted by the Georgia Center for the Book, you can watch it on YouTube by clicking the link below. [link]

Collin Kelley, Publication day and virtual launch video!

Excited to share that my new book – No Way Home – is now available on Amazon in the US and UK, in Paperback and Hardcover editions. Am sharing the links below for those who might want to check it out.

Can’t wait for you to read it! And to hear what you think of it!

US: https://www.amazon.com/No-Way-Home-Rajani-Radhakrishnan/dp/B0H3PKVBCC/

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H3PKVBCC/

It has been three long, anxious months from completed manuscript to this point. I think I am ready now to spend more time on the blogs – catch up on all that I’ve missed and start writing some new poems.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Now Available!

Some poets find it hard to accept a poor review. Luckily, I don’t suffer from this kind of thinness of skin. I’ve had plenty of negative reviews in the past for books, whether poetry or not, and have been called all kind of disparaging names for what I’ve written in newspapers, so I have long accepted that this stuff comes with the territory.

Of course I want people to appreciate and like what I write. If I didn’t think the poems were any good, I’d not have wanted them to be formed into a collection. A collection should reflect what you think is your best work at the time it was sent off for publication. But as I said, once I’ve committed them to print, while it does feel really good when someone likes them and says so, they’re subject to the free-for-all of opinion. Or, if it turns out to be the case, subject to an utter and brutal silence.

It’s no secret that I am part of no poetry ‘school’ or clique, nor do I want to be. I won’t be entering any competitions or hawking the book around ‘collections of the year’ awards because they don’t interest me. I suggest those who compile long-or short-lists of books look first for names they have heard of, then fill out the list, mostly from the more acceptable, longer-lasting, grant-aided publishers, and finally add in a few small press books as evidence of their open mind. While any publicity is good publicity, and if a book’s title is on a long-list, that does help with marketing, it seems a fairly tired model to me and the prize largely valueless. The poetry books I buy in a year have nothing to do with a poet’s reputation. I might open them in a shop, physical or online, be intrigued by a poem, and so buy it. Or in the past, have heard someone at a reading and have bought the book on the back of it. I won’t buy it, simply because it won this or that prize.

Bob Mee, IF YOU WOULD LIKE A REVIEW COPY OF POEMS IN THE KEY OF AARDVARK, PLEASE LET ME KNOW

From 1995 and my first book, to 2025, my seventh. Thirty years of putting poems together and hoping they make sense, make more of each other, at the very least offer a view of moments in time. 

This one has taken about seven years. Some have been quicker, but this book’s poems accumulated slowly and even at the last minute I was throwing some out. 

It starts with a quote about sewing, specifically mending. My life in sewing began at school when one of the first things we were taught was how to mend a sheet. That was the 1960s. Early days for consumerism. 

Fear and loss are also linked in this book. It’s impossible to write today without acknowledging the enormous environmental changes I’ve witnessed – the loss of stag beetles paired with news footage of the Vietnam war. The loss of flies paired with love. The loss of beetles paired with lifelong friendship. 

I write about money, trade, the price of meteorites. And then there are attitudes towards older women, so ageing is another topic that feeds into poems about fear and loss. In one poem I demolish a desk, in another I am cursed, in another I place an older woman at the centre of the language of money. 

None of my books have been tightly themed but tend towards the surreal. I want to understand, celebrate, dive deep into human interaction and attempt to expand specific moments with a different language to that of everyday conversation. But I hope a reader will recognise the language of everyday in my poems, as well as the assonance, rhymes, rhythms that may not be attached to specific forms, but which give it a different tone. 

In the last section of the book, Estuary, the poems come from the fluctuating self who is travelling between two places, the place where you might encounter a saint, a preacher, a memory of childhood, where you might, like a cat, be led by a sense of home, navigate by lullaby. Where you might find yourself in hiding for a night and a day and make the most of it. The book starts with mending, ‘the sea rebuilding reefs’ and ends ‘at the mouth of a river/ with water birds’. Always the sea, and that’s the influence of my city caught between a pebble beach and rolling chalk downland. 

Making the Wedding Dress is available from Salt Publishing for £10.99

Jackie Wills, A life of mending

The work has changed over the years, but every time I think something new feels vastly different, on re-read, it is still very much the same. I don’t hate this–if anything I’ve gotten cleaner, leaner, and meaner in poems. the language is more rhythmic and concise than what I was writing a decade ago. Two decades ago. Three decades ago, I was just finishing up my undergrad degree and writing terrible rhyming poems, so getting toward something good takes time.  

While I would say many of the same obsessions that fueled book number one have similarly fueled this latest book which I am putting the very final touches on as we speak,  I think I am doing them better justice. More sure-footed and intentional than the girl who used to throw things at the wall and see what would stick. But then there are also how the obsessions wax and wane. They feel more fictionalized now, with the series in MKK almost feeling like small stories and worlds placed alongside each other in the whole of the book. The NOLA vampire poems, the Bluebeard sequence, the governess poems. There were definitely books that felt like there was more of me, personally, in them–MAJOR CHARACTERS…felt very much like this. As did FEED and RUINPORN, though there may be the rather obvious reasons for this–both were bread out of a time when I was losing my parents, restructuring my life, and undergoing a lot of strangeness in the world. But I suppose just because the poems are about other people, that doesn’t mean I am not in there, rattling around like a rock in the shoe. 

And maybe, my thoughts on mid-careerness are not about the writing at all.  Things have changed greatly in the past decade on how I look at my work and strive to connect to readers. To find the best way to situate myself and my work in a way that seems right, even if it is not the usual, well-trodden path. What I’ve found there is immensely helpful when it comes to charting paths in new mediums. To look at the scope of the playing field and be able to decide what works for me, what doesn’t. What I want and what is not all that important. It’s a better state to feeling out the world in, and ill probably be far more satisfying than the years I spent tortuously pondering what kind of poet I wanted to be, what were the rules and punishments for disobeying them. It’s actually very freeing. 

Kristy Bowen, dispatches from midcareer poeting

My Plan A was to be a university professor with tenure. In California, when you teach at a university, you don’t wear elbow patches; you wear jeans and blazers. My father, whom I only met briefly, wore those patches, smoked a pipe. For real? I thought. I wanted to become one of those West Coast-type jeans-and-blazer professors. That was Plan A. But it didn’t happen. Maybe in the future. But I have never taught at USC or any of the UCs, outside of extension classes.

We recently published an author who teaches at a public university in California and makes $310,000 a year. I thought, That could be me. My family would be living well. I would have a nice house/kayak/dog/car, take vacations like la-di-da. I always feel like when you have more money, it’s easy to lean into saying smart things because you don’t have panic in your throat, and that’s a good thing. I can picture myself with a well-compensated teaching job, waxing eloquent.

Instead, I’m on Plan B.

Plan B is publishing. Making a choice to jump headfirst into instability, risk, and recklessness. People keep asking me what I’ll do if saving Red Hen doesn’t work, as if there is a Plan C. I think, Come on, these plans don’t run to Z. There’s just Plan A and Plan B.

I’ve thought about it, sure. I could live in Sri Lanka or Vietnam on five hundred a month, but that is not the plan and wouldn’t fulfill me. Failure is not in our future.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s also healthy to say, I can’t make it without help. Every single person who has stepped up to say I am here to help you, we are finding a way to honor their names. We want to remember who got us through this crisis. We want to remember that we have friends. That we are not alone.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Moon Door

I’m lucky enough to have my own rowing machine, which we keep on our balcony during the summer months. The balcony looks out over two tall oak trees, leaning towards each other like old friends. As I row I watch squirrels chasing each other through the trees, leaping insouciantly from branch to branch to the accompaniment of a symphony of birdsong.

Meanwhile the display screen in front of me indicates the distance I’ve rowed, the time I’ve taken, my pace, stroke rate and even my heartbeat. At any instant I have a measure of my performance. 

Often I count along with the strokes, particularly when I am pushing myself towards the end of a workout. When I go to the gym I count too, lifting weights in sets of six or eight, and noting the number of breaths for which I can hold plank position.

This has led me to muse upon how numbers underlie our activities: whether we are counting rowing strokes, football goals, or tricks in a game of bridge; recording the distance we’ve cycled or driven; monitoring blood pressure; or marking birthdays on a calendar. We count the syllables in a haiku, the metrical feet in a pentameter, the notes in a musical scale. 

We (mostly) think in words or images, but numbers – in all their glorious variations, as sequences or patterns or absolute values – provide the unobtrusive ostinato of our lives.

I row. I watch squirrels and numbers, listen to birdsong, count strokes, and muse.  Sometimes my musings evolve into a poem.

Marian Christie, Musings

There were swifts over the rooftops last night — a low, screaming party of them, six or seven, scything the air above the lane in that way they have, as if the evening were a thing to be cut into ribbons. I stood at the gate and watched until the light went. They had come up from the south of the town, over the orchard, and they turned at the church and came back, and turned again, screaming the whole time, that high thin sound that is less a song than a kind of friction. I have been waiting for them since the first week of May, when one arrived and then was gone, and I half-thought I had imagined it. Now there is a colony of them, and the evenings have their proper noise. […]

A swift does not land. Not on the ground, not in a tree, not on a wire like the swallows. Once a young swift leaves the nest it may stay airborne for two or three years before it ever touches anything — feeding on the wing, drinking on the wing, gathering nest material on the wing, sleeping, it is thought, on the wing, climbing to a great height at dusk and dozing in slow circles through the dark. It mates in the air. By the time it first comes to rest, in the eaves of some building it has chosen, it has flown a distance that would have carried it several times round the world. We share our houses with an animal that is, in almost every sense that matters, made of departure.

And it is leaving us. The swift is on the red list now — the most serious category of conservation concern in Britain. The numbers have fallen by better than half in a generation, partly because the insects have thinned, partly because we have tidied and sealed and renovated away the small dark gaps under the roofline that they need. A bird that asks of us only a hole the size of a fist, and gives back the whole high theatre of a summer evening, is being quietly evicted by our improvements. I think about this when I watch them. The impermanence is not only in their season. It is in their tenure. […]

I have spent a fair part of these last years learning, slowly and against my inclination, not to grasp at things that are leaving. It does not come naturally to me. My instinct, when something good is plainly temporary, is to start grieving it while it is still here — to spoil the present arrival with the rehearsed loss. The swifts will not let me do that. They are too fast, too loud, too entirely in their six weeks of August-bound summer for any of that elegiac nonsense. They insist on the evening they are actually in.

That, I think, is what the solstice has to teach as well, if we will let the longest day be what it is rather than what we wish it were. The light is already turning. It has been turning, in fact, since before the swifts arrived; it will go on turning while they fly south. None of that is a reason to stand at the gate in mourning. It is a reason to stand at the gate. To watch the birds cut the evening into ribbons for as long as the evening lasts, and then to go in, and to let them go when their night comes, knowing they will lift off without ceremony and that the eaves will be silent by September.

Adam Cairns, The longest day

short pilgrimage…
some sun
in the side yard

Tom Clausen, illumination

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: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.

This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.

In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.

I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:

“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?

And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]

Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up

Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.

Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]

A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.

Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings

Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.

What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.

I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.

One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.

I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but

1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.

2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.

A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.

I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).

Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

It’s beginning to flood, my foot
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me. 

Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends. 

Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes. 

We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same. 

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

the buddha in the window well
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.

These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman

As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]

As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain

If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.

Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.

Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!

The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.

But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”

Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…

Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.

Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”

I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.

Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

[…]

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review

Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.

Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

looking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:

blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wall

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

ch-                         ch-
click                     of cows                     moving
up                         chalk                         downs
and me in the dip
gathering sun

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflection

This is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:

hear      the       chalk       rabbits
beneath       the          mountain
&    thru    the mountain    &    pray
&     ray     to     the     mountain

(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.

The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:

Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.

There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

i find myself craving primordial. to chart
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.

Robin Gow, 5/31

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.

On bark cliff faces,
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem.  Here are the opening stanzas of  ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022  issue.

Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.

He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)

I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.

One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:

I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski

I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.

I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.

I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.

With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.

When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.

When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]

Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

How to explain to someone else
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.

Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.

Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.

The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.

At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.

Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.

We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.

Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community

My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?

Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.

Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: becoming a living ghost, getting football fans to recite poetry, advocating for stupidity and vagueness, letting chaos turn to insight, and other adventures. Enjoy!

Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.

Dale Favier, A Compost Prayer

let’s wait for the accident to get cleared out let’s lie about our diagnoses let’s watch amerikka’s lunatic leaders preach like Aimee Semple McPherson back from the dead in a white shirt flapping her wings I dropped the script on the floor they gave me a loaded gun I slithered on my belly toward my car then stopped in the marram grass don’t forget your permission slips don’t forget the right side of my mouth all my teeth aching

Rebecca Loudon, Deconstructing the panic

In March, traveling in Ireland, our guide mentioned almost in passing that the Irish were proud to have had a poet lead them. She meant Seamus Heaney’s friend Michael D. Higgins, the poet and sociologist who served as President of Ireland from 2011 to 2025, and who was known to quote Neruda in speeches and has written movingly about the duty of the imagination in public life. Our guide said it with a kind of quiet satisfaction, as though this fact alone said something essential about Ireland’s values.

I have been thinking about that remark ever since, more urgently since Air Force One landed in Beijing.

Consider the contrast. In the United States, the executive branch has long been dominated by two professional tribes: lawyers and business executives. This was true when I delivered a paper at a remarkable conference on the spirit of cities in Shanghai many years ago — a transformative experience that left me with a question I have never quite been able to shake: why does one of the world’s most powerful democracies hand its government to lawyers and businessmen?

Leanne Ogasawara, How To Rule The World

In 2020 I wrote a considerable number of posts, both prose and poetry, for a series I called “Musings in a Time of Crisis.” Below, the twentieth post in the series, is one of the poems I wrote (I wrote another about George Floyd, who was murdered on Memorial Day that year). It seems more than fitting to post the poem again.

The poem references “the man in the White House”; the same one currently occupies “the People’s House.” That fact alone defies all reason, continues a crisis I could not have imagined would define the state of our country in the last third of my life.

Today, I also remember my father, who received an honors burial at Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where he has lain with two infant children since his death in the summer of 1990. Beside him now is my mother.

I honor my father today. He served in World War II in the famous all-volunteer group Merrill’s Marauders (a Time correspondent suggested the name), who were deemed “expendable” as they fought, commando-style, behind enemy lines in China, Burma, and India, who, lacking medicines, fought disease of all kinds, suffered a lack of food, and generally experienced all the horror that is war. It was a time my father did not talk about. My father would be appalled by the crisis his America faces today.

A tiny American flag marks every grave in Arlington on Memorial Day. May wherever it’s flown have meaning.

Maureen Doallas, Memorial Day

the museum felt like it was holding its breath.
clean. white. guards with ear pieces.
i wanted to see the declaration of independence
mostly because of the movie, national treasure.
i hoped it might have a golden map.
instead, the document stared back at me
from behind its glass. i asked in a whisper,
“is that it?” a piece of skin & a tissue box.
dull & worn. not like an elder fish’s gills but
like old stockings. like polyester thrift store bras.

Robin Gow, declaration

It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence.

That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).

Maria Popova, How Not to Dwell on the Past

I chose this poem because it represents that feeling of holding on a little too long to something you know you should let go of. At its essence, Dream Logic is a collection about heartbreak, but with a lower case ‘h’. The poems are quiet and long-suffering.

It is also about the way the mind can split off and begin rewriting the story, creating a kind of “what might have been”, blurring the lines between memory, nostalgia and dreamscape. I have always had an overactive imagination, and writing has been a healthy way to express that. I am often haunted by Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, waiting all those years and becoming a kind of living ghost.

Drop-in by Satya Bosman (Nigel Kent)

I wrote this poem in 2022 in Vamvakou, Greece, where I was introduced to the hawk moth (also called sphinx moth) after running from planter to planter thinking I was watching a rather drab hummingbird at work. Its caterpillar form is called a “hornworm.” None of these delightful facts fit comfortably into the poem, but I wanted you to know. I also—up until six months ago—had a grammatical error in the poem (dangling modifier) that no one had brought to my attention. Thank goodness for the copy editor that caught it.

Maya C. Popa, Four New Poems

Much-needed rain has arrived, and therefore I’ve been inside all day instead of out in the yard and gardens. I thought maybe I would feel motivated to send some of my poems out into the wider world. Turns out that the motivation was a decided maybe, leaning toward lethargy. Instead, I curled up with a cat and Jeff Burt’s collection The Root Endures (Sheila-na-Gig Editions).

Actually, I read this book a week ago but decided to take a closer look so I could post about it, because I like it a lot. Jeff Burt’s poems contain nature-images and close observations of creatures, plants, and weather yet keep reminding the reader that there’s a decidedly human component here, an interior character who speculates about what human beings are doing here, thinking about, recalling. And how the world is constantly in flux. The rural Wisconsin of the speaker’s childhood feels vividly authentic, and I learned about lime bogs and de-tasseling corn. (I love it when I learn things from poems.) The book seems autobiographical in narrative but never becomes as specifically personal as a memoir would.

And frankly, I guess I might identify more deeply with this book than other, perhaps younger or more urban readers would. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic suburbs, but I spent all my childhood summers in the Midwestern small towns where my parents’ extended families lived. I infer that Burt is pretty much my peer, age-wise; some of his remembered details conjure up a kind of resonance I enjoy. What I’d like to learn from this collection is how to sustain a longer poem, which he does quite well. Not a strength of mine, though I’ve attempted it once or twice with some success. A poem that has numerous short stanzas and travels several pages needs to keep my attention, whether I’m reading it or writing it. Burt’s title poem (the last poem in the book) does this, as does the poem “As If Copper Wire Sang the Unleashing of Time” and “Into the Standing Grain.” Maybe studying writers like Jeff Burt and others can teach me how to write better medium-long poems when a longer poem seems necessary to whatever I’m trying to express. I don’t think I’m interested in writing really long poems–think A. R. Ammons, C. K. Williams, Robert Lowell–but I’d like to explore length a little more.

Ann E. Michael, Rainy-day reading

Vasiliki Albedo & Lucy Holmes – Sardines (Dialect Press)

“but we hesitated at the prospect of jumping out of our tenuous

skins, of dampening the fervour to sample the oily salmon curve

of yet another Bandol Rosé.”

My goodness, I am a bit of a fangirl of these two. Singularly, of course, but together is also something different and quite special. Sardines is a gorgeous exploration of artistic friendship and collaboration. It’s brilliantly put together, with the email exchange between the two poets being just as fascinating as the poems themselves. Being let into these two minds at work, and at play, riffing off each other and their influences, felt like a real treat. It is, as they call it, both intimate and expansive, and it has made me look at collaboration in a new way, as well as introducing me to Frank O’Hara.

Victoria Spires, The thing is… books!

Sze writes measured, considered poems with a focus on the natural world and nature’s ability for re-growth after winter or human-made disasters. Humans here are ciphers, following orders or keeping to a narrow path without deviation. Nature follows different rules with respect for natural cycles, seasons and the ability to bloom after loss. There’s a quiet assurance here too. The tone is unjudgmental, even when observing that humans are the authors of their own misfortune.

Emma Lee, “Into the Hush” Arthur Sze (Penguin Books) – book review

I was very struck this week by an early poem by Tennyson which I don’t remember ever reading before, ‘The Palace of Art’. This poem is — rather brilliantly, I thought — the very final poem in the superb New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (OUP, 1994), edited by Jerome J. McGann. McGann’s anthology prints a very rich mixture of verse dating from between 1785 and 1832, in chronological order, under the year of publication. ‘The Palace of Art’ was first written and published in 1832, in Tennyson’s Poems — a collection that also included ‘The Lady of Shalott’, with which it has some obvious similarities. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is much more famous, of course, and on the whole I think deservedly so, since its fable of solitude, the soul and the insufficiency of art (“I am half-sick of shadows”) is so much tighter, mysterious and self-sufficient.

All the same, ‘The Palace of Art’ is an extraordinary poem. Tennyson started out as a romantic poet, and this poem is his leave-taking of it: a sort of peak-romanticism that is also the end of it. McGann aptly describes it as his ‘hail and farewell’ to romanticism. It’s a little bit like Milton’s ravishingly lovely imitation of Virgil in the Epitaphium Damonis, a poem that similarly ends by bidding farewell to the style it has so perfectly inhabited.

Victoria Moul, I have found / A new land, but I die.

I take the 75 bus, the service from Withernsea, back to Hull. The automated announcer says, ‘Next stop: Hull Prison.’ Do not pass go. The delightful 1932 East Hull Fire station has a motto painted above each of its three arched vehicle doors: ‘Ready Aye Ready’.

I get off at the interchange, next to Hull Paragon Station, location of both the well-known statue of Larkin and the Royal Hotel featured in his Symbolist-ish poem ‘Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel’, completed in May 1966. In his biography of Larkin, James Booth claims that the atmosphere of the hotel is largely unchanged since the poem was penned, despite a major fire in 1990 and subsequent restoration.

It’s a sonnet, of course, with the turn coming after the ninth line. Although far from being the only poem in his oeuvre to prominently feature light, it starts with ‘Light’ and includes the word ‘lights’ twice, as though hammering the point that this hotel is, and maybe hotels per se are, very brightly lit: ‘In shoeless corridors, the lights burn.’ I love hotels, and I love poems, novels (e.g. Troubles by J.G. Farrell) and films (e.g. The Consequences of Love, Some Like It Hot and The Grand Budapest Hotel) which are at least partially set within them.

A curious part of ‘Friday Night’ is ‘all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, / Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.’ Few of Larkin’s mature poems mention smoking – is ‘Essential Beauty’ the only other? – even though he smoked throughout adulthood. In a dissection of ‘Cut Grass’, in which ‘Mown stalks exhale’, Tom Paulin conjured the perfect phrase, ‘the anxieties smokers know’; not all smokers are necessarily anxious (do Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever get anxious?), but the overlap in a diagram by Mr Venn must be very considerable. All of this is a roundabout way of declaring my surprise that Larkin didn’t touch on smoking in his poetry more often.

The part of the poem which is undoubtedly the most intriguing is Larkin’s pressing-home of the point about the hotel being a bastion of ‘loneliness’ by adding the curiosity ‘How / Isolated, like a fort, it is’. Was he thinking of Fort Paull here? Or maybe Bull Sand, one of two Great War forts built in the Humber Estuary, visible from the end of Spurn Point, which is implicitly featured in ‘Here’ .

Matthew Paul, A bit of psychogeography

Mid-May is college commencement season here in the United States. It seems fitting, then, this week, to feature a poem about graduation. And our readers may remember George Moses Horton (1798–1883), whose “On Summer” appeared last July, as a poet whose own biography makes for the sort of triumph-over-adversity story so often embraced by commencement speakers.

Born into slavery, the sixth of ten children, on the plantation of a William Horton in North Carolina, George Moses Horton was an autodidact, teaching himself to read through hearing the Bible read aloud. He was the first African-American writer since the nation’s founding to publish a book of any kind (Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral had been published in London in 1773), the first writer to publish a literary work in North Carolina, and the only writer in American history to publish a book with an American press (J. Gales & Son, of Raleigh, North Carolina) while enslaved.

As a young man, sent from home to sell fruits and vegetables in nearby Chapel Hill, Horton began to make pocket money by composing love poems for students at the University of North Carolina. The students in turn supplied him with books for the furthering of his education. Today’s Poem, while not a love letter written for a college student, instead constitutes something like a love letter to the idea of The College Graduate and more: to the bittersweet appropriateness of leavetakings.

The verse itself, in abab quatrains of two tetrameter lines bracketed by trimeter, feels forced in places, with syntax inverted and the passive voice resorted to, to make the rhymes. Yet even where the poem strains to fulfill its form, there’s something compelling and charming in its voice. Adopting, at least in the first stanza, the persona of The Graduate, but inevitably conscious of the gap between that graduate’s future possibilities and his own, Horton writes of graduation as a kind of transcendence, as if the departing seniors were bodily assumed into heaven. One day, they’re at college; the next day they’ve simply vanished, “here to be seen no more.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Graduate Leaving College

Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness’s tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. A Romanian-Hungarian poet, she learned English (her primary language of writing) later in life, moving fluently between prose poems, haiku, and free verse, often channeling the feminist surrealist currents of Leonora Carrington, Aase Berg, and Aglaja Veteranyi. In 2020, she released a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of haiku known as While Dreaming Your Dreams (Mano Ya Mano Books) which received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She then released her debut full-length poetry collection, Moon Flogged, in 2024 through Broken Sleep Books, and recently released a chapbook through Ethel Zine called With a Swan’s Nest on Her Back. Her second full-length poetry collection Split / Game of Little Deaths will be out with Piżama Press in May 2026.

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

My first book, While Dreaming Your Dreams, is a collection of poems written in the haiku genre. A small independent publishing house in Spain published it in 2020, when I was already 43 years old. Even though my life did not change in a material sense, this debut proved I was resourceful and capable of turning abstract dreams into a tangible reality. Winning the Touchstone Book Award validated my work, but it also introduced an immense pressure: from that moment on, both publishers and readers expected nothing less than exceptional poetry. While writing a haiku seems deceptively simple, crafting a truly resonant one is a difficult feat. I realized quickly that I might not surpass the specific quality of the poems in my debut volume within that same form. Consequently, I put haiku on hold and transitioned toward short, lyrical prose, first in collaboration with my good friend Alan Peat, then independently. In essence, I have integrated a fragmented narrative arc into the surrealism and lyricism of my haiku roots. In comparing my recent work to my previous, I find that while the form has expanded, the core remains unchanged. No matter how much I experiment with structure, lyricism remains my second skin. Brevity and conciseness continue to define the sinews of my style.

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

Poetry is an intrinsic part of me. I wrote my first pieces —if I can even call them poems— while in grade school, writing in Hungarian, my mother tongue. At the time, I found them utterly silly, yet they must have possessed some merit as they were published in a children’s magazine. However, following a single rejection letter, I retreated from writing for a significant period. I briefly resumed during my university years, still in Hungarian, but abandoned it again, sensing my work lacked authenticity; I was merely attempting to mirror the voice of a well-known Hungarian poet. For a long while, I set poetry aside to focus on reading—interestingly, primarily novels rather than verse. Then, on a snowy day in 2018, a fully formed haiku suddenly emerged in my mind, composed in English, my third language. That moment solved my dual dilemma: it defined both the genre I was meant to inhabit and the language in which I would finally find my voice.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Réka Nyitrai

I went to find poetry, or those who might inhabit poetry, at a football match. It was a Friday night in Hull. And Friday night in Hull is the last place you’d expect to find poetry which is precisely why I thought I might find it there. There was of course a poem, Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel by Hull’s adopted laureate Philip Larkin. Larkin went out of his way to disengage from what you might describe as a poetic life, living instead as a curmudgeonly librarian in a rather remote corner of England, writing of absence and detachment with exquisite precision.

My idea was to get football fans to recite his poem. The Royal Hotel in Hull is now a temporary home for those seeking asylum and has been the focus of protest from both sides, the send-em-backers and the let-them-stayers. I’ll let you use your own prejudice to decide which group you think football fans are more likely to fall into. I felt the poem, written in the 1960s about a hotel in decline from its victorian splendour, carried new potency, might add some nuance, allow people to think differently, consider this delicate situation poetically. Lines like “writing home / if home existed” and “letters of exile” took on a different significance.

I had imagined skinheads with bitten off ears weeping and switch bladed hooligans grimacing, all delivering lines of poetry with passion or menace or unexpected sensitivity. It didn’t quite happen that way. I recorded a lot of footage and the fans were generous but most of them regressed, became nervous nine year olds at school being told by teacher to read out in class. They’d all much rather be at the football than making fools of themselves with poetry.

WATCH FULL FILM

I knew there was something in this project, a film of a poem being read by those who inhabit a different kind of poetry. I asked an actor friend and Chelsea fan Mike Grady to help it along, to offer a more considered reading himself. Mike’s done a tonne of Shakespeare, movies, TV and audio books across the decades and has that voice, you know that voice, the voice you’d listen to even he was reading an itemised bill.

Mike is calm and gentle and delivers the poem beautifully. Although he’s spent his career on stage and in film I believe he’d prefer his life to be as drama free as possible, that a poetic life is not one that he has any desire to aspire to. I’m beginning to think that most people probably feel this way. On my poetry walks I find I’m drawn to the poets who lived gregariously, lives punctuated with spilled drinks and broken hearts, knife fights and mad houses. Perhaps I need to redraw my map.

Jan Noble, Nº65 Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

This poem was a sort of whim I had, which I wrote down, then laid aside. I often saw the title when inside explorer, but didn’t open the file again, then called, “I Asked AI,” until this afternoon. When I read it again, I thought there was something there, and as I edited and rewrote, I ended up somewhere entirely different from what I would have guessed the poem would be. Which is what poetry is really, right? The journey you take while you move through it.

And I must say that my own ambivalence about the current conversations about AI certainly came out in this poem. I could write a long, long discussion about AI and I may one day, but for now let it suffice that I am a diehard Trekkie before all other things.

Here it is, thoroughly redone, with a new title. Let me know what you think.

Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

I asked AI
the price of milk.

She gave me a baby.

I asked AI
for breakfast.

She gave me
a potted plant.

I asked AI the time.
She gave me
a ball of string.
[…]

Rebecca Cook, Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

Adjacent to my current writing/ researching around memory, I’ve been thinking about the difference between intimacy and immediacy as both affective experiences and as literary/ artistic techniques. In the realm of experience the gulf between these two states feels immeasurably wide: the former is a slow foliation over time; it is predicated upon mutual vulnerability and care. One grows into the intimate. Immediacy, on the other hand, is a synapse-sparking collision in-the-moment. It’s the risk of exposure, the giddy high of arousal. Immediacy is instant and kinetic. Intimacy is profound. Both are vital components of what we might rather pompously call “the human condition”, but either on its own produces an emotionally and experientially lopsided life.

Within art and literature, things look a little different: inside of review-space, I see intimacy and immediacy used as virtual synonyms a lot (cards on table, I suspect I am as guilty of this as anyone), while stylistically, the former often feels sacrificed on the altar of the latter. In poetry – the one area I’m actually qualified to talk about – this appears as, but it not limited to: direct address, and a posture of unfiltered disclosure; a plausible musicality of language, often valorised under the rubric of “accessibility”, that presents little difficulty by way of intellectual assimilation and understanding. Immediate poems make a broad appeal to the emotions through the urgency of their themes and what I guess we might call the melodic “flow” of their delivery; they excel, I’d say, at their best, in evocative moments of lyric phrase-making. They tend to centre a stable-speaking lyric subject, and are often concerned with notions of embodiment and authenticity. Intimate poems, on the other hand, are slow-growers: they slightly resist readerly efforts to enter and understand; they might take a little time to parse, to locate who is speaking, where, and to what purpose. Which is not to say that all intimate poems are “difficult” or “obscure” – Michael Donaghy’s poems are intimate, but they also operate within tightly turned and self-contained conceits – I mean only to suggest that we cannot make the same kinds of ready assumption about authentic and unfiltered writer-to-reader disclosure within an intimate poem; there’s masking, play, a teasing-out required to identify a speaking voice and its relationship to ourselves. These poems are not necessarily in or of the moment; they posit other places that we have to work to access. I think the best intimate poems are those less concerned with the “flow” or “beauty” of their lyric phrasing, than they are with judiciously weighing each word and its placement within a line; this often produces slightly strange syntax, and a feeling that pressure is being applied to language in some way; that language is being thought about as substance and structure, not only as a delivery system.

To be clear, this list of tendencies is not exhaustive, neither are these two toolboxes mutually exclusive: there are plenty of amazing poets living and dead who deploy both sets of technique within their individual poems and across the broad corpus of their work. I’m not picking a side here either. I read both. I write/ have written / written with both. I like both. Ascribing a moral or political value to a set of stylistic and structural techniques is limited binary thinking that serves absolutely no one and is impoverishing to poetry as an art. What I will say is that we are at a place, in Space Year 2026, when the immediate is in the ascendency, that is, as a dominant style on page and on screen, and as the signal nature of our experience under late-stage blah de blah.

Here I do have a problem: because immediacy is a condition of capitalism. It is manufactured by capitalism, and it serves the aims and interests of capitalism. What is immediacy, after all, but a denial or a loss of mediation? A desire for the frictionless assimilation of ideas and experiences without the necessity to collide with opposing and obstructing otherness. I follow Hegel and Kornbluh here: the world – of things and ideas – only becomes what it is through its relationships with and to (the) other/s.
Knowledge and understanding require a process of moving through and bearing with difference and contradiction – it’s dialectical, duh.

And this is self-evidently true, isn’t it? No one is legitimately going to argue that abdicating thought and choice to an algorithm has enriched our lives or experiences of art, or that the ceaselessly scrolling echo-chambers of social media have benefited anyone but ket-cooked billionaire tech bros, are they? Okay, fabulous. On some level, then, we do acknowledge that social conditions replicate themselves in consciousness, profoundly shaping the ways in which we relate to the world and ourselves. Immediacy as a poetic/ writerly technique can be a useful tool; when used consciously it can also perform a critical reflection of neo-liberal conditions. A problem appears only when this particular technique is granted an undue supremacy (which, to be clear, it has been), owing largely to the dictates of a publishing marketplace driven by demand for zeitgeisty and easily-assimilable dreck – by capitalism’s endless cool hunt, and its race-to-the-bottom populism. So far, so icky, but so much worse than a prevailing style is when immediacy becomes a manner of reading, the dominant manner of reading, the way in which editors and publishing professionals are now trained to read – this, for the practice of art and literature – is absolutely fucking disastrous.

Fran Lock, “GRANTAGATE”

I’ve become lately very wary of ways of reading poems that assume an overall meaning, or that the poem has established images in it. I need language and articulation to play a role, almost from a dugout. This stanza really answered that need this morning.

A syllogism relies on simplified language, reduced vocabulary, simplified acts. Then it can assert a truth claim and test it logically. But this stanza isn’t doing that. I can spot bathos in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, for example, because the images, argumentation and narrative are clear, so it’s more like a farce, with twists (the clown unexpectedly doesn’t fall, the vicar does). In Pope, the play of etymology is clear and the diction under control so much that it’s like maths (vide D Davie). In this late Hill stanza, Hill is recognising that he has collected vocabulary in order to make Hill Poems in perpetuity. But he catches himself doing it, and throughout the sequence advocates for stupidity and vagueness. Hence the metal detector line. Showing what rings true, and also too automated. And then there is a sad sense of age throughout the sequence and in this stanza, hence that kind of career-bathos. The theme throughout the sequence is “life is a dream”, and so there are hallucinations and sour wakings and also glad wakings, both still alive and ailing.

Ira Lightman, Brief note on late Hill

I blame these threads on Roland Barthes, and his “rustle”, that sound of fabrics swishing against each other within a sentence or phrase, the position that welcomes friction, as he puts it in The Rustle of Language (italics mine):

“I am putting myself in the position of someone who does something, and not of someone who talks about something: I am not studying a product, I am taking on a production; I am abolishing the discourse on discourse; the world no longer comes to me in the form of an object, but in that of writing, that is, of a practice; I’m going on to another type of knowledge (that of the Enthusiast)” . . .

Elsewhere, Barthes mixes his musings, always imagining that projected work (ultimately, the Proustian novel that never happened). Under the title of “Book projects”:

Incidents (mini-texts, wrinkles, haikus, notations, playing with meaning, everything that falls, like a leaf).

What does that mean?

A non-book could be conceived: one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning . . . 

Incidents kept throwing palimpsests before me, to double the trouble of my overly-entangled interpretations.

Alina Stefanescu, The two-faced self-portrait.

It was only a few years ago that I first read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband. She writes at the end, 

“Well life has some risks. Love is one. Terrible risks.
…
On a June Evening
Here’s my advice,
hold.

Hold beauty.”

When I was in undergrad, back in Miranda House, I hated men so much that my friends gave me the nickname of spinster. Before Carson, it had never occurred to me to think of men as beautiful. These past few weeks, my Instagram algorithm has been showing me reels of a woman handing out compliments to men and I thought I have been called beautiful so many times in my life but I have never called a man beautiful even though I have seen the beautiful Flemish painting like hands of men making espresso behind coffee bars in Rome, or the statuesque pose of waiters in Parisian cafes, or Michelangelo’s David, their noses and day old beards, Caillebotte’s paintings of men rowing boats or working a wooden floor, their strong forearms seducing women. Their faltering voices over phone calls, their shy disarming smiles, their bicycles, and new sneakers, their excuses to have conversations or to hold a woman’s hand, their new crisp cotton shirts, or summer haircuts, jackets, and watches, their heads turning in corridors, or attempts at making witty charming comments. Their eyes full of weight and sadness, having seen life pass them by, the undereye bags after a night of insomnia, or throats almost choked with tears. Their fear, cowardice, and exhaustion. Their helplessness and repressed anger. They, too, were children once. Their restless fingers and nails and mouths that sometimes say things I barely hear. If one looked at them long enough, they seem almost as beautiful as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. 

Saudamini Deo, On seeing men

I imagine the shape of air, the way the air moves with the wingbeats of birds. How the air vibrates when it is moved by birdsong. I imagine how the air might remember those movements it was once made of, that it was once the medium for. Lost birds. Birds that once were. Their flight, their song. The geometry of a place: its birds, trees, voices, rocks, water, air. I imagine as scaffolding for time and space as time as space are scaffolding for those things. The air is and stands in for possibility. What was possible in the past, what is possible now, what might be possible in the future. What we still have and what we have lost. How might I consider it as an instrument to play, an archive to explore, and medium to live in. I frequently consider Walter Benjamin’s angel of history and the wind of history that blows it away from history. But I think also of the entire space it is in. The wind that blows the angel back into the future is somewhere. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a somewhere. I think of this somewhere as having multiple dimensions: time and space, certainly, but also memory, and possibility. This is the place where I find myself. Like the self, it is both a medium, a concert hall and a harp to play.

Gary Barwin, Ghost Birds: memory and the shape of life

Shield of Mnemosyne is not my first extended, large-scale poema (Russian term for such things). I’ve written around 10 of them over the last 40 years. What is the primary, underlying literary impulse here (aside from all the other forms and phenomena of motivation)?

I am traveling a path opened by Hart Crane. His path, in turn, was opened by Walt Whitman. Hart followed Walt down that Open Road into America… and built a Bridge for it. I am trying to build a poetic House (or Temple, or Church) – a way station along, or at the never-ending end of, that cosmic trail.

There was another modernist “epic” poet, who like Crane formally announced his Whitman affiliation : Ezra Pound. And a few of my few though very fit readers have noted Poundian echoes in my efforts. But it is the gift of Hart Crane, not Pound, which has offered me the closest aesthetic model and deepest poetic inspiration. My long poems are buildings. Humble shacks, homes, temples… made with song.

I have been an outlier in American literature for so long, it’s become second nature. But I think our literary and intellectual culture simply does not know how to pigeonhole, bracket and brand me to suit its (generally commercial/ephemeral) purposes. I’m not so easy to read : you have to climb into the rafters. You have to put two-&-two together. But my idiom is music – which itself comes to me from a deep well of air, a basic joy of breathing. I mean this in very a literal sense : because when I was four years old, back in 1956, I contracted GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome), a rare disease similar to polio. I was paralyzed up to my neck, and kept alive by a breathing apparatus called an “iron lung”. So I’ve had a special appreciation for the breezy river of air that is poetry ever since.

As it happens, I composed my first known poem later that year, in 1956 : a brief ditty about work vs. play, addressed to my father. He scribbled it down on a little cardboard key card, on his way out the door to work. My mother saved that little card; she put it in the mail to me, sometime around 2006.

Henry Gould, Behind the SHIELD OF MNEMOSYNE

I have a broader idea around what a ‘successful’ writing life might constitute for a poet. To have five or six poems that last a hundred years already includes you in the highest rung. Three or four, is sustained brilliance, and far beyond your generation. One or two, is the goal for the most of us – to have made the hours, the life’s commitment, somewhat worthwhile. Auden is very clearly of that second group. But I cannot help but now see an infecting slackness to the majority of his verse.

Before collaborating with Stravinsky, Auden also worked with Benjamin Britten on the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941). What rigour did he bring to the project? First, let me show the rigour he demands of others. Here is Auden writing on Hamlet:

Hamlet has many faults – it is full of holes both in action and motivation. The sketchy portrayal of Fortinbras is one. We hear early about his plans, when Claudius sends word for him to stop. Fortinbras agrees, but wants permission to pass through Denmark on his way to Poland. We see him pass across the stage on the way to Poland, and he returns when everyone is dead. This subplot is needed, but it is not properly incorporated into the play. The action involving Laertes also poses problems. When Laertes returns from France the second time, why hasn’t someone told him Hamlet killed his father, and when he storms the palace, why is all the excitement over in a few moments? Polonius is secretly buried. Why? Polonius’ death is necessary to get Laertes back to England, but again the subplot is not really knit into the action. And why does Claudius delay in killing Hamlet and make elaborate plans which could miscarry? Ophelia is a silly, repressed girl and is obscene and embarrassing when she loses her mind over her father’s death. But though her madness is very shocking and horrible, it is not well motivated. She was not so wild about her meddling Papa, nor was she tremendously interested in Papa.

We have arguments about the deftness of sub-plot integrations, plot inaccuracies, and, of special note, issues with character motivation. In fact, Auden’s series of Shakespeare lectures display numerous instances of sensitivity towards character actions and motivations – those of Iago and Othello a particular standout.

How does this compare then to his self-critique of his own opera, Paul Bunyan:

Babe, the blue ox who gives him [Paul Bunyan] advice, remains a puzzle; I conceive of her quite arbitrarily, as a symbol of his anima, but, so far as I know, one explanation is as valid as another. Nor have I the slightest idea why he should fail to get on with his wife, unless it signify that those who, like lumbermen, are often away from home, rarely develop the domestic virtues.

Here, we have the librettist confessing an ambivalence as to both why the characters exist and, also, why they act in the manner that they do. How do we begin to square the discrepancy between the two stances? On days that I am feeling unkind, today is one such day, I think that Auden felt the latter statement was allowably, flippantly brilliant because, well, it came from Auden.

On more objective days, my relationship with Auden is similar to my thoughts on Hugh MacDiarmid. Admiration tinged with a weary dissatisfaction. Yes, yes, there are those wonderful few pieces, but look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross… Countered by: yes, yes, look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross, but there are those wonderful few pieces.

I wonder what the community thinks. Does all the poor work even count when we consider a poet and their legacy? Or does this not matter, and do only the brief heights that a poet reaches count?

Niall Campbell, Being Frustrated With One of the Greats

Spring cleaning seems like an obvious metaphor for revision and assembling a poetry ms. It’s not unlike casting a hard look at the poems you’ve accumulated and clearing out the debris that clogs their pipes, whatever elements might interrupt their force for a reader: cliché, unproductive digression, wordy moments.

I’ve done some beyond-the-ordinary cleaning this year, too, as a person on sabbatical tends to–and maybe a person winding up the whirlwind of a book launch, too. First ritual is clearing junk out of the office, which is both helpful (what have I lost track of?) and restless procrastination (I think of a dog or cat circling around before settling into a comfortable position). I also clean, literally and metaphorically, between hard writing pushes. For a few weeks I keep my head down and focus; then I get tired and fuzzy, unable to see the project, so I do a variety of chores. This includes professional stuff like reference letters; personal stuff like getting a haircut; and home tasks such as tackling a closet that suddenly looks dysfunctional. Visiting my kids as they struggled also meant tackling cleaning tasks that overwhelmed them–hard work but genuinely helpful, unlike some other parental behaviors in face of crisis. While I sorted and scrubbed, I thought a lot about cleaning my mother’s home during her final illness five years ago. Sort the pills into a dispenser, throw out expired foods and buy new, and shine up the sink because you can’t shine up the future or make medicine actually cure a person–that sort of desperate labor standing in for all that I could not do.

While polishing poems is a good and necessary step, though, I’ll make a case for dirtying them up first. At least for me, first drafts usually hide something important. It’s hard to dig into the real mess of my thinking and feeling. That stuff is ugly, burdened with shame, jealousy, misdirected anger, lazy illogic, and other emotional and intellectual habits that make me look bad. But poems become more valuable to others when I’m willing to do the work.

Lesley Wheeler, Getting dirty for poetry

Then I was right in there
amongst bouncy pond weed, 
straggly ribbons of leaves
and those shades of brown and black in close-up.
Oh, the depths of it.
I was so cold amongst the stale green smell
but happy.

They shouldn’t have ripped me from it
just to wrap me in a stranger’s dog blanket.

Sue Finch, FINDING THE SHAPE OF THE GARDEN

Poetry in part is a way to impose order, or find and highlight order or patterns. It is skill of finding significance and meaning, but if you try too hard, are too attached, remember that meaning isn’t hard to confer randomly. Try “he’s such a ___” and add a random noun. {cucumber, cummerbund, paper cut}. Meaning isn’t hard. It’s near unavoidable with our meaning-addled brains.

The danger in poetry is to hard-close, to soothe too soon, to give a satisfying shape before the work. It is to speak like a bland or witty horoscope containing no actual thought, but flattering appearance of it, thereby manufacturing a patronizing poet voice of authority.

A risk is to make the work the packaging words and poetic devices, the hook and the resolution, instead of the deeper work of changing self, disturbing system defaults, growth, depth, letting chaos turn to genuine insight into systems or witness the discomfiting. 

As hard as it can be to be published, with 1% to 3% acceptance rates, the hard part of writing, the most active time is the making, the improving, the shaking up your own practice, the expanding or leaning into the weirdness of your brain. The sporadic hurry-scurry of pitching poems is work but is not The Work.

Pearl Pirie, The Work

I am not being dishonest when I say I don’t like waking up at 6am.  It makes me negative. I hear stories of high-achieving friends waking at sunbreak to write, to lift weights at the gym …different species.  It’s only the leaking of the sun through the blinds that stirs me – I take in the morning’s emanation, all objects like clay just thrown and still wet in that bluish light, waiting to be fired.  My nerves, like theirs, also quiver… 

If I have no obligations, I will drift asleep at 7 into a savage world of my own interior, my dreamer standing at the glass, eavesdropping and observing myself with such precision I am often aghast.  I have dreams that enact social satire about our tourist class – ‘What actually IS a Rhode Island?” – to appalling tests of motherhood – I’m really eating live flesh?  – to surprises of who’s in bed with whom in what country – the full screen of entanglements.  Then there’s the Russian doll metaphor.  Walking into a Banana Republic while living in a Banana Republic — oh images on the screen, how crisp and precise!  Get out your pith helmet, your jeeps, your fake smiles….

Jill Pearlman, Savage Truths of 7am

I’m planning for a writer’s residency and thinking about what makes for a successful residency – crunchy snacks? comfortable pants and shoes? Inspiring reading material? A set of goals? I want to work on my book that I’m still sending out and write some new work – either essays or flash or poems. I haven’t felt very creative the last few months for some reason.

So I’m hoping this time away will give me some new perspectives, some time away from social media, television, and the routine.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Green Herons and Goslings, AI Lit Mag Scandals, Planning for Writing Residencies

It’s been a long time since I did a guest slot reading – my own fault, I withdrew following a now-long-ago (first) heart attack – but I’m really pleased to say I’ve been pencilled in for the excellent Buzzwords in Cheltenham on Sunday, February 14, 2027.

Yes, it’s a long way off but that shows just how popular the Buzzwords set-up is – held upstairs at the Exmouth Arms in Bath Road on the second Sunday of the month except, if memory serves me well, for August.

I’m already looking forward to it. I read there years ago and tried to contribute to the open mic session when I could, but as I said, fell out of the habit.

Now, with the publication of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark (see image of cover below), I have a responsibility to get off my behind and do readings again and anything else I can to promote it.

I’ll get out to do some open mics where I can. It’s sad that Stratford Literary Festival no longer caters for poetry – ancient or modern – but I’ll see where the new determination to socialise leads. It’s brought back fond memories of reading at a variety of festivals, poetry groups etc over many years, so this, I suppose, is something of a comeback.

Bob Mee, OF POETRY READINGS AND MINDLESS FOLK WHO STEAL CHICKENS

It feels like the first week of summer, although it’s hard for me to pin down when summer starts precisely.  The last day of in-person class feels like a demarcation line, as does turning in grades, as does graduation.  I want to spend some time this week planning for ways to get back to creative writing, the non-seminary, non-sermon writing.  I want more poetry.  I also want to remember that this summer is the time I planned to put a new poetry collection together.

Here’s what I wrote in a December blog post:  ” I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly. I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground. The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.”  That blog post reminded me that I had looked at past manuscripts–do I want to use one of them as a skeleton/scaffolding or start by looking at files of individual poems?

I also want to return to my New Year’s resolution, which was also my 2025 resolution:   “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

Here’s hoping for some white hot writing streaks this summer!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Writing Intentions

The cusp of summer always means summer projects, which, despite my not being beholden to academic calendars any longer, still seems like a nice time to try to get some things done, although not with as much fervor and doggedness as that which comes with autumn. This summer, after I finish a couple of play scripts that are in various stages, next up will be my next installment in the Antiquities series. I have only been in research mode of late and made a few collages a couple years back, but I am determined to get at least a good first draft by September on a series of Calypso-inspired poems. Considering one of the first unpublished poems I wrote in my very first year of writing seriously in the late 90s, a poem called “Plentitude” that is probably way too bad to share now, it seems fitting this is where I go next. […]

My other goal for the summer is to start dipping my toe into submitting plays to theaters and contests once I’ve built up something of a body of work to actually show off. Things have been going well, and just this weekend, I was able to put a bow on the final version of my Macbeth witches retelling, as well as get the first act roughly rendered of something else that mixes 90s culture, teen dieting, and demonology that’s turning out to be a lot of fun.

Kristy Bowen, May Paper Boat

I have to say that the research I’m doing on the novel I’m writing about libraries and card catalogues and the future, is so much fun and taking me to the coolest places. In the old days, I’d probably share some of that here, but it’s the new upside down secretive world of writing that we now inhabit I suppose and it seems folly to speak about one’s projects. But one essay that pops out is by Umberto Eco, on censorship. He wrote it in 2009 and it feels like he knew what our times would be like, because it was a lesser version of the noise filled world then. This is when the world began filling with digital noise, “an excess of information.” He says, “This great need for noise is like a drug: it is a way to avoid focusing on what is really important….” He refers to Saint Augustine and “Redi in interiorem hominem,” return to the interior (hu)man.

The thing I find most interesting is that he also says that even when people are oppressed by “the most censorious tyrants” they have been “able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth.” And this is why he says that the biggest “ethical problems we face today is how to return to silence.” He calls for a study of semiotics of reticence, a semiotics of silence in political debate, in theater, and in other forms of communication. He asks us to consider the long pause, “silence as creation of suspense, silence as threat, silence as agreement, silence as denial, silence in music.” […]

We are in an imagination battle, as adrienne marie brown has said in her book on emergence. We need to invent new ways to see, to write, to be. Or maybe it’s a reclaiming of the old ways. I’ve been embracing my film camera, I always write with a fountain pen. I’m going to be on social media a bit less, I swear lol, or at least be there more on my own terms. I’m planning a reset time, turning it off for a week or so here and there. Maybe even a month at some point in the near future.

O’Donohue talks about the imagination. It is like a lantern, “it illuminates the inner landscapes of our life and helps us discover their secret archaeologies.” How to see the mystery and beauty ever-present?

We can cultivate the “grace of innocence” and tap into our “passion for freedom.” Our hearts are wild, naturally. We can still answer the call to a creative life for we know instinctively what that is. The imaginative life is one of mystery, ecstasy, joy, possibility, delight, revelation, and with some perseverance, perhaps transcendence.

Times are always changing; let us use this time, we creative souls, spirits, to reinvent what creativity is even. Let’s find new ways to share our work, new ways to create, perhaps more secretly or word of mouth. Let’s share with those who approach with reverence. The others never wanted our offerings anyway.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Talk About Word of Mouth, the Unforeseen, and Delicious Trouble

When I have created art that denies my authentic self—whether by erasing my shadow self, over-extending anchors, over-clarifying my interiority, self-questioning my patterns and symbols, or cleaning up language so that it doesn’t feel “too obscure” for the reader—I have felt a primordial sting of shame.

But when I’ve generously translated the creative currents within me without diluting them, I felt an existential, euphoric liberation.

What I have learned is that the writing doesn’t need to come with a map or key. Trust that the human heart will know its way. Indulge the mystery. Bend time. Let blue be green be garnet be gold. Resist the need to hold everyone’s hands, & to have your hands held. Let the underbelly speak. Get lost in the process. Push past the illusory. Relish in the lostness. Quiet the noise. Descend and translate. Look for the big fish in the deepest of waters.

You also never need to explain or justify your process. It’s not really about you or me. It’s bigger and deeper than us all. We are a splendid conduit when we get out of the way.

Lisa Marie Basile, The poetic permissions of dream logic & otherworlds

I keep trying to break
language into patterns that will mean something

beyond myself. I think of the mulberries I picked
from a friend’s garden, how even as half of them

sank into swift ferment, their skin still gleamed.
Night, too, presses its blue bruise against

the house walls. Everything can fold back into itself,
and my ghosts slip back like leaves into the pages of

a book. After, the air feels like it does after someone
has said something so real, it becomes unrepeatable

Luisa A. Igloria, Veined

Because we’ve lived in our house for forty years, my garden has suffered many changes of mind. And because roots can be very persistent, sometimes my older ideas re-emerge. This poem is the story of one of those reappearances, told in the classical meter known as the Sapphic stanza, one of my favorite ancient rhythms. […]

Stand there still, O vegetable love. Grow taller.
Soar and soften out to a ferny greenness
feathered open, branched to adorn these hoped-for
armfuls of roses.

Maryann Corbett, Asparagus

It’s the toadflax that gets me; those clusters of tiny violet flowers, pushing through gravel and tar. It’s the plaintain and horse tail ferns too, the black merrick, its optimistic puffs of yellow; it’s the dandelion, stonethrift, wild clary. It’s the beautiful bright things growing where they are not valued, or wanted; which insist on existing. A single purple Columbine, tall and conspicuous: I think of my trans friend in the Church reading hate mail signed In Jesus’ Name. All the people I have known who have grown in hard land, who flower, who were sometimes cut down much too soon.

I think of what lies under the tarmac; a cool world of roots, roots reaching to mycelium, a fungal network stretching far beyond the reach of each plant. I think of community, interconnection, mutual aid – the plants and mycelium network exchange sugars and minerals, water; how the network protects the plants from drought and disease. I think of pesticides and diggers: the best way to kill a flower is to take away sunlight and rain. The flowers will grow regardless of what laws are passed, what anyone thinks of us.

I think hard times are upon us and ahead of us. But we are flowers. We will continue to bloom.

Clare Shaw, Wildflowers and transphobia

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, SITTING IN THE MUD

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Beach Sunrises

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

R.M. Haines, BLUETOOTH SPEAKER YALDABAOTH

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

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

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

Tim Love, Continuous narrative

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

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

Rebecca Cook, The Sound of The Ocean

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

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

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

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

Marilyn McCabe, into empty sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is looping loss upon loss.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, To play with catastrophe.

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

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

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Luisa A. Igloria, Souls on Board

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

Fran Lock, ON MEMORY #2

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

Lori Witzel, Smoke

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Life expectancy begins to fall – poems

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

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

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

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

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

Eileen Tabios, PRE-RELEASE NOTES: COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, Self Publishing Myths Dispelled

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

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

I know what you mean. It is too unstable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I loved […]

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

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

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

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

and published it.

Jill Pearlman, Wedding Miracles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the next section addresses its value:

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

The penultimate section revolves around the title line:

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

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

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

Billy Mills, A Basket of Barnetts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, Two poems by Bob Hicok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tycoch

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

Caroline Gill, 14 May is #dylanday

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Complaints, critiques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

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

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

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

Maryann Corbett, Failing Astronomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I Sprint to the Finish

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

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

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

Tom Clausen, matrix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, BOGS AGAINST FASCISM

after the rain
sunshine dripping
from the fig tree

Jim Young [no title]

This week: the beast we were given, frothed verses of salt‑song, a man in a suit with pink bunny ears, a million mirror neurons, and much more. Enjoy.

Grass: The vitality pushing through us
is stupendous. The green appears
from monochrome, from the shade
into a shadeless shameless glow.
Every blade is singing from the force
of its lit universe. Psychedelic!  
No trade-offs, no slippery motives.   
Today, now, pick herbs from our 
healing garden. Leave the narrow places, 
(suffer the stabs of pain in leaving),
let the grass, even in the cruelest month, heal.

Jill Pearlman, Healing according to our Sages, the Grass

And the message from the universe came when said carrots were getting peeled. And I was rushing because I just wanted it done because then I could…uh oh! I temporarily mistook my left index finger for a carrot and managed to potato peel its tip. The fact it was THAT finger made me feel a bit wobbly so after I had rinsed it and hidden it under some firmly gripped kitchen roll, I chopped the carrots nice and small so they would be done in the same time as the peas, and then got Kath to pop a plaster on it to seal it back down so I wouldn’t see it. (THAT finger being the finger I once had an ‘axecident’ with.)

In the morning it looked a little sad when I removed the plaster, but I showered and nothing much happened except it was a little sore. Magic healing, I thought until I hit it on the basin when cleaning my teeth. And then the world went a little narrower than usual and much blacker.

Thank goodness for a wife who bounces out of bed on her only lie-in day, a local minor injuries unit and the kind and gentle nurse who helped me clean it up, applied steri-strips, popped a bandage over it, and told me I wasn’t making a fuss.

So this week I will be re-establishing the joy of focusing on one thing at a time. I will also be remembering to pause for stillness when I can hear that I am carrying a whole conversation of thoughts around in my head. I will be taking time to think about what needs setting down, and what it is that I need to pay attention to. And for an easy and quick reminder, I will be binning all the shoulds. They are definitely not helpful with their not good enough, critical tone. I will instead be thinking about my coulds and exploring their potential benefits and how they match with my wants rather than giving myself a hard time.

And if you see me peeling carrots in the future you will probably notice that I am intentionally quite mindful about it. Here’s to the art of zen peeling and listening to what we need.

I do of course have times when I truly revel in the way my mind can ask lots of questions and go off at different tangents in response to each one. So for this week’s poem I am choosing to share again a one that I wrote after tidying my desk one evening. During the day I had been coaching and had also reviewed a list of coaching questions. I wanted to organise my workspace and spend some time with my own creative writing to unwind. One of the questions on the papers I was filing away was: ‘What would you like to achieve?’ This question continued to echo in my head after my desk was clear so I used it as the title and set to writing…

Sue Finch, SLOW DOWN

I was asking myself, what have you done of worth yet today, and my answer, well you did dogear two new pages in your Tomas Tranströmer book. (Bright Scythe).

Shawna Lemay, Notes on Photography, Poetry, a Better Good Life, and the Eternity of the Instant

Shajareh Tayyebeh
— Elementary girls’ school in Minab, Iran
bombed during “Operation Epic Fury” February 28, 2026

Panic painted gentian arrows on our feet
between the carpal and the sour toe
a molecular transfer of energy the red
thread pulled us all the lure
and the reel pickled our sorrows
count on happiness as revolutionary
because the beast is at the door
carnivorous two headed
the secrets we were promised as dangerous
girls lying low in the tall grass
imagine the animal’s astonishment
finding us swimming there
arms finally let loose from their silks
it was a measure of time
we were not inevitable
violence or salvation
it’s all the same a constant ache
trade these stories like currency
in the land of indulgence
we were too small for fatigue
we craved the beast we were given
we will not be targets
of this horror 

Rebecca Loudon, April 17, 2026

Sixteen years ago on a day much brighter than it is this morning, my husband picked me up from the hospital where at seven months pregnant I had been admitted, days before, due to my baby’s movement’s lessening. I’d been given steroid shots to prepare for an emergency birth, and then a strange set of events; a domino fall of miscommunication, led to us suddenly not being treated as an emergency. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the story. This is not what I’m here to tell you about today. The story is exhausting. After sixteen years I find myself wanting on this day, the day of her birth and her death, to remember her as the joy that came into my life and changed me. Not the trauma that almost killed me. […]

Her grave in the tree shadowed cemetery, her headstone are the focus of my loss, in many ways, they are unchanging, but not still. It is a slow life, in the cemetery, her grave sees a seasonal life of slow changes and animals and insects, and I like that.This is a kind of life for her too. I find it difficult to explain, this concept that she is a part of the nature and the life in the cemetery, of which there is much and often it is this life that finds its way into the birthday poems.

The birthday poems are a way of immortalising her, and of marking the passage of time, of capturing the moments of loss as we grow around it. Unusually, perhaps because it feels like a significant birthday, I have written several poems for today, but most of them are for me, not for you.

This year, after sixteen years, I need to get her white headstone cleaned. It has become darkened, has absorbed the weather and the lettering is becoming unreadable. Tomorrow the stonemason will come and assess her grave. This is where the poem led me today.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, but I have a good life, and much of that goodness came from the experience of her loss and being forced to look at life in a very different way.

For this I am grateful..

The Stonemason’s Visit

The year has rolled over us, again.

Another day of cherry blossom,
of crow-call beneath the beech leaves,
of wind-blown roses; offerings
to the small god of your grave.

The white marble is foxed
with sixteen years of your loss.

I imagine the mason’s thumb
touched to the sharp edge

of your M, of our loved
and missed and wanted,

the way your poem is hushed
to him on the breeze:

you are still the first sigh of spring.

Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her sixteenth birthday.

I recently received my contributor copies of On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books, 2026), edited by Montreal poet and critic Sina Queyras, an impressive volume of more than one hundred poems by contemporaries, friends, mentors and fresh voices. I have three pieces in the collection—a poem composed in response to Kingston poet Steven Heighton’s death, another composed upon the death of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s beloved dog, Niko, and a third, responding to my own Covid-era birthdays, holding off on my fifties (“Forty-twelfth birthday”) until the whole crisis passed. Honestly, this is exactly the kind of anthology I’ve always wanted to be a part of, offering a rich overview of some of the best contemporary writing across Canada and beyond. Queyras has done a remarkable job assembling this work and I thank Queyras, as well as everyone at Coach House, for allowing me space within these pages.

The volume offers itself as “A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.” Poems for “occasions,” as Queyras offers, whether births or deaths or any other kind of event worth noting. “I start this introduction with bookstores and books because these are essential components in the life of a poem. Poetry happens like this all over the world. Poems are written at café tables and library desks,” they write, early in the introduction, “on buses and subways, in fields and forests. They come out of bodies, comprised of synaptic flares, offering glimpses of the divine, tapping into deep-rooted feelings that are cross-hatched all through the poem, threads of worry and observation. Poems are best shared on paper too, and in person: hand to hand, mouth to ear. I have spent the last fourteen years of my life making such occasions happen at my university in Montreal.” I like this notion of the “occasion,” and was reminded a couple of years back, while judging a poetry contest, how elements of the public view the purposes of poetry: poems elegizing the loss of a spouse, a parent, a pet. A poem for a birthday. Although Queyras also offers the idea of the “occasion” one of the public reading itself.

There is value in witness, the occasion. Value in acknowledging a birthday, an anniversary; or as atrocities occur, armies move and the bombs drop, whether close by or in another country. Ordinary moments are worth noting, as are the extraordinary. There is value as well in acknowledging resistance, survival and trauma, and how portraits remain incomplete if only the positive moments are offered their due. The world is filled with such moments, out of which the stories of our very lives are built. There are moments that require themselves to be seen, otherwise we become lessened through the absence, the dismissal. And thus, the space for writing, whether poems or stories or memoir or essay.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, jwcurry prodded at me that not every occasion deserves a poem, and that might be true, I suppose, although I slipped his complaint into a poem as well, noting that particular occasion. Throughout that particular period, I was more consciously following American poet Robert Creeley’s lead, as many of his poems did appear to be prompted by occasions, whatever that might mean. A drive in the car, or the dishes put away. Poems that were set in what also be called the “domestic,” another term used as complaint, usually against writing by women, on those subjects dismissed as merely theirs (children, household, family, etcetera). What, then, the occasion? This particular element of “occasion” is where my three more recent poems, composed across those first few months of 2022, in On Occasion firmly sit, I’d think. All three of these poems are from the as-yet-unpublished manuscript “Autobiography,” a collection that sits as the third in a trilogy begun with the book of smaller (University of Alberta Press, 2022) [see my write-up on such here] and continues with the book of sentences (University of Alberta Press, 2025) [see my write-up on such here]. The current work-in-progress, “Museum of Practical Things” [see my note on such here] emerged a bit later, after a break of a couple of years, during which I purposely worked on other projects, including non-fiction.

The notion of the “occasional poem,” as I have long understood it, is different than poems on the “occasion.” These are poems that don’t fit with anything else a poet might be working on. One might say this is all about approach: those of us working large projects might have poems that sit outside that project, thus are unable to be incorporated. The poems, as Michael Ondaatje once paraphrased Jack Spicer, can live on their own no better than can we. Not everyone writes this way, but for those that do, these outliers, at least for me, are few and far between. My outliers continue, cluster, and eventually form books. 

rob mclennan, Poems, on occasion

If memory serves, I saw the call for submissions right here on Substack, maybe a year ago, and now “Pandora Addresses the Court” appears in the section titled “Occasions of Public, Protest, & Address.” A whole host of personal faves, among them Karen Solie, A.E. Stallings, and Luke Hathaway, also contribute, and I’m grateful to Sina and the whole team at Coach House for giving this poem another home, and for all of their good work on behalf of poetry.

Because I am recalcitrant and weird, I opted not to provide a comment in the contributor notes regarding the occasion for this poem. The actual reason is that I find poetry far more interesting as a reader when it’s just me and the words working it out alone and don’t care to know what the poet thought she was doing. If you feel the same way, stop reading . . . now.

If you are well-adjusted and cooperative: The occasion that prompted this poem was Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, which I found excruciating in every direction, and so it was either launch myself directly into the sun or write a poem. 

Vanessa Stauffer, “Pandora Addresses the Court” (poem)

That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025)
Richard Scott

I am late to the party with this one. I have Richard’s first collection Soho (Faber, 2018) which I really enjoyed, and this one has been on my radar for a while but just haven’t had a chance to buy it.

However, one of our stops in Ireland was Galway, so I took Ally for a rainy walk to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop. It has the most amazing poetry section, and I picked up this and a book by Richard Siken as well at the same time (more on that later!)

This collection has entered into my top ten contemporary poetry collections (alongside such brilliance as Stags Leap by Sharon Olds). The subject matter is male-on-male sexual assault, rape and the trauma associated with it. Perhaps this explains why it hasn’t been on as many prize lists as it should have – not because of the subject matter, but because of the original and unique approach to language and formal craft that Richard deploys throughout the book.

The book is made up of three sections, and my favourite was probably the first, called “Still Lifes”. Each poem is a Still Life with something i.e Still Life with Rose, Still Life with Lobster, Fruit and Timepiece. In the notes at the back of the book are the painting, or paintings that the poem is in conversation with. It took me a long time to read through these poems because I was reading the poem, then looking up the painting and then going back to re-read the poem again. I’ve never really appreciated the particular genre of 17th and 18th century still life paintings that the poet is engaged with before, but now I’ve read these poems, I feel like I will never look at them in the same way again – which is an amazing thing for a poem to do – to change the way we look at the world, the way we encounter art. Of course I believe the best poetry can do this, but it’s always a shock when it happens.

Kim Moore, March Reading Diary

Readers of the April edition of The Candyman’s Trumpet, edited by the remarkable Sanjeev Sethi, will have been reminded of the rich seam of poetry and abundance of talent to be found on the Indian subcontinent. To that distinguished company can be added Saraswati Nagpal, a Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, whose debut collection, Drench Me in Silver (Black Bough Poetry, 2025), explores cultural heritage and personal identity through vivid imagery and reflective insight. These are uplifting yet economical poems that linger long after the final line. […]

For many readers, the cultural specificity of these poems — infused with references to Hindu deities and traditions — may feel unfamiliar. Yet Nagpal consistently grounds her work in experiences that resonate universally, particularly in poems addressing love and loss. My personal highlight of the collection, Love’s Absurdity, captures the paradoxical nature of love through striking and original imagery: “My heart must tumble like breakers / off a reef, beating their foam‑flecked / braids, moaning frothed verses of / salt‑song loss unforeseen.” The poem conveys both the exhilaration and vulnerability of passion, the uncertainty of a world in flux where “each moment is dusk, light leaving the sky / in purple splendour.” Yet it also offers moments of luminous contentment, when one “wakes wondrous / in warm hands, shadows dispelled / in the balm of his sun‑gaze.” Few poems, Shakespeare’s sonnets included, convey the emotional range of love with such intensity and lyric grace.

Loss, too, is treated with impressive delicacy. A daughter’s grief for her mother permeates the collection, nowhere more movingly than in Libation for Mother. Cooking becomes an everyday ritual that summons the mother’s presence, rekindling memories of being guided through the recipe at the age of eleven. There is solace in the realisation that the mother survives in both the dish and the internalised voice offering instruction, culminating in the image of the daughter “bathed in your sun‑laugh ringing in my kitchen.” Here, loss is tempered by warmth and continuity, affirming that our predecessors endure through the selves they have shaped.

Drench Me in Silver is an engaging and beautifully crafted debut that immersed this reader in an unfamiliar world, rendered vividly through sensory imagery and multilingual textures, while simultaneously exploring universal themes of identity, belonging, love and loss. It marks Saraswati Nagpal as a poet of considerable assurance and emotional intelligence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Drench Me in Silver’ by Saraswati Nagpal

This is a collection in four parts – Unravelling, I have never met Joseph Gilgun, Breadcrumbs, and Wendy. Each sequence has its own microclimate, but the weathers of each also influence the others. It is darkly funny, smart and knowing in its self-sabotage. Helen Mort calls it “a brilliantly controlled unravelling”.

Unravelling, the first part, is an intriguing mix of a highly innovative choice of format with a condensed, elliptical style of writing. At first, I thought it was a poetic maze, but on a few re-reads I think it’s more like a circle. Whichever direction we follow the logic, we end up passing back through the same spots. This feeling of stuckness fits with what the reader might glean as potentially a difficult subject matter. At the same time, she shows us the nuances of looking back at the before, during and aftermath of situations we may have found ourselves in – how there is no easy closure to be had. There is, nonetheless, a compulsion to pulling at the same threads and hoping for different results;

“You keep trying to edit yourself, like a poem. It won’t work.”

“Your path is littered with half-formed thoughts. You whisper to yourself, That one. No, not that one, maybe that one. You’re searching for something – what, exactly, you’re not sure.”

It’s hard to quote from the individual poems because, more than anything I’ve read recently, the effect of Galia [Admoni]’s work is in the accumulation, the 3am logics that spiral from one piece to the next. Her control stops it from being stream-of-consciousness – this is more like the obsessive cataloguing of the artist or the collector. 

Victoria Spires, Sad boys are not my kink

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Most sentences come to me fully formed while I’m going about my day. The only thing I have to do is make sure I write them down before I forget them. I collect these sentences in my Notes app until I have enough of them to see a narrative or image unfold. I then start shaping the sentences into poems. I trim away as many lines as I can until only the essence of the poem remains. This process can take 10 minutes or 18 months, depending on how capricious the poem’s central sentence is. It usually only takes one sentence for a poem to work as a poem.

4 – Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Everything I write begins in the Notes app. I usually start getting really passionate about a project once I’ve thought of a title for it. There are titles that have lived with me for many years. But it takes the right amount of experience and thought to write a book that fits the title I’ve envisioned for it. I try to be patient so I don’t ruin my ideas before they’re ripe.

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes! I love performing and reading my poems to people. It gives me a lot of confidence.

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The main question that runs through all in my work is: How vulnerable can a person be without getting ostracized? I often wonder what it takes for a person to be rejected by society. So far I’ve learned that people are willing to forgive sentimentality, but not cruelty.

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?
The writer creates a private space for working people. Most people have to keep their emotions hidden to survive at work, or in daily life in general. These people need stories to decompress. This is why, as a writer, you cannot afford to be vain, insecure, or easily ashamed. You have to put it all out there so that people without the privilege of emotional visibility have a place to go.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nadia de Vries (rob mclennan)

It begins with scratching out
the night sky, thread by thread, one
at a time, layering thin
line over other thin lines,
until only the full moon’s
light slices through. Next, days go
gray, glimpsed through lids or lashes …

PF Anderson, Darkness (#NaPoWriMo 19)

Taken as a whole, my work writing poems for strangers addresses what I call PMM—Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness—a disorder I believe affects all of us in various proportion.

PMM didn’t surface suddenly. The agricultural age became the industrial age, which became the digital age, transforming work from something you did tangibly to something you did intangibly. The information age became the disinformation age, and now, on the precipice of an even more Artificial (AI/AGI) age, authenticity is poised to become something of an anachronism.

“Authenticity” was the topic of my master’s thesis in 1993, so it’s been something of a lifelong obsession for me, as it turns out. Growing up on a Midwestern farm had something to do with this. Child of back-to-the-land hippies, I had a tangible relationship with the food I ate (because I’d gardened it) and the heat our wood furnace produced all winter (because I’d chopped and stacked and hauled it). Even the soap I washed with was handmade. (Did you know lye is made from wood ash? I knew it viscerally, at fifteen.)

My parents made the mistake of buying a farm in winter, only to find that, when the snow melted, they’d purchased an 80-acre junkyard. I was enlisted in the cleanup effort from age seven onwards. It was tough, but we eventually made a heaven of that mess. I didn’t love the farm. I often resented the limitations inherent in a rural lifestyle. But I also had a real connection to that land, the animals on it, and the life we built there. When I talk of “authenticity,” that homestead’s where I’m coming from.

There is no telling what will happen to humanity when the majority can no longer grasp after authenticity with any success. When nothing we encounter over the course of a day is of any substance. Or a week, or a month, or a year. How long is too long for a person to play at being human?

The world is watching an American presidential administration unravel under the pressures created by artifice. There is only so much fakery a democracy can bear. False narratives add up. Misdirection and distraction entangle. Conspiratorial relationships are volatile. Leadership that lacks integrity bloats and sags under its own structural problems.

This administration is a disaster, but I believe the underlying disaster that gave rise to it is PMM. Too many people are too far removed from the things that matter most. FOX News exploits this, big brands use it to sell products, and social media thrives on the dramas that result from it. The world economy is increasingly chugging along on these false fumes. “Data centers”—factories for the data mines that are already carting their loads of information from our bodies, our minds, and our hearts, into the dark machinery of industry, and its banks—are being built on what should be our nurturing farms. These artificiality factories are guzzling our real-life water, overheating our real-life air, sucking our real-life power from us, literally and figuratively. It is not a model of humanity to build a future on.

My prediction is that, as this crisis deepens, poets will have unique leverage on a lot of good rope. Poets are trained to question the language, not repeat it like AI’s “Large Language Models” do. AI is looking for patterns; poets are looking to disrupt pattern in order to mint fresh meanings. There is real currency in this.

Todd Boss, PMM: Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness

And this is the era of dementia, of the post-liberal order,
and all the celebrated maniacs have decided to build for us
a brain big enough to hallucinate the future of all
eight billion people waking and sleeping and driving
and walking through rows of parked cars in an age
of lifestyle-brand packaged-meat influencer-burnout bait.
These are the costs of love among executable files.
And this is my most complete answer, my most sincere
and faithful attempt to keep to the confines of the prompt.
Each world arrives like a glare from the police station.
Each evening is an exit from the pickle ball court. Nowhere
will you find a way to avoid the turn lane, the trash compactor,
the sound of plumbing, the trillion trillions of transistors
that bind our psyche like a musculoskeletal system
or a vast armature of steel and plexiglass and insulated wires.

RM Haines, DAYTON, OHIO / 20 SOMETHING & 6

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

[…]

If the king sleeps content upon his throne,
I doubt the poor will sleep undisturbed,
but if he lights the night with watchful eyes,
sleep will bring his subjects a soothing calm.
Thank God the Atabeg, Abu Bakr ibn Saad,
has made the proper way to rule his own!
The only signs of trouble plaguing Pars
are the women whose lunar beauty turns our heads.

A verse from last night’s party caught my ear:
“I held my moon-faced lover while she slept
and wanted nothing more from life than that,
but the sight of her so fully lost in sleep
moved me. ‘Your slender grace shames the cypress.
Wash this sweet slumber from your narcissus-eyes;
smile, show us your lips like rose-petals;
sing for us with your nightingale voice.
Why let sleep hide the mischief your charms can do?
Come! Bring the ruby wine you poured last night.’
She opened one indignant eye, ‘You say
I’m mischievous, but rouse me nonetheless?’”

Under the rule of our enlightened king,
no other mischief dares to stir.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: Umar Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel To Help the Starving

Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write. At eleven, he entered the labor force as an office boy for two lawyers, one of whom took the boy’s intellectual development under his wing and introduced him to the splendors of literature with a gift of a circulating library subscription. Within a year, he was apprenticing with the Quaker editor of a Democratic newspaper.

His parents — a twenty-one-year-old woman descended from a lineage of Dutch Quakers and a twenty-seven-year-old man whose ancestors arrived from England in 1640 on a ship named True Love — married the summer of the Year Without a Summer. The rosy-cheeked boy was the second of their eight children. Conceived the year Frankenstein was born, born months after the landmark legislation that proposed the abolition of slavery in Missouri and sparked the tensions that would eventually erupt into the Civil War, this Brooklyn boy would soon be shaking his young country awake from the slumber of complacency — not with preachings, not with politics, but with poems: poems that would effect more spiritual elevation, kindle more moral courage, seed more ideas of the basic humanity we call social justice, and thumb them deeper into the soil of culture than all the preachings and politics of his era combined.

“I would compose a wonderful and ponderous book,” he would resolve, not yet out of adolescence, his gray-blue eyes already drooping with a weary wisdom. “Yes: I would write a book!” And so he would — his life would become this book, then the book would become his life. He would revise it obsessively until his dying hour, expanding and republishing this swelling book, hoping it would beckon to “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.” […]

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” he writes. This overarching belief in the unity of everything, the interconnectedness and interbelonging of everything, colors his entire cosmogony. It would also render him wildly controversial, for he channeled this belief by writing about science and sex and the equality of the sexes and the races and the classes — ideas thoroughly countercultural in his day, in the most literal sense, for they are drawn not from culture but from nature. Verse after verse, detail after detail patiently recorded in his notebook, absorbed and distilled into some essential truth, he writes of the natural way of things, before society and civilization have disfigured them into biases and borders, into the hubrises and hierarchies of which the rickety scaffolding we call society is built.

At the same time, he recognizes that these hubrises and biases spring from the selfsame source as our noblest and most generous impulses, and in this recognition, he gives room for our own multitudes to unfold in his vast heart — the beautiful and the terrible equally welcome as particles of our humanity, for he knows that they are particles of his. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he writes in an era when atoms were still an exotic notion to the common citizen, an incomprehensible abstraction. Only by being porous to the whole of the universe, to every expression of existence, can he harmonize those particles — the cosmic and the earthly, the temporal and the timeless, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman — particles charged, always, by the reality of the present.

Because of his time and place and particular predilections, perhaps more so than any other poet’s in the history of our civilization, Whitman’s poetic development took place in the fragile, fertile ground between the personal and the political. Another titanic poet, Audre Lorde, would capture this fertility a century later: “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word I.” Walt Whitman was the great absorptive and adhesive I of his era. “The book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853,” he would later recall of Leaves of Grass, “absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Field Guide to Being Yourself: The Trial and Triumph of Leaves of Grass

Will it be saag paneer, warmly
green with spice, or pork belly
glossy under bar lights; that pupu
platter at Alkaline where cocktails
are cute and the sake is tinged
with the smile of tropical fruit?
It’s noon and we’ve changed
our minds at least half a dozen times
but there’s no need to apologize
or forgive the wild swings of desire.
After all, isn’t this our practice?
Tasting, arranging, revising,
paring away then calling out Wait,
bring back the menu? We want it all […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Come as You Are

As I stood in the queue to get into the gallery last night I felt old demons rise. The avant garde doesn’t like waiting in line. And as I looked around at others shuffling up or slouching out for a vape I heard myself say, “Well, at least the art crowd still looks the same.”

There were some familiar faces, people I vaguely recognised from past lives and I made sure my mask was on tight as I moved up the line. And between the elbows and the puffed out chests I began to think about my Sunday walks, my weekly saunter through history where, a mile at a time, I visit old ghosts, make connections with poets across the city. And how glad I am that they’re all dead, how they no longer have to put on show, how I can know them without wearing a mask.

Last week I walked briefly with Marlowe down Hog Lane where he’d gotten into a fight over an unpaid bar tab that ended with an inn keeper’s son being stabbed to death. I was rather glad I didn’t meet Marlowe while he was still alive but I took a vicarious pleasure getting to know him on a brisk Sunday walk. I wondered if I might manifest him here, summon him up, have him rush the gallery doors. Me and Kit, the bad boys of art, back on the PV circuit. I decided against it, politely gave my name to the girl checking the guest list and quietly I made my way inside. Everyone was on show.

A man in a suit with pink bunny ears. Another with eyeliner and heroin skin. A girl in a cape and a Pillbox Hat. They were all here in pleated beards and thigh high boots, with tattoos and tiaras and tantrums and traumas and tears. It was glorious and exhausting, I wanted stay and I couldn’t wait to escape, for what nourishes me destroys me. I needed the silence of my own solitude and this bold brightness to drown my disquiet. I had to go out for a walk in order that I might return. I needed a change in order to find more of the same.

Jan Noble, Nº60 What nourishes me destroys me

The Literary Business, Peter Finch, Parthian Books, 2025, ISBN: 978-1917140522, £20.00

How do you sell books? Get the customer to pick up a copy and then give you the money. Why is this so bloody hard?

This quote from quite early on in Peter Finch’s The Literary Business lays down one of the key themes of the book. Right through his life, from early days as editor and publisher of Second Aeon, through his time running Oriel Books and then the Welsh Academi, and on to the pages of this very book, Finch has sought to get the book into the reader’s hands. However, he’s also fully aware that the one valid counterpoint to his theme is the sad fact that there really is no market for poetry, and no end of poets in search of that non-existent readership.

…pretty much anything in the business of poetry could be made to generate an income, other than the poetry itself. Teach it, discuss it, review it, write about it, edit it, publish it, go on TV and talk about it. These were all activities that resulted in the transfer of money from one hand to another. But be the author of the actual poem in question and money would rarely head in your direction. The best the poet could expect was applause, now and then, if they played their cards right.

As editor of Second Aeon, Finch had first-hand experience of all the wrong ways of going about getting your work into print, among the results being his excellent, and still relevant, How To Publish Your Poetry, a kind of guidebook for the obsessed and his contributions to The Writers Handbook.

Even after Oriel, whose death by a thousand administrative cuts is related in the book, the bookselling impulse continues, so that, for example, in a much later chapter on Chris Torrance, Finch tells the interested reader how to find out about a forthcoming title, Path: the later work of Chris Torrance, that will bring Torrance’s Magic Door sequence to a posthumous close. (As you asked so nicely, the answer is here.)

But there’s a lot more to this book than that. Part memoir, part pen-pictures of other poets and literary figures, part history of Welsh poetry since the 1960s, it’s an invigorating, often humorous read. And there are heroes: Torrance, John Tripp, Bob Cobbing, numerous booksellers and, more than anyone, Meic Stephens, the arts administrator, publisher, singer, Welsh nationalist (to understate his role wildly) whose activities made so much of what Finch charts here possible. As Finch puts it, Stephens didn’t enter the mainstream, his strategy lay in ‘creating that mainstream and wrapping it around himself’. A worthy hero indeed.

Billy Mills, The Literary Business by Peter Finch: A Review

not, in fact, the newest member of our team, but a bobble-headed novelty: a mascot.

not, in fact, a friend to the up-and-coming poet, but a rung on his ladder, a photo-op.

never a contender, the shortlist of two was the other candidate’s name. twice.

not, in fact, valued, or wanted, or loved. but so fucking useful, and so fucking nice.

Fran Lock, REALISATION DITTY

Today, April 17, is Haiku Poetry Day! To celebrate, I’m sharing a piece on a classic haiku theme: cherry blossoms.

Last spring, on a visit to my sister Yoshi’s house, I noticed that her flowering cherry tree was absolutely humming with hundreds of honeybees.

That inspired a haiku:

spring fever
the whole tree
buzzing

At home later, I mixed acrylic paints in the colors I wanted. I then used a gel press to apply the paint to an old typewritten letter, an insurance statement, rice paper embedded with mango leaves, and other specialty papers from Asia.

Using reference photos, I carefully tore the pieces into the desired shapes, then laid them in place on the cradled wood panel.

Next I took a second panel, placed it on top of the first one, and flipped both together. Now the whole collage lay upside down on the spare panel, so that the background pieces—the first ones I needed to glue down—were on top. I then worked my way up to the foreground pieces.

Inspired by the Japanese tradition of haiga (art combined with haiku), I added the haiku to the collage digitally. It is the April art for my 2026 calendar, and I also made a birthday card version, above.

Every spring, I spend some time with a Yoshino cherry tree on our country road, soaking in the delicate beauty of the pale pink blossoms. The experience is joyful with a tinge of heartbreak, knowing how briefly this stage will last.

blossom season
earlier each year
this fleeting world

It’s the impermanence itself that makes these days of peak blossom so precious. The bees certainly seem to know they need to make the most of the moment! Happy spring and happy Haiku Poetry Day.

Annette Makino, Cherry blossoms for Haiku Poetry Day

This newsletter has swung between the two poles of my writing life for the past two years: The leadership writing for tech companies and executives that is the foundation of my leadership communications consultancy, and the creative work that is the heart of my writing practice.

Perhaps this seems a bit mixed-up. But the two are actually deeply connected. Yes, the business writing is more focused, the creative work more expressive. The business writing is more about tech and AI; the creative writing is about presence and not at all AI. 

These two types of writing inform and enhance each other.

If you are writing for business, a creative writing practice can help lift your copy out of the bland, soulless, fake-upbeat style that is increasingly ubiquitous online. 

If you are a creative writer, learning to write more clearly and effectively can help keep your writing from becoming too divorced from its audience. (If that’s what you want!)

For example, when I am stuck in my work writing or looking for inspiration, I turn to poetry. I read poems, and I write drafts of poems, to rejuvenate my sense of the possibilities language contains. 

I read and write poetry to rekindle my sense of myself as a human being, speaking and writing, not a mere creator or consumer of content. Poetry recharges me. 

But, as I admitted in my last newsletter on finding your flow as a writer, it has not always been easy for me to write this way. 

Haiku, as it turned out, were the wedge that reopened my mind’s door to the poetic world. And they also opened the door to a deeper appreciation of the world. They’ve made my life richer. 

Deeply infused in Zen, but with a humble, unassuming form that tends to undercut any pretensions of enlightenment or specialness, haiku cut straight to the chase. They are all about appreciating the mundane world in its ordinary, miraculous, beautiful, ugly, tiny, grand details. Merely noticing and pointing out, like a friend saying: Look, over there. Isn’t that cool?

Over and over, haiku have been the sleeper agents that snuck past my prosaic, practical mental censors, only to activate themselves within my (sub) consciousness as representatives of another world: The one outside my head. The world of stars, autumn leaves, dog fur, green tea, and grasses. The world of rounded rocks and tumbling water, of echoing urban canyons and deserted suburban intersections. 

The best haiku are like that. Like stones, they drop into your consciousness with a little splash, making a few ripples and then leaving nothing behind as the surface returns to glassy calm. (Or whatever your consciousness is doing, which is probably not calm at all, come to think of it.) But meanwhile, the stone sinks to the bottom of the pond, solid as anything, bringing news of the world out there to the submarine life forms that populate the bottom strata of our minds.

Dylan Tweney, How haiku can help you be a better writer

Perhaps
When he leafs through that book

It might feel like skin
As if parting the warmest part of her

He might bring
Forefinger to tongue

Luciana Francis, Interlude

As planned, I am spending my April reading poetry, though some mornings a blogpost feels out of reach. This book, not new, but a fairly recent addition to my book hoard, is one I definitely want to share.

Necessity of Flight is a showcase for its author’s craft. Jane Alynn is also a photographer (see her website for a sampling), and these poems are filled with images and light. To quote the back cover blurb from Lana Hechtman Ayers, at the heart of this book is “a profound reverence for and kinship with the natural world.”

I heard Jane read at Edmonds Bookshop about a year ago, and I can still hear her reading this poem: [click through to read “In Want of Wings”]

Necessity of Flight is alive with wings, “cloudburst / of starlings”; hummingbirds “keen on honeysuckle”; “feathered beggars”; a gull, “dull and brassy and fat / as a wallet on payday, / swelled with longing.” Dreams and memories are longing, too, and almost fly, long-deceased loved ones passing through, and everywhere the rising of the poet’s words from line to line and page to page.

Bethany Reid, Jane Alynn, NECESSITY OF FLIGHT

Honestly, I had not read Etheridge Knight in years until I came across Terrance Hayes’ gorgeous masked memoir, To Float in the Space Between. A masked memoir (or braided memoir) is a term I believe I might have invented. A masked memoir (you heard it here first, dear reader) is when a writer (a poet) begins writing a book about an influential poet (or writer) in their lives, but along the way subconsciously or maybe consciously, begins to focus gently on the poet’s own world. Another masked memoir that begins in biography but then turns to personal history is Mark Doty’s, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. This is also true of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall.

To Float in the Spaces Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, (for my first read, I must have skipped the subtitle) begins with a poem of Knight’s, “The Idea of Ancestry,” which functions as a frontpiece and philosophical treatise for the book. “I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief…” This satisfying juxtaposition of identities continues throughout the book and float(s) in the spaces between, which is also the last line of Knight’s poem.

More of this masala mix happens again on page 4. Hayes writes, “When I began collecting interviews and stories about Etheridge Knight more than a decade ago, I said mostly to the few people I cornered for interviews, that I’d never write a biography because it would take more than a decade to do it. This is not a biography…Consider this a collection of essays as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” There’s so much to love here, isn’t there? First Hayes tells us that he’s been working on this project for more than a decade. He follows that up with how he can’t write a biography because it would take “more than a decade to do so.” And then the definitive, “This is not a biography.”

I have read To Float in the Space Between three times now and I’m getting ready for a fourth visit. Where does the narrative move from Knight’s life to Hayes’? I expect it happens somewhere in Pittsburgh where both poets lived in different times. For me the emotional core of the book is towards the end, it happens between Hayes and his parents at a baseball game…I guess you will need to grab a copy!

Susan Rich, Ethridge Knight on the Outskirts of My Life

Now there’s another word I think and that thought smiles into the light of the next platform. Not my stop. Don’t want to stop this merry go around of abstracted creativity. Even as the cables outside undulate into the next tunnel my smile is personalised to me alone. Not one snake knows me or my thoughts I think, neither I theirs. This black and white journey colours my thinking. We all sway in unison our separation lost in the timelessness of our thoughts. Schuum ~ the doors open ~ I get off on it again. 

Jim Young, A ride on the tube ~ a prose poem

April is National Poetry Month; but this year, I am in hibernation mode.

I’m not going to readings or writing a poem a day for 30 days, not posting much of my or other people’s poems or poetry books on social media, and not doing much poetry writing or any submitting. What’s gotten into me? Some kind of malaise? Or just a sense of being overwhelmed by, you know, life and aging and perhaps too much reflection. Plus there’s garden catch-up to tend to, since I was away for the early part of the season opener. And we’ve had a heat wave with a dry spell and lots of wind, so I’ve had to pace myself with the heavy stuff. Thankfully, Best Beloved can pitch in with much of that. Yet I am reading poetry, and if that ever stops I’ll know I’m in trouble.

So–back from traveling westward-ho. While in Fort Collins, Colorado, some dear friends introduced me to Wolverine Publick House, Cafe, and Bookshop, where there’s a lovely poetry book room in which I found my colleague Ian Haight’s book, Spring Mountain: The Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn. Also lots of other fabulous poetry that I had to restrain myself from purchasing, lest I overload my carry-on luggage weight. I read many of the Nansŏrhŏn translations in earlier versions that Ian emailed to me, and it is wonderful to find the book in print (from White Pine).

Ann E. Michael, NoPoMonth, but…

In my first term reading English Literature at university, we studied the Victorians. Busy as I was making friends, falling in love and learning how to do my own laundry, I struggled to keep up with the reading list of weighty novels, but I did manage to write an essay on Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (1852), and it is one of those pieces of writing that – looking back now – I realise has haunted my work ever since. For example, it was through Robert Browning I discovered the power of the dramatic monologue, or persona poem – he is considered an expert at the form (if you haven’t read ‘My Last Duchess’ do yourself a favour and read it now).

I have always been a frustrated actress, and there is something about the intimacy and urgency of the first-person poetry that I’m very attracted to. I love the slipperiness of persona poems, the potential of that ‘I’, and have since translated Ovid’s Heroines, the first book of dramatic monologues.

And then it’s set in a courtly, Arthurian world, and I love myth. And there are faeries and fairytales buried in there somewhere too, and ballads. The poem’s dark depiction of a supernatural waste-land is evident both in my own ballad ‘The Lure’ and in the scenes set in in the kingdom of Carbonek in my novel The Untameables…

Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning (Part 1)

Today’s Poem marks the April 17 anniversary of the death of its subject, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). The poem’s author, Philip Freneau (1752–1832), is known to us today as the “Poet of the American Revolution,” though it’s hard to say who first settled that mantle upon him, or when. It’s far less difficult, however, to say why Freneau became famous as the poetic voice of the Revolution. Freneau became that voice because there really wasn’t anybody else.

In late-18th-century America, poets were relatively thin on the ground. The Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor had belonged to the previous century. Although Taylor had died only in 1729, 23 years before Freneau was born, still he had been a Metaphysical poet, a successor to George Herbert and far more of a piece with Herbert’s age than with his own. William Cullen Bryant, meanwhile, would become, in the early years of the 19th century, the new voice of American Romanticism. Bryant’s lifetime and poetic career would overlap with Freneau’s—but in the 1770s, again, for various plausible reasons, relatively few people in America were writing poetry to any appreciable degree.

This is not to say that nobody in Freneau’s day was writing poetry. Any educated person, in America as in England, possessed in his stable of basic competencies the ability to turn a few verses. Thomas Paine, for example, far more famous as a prose polemicist than as a poet, also wrote verse. But it’s worth noting that almost the only person writing poetry seriously, the only person of any real literary fame in the American colonies in the mid-to-late 18th century, was Philip Freneau’s close contemporary in Boston, Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784). Wheatley, however, was writing in enslavement, a circumstance perhaps not quite congruous with the idea of a laureate of freedom, and her subject matter, as her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, demonstrates, was more interior and personal than political. At any rate, it’s Freneau who was recognized, and whom we remember, as that laureate of American independence.

It’s good that we remember him, if for no other reason than because he was an interesting figure: born in New York City, the son of Huguenot French parents; James Madison’s roommate at Princeton; writer of anti-British pamphlets in the early 1770s; business agent on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, where he developed a loathing for the practice of slavery and a consequent commitment to abolitionism, a conviction expressed in his poem “To Sir Toby;” and during the Revolutionary War, crew member on an American privateer. Captured at sea, he spent six weeks on a British prison ship, a traumatic and nearly fatal experience chronicled in his long poem, straightforwardly entitled “The British Prison Ship.”

After the war, he married and began a career in political journalism, positioned by his friends Madison and Thomas Jefferson to be a polemical thorn in the side of the Federalist Party. Jefferson, then Secretary of State, also hired Freneau as a State Department translator, a post that served as more or less a sinecure for Freneau, whose only language besides English was French. Until the end of his life — he froze to death at the age of 80, on his way home in a snowstorm after visiting friends near his estate at Matawan, New Jersey — Freneau continued to write poetry in a vein that anticipated his Fireside successors.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On the Death of Dr. Benjamin Franklin

Paul Revere’s Ride, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is the most famous poem about the American Revolution, but it’s mostly myth. Revere did not wait in Charlestown, and watch

with eager search
The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,

to count the lanterns: no, he knew, before he left Boston, that the British were coming by sea. Nor was it

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two by the village clock
When he came to the bridge in Concord town,

for Revere never made it to Concord: he was detained near Lexington by British Regulars. I don’t begrudge Longfellow his myth-making, and maybe there was a special need, as Civil War erupted, to remind America that

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken…

Still: Longfellow’s Revere is more theme park ride than man. It has thus been left for us, to put the man himself into a poem. And that call should be answered, for he, and the true events of that night, encapsulate the revolution as well as, or better than, Longfellow’s imaginings. It’s all there: the defiance; the assertion of rights; and the bold declaration of British overreach. “I was not afraid.”

Memorandum on Events of April 18

I was sent for by Doctor Joseph Warren,
The night of 18 April. He desired
I go to Lexington, and there inform
Adams and Hancock, that light troops and grenadiers
Were marching to the bottom of the Common,
Where boats were waiting; aiming, it was thought,
For Lexington, to take them prisoner
Or else destroy colonial stores in Concord.
I left at once, and crossed the Charles; in town,
Acquired a horse, and rode. The moon shone bright. […]

Brad Skow, Lexington and Concord

A successful sonnet requires considerable rhetorical control and a kind of density of language: in the earliest examples, we see vernacular poets struggling to pull this off. The style required was new in English in the mid-sixteenth century as it had been in French a little earlier. But it wasn’t new in Latin: in fact, both classical and Renaissance Latin verse offered multiple models for a rhetorically tight, somewhat paradoxical, carefully argued but also passionate short poems, especially in the broadly Catullan tradition, but also in elements of the (overlapping) traditions of epigram and love elegy. […]

Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries never developed a standard way of doing “a sonnet” in Latin because they had no need to: rather, the importation of the sonnet made possible in French and English a kind of closely argued, highly artificial but also passionate poetry that had previously only been doable in Latin. Most of the distinctive features of the sonnet simply weren’t required in Latin because there were multiple existing models that served much the same purpose. A few elements of the sonnet form, however, had no obvious analogue in Latin: namely, the ability to mark a rhetorical ‘turn’ by a shift of form (rhyme scheme) as well as of style and tone, and the particular emotional and rhetorical possibilities offered by a long sequence of poems in an identical form reverting frequently to an established set of images and ideas. Accordingly, if we look carefully, we do find some evidence of poets experimenting with ways to borrow these features in their Latin verse.

Victoria Moul, The Latin sonnet: on a non-existent form

Something a little different this week: I’m delighted to share an interview with Moul. Victoria is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her Substack, Horace & friends, which I cannot recommend highly enough. She is also the editor of a new pamphlet, Poems Beautiful & Useful, now available from Headless Poet, a new small press dedicated to the art of the introduction, published by yours truly.

Headless Poet aims to (re)introduce readers to poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. There will also be a series of short introductions to (my pick of) the best new poetry. In that spirit, Poems Beautiful & Useful presents twenty ‘popular’ poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are, in most cases, not well known today. It will, I think, be of interest to curious readers and specialists alike. In this — and in the masterful way in which Victoria has navigated the format’s limits (just thirty-six pages, including the intro) — it really exemplifies what the project is all about. […]

Jeremy: In his (rightly glowing) review, Henry Oliver makes the point that you haven’t included anything by John Donne. I found that interesting, because I don’t think Donne quite fits here. Rightly or wrongly I think of him as a poet who overwhelms the reader, whereas these poems are more companionable, for want of a better word. But of course, presumably in part thanks to T. S. Eliot, we do tend to associate this era with Donne in particular and with the ‘Metaphysical’ poets generally. Some of the poets here would, in other guises, appear in a ‘Metaphysical’ anthology, but not all of them and perhaps not these particular poems. Do these distinctions make any sense to you? Is it fair to describe the selection as a whole as a kind of response to Eliot?

Victoria: Yes, I think Donne and Milton are probably the two most obvious omissions, though we don’t associate Milton so much with shorter verse anyway. Donne is a good example of a poet who was demonstrably popular at the time — there are quite a large number of manuscripts containing copies of his poems — and is central to the “canon” today, though as you imply in your question, he was out of fashion for a long time in between before being revived in the earlier 20th century. I left him out for two reasons. For the pragmatic one, that I wanted to use the pamphlet to introduce readers to less familiar poets, and if I had to guess I’d say that Donne is probably the single best-known poet from the early seventeenth century, at least for British readers. (He was on the A level syllabus for a long time as well.) The other reason is one you also hint at in your question, I think — in this pamphlet I was interested in showcasing verse that, though quite varied, gravitates towards or centres around a kind of practicality or simplicity. That’s not to say that these are all simple poems, but that they have a kind of rootedness to them that I don’t associate so much with Donne — they are tethered a bit more straightforwardly to a message or an occasion. I think that the prominence of the ‘metaphysical’ tag, especially at school level, means that a lot of readers have this idea that early modern English poetry is paradigmatically rather difficult. I wanted to show how poetry of this period can also be rewarding in a rather straightforward sort of way.

Jeremy: I’m thinking about that wonderful line from Geoffrey Hill, which I someone shared on Substack the other day: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other… Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be any different than we are?” But, of course, it makes just as much sense to say that, since being human is so difficult, why shouldn’t art offer us a place where we can experience something else? Being simple, beautifully, is terribly hard, in both form and in feeling.

I’m sure this says more about me than anything else, but I’ve always felt that there is a strain within modern poetry that sees difficulty as a virtue in itself and simplicity or clarity as somehow selling out — that there are certain poets who seem to take pride in being obscure. And then, on the other hand, there are clearly popular poets who take pride in being, for want of a better word, bad (see the recent ‘Worst Poets Club’ tour). We are back to the old split, real or imagined, between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ work. That split seems as perncious now as ever, almost intractable. Does it go back to this period?

Victoria: Yes, it’s very hard to write simply isn’t it? This is noticeable in poetry but also everywhere else. One of the hardest things of all, with my scholarly hat on, is to write about very complex and quasi-technical matters in a genuinely straightforward way. To say just what you mean.

I like Hill very much and of course he’s right that everyone is difficult — perhaps complex is a better word. But I’m sure I’m not the only reader to feel, also, that Hill made a bit of a fetish of difficulty, that he used difficulty of various kinds, including setting complex technical challenges for himself, as a kind of strategy of avoidance. There’s something in Hill that seems almost daunted or embarrassed by the magnitude of his own lyric gifts. It’s an interesting phenomenon that I recognise in Cowley as well. I suspect Hill’s poetic “afterlife” might be rather like that of Cowley.

Most people, I think, would acknowledge that people and relationships and the world are indeed very difficult but also that there are moods, or moments, or aspects of life for all of us in which the important things actually seem simple.

I’m not at all against complexity or difficulty in poetry and wouldn’t want to give that impression. If anything I am rather obsessed by it — I come back and back in my own work to Horace, to Pindar, to Sanskrit poetry and grammar — these are all sort of paradigmatic examples of literary difficulty I suppose. I work a lot on very obscure early modern Latin verse and I am fascinated, both as a critic and as a poet myself, by translating poetry, which is immensely difficult — impossible, really. But I suppose like you I don’t see a contradiction. Poetry should be beautiful because that is, as it were, its proper virtue, and it should also have something to say. Pindar is very difficult, yes, because the literary conventions in which he was working were highly complex and they are very distant from ours, but he is also supremely beautiful and there is no doubt that he has something to say. Very “simple” poems can also be very beautiful. And of course many apparently “simple” poems — poems in what we might call the plain style — are in fact underpinned by very subtle and complex effects.

But I think the kinds of difficulty in Pindar, or even Donne, are probably rather different from what you meant when you talked about some kinds of contemporary poetry ‘taking pride in being obscure’. I think I know what you mean there and I don’t really have any patience with it. I’m thinking of something like the poem that just (depressingly) won the UK National Poetry Competition, ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell. Now that seems to me like an almost comically bad poem and a very good example of this kind of pointless and overwritten obscurity. When ‘meaning’s / odometer is broken’ — indeed!

Jeremy Wikeley, Rewarding in a rather straightforward way

Jane Hirshfield is a master at giving life to unlikely objects. “At Night” is a poem that amazes the reader because of the described living presence found in the world, in terra firma itself. Note the “steadfast gaze” of the earth toward the unknown. The closing lines leave the reader with an image that is precise, easily understood, but almost unapproachable in its vast scope. Hirshfield writes of “the given world” – not the earth but the world the earth experiences from its own point of view: “flaming precisely out its frame”. What remains is the darkness and depth of a space that has no end. An absolutely wonderful possibility.

The poem begins off-center, viewing the horses a bit out of focus. Looking away from the center to the edges makes recognition possible. The black horses become a strong, visual and aural encounter in the poem: “cropping,” “winter grass,” “white jaws that move,” “steady rotation,” and “sweet sound”. After the stanza leap, the horses find shelter among trees, leaving behind the dug-out spots of snow. These circles function as an opening into another world or another sort of existence. Hirshfield writes that you, the reader, will find these circles. The point of view shifts from an observer of the scene to the earth itself – “its single, steadfast gaze” – and the reader identifies with that gaze outward. A powerful transformation. A poem that approaches infinity for me.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Jane Hirshfield, “At Night”

Oak Woman

Dear Lucille, I treasure your poem as a reminder of all
the life that’s left to live in a culture that worships the young.
What is a forest but the strongest of bones, what is
a blossoming but an awakening of self. The sapling
girl is still inside but the Oak woman is stronger & fiercer,
still chasing wildness & wonder. You showed us how.
Respectfully, your ardent admirer

Na/GloPoWriMo day 17 prompt: For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

I chose this poem [“There is a girl inside”] by Lucille Clifton. I love it & have this screenprint in my photo app.

Charlotte Hamrick, Oak Woman

On a whim, because I found myself in the vicinity, I went for a hike I hadn’t done in a while around a small pond fed by a few trickling streams and dammed at one end for some purpose I do not know. Cedars bent themselves toward the water, and small islands sat covered with the reddish branches of low bushes. A fallen tree’s old root system sat half-skyward and bleached mid-pond. I’m not sure who startled whom the most: me or the frog in leaf-strewn mud. The colors were all the greens and duns and browns and rust and ocher. The sound: low gronks from geese at one end, a jay scree, somewhere far away, always, a motor, even here in this middle of nowhere. Slowly the mind-nattered plaints fell away and I was huff and humidity and the swing of legs and soft stump stump of the perfect walking stick I’d found, and all eyes and notice — lichen like a congregation! trees all knees astride a rocky beast! knobs like balls at the base of that cedar! — all pleasure. Then I slid on a hidden root, twisted my ankle, fell, had to sit and put my head between my knees because I thought I was going to faint, hobbled up and missed the trail’s turn to the parking lot so added fifteen more slow minutes on the sore leg, castigating myself all the while because I KNOW not to hike in low boots with no water and how many times am I going to have to learn this lesson. In other words, my “everyday self,” back again. And in echo, here’s this lovely prose poem by Miriam Drev, translated from the Slovene by Barbara Siegel Carlson. I found it on the recent edition of Ron Slate’s On the Seawall.

Marilyn McCabe, Removed from my usual self, just footsteps

My debut, full-length collection of poems, Night Court, took three years and thirty submissions before it found a home at Glass Lyre Press, winning the 2016 Lyrebird prize, with publication in 2017. Over those years, the book changed considerably, from its title to its content. I even had it professionally edited, a process that helped me understand that a book of poems, just like a novel or a memoir, has a plot, characters, point of view, theme, and structure.

Armed with those lessons, I thought my second collection couldn’t possibly take as long as the first. After all, I was a seasoned writer who’d published a chapbook, Wild Place, and a book of writing exercises, Vibrant Words, as well as Night Court. Surely, I would benefit from the lessons I’d learned sending my first book out.

I was wrong. My second book was just as much work as the first, and followed a similar path: early versions, different titles, multiple rejections, and painstaking reworkings. On the first pass, I chose, carefully I thought, from the poems I’d written after Night Court’s publication, crafting a story about motherhood, mental health, moving from California to Oregon, the environment, and world events.

Looking at early drafts, however, I can see that these versions weren’t focused enough. Still fresh from my move, I tried to force the manuscript into a book about place, but even though many of the poems are place-based, it refused to cohere around that theme.

Gradually, it dawned on me that every poetry collection possesses its own personality, motivations, and twisty logic. To paraphrase Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “On Children:” “Your books are not your books. / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” I realized, belatedly, that I was not the boss of this book but its guide; my job was not to order the poems but to allow them to find where they belonged.

Lessons From a Second Poetry Collection – guest post by Erica Goss (Trish Hopkinson)

In my musing over Aprils past and past projects, another year is heavy on my mind recently. Mostly because it occurs to me that there has been a span of 30 years(!) between these two fixed points in time. In 1996, I was still a college student in undergrad. I was all of 22. Youth is all about not realizing how young you really are, but in 1996, I felt like I was as old as I was going to get. I was living with my parents and perhaps enjoying the last year of only minimal obligations as an adult. Within a year, I would be off to the city and my first apartment and grad school. But in 1996, I was finishing up my senior seminar on Milton, which I was ill-equipped for with no/minimal knowledge of Christian mythology and history and only rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Roman myths–also important with that text. I was struggling with the language, much as I did in my teen years with Shakespeare. […]

That spring semester of 1996, I was also  taking my first poetry workshop ever. A couple years before I had enrolled in a fiction writing one. After seeing a few stories, the instructor, one of RC’s alum done good, offhandedly suggested my long and rambling Faulkerian sentences might be suited better for poetry. He was right of course. I already knew that, having been scribbling poems since I was 14 or so. I had already started publishing, first in vanity-esque anthologies you’d find in the back of Writer’s Digest, and in the college lit mag. My poems were pretty bad, but I was writing a lot of them, so was getting better. That spring, I had, up to then, one of my most productive spurts of activity, pounding out poem after poem on the typewriter I’d procured with high school graduation money. […]

Every once in a while, I pull out those undergrad poems on their weirdly-thin typing paper filled with cross-outs and whited out segments. For some, I even have the original messy handwritten drafts. As someone who has hasn’t drafted much in writing, only typing, since the late aughts,  these seem too quaint and anachronistic to throw out even though I should. 

What did I write about that semester?  If I remember correctly, it was probably a lot of the same strange and gothic fuckery I write about now..lol..just much more overwrought and rhymed at the ends.  Poems about artifacts and museums, about the execution of John Wayne Gacy, abandoned houses and formidable forests.

You know, the usual…

Kristy Bowen, another April | 1996

This poem (rooted in this week’s parsha, Tazria-Metzora) emerges from Leviticus 16:29, which reads, in full:

וְהָיְתָה לָכֶם לְחֻקַּת עוֹלָם בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִי בֶּעָשׂוֹר לַחֹדֶשׁ תְּעַנּוּ אֶת־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם וְכל־מְלָאכָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ הָאֶזְרָח וְהַגֵּר הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם׃

And this shall be to you a law for all time: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall practice self-denial; and you shall do no manner of work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you.

My favorite reading of this verse comes from my dear friend and frequent collaborator R. David Markus, who pointed out that while the word תענו is usually pointed and read as t’anu, “afflict,” the same letters could spell תענו ta’anu, “answer.”

I checked several translations (thanks for making that easy, Sefaria) and all were a variation on the theme: afflict your self, afflict your soul, practice self-denial, etc. But the letters are the same as the letters of the word (you, plural) answer: the only change is in the vowels. Which, of course, aren’t actually in Torah, though they are in the Masoretic text.

Reading תענו as answer, as R. David suggests, wholly changes how I experience Yom Kippur. The purpose of the day isn’t “afflicting one’s soul” or “practicing self-denial.” Yom Kippur is not a day for causing oneself to suffer, it’s a day for answering the soul. For me, that interpretation dovetails beautifully with the season’s practices of self-examination, deep inner work, and teshuvah.

And, of course, all of this is a reminder that — as we say at SoulSpa all the time — every translation is a midrash.

Rachel Barenblat, Answer

Ours was the last leg of the ‘French Way’ of the Camino de Santiago, and we left on Easter Sunday. Elsewhere, large groups of pilgrims had timed their walks to reach the cathedral at Santiago to coincide with the Sunday’s celebrations, and so our roads – far from this end-point – were quieter than usual. Our first day’s journey was 23km from the town of Sarria to the little scenic outpost by the water, Portomarín. We left before dawn and walked out of the quiet streets in the dark. Soon we crossed a bridge then a railway line, and then we seemed to quickly hit open fields. That first morning, we walked until it was light, stopping only when we reached the first roadside café, one whose television in the corner played a late-night Honduran music cabaret. The music was bad, the coffee the best of the trip. It was only after lunch, with 15km under our feet, that I took out the first printed poem from my backpack. I opted to begin this with Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’.

Why this poem? I recalled the debate around whether it was a poem of comfort or not – and was drawn to start with something suitably ambivalent. As a poem to memorise, I found it quite absorbing. There is life in it. It jumps around a little, even while repeating images (clouds, light). Where do I fall on its irony or reprieve? In the mouth, it has the taste of the apocalypse. I can see something happening outside the window of the poem’s room. It also reminded me of James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’, but with a significant difference. The end of Wright’s poem seems to come to him like a thunderbolt. It is as unexpected to the poet as it is to the reader; Mahon’s poem feels the opposite. Mahon has been mulling on the phrase long before it is uttered. It feels like a childhood memory of a parent trying to soothe him – or like a friend who had recently tried to console him. Everything is going to be all right. Things will work out. But the world keeps suggesting otherwise. Yes, it feels like a poem of grief for hope. Hope finally lost. But how beautiful in the mouth.

Niall Campbell, So … What Poems Did I Memorise?

I […] received my copy of Prairie Schooner‘s Spring 2026 “The Loneliness Issue,” in which I have a poem, “If I Will Be Queen, Let It Be Queen of the Dead.” Also check out my friend Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem “The Immigrant’s Very Good Daughter.” (I loved the poem and maybe you will too!) […]

This year we had the chance to see apple trees, cherry trees, daffodils, and tulips all blooming at the same time, though we missed our snow geese and trumpeter swans. It has certainly been a weird month for weather—didn’t it just snow here a month ago? We also visited not just RoozenGaarde but also a new smaller tulip farm called Garden Rosalyn. After a dreary cold beginning to April, it was nice to have some warmer temperatures and sunshine. We didn’t really have enough time to do everything we wanted, but it was a good reminder of how beautiful April can be out here. […]

This week is super crowded, but I am very much looking forward to a poetry break on Thursday, when we’re hosting Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new collection, Accidental Devotions, at the J. Bookwalter Tasting Room in Woodinville at 6:30 PM (wine and open mic after!)

Kelli’s book is a wonderful combination of thoughtfulness on anxiety, middle age and mortality, and the nature of love and sex, with her usual whimsy and humor. I hope you’ll come out and see her read!

I hope you get a chance to celebrate something poetry-related this month. It’s good to balance the insanity of the world with a little bit of poetry and tulip-gazing.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poem in the New Issue of Prairie Schooner, Welcoming a Nephew to Town and Tulips, and Hosting Kelli Agodon at Bookwalter’s This Thursday!

I’m hoping that you’re all enjoying the arrival of Spring – over the weekend, I saw my first sundew of the year, first damselflies, first lizard, first adder basking on a sun-warmed boardwalk at Cors Fochno.

I will post photos soon. In the meantime, welcome to the blanket bogs and the wind-battered hilltop villages of West Yorkshire.

“My second-oldest sister takes me on the bus to Haworth. It’s her favourite place – which means that it’s also mine. The steam train and sweet shop are fine, but what I love most is the stone, the cottages clustered against the wind, the moor like an ocean. I know nothing about the Brontës, but I stare at the sofa where Emily died, the empty dresses”.

This tiny extract from my essay “A Love Story of Walshaw Moor” (Book of Bogs, 2025) describes my first encounter with the Brontë Parsonage, and with Haworth’s steep, cobbled streets. It was love at first sight – the ghosts held in the thick stone walls, the open moors. In the coming decades, I’ll make a careful point take everyone I love to the ruins at Top Withens – and I’ll always, always wail “It’s MEE! It’s Kath-EE!” at the empty window, because this is the reputed setting of Wuthering Heights, and just like Cathy says, if I died and went to heaven it would break my heart to be taken away from those moors.

So I’m absolutely chuffed – this Thursday 23rd April at 7pm – to read at Haworth Old School Room, hosted by the Brontë Parsonage Museum, to celebrate the launch of Lydia MacPherson’s “The Heights”, (Calder Valley Poetry). Tickets are available here.

Since 2024, I’ve been fighting for the survival of Walshaw Moor in the face of a proposal to build the UK’s biggest onshore energy park on its blanket bogs and peatlands. Campaigning can be an exhausting, dispiriting business – but when you find yourself in the company of kindred spirits, when you are fired by the same passions and furies, it can also be a joy. I was already aware of Lydia Macpherson as a talented West Yorkshire poet, with her first collection published by Salt. Over the last two years, she’s become a comrade-in-arms in every sense of the word – along with her gentle genius of a partner, Nick (himself a wonderful writer and a past winner of the National Poetry Competition). With their warmth and intelligence, and their single-minded commitment to the moors, they are a force not just to be reckoned with, but to be enfolded and fed by.

Clare Shaw, On the Wily, Windy Moors

Buried

under the silent forest
the dead bird sings –
the whole world, motionless,
face black and rotted,
slipping
farther away

Source: Memoirs by Pablo Neruda (Tr. Hardie St. Martin)

Rajani Rashakrishnan, An April full of poems -2

Why am I/are humans in general so moved by birdsong? It’s complex and varied. It reminds us of human song and often, human instruments such as flute or oboe. There’s something existential that we can relate to in how birds call out or call to each other, in a way, for example, we don’t feel comopared to the sounds of cicadas or mosquitos. That feels more environmental. We relate to birds. They fly. A million mirror neurons go off when we experience birds in a way they don’t with flies or lizards. Do we have hollow bones and feathers? Do we wish we had hollow bones and feathers? Birds are in our world and somehow exist in a parallel world. As if they exist in another coincident dimension (I mean other than the more 3-dimensional world they fly in.) They are part of our dream, myths, stories. I imagine the inside of my mouth is the shape of a songbird.

Gary Barwin, STARLING: music with birds

Even without the complications of humans, this world is miraculously complicated with patterns and -ologies. How miraculous it is that while I while my time away at a desk 40+ hours a week staring into a screen and rejecting peoples’ paperwork, little chambered piths sit in the papery darknesses of flower stems. That while I roll my eyes at yet another protocol change or misspelled word at work, Trillium blooms in the woods because an ant dispersed its seed. That while we go on our necessary walks to process the nonsense and wonder of humans and being human, we pass last year’s dilapidation of flowers, native bees nesting in their stems like a secret. Nothing I do in an adjustable rolling chair makes flowers bloom or provides structure to a plant. Nothing I do in Excel Spreadsheets or E-System provides a safe haven for insects.

Sarah Lada, Chambered Pith

This morning, entering Moorlands Woods
the scent of bluebells reached me before 
I really noticed the swathes of blue 
between the trees, my lungs involuntarily
taking a double breath, prompting me to think, 
how could I ever have forgotten this sweetness? 

Last night I dreamt of my parents when
they were young and healthy, my mother’s
red hair, my father’s arms with a summer tan.
Perhaps sometimes it is worth forgetting 
if remembering provides us with such joy.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ From forgetting to remembering

Arlington is full spring. Blossom lines our paths. Redbuds contrast against fresh leaves and white magnolia. Along the path shrubs mound purple, dark pink, light pink, bright pink, mauve, and white. Above the car, a thin-branching tree has bright pink flowers with a white centre that look as sturdy as thick silk. It glows against the redbud and the darkening trees behind. Hostas grow abundantly here, uneaten yet. The birds are always singing the passing time. The cherry has already fallen like old confetti.

I read in the shade, interrupted for coffee and children and to write. Virgil is dying. A passing garbage man talks to Siri. A few leaves fall. Robins run along the grass, territorially alert to each other, sometimes dancing in a spiral fight, and sparrows ruffle solitary in the trees. Early, before the lights are on, or if you catch a quiet moment when no-one is passing through, you can see rabbits occupying the peace. This time I think of Elizabeth Bishop.

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!

Like the raccoon, they keep their own time, moving off as they please, waiting for nobody.

Henry Oliver, Spring-time, night-time, rabbits and raccoons

the sound of the falls
within reach
trout lily

Tom Clausen, trout lily

This week: a piebald crow, seven bloodroot blossoms, the agèd state of words, the fine grain of life, and much more. Enjoy.

When I forget for a moment that he is about to blow the world up

I chop vegetables, make kefir, do laundry, sow seeds

as if tomorrow, next week, harvest time were not in doubt.

Ama Bolton, When I forget

Tell me, how are you surviving this April day?

These times call for finding ways to not only survive, but also to persist. Some days this might mean staying under the covers with a good novel; other days it could mean volunteering your time for a cause you care about — which might take a myriad of different forms. Maybe you’re going outdoors more.

Recently, I’ve been on a local book tour for Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds. One lonely July weekend, less than two years ago, I had this crazy idea. What if I created a bird guide that matched poets and birds? What if I cajoled my friend Stephanie Delaney to write the bird notes? What if I went on a hunt for an artist that specialized in birds? Those two little words, “what if” hold so much power.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Birdbrains celebrated its nearly five month anniversary at the Seward Park Audubon Center in Seattle, WA. Poets, writers, and bird lovers gathered together in a space designated as an international flyway for the great bird migration now going on.

When I collaborated with Dr. Stephanie Delaney and Hiroko Seki, I never imagined the incredible reception this book has had so far—and it is barely five months old. What I love the most, however, are the personal stories that emerge when I talk to both audience members and contributors alike.

Recently, one new friend told me that she reads a bird poem and bird note each night before going to sleep (much better than doomscrolling); a local poet told me that her daughter’s art teach has invited her into the classroom to talk about her contribution to the book, and another contributor gave a copy to her mother, the woman who first taught her about the birds.

Now when I see the common pigeon, I wonder how Jane Hirshfield is doing as this is “her” bird and the Stellar’s jay always reminds me of Harold Taw—whose flash fiction piece invents a language for the jay. Then there’s the chukar that lives in Eastern Washington, Texas, and in Palestine; this is Naomi Shihab Nye’s bird. The oddly named killdeer belongs to Kelli Russell Agodon, the cedar waxwing to Washington State native, Catherine Barnett. The Northern flicker is the bird that I claimed as my own. My gateway drug to the world of birding.

I know that filling the feeders with hot pepper suet and watching a piebald crow along the Puget Sound will not solve the global apocalypse it seems we are experiencing daily. However, without the birds I can’t look at the news from Gaza, Iran, Lebanon without being locked in despair. Birdbrains is the antidote.

Susan Rich, And Now for Something a Little Bit ~ Practical?

Water is trapped in mudflats, but there is also

shimmer in shades of purple. This is the time
before fruit ripens from flower, before
the bruise of summer. In a hurt world,

you try to understand these ongoing
lessons in wonder. Rain, when it returns,
remembers every surface it’s ever met.

Luisa A. Igloria, Living in the In-between

The poem’s most sustained suspension of pentameter follows line 10: “Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots. / Life in itself / Is nothing.” The pentameter line drops off into unsparing dimeter, then monometer, before expanding again into pentameter. The poem’s trajectory reflects not only the temperamental April weather, but the way that the beauty of spring presents itself as “enough.”

Enough to do what? To appear to vanquish death. This is the season’s cruel April Fool’s prank, and the poem’s speaker sees through it. Still, insistent in its utter insufficiency, that prankster and fool, April — given its own penultimate monometer line — arrives, “babbling like an idiot and strewing flowers.” There’s nothing small and clean about this April. It’s a mess. Yet even in the incontrovertible face of death, here it comes again: quixotic and possibly insane, but alive.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Spring

The oak being “unwired” in the second stanza is a wonderful image. I might be taking it too far to think of it as water in the electrics causing a failure, but the cables of the tree roots coming unstuck is a powerful one for me. It’s ironic that in a time like we are in now we will almost certainly be seeing the hosepipe ban news articles coming soon, but Jemma [Borg] paints a picture that is a mixture of beauty: ‘the flood that makes a mirror / on the lawn’ is a beautiful image, as is ‘Venus’s bright eye’, but these are counter-balanced or cancelled out (saying drowned out would be pushing it, Mat) by the “suffering cherry tree” and the lovely imagine and sounds conjured up by “the grass is tutting / with its many wet tongues”. Is nature judging us? No, but it should be.

Mat Riches, Here’s mud in your eye..

To think about trees is to think about generations before you, those who planted the trees that accompany us now, and the generations to follow. I suppose no poet writes about trees alongside men without remembering how Homer says men are like the leaves upon the trees. (Indeed, Larkin’s poem is, viewed from one perspective, really just a kind of riff upon these lines.)

οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίνεται ὥρη:
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.
(Iliad 6.146-149)

Like the generations of leaves are those of men.
Leaves the wind pours upon the ground, but the wood
thickens and births, as spring comes round again:
so the generations of men — one born, one gone.

These lines have been quoted, imitated and alluded to since antiquity. Horace himself writes a version of them in his Ars Poetica, but there he makes the leaves not men, but words — the language of men. My favourite translation of this passage is Jonson’s:

As woods whose change appeares
Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding yeares,
The first-borne dying; so the agèd state
Of words decay, and phrases borne but late
Like tender buds shoot up, and freshly grow.
Our selves, and all that’s ours, to death we owe.

The language changes, but the trees live on. Homer is dead, they seem to say; begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Victoria Moul, Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding years

It’s been too long since the last post. In late March, I posted an article on writing blurbs, which is still waiting for its Part 2. But true to our usual form, both Kim and I have been taken up with this year’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) – which involves writing a poem a day throughout the month of April. Many sensible people write these in the privacy of their own homes, perhaps sharing them with a few trusted friends, before eventually – after careful consideration and thorough editing – publishing a handful of their 30 poems.

But Kim and I publish them every single day on social media, often within minutes of writing the final lines. It’s incredibly exposing, exhausting – and beautifully compelling. And by mid-April, it tends to become all-consuming. By the end of the month, I’m exhausted and slightly crazed, but I do have a stock of 30 first, second or third drafts to sustain me through the subsequent months. Out of the 30 poems, there’s often a small selection of good poems which might make it into a collection. But perhaps most importantly, NaPoWriMo, and its crazy discipline, reminds me that I am a writer. That whatever else I’m doing or feelings in my life, the practice of writing is at my core. Like my therapist said – “whenever you talk about writing, your face lights up”. I’m still struggling with cyclical depression, and the practice of daily writing is a powerful reminder that on those days when I feel like I really don’t want to write a single word, I sometimes produce my best work.

Clare Shaw, A beautiful compulsion

April is National Poetry Month AND National Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month — and here in this blog we continue to celebrate poetry-math connections.  Below I offer the opening stanzas of an old poem of mine entitled “Time”.

The clock goes round —
making time a circle
rather than a line.
Each year’s return to spring
layers time on time. 

Circle or line — 
no difference.  Wrap
the line around a rim,
tuck the loose ends in,
or cut the circle, stretch it thin —

breaking an appointment,
or separating bites of lunch.
If the slit is not at midnight,
visit darkness by going back
or skip from light to light.

A second part of “Time” is available here.  The entire poem is available in Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010).

JoAnne Growney, April — Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

This past Sunday would have been my mother’s 79th birthday, a birthday she never quite made it to, and in a world that would have distressed her to no end. There are times when I wonder how both my parents would have navigated this world, and though my mother saw less of it, dying only a year into the madness, but my father witnessed much more. Both would be extremely vulnerable–to cuts to things like social security and medicare, despite my dad being pretty organized in terms of pensions and savings (this is not a trait he passed down to me.) And while I like to joke that I have unofficially retired to do freelance design/writing /editing work for others and run the press& shop, I know full well I will be working and hopefully still earning income up til my death bed. That is, if I survive–or even if we all survive this current dystopia. In a calmer, saner world of a couple years ago, it was a little freeing to accept that and just make that the plan. I have a tiny amount of savings that is really nothing, but serves as an emergency fund at the least. With J earning money and his business doing well, we are less strapped in general from month to month, but as prices rise on gas and groceries, plus healthcare premiums that are now much higher than they were the past several years, it becomes more challenging.   I still try to fit in smaller pleasures, like theater tickets and occasional new dresses, as well as things like art supplies and books, but it gets harder and probably will even more so. 

Much is afoot in the dgp world, with me still figuring out work flows and logistics on the new books. I’ve been sampling a few different POD operations, including Amazon and Ingram, and am finding there are benefits and drawbacks to both. The books are quite beautiful nevertheless, and I appreciate the easiness of filling orders with books I do not have to print and fold and bind and trim all on my own. I am still looking for the sweet spot in pricing that does not send us into the red.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/8/2026

There was candlewax in my hair for seven days and seven nights the clouds were old testament we watched the sky which plane would fall first which soldier would fall first which angel would descend shocked by a neutral wire you might be shocked at how many people are already dead inside which astronaut will touch ground first which child will fall first small and crumpled my mouth and hands inside this numb poem words didn’t disappear me they boiled away inside 

Rebecca Loudon, Jupiter at rest

I wonder if there has ever been a study of how poets’ work alters as they age. I don’t mean in terms of life experience or a switch of political interpretation or subject matter but the structure of the writing itself.

It’s a subject that’s been troubling me for some time. In day-to-day life I function well at 73. OK, I forget where I’ve put my phone, or go upstairs to fetch something and then forget what it is I’ve gone to fetch, but that seems to be because my head is full of thoughts and responses to whatever’s going on. I can do all the things I’ve done for years, maybe a little slower, but they get done and life works well enough. Physically I’ve survived heart attacks, can still lift and carry bags of feed and bedding, can spend hours on jobs at our smallholding, can still look after pigs, ducks, hens, travel to watch football.

My point is that when I sit to write the process is different. My brain is still capable of energetic concentration but I look at some of the ‘old’ poems from twenty years ago and know I cannot write like that any more. An example:

THE WATER DIVINER

The thirsty people pay
and crowd to watch, but
for now the trick is in
the drama, in the measure

of the stride, the heavy
dance of the methodical
tread, and in the way
water rises at full moon

to break the boundaries
of grief. My reward is in
coins, a place to rest,
quiet nods of respect.

Sometimes, too, after dark
women will seek me out
for more elusive miracles.
But that is not my craft.

There is a tightness and control here, a rhythm that I no longer possess – no longer feel. I could no longer write like this any more than I could write anything sensible in rhyming iambic pentameters. My writing sprawls, jerks about, voices talk to each other within it, it responds to the world, to itself, is restless and reactive. This morning I sat down to write and came up with something that made absolute sense to me, which for now feels right, yet on reflection might be very difficult for others to fathom out.

Bob Mee, HOW THE BRAIN CHANGES THE WAY WE WRITE AS WE AGE

My son and I took my ordinary walk today, along Woods Creek, and I pointed out things he could pull from the ground and eat. Weirdly, he seems to like this, and thought deadnettle was tasty. I never knew what that little purplish plant was until this year, although it grows everywhere—all part of the very long process of learning where I live.

Last year I read selections of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s work for one of those anonymous evaluations I’m not supposed to admit to doing. I admired it so much, I put in an advance order for her collection with snow pouring southward past the window, just out from Pitt. Funny how I keep reading books about foraging, but I especially wanted to taste this one before heading to Alaska in a few days. As her bio describes, Kane is “Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska… She’s raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is currently an Associate Professor at Reed College.” Stephanie Adams-Santos writes in her back-cover endorsement that the poems are “marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away.” Many poems in with snow have a quality of litany (although there’s also one called “No Litanies, No,” so maybe don’t trust my impression). In “Without Anchorage,” she writes about trying to “harvest the tops of onions flash-frozen with approximate winter’s sudden onset, haul the tenderest medicines inside losing only the laurel: hyssop, arnica, basketgrass sagrit.” The lovely precision, though, is framed again and again by the pain of displacement. To some extent art can conjure possible worlds and preserve in them what has been or will be lost. It’s never a fully adequate answer to grief, but I’m moved when artists try.

I’m at least as struck by how these poems witness and answer violence on many scales, including brutality in Kane’s childhood and massive cultural violence. There are also a host of poems about men being assholes. “Letters from Learned Men,” an erasure poem, documents a contemporary priest writing in a condescending way to someone who seems to be Kane herself (the name is blacked out)—and concludes with a hundred-year-old letter in which a priest condemns a Native woman in an overtly vicious way. I love how this poem levels a devastating argument by mere juxtaposition: historical racism and sexism are continuous with their lightly disguised contemporary versions. In fact, I love all of the many angry poems here—as well as the book’s lack of a Notes section. “The first thing I will do: make / myself indecipherable / to you,” she writes in “Elixirs for Words to Come.” So you don’t know my language or landscape or cultural context or even why I’m mad? If you want to navigate this poetic world, it’s on you to figure it out.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 2 (spirals, drafts, wildflowers)

the warehouse always wants more warehouse.
more places to hoard boxes of plastic beads
& plastic teeth & plastic gods. they want
everyone to go & work in the warehouse.
to have babies who know nothing
but warehouse. to turn our blood
into warehouse guts. to warehouse our houses
until we are nothing but their tightening machine.

Robin Gow, warehouse

The breakthrough moment came in summer of 2017, three years into submitting the manuscript.

I woke up that morning with the head of a smart stranger, having forgotten that I had ever wrote the book.

I laid out the manuscript, and what happened next felt like the best mix of expertise and instinct, discernment and intuition.

I began culling poems without anxiety or remorse, and I listened more clearly than I ever had before to what I’d actually written. The title changed without fuss as a result. I could feel when I had finally arrived at the manuscript that would be the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton prize judged by Ocean Vuong. I read the book over with the title American Faith—the title of one of the strongest poems in the book—and thought: yes, this is the book I’d been trying to write.

It was here, in this slab of marble (stack of printouts) waiting to be aerated, chiseled released. I felt a singular mix of relief and quiet confidence. It was a lovely,

Maya C. Popa, The Head of a Smart Stranger

You can stick two contact mics on a Singer
and go to town, letting the feedback wail
as the crunchy needle sounds distort
through one of the many barefoot pedals.
One light bulb shines
through the holes in the paper
as it travels, threadless, through the machine.

Fievel Crane, POEM: You Can Play A Shoestring If You’re Sincere

The best thing about finding fellowship with dead poets is that they don’t contradict you, don’t correct you, don’t talk over you. Thankfully they don’t talk at all. They are mercifully silent. I find this makes for a better connection. When I walked from Keats’ birthplace to Blake’s grave last week the commentary I gave was broadcast unscripted, unchecked, unedited. “You sounded quite posh” said Sue from Essex who’d tuned in to the live-stream. I thought about the voice that I’d adopted, the one I think I’d put on to lend authority if not authenticity to my report. Out of a kind of nervousness I suppose, an insecurity even, I’d acquired a voice that wasn’t entirely my own.

And I thought about that voice that poets put on. If you’re a poet you probably do it. And if you don’t, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about tune your dials to the next poet up on the open mic or to any of them broadcast on BBC’s Radio 4. They’re all at it. Listen carefully.

It’s come to be known as “poetry voice.” It’s rooted in a bluesy, jazz scat blended with a dash of watered down Dylan and a measure of white-Beatnik inflection. It can be subtle, barely detectable, an occasional raised tone at the end of each phrase, a single word in emphasis pronounced from the diaphragm. It is a strange example of diluted, cultural appropriation without any specifically identifiable origin. It is designed, I think, to add “feeling” to a poem when spoken, to show that you really “mean it.” You can sound like a poet even if what you’ve written barely resembles poetry.

Perhaps it’s just a way of disguising vulnerability or simply a means of elevating speech to ‘not quite song’ but a cut above straight ‘saying stuff.’ It is a middle ground that poetry can claim as its own safe space. But with such richness and range available to the voice why such conformity? The poet Auden was a notoriously poor performer. But it was deliberate. Appalled by the manner in which populations were enthralled by the exuberant but empty oratory of political fanatics he dropped his cadence to a near mumble to avoid any sensationalism. The poem lived elsewhere, the reading a gesture toward it, a mere suggestion of it.

Jan Noble, Nº59 Dead networking (with Keats and Blake)

I woke at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and about all the times I have woken at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and specifically about these fourteen lines of Milton, the attempt to recall and silently recite less variety of counting sheep than of slowing the woolly urge to go on leaping the mind’s endless fences and instead settle down in the wet green grass. It was no different today, until I stopped bobbing along on iambs long enough to realize the reasons I’ve been quiet here overlap reasons I haven’t yet shared this poem.

The question of how to be strikes me as the obvious one for a person in my present condition to be asking, though the longer I’ve sat with it, the clearer it is that it’s been the central question of my life. It’s why this poem bewitched and baffled me at twenty-two, and has alternately vexed and consoled me since. And yet I’ve been . . . afraid? To write about it here. I’ve forgotten more about my formal education in poetry than feels prudent to acknowledge in a publication wherein I purport to bring you some insight about the craft, though writing this out longhand—in an emerald green Moleskine cahier with at stub-nib Eco TWSBI; it’s now 7:15 a.m. and there’s a bird I can’t name chiming outside the open window—I am reminded, once again, of what I set out to do here, how I set out to be.

It has been a struggle, recapturing what I want to call the simplicity of being with poems. I have found it difficult to stop myself from slipping out of it and into the assorted personas, assorted ways of being, I have tried on over the years—academic, educator, editor, critic—each of which comes with its own set of professional and social obligations, or perhaps simply expectations, internal and external alike. Some of the resulting reservations about staking any claim to insight are fairly obvious. I have forgotten more about Milton and his poems and the vast ecosystem of scholarship surrounding both than I can remember ever having known. If a doctorate could be revoked, I don’t think I’d argue overmuch if some diploma-removal goons came knocking.

Some of the reservations are far weirder: things like the persistent sense that I have forgotten some lousy thing that Milton said or did or is reported to have said or done, something unsavoury to our twenty-first century sense of moral perfectionism, and has been summarily dismissed by the loudest of internet users. That the Aeropagitica fails to fully account for some local complexity or other and must thus be chucked wholesale.

Or something even worse, like that he believed in meaning, in the soul, in God.

The point of all of this is that Sonnet XIX is a poem that I love, and it has lived with me, and I with it, for many years, and lately it has been essential to me as I relearn, each day, how to live, how to be, something I have done perhaps all my life, and not just at what lately sometimes feels its nadir.

Vanessa Stauffer, Sonnet XIX: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ by John Milton

As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.

The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.

This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.

The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?

Matthew Paul, On poetry competitions and personal taste

One does not attempt to write a poem about foremothers. One is compelled to write it. In fact, it writes itself. You are simply the last hand in a chain of clasped arms, the last daughter in a lineage of daughters, the last mouth from which the song, fully formed, emerges.

I see Daughter of Sindh as a bridge poem – my ancestral mothers gaze towards me, I look back to them, and the legacy of colonial rule, the pain of India’s partition hangs between us.

In the great gamble of map-drawing, Sindh (and half of Punjab) ended up on the Pakistani side of the border; the wrong side for my Hindu grandparents (maternal and paternal) who crossed amidst carnage, rebuilding their lives from refugee camps on what politicians declared in 1947 was now their homeland. They never crossed that border again. Their ache never ceased.

Far from their slowly reconstructed lives in India, I was born and raised in West Asia (UAE), by a Sindhi mother and a Punjabi father who spoke with each other in English and were themselves raised in the shadows of unspoken wounds of their parents’ displacement. My childhood was a surreal split between Indian mythological universes and the moody landscapes of Austen and Bronte; I memorized Shakespeare and Sanskrit verses for their rhythm, learnt ballet and Bharatanatyam.

Like Daughter of Sindh, I have existed on bridges since I can remember – at the intersection of cultures, of worlds, of times. For a long while, when I lost my mother at 19, existence felt like one foot in the realm of life, the other in the realm of death.

For me, writing poetry is standing on thresholds in their purest, most luminous warmth, and allowing the words to remake me. It is to drench oneself in their light, in their fire, and taste honey. Much of my collection ‘Drench Me in Silver’ (Black Bough, 2025) is the gathering of such moments.

Drop-in by Saraswati Nagpal (Nigel Kent)

In my yard, hands on my hips, I look down at the collage of green foliage at my feet. I look for the familiar whorls and hues of ephemeral leaves. I count seven Bloodroot blossoms, little yellow faces with their manes of white. My favorite stage of their growth is just before the bloom when the lobed leaf is wrapped around the stem like a cloak. The flower appears to be holding its face in despair. Staring down at them, I feel my arms begin to wrap around my body. […]

Bloodroot’s whorl of leaf encases the delicate stem, protecting the flower until it finally blooms. Anyone who has started seeds in the still-aired confines of their homes quickly learns that the leggy stems are susceptible to wind as soon as they’re taken outside to adjust to life in the real world. The Bloodroot eventually sheds the cloak of itself and as it opens its face to the sunlight, its root nodules foster bacteria, nitrogen, and a gossamer intimacy with mycelia to nourish itself on the earth. Every green of stem. Every brown and gray of bark. Every green and red and yellow of leaf. Every pinnacle of thorn. All of it is miraculously rendered from the soil, and light.

Today is one of those days. Despite the universe in a seed, despite the success of transplant, the seven Bloodroot blossoms are just that: seven flowers. We all have days like these where the magic isn’t magic, but simply is what is. We experience the doldrums, all of us sitting on the edge of our beds, dragging a sock over the foot of another day. Opening a door and closing it in that repetitive muscle memory. Of course the seed bursts open; what is needed is there. The plant has sap. That’s what plants do. The sap has color and it happens to be red. I stand here and stare at the ground, though, and somehow I’m still entranced. Sometimes all the looking inward is just a sign that one needs to spend more time looking outward.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “I Go Down to the Shore” where she is humbled by the work and mechanism of what is […]

Sarah Lada, Finding the World

I hope to get together another manuscript out this spring (1 circulating, 1 bounced, 1 accepted to tbc), but I looked at 60 pages of this one, and said, nope and yanked that bit of viscera and will rebuild.

I spent 7 hours on a poem yesterday and look askance at it today. Hm, maybe it needs to sit and steep a while.

Recently I got a couple poems accepted at online places. Another going up April 9. Poetry coming out at +doc too. So that’s exciting.

Meanwhile I’ve continued to read at my usual voracious rate. I’m at 75 titles, varying from a dozen pages to over 700 pages. I’ve realized how inadequate even to myself to note a good one is. Or locate again given my current state of books.

Pearl Pirie, On our small marble

Much of my writing life is about waiting, for the ideas to form, for the stories to knit together. But today: writing, tidying, note making. Toying with flash fiction, bending and breaking rules, watching how tone and structure affect a story. I’m trying to write super short flash today – nothing more than 100 words a story. It’s challenging, but I need the hard edges of a challenge, as opposed to the loose, wandering path of the novel. I like the constraint. I like the fierce cutting and chipping and chiseling of words. When I look up it’s been an hour and a half. I take a break from writing and instead search online for writing opportunities and update a spreadsheet, begin yet another grant application then give up on it.

Suddenly, around me is a shifting and dragging of tables and chairs. A group of cancer hospital volunteers have arrived for a meeting. There are about fifteen people crowding into my corner. They keep asking if it’s ok for them to be around me like this, and it is because I’m not going anywhere. One of them has two therapy dogs with her, and I reach down and stroke the nearest one, who has a surprisingly wet beard.

They start by having a right old bitch about all sorts of work based stuff. I enjoy listening to it. It reminds me of my old job as a microbiologist. Oh, strange days to remember when I was a person who got up and went to a laboratory and looked down a microscope. Strange to think I was a person who worked with people. The gossip. The bitching. And let me tell you, no one can bitch like an NHS worker. The group move on from bitching to sharing their own experiences. Each and every one a cancer survivor. Then they are done, coffee drank, plans made, they move out, apologising to me for crowding me.

‘It’s ok, I wasn’t going anywhere, I’m supposed to be working’ I say, smiling.

‘Are you here with someone?’

‘My mum, she’s having chemo’.

‘Well, we’re all survivors ourselves, you’ll have heard, don’t give up hope…’

‘Stage four.’

‘Oh, well I hope the chemo gives her some more time.’

‘Thanks’

There is an awkward silence. Even here, in the middle of a cancer hospital, death is a place we can’t quite cross into. I think about that often, that I have been crossing into and out of places of death, that for long periods of my life I have lived in the doorway of both worlds, the liminal space of waiting and watching. They have all been there too, or at least to the edges, to view from some platform what is coming to us all. The moment passes.

We talk a little more, about what I’m working on. I say I’m a writer. She says I should write about them. I say I’ll put them in a short story, but I don’t, I put them in this blog instead.

Wendy Pratt, Much of what happens here is about waiting

In the context of a review culture in which hot takes, pseudo blurbs and cod-academic posturing are rife, it’s a huge breath of fresh air to encounter a critic who engages with a poet and their poetry, who gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of every line, who reaches far beyond a mere description of thematic concerns, all without lapsing into jargon or self-aggrandisement.

This is why I’m thoroughly recommending Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read today. It’s a regular Substack where she delves deeply into one collection at a time. Her writing and insights are terrific in their clarity, worthy of a wider audience and way more interesting than most reviews that can be found in major journals, even the essay-length ones, so I’m not taking restricted words counts as an excuse here. In fact, Fitzpatrick’s showing up a fair few bigger names in The Deeper Read. I suggest you explore its archive via this link, but with one warning: it’s likely to provoke you into purchases of poetry books that you’d never heard of and suddenly need…!

Matthew Stewart, Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read

I was struck recently by the pathetic persistence of my ego needs, that little creature inside who is constantly wanting to be seen, heard, applauded. “My god, creature, will you never stop?” I scold it. “Surely we’re of or approaching an age when we can be beyond all this,” I suggest to it. “Oh yes,” it says, “of course,” it assures. But next thing I know it’s having another little fit over a rejection, a perceived slight. Recently it was in a small tizzy over a competition we lost, even though we really didn’t expect to win in the first place. “But still,” it declares stoutly. I bemuse myself with all the ways I try to be seen — my poetry, art, opinions, and all the conversations I insert myself-talking-about-myself into. “Can you just shut up,” I demand of the ego. It makes that locking-the-lips motion. I don’t believe it for a minute. Can I blame society’s focus on productivity, success, competition — does every freaking thing have to be a competition? Competition means winners, yes, but it also, by definition, means losers. It occurs to me that I identify always with the losers. Does that doom me to self-fulfilling prophecy? “No, no, it’s not my fault!” declares ego. I think about how early trauma informs lifelong twists of thinking. “Yes,” cries ego, “it’s my parents’ fault!” Oh shut up. Just keep doing the creative acts, I tell myself, and ignore the ego beast. It blinks at me, unreadable.

Anyway, then I found this amusing poem by Matthew Olzmann (“so much better known, better published, a real success story in the poetry world, not like…,” mutters ego) and felt momentary kindred, as a poem can do. And then the ending! That’s what poetry is all about.

Marilyn McCabe, the savant who believes mustard stains

Comingling bodies brewed of holy water and borrowed time. Insomnia and 5 a.m. coffee atoms. Dog-tired highways and ragged folk-songs. Starched shirts and worn jeans atoms. Counterfeit and heaven-forged. A medicine bottle with hope listed as a side effect.

Rich Ferguson, Swirling through the universe, all the atoms of us

THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Bethany Reid, Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

‘A Comet Passing’ is an urgent, taut collection of 18 poems inspired by the events surrounding the Heaven’s Gate religious group during the approach of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. As we readers already know (or can easily find out) what happened during these febrile, fervid last days, Vanessa [Napolitano]’s job as the poet is to keep our attention on each part of the sequence as it unfolds. Through a kind of poetic speculation, we experience the build-up of events as though we were one of the Heaven’s Gate members – believing when they believe, doubting when they doubt. Vanessa sustains the tension through a careful layering of moments of high intensity with moments of calm, even boredom, as the group prepares meticulously for what is to come.

I’ve loved Vanessa’s poetry since I first laid eyes on it, and it’s especially pleasing to see the emotional intelligence and subtlety of her writing brought to bear here, on a subject outside of her usual range of themes. This is a pamphlet doing what pamphlets do really well – operating as a vehicle for a set of concerns at somewhat of a tangent to the writer’s main body of work.

That said, Vanessa’s attention to detail, to the fine grain of life, is all over these poems, from the “newspaper bags full of literature” in the opening poem Recruitment, to the pin-sharp character studies of Nobodyody, to the last frivolities enjoyed and documented in Levity – “chicken pot pie, cold lemonade”.

Victoria Spires, A mystery of bodies

Frank Stanford is surely one of the most important undervalued American poets. Few have read him, but his writing of a dark and fallen South is on par with the novels of William Faulkner and the stories of Flannery O’Connor. In writing ability and scope, Stanford is their equal. The subject matter, tone, and language are quite similar. He died at twenty-nine by his own hand in 1978, yet he’d already published seven volumes of poetry. Two more posthumous collections would appear within one year. His most mysterious work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, is an epic poem of more than 15,000 lines narrated by a twelve-year old boy, growing up in Mississippi.

A volume of selected poems, The Light the Dead See, published in 1991, serves as a solid introduction to Stanford’s work. For those who want to experience the poet in-depth, I’d recommend What About Water: Collected Poems and Hidden Water, unpublished works, fragments, and letters – both books published in 2015. A writer of enormous possibility. Readers can only guess what might have been.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank Stanford, “Their Names Are Spoken”

Several years ago, I came across Nicole Gulotta’s Wild Words, a book about letting creativity meet you where you are. As a new mom, in the midst of nap-trapped days and sleepless nights, I devoured that book. We’re talking highlights, underlines, notes spilling into the margins.

After I finished Wild Words, I moved on to Nicole’s podcast. I have distinct memories of walking around my neighborhood, pushing a stroller, headphones on, and Nicole’s voice in my ear. At the time, I had no plans of publishing a book. I only knew that I wanted to keep writing. So I did—over several slow, mostly unremarkable years.

In 2025, I published my first poetry collection, A History of Holding. A month or two after its release, an order arrived in my inbox.

From Nicole Gulotta.

I was shocked, confused, elated. How did she know I existed? Where did she come across the book? I reached out to thank her and tell her how much Wild Words meant to me, and she was as kind and gracious as I’d imagined.

A few weeks later, she sent me an email.

She’d finished my book. She liked it. She wanted to have me on her podcast!

Allison Mei-Li, Slow Writing

It’s good that CBe doesn’t have shareholders, because the figures for the financial year just ended wouldn’t make them happy. The only people CBe is accountable to are readers. Thank you very much to those who pressed the ‘Donate’ link on the website home page: still there, and anyone who presses it gets a copy of a limited-edition 32-page full-colour booklet called Vedute a colori.

Early next year – which, if we get there, will be CBe’s 20th birthday – CBe will publish its largest and longest book to date. Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) happens to be – and I’m not entirely alone in thinking this – one of the major English-language works of the past century, and has never been published in the UK. It was originally published piecemeal between 1934 and 1978; in 2015 in the US Black Sparrow, now an imprint of David Godine, gathered the whole thing (including the original prose version, out of print for decades) into a single edition, and this is the edition – large format, 608 pages! – that CBe will publish in the UK.

The poems in Testimony are derived from court records from across the US between 1885 and 1915. Other poetry titles from CBe based on documentary records of the lives of others (interviews, photographs, emails …) are Sarah Hesketh’s 2016, Caroline Clark’s Sovetica, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Long Cuts, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter and New Life, and Testimony may be the mother and father of them all.

Reznikoff is little known in the UK (the US too). But some people know him, and I’d be very happy if any of those who do get in touch. Publishing this book is a statement: about small presses (much of Reznikoff’s work was self-published and printed by himself), but it’s also about why write, why publish. Any history of Modernism in literature that doesn’t include this book needs kicking.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter April 2026: new book, and news of another

Claire Taylor is a writer for both adult and youth audiences. Her poetry collection, April and Back Again is available now from Publishing Genius. Claire is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.

1 – How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote and self-published my first chapbook, Mother Nature, during the pandemic. It’s a hybrid collection of poetry and essays about pregnancy, the postpartum period, and early parenting. I don’t know that it changed my life per se, but being able to find readers who connected with the themes and emotional vulnerability at play in that book helped solidify my desire to keep writing, to remain open to the experience of sharing my life and my feelings in this way. 

My new collection, April and Back Again, focuses on a single year in my life from the period of April 2024 when I turned 39, to April 2025 when I turned 40. It’s a sort of time capsule for that period, a point in time when when both my life and the US were on the cusp of significant changes. I think the themes of family life, aging, and obviously politics and trying to parent through a fog of existential dread are universal and extend beyond the single year in which I wrote these poems, but this book feels especially like a snapshot of a particular moment in time for me.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry as a kid. I had my first poem published at age 10 in Highlights Magazine. It was about what it might feel like to be a leaf. Then I wrote a bunch of angsty and lusty poems in high school, your typical teenage stuff. After that, though, I mostly shifted away from poetry and only came back to it after becoming a mother. I needed to write about that new experience but had very little free time to sit down and do any long-form writing. I would write poems in my phone’s Notes app while I was nursing my baby or when I was up in the middle of the night trying to rock him back to sleep. Poetry is a good outlet if you need to express your emotions but only have five minutes and one hand free. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think the main concern behind my writing is how to make sense of being human. I think about writing poetry the same way I think about parenting: It’s my job to illuminate the complexity of being human, to say, here is what is hard and here is what is beautiful about being alive and now you have to decide what to do with that information.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Taylor

I’m grateful to share that my poem “Dear Judy” was just published in Solstice Literary Magazine, a long-standing, mission-driven journal dedicated to diverse voices and socially engaged work. Solstice consistently publishes writing that leans into nuance, justice, and the complicated ways we move through the world, and I’m honored to have a poem included in their Spring 2026 issue.

This poem is part of a series I’ve been writing since my mother passed unexpectedly in January 2024—epistolary duplex poems addressed to her. Some are shaped by what’s happening around us; others turn inward, tracing the parts of my life and my mother’s life that continue to intersect. These poems have become a way for me to keep talking to her, to say what I still need to say, to stay close.

“Dear Judy” is the second poem from this series to be published. The first, “Dear Judy,” appeared in New Verse News  on September 16, 2025. I also wrote a short post about that publication and the project as a whole:
“My Duplex Poem ‘Dear Judy’ Published in New Verse News”.

Formally, this new piece is an extended duplex, a variation on the poetic form invented by Jericho Brown. A traditional duplex is a 14-line hybrid that braids the sonnet, ghazal, and blues through repetition and transformation. You can read more about the form on Poets.org in their entry on the duplex.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Dear Judy” and extended duplex published in Solstice

Like many others, I get the occasional e-mail that tells me that the sender can help me find new readers for my brilliant books, millions and millions of readers.  Yesterday I got a different e-mail, an old-fashioned fan letter of sorts.  

The e-mail writer told me that she had selected my poem for a specific reason:  “This is to let you know that as a member of a Lectio Poetry group that met this morning, I chose your poem ‘The Moon Remembers’ for our session. Because of the recent NASA mission to send humans farther into space than ever before, and to study the dark side of the moon, I felt fortunate to find your poem to share.”

The e-mail concluded this way, “In this world of chaos, ‘The Moon Remembers’ gave us an hour of peace, of joy, of hope.”

Wow–what writer could hope for more than that?  I mean that sincerely.  It is one of the reasons I write, in the hopes of bringing something positive to people.

I don’t get many fan letters anymore, and the ones that I get are usually about “Heaven on Earth,” perhaps my most famous poem, read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  Yesterday’s e-mail referenced “The Moon Remembers.”  It’s a poem I barely remember writing, and at first, I wondered if she was writing to the wrong poet.

Happily, my blog answers many a question for me.  I posted it in this blog post, and I’m guessing that’s how the group leader found my poem.  Even though it’s not one of the poems I remember, I’m still happy with it.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fan Letter for Forgotten Poem, “The Moon Remembers”

I had one of those moments last week where I thought I would put off doing something until next time I had the opportunity. Luckily my thoughts stopped me in my tracks and nudged me into thinking how good it would feel to do the thing and know I had done it. I liked the fact that my thoughts were giving me the nod that I could just get on and do the thing. And when I stood in the moment to think about it, I realised it would be the same feeling of being a little bit scary whether I did it this time or next, and therefore it made sense just to crack on and do it. My mission? To pop into a book shop and ask if they would be willing to stock my poetry books. Three things also spurred me on:

• Helen O’Neill asking, “Where can people find your poetry?”
• My commitment to being 10% braver (thank you Jaz Ampaw Farr).
• This lovely feedback from someone who messaged me recently after buying a copy of one of my books… “I picked up ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ today after reading two poems standing in the bookshop! I couldn’t put it down…. The Telford Warehouse poem stopped me completely…”

So this week I am celebrating seizing the moment, the positive role of self-talk and the things and people that spur us on.

Sue Finch, A ROAD TRIP TO NEVERN

My poetry calendar is getting crowded, and I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use the distraction.

This Wednesday at J. Bookwalter’s in Woodinville, at 6:30 PM we’ll be meeting at our monthly book club to discuss Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book, Accidental Devotions, just out from Copper Canyon Press. (Well, technically its launch date is in May, but we’re celebrating early, because Poetry Month!) Here are my cats jealously guarding their early copy. I have already read the book and know it’s fantastic. I recommend it.

And on April 23rd, J. Bookwalter’s Tasting Studio in Woodinville is re-starting its Wine and Poetry Night with Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new book. I’ll be hosting and doing an introduction. […]

And just in case this isn’t enough poetry for you, I’ll be reading at the Poetry Book Party for Catherine Broadwall’s new book Aftermath from Girl Noise Press on May 5th at Vermillion in Capital Hill, as part of the opening act at 7 PM. Catherine is the poet on the right in this picture with a Rainier cherry tree.

In between all this poetry month (and early May) excitement, I’ll be welcoming my nephew Dustin Hall’s move to the area, celebrating my birthday, and probably snapping pictures of tulips, daffodils and cherry blossoms along the way.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, It’s National Poetry Month! Poetry Book Clubs and Poetry Readings, Poet Friends and Book Parties, and More

Now that we’re one week into April, I thought it might be fun to think about the aftermath of a 30/30. All those drafts, in various stages of newness and disarray. How do you begin to approach deciding what to keep, what to abandon, what to revise? I always approach a first draft the same way after letting it cool on the sill for a while. I ask questions in my head:

• What’s working, both at the language level and/or in serving the poem’s purpose?
• What’s extraneous and should be removed?
• What’s necessary/working as connective tissue but poorly executed?
• Where’s the turn/volta toward purpose or layers of meaning?

Though I am not officially doing a 30/30 (see last post), I am trying to write something every day this month. So I started on April 1 with a prompt from Bluesky from Todd Dillard:

“Deconstructed Fable”
Write a poem in which every day you receive some fragment of a fable. A red cloak, the huntsman’s ax, a grandmother’s spectacles, etc. Write the poem in such a way that “solving” this fable directs you to return to your childhood home.

As it always is with prompts, I did not follow its instructions exactly. I only used one fragment/item and stuck with one fable throughout a return to the childhood home. (Surprise! It was a grief poem…oops.) Although the draft is okay, it’s certainly not what it could be.

Donna Vorreyer, What’cha Gonna Do With All That Junk?

Walk horizonless, gaze curiously,
recognize, understand the birds,
the trees, the entire sky.
It no longer feels impossible,

something peaks and it feels
like forever, where a song
is not rain, but
a delicate wing.

Charlotte Hamrick, Beyond & Within

Dear Friends, March was a fast month for me. With all of the preparation going up to Baltimore for AWP and coming back again, I hardly had any time to review and post the recent interviews I did. One is with Donna Spruijt-Metz and the other with Heidi Seaborn. (Both are below.)

I woke up this morning excited to finally get to re-listen to these interviews and post them on The Poetry Salon’s YouTube channel.

Before I could get the raw material of these interviews downloaded, I got on Facebook to mindlessly scroll for a bit, while drinking my coffee and waking up. Instead of getting my mindless scroll, I saw pictures of John Brantingham, being shared all over my feed. John, my friend, and founder of The Journal of Radical Wonder was scheduled to feature at Poets Inspiring Poets on May 18th at The Poetry Salon. At first I thought, “Good. People are promoting the event with John.” But then I read the notes under the photo and saw, as I so often do, that people were announcing our mutual friend’s passing.

I was so not ready for this; I was getting ready to see him again on zoom. People who have events scheduled with you can’t possibly die! I thought.

I turned off the background noise. I starred at the screen. I scrolled more mindfully now. […]

I spent a chunk of today working on an essay about John and what he taught me and inspired for me in the brief time I knew him. It connects quite a bit with my discussions with Donna and Heidi – personal grief and collective grief, the environmental crisis, and the resilience of the planet. It’s about using poetry to share and process complex feelings. It’s about what we can do for one another and for the planet.

It is also about acorns and making cookies.

I will share that essay soon. For now I want to say that we will open our April 18th event, Poets Inspiring Poets, to everyone who wants to celebrate John. Please bring a poem of his to read, or bring a poem of your own that connects with John’s work in some way. If you had work published by him in The Journal of Radical Wonder, bring that. Mostly, bring yourself!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Finding Radical Wonder in Difficult Times: Honoring John Brantingham

It’s not so much the lifeboats
studding dark water like stars,
as what lies beneath the boats,
free swimming, with hearts beating,
then ferociously attached
(armor and weapon), hungry
for the funk of horizons

PF Anderson, Barnacles (#NaPoWriMo 11)

It is surreal that war is raging while my surroundings are so serene. I think of rocket fire, explosions, thick clouds of toxic smoke. I think of people I love in Israel who are protesting the war with Iran. I think of a pregnant friend making sure she can get to the nearest bomb shelter. I think of all the people across the region who have no bomb shelters.

I wonder how any of us made it through last Tuesday (the day we all woke to “a whole civilization will die tonight”) without a nervous breakdown. My cat naps peacefully on the couch. The tree frogs sing their spring song. I’m not sure we’re out of the woods. Maybe we’re still on the brink of global disaster. And yet laundry needs doing, the groceries must be put away.

Rachel Barenblat, We made it

The news. The girl switches the channel to Chopin’s Berceuse.

They have been sending drones. Only half of the house is still standing, wires protruding from the walls.

The boy, dizzy, asks his mother if it’s time for strawberries—soon.

Spiders. The woman shies away from touching their cocoons as she clears the furniture out from the shed.

Naming a crater after their commander’s late wife, the Artemis crew falls into each other’s arms.

Kati Mohr, Beads

I’m scared. I’m guessing we’re all scared. I stop scrolling, I stop reading, I stop listening. I feel guilt. I feel shame I should be informed, I should be aware I should not bask in the privilege of being able to turn away. More than anything I should be changing things, I should be using writing to change things.

I am not. Take this morning for example – I have finished the first draft of a wedding poem for a couple who are looking forward to building their life together in a beautiful country cottage. I’ve written a slightly dark poem about a blackbird’s song for my Poem Whisperer’s group. I’ve checked my seedlings, wandered sunshine and tamped down the fear that grasped me yesterday. I have turned my mind away, I have basked in my privilege. I am able to choose the place that Marwan Marhoul talks about

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

– Marwan Makhoul

I have no lived experience, no first-hand knowledge of this. I am write outrage, devastation, fear, from a place where I can hear the birds. Will it not be hollow, even insulting to write about things I know of but can never understand? I can write about my own response, but what do I really have to say that is different than all the other sorrow and regret that’s out there? I look up the point of writing in terrifying times and read about poetry being a balm, a soothing presence. I read about poetry being a means to rail against injustice, to call for solidarity. I read about poetry being a way to connect and to empathise. I read that poetry captures the essence of what it means to be human. I read this wisdom and feel empty. I don’t know if I believe it anymore. I don’t know if art is powerful enough to overcome and rebuild.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Do the words of a person who can still hear the birds have any value in times of terror?

The image of the H above is from a series entitled the Scaffolding for the Alphabet. Is the alphabet all scaffolding? Is old writing scaffolding for the old? Or the other way around.

And here’s a poem that I wrote “after” A.R. Ammon’s “Poem.” I took his poem and ran it through a bunch of translation tools and then a wisp of something emerged which I made into this poem.

AFTER

lunch I
put
on my shoes
and stand just
above
the earth

Gary Barwin, Scaffolding for the Alphabet

This week: intense incomprehension, the strings of things, apple maggots, plastic words, and much more. Enjoy.

Spring begins today. The seasonal gate swings open on its equinox hinge. And I’m also in-between things : the end of a years-long writing project, on one hand, and a new and unexpected set of social responsibilities, on the other.

So this is just a diary note, a fugitive transition report. Stray thoughts.

When you are absorbed and propelled by the magnetic field of an extended poetry project, you are really in that world. Wearing thick horse-blinders donated by Pegasus. So when you emerge, everything looks slightly changed.

And what have I sought for, all these years, eyes fixed on poetry? Yet maybe this is the wrong way to put it. The ideal, the model, of poetry is out there, in the world; yet the quiddity of poet-qua-poet is constituted by an ongoing relationship, with an emerging process – that is, between the poet and poems themselves. And over time, sometimes, this relation becomes more symbiotic, more “second nature” : “Time silvers the plow, and the poet’s voice” (per Osip Mandelstam).

When Mandelstam was asked by one of his Soviet media handlers to define “Acmeism”, the literary movement which he helped bring to birth, he replied : “Nostalgia for world culture.” His remark encapsulates one of the evergreen, effervescent aspects of the poet’s métier : a sense not only of tradition, but also solidarity with fellow workers in the verse-furrows – all over the world, all through both time and space. It can make you giddy just to think of it.

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

I have twelve hives of bees. Some are on a farm, at the edge of a field in a long strip of woodland. Amid the scrub there is a small tree which in late Spring is a cloud of blossom. I notice it because it sings: the insects that are feeding on it are so tiny, they can only be heard. They greet the nectar with a high, sweet note – pure elation. […]

Sean Borodale’s wonderful Bee Journal should be prescribed reading for all aspiring or armchair apiarists. Everything happens : they swarm, they die, they reinvent themselves, all while he learns to do the hardest thing of all – nothing. From its Introduction: “When the wider landscape parches in high summer, this shaded, humid locality divines its insects and flowers; re-builds itself delicately in colour, sugar, water and sunlight”. He understands the life-force of the colony as a manifestation of Lorca’s “duende” :

All that has dark sounds has duende. Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art …

Bee Journal came from notebooks he took to the hive : “inside the increased effort of simultaneously writing and ‘keeping’, I experienced a pressure, a slight emergency of the senses”. His poet’s attentiveness allows him into their world. He quickly gave up trying to write while also tending to an open hive, but the poems really do hold what he hopes is “the poetic pulse of the poem in progress”. This “raised alertness” – to the radical geography of the bees’ orbit as well as to the tiny intimacies of the bees themselves – really do capture the experience, including, frequently, “intense incomprehension”.

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 
irremediably.

Dale Favier, Already Spring

Another reason I love reading poetry in the morning is that, more often than not, reading others’ poems inspires me to write my own.

I have a “daily” poem exchange with a few friends on email this month (we’re calling it “rogue” since we’re not actually required to write every day—so yes, we’re definitely playing fast and loose with the word daily here). But it’s been a reminder to me that writing has always been the one thing when I’m doing it, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. And many times, just by showing up, I end up with a draft of a poem. Other times, nothing—or a poem that feels like it was written by a feral raccoon who just discovered he has big feelings. But I’m okay with that, I’m okay with a not-so-great poem. When it comes to poems, I realize I’m less attached to outcome and more attached to the idea of play and process.

But as you know, it’s a hard mix these days—to be creative, happy, engaged, and informed without short-circuiting. So I’ve been trying to keep things simple when at home, I reach for the natural world and books (my two comfort animals in tough times) along with daily Biscoff vanilla cream sandwich cookies (sometimes a few or more) and Mighty Leaf Ginger Twist tea at night (no, I am not a sponsor of either of these products, I just somehow became accidentally devoted to both of them recently—some of you will remember my expensive French yogurt kick). Yes, it might sound a little dull (poetry, cookies, tea, the sky, robins, early spring flowers, etc.), but I’m recommitting myself to the small luxuries in life. 

Kelli Russell Agodon, Rogue Poems & Reasonable/Unreasonable Amounts of Cookies

I write to my elected officials, I donate when I can, I hold a sign at rallies, I feel helpless.

After reading for a few hours, most nights I still lie awake trying to keep my mind from heading back to poet and activist June Jordan’s question, “How many gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?”

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

Every once in a while, you stumble upon something so lovely, so unpretentiously beautiful and quietly profound, that you feel like the lungs of your soul have been pumped with a mighty gasp of Alpine air. This Is a Poem That Heals Fish (public library) is one such vitalizing gasp of loveliness — a lyrical picture-book that offers a playful and penetrating answer to the question of what a poem is and what it does. And as it does that, it shines a sidewise gleam on the larger question of what we most hunger for in life and how we give shape to those deepest longings.

Written by the French poet, novelist, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Simeón, translated into English by Enchanted Lion Books founder Claudia Zoe Bedrick (the feat of translation which the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska had in mind when she spoke of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes … a second original”), and illustrated by the inimitable Olivier Tallec, this poetic and philosophical tale follows young Arthur as he tries to salve his beloved red fish Leon’s affliction of boredom.

Arthur’s mommy looks at him.
She closes her eyes,
she opens her eyes…

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

Puzzled and unsure what a poem is, Arthur goes looking in the pantry, only to hear the noodles sigh that there is no poem there. He searches in the closet and under his bed, but the vacuum cleaner and the dust balls have no poem, either.

Determined, Arthur continues his search.
He runs to Lolo’s bicycle shop.
Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time, and is always in love.
He is repairing a tire and singing.

So begins the wonderful meta-story of how poetry comes into being as a tapestry of images, metaphors, and magpie borrowings. Each person along the way contributes to Arthur’s tapestry a different answer, infused with the singular poetic truth of his or her own life.

Maria Popova, This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
If I were a liar, I would say it was thanks to the mentorship of [INSERT IMPRESSIVE NAME] and [INSERT PRESTIGIOUS SCHOOL]. The truth is that I squeezed between Jim Morrison lyrics and the skips on Dylan Thomas records I took out of the library. How else does someone like me discover poetry? I’m from the Bronx. Nobody had books in the house.  

3 – How long does it take to start a writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Writing is slow for me. Until it speeds up. Until I have something I have something to stretch across the room. Each project is intended as a new experiment unto itself. For /face, I started sampling images and language from Google Patents on facial surveillance technology. My first ten or twenty pieces were nothing anyone cosplaying mid-century Confessionalism would recognize as poetry. That’s the standard I set for myself. That’s how I view “experimentalism.” I was confused but also encouraged when I heard right back from editors who wanted to publish the material. Of course, unlike in the movies, any acceptance was followed by ten more rejections. Anything I achieved with this book came after this 1-in-10 ratio, which, for me, became a game of how weird I could make the work and which snob magazine I could freak out. That was my “journey,” as the kids say. That and a lot of reading and research. Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Shoshana Zuboff. They all rode along in the back seat. In the front was Nancy Spero squeezed alongside Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.   

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
All poems begin at the bottom of the esophagus, where gastric acids begin breaking down anything I’ve ingested. Nutrients become energy; the rest, the materials that cannot benefit the body; they become poems. Everything starts with a few lines, then a few more. I cannot work without an idea for a “project.” Everything has to be an attack on a larger order, or why am I even bothering? 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with William Lessard

Its origin is unclear: it may or may not have been Oscar Wilde who said a net is just a bunch of holes woven together with strings. He may or may not have been quoting some ancient Asian wisdom. But I like the notion. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by John Irving, but I loved the books of his that I loved because of how the strings of things in the stories would wander around then come together in the end not in a tidy bow but in a weave, the weft bending to the warp of all the crisscrossed lines, the gaps suddenly making sense. I try sometimes to think about my own life that way, to catch a glimpse of some fabric of it. It’s hard to see the fabric of one’s own life, so close are we to the weave, trying to peer through the holes, missing the overall pattern often. I like this poem by my friend Jessica Dubey because of its filaments, and how they dangle and tangle, and how by the end something unexpected is woven, and something is caught in the net.

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

 I want to share this essay in Annulet by Ryan Eckes and Laura Jaramillo: “Searching for the Commons through Precarity and Crisis: American Poetics since 9/11.” Both Ryan and Laura are my age but they feel like my elders in the world of poetry and politics, as they’ve both been tapped into things throughout the entirety of the last few decades (whereas I have been playing catch up for the last 7 years or so). This essay offers a really insightful history of what it was like as a poet on the left through the Bush years, OWS, and beyond. There is also a really astute analysis of how social media and the internet more broadly has impacted us as poets striving for a common connection. It’s a great essay and one not to miss. (They also happen to give a brief shout out to Dead Mall Press, which is much appreciated.)

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

Rabble rouser, organizer,
bold bright spirit wrapped in awkward
flesh and cotton ball softness and
carrying the most essential
pastels (pink as your cheeks, baby
blue like your eyes, and white as grief
and graves and talcum powder). You
flung your arms up, shouting over
signs and crowds and floats wheeling on
hidden wheels with black treads. You lead
the Pride parade; you celebrate
the you others have yet to learn
to see—

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

The past couple days have found me stuck on the latest play script, at the end of Act I, which is about usually where I’ve been getting stuck. It’s turning into a mystery, almost, and I am not sure I want it to go in that direction. I am the writer, after all, you would think what I say goes. But then again–many poem projects have gone in entirely different ways than intended, so maybe I should let the writing wander as it may.  I will return in a couple of days and see if it’s working better or if I can find a way to make it so. 

In the meantime, I have been writing some early bits to a newish project, the bone palace, which was meant to accompany a set of fun fauxtographs I made up a couple years back. The images are proving a ripe and fertile space for building stories around and within them. The project as it starts feels very similar to errata, which was just a little chap of borrowed formats, something which I love doing in the midst of other kinds of projects. But the narrative feels sharper here and less collage-like […]

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

On Thursday, I finally submitted the manuscript for my fifth collection, I Saw What I Know. For the past six weeks, I’ve needed to write a blurb for it – the short summary which appears on the back cover. Instead of writing it, I wrote an article about blurb writing. In the process of finishing said article, I began researching the process of caring for cat litter trays. ADHD procrastination and paralysis is REAL.

The thing is, I don’t have a cat. So I invite you to celebrate with me the miraculous fact of having writing not just this article, but also my fifth collection. […]

If you think that writing a blurb for someone else is hard, try writing your own.

Seriously, try it. There’s a lot to be gained from it. Not only in practicing your skills for concise, original writing – but also, developing a deeper understanding of your own work. If you can’t explain concisely what you’ve written; if you can’t describe what someone may gain from reading it – maybe you don’t know your work enough; maybe you don’t love or believe in it enough. And maybe you can change that.

You don’t have to have written a pamphlet or book. If you’re not working towards publication, or you’re years away from a completed collection, it doesn’t matter. Just pull together a bunch of your writing; say 10-50 poems.

Read them; make notes. Identify your primary concerns, the recurrent topics and themes. State – at least to yourself – what your strengths are, how a kind and interested reader might describe your voice. Consider what that reader may take away from the experience of your work.

Writing about your own work will give you a stronger appreciation of your own voice; an understanding of your techniques, your intention, your focus. The river of poetry has its own currents. It will – and should – always take you in unexpected directions – but at the same time, you have oars, you can build your own craft, you can follow a chart. You get to decide what you are writing about, and how, and why. A blurb is a great way to dip into the process.

Let yourself be lavish. Get drunk on your own wine.

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

The other morning, leaving our Mexico City apartment after reading the news, I had the thought, “Everything I do is meaningless in the face of all this violence, and in the face of death.” But then we spent that day in the National Museum of Anthropology, where thousands of ancient objects from the civilizations of Mexico, all made with extreme care, are housed in a magnificent building, also made with care and attention to every detail — and I came back to myself and my purpose.

We are living in a time when the concentration of money and power, ruthless economic competition, and the demand for everything being done immediately are forcing the prioritization of speed and efficiency over perfection and care. Carefulness will increasingly be found in individual and small enterprises that exist more and more outside of, and independent from, mass production. In Japan, master craftspeople are revered as “living treasures”, but there is a real question of whether our western societies will have the capacity in the future to appreciate and preserve not only what artists, craftspeople, poets, and musicians produce, but the traditions, rooted in care and attention, that are the foundation for these arts.

For a long time, we’ve counted on arts organizations and institutions to do this work of preservation, education, and passing on. Not only are those institutions under political and financial assault, but their “gatekeeping” has been criticized as exclusionary and discriminatory — and rightly so. That in itself is another subject.

The point I want to make here is that living in a very different culture, as I’ve been doing for these weeks — one that has had a long history of political disruption, colonialism, violence, discrimination, and economic hardship, and where individuals could not expect much of anything from outside themselves and their communities — makes certain things clear. The vibrancy of the arts here is the result of a choice: people have taken that responsibility upon themselves because they know that art is intrinsic to life. The work that is shown in the National Museum of Anthropology is almost entirely unattributed: these are extraordinary objects that were made by anonymous master craftspeople. Many of the people who live in Mexico today have spent their lives knowing and valuing those traditions more than they value personal recognition. The indigenous woman sitting in the street selling exquisite needlework take pride in her craft, sells it to make a small living, and smiles when she sees that you appreciate it. The older man who takes my hand and draws me into an impromptu salsa in a city street is filled with an ebullient joy that he freely gives to me. I doubt that either of them has an easy life. But I would argue that both are more in touch with their humanity than many of us.

The sickness and malaise we are experiencing in the western First World is a disease that comes not only from the top down — which it surely does — but because too many of us have lost the conviction that art for art’s sake is vital for our own spirits, and for our communities. When we, as artists, buy into the capitalist model, thinking that money, fame, titles and rewards are the measures of our self-worth as creators, we have already missed the point and made it far harder for ourselves. One does not have to be a famous poet to write words that matter. Art and music that lift people up can happen when two or three people get together to make some “house music,” or dance in a park.

Beth Adams, Care

There’s been a good sprinkling of words in my week all round because as well as reading I have been writing. One of my favourite ways to write poetry is when there is a compelling feeling of being pulled to set something down. This week my sister was my muse. We had been talking on the phone and after telling me something she hadn’t told me before she said it would make a good poem if I wanted to write it. I pondered on what she had said on one of my walks and came back with a pretty much fully formed poem. I remembered to leave it to rest overnight as well as read it out loud to check it sounded right before editing it and smoothing its edges. Then I recorded it as a voice note and sent it to her.  We both agree that is has something special about it so I am hoping it will find a home in the not-too-distant future.  

Sue Finch, A DAFFODILESQUE DALEK, THE FIRST MOW, AND THE MUSE

Rather incongruously, I am a member of the French Rugby Federation (FFR) — this is because I do all the admin for my middle son’s rugby club membership — and as a result I had access to early booking for the last game of the Six Nations tournament, which was played last Saturday night at the Stade de France — a huge, 80,000-seat stadium in the north of Paris. Thanks to my prompt use of the booking link, I managed to secure for my son and I what turned out to be amazingly good seats, just behind one of the goals, for a very reasonable sum. […]

Pindar’s victory odes are some of the most sublimely beautiful poems in the entire Western tradition. But they are also, quite sincerely, about sport. We don’t have a Pindar today, but I was struck by how the spectacle and conduct of the match provided in many ways most of the elements of a traditional epinicion. The match itself was preceded by a very impressive show, featuring two men dressed as medieval knights mounted on horses riding onto the pitch (they carefully covered it up first, presumably to avoid the possibility of the players ending up face-first in a pile of horse manure). I’m not sure exactly what they were meant to represent, as there was no explanation as far as I could tell, but the pageant was clearly intended to allude to the long history of conflict between France and England — as an Englishwoman, I thought of Agincourt, but perhaps the French would recall rather the Battle of Hastings.

Pindar’s epinicia, similarly, always have a structuring myth linking the present-day victor and his sponsor to the distant past — generally, Pindar liked if possible to work in Achilles, Hercules or Ajax, presumably as their manly credentials seemed the best fit for athletic victory. But unlike the organisers of the Six Nations spectacle, he had the somewhat harder task of creating in each case a link between a reasonably well-known myth and the specific family, town or island of the victorious athlete and/or his aristocratic sponsor. Partly as a result, Pindar’s versions of myths are often eccentric or obscure, and he may have invented details to suit his purposes. The style of formal epinicia, which generally avoids direct names and narrative in favour of complex allusions, adds to this effect. So overall, the fact that I wasn’t quite sure exactly what story this moving and impressive opening show was alluding to was also rather authentic.

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

Great imagist poetry is distinguished by its ability to immerse the reader fully in the immediacy of emotion. Amy Lowell’s sensual warmth, Richard Aldington’s taut emotional energy, and the deceptively simple yet resonant details of William Carlos Williams all exemplify this tradition. I Am Not Light by Louise Machen (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) demonstrates that same capacity. The collection is arranged in three parts—Into the Darkness, Origins of Darkness, and Into the Light—and throughout them Machen’s urgent, sensuous poems exploit the powerful cultural associations we attach to darkness and light. Darkness appears as a space of turmoil, threat, and uncertainty; light signals growth, clarity, and renewal. Yet in Machen’s work, the two are not oppositional. They are symbiotic. Darkness becomes a necessary condition of transformation, a landscape to be endured before light can be reached. […]

Louise Machen’s nomination for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem feels entirely justified. As Briony Collins notes in her endorsement, there are echoes of Sylvia Plath in these poems, but Machen’s voice remains unmistakably her own: contemporary, incisive, and deeply resonant. I Am Not Light establishes her as one of the most compelling poets writing today.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘I Am Not Light’ by Louise Machen

There’s a folio of 45 Ottawa poets up at Periodicities. 2 of my poems are included, “memento vivis” and “a placebo science” which are ghazal or ghazal adjacent. Don’t miss Michelle Desbarats‘ and Sarah Kabamba‘s and Tamsyn Farr‘s while you’re there. Ooh, and Cameron has a book of essays coming out this fall.

Word from David O’Meara, “When you’re starting off, it’s easier to take writing really seriously while also having a really good time doing it. I want to do whatever I need to, in my writing, in order to be doing those two things simultaneously again. “This matters” plus “This is fun,” the whole time I’ve got my notebook open.”

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

Reviewers, particularly poetry reviewers, aren’t usually paid (the commissioning editor themselves might be an unpaid volunteer so this isn’t a ‘pay the writer’ argument). They get a free copy of the book they review. That’s not to say the reviewer doesn’t benefit from reviewing. They get an introduction to a book they may not have chosen to read or couldn’t afford to buy. There’s value in writing a review: assessing the poems, developing critical skills, learning how to justify an opinion and argue a case. Reviewing is also a way of getting or keeping a reviewer’s name in print in between publications of their own work where the reviewer is also a practitioner. Occasionally a reviewer may be thanked.

There should be no reason to unpublish a commissioned review. A review is only commissioned on books that a magazine editor has deemed worthy of a review. A reviewer has read and re-read the book, written and edited the review, the review has been further edited and agreed. After that lengthy process, which gives the editors and reviewer plenty of time to withdraw if there’s a disagreement about the tenor of a review or the reviewer can’t edit it to the correct length, before the review is published. The writer or publisher of the book under review may ask for inaccuracies to be corrected, but they cannot dictate what a poetry magazine does or does not publish if the references to the book are accurate. A disagreement about the opinion expressed should not sway a magazine editor to take down a review.

It is galling to see a review taken down after publication, when there was nothing wrong with the commissioned review. When Gutter magazine took down their commissioned review of Polly Clark’s “Afterlife”, a review good enough to be used as part of a ‘book of the month’ feature, alarm bells rang.

Alarm bells continued to ring as the review was not withdrawn for reasons of quality or even disagreement with opinions and arguments put forward in the review.

It seems the withdrawal was actioned on the basis of a complaint from a reader (whose name may be known to the magazine editors but has not been revealed publicly) not about the review, not about the contents of the review, not about the book being reviewed, i.e. not for any legitimate reason. The review was taken down because the complainant drew the editors’ attention to social media posts made by the poet whose book was reviewed. While I’m not discussing what those posts were or the views of the poet, this review was withdrawn after agreement to publish for reasons that had nothing to do with the review.

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

Power and authority are at stake when we talk about what makes a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ poem. This is what animates much of the discourse. Without power and authority, the critical judgement of poetry experts has no answer to the popular appeal of Insta-poems and other money-spinning media forms — they are reduced to customers reviewing niche products.

But power and authority is hard-won; genuinely illuminating, convincing evaluations of individual poems and books take time to muster. Meanwhile, there is the constant need to promote interest in those same poems and books, as well as related events.

So shortcuts are taken. Agreement among a small and insular group is presented as widespread consensus. Authority is extended far beyond its natural purview, as when a poet who is successful and well-liked among his coterie, but limited in range, makes pronouncements on the state of the whole scene. Bad poems need to be invented, and need to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the authoritative critic to have a function. What’s more, the criteria must remain somewhat hazy in order to avoid the average reader learning how to consistently apply it themselves. Periodic trenchant denunciations of work that, to the untrained eye, is remarkably similar in character to that which the same critic praises are a smart move.

By the same token, the real offence committed by those editors and activists who rule out work by avowed political reactionaries, or are overly interested in poets’ claims to membership of an oppressed group is that their criteria are too transparent. They make it too easy to jump through the hoops, and in so doing threaten to mortally wound the power of other editors and critics — which is wielded on the basis that they possess an exceptional capability when it comes to judging poems.

Jon Stone, ESSAY / What is a ‘bad’ poem exactly?

2. In the thick of the monsoon, the poem should hold its breath and sink into standing water. In the deepest murk, lie the choicest words. A poem must be an abalone diver.

3. Through mango-hued summers, the poem cannot be shadow. Cannot be shade. The poem should climb up a light beam to interrogate the sun. To look into its eyes. To hold itself up to that light. A poem must sweat.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Things you should teach your poem-child before it leaves home

This morning, I’m thinking about the downside to surprise—the sudden stroke that leaves you fatherless, the burst in the dot-com bubble that evaporates wealth you realize was only ever imaginary, the rollover that leaves your twin brother paralyzed from the neck down. . . . During the summer of 1988, my mother went into an operating room for a routine hysterectomy and woke to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

This kind of surprise has a profound effect on character. Often, during the seven years of my mother’s intermittent treatment, I thought about how hardship turns some of us bitter while others become better versions of themselves. Once during those years, I visited the family farm after my parents had gone dancing. During that season, chemotherapy was having its way with Mother. “Well,” she said to me, “I could stay home on a Saturday night. And be alone with the side effects. Or I can be among friends. I can dance with your father. The music, the company will take my mind off how I feel.”

During the years I lived in Austin, my husband Scott and I became friends with the Houston poet Erica Lehrer. I well remember the time I saw Erica get out of her car for a reading and walk toward us with a cane. A decade younger than I, Erica was a vital, healthy presence in the poetry community. She’s turned an ankle, I thought. Soon she’ll be tossing that cane. Erica’s need for a cane, I soon learned, was far more serious than a sprain. She’d been diagnosed with ataxia, one of three in every hundred-thousand. Also known as Multiple System Atrophy, ataxia is progressive, affecting coordination, affecting speech, affecting everything.

Once on a visit to Houston, Scott and I stayed with Erica and her husband. By then, Erica was using a wheeled walker. She spoke haltingly, her tongue uncooperative. Still, Erica entertained us. She made us laugh. She found humor in carrying a medical document about her diagnosis—to save her from being arrested for public drunkenness.

Yesterday, I pulled Erica’s poetry collection from my shelves. The title says so much about this remarkable woman: Dancing with Ataxia. The poems are sometimes bluntly honest about the grueling losses exacted by ataxia. But never self-pitying, always alive with the resilience that defined Erica Lehrer. 

David Meischen, “I Am More”

I get as close as I can to Turtle, careful to read their body for signs of unease. Turtle does not move, but stares right at me. Or through me. A heft. A mountain. A gargoyle. A carapace of watery wisdom. There are so many ways to describe and honor Turtle. Staring into the ancient, the ancient stares back. Maybe someday I too will be craggy. Maybe someday I too will have deep rivulets across my skin and in them a language of time well-spent. But right now I am soft. My shoulders are worldless. My language, young and unsure.

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

William Wordsworth famously described poetry as “strong emotion…recollected in tranquility,” and that is how I want to think about—or think with and through—this collection of poems by Thomas A. Thomas, a photographer and an extraordinary poet, now the Assistant Managing Editor at MoonPath Press.

Because My Heart leads us down the path of a partner’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the painful decline, to loss, I both wanted to read this book, and I very much didn’t want to read it. Before my own husband was moved into a residential care home, I picked the book up multiple times, but couldn’t make myself continue. Around the first of this year, however, I told myself it was time, and I took it with me to a local café. Once I began, I read it all the way through. Five sections, 29 poems: I thought I could easily gin out a review. Tried. Couldn’t. A few weeks ago, having read it through again, I found my way in. Narrative arc of disease and death aside, My Heart Is Not Asleep is primarily a love story. So that’s the book I’m here to tell you about.

“Around Us,” the second poem in the collection, lights up the two main characters like gods in an ancient Greek drama. They may be on their way to a hard fall, but, reading this poem, I knew I wanted to be there to see it:

A beam of full moonlight falls through the skylight and
graces our pillows, our faces, lights up
dust motes, like stars turning silently above our bed.

Silver lights reflect “high knotty pine ceiling / and the knotty pine walls, each knot / you said, a galaxy.” The poem holds the arc of the whole book, ending with “eons exploded and long gone dark stars.”

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

When I was 17 or 18 years old, we read in class Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem, written in blank verse, retells the biblical Fall of Man — Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden — in over ten thousand lines of verse, first published in 1667. Lucifer, cast into the fires of Hell after his failed rebellion against God, resolves to take revenge by corrupting humanity and its innocent residence in paradise. He arrives into the Garden of Eden and, disguised as a seductive serpent, tempts Eve into eating an apple. She bites, then Adam bites into the apple. Their disobedience to never taste the forbidden brings upon the world sin, death, and shame, and they are expelled from Paradise. But Milton reassures his readers: the divine angel Michael reveals that Christ will one day redeem humanity’s fall.

Last summer, I went to Giverny. Among the purple, and the pink, and the red, and the blue flowers, in the middle of ice cream shops that sold melon and strawberry parfums, there are rows and rows of apple trees in bloom, with green and red apples hanging off the branches, apples of varying colours rotting on the soil, apples eaten by worms, insects and birds. Codling moths and apple maggots laying eggs on apples, living inside apples, feeding and living their lives inside the flesh of apples. Have you ever seen apple trees in bloom? On a sunny spring day, have you seen fully ripe fruit, a pear or a fig or even litchis, placed right next to each other, full and bright? A few days ago, at the Port Royal farmers’ market, where I like to go sometimes, a man cut a section of a mango that could almost have been as good as an Indian mango. 

If I were to choose between god and an apple, I would always choose an apple. But I am one of the fallen people. 

It’s the biting of the apple that makes me human.

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

Read literally, alongside its setting, “You Are Not Christ” might be regarded as a kind of prayer for, and to, the people of New Orleans who suffered during the flooding: a simultaneous wish for strength and softness. It is a poem of tremendous compassion, its employment of the second person performing a kind of compassion transfusion in the reader: Imagine this, the poem insists: the moment of your drowning, of the body overruling at last—as it will—what we call the mind and by which we mean insight, planning, steadfast belief in futures. What you wish for yourself in this instant, the poem reaching into your chest, itself a sort of “strange new air,” is what you’d wish for anyone alive to these same circumstances.

I’ve called this a prayer because it insists on a variety of humility. Both “wonder” and “a need to know” are presented here as separate from actually living, from the need to simply continue doing so; at the same time, the poem predicts, you will not ask after meaning: What, after all, could be the meaning of drowning? What is meaning to the one who ceases seeking it? So unguarded, or defenceless, you become “like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,” but here the simile is load-bearing. You’re not prey, not the lamb—not some Christ figure suffering a millenia-defining passion—but what makes Christ possible.

What can this mean? So we bleat on, Christs against the current . . .

It’s been a difficult month, but I’m still here. Reading this poem now, with the knowledge that a strange new air, of sorts, does fill my lungs, I’m delighted to follow Laurentiis’s instruction. If I read it as a prayer for the already departed, for myself I read it as a kind of spell, an incantation for continuance: “You will not ask / what this means.” This is the way to be ill, at least for me, I have come to understand. It’s also, I’ve begun to suspect, simply the way to be alive. I knew this, in the blithe repose of health, acknowledged it far more than I ever felt it, but now, having run short on the prophylactic illusion of mortal exceptionalism that mostly keeps us sane and swimming, I find I need something else: whatever it is that precedes meaning: that makes it mean.

Vanessa Stauffer, “You Are Not Christ” by Rickey Laurentiis

i have been reading up
on how to become a ghost.
i think i was made to stay
past my welcome in a house
no longer my own. i was born
in the united states which means
i was fed a sick promise
that everything should arrive to us whole.
someone else can fuss with the pieces.

Robin Gow, assembly required

We make such a fuss of the dead. It is as if they’ve gotten closer to god, have become untouchable, holy, sacred, elevated. They can no longer make mistakes or let us down. It’s almost of some comfort when they’re gone, both the good and bad, the tyrant and martyr become stars we gaze upon or curse safe in the knowledge they’re floating in a far off orbit.

The living piss and shit and make a mess of things. They will talk out of turn, interrupt us, upset us with sudden opinions we wish they never held. Half the time we wonder what they’re on about. Sometimes, regrettably, they explain. Worst of all they will show us their poetry. They want us to listen as they read and then, when they’re done, they’ll ask for applause or money or love or praise or prizes. A dead poet will do none of these things. A dead poet rises above such vulgarity, a dead poet no longer has success to suffer, has no further failure to relish. Their work is done. Ours, set to continue as we carry them on, perhaps out of duty or pity or for beauty and the eternal.

I must tell you of the morning I left that house. We – and I say we because he was there too, the dead poet. I had sensed he’d been awaiting my arrival, approached me ghostly when I first crossed the threshold. He was cold and unfriendly but gradually he’d warmed to me. Or maybe I’d cooled to him, met his temperature, adjusted my thermostats accordingly. This is what you have to do with poets, dead ones especially, this is how we must approach poetry. We need to reconcile with it, become accustomed to it, assimilate with it. It requires effort. We must fully immerse ourselves in it.

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

Mat Riches’ poem puts me in mind of Margareta Magnusson’s 2017 book Döstädning: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The aim of this practice is to go through possessions before death to avoid leaving your family with the huge task of clearing them after you have died. Sadly, the experience of many of my bereaved midlife friends belies this, and they end up burdened with emptying entire houses of a lifetime of things whilst also trying to deal with their grief; something Riches skilfully evokes in this poignant poem. I was startled to find out whilst researching this piece that Magnusson died very recently aged 92; I assume she left everything tidy.

As with Anne Stewart’s poem last week, the title is a ‘Ronseal’ title: does what it says on the tin, appropriately enough for a shed poem. It immediately signals either illness or bereavement; “Dad” is not able to do this job himself, and no longer needs the things in his shed. The first stanza sets out the Herculean task, and we share the speaker’s sense of overwhelm as he shows us how: “Tobacco tins of tacks and screws / cover every surface and shelf.” (1-2). The departed dad is of that war-born generation which remembers rationing and never throws anything out that might be useful; commendable in today’s need for sustainability. However, these repurposed tins from the days of loose-leaf tobacco are full of things that have not, in fact, been re-used and now won’t be. […]

If this is a man cave, the man is missing; we are in the territory of absence as presence. There is life here, but it is the sort that contributes to decay: “The spiders have been working hard” (5).

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

I don’t know about you, but when I read this I found it an incredibly uncomfortable, but joyous experience. I knew from reading previous editions that this wasn’t going to be a kicking, and look. I knew it was coming because Suzanna asked me, but even so, until it landed in my inbox on Friday morning, I had  no idea what she would say. How deep is deep (deep, man..), etc.

And I think this is about as deep as it’s possible to get with that poem. As with all good critical writing, I think it teaches the writer themselves something back to them. And Suzanna has really made me see under the hood of my own work. I’d be lying if I said all of the things that she points out were intentional. I’d be lying if I said that some of it isn’t the work of craft and having worked on poems enough now to sort-of-have a sense of what I’m doing (not always, but sometimes).

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

                                              I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

I was very pleased to receive my copy of this poetry pamphlet, published by Jem and selected (with an introduction) by Victoria. […] I have left behind me in England all my books of Elizabethan poetry. Bullen’s Shorter Elizabethan Lyrics, collections of madrigals, that sort of thing. I do have Gardner’s Oxford Book here, and now a Golden Treasury, and Fowler arrived recently, but not my Ben Jonson, my Cavalier poets. No Donne! One manages, of course. First world problems and all that. Still, this was a very welcome addition to my stocks.

Naturally, Victoria Moul has made a very fine selection, and with some unfamiliar poems. The idea is that some of these poems are rarely anthologised. At least two of them, Like to the falling of a star by Henry King and Dazzled thus with height of place by Henry Wotton, are in Gardner, but not in Ricks. (Why Ricks excluded them is a mystery to me, though it’s not his period and it was Gardner’s.) Some of them are in Fowler too. But there are several poems not always available elsewhere and the overall selection has a good balance of the familiar and the unexpected.

Victoria says in her introduction that it was taken for granted in the seventeenth century that a poem “teaches or expresses something that it is helpful to remember as one tries to conduct a decent life.” This is the theme of the pamphlet. Here, in that spirit, is the Henry King.

Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot.

Hot stuff, and really quite modern. Clive James was writing things like that final couplet in his early days. One can mistake this for mere verse, too simple, too gross to be “great literature.” Well, read it again with a real sense of your own mortality. The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entombed in autumn lies—this is the good stuff.

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

Publishing by subscription has a long history, of which the platform that hosts this newsletter is only the most recent example. Once upon a time, publishers would send letters out drumming up interest in a title before committing to print. This continued (and evidently continues) right into the era of commercial publishing, especially for niche or expensive works; Edward Lear was always buttonholing wealthy friends and patrons to support his books of illustrations. There is nothing new under the sun, as the teacher said.

I’m working in a tradition, then. I had more recent inspirations, too. Several small publishers I really admire, like Galley Beggar and Peirene Press, both of which mainly deal in fiction, offer annual subscriptions to supporters as complement to a traditional distribution method, though complement isn’t quite the right word given the scale of the challenge facing independent publishers these days. The subscription seems well suited to poetry: poetry publishing is scrappy, and slow, and it relies on individual risk-taking to make things happen.

The model also suited me because I am doing this, for the most part, in that fabled thing called “spare time”, so wanted to publish in a way which at least felt sustainable, while also allowing me as much time and momentum as possible to find a readership for each pamphlet—or at least, to give each one its moment in the sun. That moment is something that, from my own observations, poetry presses often struggle to create. The model also imposes a limit and a rhythm, both of which seem well suited to poetry. Well, we shall find out.

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

When we sit down to work together, it isn’t just about placing an image next to a stanza. It is about a “shared attention,” temporary alignment of perception, where the boundary between your inner world and another person’s becomes briefly, thrillingly permeable. It’s a commitment to looking together until something new emerges. Our latest collaboration, Feverdream, grew out of Renée’s poems of grief, illness, and the complex physical and healthcare landscape in Appalachia. In this context, attention, when it is shared, becomes a form of care. 

For the artist and writer looking to embark on a similar journey, we’ve distilled our process into a practical roadmap for creating a book that is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

A collaboration needs a foundation stronger than just “liking each other’s style.” For Feverdream, the root system was Narrative Medicine and the bodily experience. Renée spent two years writing with patients in a chemotherapy clinic while her own brother underwent treatment, experiences that profoundly shaped both the content and the process of writing these poems. Sally’s work, centered on the human form, met those poems in a deeply personal space and allowed for word and image to create a reflective intimacy. The body itself is where external and internal meet, and both the art and poems share this embodiment. The body doesn’t belong fully to either world, which makes it such fertile ground for both poetry and visual art to speak to each other.

The Shared Lens: A Practical Guide to Creative Alchemy – guest post by Renée K. Nicholson & Sally Brown (Trish Hopkinson)

In my last post, I wrote about habitat loss and language. I considered how language can act to connect us to the increasingly “lossy” habitat of the material world. This leads me to consider how language itself, language as a habitat in itself, is also subject to the depredations of the modern world. I do feel that language as a habitat is under threat. It is being taken over by corporate and other geopolitical sources of power.

In Uwe Pörksen’s conception, according to Andrew Sweeney, “plastic words” are “words that have become supremely abstract though being stripped from their original context or meaning.” I can’t help but imagine a further process whereby microplastics have entered language like they’ve entered everything else. Language is suffused by capital, technology, commodity. In the contemporary world, it’s hard to find an outside.

If feels like, down to its bones, language has become entangled. Of course, language has always been implicated, forged, through power relations. Made from the societies it is part of. But something has changed with virtuality, AI, and the acid rain of the contemporary media panopticon. We’re soaking in it, Marge.

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Depth is the culprit hastening shrinkage,
meltwater and the salty layer

drivers both of change and loss.

We measure warmth and the salinity,
quantify the calving and new fracturing,

conclude our lack of means to stop
makes faster flow and level rise,

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

No slow surrender, they to land.
No adaptation, for us no plan.

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

I studied with a famous poet when I was in college. I took two poetry workshops with her, and it’s safe to say that her approach to critical reading and revising made me a much better writer. It also made me into an editor, and that led to a long career in journalism. Although I was writing and editing prose about tech, I used skills I had developed in those poetry workshops every day: Close reading, attention to nuance, an ear for rhythm and flow, a sense of structure and drama, an ability to hear what’s left unsaid or what could be said better. 

But for about ten years after college, I wrote no poetry at all. She was such a sharp critic, and her voice was so powerful and distinctive, that I could not write a single line without hearing her comment on it. Fairly or not, I imagined her voice as a disparaging one, and it discouraged me from continuing to write my own work. Without explicit assignments, I simply couldn’t get started. 

My way back into writing for myself (poetry and otherwise) started with haiku. I found the form was spare enough, and modest enough, that it could slip past my internal poetry sentries. 

Haiku are extremely short, and the form eschews most of the tools used by modern poets: Metaphor, overt allusion, excessively self-conscious wordplay, direct descriptions of emotions. It is a self-effacing form, Zen in its origins and aspirations. I found I could write haiku about the plum petals in my daughter’s hair, an orange-brown leaf twirling down next to a Calder sculpture, a flock of crows crossing the space between skyscrapers, or the moon rising over a neighbor’s house. I might not have been writing great poetry, but these little moments satisfied my need to connect with the world and to express myself. Then I found that the words on the page set up a kind of resonance that started to shake loose the rust and get the poetic wheels turning again. 

That gave me enough of a charge to keep going. I discovered the haibun (a form mixing prose and haiku) and from there started experimenting again with longer poems and essays. 

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

Belfast Twilight – haiku, senryu and micro-poems, Liam Carson, Salmon Poetry, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-915022-96-7, €12.00

Upward Spiral – haiku and senryu, Tim Murphy, Red Moon Press, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-958408-73-5, $20.00

It appears that Irish haiku poets are like busses; they arrive in twos. And while my previous reviews touching on this genre have focused on women poets (think Maeve O’Sullivan and Rosie Johnston), this time it happens to be two male writers, one based in Ireland, the other in Spain.

The inclusion of the word ‘senryu’ in the subtitles of both collections raises some interesting questions around what the haiku/senryu distinction might mean in the context of urban-dwelling, 21^st century English-language poets for whom the urban landscape is more present than the natural one and whose world is more defined by human behaviour than the motion of the seasons.

In Japan, the distinction began to dissolve with the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s and 40s, with works like Sanki Saitō’s airport haiku and his war poems which were derived from news reports rather than direct experience. These poets also tended to dispense with the standard kigo (seasonal identifier words) that typified traditional haiku. And so the lines became blurred. […]

I’m tempted to link Carson’s use of assonance to his positioning of his work in a distinctly Irish tradition. It may be fanciful to hear an echo of the Celtic Twilight in the book’s title (less so, perhaps, given the Jack Yeats poems), but the Irish literary link is most forceful, unsurprisingly perhaps, in a set of five haiku in the Irish language under the title ‘Séideann An Gaoth’ (The Wind Blows). One poem in particular has a very specific and resonant allusion to the Early Irish:

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

It’s impossible not to be reminded of the widely translated 9^th century poem often referred to as ‘The Blackbird of Belfast Lough’ behind these lines, particularly given the broader Belfast connections in the book:

Int én bec
ro léic feit
do rinn guip
glanbuidi:
fo-ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg,
lon do chraíb
charnbuidi.

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

Along with, perhaps. a hint of the tale of ‘Buile Shuibhne’, the mad birdman of Irish legend. The poem also resonates with Carson’s English-language ‘nature’ haiku, quite closely in this example from ‘Island Haiku (Árainn Mhór)’:

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

Belfast Twilight is a fine collection, full of quiet moments of delight.

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

I’ve had an interest in translating poetry for as long as I can remember. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the B’nai Zion medal for excellence in Hebrew, largely on the basis of an independent study I did with Professor Robert Hoberman for which I produced translations of biblical, medieval, and contemporary Hebrew poetry. If I am ever able to locate those translations, I will publish them in a future issue of On My Desk Now.

If I had to trace my interest in translation to a single point of origin, though, it would be to the year in junior high school when I-don’t-remember-which-rebbe encouraged our class to buy the ArtScroll edition of Shir Hashirim: The Song of Songs, so that we could better understand “the most misunderstood book in the entire Tanach.” Because the ArtScroll translation was allegorical, he explained, it revealed the text’s true significance in a way that translations based on the text’s plain meaning did not. I don’t think I understood at the time what the word allegorical meant, but I was in for a shock when I opened the book. I understood Shir HaShirim to be a book of sometimes quite erotic love poems, the beginning of which is usually rendered as something like “May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The same verse in the ArtScroll version, however, is translated like this: “Communicate Your innermost wisdom to me again in loving closeness…” Many years later, I would discover a podcast episode in which the host offers a really interesting, philosophical, and very-much-worth-wrestling-with justification for the allegorical translation. At the time, though, my only response to what ArtScroll had done was anger, since the only purpose I could discern for their allegorical approach was to obscure the eroticism of the original. Ever since then, I have been fascinated by what’s at stake culturally and otherwise in why and how a text gets translated from one language into another.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Translating Korean Poetry

Selecting one Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem is no easy task because of the depth of her work. But, I settle into “The Bean Eaters,” one of her most visible poems, mainly for the poem’s richness as a love poem but also because of its sharp contrast to much of today’s world. The lines point toward a future that has dissolved aloneness: “Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day”. They go about their lives, always moving in the same direction. This is one of the secrets to their shared life. They’ve become accepting of their moving together.

What’s gained isn’t the accumulation of material things – though their physical world is always present to them – but the gain is in the actual living. There’s repetition, surely – they “keep putting on their clothes / And putting things away” – but the writing shows this more as a natural flow, as an order to their world, rather than actions or fear that have trapped them. There’s no real glamor in the simple things that surround them, that give them comfort, but Brooks makes clear the lasting value of this life that is theirs. It’s their world on their terms.

This is also a beautiful poem about memory, about aging. The “twinklings and twinges” that are the real stuff of living a full life – are significant because they’re shared. The pair is busy at work – nurturing their love, taking in the necessary source of life that will allow them to continue. Happiness finds itself in the intimate simplicity of chipware, creaking wood, and tin.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters”

Tonight, at a literary event at Parnassus with our author Laing Rikkers, I met up with Major and Didi Jackson. I also met a woman who told me she would like to be a poet. I asked the woman whether she had ever studied poetry, and she said no. I asked if she had read much poetry, and she said, “Robert Frost.” It’s a good start. Robert Frost is a man of letters, well-loved for a reason. But becoming a serious poet requires reading, writing, and living with poetry. Going to readings is a part of that journey. I grabbed dinner with Major and Didi after the reading, and I thought about how being in the company of great poets—having an artistic community—is also part of the building blocks of a creative life.

The building blocks of a creative life aren’t really blocks at all. I like to think that what moves you toward a creative life are nonlinear, wild spaces you wander through that might add up to a creative undertaking. […]

What you don’t want to do is carry invisible suitcases with opportunities you didn’t get. I didn’t go to a good college. I didn’t have the resources to go to Breadloaf or any other writing conference. I could take stock all day, but it doesn’t help me write my next book. I’m working on a different frame of mind when it comes to creating a life that centers on artistic work.

All the men on my list started the race way ahead of me; that’s a fact. But if I stop to complain, I’m not in the race. And it isn’t a race. For them, maybe it is. They are building a Literary Career.

I am walking out into the clearing and finding my writing self. That creative self reads, writes, dreams, arches toward sunshine, swims, stretches, trains for greatness, learns from mistakes, is crazy and afraid. In my writing life, I’m not clawing my way out of the bottom of the well. I’m walking the clearing, finding my way toward creative work, soul work, publishing work, body work, family life, dream life.

Expectation is everything. So, young woman who wants to be a writer: Read a lot. Create a writing schedule, and make it flexible enough to adapt when work and caretaking pull your attention. Send out work to literary journals and magazines at least once a quarter. Try to spend some time with other writers or literary professionals. If the people in your life don’t take your writing seriously, get some people who do.

Most importantly, don’t compare yourself to others. Writing is hard enough.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Clearing: The Thrum of a Creative Life

Last night’s rain still lines the undersides
of leaves, and the lamps on the street have not
yet gone out. I am always standing in the in-
between, one hand folded around a dream, the other
raised toward the shape of a decision. My ear
turning toward the last place it remembers
an animal once stopped for water.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem with a line from Linda Gregg

So I have these boxes of postcards and letters I’ve received decades ago, ticket stubs, hard copy photographs that are so badly out of focus or dark, but there was no option but to keep them as they may have been the only record of an event. My analog past I can’t bear to throw out. I’ve been scanning some of them to print in photobooks. I love the accidental finger, the overexposed blanch. That’s who I was, I barely remember her. 

In the midst of this paperwork bog, I’m trying to write poetry about happiness and where I find it. Finland has been voted happiest country again and my writing group has decided the theme for our next anthology will be ‘happy places’. So with war everywhere, job insecurity, my kids growing up and a lack of happiness where I am, I’m looking backwards, trying to remember what happiness looks like. 

Gerry Stewart, Wallowing in nostalgia is better than red tape.

Here in Seattle, though so far it’s been cold, I love to see the cherry blossoms and daffodils that are the first heralds of spring. Also, more birds popping up. I’m hoping I can make it back up to Skagit Valley some time in April though my schedule is packed with book clubs, the Poetry night at J. Bookwalter’s restarting with a feature with Kelli Russell Agodon and her delightful new book from Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, and more medical appointments that tend to come around in my birthday month for some reason. (Does this happen to you too?)

I really like celebrating National Poetry Month—it’s nice for the world (and myself) to put a little more attention on this mostly neglected art form. Do you look forward to cooking something in spring? I love the influx of fresh peas and asparagus, and I love the rituals of Palm Sunday and Easter, which always feels like a celebration of chocolate and pastels (even if you’re not particularly religious). The myths of rebirth are generally hopeful, aren’t they? April is also my birthday month—and though I am getting older, I am thankful that I am still here, even for the hard parts. I am trying to adjust to 1) surviving ’til I was 50 and 2) realizing I am, if you’ll forgive a pun, no longer a spring chicken. I am adjusting to the shift into elder mode—along with losing so many friends and family, which seems like a part of aging. I am actually physically in better shape and in less pain than I was ten years ago—food allergies sorted, out of my wheelchair thanks to my MS diagnosis and subsequent physical therapy focusing on balance, and better able to appreciate the smaller joys of life.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Day of Spring, Hawks and Cherry Blossoms, April Rituals: Poetry Month and Birthdays

My Lenten poem-a-week project has been going better than I expected, and I’m grateful that I’ve actually been able to produce a draft poem a week as intended. It’s been freeing to not overly-worry or think too much and just get something written and posted on whatever topic or prompt was occupying my spirit in a given week. But as Holy Week and Easter approaches, I am feeling a sense of needing to slow down and really take time with these last two. They are on heavy topics that I feel extremely ill-equipped to deal with as a poet and a human being, not to mention a somewhat newly-reverted Catholic. Yet they are haunting me, and I feel the need to go deeply into their mysteries. And going deeply into a mystery takes time, silence and attention.

Kristen McHenry, Poem of the Week Interlude, Catana Lives!

So far in this National Year of Reading, I haven’t bought any new books. At the end of last year, my daughter suggested buying Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020) for me as a Christmas gift, since she knew the film was coming out but, once I’d heard the plot involved a child’s death, I said no. Then, when I saw a trailer for the film, I thought perhaps I should have said yes. Then there were advertisements, trailers, clips, snippets EVERYWHERE and I thought perhaps I should have tried to read the book before seeing the film. After that, the onslaught of film publicity turned me off both the idea of the book and the film, but, THEN, my friend Isy gave me her copy of the book, when I popped in to see her and her new baby. So, I started reading and, without meaning to, I still haven’t bought a new book. […]

Although never named as William Shakespeare, Agnes, her playwright husband, and their family live in Stratford-upon-Avon (although the playwright has to spend much time in London),in the late 1500s. The book’s introduction plainly states that it is a work of fiction, so a few esteemed Shakespearian experts who have questioned the accuracy of the story are rather missing the point, in my view.

It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a book. What an extraordinary phenomenon reading can be. I still haven’t seen the film – I think I need a little distance from the effect the book had on me before I book any tickets.

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

It’s World Poetry Day so instead of talking about my favorite famous poets (Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Jericho Brown, Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirschfield – is there anything that hasn’t been said?) I thought I’d share this epistolary poem written for me, something I never dreamed would happen. I’ve known poet Robert Okaji for many years, after we virtually “met” on his poetry blog and mine around about 2010 or so. Robert writes the kind of lyrical, meditative poetry that I could only dream of writing.

Thank you, Bob, for your years of friendship! Here’s to many more.

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

Dear Charlotte: The sun here winces daily, stumbles
across morning before smudging gray like an old slate
scarred with decades of chalk dust and erased messages.
I’m hunting work, and there are days when it feels
as if past experiences have been rubbed out, or maybe
I can’t make myself slog through the powdery white
crusted blend of ennui and discounting youth. […]

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

“Dear March — Come in —,” written in its author’s great creative surge of the early 1860s, feels slighter and lighter than many of the poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) we’ve discussed here before. In this poem, no carriage bears the speaker toward eternity. No life has “stood a loaded gun.” The “frock I wept in” never offers itself to be worn here. But then, we knew already that Emily Dickinson liked March, having read only recently her lighthearted “We Like March,” which dates from roughly a decade later.

That poem of the early 1870s turns on Dickinson’s knowledge of and love for natural philosophy, with its references to violets (which are certainly March’s purple “shoes”), the Adder’s Tongue fern, the sudden nearness of the sun after the long winter, the ubiquity of mud as the snow melts, and the “buccaneering” bluebirds. It is a poem of the out-of-doors, full of the wind and bluster that signal New England’s return to life.

Today’s Poem, by contrast, bustles with a hospitable domesticity, welcoming back the traveler-month after a long absence. March returns like an old school friend, its bluster reduced to mere windedness after a long walk, to be beckoned upstairs for a gossip. In precisely this way the young Dickinson did write to her school friends, with ardent affection, longing always to see them and trade news.

Her speaker’s emphatic tone here — alternately chiding March for staying away too long and turning up without notice, and apologizing in a hostessy manner for not turning the hills purple enough — is underscored by the poem’s meter, a variation on her characteristic common or hymn measure. Here, especially in the first stanza, she has cast many of her lines in dimeter, as though to divide the expected tetrameter in half, an effect that suggests a hostess’s distraction, bustle, and fluster when a guest arrives at a time not precisely appointed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Dear March — Come in —

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 23, 2026)

I don’t think of this blog as being primarily about hope, but hope is certainly an undercurrent. Possibly one of my favourite poems that I’ve ever posted is “Hope is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat” by Caitlin Seida. It of course refers to the Emily Dickinson poem. In her brilliant book on the writing life, Opacities, Sofia Samatar quotes a friend who talks about “doing an Emily Dickinson” which is to say, disappearing from the internet, and who knows where else. And isn’t it tempting?

But then, also, I think of Simone Weil, and unrelatedly, ageism, or being an artist and writer these days, or being someone of the artist class, and this line by Weil: “Indeed for other people, in a sense I do not exist. I am the colour of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.” I think about my goal, after Rumi, to be the one in the room the least in need. (Bad career move, good soul move). And then, I also think about what Anne Bogart says about how “we have something to learn from the person who has not yet spoken.” (This in the context of civic conversation, the hope and the notion that everyone should be heard). I think of the line from Elizabeth Gilbert who said, “no one is thinking about you” — that salve. And it’s true, it’s really true. What to do with these gifts?

I recently quoted Rebecca Solnit on hope and her saying that “maybe the community is the next hero.” And while I do believe that this is the answer politically, I, a bundle of contradictions myself, also crave the hermit life. At the same time, I also wish to be seen, heard. (Generally speaking, the eternal writer’s conundrum/quest — how to be known and seen but also simultaneously invisible). We want our due and not too late, unlike Jean Rhys, quoted as saying at an award ceremony where she received accolades late in life, late in her career, “It has come too late.” In a James Wood essay in The New Yorker, he said of Rhys, “She lacked hope, but never courage.” In truth, most of us are unlikely to win any awards.

Ah well, it’s courage that’s the thing. It’s not time we lack, said Adam Zagajewski, but concentration. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all in equal measure, hope, courage, concentration.

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

Go green. Green light, go. Green thumb deep digging in flowered earth. Greenhorn morning wet behind the ears. Green promise. Green renewal. Greenbacks riding cash cows in green-dawn calm. Green hornet. Green goblin. Grass is greener where envy grows, green screen sky edit me a ton more trees. Green frog rap, green moss nap. Green apple. Green peas. Green light, go get me more world peace.

Rich Ferguson, Green

‘Rosie Jackson and Friends’ gave a short reading of poems celebrating kindness on Saturday evening at Rook Lane Chapel in Frome. It was the final event in a week-long Festival of Kindness co-ordinated by The Good Heart, a volunteer-led community group. The chapel was decorated with local schoolchildren’s kennings on the theme of kindness.

From left to right in the photo above, the line-up was Morag Kiziewicz, Stephen Boyce, Tessa Strickland, Rosie Jackson, Ama Bolton, Michelle Diaz, B Anne Adriaens, Rachael Clyne, and hidden behind me is Dawn Gorman, reading for Claire Crowther. We had a wonderfully attentive and responsive audience of about thirty. Rosie selected and sequenced the poems with great sensitivity. The programme included three pieces by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Some of the poems featured personal encounters, while others responded to appalling recent events. Morag’s poems celebrated the kindness of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. One of Rosie’s poems was addressed to the schoolgirls who were killed during the first wave of air-strikes on Iran. At the end, Rachael led us all in a short Buddhist meditation. […]

Yesterday skylarks were singing above a nearby field. This morning the sky above me is full of the noise of military aircraft. I have heard this sound twice before in the past forty years; the first time, the target was Libya. The second time, it was Iraq. What can fifty minutes of focus on compassion do to counteract the daily horrors of these terrible times? Perhaps it effected a small change in us. Be kind to yourself, dear reader, and do no harm to others.

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: cave fish, unnamable muscles, the armpit of the fire, an abandoned glass factory, and much more. Enjoy.

My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems. 

Lori Witzel, Shed

As a young BBC business reporter during the first Gulf War in 1991, I was attached to the rolling Radio News service known as ‘Scud FM’, a reference to Iraq’s powerful Scud missiles. Reporters like me (see the young me in pic) would scuttle down to the rolling Radio 4 studio and throw ourselves in front of a mic to answer the eternal question : what’s happening on the oil markets?

I would talk breathlessly about the latest price of Brent Crude and what had sent it up or down, prices at the pump, inflation and interest rates. […]

It is amazing to me how a few words from a news presenter can instil mild feelings of panic in so many of us.

That’s true even when the real economic effects of a headline have not been felt yet. We go through the same cycle of emotions, distress at the human disaster of war and muted fright for ourselves. And it is the familiarity, the repetition, that hits our neural buttons – we have felt it before and we will feel it again.

When I think calmly about the wider phenomenon of repetition, I see its potential as well as the downside.

It is sound and echo, expectation and confirmation. If you put it in a poetic context, we gladly use it all the time. It is one of our most important aural (and visual) tools. Think of tools such as villanelle, sestina, pantoum, anaphora and epistrophe.

It pushes powerful buttons in our minds and makes us listen more carefully. Something repeated is always going to be something significant. It may be a warning.

In the real world, when history repeats itself, it usually is. 

Lesley Curwen, Repetition and Gulf Wars

The men who killed poetry

Hated silence . . . Now they have plenty.

Quoted from Larry Levis, “Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966” in Larry Levis, The Selected Levis | Selected and With an Afterword by David St. John, Rev. Edition (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000, 2003), pp. 62-63

Maureen Doallas, The Sunday Quote

Sharp crack startles the room
vegetation maps forgotten
we regard each other

And then the fighter jet howl
and Tehran
suddenly seems next door

Chris Clarke, Letter From the Desert: Ajo

I keep returning to May Sarton’s description of the “poignant evening light,” and the strange shape of poignancy when pronounced — how it goes from the stillness of poignant to the shimmer of that added “ancy”, a sound that reminds me of a city called Nancy in Alsace-Lorraine.

My first glimpse of bears rutting occurred in a park in Nancy, not far from the lycee named after Chopin where I spent part of my seventh grade year unlearning the stability of language.

Today, the adjective “poignant” means “evoking a keenly felt sense of emotion, especially of bittersweet sadness or regret.” But the archaic meaning of this word — “sharp or pungent in taste or smell” — also appears regularly in poems.

And there is the prick of it as well . . .

Alina Stefanescu, “Poignant” in a poem by May Sarton

It is no surprise:
Dove flies,

Startled
By an approaching human.

Light, smooth as a pebble
Minus the few feathers discarded in fright —

Luciana Francis, Dove

Eight of us met in Bron’s print studio at the Dove on Saturday to critique new work and work-in-progress for our upcoming exhibition at ACEarts in Somerton, featuring new work by the nine active members of Artists’ Book Club Dove, and a selection from guest artist Fiona Hingston. If you’re in the area, do come to meet the artists on Saturday 21st April 11am to 1pm. […]

where nothing happens
the women worry
the men play golf

two colours going
down one side and up the other
a third is the overlap

this is the Grand Canyon
put it on white
put it on black

Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2026

I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace. […]

Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months. I must add the not-quite-random fact that both Ama and I have had poems published about dental hygienists!

Matthew Paul, Beetle in a box

When Kim and I set up Shaw & Moore, both of us were in the final stages of our next collections, and neither of us were convinced that we weren’t just seeking distraction from the monumental tasks of drafting, ordering, editing, setting out, proofreading and the hundred other vital jobs involved in finishing a book.

We probably were, but it’s worked out well all the same. We intended to share our journeys towards completion and publication, whilst reflecting on our lives as poets and parents and friends, our various enthusiasms, the challenges we face as poets with ADHD.

Inevitably, the Substack has evolved and expanded over the last two years to encompass many shiny, sharp or fascinating things which have distracted us along the way. As my therapist says, it’s not that I lack attention – it’s that I have too MUCH of it. I am constantly distracted by the world.

Kim’s new book “The House of Broken Things” is finished, and it’s due out on 23^rd April. You can pre-order it here, or you could come to the afternoon launch in the Wainsgate Chapel on the hills above Hebden Bridge on 3^rd May, where she’ll be supported with readings from me, Amanda Dalton, Carola Luther and Malika Booker. There’ll also be live music and cake – tickets available here.

Clare Shaw, You were the forest and you were my mother

Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, Substack…Which feel useful to you instead of like distractions, or worse, something that makes you feel worse, that drains you? I am contemplating this as I am trying to decide where to stay, which to cut, where to spend energy. As you can probably tell, I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I don’t really want to stop now. This is where I feel most comfortable.

I was thinking about how I follow writers, artists and musicians—like I learned about the Aimee Mann concert from a post of hers on Instagram and the last piece of art I got I learned about from an artist’s Instagram post as well. I hear about books from my writer friends mostly on Facebook—but books from authors I don’t know—it’s harder to pin down where I hear about them. The next time I have a new book, I’m not even sure what social media network will be working, not run by a supervillain, or where writers and readers congregate. I do know that I keep in touch with friends and family on various platforms—even LinkedIn sometimes (yes, I do have an old profile there). It shouldn’t be hard to cancel one social media or another, but somehow, I just keep hanging in there, posting once in a while.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprise Snow, Aimee Mann and Daffodils in Mt Vernon, and Social Media Musings

in a zen temple
near Arashiyma, an old man
dragged neat lines down soft gravel

nothing else stirred
cloud and bird and leaf and eye and breath
paused to watch
though later, each one would swear
that they had seen something different

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stuck on a hospital bed at fifty-six, mortality mixing with the saline in my IV, I wondered if writing poetry would be a good use of the time I had left

I gazed upon several astounding pieces, one after another encased in a glowing, golden light, a rotunda filled with Surrealist alchemy. My she-roes on full display, the intensity and intricacy of each painting and photograph I beheld with new eyes, though I’d seen a few of the Varo pieces up close at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen in Chicago many years prior.

And yet, one solitary painting stole my heart, captured it, and left me thinking for the rest of my journey: “The Inner City” by abstract expressionist / Surrealist, Alice Rahon.

Rahon (another Gemini) was a French-born Mexican poet and artist who used the technique of sgraffito (scratching into canvas or metal) in her work. Like Frida, Rahon suffered a serious childhood accident which put her in casts and affected the rest of her life: one of the injuries was a fracture in the right hip, which forced her to recuperate lying down for long periods of time (like Frida). Rahon was invited, with two other artists / writers, to visit Mexico by Andre Breton and Frida. (Rahon was the first female to be published in Editions Surréalistes in Paris in 1936; as well, she and Frida had become fast friends).

One of Alice’s poetry books, À même la terre (On The Ground), featured a poem in which a woman “removes her face / safe from the traps of mirrors”. And another line, almost describing the painting (done years later): “Like the ember with blue down / in the armpit of the fire / that speaks in sparks”.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Inner synchro-cities.

Canadian winter is not the only reason we like to come to Mexico City in March. We love being here when the city’s iconic “purple trees”, the jacarandas, are in bloom. For northerners like us, the very idea of a purple-flowering full-size tree is astonishing, and enchanting.

Beth Adams, Jacaranda

HOPKINSON: There’s something surreal and completely sad about seeing a poem for only a second and then having it wiped away by technology. I think I’m crying and excited at the same time. What emotions do you hope participants will experience?

MEDSKER: Haha! I hope that people feel startled, then sad, then excited. It’s an exercise in being present. Something I’ve struggled with every day of my life. Ugh!

HOPKINSON: Why poetry?

MEDSKER: Poetry is sort of the way I think now. Condensing a slew of complex feelings and observations into as tight a space as possible. Their economy lends itself to accompanying a photo on a smartphone.

Composing the photos is the big feat for me. I’ve always wanted to be adept with visual art. Hopefully this will hone my eye!

HOPKINSON: This could be seen as commentary on the whole concept of social media, the lack of tangibility, the short attention span of humans, or the fleeting connection of life to art–is it any of these things?

MEDSKER: Absolutely. It’s a direct comment on the digital glut we live in. I don’t know about you, but I get overloaded with info very quickly. And it just turns my mind into a fragmented mess. It’s comforting, in a weird way, to know that these poems and pictures can be experienced but not held on to. I think that’s the real key… that these are meant to be experienced, not consumed. And there’s a difference between reading that statement and actually experiencing it in real time.

There’s this assumption that people have, I think, that we can stave off death if we work hard enough, care enough, consume enough… I hope this project helps people to be more contemplative about the fleeting nature of experience.

I have been doing a lot of pictures of flowers and wildlife. Sometimes I’ll throw a curveball like a thick metal chain on a gate or something. An old brick apartment blocks in the Bronx. The photos are often just something I think looks interesting and has a tangential relation to the words. Hopefully the juxtapositions are interesting to people.

I am always on the lookout for something to snap, and then I come up with the poem on the fly. I don’t like to fret too much about the lines. It’s a direct conversation between me and one other person, so I like to keep it intuitive.

Trish Hopkinson, Disappearing Poems on Instagram – Interview with Josh Medsker

Each of the poets involved in the project, which was designed by Gill Connors, was sent a poem as part of a chain and asked to write a poem in response to it. I remember being excited when I saw that a poem had arrived in my inbox. I purposefully did not open the email until I had time to be at my writing desk with a dedicated time to think and write because I was keen to capture my response as cleanly as possible.

Firstly, I read the poem on the page in the same way that I read all poems that I am meeting for the first time. Then to increase my interaction and feel for the poem I read it out loud to myself. My usual way of starting the drafting of a poem when I know I am going to write is to use a fountain pen and a notebook. On this occasion I jotted down the parts of the received poem that resonated with me most strongly and let my mind take these thoughts for a walk. I found myself focussed on plate spinning, things imagined, and the passing of time. An idea began to emerge around the comments related to the t-shirt and the fact I had invented a persona that was beautifully fantastical.

Once I have ideas for a poem, I like to swap to typing into a word document so I can chop and change words and lines easily as the poem takes shape. Forming the whole on a clean page helps me think. I used this method to form a solid draft before rereading the poem I had received to find out if I could sense a link. I decided that I could, and that the evolution of a new poem from one read was happening naturally and in that sense, it was good to just go with it. After spending a little more time drafting and editing my work and reading it aloud, I left it alone overnight.

Sue Finch, STUNT GIRL

As there is habitat loss in the world, so my sense of the habitat of my body feels reduced. Fragmented. The points of contact feel diminished. I’m virtual, a ghost floating over place, even as I understand how my body is written on by its environment. That what my body is is a result of its entanglement, its symbiosis with the ubiquitous network of materials and forces it lives in.

I look to language to help me understand. By putting pressure on the language I have access to, I hope to gain insight into how I am entangled in environment. I use language for points of contact with the world, points of interpretation for that contact. Speaking or reading my way into a more aware connection with the world. My habitat is being lost, so I attempt to rebuild it by finding a home in the words that help me relate to it. Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt becomes Umwort. The environment constructed through an organism’s awareness of words.

Gary Barwin, Language as habitat, as ecotone,

According to Lawrence Beaston in Talking To a Silent God: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and The Via Negativa, the Holy Sonnets, which Donne wrote between 1609 and 1610, render a spiritual struggle that many contemporary readers find troubling. For these readers, Beaston asserts, the “note of despair” the poems consistently strike is “out of keeping” with Donne’s position not just as an Anglican priest, but also as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Given the spiritual leadership Donne was expected to provide, Beaston goes on, these readers expect the Holy Sonnets to arrive at some version of “spiritual health.” Since the poems explicitly do not do that, he argues, since they actively resist such a reading, to find them wanting on this account is to fail read them on their own terms.

Instead, Beaston proposes a reading that places the poems in the “long tradition of Christian mysticism,” known as the via negativa, which “insists upon…the vast difference” between God and humans not as a reason for despair, but as evidence that God “work[s] to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” In this view, Donne’s speaker becomes a “penitent individual…beseeching God for some spiritual grace,” despite the fact that he receives “no apparent response;” and God’s silence becomes not an occasion for the speaker’s “despair,” but rather the poet’s way of representing God’s “radical otherness”—the impossibility of rendering God’s presence in words. Read in this context, the homosexual violence the speaker calls down upon himself, metaphorical though it may be, becomes a final, desperate act of abject surrender, offered in full knowledge that God will neither accept nor reject it; and the speaker should be understood as being fine with that, in the sense that God’s response is not his goal. Having arrived at the point where he can surrender himself in this way is.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 4

Cruel, needless death: arms, legs, dismembered
Bodies, all blasted in a heavy cloud of dirt
And blood. The wounded horses we could shoot,
But for the human beings we had nothing.
This was the enemy that we would fight.
We made our camp, and after darkness fell,
By lamplight our commanding officer said
Heads down, my boys, spirits high, you’ve trained for this.
We’re now at war. When you shoot, shoot to kill.
We stood, and grabbed our packs, and marched into the night.

Brad Skow, Prelude to a Storm

The latest title by Montreal-born Olivia Tapiero [performing virtually next week as part of VERSeFest] is Nothing at All (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), translated into English by Kit Schluter, and published with a Foreword by Anne Boyer. Nothing at All is a collection that Boyer describes as “a vital, accruing, distributed process.” “The threat precedes me. The chkoumoune,” Tapiero writes, via Schluter’s translation, mid-way through the collection, “the shour, which my grandmother pronounces zhor when she tells me about the spells the crumpled spirits impose on those women who attract the evil eye. One morning, in a village where the wind drives people mad, her mother wakes her up screaming, forbidding her to look in the mirror: the zhor has disfigured her, her childlike features have drained from the right side of her face.” Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves. Set in sections of self-contained but interconnected prose sections—“Black Hole,” “Now You Say Nothing,” “Letter,” “Here I Am, a Dull Transplant,” “Zhor” and “The Unthinkable Orifice”—Tapiero’s precise, prose abstracts on and around war and memory, family story and upheavals read as echoes of works by the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021) [see my review of her most recent here] or even Canadian expat Nathanaël, asking, precisely, what one inherits through such a history, and one so deeply present.

rob mclennan, Olivia Tapiero, Nothing at All (trans. Kit Schluter

Peter Dent’s Previous consists of five titled short prose poem sequences, each of five numbered sections of three lines of text. The poems are made up primarily of oblique observations of the world in a language that is simultaneously hermetic and transparent, or flickering between those two states. Here’s an example, the fourth part of the opening piece, ‘States of Undress’:

No fraternizing with those at the top who keep mouth-to-
mouth records in high duty alloy files marked LATER.
Think freely. Sleep it off in the comfort of your own bed.

No one sentence necessarily leads to the next, and yet, taken as a whole, they cohere as a series of near-impossible imperatives; ‘think freely’ is as reasonable an instruction as ‘don’t think of an elephant’, for instance. But the overall effect is not unlike, say, a condensed version of 1984.

Billy Mills, Two Peter Dent Pamphlets

My debut collection (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) explores an era of change through the speaker’s relationships with people and the world. The symbolic juxtaposition of light and dark runs through these poems to highlight the contradictory nature of our experiences and subsequent transformations at different stages of life. It suggests that darkness is a necessary, if not temporary, state as we face grief, doubt and despair – one that will eventually give way to hope, freedom and a light that shines through personal growth.

The title poem, I Am Not Light, serves as a thematic hinge as the final piece in the first section of this three-part collection. This poem began as an observation of a pair of curtains that had faded through exposure to sunlight. This image and the first line of the poem sat with me as I ruminated upon the ideas of physical and emotional transformation through loss. The “sun-bleached” curtains became a metaphor to explore aging, memory, and the gradual alterations of identity, ultimately suggesting that fading does not erase value but creates a more complex sense of self.

Drop-in by Louise Machen (Nigel Kent)

Let us turn first to that evergreen truth: the only time poetry ever makes the news is when poets fight. It’s never because someone’s written a great poem, or an unusually terrible poem, or a poem which has upset the authorities enough for them to bite back. (We could try writing something they couldn’t get out of their heads; that would annoy them. Aye, sorry; crazy idea.) No: it’s always ‘poets at war’. You may have noticed a couple of recent news stories involving two journals, Gutter and Aftershock, both of which cancelled work when they later discovered its author or subject held opinions that were offensive to them.

It’s all a great shame. There have been positive signs over the last couple of years that our fractious little community is slowly coming back together after a period of unprecedented and often horrible division. Many of its architects, however, remain in positions of some administrative influence. As peace slowly breaks out, we can expect to see them directing some rearguard action.

It’s almost comical, for those of us old enough to remember how it all started: a good faith attempt to correct for biases in poetry publishing that had obtained for as long as anyone could remember. For countless decades in the UK, these had operated primarily and most egregiously against women; poetry had also shut out the provinces, the working class and ethnic minorities. By the 90s, things had markedly improved. But from the start of the millennium, this project was subsumed by wave after wave of sociocultural, demographic, technological and economic change. These great changes brought with them new political priorities, but also a raft of peer-group rules and incentive schemes which older artists often found impossible to parse. We watched as our well-intentioned project changed from one of redress to progressivism, from remedial balance to ideological correction.

In the case of poetry, this involved the revision of what was meant by literary merit. Some folk began to tell themselves a different story about the value they found in certain poems. Their critical attention shifted from the skillfulness of the poem to the authenticity of its performance; this was a sign that their cultural attention was shifting from the poem to the poet. It led, in the end, to the creation of two different camps, with each reading poetry – and, eventually, defining ‘the poem’ – in very different ways. You could attempt to belong to both, but not without a lot of mental contortion. […]

It takes very little time to alter the meaning of words. They go to wherever their value concentrates. A ‘good poem’ once meant a poem which demonstrated something like ‘the skilful manipulation of symbols within a word-game whose rules were broadly agreed’. Now I’ll often hear folk use it to mean ‘the work of a good poet’; and in ‘good poet’ I know they mean ‘the kind of person I find admirable, or feel I should’.

Don Paterson, Poets are in the News Again

How
is it a flaw to be moved by the world,
to be undone by what was felled

or disfigured, torn from its bed?
May we be tender through the frost
that comes to kill everything,

the scrubbing after the stain that
reddened the walls and toppled
the chairs to the floor.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Winter Garden

When I first began my study of saijiki, I found it difficult to operate within two calendars at once. The classical haiku calendar, which uses the solstices and equinoxes as the midpoints of the seasons, made more sense in relation to my lived experience. However, the Gregorian calendar guides the country in which I live. Sometimes, it is deeply frustrating to see people celebrating “the first day of spring” when spring has been evident for weeks. I get irrationally annoyed that The Old Farmer’s Almanac – an inherently agricultural text! – eschews the preindustrial boundaries of the seasons and adopts the Gregorian seasonal boundaries. However, my exposure to different religious traditions helped me understand that all over the world, people adhere to different calendars. I’ve of course learned about the Jewish liturgical calendar; life in St. Louis has also exposed me to the Catholic liturgical year, as well as the Orthodox Christian year. In my own personal studies, I’ve learned about Hindu and Buddhist calendars as well. Most people with a specific religious or cultural identity navigate their specific calendar along with the Gregorian one. There’s no reason why a haiku poet can’t do that as well. 

Likewise, my understanding of season words and what they mean cannot be limited to my experiences living in the Midwest and the American South my entire life. I have to recognize that my experience of summer will never be the same as the experience of someone living in Iceland. The world is too big to contain any individual’s limited knowledge of seasons. In fact, it’s too big to contain any one saijiki’s attempts to categorize the seasons. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study saijiki. Rather, we have the saijiki as a foundation that guides our experience, but doesn’t dictate it. After all, even the strictest saijiki won’t refuse to let poets write about the moon in the spring. 

As I wrap up this post, I’m reminded of this enduring haiku from Shiki:

for me going
for you staying—
two autumns

This haiku points to the individual experiences of two friends who will spend autumn in different regions. Today, it has me thinking about how there are in fact innumerable autumns (and winters and springs and summers). That is not to say that we should take a purely individualistic approach to the seasons, but rather that we should recognize the incredible variety within collective experience.

Allyson Whipple, Innumerable Autumns

Here’s something I drafted two weeks ago. A seasonal poem with a hint of frustration and a little relief:

Late February

And I’m awaiting
the buzzards’ return.
Each year
they migrate just
two or three months
then reappear
on their snag perches
and on updrafts,
wings outstretched
to embrace
the sky.
I can’t say I miss them
in winter
yet am glad
of their return
which signals
a tiny season
one wedge in winter’s grip
that says
it is just warm enough
for decay’s odors
to reach turkey vultures’
nasal cavities.
Soon there will be
skunk cabbage
and skunks will awaken.
Here, spring commences
with leaf-mold stink
and buzzards.
Reader,
try to be grateful.

Ann E. Michael, Ides, ideas

The Oregon poet Hazel Hall (1886–1924), paralyzed at age 12 following an episode of scarlet fever, left school after the fifth grade to educate herself at home. Like other bright girls in literary history, left to manage themselves in a house full of books (Anne Bradstreet, for example, comes to mind), she read voraciously. It’s no surprise that as such Modernist poets as Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay began their ascendency, in the 1910s and 20s, Hall not only read them but responded to their influence with poems of her own.

In the course of her relatively short life and poetic career, which included three books of poetry — Curtains in 1921, Walkers in 1923, and the posthumous Cry of Time, which her sister compiled and published in 1928 — she gained a reputation as “Oregon’s Emily Dickinson.” Today Hall shares (with William Stafford) the name for the Oregon Book Award for poetry.

Today’s Poem, “Two Sewing,” takes the severity of spring weather as its overt subject, though its real concern is its own music. Its couplet pairs with their tight rhymes create one level of pattern, in tension with a metrical pattern of predominantly tetrameter and trimeter lines. The poem’s sounds become as mesmerizing as those of the wind and rain it describes.

In particular, the repeated “In, in, in” of lines 5 and 22 strikes in much the same register as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break.” Its three monosyllabic stressed feet, set off by commas whose enforced pauses suggest the missing unstressed syllables in those feet, drive home the intensity of the actions of spring wind and rain. But what’s also fascinating in this lyric is the conceit of sewing, which presents the often destructive vagaries of weather in the springtime as actually constructive, engaged in putting the world back together, stitch by stitch, “for all the springs of futurity.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Two Sewing

I didn’t know this, but when news of his death reached London, around this time, in March but of 1821, thirty-four newspapers published announcements of his death. Thirty-four. Most were only brief notices, just a few lines, but typically they described him as “John Keats, the poet” Not a poet but the poet. The poet.

When I first arrived at Keats-Shelley House, and I say this to you in confidence, I felt a presence. I’m not going to get all woo-woo with you and I’m quite sure I brought a certain energy there myself, conjured something in that space having become intimately acquainted with the poet over these last months, I most likely manifested my own projection of him.

Of course there was expectation, stepping inside that house, stepping inside his house, moving through the poet’s rooms, well, you’d want to feel something too wouldn’t you? And just as, if you’re receptive enough, you can feel moved reading a poem or hearing music or witnessing drama in theatre or film, so it was there, elevated from the page, a vibration, an atmosphere, the essence of poetry. Only without words.

That first evening, after they’d closed the museum, when they’d locked all the doors, after the crowds had drifted away from the Piazza, there was the kind of silence you might imagine being or not being heard two hundred years ago. And I felt it, a sense that I’d interrupted something, had intruded, arrived without invite. The coldness of London stirring in the ancient heart of Rome.

“This is my patch pal, my manor, my gaff” the spirit might have said and yet it wasn’t entirely unwelcoming, more it was trying to assert dominion over the territory, not chasing me out simply deciding whether I might be accepted there, to share the air, bunk in his crib, couch in his cell.

I know this feeling well. This, this is what it is like being a writer, what it is like doing the poetry, among snobs and toffs, in the presence of gatekeepers and taste testers, parvenus and pretenders. They will jostle and muscle and budge but they wont throw you out. Neither will they let you in. The best advice I ever received about getting on in this business was, “Just keep reminding them that you’re not going away.” And so, in order to make claim on the space, I undid my laces, removed my boots, walked bare foot across the night tiles, those same clay tiles that have carried centuries of feet and l felt, if not a connection then a stronger closeness to it, to him, to the poet.

Jan Noble, Nº55 Signals sent from the poet’s house

The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe, 2024) is Niall Campbell’s third full collection, though the first of his that I’ve owned. Campbell is a fairly high profile young-ish/early middle-aged Scottish poet who’s done the sort of things you’d expect for an established poet of his age in the UK: his first collection won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and his second was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Back in 2011, he won an Eric Gregory award, the traditional post-university prize for the up-and-coming UK poet. (You have to be under thirty.) More recently, he took over as editor of Poetry London and his approach to the magazine persuaded me to re-subscribe. […]

I enjoyed the lightly-borne but unapologetic literariness of this collection, with poems referring or alluding to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. S. Graham, Jules Laforgue, William Blake, Borges, Hart Crane, Robert Browning, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare and the Persian poet Farid ud-din Attar. There’s a real sense of a range of experience and reference, reflected in a variety of form that emerges naturally from the “world” of the collection — without that sense that you sometimes get that a poet is making a careful attempt to show us they can do more than one thing.

Naturally I liked some of these poems less than others, and I could have done with a few fewer pieces self-consciously ‘about’ poetry itself. I disliked, for instance, the arch and internet-meme style title ‘Three Folk-tale Characters Who Are Definitely Not Metaphors for the Poem’, but I liked the three poems themselves. They reminded me a bit of similar short sequences of folk-tale-type poems in recent collections I’ve read by Rory Waterman (Come Here to This Gate) and Reagan Upshaw (In the Panhandle), in both cases presented ‘straight’. If a fine poet can’t tell a fairy story, who can? I don’t think there’s any need to add defensive scare-quotes.

I appreciated also the sense of a real range of addressees in Campbell’s book — I think this is a kind of corollary of the range of literary reference. Sometimes a collection contains lots of essentially similar poems dedicated or addressed to a range of people and there doesn’t seem that much connection between the style and form of the poem and the addressee. Here, though, there’s a real sense of speaking in different ways to different people. A moving and understated series of verse epistles, ‘Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage’ run throughout the collection (tantalisingly, numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8, so not, presumably, quite all of the sequence). Written in rather loosely metrical lines, these are some of the most conversational poems in the book.

Victoria Moul, Two good poetry books

The Tattoo Collector – Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press)

“Your train passes a valley –
Mountains around you
are unnameable muscles.
Your insides
shift like sand
as animals go ashore.”

I’d had this book on my ‘to read’ list for over a year and I’m so glad I finally got it for Christmas. Tim Tim is a poet of real skill and deftness. She plays a lot with erasure and other forms where the poem is found from within another text. This is a great way of dismantling and undercutting received narratives, and has now inspired me to try similar things in my own work. I enjoy the precision of Tim Tim’s work, even where she is working within and across multiple languages – the clarity of thought is always there.

Victoria Spires, Some things I’ve read recently – Part 2

I realized at some point during this convention that it’s 20 years since I attended my first AWP, in Texas. I didn’t know anyone in 2006 and approached AWP less artistically than critically: how are the readings and panels framed, and what literary values do those formats express? How do writers represent their affiliations through their performance styles and self-presentations, scare quotes and square coats? I’d been learning how to look and sound like a literature professor, and my attendance, after all, constituted research (I analyzed the conference, alongside other ways poetry manifests in public, in a 2008 scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present).

The 2006 AWP panels, while closely resembling those at scholarly conferences in format, seemed scattershot in quality. The scholar in me was shocked by how little background work some presenters seemed to do preparing for them. AWP panels are better now, yet I attend fewer of them. I’m interested in many of the topics. I’m just running around in my writer hat: connecting with old and new friends over lunch or tea, doing signings and off-site readings, checking out the Book Fair.

In 2026, I can report on only one AWP panel that wasn’t my own. Early on, I lost my hand-written list of what I planned to attend, along with my favorite water bottle, thus ramping myself up quickly to Maximal AWP Disorientation, a condition that eventually takes down many conference-goers. I forgot the time of one panel I’d been determined to make; I got shut out of another, “Poetry and the Sacred” (room at capacity).

The panel I did squeeze into, though, was funny as well as thoughtful. (I couldn’t see if they were wearing thematically appropriate outfits, since the room was full and I sat way in the back.) “Alternative Nation, or Whatever: Gen X Perspectives on the Writing Life” reminded me about the wars, epidemics, economic crises, and toxic prejudices of the late twentieth century AND the mixtapes, miniseries, and problematic literary smashes (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?). Tara Betts talked about reading as a pleasure and a freedom–and how hard that reality can be to translate to her students now. Most presenters addressed the stereotypes of slacker, wiseass nihilist, and the “loser with pointless integrity” (that’s a quote from Matthew Zapruder’s poem “Generation X,” discussed by B. K. Fischer). Paisley Rekdal described the literary culture she entered as a Gen Xer: creative writing workshops, mostly taught and enrolled by white people, characterized literary subjectivity and political engagement as naive, anti-intellectual, and anti-aesthetic (a position espoused VERY strongly in the scholarly world, too, where only the avant-garde among contemporary writers seemed to be breaking into the canon). Rekdal cited Cathy Park Hong’s influential critique of this attitude in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde”. (I flashed back to the modernism conferences where male Language poets in leather jackets held court in the hotel bar.) Gen X writers, according to Rekdal, went on to break down some of those attitudes and open a lot of doors–but remarked that our generation is also responsible for the current accommodationist ethos in universities. I’d like to hear a whole keynote by Paisley Rekdal one day. As I might have put it in the 80s, she’s wicked smart.

Lesley Wheeler, Square coats: AWP & Shenandoah

everyone has their own private capitalism
like a daughter in their coffee cup.
a hand beneath a pillow. the self without
any lungs. the little hunger that eats the dark.
mine is a gone flavor. something marketed
with shiny teeth & iridescent packages.
mystery flavor the color of cave fish.

Robin Gow, limited edition flavor

Do you ever wake up wondering how to live? I don’t mean in the face of terror and imminent death, as so many around the world are facing in this war torn world, I mean just the daily ordinariness of getting up and getting on with things, whatever those things are. I look around and wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, something that I don’t know about or have forgotten. And why. I wonder: Is despair a reasonable response to some days’ unfoldings, or is hope the only way to go? Is gratitude just a way of distracting from doing the vacuuming? When is trying to make something happen worth doing and when is it folly? And do you only know when you’ve either succeeded or failed? When is desire just a failure of gratitude and when is it a useful engine for change? And when is effecting change a useful effort and when should you just sit still and breathe for a while? And when have you been breathing and sitting still for too long like a scared rabbit and you should just go make a run for it? These are things I wonder some days. Dysphoria, c’est moi, as a natural state of being, some days. More days than I care to admit to. So, sometimes, poems can provide some momentary stay against all that. I said “momentary.” There’s only so much poetry can do. Here’s a little prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his book Kitchen Hymns, from Copper Canyon Press.

Marilyn McCabe, When the wren wakes I’ll ask

Li-Young Lee is a strong poet of family – creating throughout his works an atmosphere of home that is vivid and inviting – even when he conjures up the small terrors familial relationships can display. The image of father looms in several of his best poems. In “Eating Together,” Lee focuses on the absence of father, or, more precisely, on the family space the father once occupied.

The poem, which melds the tenderness of family with the ache of loss, begins with the rich smells of a shared meal. I like the attention to detail here: “slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.” The “we” of line four gives the family a hallowed moment – this is the clearest descriptive I can write for how I react to these lines – a moment made warm by their gathering around the table for the meal that is surely a good-bye to the dead father.

The physical motions of the mother, probably addressing her own grief, recall the recent past, tasting

“the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago.”

Human action in most of Lee’s works, certainly in this poem, takes on an almost sacred presence. This meal is such a beautiful setting, made even more sharp and direct by the use of few words – and it’s perhaps the brevity, with nothing wasted, that shapes the poem’s impact on the reader – definitely this reader.

In the closing lines, however, the warm scene surrenders to the cold inevitability of loss. Lee finishes the poem with a powerful simile for death: “a snow-covered road / winding through pines.” The loss is real and is felt in the depths of the silent, snowy road – a strong poetic visual that recalls the isolated but compelling winter images by the artist Hiroshige Ando. It’s the final line I can’t escape – a road with no travelers but “lonely for no one.”

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Li-Young Lee, “Eating Together”

Swaddle them in manuscript.
Mold them with the soft indent
of pen, of ink, jet-black as their hair.

Your characters will be their playmates,
your stories their dreams, woven
for them like any toy a mother weaves
from scrap yarn, remnant cloth.

When they taste simile and metaphor
they will be glad to have a literary mother,
glad for the sweet drip of language
over lips and tongue.

Renee Emerson, Literary Mama

There is an idea that more people write poetry than read it. Often, this argument is made by people who edit poetry magazines. Most recently, Sam Leith has made this argument, in response to this Note worrying that the Venn diagram of people who read and who write poetry is a circle.

To a certain extent, this is just the sort of exaggeration one expects on the internet. But it is important to note that the idea is false. According to NEA data, something like 9-12% of American adults read poetry. That is some thirty or forty million people. In the UK last year, over a million books of poetry were sold.

Now, maybe these numbers have changed from earlier times, but do we think they are very much higher than in the past? There is simply no way that these millions of people are sending poems to magazines. That is not what the editors’ anecdotes suggest. They are seeing the multiple submissions, the prolific minority, the enthusiastic “Sunday poets”, but they are not seeing the silent readers, who don’t talk much about their reading, let alone write about it, who don’t go to readings or workshops.

Theirs is an understandable point of view. Beleaguered editors are inundated with submissions from people who do not subscribe to the magazine, but all the people reading Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive, pulling down an old favourite from the shelf, discovering a new poem as they scroll—they don’t need or want poetry magazines. (Maybe they should, though: Victoria Moul reviews some options if you are interested…)

A lot of poetry magazines, we must be honest, are full of poems that not all poetry readers want to read, either because they will read them in books and anthologies (or online) later on, or because there is never going to be much of an audience for the work. These magazines are part of a winnowing process, in which many readers will not, understandably, wish to take part.

It is reasonable to think that we must have flourishing poetry magazines of the old-fashioned sort, but lots of poets publish online—some of them here on Substack!—and they do just fine.

There are still plenty more readers than writers of poetry, they just may not be reading what the editors wish them to read.

Henry Oliver, Do more people write poetry than read it?

favourite corner
the cat takes ownership 
of the sun

Jim Young [no title]

I woke in the middle of the night with the germ of this poem circling inside my head. I got up and sketched the bare bones in the light of a street lamp.

HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR COUNTRY

• start with the teachers. Make them mouth your new lies. Fashion the curriculum until it mirrors your twisted logic and hate is triumphant
• control the media. This goes without saying. Pass laws that make truth telling illegal.
• silence all who dare to disagree. Show trials can be effective, as can framing the innocent. If this fails fall back on the death squads.
• have neighbour inform on neighbour, brother on sister. Offer incentives to ensure that none will know who they can trust.
• once all this is achieved, begin to purge those closest to you. The corruption you have condoned will provide real evidence.
• try to sleep at night, if you can. 

It is an angry poem. How many times have individuals sought to destroy democracy? Probably since we invented democracies. This is a work in progress. I worry it is too hectoring, far too much tell and not enough show. Plus it is essentially a list poem and it is difficult to pull off a list poem without it sounding simply a list!

Paul Tobin, HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR OWN COUNTRY

I got an MFA in Writing years before I went to rabbinical school. (Thanks, Bennington.) Writing is my other vocation, and a lot of my identity is wrapped up in that. I know that rabbis are exhausted — the last several years have been a Lot. I know not everyone has time or capacity to develop the literary skills I hold dear. And yet hearing that some (many?) of my colleagues turned to AI for sermon help filled me with uncomfortable feelings.

So I sat with that. Why does this bother me so much? Here are the seven answers I’ve landed on. […]

AI is good for large-scale data processing, and for things like searching medical scans or DNA code for markers of disease. AI translation tools can be useful in medical settings, especially rural ones (and especially in conjunction with live human translators who can offer nuance and context.) AI is good for automating repetitive tasks. And some of these things are probably worth AI’s current environmental cost, though I still think we need to figure out how to exact less of a price from the earth.

But writing, painting, poetry, composing…? Not a chance.

Using AI to create art (and in case this needs to be said, I see poetry, sermons, and divrei Torah as art forms) bothers me both because we risk the atrophying of our artistry and because creating art is something human beings can do. An AI can mimic the product of a human heart, but it is fundamentally not the human heart. I fear that something spiritual is lost in us when we outsource our creative capacity in that way.

I wouldn’t ask an AI to help me write my poetry. Or to write a love letter, because what makes a love letter matter is not the information therein but the stumbling, imperfect, human expression of its author’s heart. And that’s also why I wouldn’t ask an AI to write (or even to help me write) a d’var Torah or a sermon.

Rachel Barenblat, The words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart (or: why I refuse AI)

This past week, I managed two nights sleeping on the cold floor of the Pittsburgh Airport. I am a pro at airport sleeping. One flight was at 6 a.m., so it wasn’t worth getting to a hotel. As I settled in for the night, I remembered getting up in the night at the Farm, all the kids who used to wet their beds. I did not because I did not drink any water. The kids who got thirsty would wet the bed because they were lonely and cold. I found myself in that same cold in the airport, sleeping in my clothes with my golden coat draped over me.

Earlier, as I wandered through the airport, I got word that there was a thing about a cover. I needed to talk with an author about a cover change, and the production team was feeling exhausted because they had already tried out so many covers. What to do next! I listened. I registered. I called the authors. I solved the cover. To me, that’s a tiny problem. Yes, we must have a great cover, but of course, we will.

The big problems that keep me up at night, whether I’m on the floor or in a bed, are raising funds to keep publishing poetry, and fundraising in general. I want to keep our poetry program alive. Find new board members. Build the editorial circle. Pay the bills. I want the authors to love their covers as well, but keeping the machine going is the wheel on which I turn and turn.

Kate Gale, The Story of the Summit: Finding My Footing in Risk

I wanted a break from schmoozing and talking to strangers at the writing conference. But that did not happen. He introduced himself as Thomas and I learned that he is a mythology professor at a university in Ohio, so of course he liked my response to the writing prompt from that morning in which I spontaneously took my legs off my body, planted them in the woods, rendering my torso a trunk writhing with cicadas and in wonder of watching my legs grow amongst the trees as the years go by.

The four feet of dark, gray space between my childhood home and the neighbor’s house. The abandoned glass factory near the Allegheny River and its grimy floor covered in ledgers, the handwriting within them almost impossible to decipher. The Allegheny River and its pits of gurgling mud and green riverside oases. The wooded edge of anyone’s backyard, away from the crowd of the party, where I have seen red fox, mice, and of course the birds. The forbidden, dangerous landscape of railroad tracks. The dark tapering world of my childhood home’s closet, well beyond the hanging coats, the sound of people looking for me as they go up the creaking steps above my head. All my life I have been drawn to the lonely, dark, once-was places. Away from the adults. Away from my peers. Knee-deep and stuck in mud. Entering abandoned mine shafts like a reverse birth. Decades-old exhaust grit lining the part in my hair and crunching between my teeth as I walked hunched-over in abandoned turnpike tunnel ventilation shafts. All my life, I’ve felt out-of-place and alien to nearly every person around me, even my closest friends. All my life, I’ve laughed at and belittled myself around them so that I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

Earlier that morning, in front of an audience of just under 100 people, a celebrated poet called writing for one’s self precious. I hadn’t heard that word in a negative connotation since my MFA program about 15 years ago. You don’t want for your writing to be precious. It is precious to say that you only write for yourself when you actually mean that you fear rejection from an audience. Listening to this poet, I allowed my mind to groan and roll its eyes. I am guilty of just writing for myself. It is something I have done nearly all my life. Right? I allowed what he said to steep in my mind as I sat through the morning’s next panel discussion. I thought of an interview I once listened to with the writer Ocean Vuong as the guest. He talked about his books being “sent down the river,” meaning that once the book is out of his hands and in the public, the book takes on a life of its own. A life he cannot control. I thought of my own writing and how when I release it into the river, it just spins in circles and bobs back and forth from shore to shore, always within reach of a long net that I carry in my hands.

Sarah Lada, I Can’t Put My Teeth Together And I’m Seeing Stars

when you say,
Give me silence,
purify my sour heart –

I prepare yellow gills of liminal poison,
brush damp earth from caps
scented of hoar and musk,
slice then grind under mortar and pestle
emetic fungi, season with butter and salt.

[…]

This poem was inspired by the 2017 film Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. If you’ve never seen Phantom Thread, it’s a dark and twisted story of a haute couture dressmaker played by Day-Lewis whose structured life is upended by a chance meeting with a waitress played by Vicky Krieps. Her ability to perfectly remember and serve his large and detailed breakfast order intrigues him and is the spark that begins her role as muse, model, and lover. Their relationship gradually turns to the dark side with scenes of fevered outbursts and mutually toxic behavior that flirts with death:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open, with only me to help.”

If this is a love story, it’s one of masochistic obsession that will keep you mesmerized, if you’re in the right mood for it, as it does have long stretches of silence and drawn-out scenes. There are no nude or explicit scenes because none are needed. There’s also lots of gorgeous 1950s fashion and interiors. A good movie to watch on a chilly, stormy day or on a too hot, blindingly sunny summer day. Milder days are for outside living; nature’s breath on your skin and dark thoughts behind cobwebs in your mind.

Charlotte Hamrick, Roots and Rituals

Our apricot trees are blossoming, 
always the first. Next the greengages. 
Then the cherries. In the Alborz mountains 
behind Tehran the cherry trees blossom

around Nowruz, the Persian new year – 
a time of joy, gratitude, and fresh starts, 
of visiting families and celebrating nature. 

Is this where we can begin to find hope, 
in the things that tie us together, not 
drive us apart? Branches of blossom,
the shared miracle of their fragile scent.  

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary Miracles

snowflake melts.
path’s completed.
somewhere darkness flowers.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

Spring is arriving.

Wendy Pratt, Dawn and Dusk Chorus Write Along Sessions

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

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I Picnic On Ice

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

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

Clare Shaw, The Cruellest Month is over!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maria Popova, Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

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

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

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

The Hollow Women

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

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

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

Sarah Lada, Orogeny

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Broken

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, creative life amid the doomscroll

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Zimmer, Guest Pep Talk (Maggie Smith)

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

yellow-bodied machines scooping
the dirt from between white lines

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

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

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

— the call to prayer — has come too late.

Maureen Doallas, Who Counts

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Uber Drivers at AWP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Meischen, No Porch Light On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Two Pamphlets by Henry Gould: A Review

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, February Reading Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, cheese pull

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, Still, I listen. I search

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Water

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº54 A postcard from Rome…

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

Jim Young, on looking at a mountain lake

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

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

Matthew Stewart, Less of a poet…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Canada is as far away as bibles are

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

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

Paul Tobin, THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

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

books, random receipts with poems written on the back.

Smells of vinyl and dust preserved under glass.

The Museum of Instructions Without Context was far too confusing,

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

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

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

a key that insists it belongs to you.

Rich Ferguson, I’ll Always Remember The Day

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Snowdrops

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

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

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

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

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

Don Paterson, A Year of North Sea Poets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annette Makino, How to move through a broken world?

                            Without 

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, On Blessing