This week: bearing witness to old rhythms, the laptop singing to life, a postcolonial flâneuse, the slow harvest of mindfulness, and much more. Enjoy.

I often cannot see the night sky, here in the mountains of North Carolina.  There’s usually too many trees that obscure the view, which seems a fair trade most nights.  But in the winter months of no leaves on the trees, I get unexpected treats as I glimpse a star here and there.

This morning there was the delight of the setting moon.  I was working on a poem that I was writing, a poem inspired by an in-class writing experiment that led to some good student writing (see this blog post for details).  I thought I might write from the point of view of the saw mill blade, but instead, I focused on the door frame, the door frame that was once a tree, that sacrificed essential parts of itself to become a door frame.  Was it worth it?  The door frame feels sorrow, much like many adults I know who feel sorrow about the sacrifices made along the way.

As I was writing it, the poem seemed tired and trite to me.  Writing about it now, I think it has potential.  I’ll put it away for a bit and see if anything new comes to me.

As I was writing, the setting moon caught my eye, and I thought, I’d probably see this beautiful moon better if I turned off the lights in this room.  And so, I did, and it was amazing, watching the moon set beyond the bare branches of the trees.  The moon was shrouded in haze, so it had more of a Halloween vibe than a December vibe.  I tried to summon a December feeling by thinking about the haunting Christmas hymn, “In the Deep Midwinter.”  I thought about Christina Rossetti, author of the words.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Moonset and Midwinters

In studying prosody, how it informs a poem’s argument or intonation, we tend to look for ruptures, dissonance, places where the music breaks down: the meter falters or the rhyme abruptly strikes a minor chord. But with Frost, as often as not, the deviation is a doubling down instead of a stepping away. “Stopping by Woods” is no exception to the exception, and while the last stanza is linked by rhyme to the penultimate, it is in fact linked more tightly, all four lines, rather than just three, rhyming with sweep:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

While the poem ends, famously, in what may be read as an avowal to continue, to push onwards, the repeated line as an assertion of determination, I hear in the music a hypnotic quality, a trailing off instead of a striking out, a settling down, as if instead of resuming his forward momentum, the speaker has decided he might linger a little while longer. The mind may know the story it’s been telling itself—things to do, places to be, don’t let anything distract you from the behest your mind is bent on—but some more ancient sense knows the thing to do when the snow begins to pile is to hunker down someplace warm and rest a while.

Solstice derives from the Latin solstitium: sol, meaning sun, plus sistere, “stand still”—the solstice is the point at which the sun stands still. In this, ahem, light, the third line of Frost’s quatrain, its wayward rhyme, is an accounting, an observing: a bearing witness to the old rhythms against which all our human machinations beat and bleat and strive. But it only takes a moment’s work to decide that you can linger there a while, and let the easy music of the wind, the sharp smell of snow, enchant you. The thing to remember about keeping promises is: they will keep.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

As you might imagine, independent bookstores really depend on holiday sales, and this is a great time of year to shop independently instead of at the enormous online retailers (who don’t need your money, frankly). You can even use that site that won’t be named to find titles and make a wish list, and then take that list of books to your local indie and buy from them instead. If you don’t have an indie or a brick-and-mortar chain bookstore near you, check out Bookshop.org, which gives a portion of its profits to independent bookstores.

To get you started, in case you’re looking for recommendations, here are some of my favorite books from 2025, plus a couple of books coming out in 2026, including a new collection of poems by yours truly, my first book of poems in five years. I love preordering books as holiday gifts, and giving a card that tells the recipient what title(s) they’ll be receiving and when. That with some dark chocolate, coffee, or tea? Instant holiday hero.

Lion by Sonya Walger
Startlement: New and Selected Poems by Ada Limón
Paper Crown: Poems by Heather Christle
Terminal Surreal: Poems by Martha Silano
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis
Scorched Earth: Poems by Tiana Clark
The New Economy: Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
A Silent Treatment: A Memoir by Jeannie Vanasco
Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, coedited by David Baker and Michael Collier
The End of Childhood: Poems by Wayne Miller
Transit: Poems by David Baker (preorder)
A Suit or a Suitcase: Poems by…me (preorder)*

*My neighborhood bookstore, Gramercy Books, allows you to order signed and personalized copies of my books, and they’ll ship to you anywhere in the continental US. I love walking down to Gramercy to sign books and make them out to the people you care about most: friends, kids and grandkids, teachers, neighbors. So please know that’s an option this holiday season! The folks at Gramercy—and I—appreciate your support.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

The second poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Sarah al Bohassi.

Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi [Instagram login required].

Sarah al Bohassi is a 13-year-old poet from Gaza. She has composed her poem in English. As Robert Macfarlane has written on Instagram: ‘Her mother has multiple sclerosis so Sarah looks after the whole household. They can’t get medication for her mother and can’t evacuate her. Sarah has not stopped writing.’

Sarah’s poem has been letterpress-printed by @theohersey. You can buy an A4 print of her poem here. Each purchase also comes with an A5 print of ‘Repeating Ourselves III’ by Alice Oswald, Zaffar Kunial, Max Porter and Robert Macfarlane. All proceeds will be shared directly with Sarah and her family, and with @doctorswithoutborders.

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 2: Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi

It’s been a good year for my memoir, and I am thrilled to have been reviewed and interviewed a few times . Today I heard I made the Lit Hub list of notable titles. The reviewer wrote: Nin Andrews’ memoir in prose poems chronicles her feral childhood among farm animals, miscellaneous siblings, and eccentric parents. As the “last daughter of a gay man and an autistic woman,” she is raised mostly by a Black nanny (the memorable Miss Mary, who nicknames her “Son of a Bird”), along with cranky farmhands and the land itself. I was swept up in the poet’s exhilaration, confusion, and awe as she digs up and lyrically configures her past. Heart-breaking, revelatory, and devastatingly funny, these are brilliant vignettes. (Charles Goodrich)

Nin Andrews, A Good Year for Son of a Bird

With no access to slots at major festivals, no wholesaler, no chance to get copies on shelves at physical bookshops, no distribution in the U.S. or Canada, no realistic retail prices on Amazon, no reviews in broadsheets or major print-based journals, Nell (at HappenStance) and I have now shifted going on for 250 copies of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. And I’m determined to ensure there will be plenty more sales of it to come over the next few years.

In this context, I’m inevitably left wondering just how many I’d have sold with any of the external commercial support network I’ve mentioned above. And, given that many significantly funded poetry publishers (who do have that sort of backing) have stated their average sales of full collections barely reach three figures, why aren’t they flogging far more copies than me instead of far fewer…?

Matthew Stewart, My personal experience of selling poetry collections in the current climate

My new poetry collection. The Artist’s House is a cultural autobiography, honoring the literature, art, and artists that have shaped my writing, with illustrations and interactive features. It will include Art Nouveau style drawings and links to music, dance, and poetry online. Listen to a song by Jacob Collier while reading a poem about Emily Dickinson’s lines dueling with Taylor Swift’s. Watch a performance of Twyla Tharp’s “In The Upper Rooms” ballet after reading the poem it inspired.

This has been a passion project, poems contemplating the world of art and the creative process. I’ve been drawn to contemplate this since childhood, as I grew up with the arts — a father who was a painter and a mother who was a musician. They enriched my childhood with reading, visual art, music, and dance—taking us to see concerts and plays, to visit museum and art exhibitions.

Rachel Dacus, Why I’m Inspired by Art and Artists

“The Instagram astrologers says big positive changes are coming for me this week!” I yelled from my reading chair to my spouse at his laptop, although the cats seemed interested, too. He said something like “that’s nice, honey,” or maybe just a neutral “mmm” because he was concentrating on the hundredth book of comics scholarship he’s found himself writing for fun, because his brain grooves on producing scholarship. I sighed, shut off the social media algorithms that were mesmerizing me into a stupor, and pulled Phillip Pullman’s massive new novel onto my lap.

Hence my delay in spotting what a few FB friends had just posted to my timeline, that Mycocosmic has been named to Literary Hub’s list of 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. (I turned off all social media notifications years ago–I’m distractible enough, thank you.) My mycelially themed poetry collection even appears in Lit Hub’s graphic, in the understory, appropriately enough. I had just woken up and searched for the local outdoors farmer’s market page on FB to make sure they’re still opening at a very chilly 8 a.m. Instead I sat on the wooden stairs in my pajamas to read and process. I’ve never had a book appear on one of these year-end lists before. It’s a multi-genre list including eight poetry collections. That’s pretty good, right?

Lest I get TOO cheerful about it: after the article throws out disheartening stats about how seldom small press books appear on “best of” lists, it states, “This is not a best of list.” Ahem. I don’t think lists intended to be “best of” actually qualify for that label, either, as it happens. It’s not like even the most diligent poetry reviewers know about every good collection published that year, much less have given each one a fair shake. The U.S. poetry scene is big, messy, and wildly various in ways the highest-profile review outlets don’t reflect. “Best” is more like “my favorites among the books that floated across my attention this year, with an emphasis on buzzy authors and prestige presses and fellow Brooklynites who already got a lot of media because c’mon, I’ve been doomscrolling more often than reading poems, just like you.” (I do get it, Imaginary Poetry Reviewer–reading everything is impossible–I’m just perpetually irked by how NYC-centric the poetry world can seem.)

Lesley Wheeler, Stars, luck, and revelations

One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the Little Free Library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments it is worth turning the page of experience because the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the Little Free Library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.

As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.

After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.

Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.

Here they all are — perhaps uncommon gifts for the book-lover in your life, perhaps simply inspiration to try the practice yourself — available as translucent 4×4 blocks with proceeds supporting my endeavor to put up Little Free Libraries in book deserts throughout the five boroughs of New York City — communities more than a mile from a public library or bookstore.

Maria Popova, Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

We are in this together. The dream of the lens
has led us to an abandoned treatment plant, a cold
and vacant warehouse. Shacks, trails. Underground.
Mines and secrets whisper in the grasses, telling
of nations, angelic invasions, the terror of inhaling
eternity’s parasites. Just so, the children here
grow vast libraries of psychic error.

R.M. Haines, “The Other Century”

Whenever I feel trapped or stalled, I sit in a space (pub, coffeeshop, whatever) with a stack of reading to flip through (poetry books, fiction, non-fiction whatever, as I’m always behind on my reading), with notebook + pen + nowhere to be for a couple of hours and no expectation, beyond flipping through reading; it always triggers even a sentence or a thought or a something into the notebook. From a spark, one can build, certainly.

Also: attempting to write to a particular prompt might also force an idea, beyond one’s usual structure or comfort zone. I know Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen composed a novel based on taking words-as-prompts for each section; one hundred short sections from one hundred short words. If you can imagine, she wrote a whole novel out of that.

I’m currently working a poetry manuscript from weekly prompts that Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany has been offering since January, but I’m using less as forced-prompt than simply a structure to stretch my boundaries; he’s only doing this year, so I’m hoping I can get a manuscript of something somehow coherent and publishable out of it.

Denver poet Julie Carr said she was feeling stalled during early Covid, so I suggested a call-and-response; I wrote a poem and sent it to her; she wrote a poem in response; I wrote a poem to her response poem; and so on; we each manage a dozen poems over a year and a half (I produced our immediate results into a chapbook, but she later rewrote hers into three poems, which landed in her 2024 collection, whereas I’d initially hoped we could get a full collaborative book out of it; my side of our conversation, thus, appears in my spring 2026 book with Caitlin Press).

rob mclennan, How to break through a writing block:

winter wind
the voice of one tree
after another

three of a kind by tom clausen

The evening in York was a memorable one: Janet Dean and Ian Parks, whose new collection we were celebrating, read beautifully, and Jane Stockdale’s songs and tunes were delightful. I stuck to my usual set of poems from The Last Corinthians, tempting though it was to read different ones and even some from my previous collection and/or some new ones.

Five days after York, having been invited by Katie Griffiths to read in Walton-on-Thames alongside Sophie Herxheimer, I skedaddled down south for what was perhaps the most enjoyable gig for me since the one in Nottingham in September. Sophie is a force of nature, an artist as well as a poet, whom I could’ve listened to all evening. She got everyone making zines during the interval. Katie herself read a poem; it’s excellent news that Nine Arches will be publishing her second collection next year. There was also a short open mic, the readers including marvellous Jill Abram.

As Walton is only a few miles west of Kingston, I tailored my set accordingly, with more locally-set poems than I would normally read, though I decided – wisely, I think – against reading one, ‘The Blue Bridge’, which features Sham 69, who came from the neighbouring town of Hersham. In all, it was a joyful evening, and a good way to end this year of readings, which has seen me appear in eight cities and towns in England within the space of six months. It’s been more of a meander than a tour, and two of them were serendipitous invitations at fairly short notice; nonetheless, it’s been lovely to read my poems out loud in front of attentive listeners, not all of whom are poets themselves. I’m thankful to everyone who’s come along, whether because of me, my co-readers or both.

Matthew Paul, Recent readings and reading

On 7th Dec I attended a CB1 poetry event at yet another new venue – the Brew House. About 40 people attended. I hadn’t heard of either of the headline poets. Leo Boix read from his book of 100 sonnets. Stav Poleg lives in Cambridge and has been in The New Yorker among other places. Her work sounded more substantial – rather heavy going for a reading, but a name worth adding to my reading list. Her “Memory and Geography” poem was excellent.

The open-mic readers took up over half the evening and were more varied than ever. A few of them had never performed poetry before. One person read a piece that they hadn’t looked at since they wrote it in 5 minutes. Another read his piece that has just won 2nd prize in the Bridport (£1000). I read an old piece that I think I’ve read before. It’s about time I read something new.

Tim Love, CB1 – Stav Poleg and Leo Boix

This past week I facilitated a workshop called “The Gift of Poetry.” In it I and some of my poet friends, Jon Pearson, Kim Malinowsky, John Brantingham, and Robbi Nester all shared prompts they use to write poems for special people. Some of these ideas incorporate visual elements, making the poems more like art pieces. Some of these prompts involve writing to a specific person, incorporating telling details about them in the poem. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure how things would work out. I find it really difficult to write poems to people I love without getting too squishy. I have to say though, I was truly blown away by the fun, funny, tender, beautiful things people shared in our workshop. Everyone walked away with great material to make into poetic gifts for loved-ones.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Poems and Prompts from Our Community

Many thanks to Kathleen Mcphilemy for including three of my poems in episode 37 of Poetry Worth Hearing or you can listen on Youtube, Audible and Spotify. […]

The theme was hiding and/or seeking. The episode is 60 minutes. The first half hour or so is an interesting interview with poet Nancy Campbell who talks about her residency on Greenland among other things. The interview and Nancy’s poems bookend poems by Guy Jones, Zelda Cahill-Patten, Lesley Saunders, Pat Winslow, Richard Lister, Dinah Livingstone, and Sarah Mnatzaganian.

Fokkina McDonnell, Poetry Worth Hearing

Home across the Wolds again, the sky now is a winter-dusk sky of pink with a moon as fine as lace. Mum is feeling better after a terrifying couple of weeks. She chats all the way back. My siblings and her friends take over her care now. I can come home.

The next day I try and write but instead I catch up on sleep; deep, dark sleep, the kind without dreams. It is recovery from days of ambulances and terrifying illness and wards and worry. Today I have a meeting about the Arts Council application which is so close to being finished, but for which I have done absolutely nothing except open it up and listen to my brain trying to run away from it. The application is a priority, but so is listening to what my strange brain needs. It needs to sink into writing the book, have a few hours disappearing into the world I have created there, connecting to something that is primal: the urge to create, to write, to transform and today I shall do this. Tomorrow is for questions about impact and audience, numbers and timelines, today is for me. I can feel my protagonist like a ghost at my shoulder, waiting for me to draw her path for her. This has nothing to do with grinding towards a word count and everything to do with the creative brain enjoying its work.

But how do I fight the fear? How do I stop feeding the roots that cause me to worry about being left behind? What will I do when I can’t rely on my work ethic, when the sacrifice of time needs to be made to people, not pages? I fight it with the secret, shy knowledge that it is not the grind that has led me to this point in my career. That is a factor, but the other, more important factor is ability. I have crossed out ‘talent’ so many times in this sentence, it is just too cringe. I will settle with ability. The ability to create in a unique way, unique to my odd brain and way of thinking. No one can write this book but me, not because they wouldn’t know how to write it, or because they wouldn’t get there first, or aren’t as dedicated, but because they are not me. The root that I need to feed is the one that values my own ability, my own differences. Difference is uniqueness. The work, the book, will wait for me. It can’t be written without me.

I’m sitting in my writing room watching the seagulls crossing a lavender sky. Early morning. Good coffee, the laptop singing to life, the work ready to be done.

Wendy Pratt, The Fear is on Me

Weather continues dizzy
with fatigue, slowly floating
drifts forming of white dust: snow,
ash, the evaporation
of poison rain, something else?

PF Anderson, On Resilience

I love art for its embrace of the not-knowing. That sense sometimes of sliding one foot forward slowly in the dark, then the other; or of feeling along the wall for a light switch. I know it’s here somewhere. I like that the advice offered in poems can be both wise and suspect, both silly and true. Can be understood by the body, but not necessarily by the brain. Yes, something in me says. Yes, that’s true, even as the rational brain may say, Now, wait a minute, hold on here, what’s this now? And I appreciate artists who speak out of the not-knowing, the I’m-not-sure. The artists who say, Let me show you what I saw, tell you what I heard, and you decide: what does it mean?

Marilyn McCabe, the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

The final few lines reference an interview and performance John Cage gave on television in January, 1960 which has always stayed with me—his way of being seems so gentle and loving—and remains an endless source of inspiration to me in my own approach to poetry and life: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”

Dick Whyte, Maude Uschold – 2 Short Poems (1926-1935)

I wonder about the vacuum
that grows inside me
like an ancient bonsai.
Pruned and constrained.
Yet sometimes daring to offer a miniature flower.
Or to break through skin —
as wound
as weapon
as poem.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Honeycomb

For the video below, I took the first twenty or so sections of Oppen’s poem “Of Being Numerous” and transformed them into this new text (a process involved alphabetizing, and multiple Google translations and then editing) which is haunted and speaks to the spirit of the times, somehow. Then I made this video which is all about absence and haunting. I recorded myself playing alto recorder and then tranformed that into MIDI harp and ceramic bowl sounds which I transformed through delay, reverb and displacement.

Gary Barwin, On “Forgetting”: Turning One’s Back on Turning One’s Back to the Future

Something you may not know about me is that I sometimes wander onto eBay to hunt for things I’m convinced belong in the Poetry Museum I curate in my mind. Some people binge-watch Stranger Things, some people look for lost ephemera.

In my searches, I found this letter written by Anne Sexton, which I found charming. Not because I am a fan of cucumber soup, but because of the P.S. at the very end. [image]

Here’s my cucumber soup recipe AND I won the Pulitzer Prize—all things being equal.

I’ve always loved letters and postcards (you may have noticed I’ve renamed this Substack Postcards from a Poet, because for me, this feels less like a “newsletter” and more like a small check-in from me to you: Hey, how are you holding up? Here are a few things bringing me joy.)

And here’s something that delighted me this week: I did not know that people (and kids!) write postcards to Emily Dickinson via the Emily Dickinson Museum. While many were mailed, this one, I’m guessing this one was penned in the moment and handed over to museum staff. And well, it warmed my heart: [image]

“Thank you for writing a soft sea washed around the house”—Come on! What a way to say thank you! It reminded me of William Stafford’s quote: Everyone is born a poet. . .I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

Kelli Russell Agodon, Anne Sexton’s Recipe for Cucumber Soup…

I stopped writing poetry at a certain point, good party though it was. Coulda been the whiskey mighta been the gin, coulda been the humiliation coulda been the freeze-out. I kept moving toward where the love was. Maybe poetry left me, and maybe it’ll come back some day. What has always seemed perverse to me though is that poets could form inhospitable communities. But in the end I’ve found my own small community of hospitable and openhearted writers and that has made all the difference. […]

I think most of us stopped imagining that the creative life would ever get easier, but suddenly it seems like it will be getting harder than ever. And it’s still hard for me, 13 or so books in, 35 years or so in. But I worry about the young writers, all of them. The ones who haven’t even begun to imagine a writing life for themselves. The ones who live in a world with drugs that affect your appetite, making you feel hungry when you’re not, and others that make you feel sated when you might need nourishment. And it makes sense to take drugs for depression, anxiety, diabetes. It does. It makes sense to be afraid right now. It makes sense that many are in a recurring flight or fight response mode which elevates cortisol levels and which according to Harvard Health could in a chronic case cause, “brain changes that may contribute to anxiety, depression, and addiction” and weight gain.

One must continue to ask as Woolf did, “Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?” What new considerations are there? As a white woman writer in my 50s in the mid 2020s, of what use can I be? Is it helpful to tell my story? Or is it better just to get out of the way to make space for others to articulate theirs? How do we make meaning of our own ongoing stories at this particular historical moment? How do we balance the needs of our stomachs so that our small eyes can imagine an enormous and nourishing future?

Shawna Lemay, Artemisa Gold – an Essay

Ramisha Kafique updates the role of flâneuse to today’s world, taking in streets and cafés both local and distant. In the process, she also subverts the original role of a white male strolling city streets and recording what he observed to that of a Muslim woman, recording what she sees and how people observing her react. As the title poem, “Postcolonial Flâneuse” observes,

“Neutral positions clash with colourful scarves and turbans, veils, bands, and bracelets. You can’t tell them what not to wear, here. Is it my faith that is silencing me or your gaze? Is there a lack of me in the spaces I inhabit?

“Give space. deep breaths, sighs, long strides, fingers fiddling in laps, chins resting in hands. Alhamdulillah. I can walk where I like.”

England’s bland, grey streets where everyone was in business uniforms or a casual uniform of sweatshirts and jeans, are being opened up to colour and signifiers of different religions. There’s a challenge too as the speaker asks if those observers who see her as different are assuming her faith doesn’t allow her to walk alone or visit a café without a chaperone or their attempts at intimidation, even unintentional, are trying to push her out. The poem’s speaker, however, is not deterred. She records in “Book in Hand”, “She has become part of/ the mass. She is him, and her,/ and them.”

Emma Lee, “The Postcolonial Flâneuse” Ramisha Kafique (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground and hadn’t been impressed. More than unimpressed: he had actively taken agin it, he had wanted to stand in the middle of the carriage and say in a very loud voice: ‘Read that – does anyone think it’s good?? That’s the kind of poem that can put people off poetry for life.’ He sat down next to me and googled the poem on his phone and insisted on reading it aloud, exasperated by every line, and this was funny because I know his exasperation. My encounter with two recent, widely praised novels followed a similar trajectory: I began reading slowly, respectfully; I became impatient; I did some skim-reading; I placed them on my pile of books-to-take-to-the-Oxfam-shop.

The chorus of approval surrounding many new books begins pre-publication with puff quotes for the cover from other writers, with ‘books to look out for’ features in the Guardian, and with excited freelance reviewers posting pictures of their advance copies; post-publication, if there are good reviews and author interviews and ‘profiles’, the chorus can feel wraparound. Stifling. Airless. In this context, negative reviews have a thrilling whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church. Not negative reviews of books (and films, TV shows, restaurants) that are widely agreed to be pretty terrible, because their target is low-hanging fruit and the reviewers are saying little more than see how witty I am, but well-argued negative reviews of books that been praised elsewhere and get ‘likes’ all over the place and have won prizes. These are different; they feel personal.

Charles Boyle, Teeth: On negative reviews

I admit to personal bias here: Andy Fletcher and I go back more than forty years, could be nearing fifty, if numbers matter. And in my view he’s one of the best poets I’ve read in all that time. Like so many others, he should have had more recognition, but thankfully – as his new collection the uncorked banshee rebellion bottle demonstrates – he’s still hard at work, crafting his tight, lively, profound, sometimes mysterious, sometimes tender and always entertaining poems.

He tends to take an image or circumstance, explore it, twist it, find the life in it and then pare it to its essence. He’s rarely if ever wasteful with words, or loose in his construction. With each poem, there is a sense that here is a poet who knows what he wants from the piece – and knows how best to achieve it. This is a skill not easily learned.

Take the poem my work, which is typically absurd in its expansion of an image, yet holds a darkness, a feeling of being overpowered or controlled, as so many do. It begins the teacher examines my work/and says it’s the worst she’s seen// she picks me up bodily/ pushes me into her pencil sharpener/ and turns me until my head’s pointed

In another poem, time, there is an echo of childhood scraps when the narrator’s jumped and knocked over by the grandfather clock in the hall. He fights back but in the end admits defeat – ‘you win’ i gasp. And as we know, time always will. the clock stands upright again/ and chimes loudly

Some poems are very short, just two or three lines, some are blocks set out as prose without punctuation, most are tight and fit into one side, which makes them deceptive. On one level you can take them at face value, enjoy the fun in their ideas, read them quickly. On another you can re-read and consider the depths of understanding of the human condition they contain. 

Bob Mee, ANDY FLETCHER

Bodies of water with a menace of teeth
beneath the surface.

Silvered arms of trees, unleafed, suggest
a longing for taxonomy—

How to remember origins,
where we began.

Luisa A. Igloria, Long Night Moon

It’s December and I have enjoyed reviewing many excellent collections and pamphlets during the course of this year, but the subject of today’s review, Katrina Moinet’s State of the Nations (Atomic Bohemian, 2025), must rank as one of the best. I have a penchant for poetry that pushes the boundaries of language and form and that engages with the challenges of contemporary society. State of the Nations does this and much, much more.  

The collection begins with poems that reflect upon the state of government in our country and perhaps internationally. Demockracy as the title suggests paints a picture of a system of government that makes a mockery of the ideals of democracy. The poem takes the form of a list, each line describing the actions of government often in apparently contradictory statements. For example, Moinet writes ‘Demockracy/ …is arresting/ arrests no one/ rises in solidarity with no one (for fear of arrest).’ This is government that has lost its way: it represents no one, the exact opposite of what a democracy should do! The notion of ‘arresting’ makes the system sound more totalitarian than democratic, and in order to resolve the contradiction in the line that follows (‘arrests no one’), the reader imagines the non-arrest of corrupt political leaders and their friends so characteristic of such states. Perhaps unsurprisingly earlier in the poem we are told ‘Demockracy…is going for a walk…is taking a hike,’ suggesting an abdication of responsibility. As a result, it ‘will find itself on the police national computer/ may one day appear in court.’ The idea of a democratic institution being guilty of illegal acts is frightening.   No wonder the poem ends with an appeal: ‘incites people to read/ incites people to read/ incites people to read it for themselves.’ Moinet is asking us to exercise our sense of individual responsibility: to take note of what is happening, because only through the aggregation of  individual action can we protect democracy.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘State of the Nations’ by Katrina Moinet

In the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program, a common topic of debate was what it meant to write “political poetry.” I’m sure my memory has reduced the positions people took in this debate to their lowest common denominators, but there were, as I recall, two basic lines of reasoning. One argued that poets had an inherent obligation to write about the political and cultural concerns of the day—that the vocation of poet, essentially, demanded it. The other asserted that the debate itself was a red herring, because poems were political by definition. The linguistic, formal, and expressive choices a poet made were inescapably and ineluctably already embedded in the poet’s politics. I was just beginning back then to figure out what I had to say as a poet, but my sympathies were with the first group from the start. I knew I wanted—that I needed, actually—to write about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but I wanted to do so by locating that experience within a larger cultural and political context.

My touchstone for this desire was June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights,” in which she connected the fear of sexual violence that kept her from walking alone whenever and wherever she wanted not only to the systemic nature of sexual violence itself, but also to other systems of oppression like racism and colonialism. I don’t know if I could have said it this way then, but making those kinds of connections seemed to hold out the possibility of healing in a way that nothing else did. The sexual abuse of boys was barely recognized as a phenomenon at that time. No one was talking about it because it was assumed to be so rare that it didn’t merit much attention at all; even the therapeutic wisdom in those years was grounded in how uncommon this kind of abuse was believed to be. I didn’t learn this until decades later, but therapists were trained back then to assume that when a boy or man revealed he’d been sexually abused he might very well be reporting a fantasy of some sort, not something that had actually been done to him.

The feminist strategy of making the personal political, in other words—which is fundamentally an ethical stance rooted in the assumption that people do not lie when they relate their own experience, and which “Poem About My Rights” embodied—offered me a way to give meaning to what the men who violated me had done to me beyond the simple fact that I had been their victim. Still, it took me a long time to figure out how to do in my own work what June Jordan did in that poem, primarily because bearing witness to violence and trauma in poetry inevitably confronts the poet with an ethical paradox. A poem, by definition, is a beautiful thing made of words; trauma, on the other hand—in my case the trauma of sexual violence—is anything but beautiful. How can you ethically use the former to represent the latter without in some way falsifying what the person who experienced the trauma went through?

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma

For the last 13 days, Kim and I – mostly Kim – have shown how poetry can help us to survive and speak out against gendered violence; how it can help us to make sense of shattering experiences, to comfort and heal ourselves, to reach out, to offer help, to create communities of recovery and activism. Poetry can invite us to walk in another shoes, to inhabit our own experiences more deeply, more clearly, to find new depths of understanding, empathy, and strength within ourselves. Poetry can deconstruct social systems, old patterns of thought and behaviour, it can highlight injustice; it can demand reparation and inspire action. It can expand and reshape our sense of possibility, it can change the world.

In “Writing about Trauma/ Writing Saved My Life”, I draw from my faith in poetry to examine why writing about trauma is a powerful experience, which can hurt as well as help us. There’s plenty of evidence to support the therapeutic potential of creative writing – but without the right support and structures, writing directly from the experience of trauma can be upsetting, triggering, even retraumatising. Catharsis, in itself, is not therapeutic. Instead, I look at some of the poetic devices we can use to maximise safety and control in the process of writing – metaphor and imagery, rhythm and form – and how these devices can help us to sing in the darkness, about the darkness. This chapter was first published Nine Arches Press in 2021, in “Why I Write Poetry”, a collection of essays edited by Ian Humphreys. It ends with a short writing exercise – and on Day 16, I’ll share a link to a more comprehensive writing resource for those wanting to write about trauma.

Clare Shaw, Day 14: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

The distinctive scientific curiosity and optimism of Cowley, Ewens and Grove, reflected also in Dryden, is one of the most attractive features of the literary culture of the 1660s. These are unignorably political poets, all written by royalists, but their scientific curiosity is never reducible to politics, and, if anything, the extraordinary freshness of their style — in both Latin and English — seems to have been shaped or facilitated as much by the civil war and interregnum as by the Restoration.

No-one reads any of this stuff now, but if you look across Europe there is plenty of Latin didactic verse from the 1660s: these projects were not in themselves unusual. The most obvious comparison for Cowley’s poem is René Rapin’s Hortorum Libri IV (‘Four Books of Gardens’), for instance, published in Paris in 1665 — but Rapin’s staidly elegant Virgilian pastiche has nothing at all of the urgency or oddness of either Cowley or Ewens. Rapin’s beautiful but ultimately slightly tedious Virgilian imitation is typical of the wider genre, and of the kind of description often offered for ‘neo-Latin’ poetry as a whole. But it’s very far indeed from what you find in English scientific poetry of the 1660s, the urgency of which seems to emerge directly from the ravages of civil war and the hope of a lasting peace.

Victoria Moul, The heart of man, what Art can e’re reveal?

A whistling that freezes more deeply
the spines of icicles
goes on and on like a siren.

Out of the fog and the thunder
and the smoke and my shadow
a figure as pale as milk comes tottering, sloshing
staggering.

[…]

This is part of a sequence called ‘Second-Hand Kite Feathers’, all but one of which is genuinely derived from the Japanese.

I can’t speak or write Japanese, but using a combination of Google Translate, Wiktionary and existing English versions (in this case Robert Pulvers’ translation from Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems of Kenji Miyazawa), I sometimes write down versions of Japanese poems in English. I published a few in School of Forgery because the underlying theme of the book was ‘the volatile relationship between fakery and invention’.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” goes the well-worn Eliot quote. It continues: “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But isn’t the defaced object automatically made different? Did he mean that it should no longer bear any resemblance to what it once was? That is has to have been pointed to a new purpose? One thing I like about remakes and readjustments — the principle of them (something which seems to occupy film-makers more than poets) — is how they make it seem as if the paint is not yet dry, as if nothing is really finished.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #5: Shadow from a Future Zone

In her July 2022 essay “On Erasure” for the Poetry Foundation, Leigh Sugar claims the “erasure poem may be defined by inclusion and/or exclusion—both actions will produce an effect. So, rather than define erasure poetry as a form that solely reveals what may be hidden, we might well understand it as a form and action that, when engaged consciously, can illuminate, for the purpose of celebrating, condemning, revealing, or interrogating, that which is otherwise invisibled.…”

We agree with Sugar’s definition since the poems included in Oversight: Erasure Poetry are, in effect, translations of the original texts. In some cases, they are translations of translations. And with each translation—whether it is the English adaptation of Veronica Franco’s Venetian capitolos or Marie-Sophie Germain’s theory of elasticity published in a French academic journal—the collaborator is effectively creating a variant of the original. Each new translation, each new variant, offers new insight, our purpose, as Sugar says, to illuminate, celebrate, condemn, reveal, or interrogate, that which is otherwise invisible, to lift women’s stories from obscurity.

Oversight: Erasure Poetry – guest post by Carina Bissett & Lee Murray (Trish Hopkinson)

Seeing the End-of-Year lists of fellow writers can make a person feel…all kinds of ways. Yes, it can be inspiring. Yes, we can be happy for our fellow terrestrials as they achieve their intergalactic goals. Yes, it is great to see hard work, hustle and talent get rewarded, especially in a cultural climate that every day seems to squeeze artists into a vice-grip of ever-higher hurdles. (Yes, that was a bizarre mixed metaphor. Blame the vice-grip! And the hurdles!)

Also, though, seeing what other writers have achieved can lead to us looking inward, feeling like what we did, what we got done, what we accomplished simply doesn’t measure up. The happiness we feel for others may invariably lead to a diminished feeling about ourselves.

In therapy-speak, this is often referred to as comparing one’s own insides to others’ outsides. When someone lists their accomplishments in a neat bullet-point list, that’s all you see. The awards. The recognition. The bullets.

What you don’t see is that person’s insides. You don’t see the doubt, the self-recriminations, the anxiety. I once met a writer who got a six-figure book contract for her first collection of short stories. A huge deal, by any measure. This writer was known as an “It Girl” for a good while in the literary sphere.

In a private conversation with this writer, she told me she found writing so hard that she wept in agony through almost all of her revisions. She sat at her desk for hours, typing and crying.

This is not a judgement on that writer’s process. No doubt that writer was working through some serious issues. And she got the work done, which is extraordinary. But are those tears of agony visible to anyone reading about her “It Girl” status? Did the Publishers Marketplace announcement of the book deal include the fact of this writer’s pain?

Of course not. End-of-Year lists rarely mention such things.

Becky Tuch, Q: What are your (intangible) end-of-year accomplishments?

My desk at the synagogue is cluttered: books, binders, folders, piles of sheet music, one of my son’s tallitot, siddurim, printouts from a recent text study session. After Hebrew school the other day (which means: after early nightfall) my eye lingered on this corner of the desk. I love the small framed print, especially at this season of the year.

The print is by Beth Adams of The Cassandra Pages, who I first met in the early days of both of our blogs, probably in 2004. Beth published two of my books of poetry. I think she gave this print to all of us who had work in Annunciation, an anthology of poetic and artistic work exploring the figure of Mary, which Phoenicia published… wow, ten years ago now.

The jade rosary was a gift from Seon Joon, who I first met when they were blogging about Buddhism and preparing to move to South Korea to ordain as a Buddhist nun. We met in person for the first time at a blogger meet-up in 2005. They wrote about their ordination back in 2012, and I posted about getting to meet up then, too — A rabbi and a nun walk into a bar.

Both of these friendships began via our blogs. We read each others’ posts, we commented, we emailed each other. For a time there was a list-serv for literary, artistic, oddball bloggers who felt akin to each other; some of us met up in Montréal in 2006. I miss those days of the internet. The vibe was entirely different from today’s outrage-driven social media sphere. […]

Today’s internet rewards quick takes and clickbait. But all of these objects link me with a slower speed. Relationships built over time. Sacred items that are familiar to my fingertips — the jade rosary, the wooden coin emblazoned with a quote from a second-century text (Pirkei Avot 2:16.) Even the photo of my son, evoking the slow shifts of parenthood.

Maybe it is the poet in me, the contemplative in me, the artist in me. Maybe it is a function of being in my fifties. Maybe it is the impact of my strokes and heart attack. I am far more interested in the slow harvest of mindfulness than in heated social media arguments. I want to be reflective and steady. Not a blaze, but the lingering warmth of coals.

Rachel Barenblat, Still life

I learned to avoid planning anything the next day or two after our annual amusement park visit. It wasn’t just me. The kids needed time to chill out too. They’d lie on the couch reading or play in the backyard or draw pictures while listening to audiobooks. They didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t want friends over, they just needed to BE. We were like those creatures from Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book, the Collapsible Frinks.

That’s what this year has felt like to me. Like post amusement park visit syndrome. Every day’s news packed with atrocities committed in our names against people around the world and people down the street. Gut-punch news about this administration’s war against the environment, healthcare, education, civil rights, even civility. Nearly everyone I know is beyond overwhelm, no matter if they voted for or against. I’ve barely been able to write this year— no essays published and only a few poems. Here’s one of those poems, this one published in One Art: a journal of poetry:

[…]

My sister and father are at the table, all of us
unaware we’re in my dreamworld,
unaware we are inexorably moving away
from each other the way stars grow more distant.
Stand still she says as she fastens a tiny rubber band
at the bottom of each braid so I don’t turn around
to hug her as I long to in my dream. I want to hang on
for dear life as galaxies move apart ever faster
in a universe widening toward absolute zero.

Laura Grace Weldon, Post Amusement Park Visit Syndrome

I dreamed of wolves and the moon they howl at, and now, everything takes me back to understanding the world through stories. My life is a myth. America is a myth. We are bringing the wolves to Yellowstone. We are bringing them back to life. We are finding new stories, changing our outcomes.

In the spring, I plan to visit Yellowstone and see those wolves in all their glory. In 2026, I want to get out more, engage with the world to face my own fears of shame, darkness, failure. In the darkness that has become America, in the desperation of keeping a nonprofit arts organization afloat, it’s easy to feel like you are wandering through a forest of hungry creatures. But they, too, are finding their way through their own stories. They, too, might be seeking miracles.

Shooting stars. The wolves are coming back. We live mythic lives. In 2026, we will do big things. This was our egg year. Next year is our comeback, our hatch year—our flight to the moon.

Kate Gale, The Myth of the Wolf: Surviving One’s Story

This winter, the back door won’t swing open just for the dogs or to catch a few snowflakes on my fingertips. No, this year, the yard will not be cordoned off by frost locks or lattices of ice. I will resume relishing in the real estate. Tour the garden of grays. Shake off the pelt of snow. My body will follow me for the rounds. Snow is but a measurement of time and frequency just like summer’s trumpet vine. I will arrange snowflakes into a poem to read to you. You will watch my voice carry off into the sky without me.

Sarah Lada, Old Bone

This week: polar bears in the pews, the pace of chance, bioluminescent joy, the secretary spider, and much more. Enjoy!

Today I am in church again. I have come for silent reflection in one of my favourite seats, but it feels a little closer to the edge than usual. Shuffling footsteps in the aisle have me predicting who might be about to go past. Slowly and steadily polar bears are settling into the pews around me. Their black claws lightly clasp copies of The Book of Common Prayer. One across the aisle is flicking the pages randomly as if speed reading, another puffs out fishy breath in celebration of finding the right page.

Sue Finch, CLAPPING WITH MY HEART

the blue hills open a window.
i greet the poem with calloused hands.
silence ticking in the walls.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I think a lot about how the words author and authority are related. What does it do to the authority of the poet—and the speaker—when errors are allowed to remain and play an important role in a poem? I’d argue that it’s worth the risk, and that there is value in that transparency. I’d argue that it doesn’t undermine the authority of the poet or speaker as much as it prioritizes authenticity.

By allowing imperfection into our poems—by letting some of the breaks and repairs show—we’re allowing for a different kind of intimacy between the reader and writer. I read poems to witness someone else’s mind at work, and these moments of error or brokenness, those switchbacks and wait-on-second-thoughts, help me see that work.

I don’t go to poetry for comfort, as a writer or as a reader. I go to poetry to be changed, to revise my own thinking. I’m much more likely to be changed by the original thinking of another human being, a voice I trust because it’s honest with me, and because I can see myself mirrored in the utterance: the occasional faltering, or disorientation, or struggle to find a new foothold.

We’re imperfect. We slip up. We change our minds. We lose our train of thought. We misspeak or mishear or misunderstand. We do this, all of us, in our lives, but can we also sometimes do that in our work? I want to leave you with a prompt: Let some of the seams show in your next poem or essay. Accept the gifts that arrive packaged as missteps. Try not to buff out every scratch, or sand down every splinter. Give yourself permission to be more human.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

I recorded some el cheapo broken student violin. I played a wonky zither (both plucking and bowing it.) Then I slowed down some of the violin sounds. And finally added alto recorder. Of course, I added some digital processing — some reverb and echo effects to make the audio sound good.

And then I found a text file on my computer which had a bunch of poetry material collaged together. I then further randomized the lines and edited them, moving some around, changing some, removing some others. And so I arrived at the poetic text.

I tried videoing me drawing with a thick pencil around some stones but it didn’t look very interesting, so instead I filmed the rocks in close-up, slowly. I slowed the video down even more and then combined the three elements: the music, the text and the video.

I found it the mix of sound, scrolling text (using a fake old typewriter font) and the visuals to be satisfying. Usually inscrutable and ambiguous.

I did think about what the experience of someone watching the text might be. The slow visuals and the non-developmental music, the ambiguous text. And I thought about what the experience might be if encountered online, which I know is different than say, experiencing the work in a gallery or cinema aka biosphere, as my South African granny would say.)

I think in this work, I’m interested in a slow yet rich experience for the viewer, one that asks questions while keeping the viewer engaged in its play of signs. What is happening? What is being said? How does it feel? What does this say about making art and art itself? How is this like or not like the world or my experience of the world? What do I notice? What thought, feelings, experience, tactility, does this work bring up for me?

Gary Barwin, When I invent rain: how much do you want to know about an artwork?

How might we fashion
the pace of chance?

– Sam Kerbel, “Broken Record”

“Broken Record” is from Sam Kerbel’s chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price, a series of poems that riddle, poems that inhabit the riddling, poems engrossed in the unconscious communication between instances and objects. Words are played into their sonic shadows, or their near-homophones, as with “Romance,” which finishes:

Yes royalty is our golden ample
But we’re never quite finished with things
Are we?

The plural pronoun of the last line asks both if “we” are and what “we” is under conditions too thin and skimpy to imagine the events of tomorrow. The conditions, as they stand, are not enough. And yet there is a confirmation  — “Yes” –  followed by that play on sound and idiom which gives us the “golden ample” rather than the golden apple. The ample is not an apple. 

Alina Stefanescu, “Lyric research and adamant digression.”

Another coolish, sunny afternoon in Northern California. Yesterday biking, today gym, everyday, in the morning, writing, translating. I’ve been slogging away at some prose texts (poems) by a contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli. I discovered Magrelli by reading a selection of his poems by a British poet Jamie McKendrick (Faber), really fine translations that made me want to read more of Magrelli (and McKendrick). I began with a recent collection of poems called Exfanzia, then switched to the prose called In the Flesh Condominium, as backup. I’m gradually getting it, but it’s not easy. I’ve fallen back on Baudelaire as relief, a poem called ‘The Giantess’ (La Géante’) ‘recited’ by Matisse in a book I was reading, a favourite of Matisse, apparently. It’s lovely, I hope I can get it word and tone-perfect.

I’m also trying to do that with a couple of my own poem drafts, over and over, in each case a stanza that won’t come right (of course I come back to them after not having worked on them for a while, and nothing will seem right).

So I’m going to the gym and maybe a yoga class to think of something else.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Palo Alto, Tuesday 12 August 2025

Discouragement, a regular visitor to this writer (and many other writers), has settled into the house with me. Summer is often, for me, a time of writing less and doing outdoor and social things more; this year, though spring was lovely despite torrents of rain, summer commenced with the deaths of two long-time friends, and I haven’t been able to shake my low mood. Now the rejection slips are arriving thick and fast, and I’m questioning the value of my work in particular and of creative writing in general. Like, why bother? What am I doing this for? For whom? What’s my purpose? And under what circumstances? Why? […]

Somewhere on a social media platform, I encountered these words by Virginia Woolf (from “A Room of One’s Own”): “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Good perspective, that, to stop being concerned for how long your writing matters, or to whom, as long as what you write is what you wish to write. And then if you don’t submit your work for publication? Maybe that is something you can live with. Rather, something I can live with; at this point in my life, I have had hundreds of poems and essays published, six chapbooks, and three poetry collections…maybe from now on, I should write (as I always have) for myself. Even if my work is not in fashion, or considered irrelevant, or judged as potentially lasting, it is still what I wish to write, what I find necessary to express.

Ann E. Michael, As you wish

O, gentle reader. We’ve all been there. And what other medium is open to bottom-feeding poets like myself, but the open mic. And the whole thing is satirised in outstanding fashion here. The persona of the book, Zuleika, wants to be a poet. So she organises an event (hang on… I see where this is going…). The chapter/poem is called ‘Verbosa Orgia’. The first poet to read I has the adopted name of ‘Hrrathaghervood’ and comes on to shout at everyone and receive a ‘standing ovation’ for his ‘Pictish patois’. I won’t spoil all the lines, but everyone in the audience feels as Zuleika does that ‘Mesmerised… by his stage presence, I had hardly/ listened to his utterances’. You’ve met this guy. I have. In the fiction, his name is actually ‘Robbie’ not ‘Hrrathaghervood’. Like I say, you’ll find him familiar. Familiar, too, is the next poet to read at the reading who is called ‘Pomponius Tarquin who has won the “Governor’s Award for poetry”. He says to the audience “This first poem/ is called ‘Matter. Moment.’ This first poem/ is called ‘The Day My Cat Died’./ There are one hundred poems in the collection,/ but I’ll only read seventy-five of them now.” You’ll finish the chapter thinking you were at this reading (but for the ending…). Next up is ‘Calpurnicus Trio who is ‘popular with sheep’. It’s good poetry satire.

Andy Hopkins, ‘The Emperor’s Babe’, by Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin, 2002): Five Reasons to Read.

Last night, I looked at the Saturn through a low-resolution telescope. It took me some time to understand: the large planet of Saturn appeared like a tiny orange dot with rings around it. At first, I felt a bit disappointed but just a few moments later I couldn’t believe that it happened, that I saw the planet of Saturn with my own eyes through an eyepiece lens. After some time, I went to see it the second time. All day today, the orange dot keeps returning to me in flashes and I keep thinking: I saw the planet of Saturn. 

I would not want to live 2000 years later where it might be commonplace to travel to distant planets. I would like to die in a forest somewhere looking through a telescope. And someone, thousands of years later, will find bones of an ancient woman not knowing that she died looking at rings of Saturn. 

Saudamini Deo, The Rings of Saturn

I feel like I’m crawling out of the primordial swamp, I said to my friend Jody yesterday as I crawled out of cave water to where I was eventually able to stand on my feet. At that point, I was the farthest I had ever gone in that cave. My bare knees stung from crawling on my hands and knees over rocks. We started off as a group of six that dwindled down to four due to personal comfort preferences. The four of us, bipedal again, stared up at the cave ceiling as if we were standing inside an expanded, textured lung. What looked like draperies of flesh was limestone and calcification. Some parts of the ceiling had organic debris lodged in the crevices, an indicator of having been flooded to the ceiling. I then had a flashback to the briefest paralysis of panic I felt when army crawling through the earth just minutes ago. I had imagined the small space I occupied filling with an unexpected torrent of water. Being a pro at panic attacks, the paralysis had subsided with my well-practiced mind tricks.

All of us adorning head lamps, we illuminated the limestone cathedral and marveled at its decadence. The ceiling, lung-like and gill-like, had me mindful of my own breathing apparatuses. The expanding and retracting sacks adjacent to my heart. The swell of my diaphragm. The way air catches in the throat. The way I hold balls of air in my mouth and move them around my gums and lips. How those balls of air chortle as they break down into smaller balls of air. And there I was, a little human inside a ball of air within the cave’s body.

Sarah Lada, What in Earth?

In the just-about dark twilight of late summer, the stars coming out after their long Scandinavian rest, we stripped off – no costume or shyness required. L&P insisted I go in first promising me a surprise, and not the jellyfish which L scanned for using a torch. 

I took my silhouette down the ladder into the sea. I swam, and as I stroked the water saw sparks fly from my fingertips. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed. “Oh, oh … wow!” I could think of nothing more poetic. As I moved in the water, it seemed stars were born. 

I looked up at the sky – stars. I looked into the water – stars. Starlight everywhere. Starlight within reach and starlight beyond imagination. 

L&P came in to join the celebration, the firework party, the bioluminescent joy of seawater – plankton when ruffled – in dark-skied warmer waters of this late season.

The current drifted us away from the jetty – we took the light show with us, between our fingers and toes. We laughed, sang, played with the magic of the night – British, Australian, and Belgian, in Swedish waters, nothing between our skins and the heavens’ gift of freedom, of joy. 

Liz Lefroy, I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars

When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, he joined a tiny but existent coterie of Nobel laureates who were poets: Walcott, Miłosz. Brodsky. Wisława Szymborska joined a year later, the same year both Odysseas Elytis and Joseph Brodsky died. Tomas Tranströmer joined in 2013. You could have intelligent discussion about who else should or could join that list. Les Murray? Adam Zagajewski? Adrienne Rich? Hughes? Darwish? Voznesenski?

Then they were gone. The poets, I mean. I am deliberately excluding Bob Dylan. Louise Glück spent a lonely couple of years as the only Nobel Prize-winning poet on the planet. She died in 2023, leaving none.

To my mind, this feels like an extinction. The removal of a charismatic megafauna. And yes we all know that megafauna need a busy ecology of small and lesser creatures, and unlike extinction, the situation might be temporary; but I feel the lack. Where now that rumpled clique, however few, however male-dominated, of older poets of global stature? You didn’t necessarily have to like them or their work, it was enough that they existed: far from slick, far from performance-y, invested with authority, with shambling gravitas and various accents, persons of conscience whose presence at a festival or a lecture-hall induced a frisson and attracted a crowd.

Why are there none? Why does the very idea of a Great Poet seem almost old-fashioned? Surely it’s not the lack of talent or availability of poets; there have never been so many published poets. It must be to do with the times and our current sense of what poets are for, or can be, in public life.

Kathleen Jamie, Where Have All the Great Poets Gone?

Here’s the first paragraph of a message sent to the Associated Press’s book reviewers a few days ago:

“Dear AP book reviewers,

I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.”

No one reads book reviews?? Or, to quote the above paragraph, “the audience for book reviews is relatively low”—in comparison with which audience? Or audiences?

This message does not include any substantial data to back it up. A “thorough review” should show statistics like website visitor engagement, how many views a piece of content receives, and how long users stay on a piece of content. The people who’ve been writing book reviews for the AP deserve at least that.

And what about the idea of supporting a literary form that might have a small, but passionate audience (such as poetry)? An organization like the AP helps drive culture forward, but without book reviews, it’s a poorer offering. I was saddened when American Poets, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, ended the “Books Noted” section, which contained micro-reviews of recently published poetry books, in 2021. I did not renew my subscription in 2022.

The letter goes on to thank someone named Mark, no last name, “who has edited the reviews and incorporated best practices for trying to get reviews to appear in search results and get as many readers as possible.” So I guess we can blame this poor guy for not getting more readers for those reviews you worked so hard on.

Erica Goss, Associated Press Ends Weekly Book Reviews

While a couple of weeks too late to celebrate Bloom’s Day (June 16) properly, I made my pilgrimages to the Martello tower and Eccles Street. I bought a bar of lemon soap at Sweny’s pharmacy, and I ate the traditional gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Brynes. I’d been living out these moments in my imagination for more than 25 years, and I savored every minute of making it real—to take something as miraculous as a novel and to let that magic spill over into the lived world.

But what surprised me most, and what I cannot stop considering, is how much of Dublin—and Ireland, more generally—is dedicated to a celebration of its literary tradition. It reminded me of being in Slovenia in the early 2000s, when even the pre-Euro currency had poets on the bills. It’s not Joyce, of course, who gets the attention. In Dublin, there’s even a Samuel Beckett bridge. Living in Clout City, I cannot imagine something like a bridge or a tunnel not being named for a politician. But in Ireland, two of the most challenging and experimental modernist writers and their works are honored—perhaps, even more so, because of their difficulty.

This is the land of Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, Iris Murdoch, and Elizabeth Bowen, among so many more. And, it feels like that literary culture is still an incredible point of pride, something you see called out in big or small part wherever you are. And yet, I came back from Ireland to the news that even my home institution—the University of Chicago—was cutting its commitment to the humanities, due to funding pressures caused in great part by our own country’s retreat from supporting higher education and the arts.

I am worried less these days about what my own artistic legacy might be—I know I won’t fill auditoriums like Maya [Angelou] did—and more about what legacy there will be of the literature of today. What happens to a society that gives up on the things that exist outside market value? Who will we be and what will be remembered?

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Country That Celebrates Its Writers?

I became interested in thinking about the poetry of interiors thanks to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. (Originally published in the late 50s, my edition came out in English translation in 1994). All the writers at a certain point had read it. How can any of us think of space the same way after reading it? Mark Z. Danielewski says, “it has everything to do with how our comprehension of space, however confined or expansive, still affords an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just as they are about to give way.”

And John Stilgoe says of the book: “it demonstrates to its readers that space can be poetry” and he notes that the book “opens it readers to the titanic importance of setting.” I can only be jealous of anyone encountering this book for the first time. […]

If you’ve read this far, thanks for coming along with me into this little rabbit hole, thinking about our happiness in spaces. Thinking about how spaces can hold poetry. Thinking about how sight-lines, smells, colours, doors, windows, light, sounds, all operate together on our nervous systems to make us feel certain ways below the surface of our awareness. But how when we become aware of those spatial comprehension we might be able to manipulate where we are to accommodate a poetics.

My morning writing space is a bit of a sacred thing: quiet to begin, then some wordless music. A candle burning, perhaps. Good paper and a fountain pen to think things through. Books and more books. Paintings to look at. (Yes, I’m spoiled in that category). Plants are also nice. Interesting lights when there is darkness, and natural light when possible.

Our spaces don’t have to be perfect, just offer us a place to breathe. Because we can’t be creative when we’re not breathing well. We can’t work well. And who want to squander their gifts?

Shawna Lemay, Neuroaesthetics and Interiors

In the early 2000s, I worked at a tech job on Bainbridge Island, Washington—our office was on the third floor surrounded by trees. One day, I overheard two coworkers having a discussion—one said, “I think a pet store burned down. Or maybe someone’s canaries escaped?” Wait, whaaaat?!

I looked out the window and saw what they were seeing—dozens of yellow birds flickering through the evergreens. I turned back to them and said, “Gentlemen, those are goldfinches.”

Sometimes when beauty shows up, and we panic and think the worst—or we mislabel it. But it’s still there. Beauty just being beauty.

Since the start of 2025, I’ve been trying to write a poem each day (another kind of beauty). There’s something funny that happens when you try this practice—you write a lot of bad poems (okay, that’s not really funny, but it is.) This daily writing practice is kind of like batting practice, except instead of baseballs, you’re swinging at metaphors and images, and occasionally, one cracks the sky open—in a good way.

Daily poems remind me that beauty can still be created, even when it feels absent everywhere else—wordbeauty—when you pair two words together and they surprise you. […]

I turned in the FINAL version of my manuscript, Accidental Devotions, which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026! I have worked so hard on this collection! And one thing I’ve learned through it all is how revision is its own kind of devotion. My advice when revising a manuscript: 1) Let go of what isn’t strong enough. 2) Bring in a few newer poems to create energy. 3) Continue to allow the manuscript to evolve—even when you’re certain it’s finished.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Beauty Just Being Beauty ~`♡´~

I volunteer at a county food bank, staffed by a handful of paid workers and a stalwart volunteer phalanx of middle-aged (and I use the term loosely) women, and some men. They show up early, stay late, do what needs to be done. They are funny, quirky, busy, kind, crabby, generous. This may be the future, this aged rabble. They may make the way. I don’t know.

I think often of this poem [by] Antonio Machado, perhaps so common as to be a chestnut now, but I find power in it. That first word has been variously translated: traveler, walker, pilgrim, wayfarer; and the second noun as path, road, way. Each has its pleasures and power. I favor “wayfarer” and “way” as a satisfying echo to the original: caminante, camino. I like “pilgrim” too, with its sense of someone going with a purpose and humility, a sense of something larger than themselves at work.

“Proverbios y cantares XXIX” in Campos de Castilla.

Antonio Machado

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

[…]

my translation:

Wayfarer, your steps
are the way and nothing more;
wayfarer, there is no way,
the way is made by walking,
by walking you make the way
and when you look back
you see the way that will never
be walked again.
Wayfarer, there is no way,
only the wakes on the sea.

Marilyn McCabe, and when you look back

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure my first book did change my life, though it perhaps coincided with a volatile period in which I did go through some very big changes. I can’t say for sure from this distance, but I likely held some hope that my first book was going to somehow open doors (to where, I don’t really know). All in all, the response was quiet, and this was one of several elements of my life that contributed to a deepening depression and addiction. My drinking, which was already problematic, got worse and worse, and I dove straight to the bottom and stayed there for some time.

When I finally began to get sober eight years ago, it took a great deal of time to get healthy enough to begin writing. Making If Nothing changed me. By going back to the source of pain and betrayal again and again with a hunger for honesty, I had to grow my capacity to be with the parts of myself I couldn’t bear. By doing this, I became more coherent, more resilient, and much more available to my family and friends. Until writing the poems that make up this new collection, there had always been a faint veil between my daily life and my poems. This book erased that separation for me and I haven’t fully metabolized what this means in the larger scope of my life.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matthew Nienow

On Aug. 1, Megan and I submitted the completed draft of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology to Madville Publishing. We also got some lovely photos of Stevie via photographer Donna Kile, so the cover is in the works, too. Contributors should see a proof this autumn and the book is still on track for a May 2026 release. 

Last month, I received a surprise acceptance letter for the Visiting Joni: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Joni Mitchell, a forthcoming anthology edited by Debra Marquart, Alan Davis, and Thom Tammaro. I submitted my poem “Night Ride Home” to this anthology back in 2022 and, frankly, had forgotten all about it. Glad the anthology is finally seeing the light of day in the near future. 

Collin Kelley, The Sealey Challenge and a Stevie update

My first full collection, Daughter of Fire, reimagines the life and legacy of Queen Margaret of Anjou, the late medieval Queen of England and fierce protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. Margaret is best known today as Shakespeare’s villainous “she-wolf of France” or perhaps as the alleged model for Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.

Like many women of history who dared to tread their own path, the living, breathing woman behind the reputation has been lost to time. Margaret has not been treated kindly by chroniclers and historians, playwrights and novelists. She’s even been a Manga villainess, which I explore in another poem in the collection.

Daughter of Fire reconsiders this much-maligned warrior queen, seeking out connections with women’s experiences through six centuries, right up to today. My aim was to call out the maligning of women, the gendered insults, name-calling and inuendo that are so often used to control women’s behaviour. That said, this is not a history book or hagiography – this Margaret of Anjou is not a saint or a “girl boss” but a woman with many faces: daughter, wife, consort, mother, political schemer, leader of armies, survivor.

Drop-in by Lucy Heuschen (Nigel Kent)

It’s been a long time — seven years — since I published a poetry collection. I was interrupted by the pandemic, a busy work schedule, and other projects. Receiving a poem is a delicate thing. It requires an intense, Zen-like freedom from thought and for me, quiet mornings. A space opens, a mood descends, and then a thought or image. As it touches the soil, words arrive like wings folding to yield to gravity. A poem is much like a hawk landing, wondering what to devour.

This summer opened a gate to the creative fields, and I found myself circling around a concept that feels like home. It became clear, and I worked myself up to naming a theme: The Artist’s House. I drew into the document poems from my vault and new imaginings. I indulged in paying homage to inspirations and my early immersion in the arts. My parents were dedicated to music and visual art. They enriched my childhood by encouraging me to read and taking me to see painting and sculpture in museums and galleries, as well as to experience live music and dance. They gave me all the lessons I wanted, for which I chose a focus on ballet.

This collection forms a sustained contemplation of what art means in my life, and of the creative process. I tip my hat to favorite artists—Monet, Caravaggio, Andy Goldsworthy, and Oz book illustrator John R. Neill. Favorite poets Emily Dickinson and Rilke get whole sections. Walt Whitman makes an appearance, as does another favorite, Alice Oswald.

Rachel Dacus, New Poetry Book in October

As someone who designs books for other people (or at least designs chapbooks, with occasional commissioned covers for other publishers) and an avid zinester, I have to admit I may approach the task of putting together a book a little differently than a writer who doesn’t have their hands as much in the design. Typically by the time I finish a manuscript, there has already been some thought about potential cover designs, interior layout, materials like video poems and reels, graphics for the book promo stuff. For other writers, the manuscript alone may be the focus, the words on the page, but this will be the second longer project I’ve done with artwork included, so there are already a lot of visuals and design elements at play by default.

Kristy Bowen, self publishing diaries | finishing the book

So far, I can’t recommend Bluesky enough for poetry. Over the past few months, it’s enabled me to connect with a lot of poetry people who were new to me, while also finding a whole host of additional readers from beyond the poetry bubble. One excellent example has been the reception for my poem ‘The Last Carry’, first published in The Spectator and then included in my second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023). As of today, it’s garnered well over 600 likes and more than 100 shares, all along with numerous generous comments from readers. This is the nearest I’ve ever come to going viral! In fact, not a week goes by without a trip or two to the post office for me with books that I’ve sold via Bluesky. From my experience, it’s really worthwhile in terms of finding a new audience for my poems, though perhaps the most significant bit has been the lovely people I’ve encountered on there…!

Matthew Stewart, Poetry on Bluesky

I’ve attended the Glen Workshop many times, so it was a special honor to return as faculty this summer. I was the writing retreat guide, and I spent a few hours each morning working on writing projects in the company of wonderful creative people.

There were too many highlights in the week to name them all, but one that stands out to me is the LOGOS poetry reading on Sunday night. It was co-sponsored by EcoTheo and hosted by Shann Ray, who created such a welcoming space. I loved reading alongside Phil Metres and Gabby Bates, and the audience conversation and Q&A times were more lovely than I can describe; the whole event had a beautiful earnestness about it.

Katie Manning, Glen Workshop Reflection

But of course, what really made me feel better was getting the writing tasks done.  I now have a sermon I like, and I made significant progress on my CPE paper.  Now let me think about the upcoming semester.  I want to establish some habits that can get me back to writing more of what I want to write:

–I want to write my sermon by Thursday, which means that I start thinking and planning by Tuesday.  I had this goal in the spring, but the seminary course work I needed to do often took priority.

–I want to return to my goal that I formulated in the first days of this year, writing one finished draft of a poem a week.

–Actually, that’s not really my goal.  Here is that goal, as I wrote it in my January 1 blog post:  “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.”

–Right now, I have 14 finished poems in the file.  So I am seriously behind.  But I still have 19.5 weeks in the year.  I could get to 52 poems in the file if I focus.

–I have a lot of rough drafts.  Many of them won’t require much revision. So, I’ll take a look through those drafts, as I am also writing new work.  I also want to get back to writing new poems.

–Let me finish with the words of Octavia Butler, from one of her early journals, before she won the MacArthur, which changed her writing life trajectory:  “So be it, See to it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Goals for the Last Third of the Year

It works I think, a simple straight-forward narrative, something I could have remembered. I don’t, though, think it is true. It is a very vague memory. But then again, things don’t have to be real to be true, or so it seems with all the made up nonsense circulating about the internet.

Paul Tobin, BOUNCING LIGHT

I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge – one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people’s stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person – and a mercifully short one at that – turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title Cargo of Limbs. Originating in events almost 10 years ago now, it is utterly depressing that the longish poem that constitutes most of the book remains relevant. Now – as then – the news is full of people in small boats. Then, refugees and migrants were embarking in the Mediterranean. Now, most of the talk here is of people embarking from the coast of France to risk the real dangers of the English Channel. The book remains in print and can be bought from Hercules here or by contacting me directly. […]

It’s early in 2016 and I am on a train crossing southern England. On my headphones, Ian McKellen is reading Seamus Heaney’s just-published translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is the book in which Aeneas journeys into the Underworld. As he descends, he encounters terror, war and violence before the house of the dead. He finds a tree filled with “[f]alse dreams”, then grotesque beasts, centaurs, gorgons, harpies. At the river Acheron, he sees crowds of people thronging towards a boat. These people are desperate to cross, yet the ferryman, Charon, only allows some to embark, rejecting others. At this point, in Heaney’s translation, Aeneas cries out to his Sibyl guide: “What does it mean [. . . ] / This push to the riverbank? What do these souls desire? / What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy waters?”

The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries. The timing is crucial. It’s just six months since the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body – drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey – had filled the media. In the summer of 2015, this three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes of their planned flight across the Aegean, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.

Beyond my train window, the fields of England swept past; Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family. It struck me that some form of versioning of these ancient lines might be a way of addressing – as a poet – such difficult, contemporary events. I hoped they might offer a means of support as Tony Harrison has spoken of using rhyme and metre to negotiate, to pass through the “fire” of painful material. I also saw a further aspect to these dove-tailing elements that interested me: the power of the image. The death of Alan Kurdi made the headlines because photographs of his drowned body, washed up on the beach, had been taken. When Nilüfer Demir, a Turkish photographer for the Dogan News Agency, arrived on the beach that day, she said it was like a “children’s graveyard”. She took pictures of Alan’s lifeless body; a child’s body washed up along the shore, half in the sand and half in the water, his trainers still on his feet. Demir’s photographs, shared by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch on social media, became world news.

Demir’s images were indeed shocking, breaking established, unspoken conventions about showing the bodies of dead children. I remember passionate online debates about the rights and wrongs of disseminating such images. Yet the power of the images, without doubt, contributed to a shift in opinion, marked to some degree by a shift in language as those people moving towards Europe came to be termed “refugees” more often than the othering word, “migrants”.

Martyn Crucefix, Continuing Relevance of ‘Cargo of Limbs’

I suppose we can blame Trump for the mini-shake-up in the literature world. His selective reduction of NEA grants has helped provoke an anti-woke reaction.

There’s nothing very pure about the Arts. They’re used as a vehicle by dictators and revolutionaries. They’re used as therapy, as vanity showcases. When public funds are used for the Arts, closer scrutiny is attracted. The NEA’s home page currently says that “Approximately 34 Percent … of Arts Endowment-funded activities [are] in high-poverty communities”, which may make US tax payers think that the NEA is left-wing. But stats can be misleading.

Sometimes when I read a magazine I do some stats based on the bios. Some info is easier to collect than others. I like seeing how many of the contributors are Creative Writing lecturers, or have Creative Writing degrees. The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories. Age and race details are harder to determine. Even if stats can be determined, interpreting them is difficult. Why should the demographics of authors correspond to that of the general UK (or world) population? Isn’t it reasonable to believe that a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people than the general population will turn to writing?

Tim Love, Reactionary writing?

But the poet can dream. The poet
has the freedom to wish this much
at least will happen: That her
plan works. That the poem can
manifest wings. That the reader
can open a cage. That the thought
can escape, become airborne. 

Rajani Radhakrishnan, It won’t bite

Perhaps we are born with a tendency towards certain landscapes, but I think we learn what to love. As the youngest of six in a single parent family, I had little supervision, and sometimes this came at a price. But in South Cumbria, it felt entirely safe, and I learned to love the tall hedges, the small walled fields and their gates, the copses and crags. I am so grateful to her for this.

I think we were at our closest in nature. As we walk in the heather, I tell Niamh how, long ago, I dreamt Mum told me she wanted to me to be there when she died, and how, against all the odds, it came to pass. I told Niamh how being present when someone enters the world, and when someone leaves it, is the most privileged and holy space, how all ordinary things fall away, how all that it left is the unspeakable magic of it. As Niamh pointed to the peat, I felt something of my mother on the moors.

Peat is unrotted vegetation; that’s why it holds so much carbon, why it’s such a vital defence against climate change. It’s largely formed from sphagnum, which grows from its tips, leaving its death behind it in its roots, which can be millennia deep. Peat, moss, bogs, are death and life all at the same time, deep and dark and soft. My mother is gone, and my mother is in my humour, and love of nature, and I talk about her every day.

When the walk ends, my holiday with Niamh is over, and they will head off with their other mum. The prospect is painful. Remembering what we’ve done these last fourteen days is painful. Even as we live them, every moment is sliding away into memory; there is no way to stop it from moving and leaving. How brave it is to love something, anyone, anything, knowing that it will pass.

Clare Shaw, Coast to Coast: Day 14

At all these fields of flowers, the finches have been twittering around us in the air. The hummingbirds are dwindling in number but still busy at the flowers as well. I’ll miss their bright colors and songs when the winter comes back. Some small parts of late summer are my favorite parts. (Wasps, not so much, but the birds, absolutely, and the blueberries in my garden this year – especially sweet.)

This is a busy month – my older brother is coming out to visit the week after my folks leave – I am trying to look at my schedule for the fall, with readings and classes. After the health and dental dramas of the past weeks, I am ready to relax a bit, hopefully. I’m also hoping my next book gets picked up soon so I can start focusing on my next writing project, which might be quite a different creature than my previous works.

In the meantime, my friends, this seems like a rough and tumble world, but there are tiny moments of joy, beauty, kindness to be found. Sending you all hopes for tiny good August joys.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parental Visits, End of Summer Flower Farm Visits, August Birds

On the bottom step of the patio,
unmoving: the perfect wire
symmetry of a dragonfly.

In a clump of grass a few
meters away, the armor
shed by a lone cicada.

When the stars emerge
tonight, will they let down
a ladder for them to ascend?

In the shadow of the fig
tree, the secretary spider
keeps writing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Chronicle of Small Moments in Time

This week: clay-pits, a beautiful dumpster, the Hole of Sorrows, a tablespoon of cream, and much more. Enjoy.

I don’t know how any of us go on with our ordinary lives lately. I am among those privileged enough to have my days largely unchanged, so far, despite—among other tragedies—a climate pushed past the tipping point, despite the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, despite all three branches of government stomping directly into authoritarianism. I’m aware my puny efforts to protest, write letters, support good causes, even drive around with a handmade protest sign on my car aren’t enough. I simply hope it’s a teensy contribution toward the transformative 3.5 percent rule invoked by Erica Chenoweth, author of Why Civil Resistance Works. After researching hundreds of social/political change movements over the last century, Dr. Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics depend on many factors, her data shows it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. But what are the chances it can happen here, I grumbled to myself.

And then I drove past a dumpster. A beautiful dumpster.

It was a deep purple, a purple most often seen in delphiniums, pansies, hydrangeas, and irises. The sort of purple that would look good as a velvet dress or painted across a domed ceiling scattered with gleaming constellations. My mind gladly rested on that color purple for the rest of the drive.

Laura Grace Weldon, A Glorious Shade of Purple

These 6 poetry chapbooks were written over a span of exactly one year : May 11, 2024 to May 10, 2025. They represent some kind of quasi-pre-Socratic sagacity-foolishness of mine, on behalf of a civil society. I am perhaps now JUST BEGINNING (hopefully) to write about our actual or ideal “polis”.

Henry Gould, One Year in Poetry

Ventriloquism
a boxing match
of beings and voices 

sharpened by a whiff of the abyss

The self.  
How very small.  
The poem, how other. 

Jill Pearlman, MEMO TO SELF

The editors observe that many poems in this issue are ‘in conversation’ with other works of art, film and literature. Mine is a response to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and the 1971 film of the same title directed by Luchino Visconti. It draws on Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and was also inspired by the documentary on the life of Björn Andrésen, “the most beautiful boy in the world”, who played the part of Tadzio in Visconti’s film.

In their notes, the London Grip editors comment that they have deliberately ordered the poems in the issue so that “each poem is related to its neighbours by theme or narrative thread or at least some keyword.” I love the connections that emerge — the poem before mine is “Thomas Mann” by Norton Hodges and the one after links thematically. You can find the full issue here.

Ruth Lexton, He’s Looking At You, Kid

This post is coming to you at the tail end of a month of in person events where I have been promoting the paperback version of my nature-landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake, and my latest poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk. In between the in person events I’ve been mentoring poets and non fiction writers, running write-alongs (the next one is today!) and trying, and failing, to cram in work on the new writing project.

It’s been a very #authorlife month. Next week I can turn my face back to working on the funding bid for Spelt Magazine‘s digital platform and working on a new structure for Notes from the Margin, which I’ll tell you about in another post. I may even (shocked gasp) get time to WRITE.

Wendy Pratt, How to Get Published

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed through an entire interview before, but the My Bad Poetry podcast made it happen. Thanks to Aaron and Dave for the hilarious conversation about my old poems!

Katie Manning, My Bad Poetry Podcast

It’s my pleasure to introduce our May guest poet Jane McKie. We met many years ago on a writing workshop and are still part of an email group. You can find her biography at the end of this post. Cinnamon Press recently published her new poems and I’ve chosen some poems from Mine: vivid, clear embodied images with marvellous economy.

Mine

On nights when the wind drops, I hear it crooning softly,
not like a real bomb. A toothless, barnacled silhouette, wittering
to itself when the tide is low. My friends and I sometimes get close,
daring each other to nudge its rust. But what happens when
the music cuts out? Tonight, the mine’s a mute companion:
whiff of brine, cryptic fist. As my eyelids close, that’s when it—

Fokkina McDonnell, Mine

i dream of hundreds of broken windows
and of she who believes
there is no stone in my heart

Grant Hackett [no title]

[A] deluge of rain—I mean, it rained all day long, steadily, wonderfully, wow, it didn’t stop at all, all day long! Which means virga, because the next day it looked like it was raining everywhere in the distance but not right where I was, yet somehow, I felt like I was walking through mist but the mist didn’t register on the windshield so was I actually feeling mist? Which means that virga might have been happening—when rain falls but evaporates before it hits the ground. Which means that virga is a form of gaslighting. Which means that virga is here but not here. Which means that virga is so relatable, here but not here. Mysterious but explainable. Which means that I am constantly learning new things, making new connections. Which means that when I do write, I write piss-poor poetry. And that means that I have not much else to share with anyone but this piss-poor poetry and a handful of weeds.

Sarah Lada, Virga

This morning I wondered how grad studies might have changed.  Would we still spend the same amount of time on Wordsworth and Coleridge?  Is Frankenstein seen as more important, the gateway to much that is modern?  And more sobering, to think about how removed I am from literary scholarship, that I’m probably asking the wrong questions.

I am looking forward to teaching these works again. I will probably not spend much time on the last 40 years, particularly as Norton enlarged the scope to include all sorts of countries that used to be colonies, which makes the topic unmanageable.  We will do a deep dive into post World War II lit and end by thinking about whether or not these topics (fear of nuclear annihilation, seeing an increasing concentration on human rights for more groups, who will rule the world now) are still relevant.  

For decades now, when I got to make my own textbook choices, I’ve gone with no book.  This year, as I’ve been reading Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer:  Pep Talks and Practical Advice for the Creative Life, I decided to use it in my English 100 and 101 classes.  I’m not sure exactly how yet.  For those first year writing classes, I still plan to do a lot with trees and observing nature.  But some of the chapters in the book will make a great contribution to the class and to their experiences as first year college students–at least, that’s my hope.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Placing Book Orders for College Classes in an Age of AI

“You know,” she said, “I’m finally in a place where every shooting doesn’t hit me the way they used to.” We talked about how different schools had been when we started teaching, before locked perimeters, security badges, security officers, hallway cameras, shooter drills, and “run, hide, fight.” We talked about what it did to us to be constantly on lookout for danger. We didn’t consciously feel it all the time; our conscious minds had so many other things to attend to. But we knew it was always there, just under the surface, in the way we came to respond immediately to anything out of the ordinary: a lone adult we didn’t recognize in the hall, a loud and unusual noise, unplanned fire alarms, a certain kind of agitated student. We’d suddenly be scanning, on high alert, running through possibilities in our heads, locating exits. We’d each had close enough encounters with physical danger at work that threats were never hypothetical or abstract for us. Our work environment had become dystopian long before the pandemic, and Uvalde helped me see that.

There’s more I might say. I have so many thoughts about what it’s doing to all of us (of course, some of us more than others) to live in a heightened state of threat and fear now, in so many different settings, from so many different sources. But that would take me down a deep and dark rabbit hole, and all I really want to do in today’s post is share a link to that essay and provide some context for it.

Here it is: “On the Morning of a Massacre of American Schoolchildren,” which is in the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

I hope the words there say all the things I might say here, but in a better way. It is about a lesson in a high school English class, and about a school shooting, but it is really about more than either of those things. At least, I hope it is. Maybe read it as if it were a poem, if you click through. (Also, there’s an audio recording of it, if you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like.) And maybe read the poem that the essay hinges on, Jim Daniels’s “American Cheese.” It’s a good one. That we happened to be reading that poem on that day will always make me feel that there are forces at work in the universe beyond my ken.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Maybe read it as if it were a poem

i want to become a piece of the sky.
if i gave a cloud all my water, would
i still be able to think? to write poems?
i have learned to shrink my list of necessities.
i used to need lungs. i used to need
a tablespoon of cream.

Robin Gow, plane full of geese

My upcoming collection, The Artist’s House, is a series of poems engaging with art and artists in other forms. Ekphrastic poetry, it’s called. Each poem gives a nod to another poet, painter, musician, composer, or writer. The manuscript is leaning on me to include images. That will turn it into a more expensive book, but will increase the visual aspect in an appropriate way. I find that the most appealing ekphrastic poems are publishing online, where the image to which the poem speaks can be shared in full color at no cost.

At first I was thinking of this as a traditional print book, easy enough to publish those on Amazon, but then I remembered how many of my poet friends don’t buy poetry books. Sad, but true. And I discovered that my program that creates interior formatting for fiction doesn’t work well for a poetry collection. But thanks, Google, I found downloadable poetry book templates, some inexpensive ones on Etsy, some free from poets online.

But an illustrated poetry book? I only have one in my collection. Snow Effects by Lynne Kight, was published by Small Poetry Press in 2000. It’s this wonderful poet’s response to a traveling art exhibit called Impressionists in Winter. I saw it at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and so did Lynne. Her ekphrastic collection responds to many specific paintings, and poet David Alpaugh’s Small Poetry Press performed a miracle in putting a reproduction (with permissions) facing each poem.

Could I find a publisher to bring out such a full-color illustrated book of poems? Not a chance!

The solution: I’ll have to self-publish this kind of poetry book. That means I have to promote it. But what poet isn’t faced with that responsibility?

Other options come to mind: to publish online with full-color images, and even to make short videos of the kind that are popular on Instagram and TikTok. A poem I’d read aloud over moving visuals. Or maybe I can do all three forms of self-publishing! I do like challenges, especially the slightly impossible ones.

Rachel Dacus, Self-Publishing a Poetry Book

Self-publishing has freed the market to allow pretty much any of us to put our work out for public consumption. Some of the old guard don’t like it, of course, believing it leads to a lowering of standards. A pompous, self-satisfied view, obviously, but one that has had a disproportionate influence for too long.

They would argue that being accepted by a ‘traditional’ publisher is both an accomplishment and a sign that a piece of writing is of a high enough quality to be admired by someone qualified to judge.

If only this were true… unfortunately for that argument, most traditional publishers are in it for the money. They have to be. They have wages to pay, a business that needs to turn a profit. Therefore, they look for what is marketable, which does not always reflect the quality of the product. If you’re on TV, if you’ve got a ‘name’ of some kind or other, then you’ll get your novel or children’s story published, however flimsy a piece of writing it might be. If you’re a duchess or a duke, that helps too.

In my view it’s this eagerness to publish pretty much anything by famous people, just as much as the availability of self-publishing, that constitutes a danger to ‘literary standards’.

And on the positive side, I can’t see what’s wrong with having choice. In the past, self-publishing was hampered by bookshops, who concentrated almost entirely on what was offered by distribution companies linked to publishers. A few would have a ‘local author’ section – sometimes jumbled up in a box by the door – and most would charge percentages of the sale price that left the self-published or those published by small presses, who were inevitably dealing in short print runs, facing a deficit on every sale. And most would apply a ‘sale or return’ policy which meant the small or self publisher would have to live near enough to fetch back what didn’t sell, often within a very short timespan, or pay the postage.

Now bookshops face competition from online companies – obviously Amazon springs to mind – who will produce a book for you as well as market it. Sure, the costs will be advantageous to them, but they will get your book out there.

Bob Mee, TWO BOOKS BY AN OLD FRIEND: A CHARMED LIFE AND HELL IN PARADISE

When people first hear that I work in book publishing, the assumption is always that I’m an editor, as though that’s the only job that exists in the book world: the one that decides what is and isn’t published. And well, yes, in part of my life, I am that gatekeeper for Black Ocean, but in the part of my life that pays the bills, I am someone other—the one whose job it is to talk about books: the publicist. And, talk about books, I do. A LOT. […]

We talk a lot about the atomization of the media when it comes to politics these days, but the same is true of book media and culture media as well. There are significantly more books being published each year than ever before (the number only increasing year to year), and the outlets and space for reviews have not remotely grown to match. At the same time, with the dispersion of media and our attention into more specialized and niche outlets, we’ve lost the power of a common or shared curator of taste. We all have different go-tos for recommendations and criticism, and that diversity is as helpful as it is harmful sometimes. I’ve watched a lot of good books not get the reviews they deserved. And, whether it’s books or music or movies, I know there is good stuff out there I am missing because I don’t have the time to cull through all of the voices in their many formats and platforms offering opinions. The reality is that book reviews are harder and harder to come by, and it takes more of them to have an impact on moving books. It is undoubtedly harder to be a publicist today than it was more than two decades ago when I started working in book marketing.

This makes me even more grateful for the publications and book review editors that have remained committed to covering and engaging with serious literature and nonfiction. And, I want to extend a big thank you to all of you who have taken on the often thankless (and not well compensated) task of reviewer and critic. We need you! And, I need to talk about books with you!

Carrie Olivia Adams, Let’s Talk About Books

Twenty numbered parts. Twenty first lines: She taught me how to sleep –

A Dickinsonian cascade of variations on a theme.

Instructions for falling asleep: “string  / the stars hung overhead,” “listen for the sea,” “name the gemstones  / in the sky behind my lids,”  “memorize a poem of breath / each molecule of air a wing / upon my tongue.”

Descriptions of a “she” who is part mother; part ghost; part earth, our home hung spinning in space: “her sweater pressed against / my cheek, the blanket satin / frayed by dreams.”

Kleinberg is also an artist (see her blog featuring her word art, chocolate is a verb). Each line is compressed, every word weighed and weighted, and the effect overall – hypnotic.

Bethany Reid, Sleeping Lessons, a chapbook by J. I. Kleinberg

I was told to read Vanessa [Lampert]’s work by Christopher Horton a while back..Maybe 18 months ago. I obliged and bought the collection mentioned above [Say It With Me, Seren, 2023] about a year ago, and it’s languished on my TBR pile until a couple of weeks ago. I figured that as we are reading together soon (17th June, The Devereux, London. Supporting Matthew Paul, also featuring Ian Parks) I should get myself up to speed. I was instantly grabbed from page one…ok, page seven because that’s when the poems start, although I did subsequently go back and get grabbed by the quotation from Richard Thompson at the start.

I raced through reading the collection relatively quickly..Turning the corners over as per usual to mark up poems to come back to, and the book is now mostly turned over.

Mat Riches, Stuck on a call

Penguin Modern Poets isn’t a new idea. There was a series in the 1990s (I have a few of these), but the original series ran between 1962 and 1979, publishing 27 slim volumes in all. Recently I’ve been rereading the sixth of this original series, published in 1964, reprinted several times up until 1970, which I bought second hand at some point for a princely £2. A lot of the names in the original series are now obscure or forgotten, and this volume contains poems by Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith and George MacBeth. I’d guess that if readers have any knowledge of any of these, it’s most likely to be George MacBeth. Edward Lucie-Smith, rather sportingly, is apparently still alive at 92, though he is known rather as an art critic than a poet, and has no page on the Poetry Foundation website. (This reminded me of a piece I wrote last year, in which quite a number of the poets picked out in The Forward Book of Poetry 2000 had gone on to focus on different kinds of writing.)

But it was Jack Clemo that prompted me to buy the volume. I came across his work via C. H. Sisson and Donald Davie, who both wrote about his poetry back in the 70s and 80s. Shamefully, Clemo has no page on the Poetry Foundation […] though there has been a small revival of interest in his work recently — Enitharmon published a new Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson,in 2015. Unfortunately I don’t own that, so can’t comment on the selection.

Clemo — born in 1916 — was significantly older than the other two, though like them he was still quite early in his poetic career in the 1960s. The son of a clay pit worker in Cornwall, he became deaf as a very young man and blind while still in early adulthood. His poetry is full of the landscape of the clay pits, which he combines with a devout Calvinist faith to very memorable effect. Here’s the beginning of ‘Christ in the Clay-Pit’:

Why should I find Him here
And not in a church, nor yet
Where Nature heaves a breast like Olivet
Against the stars? I peer
Upon His footsteps in this quarried mud;
I see His blood
In rusty stains on pit-props, waggon-frames
Bristling with nails, not leaves. There were no leaves
Upon His chosen Tree,
No parasitic flowering over shames
Of Eden’s primal infidelity.

(‘Olivet’ is an alternative name for the Mount of Olives.) The poem ‘Sufficiency’ pursues a similar theme. It begins like this:

Yes, I might well grow tired
Of slighting flowers all day long.
Of making my song
Of the mud in the kiln, of the wired
Poles on the clay-dump; but where
Should I find my personal pulse of prayer
If I turned from the broken, scarred
And unkept land, the hard
Contours of dogma, colourless hills?
Is there a flower that thrills
Like frayed rope? Is there grass
That cools like gravel, and are there streams
Which murmur as clay-silt does that Christ redeems?

Clemo returns again and again to an association between the bleak and broken industrial landscape of the clay-pits and the humiliation and suffering of the incarnation and crucifixion. I find this guiding metaphor very powerful and also quite unusual; I would be interested to know if any readers can think of other poets making any similar link to the industrial or post-industrial landscape? Blake, with his juxtaposition of the ‘dark, Satanic mills’ and the new Jerusalem is the obvious example, but his point is quite different — for Blake, mass industry is Satanic, a force working against the salvation of the people. Whereas Clemo sees in the realities of labour and its effect on the land an image of the incarnation.

Victoria Moul, Calvin in Cornwall: revisiting Jack Clemo’s early poetry

When I think about myth, I occasionally flash back to those first poems I wrote over two decades ago in my grad school apartment, many with similar origins in myth and literature. At the time and maybe even a little in hindsight, it seemed like good subject matter. They always say write what you know, but in your mid-20s, especially when you’ve spent the past two decades in the classroom, the stories are where you find your inspo good or bad. The first two poems I ever had accepted and published in a non-school journal?  One about Paradise Lost and the other about Salem witches. The first chapbook I put together? Rooted in personal details but imagined though things like myth, fairytales, history and lit. It’s surfaced in other projects beyond the Persephone one. In books about other things than myth–like “no girls were harmed in the making of this poem” in MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS and “beneath” in THE FEVER ALMANAC. TAURUS is basically a modern re-imagining of the minotaur myth, but set in the midwest.  (The only thing I may get more mileage from is fairytales, urban folklore, and horror films…lol…) I felt the pull of it especially enticing when I was writing a lot of lessons on Greek art, myth, and literature the first year I was freelance writing for the online lessons, since that was how I spent my days amid research and refreshers on things I’d only studies in lit or theater history classes prior.

I think, or at least I hope, I can use myths more adeptly than those clumsy early poems. Maybe it’s a question of lived experience making them more grounded, however fantastical they are.

Kristy Bowen, cloven, or revisiting the Greeks

Nin, Colette, Casanova, captured something. Reveal what you wish. It’s your story. Tell the story they want to hear. Story of desire. Story of passion.

I am starting my diary. I am the greatest lover of the twenty-first century.

Men who sleep with me never recover. Nor do women. They are all of them mad.

I am Aphrodite of the modern world. Music precedes me. Stories follow me. Give me fourteen years at the Chateau Dux. My name will be synonymous with pleasure.

Kate Gale, Venice, Who Will Tell Your Story?

The Plan B default for me usually entails spending “down time” reading, writing, or housekeeping, though visiting the library and meeting friends for coffee fall under Plan B, too. Today, since I feel lousy and have a spate of brain fog, reading has been the choice. I still have a few books on the bedside pile that I haven’t gotten to–mostly poetry collections I bought at AWP at the end of March. But also there is Ocean Vuong‘s heartbreaking and beautiful novel-that-reads-like-memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that I finally got around to reading, and a back issue of Rattle Poetry a friend gave me–one that was largely devoted to haiku and related forms–that featured a fascinating interview with Richard Gilbert (thank you, Lesley S!). On the poetry-only book list, I read January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road, Julie Kane’s Naked Ladies, and Ross Gay’s first collection, Against Which. All quite useful to me in times when I feel bleak and physically frail–there’s humor, sorrow, and bravery in all of these writers’ poems. Though I’m too foggy-headed to write mini-reviews at the moment, I encourage my readers to check these poets out.

Perhaps my next post will be about the lovely time my friend and I had in northern New Mexico, visiting my daughter and Santa Fe, including my opportunity to see Bandelier National Monument again and ponder its environments and history. A trip like that takes some time for me to “digest.” But it was wondrous. And so is a day at home to recuperate in my favorite way: reading.

Ann E. Michael, Plan B (reading)

Composed during the Covid-19 pandemic, Which Walks presents itself as a book on walking and being, and being present within an unprecedented global event. “reaching back / to owned devices,” the opening walk offers, “feel free, imaginary, / and tactile as the shudder // of daily acquisition, / domestic, time-bound, // vexed by practitioners, / whose practice // like ours, / a consummation, // is thrown up and out / as the poison // presence of each entrance / of nonlife into life [.]”

It has been interesting across the past few years to see the variety, volume and intimacy of literary responses to the Covid-era, a flood of eventual titles we all knew was coming, including British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020), Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield’s a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] and American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) [see my review of such here], not to mention my own pandemic-suite of essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022). Each title, in their own individual ways, working amid and between the two poles of anxiety and calm, navigating the treacherous and uncertain waters of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

rob mclennan, Laura Moriarty, Which Walks

It would be difficult not to like Pam Thompson’s poetry, because it has immediacy, depth and variety. Her Sub/urban Legends won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet prize in 2023 and has recently been (rather belatedly) published. At only £5 (plus p&p) it’s a genuine bargain and is available to buy here. It’s Pam’s first publication since her excellent second collection, Strange Fashion, published by Pindrop Press in 2017. […]

Pam is influenced, inter alia, by the New York school of poetry, a loose amalgam of poets associated in the 1950s and ’60s, chief among them Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Pam has discussed her particular liking for, and the influence of, Schuyler in an intriguing 2023 podcast with Chris Jones, here. The deceptively offhand diction of the New York poets, their acute but apparently nonchalant awareness of what’s going on around them, their precision, urban sensibility and painterliness can all, I think, be discerned in Pam’s poems. And as she says in the podcast about the New York poets’ poems, hers are almost always ‘peopled’.

Sub/urban Legends doesn’t feel like a themed pamphlet, because it isn’t one. Its 24 poems are varied in tone, subject-matter and form, and each of them is worth spending time with.

Matthew Paul, On Pam Thompson’s ‘Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest’

“Bloom and Grow” feels like tending a plant in the plant owner’s absence. The poems are tended and cared for, but the writer is happy to let readers watch, figure out if that curved bud is a leaf or flower, if the stem is getting longer or thicker and to know when to deadhead the flowers. Donnelly writes from personal experience and concerns of family connections in a subtle, familiar language, showing that the lives of ordinary people are worth documenting and remembering.

Emma Lee, “Bloom and Grow” Peter J Donnelly (Alien Buddha Press) – book review

One of the strong and consistent promoters of connections between mathematics and the arts is Sarah Hart and she recently gave the 2025 Einstein Public Lecture at Clemson University (sponsored by AMS, the American Mathematical Society) entitled “A Mathematical Journey Through Literature.”  

Hart is the author of Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023) — NYTimes review here;  purchase info here.  Her presentation, summarized here in an AMS article entitled “The Axiom of a Sonnet,” explored ways that the guidelines for a sonnet — or other poetic structure — are similar to the guidelines for a mathematical structure such as a group or a ring.  A thought-provoking quote from her presentation:

“We talk about mathematics as being the language of the universe, a vital tool for science . . .”  She also noted that mathematics also provides the rhythm of music, symmetries in art, poetry rhyme schemes, and symbolism in literature.  She further noted, “Literature itself has an inherent structure much like geometry.”    (Read more here .)

A variety of poetic stanzas are scattered throughout Hart’s wide-ranging exploration of math-poetry connections — including attention to Martin Gardner and the Oulipo.

JoAnne Growney, An AMS Presentation by Sarah Hart

Now that I had my ‘captive’ poets, I wanted to seize the opportunity to go beyond the poems themselves. My poets all had additional skills and knowledge as, for example, editors, translators, competition judges, lecturers and slambassadors. Therefore, at the end of each chapter, having first discussed the development of their poem, I asked each poet for their advice on aspects such as putting together a collection, applying to competitions and examining the difference between writing for the page and for performance.

The Process of Poetry seemed to be quite well received, including being put onto a number of universities reading lists and that of The Poetry School. I therefore thought that it might be good to write a sequel. Having dual nationality, I turned towards Australia. John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge were joined by Mark Tredinnick, Sara Salah, Gavin Yuan Gao, Sarah Holland Batt, Judith Nanagala Crispin, Anthony Lawrence, Bella Li, Audrey Molloy and Jaya Savige.

In doing so, I discovered two fascinating differences. Firstly, in content, secondly, in form. Whereas in the UK version the poetry was often quite personal in nature, in the Australian sequel, The Making of a Poem, major preoccupations were clearly environmental concerns, the protection of native flora and fauna, for example, as impacted by bushfires and smugglers, and the amazing search for aboriginal ancestors.

In the UK, I was inundated with sonnets, in Australia free verse and experimental verse prevailed. Words such as anti-establishment and ‘a resistance to formal poetry’ appeared in our conversations. Having said this, ultimately the sequel contains forms such as an Abecedarian and an ideogram.

For me, the most fascinating aspect was that poets had distinct outlooks and creative processes. The fact that these were sometimes conflicting, in my opinion, only adds to the book. I hope that, if you read it, you too will celebrate the differences.

Drop-in by Rosanna McGlone (Nigel Kent)

I have a buzz after the last Haiku Canada Conference with no energy crash. That’s odd. Grocery shopping can give me an energy crash and days of trough. I did things differently, blew off talks, the day starting and ending for me when I got there or left. Not a strain to absorb everything. Chatting with folks or not. Where is this lack of pressure coming from? Who knows. 

The core of life, of writing, of events, is about people, affections, connections, curiosity about people not “Networking” and “Learning”. Reflecting on the weekend there are all kinds of salient patterns, inner and outer. […]

It doesn’t matter what I am not. What I am not is also infinite. I love the idea of being a generalist, a know it all, a curious renaissance man or polymath, drilling down immersively also appeals.  

I’ve kept one foot in familiar, compensated. I was the peacemaker, negotiator, translator, who was bridging worlds. I don’t need to be a runner, messenger on the bridge. I don’t need to shield people, make myself available as a piggy bank for other people’s secrets. I don’t need to use up my slack for people who are thrashing. I don’t need to affirm everyone and sooth and mute myself to not make waves. That may seem radical and selfish. That may seem to bear no relation to how I seem. I have spent a lot of time trying to justify my existence by helping and pleasing others, trying to be found acceptable by people who would use anyone convenient. 

I don’t have a lot of life left even in best case scenario. Maybe a third if I’m lucky. 

Being drawn by glimmers, by quiet yesses instead of being hampered and hammered by crowd of hectoring internalized voices condemning is a new idea. What if I could say, shush you, and be led by what lights me up. 

Pearl Pirie, Events: It all works

What do you want that is beyond a word?
Beyond any word? Beyond want?

Take a plant primed to flower.
Not wanting rain.
Just holding the possibility of the flower.
Not waiting. Just being under the sky.
The sky knows this. And the plant.
And the water that isn’t rain yet.
And time that isn’t the time to flower yet.
And the flower that isn’t a flower, yet.

The sum of all that potential is not want.
Is not a word. It existed before words.
Words constrain it.
Language craves it so it can survive.
Silence tries to spell it without alphabets.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Wanting

Daily one sits at one’s desk; or doesn’t. One wakes and scans the retreating subconscious, rich with dreams, for the glimpse of an idea. One tastes words, mines memory, goes about earnestly noticing things: but it all turns to ash. A line, a half poem, an idea – all flounder. This goes on for months. You try too hard, fail. The months become a year, and all the while we have Capitalist expectation of production, Calvinist horror of idle hands. You feel anxious and guilty. If you’re not working you must perforce be on holiday. But then there’s the suspicion that, for writers, even when we are ‘working’ we are actually on holiday anyway. ‘You’re hale life’s a holiday!’ said my mother, once, bitterly.

I don’t believe in so-called writer’s block with all its suggestions of drains and fatbergs. Whatever is going on, Dyno-Rod will not help. I do believe that if you’re beating your head off a wall to no avail, chances are it’s the wrong wall. As someone said, and I wish I could recall who, it was a woman and a poet – she said something like ‘if you’re suffering writer’s block it’s because you’re lying to yourself.’ Lying is a strong word, but yes, could be you’re trying to write the wrong thing. And why would one do that? Often because we try to mine an already exhausted seam. We return ever hopeful to a cupboard which now lies bare.

Not ‘block’, then, but fallow. All these metaphors. There are good ones: the bare cupboard, the fallow field, the well which must replenish drop by drop, the battery which must recharge. All understandable. But living through it feels like a waste of life.

Kathleen Jamie, On Not Writing

Marty [Silano] was a dear friend of mine. I met her in 2001 at Seattle’s Poets for Peace reading. Since her death, I’ve found myself unable to write poems—even though I can hear her in my mind telling me, You need to write that poem! It was a phrase we often said to each other, whenever one of us shared something like, “The castle on the top of the cliffs looked like a discarded chess piece,” “Our neighbors want to trim our hedge during nesting season!” or “I’m at the airport and O’Hare autocorrected to o hate!”

The first day at this retreat, poet Grace Wells brought us to a sacred Irish land to write—Poulnabrone Dolmen, sometimes translated as the “Hole of Sorrows” (Poll na mBrón). I sat on limestone, listening to a cuckoo calling from the distance (yes, they have cuckoos here), in an ancient landscape full of stories and birdsong. I thought of Marty—of how brief our lives are, the temporariness of this all, how much she loved the natural world. For the first time since her death, I began to write. The draft was rough, clumsy, I would even say—not good—but it was a draft and I had words on the page. I ended the poem with: The cuckoo continues / counting moments. I am empty / of everything I once held.

That night, Marty came to me in a dream. She was laughing and dancing and said, “I only need a thimble of wine now.” She added, “Write me into your poems.” It felt as if the place had opened me, the dream too. I woke up and wrote a draft of a poem that I continue to work on. Since then, I’ve been writing again. . .

So that’s where I am—writing, thinking of home and Marty and the beauty around me. Marty’s absence from this world has been so deeply felt by many. It’s hard to make sense of a world that so often takes the best souls too soon—but here we are. She was endlessly generous—with her love, her praise, her joy, her fierce care for the environment, and the way she continually lifted other poets, myself included. She will be missed.

Also, if you don’t know Marty or if you do and want to hear her voice again, you can listen to this wonderful interview by where they talk about meditation, Marty’s creative process, her teachers, as well as her thoughts on poetry, ALS, napping and more, for Jess’s podcast.

Kelli Russell Agodon, With Love from Ireland 🇮🇪 & Remembering Marty

Grief has been the perished rubber of a flat tyre, the wrinkled end of a deflating balloon, a dull heaviness to the body, a horizontal. Songs on my playlists have been welcoming me back when I have pulled myself out of my need for silence. Finding colour and light mixing in has given me things to lean in to, something to prop myself up against, a gentle re-plumping.

Reading ‘Hopscotch’ at The Gloucester Poetry Society’s Crafty Crows open mic felt good because I was taking part in things again. And although I shared it on my YouTube channel back in 2022 I had never read it to a live audience so I wanted to give it an airing of its own. Afterwards I discovered that the theme for National Poetry Day this coming October will be ‘Play’. That gives me a prime opportunity to read it again which is good because I like reading it out loud. This news also sent me to my poetry folder to see what other poems I have that will fit this theme and which drafts I can polish in readiness. I look forward to exploring the theme in detail and predict that poets will be sharing some cracking poems on that day.

Sue Finch, RAINBOWS AND CHICKPEAS

About 7 years ago I was working on my first full manuscript. I think the title at the time was “Cartography Lesson.” It was the collection of all of the best poems I had written at the time. And I’m an eclectic writer with eclectic interest so the poems had wide ranges of styles and subject matter. There were poems about my parents next to poems about swans, and poems about swans next to poems about sex. What held the collection together was basically that all the poems were the best pieces I had at the time. That’s all.

At one point I got word that the book was a finalist for a prize from Moon City Press. You’d think I would be excited about that, but as soon as I saw it listed, I actually had a very surprising reaction. My stomach clenched and I heard a voice say, “Oh my god, I hope I don’t win!” […]

Fortunately, I didn’t win. The poet Jeannine Hall Gailey won for her book Field Guide to the End of the World. And I was relieved.

I’m serious here. I’m not just having sour grapes about the fact that I didn’t win. I really, sincerely hoped that I wouldn’t. Because, even though I believed in the individual poems in the book, I did not believe in the book as a whole. What was I thinking, having those sex poems in the same book as the poems about my parents???

Ew.

I had put that book together not because it was ready, but because I was impatient and wanted a book out. Over the next few years I took the book apart. I divided the poems into different categories, poems about my family, poems about nature, poems about being young in the city, poems about romance and sex.

Turns out I didn’t have one book. I had the start of 3 different books.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Why I’m So Glad My Manuscript Didn’t Win This Poetry Prize

The book is well and truly launched. A month or so ago at Free Verse, the poetry book fair in London, I was helping out Jeremy Page on the Frogmore Press table while at the same time handing out promotional postcards – a bit cheeky, but Jeremy was OK with it. It was a shame not to have the actual book to sell but hey ho.

Free Verse was fun. The publisher tables were so closely packed we were virtually on each other’s laps. We were sandwiched between Caroline Davies of  Green Bottle Press and Liz Kendall of The Edge of the Woods. The nature of the event means you do a lot of waving and not-quite-conversations with people, nevertheless it’s very nice to see old acquaintances and meet new ones. I crossed paths briefly with Claire Booker, Paul Stephenson, Julia Bird, Caroline Clark, Tammy Yoseloff, Isabelle Baafi (after interviewing her recently for the podcast) and Kate Noakes…and met for the first time a number of small publishers including Kym Deyn of The Braag and Carmen et Error and Julie Hogg of Blueprint Press. I liked the fact that magazines were represented alongside book publishers.

A few people came up to me and said how much they enjoyed Planet Poetry, including one of our regular supporters Richard Chadburn, who promptly got his local bookshop to order my book! It’s always gratifying to know we have listeners, and fans even – tee hee.

So The Mayday Diaries – yep, we had a lovely launch event in Lewes with both poet and non-poet friends and family. I say ‘we’, because I had alongside me my ol’ poet pal Peter Kenny and also my mentor and Telltale Press Associate Editor Catherine Smith, who emceed. Peter read some poems, including those in his recent pamphlet Snow (Hedgehog Press). Snow is a collaboration with artist Palo Almond, who came to the launch with two of her paintings and spoke about how the pamphlet illustrations came about, which really added something special to the evening.

Robin Houghton, Free Verse, book launch & readings

It’s hard to put your finger on what makes a good workshop. Of course, it’s something to do with structure and pacing, something to do with writing exercises which include you, and excite you, and challenge you…. I’m thinking of Carola Luther’s skilful crafting, how much planning and intelligence in her teaching – how she holds her workshops gently, perceptively, so that they engage everybody. I’m thinking of humour, and charisma, and Jackie Kay, and the workshop I attended in Lancaster where I wrote the title poem of my first collection, and it came out almost finished. It can be something to do with presence, and fame: I’m thinking of Carol Ann Duffy at Moniack Mhor, her hand on my shoulder, how I hung off every word, how she read “Stafford Afternoons” to us and the whole week, the expense, the trials of sharing a room with a stranger, the 8 hour drive in a leaking car that wouldn’t get me home, was worth it. […]

In tonight’s workshop, we read Rachel Mann’s “Eleanor as Julian as Margery”, and we considered the ways in which pressure can make us beautiful. The pressure in a writing workshop – the task, the limited time, the need for concentration, the weight of expectation, the silence – is a beautiful thing as well. It can act like poetic form, providing the boundaries which hold and enable our creativity. It’s a place of contradiction: as a participant, you are both supported and challenged, liberated and contained, pushed further and further into your own interior as a result of being amongst others. Beyond the murderous levels of irritation I feel at someone repeatedly clicking their pen, there’s also a level of acceptance and unity which is astonishing in its taken-for-grantedness. Strangers from disparate backgrounds sit alongside each other as they consider and explore deeply personal aspects of themselves and their worlds; they may share stories they have never shared before, in ways they have never considered. Incredible.

Clare Shaw, Making Our Own Light

I am surrounded by objects who wait for me to move them. Sometimes, these objects must be tidied. Sometimes, washed. I pick them up with my hands and place them elsewhere. Put certain ones in the sink, others in the recycling bin, another on a shelf. Often, I gather up several that belong in the same location and make a small pile on the couch or the hearth where they wait again, coalescing, temporarily, into a new collective shape.

If I ever begin to feel depressed by my constant maintenance of objects around me, I remind myself that when one cares for something—even middling care suffices so long as one can sustain it—that thing becomes a sort of pet, and then it is able to give as well as to receive love. […]

Surrounded by objects as so many of us are, should we not have more nuanced language to describe the universe of things, as the Inuit are said to have their many words for snow? I ask the internet about this cliché and find that it is at least partially true, depending on how different linguists count words in agglutinative languages, wherein affixes (such as prefixes and suffixes) are added to a root word to form a wide variety of nuanced vocabulary. Examples of the Inuits’ basic words for snow and ice include:

qanik: snow falling
aputi: snow on the ground
pukak: crystalline snow on the ground
aniu: snow used to make water
siku: ice in general
nilak: freshwater ice, for drinking
qinu: slushy ice by the sea

And so, clumsily, I venture the start of an object lexicon:

earthing: object formed naturally on Earth (such as a mineral or fallen leaf)
starthing: object in space
handthing: object made with care
machinething: mass-produced object
screenthing: object one looks through to elsewhere
fragmenthing: an object more beautiful now that it is broken
meaningthing: object bestowed with significance through care or memory
plaything: object temporarily electrified by a child’s ardor

These words are inadequate, and immediately I want to replace them with other words, other categories. They have an earthy, AngloSaxon ring to them that I like, however. Noun upon noun, like two feet stomping a circle around a fire.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Everlasting Universe of Things

I am still feeling a bit at odds and ends—am I doing the right things? Am I doing too much—or too little? What should my priorities be right now (health vs. fun vs. work, etc.) Is this normal at my age? I’ve signed up for way too many things next month (judging a poetry contest, taking a class, doing a tutorial, plus an essay or two will be due, plus all normal things including another dental crown.) Needless to say, I have anxiety about all of this. I have been trying to reconnect with some old friends—the loss of one friend makes you realize how important that is. Here’s another kind of frightening thought—do I even want to do poetry anymore, or should I be trying something else? I have a lot of friends (poets) who’ve moved into essays, memoirs, even standup comedy. It certainly would be nice to be paid one in a while and have people actually read what you write. I don’t know what’s next. I’m open and hoping for guidance.

While the world is burning, the poet acts a little lost. She goes to the forest, where several giant trees have toppled—the forest seems more bare, though the river runs even louder than ever. The gardens have fewer plants and fewer birds. Maybe she doesn’t recognize the places she thought she knew. She worries about losing people, not just places. She doesn’t see a clear path ahead the way she used to. That can be unsettling. She worries that she used to be the hero of the story, and now she’s just the one taking notes.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry Readings in Woodinville, Suddenly Summer Weather, Goslings and Goldfinch, Searching

The wind was a ghost
I learned also went to bed, waking

early just as fruit bats returned
to their roosts on the cliffs.

Held in this interval, I felt almost
endless and untranslatable; but also,

small as a pebble in the throat
of a universe threaded with seams.

Luisa A. Igloria, Perigee, Apogee

This week: the idea of blackbirds, the bones of a feeling, an assembly of hares, and more. Enjoy.

So hard
when I hear nothing
not to be nothing
falling on the concrete floor.

I’ve noticed that there are no more blackbirds in our neighbourhood. I wonder if they are dying out everywhere now and what will happen to all the poems and songs in their honour? I love the Beatles song. In a few years’ time, perhaps no one will understand that the morning has become emptier and that an idea of blackbirds was important in our lives. Funny. How people cling to themselves and what has been. It’s somehow charming and nonsensical at the same time.

Kati Mohr, Curtains Are Not Necessarily More See-through In Broad Daylight

“Everything is covered in blood related to sound” (Pascal Quignard)

Pascal Quignard organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s. However, in 1994, Quignard suddenly renounced all his musical activities. No more music, he declared. He was finished. What followed was the publication of a book, The Hatred of Music, on the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. These ten treatises about the danger in listening aim “to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”

Quignard’s beef is actually with the omnipresence of sound, a sonic super-profusion that has metastasized into a force of death more than of life. “Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum,” he wrote. Q mines a pet peeve of Glenn Gould’s when he concludes that “concert halls are inveterate caves whose god is time.” Ultimately, it is an irresistible book about how we hear, and how what we hear can destroy it.

Alina Stefanescu, “The disordered and passionate application” of the non sequitur image.

There is not enough love to smother
every wound. A single day demands
five stages of grief and four stages of
anger. Or all nine parts of disbelief.
The summer sky explodes with
lightning in the late afternoon
as if it too can only take so much.

There is a strangeness in normalcy
like it shouldn’t be and yet it
should. How else will the days
pass if we cannot play hopscotch
when we pass a chalk grid on a
side street, if we do not sing
along with the radio, even if we have
forgotten the lyrics, if we will not slow
down the last forty pages, because
a book must end, but not just yet.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, How much do we need to know?

I don’t want to say a whole lot about the poems, as I often say more than needed. But the description is “studies in an undead mood.” And that’s how I feel about it: the book is guided by mood, ambience and impression, and it wrestles with pervasive dread. Also, uniquely among things I’ve put out, this one has pictures (nothing fancy, mostly internet detritus from my camera roll). See a couple samples below.

Lastly, the print is limited to 35 numbered copies. Don’t sleep! They’ll disappear.

RM Haines, NEW BOOK IS HERE

“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.

Maria Popova, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

Dizzying, the tumult of waking. It seems as I watched, the early rhodie opened a bit more a bit more. Daily I stood under the crab apple to breathe in the rising perfume, a bit more a bit more, not wanting to exhale in the still cool morning, the usual human din briefly lulled to the dull roar of a distant dirt mover and plank-on-plank rattle from a neighbor’s construction crew. Buzz of bee moving through the whiteness above me. It was an intimate moment: me, the blossoms, the busy bee. The world was there but not.

Marilyn McCabe, windows. The windows turned to night and night turned into a heavy rain. Then the rain

In our hands we hold the lost,
but our bright eyes stare fiercely
into the heat, harm, hardship
that destroyed them, and thus us
as well, in some other way.
I don’t know if the crowds roar
or blood pounds red in my ears.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 121: Blow the Trumpets Before God In Times of Catastrophe #NaPoWriMo

This is the first new month that has started without my dad being here. I’ve learnt that I want to tell everyone what I learned from him. I’ve learned that one of the best things I can think of to do right now is carry forward the very special parts of him to the best of my ability. I’ve also learned that writing some of this down in a poem felt right, but that reading said poem when we gathered together to say goodbye to him required a large hanky and plenty of time for deep breaths. […]

The way he turned his head to look and smile
never minding being interrupted.
That quiet, gentle, I’m alright, thanks my love.
The time I called him

from somewhere between Crawley and Croydon.
Parked up. Feeling lost.
To hear him tell me exactly where I was
based on the wrong turns I had taken.

Sue Finch, SOMEBODY’S MISSING

My dad passed away this week. I feel shocked by this every time I say it. This post is not about my dad, but it felt wrong not to acknowledge that after the last few hard months, things here continue to be hard and sad.

Somehow, there’s still been joy and fun in the last couple of months too. This extrovert writer is especially happy when I get to throw myself into a sea of writers and spend days totally immersed in the writing world […]

Katie Manning, AWP, PCA, & the San Diego Writers Festival

I never want to forget that we live in a world like this, among creatures that know nothing of our human preoccupations. The paths were muddy and mucky, the sun warm on my face, the smell of wet earth and waking plants strong; nesting blackbirds scolded me from swaying reeds, and song sparrows and white-throated sparrows made music as beautiful as any I can imagine. I will miss going to the lake this year, so it’s important to me to find places and time closer to home where I can leave urban life behind for a while, rest, and recharge my senses and spirit. Meeting that turtle’s beady eye renewed my faith in nature, if not humanity, and that was enough for today!

Beth Adams, A Walk in the Woods on Election Day

I want to thrive. Today. Full stop. In spite of (waves arms wildly) everything. I want to thrive not as an act of resistance, but simply because I am 60 years old, and I don’t want to give away what’s left of my life waiting for some better time that might not come before I go. Since none of us ever know how many years we have left, this stance, I think, is valid for anyone at any age.

Rita Ott Ramstad, No such thing as bad weather?

On April 30 […] I felt like I walked into the light again, as the sciatica calmed and the cold faded out. It reminded me of emerging from serious depression, an experience I’ve had the bad and good fortune to undergo several times. Suddenly you look around and think, oh, I’m better, and only then realize how not-there you were for weeks. […]

It wasn’t the easiest trip, given the sciatica, but in other ways the timing was lucky, as in escaping Spain right before the big blackout. And while I could have used more energy during this first week of spring classes, my verve is perking back up as I need it for more barding around with this new book that is so much about my mother’s death as well as mycelium and other occult life. I just recorded a podcast with The Mushroom Hour; I will read at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville on Sunday 5/4 (live and hybrid, sign up here); I’m joining the always virtual Wild and Precious Life series this Wednesday 5/7; and I’ll be in Baltimore for the Hot L series at Ivy Bookstore on 5/11. That last is Mother’s Day. I wonder if I’ve just delayed the seasonal sadness, or whether I’m genuinely healing from mother-loss, too?

Lesley Wheeler, Dark corridors

What is it knocking on the walls of this little house in the forest? Are we mostly scared of imaginary and unseen and unknown things? Are we afraid of monsters? Wild animals? Maybe zombies, werewolves, devils and demons? Or are we scared of actual threats like axe murderers and serial killers? Or let’s be honest here, are we scared of this alone time with our manuscript and the fact we have no excuses right now but to finish the work and write, write, write and push ourselves from night, towards day, towards the light and the last pages.

It is of course, mostly, the latter, and so instead of working on the book … I think I see a flicker in the night. Then I tell myself a wild horror story and scare myself rigid. I write this Substack post, it is all about fear and how I wish to boil the bones of this feeling down to get to the sticky glue.

Salena Godden, Fear Of The Last Pages

I’m working on an ekphrastic poetry collection titled The Artist’s House, inspired by my llongtime association with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. My poetry and my novels often feature artists or a response to their work. It’s because I grew up with an artist father who painted constantly and invited many artists to our home and shared studios with them. He took us to working studios, local art exhibitions, and art museums in the Los Angeles area. More about my childhood with art and artists here.

The smell of oil paint and turpentine evokes these childhood memories and the wonder of a Saturday morning, watching my father mix oil paints and dash colors and shapes onto a white, gessoed canvas. In the mid-50s he painted these fishing boats at the dock in San Pedro, where we lived. It represented his passion for sport fishing. I loved the flaring spotlights, the night blues, and the way light and midnight blue meet and interpenetrate. My father’s time and focus on his art showed a lifelong devotion. Even as he eased into dementia, a brush was still in his hand. Once, in his basement studio, he confessed, “I don’t know how to mix paints anymore.” But he kept trying.

Rachel Dacus, Art & artists are a theme in my fiction and poetry

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. It comforts me somehow, even when the poems are sad or angry poems (that seems to reflect the times, which poetry can do). Your own writing, who has it? Does it exist on some hard drive somewhere? You always were excellent at organizing things. A talent I envy and do not possess. […]

When a person we love dies, I guess there’s an impulse–almost an instinct–to memorialize them, at least among those of us in “Western societies.” Or maybe it is a human impulse, I can’t say. I have written too many poems of elegy, and there will be more; but sometimes, it takes awhile before I feel I have the right perspective or frame of mind to write about them, or about my feelings of loss. Today, so much reminded me of you, Beejay, that I had to write something. If not a poem, then an epistle–the way I used to write to you, of ordinary things, the garden, cats, seasons, poetry.

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Ann E. Michael, Correspondences

It did make me feel somewhat philosophical, turning 52. I’m still around, even after multiple doctors said I wouldn’t be. I’ve lost friends in the last few years, friends who seemed much healthier than I am. So much seems random, out of our control. This leads me to think that maybe we should let go of some of the things that keep us from living a full, joyful life, right now. Don’t put off fun, or things you love. […]

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my poem, “Lessons You Learn from Final Girls,” from Field Guide to the End of the World, was up on the Daily Kos this week (right after Yusef Komunyakaa, whose birthday is apparently a day before mine) as birthday poets. See the link here.  

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Dinosaurs, Birthday Poems on Daily Kos, Hummingbirds, and More

I woke up thinking about Frankenstein, about ways I might teach my British Lit class even if I’m off campus for some of the teaching days.  I woke up thinking about online discussion posts, but now I’m thinking about a collage/erasure poem.  Now I’m thinking about a wide range of projects that could use erasure and collage.  It’s an interesting way of thinking about assessment:  choose a page, make an erasure poem, add collage elements, and write analysis showing how your creation shows understanding of the work.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

It was the dead time between Christmas and New Year and I couldn’t breathe, so I went outside for some air. My eldest joined me and we traipsed the pavements of our town as dusk fell, before turning onto a footpath to cross a playing field. Here, in the unlikeliest of settings, we encountered the mysterious circular assembly of hares, better known as a ‘parliament’ or ‘council’.

This remarkable sighting in the edgelands of north Bristol became a totem for me through the traumatic years during and after my divorce. A marvel few people have the privilege of witnessing had been revealed to me and one of my children: how, then, could we not get through this ordeal together?

Sadly, despite my magical thinking, our depleted family was further fractured by the inevitable fall-out of that rupture, with my eldest ultimately choosing to go no-contact with their three siblings and me. In an effort to make some sense of the situation, I began to explore this estrangement – carefully – through poetry, turning again to the hares in the hope I’d find some redemption through them.

At first, I expected this poem to be just one of forty or so that might comprise a collection, but during its writing it became more important than I’d anticipated, positioning itself as a potential envoi. At the same time, it increased in complexity, particularly with regard to time. As well as inhabiting what the critic, Jonathan Culler, calls ‘the lyric “now” or moment of utterance’, it looks back to when my eldest and I were apparently in step with each other, and forward to when I’ll be dead and the only reconciliation possible would be for my child to make alone. In this respect, it seems to be in the spirit of poems Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes wrote for their dead wives, only with the status of narrator and addressee reversed.

Drop-in by Deborah Harvey (Nigel Kent)

I have an odd superstition about getting published.

I believe that the real goal of writing and sharing our work is not just to get fame and fortune, but rather to help us get connected to our authentic “tribe.” I have a belief that whoever gets published alongside me in a journal or anthology is someone I’m supposed to know – or their poem is one I’m supposed to read. […]

I therefore believe that every time I get a piece published, I need to read the full journal I’m published in, and if I don’t I believe the poetry gods punish me by refusing to give me any more acceptances until I do! Therefore, when I get a piece published, I make time to do this specific ritual that helps me not only make new poetry friends, but also find my next submission target.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Strange Ritual That Helps Me Decide Where to Submit My Work

In preparation for my Creative Retirement Institute course on May Swenson, beginning next Tuesday afternoon, I’ve been reading Swenson’s poetry and a collection of essays, Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt (Utah State Univ. Press, 2006). I also searched for my photographs from my visit to her archives at Washington University, St. Louis, and I found my 2022 blog post about it.

Believe me, I have come very close to contacting CRI and screaming, “I can’t do it!” But, in calmer moments, I think it will be a good distraction from all else that’s going on in my life. Show up, Bethany, it’s only 4 weeks, 8 hours total. Read some poems together, talk about the poems. Talk about Swenson’s creative life and ideas and how far the tendrils of her influence have reached. Easy-peasy.

Of course we will read “Question” and “Centaur,” also “Bleeding” and more of Swenson’s iconographs.

Bethany Reid, Nature: Poems Old and New

[Karen] Solie’s poems offer both deep wisdom and a lightness across the line; a sparkle, if you will, of truth, if that idea might still be one that holds any resonance: the heart of one true thing articulated across an otherwise landscape of dark. Her poems craft deep wells of meditative thinking, lines that turn a leaf over in one’s hand, to study every side.

The landscapes of her poem-scenes are solid, foundational; shifting from poem to poem but always returning, book after book, to the foundation of the people, physical detail, climate and intimacy of rural Saskatchewan, a sense of home and prairie Solie has in common with Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers [see my review of her latest collection here]: the further out either of them might move through the world, the stronger the pull to return back to the landscapes that shaped them. As Solie writes, as part of the extended and descriptive “THE GRASSLANDS”: “And when you do venture in / with your tire tracks and snake gaiters //  the hospitality of grass / is a dry loaf, cracked cup, mattress of prairie wool, / northern bedstraw and great blanket flower, / wild licorice, clover, corn mint, bergamot, // and heat, rippling like curtains / as the grasshoppers saw away – / leave your packed lunch out they will eat it in an hour – [.]”

There is almost a kind of restlessness articulated through these poems, with an inability to remain still even across multiple poems on and around stillness, but rarely in the same geography, the same moment, beyond that aforementioned Saskatchewan (and Toronto, I’ve noticed). The poems, together, cite a restlessness, or perhaps a curiosity, perpetually seeking to reach across another horizon to seek a better understanding of what might be out there, whether through moments across geography, or even across the narrator’s own past. It it the clarity, one suspects, she seeks.

rob mclennan, Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

Andrew Taylor, who was credited as editor of the vast two volume Collected Poems of Peter Finch in 2022, has now written a companion volume that is part-biography, part-critical analysis.

As I like much of Finch’s work, it was perhaps inevitable that I would appreciate Taylor’s efforts to give it perspective. […]

I’m not so sure about Taylor’s claim that Finch has been overlooked and underrated. You could say that most poets, short of poets laureate of one kind or another, always are. I think Finch has fought for his own space and recognition, partly through performance as well as through his willingness to engage socially or professionally with those who hold literary influence, and, perhaps because he has been so persistent, has become known and respected, I was going to say, within the poetry community, except there is no such thing. It’s just a place where some poets can be bothered to fight for validation and others can’t, so some are visible and others not so, or not at all. Finch has fought, and has done it, it seems to me, ferociously. Unlike those with less stamina, his reputation has increased and established itself over the decades. I admire him for that.

Bob Mee, THERE’S EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR, THE POETRY OF PETER FINCH by ANDREW TAYLOR

In the British Library there’s a manuscript collection containing many of George Herbert’s Latin poems, including a little occasional epigram which is very probably also by Herbert, but for no obvious reason has been left out of previous editions of his work. The poem is about a gift of gloves.

Here is a transcription of the poem and my own translation:

Wren cum Chirothecis

Candida amicitiæ nascentis pignora, sed quæ
Nescio quo dicam nomine dono tibi
Græca mihi supplet, supplet vernacula nomen
Deficit ad numeros sola latina meos
Et iuste male nempe voco, quod debeo donum
Pollicitum satis est reddere; dono nihil.

Pure tokens of a friendship that’s begun — but which
I cannot name — I give to you.
Both Greek and English offer me a name
It’s only Latin verse cannot contain
My gift. Fair’s fair; it would be wrong to call
What’s owed a gift; if I fulfill
A promise, then that’s not a gift at all.

Occasional verse of this kind — I mean poems written to and for a specific person, to mark a specific event — are often the most difficult to interpret. Frequently we just don’t know enough about the context — their attitudes, relevant recent events, what they agree or disagree on, which of them is the senior or more powerful, what their shared intimacies or injokes might be — to be sure of interpretation, especially when it comes to tone. Imagine for a minute that you dash off a teasing letter to an old friend, or an awkward email to a good friend of your boss, and how hard it would be to reconstruct the tone and context of such exchanges if a historian encountered them without any other information.

These are historian’s problems, of course, but they overlap with questions of literary judgement and interpretation especially because of the particular difficulty of assessing the tone of poems like this. ‘Wren cum chirothecis’ has recently been edited by Robert Whalen and Luke Roman, and I believe they plan to include it in the forthcoming complete edition of Herbert’s work for Oxford University Press. But Whalen and Roman, I think, slightly over-interpret the epigram to Wren. They take the final phrase, dono nihil (literally, ‘I give nothing’) to mean that the poem was not in fact accompanied by a gift after all — that the prospect of a gift (of gloves) is proposed and then withdrawn, making it a kind of mock- or even meta-occasional poem. I think this is almost certainly wrong: there are quite a lot of examples of Latin poems saying, roughly, “thanks for nothing — this gift is so pathetic you might as well not have bothered”, but they are always satiric at best, if not outright invective. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all.

Victoria Moul, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?

You became a doctor and wrote a book titled Bedside Manners. As a medical doctor, what is your specialty? How has your career in medicine informed your poetry in general and your haiku?

Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology are my specialties. My writing and my work inform each other. No doubt, I am a better doctor because of it. The writing, if we do it well—by that I mean, with courage and setting aside the usual protections that keep us from the truth—is a pathway to enlightenment. That kind of understanding brings us to fundamental truths about how the body and the mind work, an area of interest to the healing professions, though we leave much unexplored in our educational processes. It’s all about compassion, empathy, kindness, and making a connection that emboldens trust. How else can we change our lives to accept the often invasive notion of getting better?

You also collected an anthology titled, Poems for the Time Capsule. What was the inspiration behind publishing this book?

I have taught poetry for thirty-five years at a wonderful place called the Fromm Institute. The professors there are allowed to choose their topic. There is no homework, no tests, just explorations of knowledge. The students are all educated and arrive there not to advance their careers but to gain knowledge and understanding. In order to have a text to demonstrate my opinion about the best poems of all time, I created this offering, Poems for the Time Capsule and a second version to use in the classroom. I also have placed it in doctor’s waiting rooms. Reading great poetry builds trust, which is so valuable in the healing professions.

Jacob D. Salzer, David Watts

At this point, a therapist would have me list all my successes: I raised a good-hearted child who’s a hell of a writer and musician; I had a book published by Simon & Schuster; I have two Master’s degrees; I’ve been in a stable and loving relationship for more than 40 years; I make good art.

But for each of those things, I can add the failures: my child is sad, my book was panned, etc.

Sometimes people tell me I’m a badass: tough, confident, impressive. But badasses don’t spend their days inert, playing games on their phones and crying while the TV murmurs in the background. Badasses know their worth and don’t settle for less. Badasses brush themselves off after a swing and a miss and swing again, and they don’t stop swinging. I’m more of a broke-ass bitch.

I don’t say these things because I want sympathy or reminders of my value. And this didn’t come from the suck voice or imposter syndrome. I’m not an imposter. I have a strong mind and I make some good stuff and I still like to squeeze all the juice I can from this life. I’m just being honest about the demoralization of a job search—at any age. And I’m showing you the ways I cope—or don’t—with my failures.

A lot of us feel this way at times, and it can impede action. However, even as I stew over my lack of worth to the business community and my brokeassery, I do what I can. I went to three May Day marches, in DC and Maryland, on Thursday. I went to the Flower Mart (first time ever for this forever city resident) yesterday. I’m heading to an in-person Indivisible meeting today. I’m planning a doll-head and thrifted ceramics indoor/outdoor fountain. And I’m trying to figure out how to turn myself into Blossom, one of the PowerPuff girls, even though I’m more of a Buttercup. (Buttercup won’t go over well on LinkedIn.)

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, No Crying in Baseball

sometimes i wish i would
have left that interview halfway through.
i would have said, “there is a hole
in the sky that is calling me more than this.”
i wish we could get real with each other.
i want people to tell me i didn’t get the job
to my face. i want them to say,
“you looked too crazy for our
pretty white building.” then i can laugh.
i’m convinced i can hear it between
the form rejection’s lines. i don’t apply
to jobs anymore. i plant garlic. i leave offerings
for fairies on the windowsill. i check my bank account
like a morning mass. no eucharist
just the stingy taste of spruce tips
from the cutting board. sometimes feed my fingers
into parking meters to buy myself
just a little more time.

Robin Gow, form rejection

a softening of the heart
a lowering of walls
advice over the phone:
avoid the area

later we learn
someone shot himself
in the dark on the campus lawn
avoid the area

sell yourself short
sell yourself cheap
just sell yourself
avoid the area

Jason Crane, POEM: Avoid The Area

In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, tells how the Nazis dragged this luminously yellow canvas through the streets of Mannheim, with the tag, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” It is chilling, the philistine, ideological and disgust all wrapped up in a familiar package.

Jill Pearlman, The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

We witness the world coming at us—

profits and poverty, despots and detainees.

Galaxies of goodwill and a moon refusing to turn maniac.

Wars coming at us. The bullet that killed Lorca coming at us. 

Fury, forgiveness, and imprisoned humanity.

Our weary world is spinning faster. Behind us is history, and even that is changing.

Suddenly, we’re different but still living in our skin.

Rust, reprisal, and death-pallor promises coming at us. Ma Rainey blues and the incendiary jazz of revolution.

We move through smoke and dust, search for stable stars in the night sky.

Across our knuckles, a tattooed map to find our way home.

We allow no one to alter the image to lead us astray. 

Rich Ferguson, We of the World

The trees are leafing out again at last.
Flying little chartreuse flags, crumpled
like wet laundry before they spread
and take up space.

If this were a love poem
I would say, I want you to take up space
and stretch toward the sun, exuberant
as the birds who can’t stop singing.

If this were a love poem
I could say anything at all
and you would know I really mean
all I want is for you to bloom.

Rachel Barenblat, Spring

Play heart-rendingly 
                     on your instrument so as to move
the coldest juror and melt the prison bars—  Blindness
         and the long road back—   A shorn head, loosened
                     cuffs; chains snapped for a body restored—

Luisa A. Igloria, The Underworld

And here’s a bonus poem, not really written “after” [Gale] Wilhelm, but still somewhat inspired by her work […]

spit on the spirit
till it’s holy
& filled with holes

like rain articulating
the surface of a lake

we kiss

Dick Whyte, Gale Wilhelm – 4 Short Poems (1929-1930)

This week: feathered messages, spring monsters, animal bodies, emerging seeds, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s all Humpty Dumpty now,
the promises of riches
floating in a golden sky,
soaring carrion eaters
eyeing the brick walls stained red,
the red spreading as the walls
fall, and fall, and keep falling.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 44: Not to Prophesize Falsely #NaPoWriMo

In 2022, when I started Dead Mall Press, I was emerging from a pretty demoralizing period […]. I had tuned out of poetry for a while and focused on music, but eventually I realized this resignation was something I had to push back against, or it would just stop my own artistic impulse. But it wasn’t enough just to write anymore: I felt a need to materially enact some of my ideas about publishing and to learn from doing—from physically making. And in a vague sort of way, I believed that there was something vital about the materiality of published objects—and I wanted to understand it.

While the entire experience has been on a very small scale, so far it has taught me an enormous amount—some of which I am not even fully conscious of. Things happen around and through these books, connections form, time unfolds—among people, in dialogue, through echoes and unknown attention. Each book is a material thing, and yet it involves psychic intensities that exceed its materiality almost excessively. And making this happen, circulating this experience, becomes an adventure—a cultural one. And I started to recognize others—other poets as well as other micro-press/DIY operations, of which there are so many—who share a desire to keep this cultural adventure alive even in its ephemerality. And this also means making sure it stands against professionalism, institutions, and capital.

As such, I think the right way to look at it, for both writer and publisher, is that both sides are peers in collaboration: they are coming together to create books of poetry, but also to give material life to a culture of oppositional imagination.

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 2)

Yes, I’m going to take the challenge this April, and write (or noodle around on) a poem every day. That includes haikus, a single couplet, and rehabbing ancient drafts that weren’t working.

I’m working on a new poetry collection tentatively titled Feathered Messages highlighting – you guess it – the importance of birds in our midst and the way they affect us. Did you know, for example, that hearing birdsong regulates your pulse and breathing to calm you?

Rachel Dacus, April abundance & poetry month!

Sometimes a line comes singing into my head. What a gift. “The light has always been going down” began this way with the opening line “What. The quiet work of words.” appearing on the way back from dropping my kids off at school. Other time it is an image that triggers a poem, something I saw. Other times, it is the space I make for the writing of the poem that triggers the poem: sitting down on the couch with my dog, sitting down with my student in a sterile, grey study room on a tired, Friday afternoon, and a poem blooms out.

Han VanderHart, Everything I Know About Writing Poetry (with Jane Kenyon)

Making something from scratch — whether it’s a chocolate cake, a poem or a plant you grow from seed — stands in opposition to those whose modus operandi is destruction and chaos, and heals our wounded spirits. This is where we have to start: with ourselves. The efforts to create, and to appreciate created things, bolster our recognition that destruction and its desired effect— paralysis — don’t have to prevail. Even in the worst situations, no one can take away our ability to look for the beauty and complexity of our world, and make something from it, even if it’s just words or a melody or the idea of a drawing that we hold in our head during a time of suffering or fear. I hope a lot of you are participating in demonstrations today. And I hope tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll write some words or play some music, read a good book, walk in a park or natural area or garden, or make a good meal. Let me know how it’s going with you. Sending love.

Beth Adams, One Brushstroke at a Time

In order to keep loving, we’ll

have to keep living for those
deprived, no longer alive, taken

too soon. Pollen dusts the porch,
and new maps of the world appear

before our eyes.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Things to Love Today

It’s April (woohoo) and I’m bunged up with a head cold and my birch allergy, so I’m hiding indoors though the weather isn’t too cold. Spring always gets started without me when it finally comes along as there is just so many birch trees here. Time for writing, watching rugby and indoor chores. Not too bad a way to spend the weekend. 

April is also time for the write-a-poem-a-day challenge from NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo. I’ve been posting my attempts on my various social media channels and have managed to keep up the first six days. I don’t always manage a full poem, but usually have a start I can play with over the next month or so. I use various sites for inspiration, including the official site listed above, Wendy Pratt’s Substack prompts, Todd Dillard’s thought-provoking prompts (he has the last few years’ threads on Twitter, I think, but I won’t link to there) and my Substack feed in general. I’m enjoying the break in my day to come up with some lines or just play with words. 

Gerry Stewart, Poetry Snippets for GloPoWriMo

April really is panning out to be the cruellest month in politics. We still have poetry. No one can take that away from us. I hope you’re still managing to write poetry. We need it; poetry is important (and even mysterious). And maybe it’s equally absurd to not write it now as to write it. May your life become poetry this month in the name of all those whose lives have been lost, whose lives have become harder than they needed to become, who are living with grief, who are afraid and anxious, who are living with unimaginable difficulties.

This past week I became frantic because I couldn’t find my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Small potatoes, I know, but somehow these days a small thing can take on a lot of whatever else is troubling us. So I’m not using the word frantic lightly. I took apart a couple of shelves on my book case. And quite wonderfully, to me, I found a different book that I’d given up on finding — I ended up believing that I’d loaned it out or given it away by accident. (Meditations ended up being on a top shelf where I’d placed it for easy access, naturally). The book I’d given up for lost is View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska’s Selected.

Shawna Lemay, April is Poetry Month: 2025

Gigging Monster leaps about the house singing, ‘Spring is here! Spring is here! Stop writing! You wrote loads all winter, it’s my turn, it is my time to dance in the spring sunshine! You better have written something half-decent, because it is me that has to do all the leg work and stand on stage and tour it all summer!’

Writing Monster bursts into tears, upset with all the noise. She runs upstairs and throws herself on the bed and weeps about her need for solitude. She pours on the guilt about unfinished stories, she wails, ‘but I like writing, writing is a happy place . . .’ Writing Monster is so needy. She demands all of my time and patience. So much re-living and gazing into the long dark night.

Salena Godden, Monsters In Spring

I should have made more time for parties, lunches, dinners, and other events, but I was usually burned out after about four hours. My energy levels aren’t what they used to be! (More on that later.)

I did get to have a coffee and a bite to eat with Lesley Wheeler, whose new book Mycocosmic just dropped from Tupelo Press. This trip to AWP was a last minute decision on my part—I had decided not to go a long time ago—but I felt that with having to be out of the house anyway (with the ongoing disability renovation) and having felt a bit down since the beginning of the year (and Trump’s re-presidency) it would prove encouraging, and it did. Even getting a bit of a break from Seattle’s cold and dreary spring (everything bloomed after we left!) was nice. If AWP is a bit physically and mentally exhausting—and it is—it also reaffirms you as a writer—a writer some people have actually read—and part of a community—whose books you actually read.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, AWP Part 2: Meeting with Editors and Fellow Writers, My Moon City AWP Reading on YouTube, and Down Days

I think I started sharing Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach on this blog in 2007, though the haggadah existed long before that. […]

There’s new material here, including prayer-poems by me and by my fellow Bayit Liturgical Arts Working Group hevre Trisha Arlin, R. David Markus, R. Sonja Keren Pilz, and David Zaslow. And poems written by people I don’t personally know, like Amnon Ribak and Linda Pastan. And I added a favorite piece from Marcia Falk’s gorgeous Night of Beginnings haggadah, and some wisdom from the new A Quest for Our Times haggadah.

Some pieces appear both in long form and in shorter form. Some pieces appear in several forms (there are six different versions of the Four Children; which one speaks to you this year?) 

Most importantly to me: there’s more attention to what freedom asks of us. When I started working on this haggadah for my own use 25 or 30 years ago, I was really focused on the inner journey of liberation. And… in today’s world I am keenly aware that freedom comes with obligations to each other and to those who are not free. So there’s more of that in here too.

Rachel Barenblat, New edition of the VR Haggadah!

I started blogging in 2006. I started and wrote in five blogs between then and 2009, deleting three. I’m not sorry I deleted them because I changed with every iteration of writing and it was time to move on and not look back. The fourth was a New Orleans centered group blog that’s archived but still online. I still have my last blog, Zouxzoux, which is primarily a poetry blog, and I started writing in it again this year after pretty much abandoning it. I’ve been writing poems fairly often in a series I named “Something Small, Every Day (or so).” I’m writing for myself, like I used to, with no thoughts of submitting. I don’t care if I think it’s good or bad or if anyone thinks it’s good or bad, I’m just doing it. I’ve grown tired of the submissions game. Not saying I won’t ever submit again but it hasn’t interested me this year. (I do have one sub in waiting and a flash being published in Bending Genres this month – thanks BG!)

In looking at my archives, I see I participated in NaPoWriMo from 2011 – 2022, skipping the past 2 years. I’m participating this year in combination with “Something Small, Every Day.” I haven’t decided whether to post here, too, but probably not. I’m hoping to get back into the vibrant WordPress poetry community I used to be part of before I abandoned writing poetry.

All of this to say, please visit my poetry blog here, if you’re into poetry and care to. If you’re doing NaPoWriMo, drop a link and I’ll follow and support you as best I can.

Let’s have fun, for us.

Charlotte Hamrick, NaPoWriMo & Something Small Every Day

We’re not even a week into National Poetry Month, and how strange it’s been already, in small and cataclysmic ways. I spent the second half of March giving readings from Mycocosmic (and recording one super-fun podcast with Jason Gray), talking about mycelium and grief and awe and the role fungi play in helping trees communicate. Foragers turned up in most of the live audiences, as well as people who have been experienced in the Jimi Hendrix sense and want to talk about it. It’s as if mycelium connects poets to readers as well as conifers to hardwoods. Fungi also offer substantial hope beyond the mystical vibes: they help landscapes recover from wildfire and pollution, and psilocybin supports some people as they heal from trauma, for starters. Mycelium continues to feel like a role model and a blueprint. It’s done my heart good to hear people’s weird mushroom stories and field questions like one from an AWP guy in a witch’s hat.

Yet it’s not like fungi are altruists. They’re masters, instead, of ingeniously intertwined fungal-plant-animal-bacteria economies. In fact, each one of us apparent individuals is a polity, a microbiome housing many interests. Most of the DNA in our bodies is not human. What a trip! It can all fall out of balance so easily, in which case fungi might sicken and kill us (then help bacteria digest our remains, yikes). I’m working through these ideas and metaphors in a world that’s been out of balance for a long time, with a few powerful entities now hastening the damage along, the better to feed on chaos. Might there be a better equilibrium on the other side? Possibly, but even if so, too much suffering precedes it.

So, yes, between reading tour highs and the lows of being a United Statesian during fascism, I’m feeling emotional whiplash over here.

Lesley Wheeler, Role model, mycelium

I’m jumping octaves again
Startling the pigeons in front of the cathedral

Trolling the lake’s edge
Sending swans huffing into the reeds
(Once I caught them eating the ducklings and they’ve never forgiven me)

The catfish suck at the high notes
Percussive smacks of mistake

No, I sing, no, I sing, no

Ren Powell, Jackhammer Song

Latin sapphics were hugely popular in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. This corresponds in part to a wider European fashion, but not entirely so. I think their particular popularity in England in this period was — funnily enough — partly just because the word Elizabetha, the Latin for ‘Elizabeth’, fitted so temptingly neatly into the adonean. I chose Edward Cornwallis’ page because of its handy combination of the metrical diagram and this ‘Elizabetha’-adonean at the end of the third stanza. But you see it over and over again: to such an extent that I think we can reasonably talk about the ‘Elizabethan sapphic’. If you have any Latin, you may also have noticed that Cornwallis, like most English authors of the period, is using sapphics for a grandly panegyric political ode, praising Queen Elizabeth I for her beauty, virtue and might — with her in charge, he says, the English have nothing to fear from Philip (of Spain), the chilly Scot or the ferocious French. This use of sapphics is typical of the period in England, though it’s not at all what we associate with the metre in Sappho, and even Horace in general tended to use alcaics (rather than sapphics) for his grander and more public odes. A metre can ‘mean’ quite different things at different times.

Victoria Moul, The embroidered earth: sapphics in the spring

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Collected Poems (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.’ Likewise, in their adjudication, the 2014 Büchner Prize jury highlighted the way ‘Becker’s writing is interwoven with the times, with what is observed and what is remembered, what is personal and what is historical.’ […]

Though relatively brief, this poem is just one sentence, woven together with the conjunction ‘wie’ (translated here both as ‘how’ and ‘the way’). The weave is dense and as I’ve suggested it’s not really possible to tell whether what is observed – the children, the oil spill, the tree stump (resembling a body) – are contemporaneous or from different eras. My translation keeps these possibilities open: borders here are felt to be temporal, as well as geographical. The German word ‘Avantgarde’ has artistic as well as political implications, but my choice of ‘vanguard’ also brings out the militaristic connotations which are reinforced by the ‘spitzen, grünen Lanzen’ (‘sharp, green spears’) which are then swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are interestingly referred to as a ‘Konvention’ and I retained the English equivalent, intending to suggest both a performance (something conventional, perhaps not genuine), as well as a political gathering or agreement (like the Convention on Human Rights). The ambiguity felt very relevant (and once again topical).

The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen observed through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but she is inaudible to the observer – sum up Becker’s concerns about the media, political and historical change, borders real and imagined, exclusion, and the need to ask questions of those in power. Issues as real today as when the poem was written in the early 1990s.

Martyn Crucefix, Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

Before his landscapes scorched by war and history, paintings of straw
and glue, your golden hair, Margarethe, before ‘Death Fugue’, I was back at
school, deep winter. In the yard blew a few stray crisp packets; seagulls
pecked at crumbs. The annex and fence had the look of an abandoned
camp, in Polish hinterlands. Through a cloakroom window I peered,
looking for a ghost of myself, then at a ghost of myself, as the sun
poked out from a cloud and the contours of bulimia gazed back, in
sepia tones.

Fokkina McDonnell, Archive

dad’s war
in a mock-leather box
that telegram
home tomorrow
love george

Jim Young [no title]

Since I was brought up with sewing as an everyday occupation I’m surprised to find relatively little writing about sewing, although as my research continues one of the most satisfying finds was an interview with the poet Rita Dove for the Stitch Please podcast. 

The interviewer is wonderfully enthusiastic and starts with an anecdote about meeting Dove in a fabric shop. 

Dove, of course, as an older woman, was brought up with sewing. She talks about sewing being a “sensation of inventiveness”,  remembers the dresses her mother made out of coat linings and making a velvet cape for Venice carnival with a matching waistcoat for her husband. 

I could talk about fabrics, learn about them, their quirks and difficulties all day. In fact, as I write this, I’m missing that. 

Jackie Wills, Rita Dove, Rosa Parks, sewing and poems

my brother was a monk I was a musician
now we gumption
through the trees our horse hooves
clop clopping our brains fucked
with news we wriggle
in this New American Church

put our heads
together tether the breath breathe in
breathe in breathe in
pick up a hymnal

Rebecca Loudon, April 1, 2025

I have a modest goal this month of sharing a poem a day from the pile of books beside my desk. Some of these I read in August during the Sealey Challenge. Others — well, it’s about damn time. I may not read a book a day, and I’m not pushing myself to do the usual blog reviews (though some may ensue), just this: one book, one poem.

Today it is Bones in the Shallows: poems from Mission Creek by Seattle poet Tito Titus. I reviewed his I can still smile like Errol Flynn (Empty Bowl Press, 2015) a few years back.

Tito Titus’s Mission Creek is located near Cashmere, Washington, and runs into the Wenatchee River. (Forgive me if I have any of this wrong.) As the title, Bones in the Shallows, suggests, the creek disappears every summer, drained by drought, by natural disasters, by greed. And in this slim book the creek, its creatures, and the people whose lives are lived on its banks are lovingly chronicled. Nature can heal us, Titus all but says, but only if we don’t destroy it first.

Bethany Reid, National Poetry Month: poetry book #1

“Tempo” is a measured, upbeat collection, with more than a dash of earnestness. Like Mary Oliver’s “There is only one question:/ how to love this world,” Coppola asks readers how to simply be and focus on the moment, savouring the present and asking for readers to coexist and respect the natural world. It’s a world that includes storms and floods as well as sunlight dappling through green leaves.

Emma Lee, “Tempo” Lucia Coppola (Kelsay Books) – book review

The Gods of Winter by Dana Gioia
This is an older poetry collection by Gioia, who has written much. I was interested to read this after learning it was written after he lost a son to SIDS at 3 months old. His collection is infused with this loss, but not overwhelmed by it (like my work in progress, to be honest!). I admire his ability to write formal poems, and this collection shows his range. […]

I have a poem in a special project – Poems for Life with Let Go the Goat
My doctor encouraged to abort my daughter Kit when she was diagnosed with her heart condition in utero, and, though we only had six months with her outside the womb, I will never regret choosing life.

Renee Emerson, Have you seen the White Whale?

My book is finally out! I am both anxious and excited—it seems that every time I publish a book, I immediately think of changes I’d like to make. And when the book arrives with its shiny new cover, I am overwhelmed by a sense of nausea and doubt. At least now, I know that’s just part of my process. And I know I’m not the only one. I have heard stories of poets like Clark Coolidge who would edit his books on the shelves of bookshops.

Nin Andrews, Son of a Bird!

I’m not getting squared somehow in the manuscripts underway. I drop a plumb bob and there’s a slant. Is it overwriting? Is there an omission I need to see? How far down do I need to rebuild?

I hold poems at a distance. I can’t get intimate with my poems. Is it a performance anxiety that I see the words through others eyes before my own? I’m too destination/objective minded instead of process-minded. Editing before speech. Could be. Or.

To get out of a rut you need to jolt your schema, get a new influence, new experience or realization. […]

There’s still movement from VerseFest with Phil Hall and Eileen Myles, workshops and listening to their readings.

They are letting things in. Speaking out for the rightness of the extraneousness.

Poetry is not only an act of narrowing down, curating control & shutting out, but seeing, being, allowing in.

Pearl Pirie, Reopenings vs Closure

Poems eat us. Alive or dead, doesn’t matter to them.
Poems swallow the great nowheres of the world.
Poems deceive you, persuade you, tell you imagined truths.
Poems rage, ignore, do what they want.
Poems have no conscience, no guilt, no shame.
Poems bring your darkness into light and when your time in light is done
Poems take you back to darkness.
Poems know how to defend themselves.

Bob Mee, POEMS AND A SELF-PORTRAIT FOR A 72ND BIRTHDAY

Somehow, we have crested into April and National Poetry Month. With work obligations, wedding plans, and the downfall of democracy doomscroll (the DODD I’m now calling it), I am doing nothing in particular beyond my usual to celebrate this month (though that usual is usually a lot anyway.) I am finishing up a short series I’ve been working on and getting ready to start something new. Today, I paged through the stack of books on my shelves that somehow have my name on their spines and marveled, once again, how I have managed to have so many words in me, much less get them out on the page and into book form. This is especially true of COLLAPSOLOGIES and RUINPORN, both of which are a bit longer than other books and feel like companion books ins some way (and not just because of the titles are complimentary.) And even more amazing that I have two other manuscripts in their final stages of development. 

Outside of writing, I have many spinning thoughts on things I’ve seen and absorbed recently that are here then gone before I can commit them to the page more in-depth. One was the series of David Lynch screenings we’ve been enjoying at Alamo that most recently gave me a chance to see Mulholland Drive, my favorite Lynch hands down, on the big screen. Lynch is all dreamscape and little connective logic, which I feel is so much what I’ve been trying to capture in writing but always somehow fall short. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/3/2025

Happy National Poetry Month, everybody!

Working in collaboration with Pennington Public Library in New Jersey, my wife and I installed 10 of my poem signs at a place called Sked Street Park for the delight of visitors and passers-by. They will be on display all month. […]

high noon . . . / climbing the sky / a little spider

Bill Waters, National Poetry Month @ Sked Street Park

When and how were you introduced to haiku & Japanese poetry forms?

Since the early 2000’s, I have attended regular open mic events in our city. At these open mics, I was introduced to haiku and senryu by Irene Goals, who has become a dear friend. Her haiku journey started at age 16 and she was well-versed in what the writing of haiku and other forms entailed. I had a hard time grasping the fundamentals for several years, but thankfully she never gave up on me. She saw I was serious about learning the way and mentored me. It was Irene who introduced me to the work of Roberta Beary as well as others. I think it’s fair to say Roberta Beary is my creative standard for haibun. After reading one of her haibun in Rattle, I was hooked. I continue to expand my attempts in Japanese poetic forms. Currently, I am working to improve my grasp of tanka.

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

I used to think people who say, “Well, my process is…” were a bit pretentious. But when I realised that I, too, actually have a process with writing haiku, I had to shut my own self up. My process of writing haiku is the centering of my thoughts, slowing my breathing, opening my senses, taking the time to see things around me with a deeper awareness and observation, letting myself feel the world in that moment, and feel my place in the world—all of this preparation is a big part of what I like about haiku. The opening of mind and memory, surprising myself with the words that come to me, and the deep appreciation for my surroundings: all of this is a gift to me from haiku.

Jacob D. Salzer, Vera Constantineau

Ah-LEE-nah. Is it wonderful to hear my name pronounced correctly, wherein “correctly” is defined as the way it is pronounced in my native (and very minor) language? Does the thrill of hearing myself pronounced in my first language relate to the power to be one simple thing, one Alina Stefanescu, one constant and stable self? And is there—beneath that thrilling presumption, perhaps— a refusal to be known as one of you, as among you, in your presence, in your language —known as spoken and held in your mouth?

As a reader, it is not your job to acknowledge me, to affirm me, or even to perceive me correctly. I believe that such expectations set us up to fail in beholding one another. It is too much to ask of any human. I keep thinking of Beckett’s Godot and the firmament, and the constant question that the two old friends, waiting, ask one another. The endless repetition: Who am I to you? Who will we be to one another? 

To be read is one way of knowing. To be pronounced is another. To be remembered, well, to be remembered as both a blessing, and a curse in any language.

Alina Stefanescu, What’s in a name?

The first full-length collection by American poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson, following the chapbooks Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna*, 2023) and saltsitting (g l o s s, 2020) as well as the co-authored (as mouthfeel) Consider the tongue with S*an D. Henry-Smith (Paper Machine, 2019), is FLAG (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), a striking collection of prose lyric that writes on boundaries, borders and history, elements that read a bit more charged during the current geopolitical climate. “Sometimes there are no words or / the words simply are not the right / ones.” she writes, as part of the opening section. “Or sometimes the words don’t / match, or they jumble. It’s okay, it’s / alright, it’s all flow. Flow, flow, flow.”

Set in six sections—“Untitled,” “Land mouth,” “The Black Bettys,” “One wild blue day,” “Flag” and “Slow coups”—each section rides an unfolding, an unfurling, of accumulations set as individual prose blocks, allowing the music of these lyric narratives a kind of propulsion. As she offers as part of the first section: “It bears repeating that Toni Morrison / said all water has a perfect memory / and is forever trying to get back / to where it was. Writers are like / that: remembering where we were, / what valley we ran through, what / the banks were like, the light that / was there and the route back to / our original place.” She writes of history, slavery and arrival, and the ongoing impacts of that history, little of which has been properly acknowledged by the descendants of the perpetrators. “Certain facts stand.” Or, further on: “Some of us can be traced by how we / arrived—which way up or down. Some / of us don’t remember. Simply can’t.”

Moving from American border space through “Louisiana and Mississippi,” south to Guyana and the “Meeting of Waters in Brazil,” Jackson’s text is lively, powerful and performative; bearing an incredible weight with a music and craft that provides such a quality of light. I would suspect such a collection equally comfortable on the stage as it is on the page, and an adaptation for the theatre wouldn’t be impossible to imagine. Composed through an array of short narrative bursts that string and sing together to form something greater, Jackson’s FLAG articulates a conversation around borders and depictions, notions of country and self-description, and how often that narrative contradicts, and so often at the expense of the very populace they claim to protect. FLAG weaves a variety of histories, music and story, providing an incredible collage-effect of fierce intensity. This is a remarkable book.

rob mclennan, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, FLAG

The past week gave me riches galore; though I am somewhat poorer in the pocket for it, my cup runneth over in about every other way. It’s true that often, lately, I’ve felt that I am living in “interesting times” that are all too much and too awful to contemplate for long. Then again, I could have been alive (possibly quite briefly!) during Boccaccio’s time and weathering the bubonic plague. Thanks to The Decameron, readers later in history have been able to get a picture of what people were thinking about and imagining–or trying to escape–when things were truly terrible all around. And while I’m not pollyanna-ish about the present, I do feel grateful that I live during an era when travel to distant places is possible and rather speedy, that books are readily available, and that some of the wealthy people of the not-too-distant past decided that philanthropy included funding libraries, gardens, and museums for the average citizen to visit and enjoy. Current billionaires, please take note!

What the week entailed was a trip to Los Angeles to visit my eldest child and, while there, to spend a morning at the AWP conference book fair. Riches indeed! I “packed light” to be sure I had space in my carry-on for poetry books, which thankfully tend to be slim paperback volumes. I bought almost 20 books, I confess. So I came home weighted with literary riches, and while at the convention managed to connect (however briefly) with numerous poet colleagues. A shout-out here to Lesley Wheeler, whose book I had to purchase online because Mycocosmic had sold out! Congratulations, and I cannot wait to read it.

Ann E. Michael, Riches

One of the things that I love about my job, even now I work full time in a university is that no day is the same. Sometimes I get asked what a poet does, most often by my dad, who is still outraged about the time I answered his question by saying “I took a full stop out of a poem and put it in again”. I said this to annoy him, it’s quite rare that I get a day to obsess about a full stop (or not) but inspired by Clare’s recent posts about working with small children, I thought I’d start a new series of posts called ‘What do poets do all day’ where I will attempt to pull back the veil on what this poet, at least does, on a particular day.

Today my husband and daughter have gone off on a camping trip for a few days, so I have the house to myself, which is very rare. I have the last week of university teaching next week and this term has been so intense and full on that I couldn’t cope with the thought of camping and then rushing back for my teaching, so I have stayed at home.

This morning I got a lift with them out to Luddenden and ran back along the ‘clearway’ a path that runs mostly alongside the train track and means I can avoid the geese on the canal who are going into full on psycho mode, and also avoid the traffic on the main road through the valley. I got back to Hebden, got the bus up the hill (I’m a runner not a masochist!) and then showered, made myself some lunch and then Clare Shaw appeared to do some writing.

Clare announced they were working on the last part of their next collection and I decided I would have a look at my manuscript as well, after a long break from it to start some edits that have been niggling at my mind for a while.

So my editing job today was to sort out “Damaged Cento” which avid readers of this blog will know was published relatively recently in The Stinging Fly, edited by the brilliant poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin.

Kim Moore, What do poets do all day?

One poet who always feels like a rockstar to me is Todd Dillard. I had to leave Twitter when it got x’d, and he’s one of the reasons I miss it, because that’s how I always found out when he had published a new poem. So, I went to his website to see what he’d been up to and was delighted to find him in Waxwing. His poem “No Rush” really hit me hard, especially, especially, especially the ending. I am tempted to include the last few lines here, but the whole thing fits so beautifully together I didn’t want to break it apart. The poem reminded me why I love his work: Dillard has this incredible ability to pull readers in completely, in a way that feels both vulnerable and universal at the same time.

There is something about Waxwing that makes poetry feel like an open-armed invitation. Chill Subs categorizes it as “top-tiered stuff. Not Paris Review but ok.” Its website is clean and professional-looking, and easy to navigate. I first discovered the journal when I was obsessed with another rockstar writer, Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. He published Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in Waxwing, a poem that has everything in it, including some of the sexiest lines of poetry I have ever read. It is a long poem (which he even acknowledges toward the end) that brims with joy and generosity, even thanking the reader for sticking with him:

“…you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.”

You know what I love about sexy poetry? It jolts me awake, snapping me back into the present. It reminds me that I have an animal body. I’m not just a grown-up person with responsibilities, covering myself every morning for work, layering on clothes like dropping down the blackout curtains. A bra to hide my nipples. An undershirt to smooth over the softness of my belly. To keep my pants up, a belt. Then off to work, where I make lists, try not to stress about layoffs, schedule appointments, attempt to budget, and eat something responsible when what I really want is a Pop-Tart.

As much as I love print magazines for pulling me away from screens, sometimes I appreciate the immediacy of finding a sexy poem online. It looks so innocuous…just words on a screen. Of course, words are safe at work. It’s just a poem, right? Except my grip tightens around my phone as I take in the lines. But maybe people will think I am just reading some terrifying news article about the state of the world. Right? Except I’m also blushing.

Becky Tuch, Who Reads Lit Mags? We Do! Spotlight on Little Engines, Waxwing, Blush, Adroit Journal, Citron Review, Epiphany

A garden has lots of failures; seeds that don’t germinate, plants that succumb to frost over winter, vegetables that grow in a way that is most definitely not edible. There is never a year where something doesn’t work out as I hoped. Yet somehow, I accept this transience and uncertainty. When failure occurs, I apologise to the plant I’ve let down (I know, I know) clear it away and move on. I don’t feel personally affronted; I don’t feel that I never want to garden again, and I don’t feel that everyone else knows what they’re doing and I’ll never reach gardening nirvana. Sure, experts exist and show their skills at fancy flower shows but I honestly don’t care. All I’m worried about is my patch of colour and joy, and how to solve the puzzle of keeping geraniums alive over winter. […]

The answer to being content with my writing lies in my garden. It lies in learning to nurture my words with the same care and tenderness I give to an emerging courgette seed (I genuinely cheer when I see them). It lies in accepting failure with a cool understanding that sometimes things just don’t work, that I’ve chosen the wrong place for the plant and I’ll learn for next time. Above all it lies subverting the need for external validation and learning to enjoy the words for the way they delight me, the way they feel on my tongue, the thrill of raising my eyes to sky, seeking the right word and plucking it down to be part of the page.

As the year unfolds, as April continues its journey to the heat and celebration that summer can bring, my goal is to keep my heart light, to keep my mind trained on what brings me joy and to fall back in love with writing. Which I will, if I learn to write with the same perspective I have when I garden.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, On hope and falling back in love with writing

Today is the heavy teaching day, yet my heart is light.  We finish Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” today.  I had thought about canceling it, because it is long.  But we had space in the syllabus, and I didn’t feel like devising a new plan.  I am so glad I went ahead with it.  I had forgotten how delightful it is to teach.

I taught the first part last week, and it made me so happy to hear students still discussing it on the way out of class; as two students tried to determine if the poem was really talking about bestiality,  I thought, I am so happy not to be teaching in high school.  I don’t have to worry about angry parents coming back to demand that I be fired for teaching their students about this poem.

As the semester winds down, particularly in April, I sometimes feel a bit of despair about all that I am not doing, the poems I’m not writing, the journals that will be closing down their reading periods for the year without a single submission from me, the books of poems I’m not reading, the events I didn’t organize to celebrate National Poetry Month.  It’s good to remember all the ways I am celebrating National Poetry Month, by bringing poetry into my classrooms, by reading poetry to students and sparking interest.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Celebrating National Poetry Month with “Goblin Market”

Glowing white below a greyish sky: magnolia buds. Large, spindle-shaped, and vertical. In the week they open, the pink on their petals counts all the more as it almost always rains, and the splendour is less splendid and quickly over; the petals soaked wet. The pedestrians walking past duck under their umbrellas or into their hoods or into their thoughts.

Then all the green, in a shower.

Kati Mohr, Aye.

Consider:
How the night confesses with twinkling stars even as it swallows the flowers.
How the empty quarter of the page cradles your eyes at the end of a sorrowful poem.
How the animal released back into the wild turns once: saying something, saying nothing, perhaps grateful, perhaps disbelieving, perhaps remonstrating, before running away as fast as its legs will carry it.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, But there is the fog

This week: milk-blue light, a bag of grief, demonic possession, the promise of spring, and more. Enjoy.

Morning twilight brings me a sense of peace like nothing else. There is a quiet hope, a sense that the world is surviving, despite everything we place in its way. Birdsong builds, milk blue light rises above the trees and, just for a moment, nothing is spoiled.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Embroidering Hypnagogia

I try not to hate on February. The days do get longer; there’s often some early blooming or greening, a little more birdsong in the mornings, days that aren’t too miserable for walking. But. A lingering malaise of the spirit often natters about in the background of my days. This year, I am trying an infusion of art.

I’ve enrolled in an art class–visual art–drawing, sketching, experimenting with different media such as gouache, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils. I just want something to do with my eyes and hands that isn’t reading, writing, photography, social media/texting. I think of it as an exploration. The workshop I took with Anita Skeen and Cindy Morgan Hunter in October made me realize that using other forms of art might feel good to me, body and soul. This year, starting now (February), I’m taking an 8-week art class with Helene Parnell of Blue Church Art. We shall see how that goes. I am not doing this to create a good “product” but to enjoy the less-intellectual, more freeing aspects of the art as process…the way I did with the collages and book-making in the New Mexico workshop.

Ann E. Michael, Febru-dreary

The writing door in my brain has been closed lately. Slammed tight. Swollen shut. Locked and barred. I have only written two poems since January 1, and one of them is so awful that I shudder to even call it a poem. I have been trying to revise and submit, what I usually do when I hit a rough spot with my writing, but that hasn’t changed anything nor has it fulfilled the urge to make. So, with my writing door closed, I don’t look for a window. I look for another door.

Another door implies that I’m choosing to cross the threshold into a different space. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the computer, reading and responding to subs for Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters, so finding something offscreen with which to engage was appealing. That hallway has led to working on the Februllage collage challenge. From their Instagram page: “Februllage is a collaboration between Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandinavian Collage Museum. This initiative invites collage artists to make a ‘collage a day’ throughout February using our OFFICAL WORD PROMPT CALENDAR – 2025.” They provide a prompt word each day in February, and artists from all over the world, both beginning and experienced, post their results.

Donna Vorreyer, When One Door Closes, Look for Another Door

I don’t have a strong idea of who I am and I change my mind a lot. To have a strong identity of self is to have a steady thought process, a set of similar thoughts about one thing at once. You know who you are because you always think this way or that way. I’m making assumptions here, about people with a strong sense of identity, please do comment with your experiences. The flip-flop nature of my identity is, I believe, in part because I have lots of thoughts and images in my head at once: my brain is like a switchboard on which all the lights are lit up at the same time, each one containing a separate idea. These ideas are usually connected in some way, but that connection might be sensory or imagery based rather than concrete. […]

There are a handful of what I would call ‘self portrait’ poems in the collection. Some of them obviously self portrait poems, unashamedly using this very well used poetic device to explore identity. Some less obvious. Boulder Returning in Echoes of Self is a self portrait poem, Sometimes I pretend I am a Dog is a kind of self portrait poem, Drone is a kind of self portrait poem. There are a lot of poems in which my body is reimagined as nature; as an interface for nature, and my brain as the receptor, the translation place for nature. I like that idea. That is my identity in this moment. Perhaps my identity is not meant to be anything solid, perhaps my identity is meant to be fluid. There are a lot of poems in which identity, female experience and the rural identity are merged and explored, and these are often self portrait type poems. […]

The hearth is my heart. I am
rooms of darkness and forgotten light.
My language is the mid-winter sun.

Whale-backed. Face-down.
Burrowed into by rabbits.
Burrowed into by rats.
Ashes and teeth are my language.

Wendy Pratt, Writing the Poem: Self-Portrait as Bronze Age Burial Mound

The human is a bag of grief; a bag pierced with holes, 
a multi-headed bag, split and split
again.  It still asks questions: Who put the country
in the blender and pressed whirr; who remembers 
when “decent” was what we called citizens?
Who let homo sapiens out of the bag 
to torture their own? 

Jill Pearlman, Bag of Grief

This week has been given to procrastinating, the biting of teeth in pain, two trips to the emergency room to check on an a post-surgical infection, sleepless nights, and cabin fever. The rain has been coming down relentlessly since Wednesday, and I’m struggling to get a full breath. Something is bothering me. And, ironically, if I could just bring myself to write, I might be able to calm myself and breathe.

This is not the first time I’ve had this breathing issue. I first saw a doctor about it when I was in my 40s. It didn’t stop until I quit my job. Then it started again during cancer treatment. It has something to do with losing the hope that I will ever feel moored. Instead I feel that my life is flowing backwards into chaos instead of following a story arc from rags to riches—metaphorical riches—like all those stories I read as a child. The heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess had a martyr-like disposition, had a neighbor with a monkey—though I would absolutely settle for a neighbor with a donkey or some fainting goats.

Can I at least expect a deus ex machina to swing in sometime in the next decade and make me feel like I have “done something with my life” before it’s over?

Memoirs have story arcs about transformations. And while I’ve been trying to shape this memoir, I’ve been writing these poems about wasps, who transform from eggs, to larvae, to wasps; from carnivores to vegetarians. But I’m not sure that I’ve undergone a transformation. Or maybe I’ve undergone several, only to morph back again to my basic insecurities and my dysfunctional methods for compensating.

Ren Powell, Arriving at the Banality of Evil

There’s a moment about 40 pages into Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want that, in retrospect, comes to read like his own description of the book at work, its operating principle, so to speak:

I only know what I think when I’m in conversation. Conversation’s an art: my thinking comes alive in dialog. I don’t have doctrines or positions, I have modes of engagement, situational rejoinders, reaction deformations. It takes two to tangle, three to rumble, four to do the Brooklyn trot.

It’s more than apt that this is the opening to the first response in the first of a number of interviews collected here, conversational interviews where the questions are sometimes longer than the answers. However, the conversational tone spreads far beyond these formal conversations; the whole book is a conversation involving Bernstein, the kinds of poetry (and poets) he wants, the reader and the kinds of poetry he doesn’t want, ‘the button-down decorum that masquerades as serious poetry’.

Billy Mills, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies by Charles Bernstein: A Review

— To whom is the poem faithful?

— To itself.

— Who does it serve?

— That flush of emotion that birthed it.

— Who does it betray?

— The world.

Alina Stefanescu, Sul ponticello.

I mentioned in my last post that January had been intensely difficult, but the weeks since then became even more harrowing. My dad had a heart attack and has been sedated in the ICU with all sorts of tubes keeping him alive. This week, I had the scariest asthma attack of my life and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Yesterday, my son injured his foot in PE and is now on crutches. And, of course, the entire political situation in the US gets more absurd and awful each day.

But just yesterday, my dad was finally able to wake up enough to nod in response to questions and squeeze hands when asked. That feels like a miracle.

I’ve had to miss or cancel many poetry-related things so far this year, but I’ve also had several lovely poetry-related things happen: I had two poems each accepted in the new journals Villain Era and Jackdaw Review, and I was invited to contribute to a really cool project called The Creative Process. Today, I get to read at the first event for the MAW Reading Series, which is run by students in our new M.A. in Writing program. I’ve been writing new things alongside my students during exercises in my writing classes.

Somehow, in the midst of so much bad, there is still creativity, newness, and good.

Katie Manning, Bad News, Good News

i don’t want to buy a mask anymore.
where would i go with it anyway? i am not that man.
i have seen the fires already & they have seen me.
we do not all want the same midnight. oh if only we did.
mine has sugar & a heavy moon. theirs
has a pane of glass from which they dream
of watching us burn.

Robin Gow, guy fawkes mask

Silicon wafers endure a strenuous process of weathering and production in order to become the little aerial landscapes we call microchips. Silicone dioxide is grown or deposited upon it. Lithography occurs, preparing it for light resistance. Parts exposed to UV light are hardened, the other parts to toxic gases. Some parts are doped with chemicals. Aluminum paths are interwoven into the landscape of the microchip. Computational power is pumped into the tiny square. Time and the manipulation of its materials has led to a single microchip possessing up to 50 billion transistors. To hold a microchip on one’s finger is to hold time and its materials.

*

I roll onto my side and focus on Nineveh. Thousands of years before Christ turned water into wine, men turned sand into a metropolis. It is argued that the meaning of Nineveh is “place of fish” or “house of the goddess”. The city, located on the east bank of the Tigris River, most certainly became a place of fish when flooded. Located next to the modern city of Iraq’s Mosul, the metropolis of the city is a backdrop to the diligent uncovering of an ancient civilization.

*

From quartzy river-worn sand comes the microchip. From above, any given microchip resembles an aerial view of a civilized metropolis. The central square, a headquarters or palace. The aluminum rivulets, a meandering river. The interface here, a suburban town. The interface there, a parking lot to the module grocery store. The USB Host is City Hall. The JTAG Interface, a skate park. The WKUP Button, a rotunda or aviary. The LCD Interface, a dairy farm full of cattle. The UART Debug Interface, a playground. And so much green space!

Sarah Lada, Time and Its Materials

Tanka are a vessel for holding tough things. I don’t want to add “in a beautiful way”. I would rather prefer to say “in a way that is necessary”. Sometimes a poem stabs you, shooting out of the dark alley of your being.

bloody uterus,
when will you
finally stop
hurling at me
probabilities—

[…]

the truth is we lost
as we began to look
the other way
augmented
reality

Kati Mohr, … an ode to tanka

I have listened to “Not Like Us” over and over since it came out. I feel this song beating inside me.

There is a reason this song won so many awards. Kendrick Lamar is a talented musician. This song catches the national heartbeat. I am the least qualified person to write about rap/hip-hop, so I won’t try to speak over the voices of lived experience. I know about Drake. I know about the diss war. But if you didn’t know any of that, you would know this song. It is America singing to you. […]

I’m not giving up.

It’s painful now, but the best of us are interested in all the ways that we are magical, unique, and share humanity. That’s why I believe that travel is so great. You meet people who are different than you, who think differently.

The first time you realize there are people in the world that eat with sticks, you think, “Wow, all this time, I’ve been stuck with these metal implements? I could have been eating with those cool sticks!”

The first time you go to a fancy person’s house, you think, “You have got to be kidding! How much silverware are you putting on the table?”

I have to say, that’s what I love about Red Hen’s current board. A group of people curious about books, stories, how the world works, and how to make it better.

That’s what makes life so amazing. Learning about the forks and sticks and the napkins folded like flowers, and the platypus, and the mangrove swamps, white dolphins, and the rings around Saturn, and all those wild stories waiting to be written down and read.

Yes, they are not like us. We could learn from them. They could learn from us. We could all sit around the campfire and share food and listen to music and tell stories like we did at the beginning of the world. 

Kate Gale, “Not Like Us” and the national heartbeat

— Let something call to you — a beautiful or frivolous object, a word, a picture, and then follow it, learn about it, ask questions about it. Maybe it’s a glitter ball, maybe it’s a typewriter.

— Disco balls or Glitter balls were patented in 1917, used in nightclubs in 1920. We know them from the movie Casablanca, and we remember Madonna’s disco ball entrance.

— Kingsley Amis called the typewriter an “alphabet piano.”

— In her book The Art of Resonance, Anne Bogart reminds that “the typewriter is a transformation modelled upon a piano.”

— The Gen AI gang like to quote (or paraphrase, let’s be real) T.S. Eliot (have they ever read Eliot? they might enjoy The Wasteland lol) who said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better or at least something different.” We hear the phrase, “steal like an artist,” often enough. Artists are allusive, though. Artists pay homage.

— Maybe we should all start imagining the phrase, “steal like a librarian.” You know, add the footnotes, the citations, the bibliography, the endnotes, the indexes. Still, that’s not really the writer’s or artist’s job. The work of art should make you want to delve, dig deeper into meanings, allusions, subtexts. Look how this worked after Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime gig.

Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes – Typewriters and Pianos

It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it — its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow — is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a “wave in the mind” — the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable. […]

as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:

The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times… I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging — which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical — things.

In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature (public library):

HOW POETRY COMES TO ME

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Complement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world.

Maria Popova, Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force

I was thinking about [Hilary] Mantel’s description of demonic possession this week partly because I’ve been rereading several of her books, but also because I’ve been thinking about different types of religious poetry, and especially about how women (in particular) describe encounters with the Muse, a kind of supernatural or spiritual experience which often combines a kind of possession with a story about origins — what it was that made the poet a poet. (Mantel’s story is horrible, but it, too, is a kind of explanation.) I am particularly interested in examples which (like Mantel’s descriptions of encountering the demonic) are largely unironic.

When I asked this question on social media, several people wrote mentioning Jo Shapcott’s poem, ‘Muse’, which is clever and memorable but not exactly what I mean. Her poem relies upon the modern sense of a ‘Muse’ as a (real and human) person who inspires another’s art and who is, very often though not always, also a lover or at least a person of, as it were, erotic interest. Typically, a male artist has a female muse and the wit of Shapcott’s poem lies partly in the reversal of that — though I also like the way the beloved is compared to a dreaming dog, lost (like the poet) in its own passion of pursuit.

Obviously sexual passion has overlaps with spiritual experience, and for many contemporary poets perhaps an erotic metaphor is the most accessible way to approach the mystery of inspiration. But when I asked the question I was interested in more literal — and therefore, I think, in a contemporary context, much more surprising — ways of imagining this sort of supernatural or religious experience of encountering an external power. I am particularly interested in poets who find ways to write about this sort of encounter as straightforwardly as Mantel does: the opposite of the sort of wishy-washy ‘spiritual-by-numbers’ sprinkling of vague profundity which is surely one of the most irritating features of a lot of contemporary Anglophone poetry.

Victoria Moul, Muses and demons

Surely we all have one or two Faber anthologies edited by Geoffrey Grigson on our shelves? Love Poems, Popular Verse, Reflective Verse, Nonsense Verse, Poems and Places, Epigrams and Epitaphs . . . As a critic he often wielded a savage power through his magazine New Verse. And as a big beast on the literary scene of the early 1980s, Hermione Lee interviewed him on Channel 4. But since his death in 1985, he’s better known merely as the husband of Jane Grigson, the celebrated cookery writer. His own poetry has been neglected which made John Greening’s 2017 Selected Poems from Greenwich Exchange a welcome opportunity to re-consider it. I think Grigson’s contrasting themes were established early on. The influence of two great poets (not Eliot, not Yeats) is clear from the start and it may be that the limits of Grigson’s poetic achievement and the absence of much development in his style, are because he never chose one path or fully escaped either. […]

‘To Wystan Auden’ records the moment Grigson learned of Auden’s death in the “English September” of 1973. His admiration for the younger poet is fulsome. With the appearance of his early work, Auden became “living’s healer, loving’s / Magician”. From the other end of the temporal telescope, we can now see what the young Grigson gleaned from Auden’s poetry:

You were our fixture, our rhythm,
Speaker, bestower, of love for us all
And forgiving, not condemning, extending
To all who would read or would hear
Your endowment of words.

For all Auden’s own protesting about poetry making nothing happen, for Grigson, “time, after you, by you / Is different by your defiance”. One might ungratefully gripe that these are rather vague compliments from one poet to another. But Greening quotes Grigson suggesting that Auden’s achievement was in destroying “a too familiar, too settled monotony in manner and subject”. This is undeniable and this selection shows Grigson following Auden’s lead, yet at the same time, through his life, also being drawn back to a different, more traditional poetic style in the model of Hardy.

Martyn Crucefix, Remembering Geoffrey Grigson

Poets, obviously, display varying means, foci of attention, strengths, weaknesses. Peter Gizzi’s special strength lies in his ability to transport inarticulate emotions – grief, dread, disorientation, wonder – directly into verbal music. Here I mean music in a very literal sense : ie., the words his poems, though they are words, remain inarticulate. They are sometimes quite moving, as partial songs, untranslatable melodies : yet it seems to me Gizzi attains this state of unrealized elegy – unmastered grief – with a very deliberate poetic method or constructed idiom.

The reader/listener is held fast by this suspended, unrelieved emotion, this unresolved grief – on behalf of the poem. Mute, “unexplained” emotion provides the material foundation, so to speak, for the independence, the hermetic integrity, of the poem-as-poem.

Some critics and commentators have questioned the lack of a clear elegiac “object” of emotion in Fierce Elegy. They have also noted the quick tonal shifts between slangy demotic “street-talk” and refined allusions to past poetic masters. In my view both of these effects are only incidental phenomena, representing a more pervasive stylistic idiom, which Gizzi shares with several other American poets of recent decades. I would (with fear and trembling) label this style postmodern deflection. Here, by “postmodern”, I’m suggesting that the style’s roots extend back to early modernism : the great wave, across all the arts, toward abstraction, autonomy, autotelic hermeticism, free self-realization. And by “deflection”, I suggest this style’s roots go back even further : to the symbolist revolt against “journalism”, the rhetoric of all social collectives – in favor of art-for-art’s-sake and poésie pure, the literary “absolute” of Mallarmé and (to some degree) Rimbaud.

Henry Gould, “Forget daylight, I prefer a dark tenderness”

A daughter-father relationship and threats to a way of life mingle in Fat for Our Stories by Vivan Faith Prescott, a native of Alaska.  Prescott and her father harvested salmon together; several poems describe that labor, its joys and difficulties.  Others comment more specifically on changes in the climate, leading to a sense of things out of season. The reader learns about both the life of salmon and the concerns of those who depend on them in a series of gentle poems using a variety of forms.

There are many sad notes, like “We were once good at reading weather.” in “Five Degrees Above Normal.” but also hope, as in the end of “On a Variety of Temporal and Spatial Scales”:

The scent of my natal stream
still awakens me, the sea butterfly
still stirs my morning coffee.”

This chapbook is well worth ordering from Green Linden Press, especially for those like me who have not personally experienced a life dependent on nature’s balance.

Ellen Roberts Young, A Chapbook I Recommend

Snow day has landed! Given the wealth of snow we’ve had since Wednesday (a snowfall record over a few days, going back to 2008), the arrival of my first copies of this are absolutely perfect. This is my third title with American publisher Spuyten Duyvil, following How the alphabet was made (2018) and Life sentence, (2019)! This collection is constructed as a kind of sequence of sequences, and includes the title poem, “Snow day” (produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2018), and “Somewhere in-between / cloud” (also produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2019), which was composed for and published as part of Dusie Kollektiv 9: “Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween”—A Tribute to Marthe Reed (1958-2018). 

rob mclennan, Some updates: new poetry book (Snow day) + next week in Vancouver

I have finally again (again) started a daily writing practice — just five or ten minutes in which I note what I’ve been seeing, what I’ve been thinking about. I’ve resisted it even though I know it feels good to do, to take notice of what I’m noticing, if not living an examined life, the kind worth living, according to Socrates, at least a half-awake one.

I’ve been sitting on this Tony Hoagland poem for a long time, trying to figure out exactly what I want to say about it. It’s an easy poem, maybe a little too self-conscious, a little too wink-and-nudge. But I give Tony Hoagland a lot of leeway, as his poetry tends to be open-armed and gleeful anyway. (Plus, I have soft spot for him since that day in a workshop after I read my draft, he said, “Yeah, now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.” The guy can do no wrong now. Well, I mean, he’s dead, so, yeah. Rest in peace.)

Anyway, it’s a poem of notice. A narrator noticing themself noticing, finding themself finding, and writing it all down, nosing it all down the page, but thinking, in the end, of you, reader. Finding in the end of the journey of writing that they’ve discovered a poem, and in the poem they’ve found you peeking over their shoulder. And in the poem Hoagland picks up the poem and gives it to you. Here, he says. Lookee here.

Marilyn McCabe, Once in a cool blue middle of a lake

Lots of people liked my post last month featuring a week’s worth of short poems from recent reading: [link]

So I thought I’d give it another spin. My model was the late-night radio show where the DJ has the freedom to play a mix of things without much more comment than the name of the track and the artist. This time, I’ve widened my range from recently-published books to include poems from magazines too, and sprinkled in a few links.

*

I found it hard to pick a favourite from Ian Duhig’s excellent new collection, An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador). So I decided to go with one that continues last week’s post about my discovery, as a teenager, that other poets sometimes made fun of Ted Hughes. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #28: Animal Facts

One Language (SmithǀDoorstop, 2022, available here), the debut collection by the photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, intermittently dazzles with its poems from far-flung warzones, as in ‘Welcome to Donetsk’:

You teach me this wartime trick –
to look for living pot plants
in the windows in Kievska Avenue.
Most are crisped and brown.

But one green geranium
and a succulent spider plant
offer proof of life
for the person who waters them.

It’s interesting that she writes ‘for the person’ and not ‘of’, and in so doing shifts the perspective from the external observer to the unseen person inside.

Despite their most serious subject-matter, some of the poems feel inconsequential and fragmentary, like a diary haphazardly moulded into poetry. The most affecting highlight is a 12-part sequence, ‘Stories No One Wants to Hear’, recounting, in perhaps necessarily prosaic poetry, key incidents where, for better or worse, violence played a part in her life. I was left feeling that where she does tell her important stories well, Taylor-Lind might have rendered them more successfully still as a prose memoir, in the manner of Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, because it feels like she has a lot more to say, e.g. regarding her position as one of the few females in her profession.

Matthew Paul, February reading

Long ago, in a less digital world, I wrote things and sent them through the mailbox to a few print magazines to see if they wanted to publish them. I enclosed a self-address, stamped envelope (the old SASE — anyone remember that acronym?) and waited, often for months. Most of the time, my poems came back to me like homing pigeons in the old SASE, sometimes with an editor’s letter explaining why they weren’t going to publish them. Once I had a rejection letter from the editor of The Atlantic. I considered framing it. Once I had one from the distinguished editor of Poetry Magazine. Again, frames were considered.

But in today’s digital world, everything is online and happens fast. I send out a batch of poems only to get my rejection — or acceptance — within a few days or weeks. I can post a link to the poem in the online magazine and people can actually read it at the touch of a button. No subscription required.

What I’ve learned from this is that writing — especially poetry — is for sharing. For me, it’s not about collecting distinguished credits but about being read by actual people. Many of whom don’t normally read poetry, let alone subscribe to poetry magazines.

The comments I get back teach me things. The biggest thing I’ve learned from publishing my poetry is to be generous. Writing a poem is a way of giving something to the world. It’s about the reader, not about me, though it usually starts being about me and my memories, dreams, and thoughts. The fluidity of publishing my poetry in the world is now a conversation, and as a poet, I become part of a community. I highly recommend it!

Rachel Dacus, Publishing My Poetry Online

I have a structural problem, with books. So far my digital storage isn’t jammed but there is no way in sweet purgatory that these stacks are all going into those shelves. They have overrun the box capacity and heaven help but 4 more at least are coming by mail this month. Not to mention the wish list and the inevitable caving in at least some cases.

I have to make some hard calls. No, no, not purge. Probably. Boxing up anthologies and magazines so there is room for novels, history books and single author poetry collections. Even that mitigates little. I could actually box up some to sell that I expect I won’t read again. I believe I have a box or two that I meant to drop off at a book fair but mislaid when the time came. Or I unconsciously wanted to keep them.

Two walls are covered floor to ceiling in shelves. There’s a lot of windows and few options with quilting supplies also overflowing containment. And now more canvasses, and more embroidery gear. This is getting a little out of hand. But to be surrounded by possibility and options is rather delightful.

Pearl Pirie, Conundrumming

When a dream mates with an anvil, they create the heaviest thoughts.

When conundrums shack up with condominiums, you get troubled dwellings.

What if we could take what we consider to be the worst parts of ourselves and rearrange them into a cosmos where every planet can play any musical instrument with no training?

Rich Ferguson, One of Many Litmus Tests for Longing

You erase a comma. Then put it back.

And then erase it again. You keep wondering — why did you spend this winter writing a book? Because one day we all might burn books for heat. One day we might use books to build rafts. We’ll tether books together to sail to safety.

I think maybe the world will end with dead unread books.

You snap your laptop shut. You go downstairs and switch on the TV. The news is on. There are images of empty supermarket shelves. The newsreader is talking about stockpiling food and medicine. They cut to footage of a couple stockpiling tins. The couple stands side by side and they smile into the camera by a wall of baked beans. They grin down the lens and tell us all at home that they are ready.

I’m ready. The man repeats. We want to be ready. His wife nods. We want to be ready. They say this in unison as they fill plastic storage boxes with tins of baked beans. I think the beans situation is covered now thanks to John and Elaine in Maidstone.

At the end of the world, will baked beans be like heroin? You now imagine swapping a book for a tin of baked beans and wonder, which book would you sacrifice for a tin of beans? You picture yourself scoring a cheeky hit of beans on toast by a public toilet. Hey man, got any dirty brown sauce?

You switch off the TV and go into the kitchen to make tea. You stare out of the window at the pink and the sky and the light. It is summer but it is February. But it is summer and it is February. And too bright and too warm and too weird and too sunny. It is alarming that they don’t mention this heat on the news. We need sun cream in February. Sun cream in February. And my neighbour is having a barbecue in February. And the last super tusker elephant died this February. And it is summer and it is February and it is summer and it is February.

What was the point of writing a book all winter? What is the point of us? When our time is so fractured. Divided. Distracted. Interrupted. Our attention is demanded and demanding attention. Our world is burning, flooding and changed.

But then if not for love, then why are we all here?

Salena Godden, Sun Cream In February

You know you’re only mortal and not a god
           but that doesn’t mean you know nothing 
about how language is right now being used 
           to camouflage ignorance as virtue, villainy
as self-control, avarice as acumen. Whole 
           planes collide mid-air or roll over in flames 
on the tarmac. Lawyers stutter I don’t know 
           rather than tell the truth.

Luisa A. Igloria, If You Know, You Know

The job of the politician is to try to find practical solutions for these problems. The job of the poet though is to help express how we feel, both individually and collectively. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Perhaps that’s why I felt particularly drawn to this poem by Cynthia Atkins, because she takes this difficult subject and handles it so effectively. […]

The poem comes from a book where “God” appears as multiple objects in the modern world. I interpret the title of this poem, “When God is a Bullet” to be a nod to the many powers – good and evil that fill the world but are beyond our control. In this case, the bullet is a god that takes away life and is beyond understanding.

It feels like the speaker is outside the situation looking in, trying to understand the boy who does the shooting. This is difficult which is why the speaker turns towards metaphor.

“This is the scar of the battle lost to each failed self. . . This is the blemish larger than a shrunken world. . . A jacked-up car . . . This is a storm in a damaged town.”

But this is also a real person. The speaker posits a boy who feels excluded, isn’t invited to parties. She’s trying to understand what causes him to become a shooter. But rather than trying to distance the boy and other the boy, she looks at how he is familiar, part of a family, part of a school.

Tresha Faye Haefner, When God is a Bullet

Someone wrote me a question about what her young daughter should read, if she enjoys my poetry, but couldn’t find other poetry like mine. I thought hard about the poets that had inspired and influenced me when I was a young girl, although I was certainly a somewhat unusual reader – Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, E.E. Cummings, and Louis Simpson as a ten year old. I was reading my mom’s college poetry textbooks and encountering T.S. Eliot and Yeats and Robert Frost. In college, definitely inspired by Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, Margaret Atwood, and of course, Sylvia Plath. If my own work seems somewhat unusual, it could be because it was the kind of poetry I wanted to read and couldn’t find – funny and pop culture-y and dark and not afraid. Of course, besides poetry, I was very influenced by mythology and fairy tales, prose like A.S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood and Terri Windling’s collection “The Armless Maiden” and later on, Kelly Link. I read a lot of male science fiction writers as a kid, from Isaac Asimov to Ray Bradbury, but also read female science fiction writers, like Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L’Engle. What recommendations would I make to a young person today? There are so many more young women writing and getting published than when I was a kid.  Who would you recommend?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Supporting Each Other in Difficult Times, and Recommendations for Young Poetry Fans

I wrote a draft of a daft poem after hearing a discussion on The Verb between Ian and Cecilia Knapp that used the phrase heavy lifting. The draft mentions reviews. I then looked at my RSS feed after the show and saw an article by Emma Lee about reviews. All this in a week when I thought about getting back into the reviewing game again. I’m still choosing not to as I don’t care what I think at present, so why should anyone else?  

Mat Riches, (not) Under the influence (aka Two Timming)

A couple of years ago I wrote a pair of Sukkot poems, Fragile and Rejoice. In the manuscript for my next book of poetry, they’re a two-part poem titled “Shekhinah says.” You could read them as written in God’s voice to us, or as written in a human voice to a human beloved. (Or both at once.)

In recent months composer Adam Green (who is also the music director at my synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires) wrote a musical setting of those two poems. And yesterday, at our belated Tu BiShvat concert, the two-movement piece was premiered by the CBI Choir. 

It’s an incredible honor to have a composer write music to uplift my words. Melody and rhythm give them a whole new layer of meaning. I love that one piece feels wistful and soft, like watercolors or fog in the valleys — and the other, written in 5/4, feels multilayered, surprising, like it ends too soon.

Every time we sing these poems, I’m hyperlinked to what I was feeling when I wrote them. I can call the exact feelings to mind and heart. And now the poems also have another layer, because I hear them in harmony! Adam also switched the order of the two poems, which (for me) subtly changes their arc.

When I wrote the poems, I was praying for a trajectory from fragility to rejoicing. I began with what’s broken, and closed with the hope of wholeness. Adam’s choice to put them in the other order makes an existential point: even within wholeness, we are fragile. But in that fragility, we are not alone.

Rachel Barenblat, New music for Rejoice / Fragile

February always brings lovely things in this household – a birthday, a wedding anniversary and the promise of Spring in the offing. I’ve already been spring-cleaning my poetry folders, and feeling rather humbled as regards my poor submissions habit. I seem to have a reputation as a submissions queen, because of my spreadsheet. But there’s that expression ‘physician heal thyself’ (where the heck does that come from?). A number of people have accosted me recently to ask about magazine submissions, and I’ve had to admit I haven’t submitted anything much for ages. Why? I suppose it’s partly because I feel there are so many up and coming poets whose work is appearing everywhere, I’m feeling my work might be a bit ‘has been’. But I know that’s stupid really, because for all the ‘fast fashion’ that exists in the poetry world, decent writing is still appreciated. Plus, my first collection is about to launch, so this is no time to wallow in self-flagellation. I guess I’m making excuses for being a bit lazy. Having Sharon Black of  Pindrop Press critique my poems for the collection, in great detail, has given me a bit of a kick up the bum I suppose. As a result, I’ve pulled together all the poems I’ve written over the last few years that I’ve abandoned, sometimes after multiple failed submissions, others that I just lost interest in too soon, and have them now all in a  2025 folder ‘to be worked up’. There are over seventy poems or proto-poems in that folder. I picked one out randomly and (without planning to) spent a whole day playing with it. I have plenty of material to revisit!

Robin Houghton, Readings, giving myself a talking-to and some early Spring cleaning

Maybe I’m waiting for spring, as I always am, but in a new way, to uncurl and find a new appetite to turn towards. A new sun. 

I sometimes tell myself I’m a fool, an old fool, that life is slipping by. But I know I have so much going on in the reality of my life, my kids’ lives, that maybe I need this silence to conserve my energies. 

My writing has also changed. I’m writing love poems to no one, to an invisible someone. I’ve been single for about 6 years, there’s no one on my horizon and until this year my ‘love’ poems have been angry or happy to be defiantly single. 

Now, what I write is overwhelmed with a different emotion, gazing with love into that dark stillness I’ve built in my head. I don’t know what I see, but the lines that came to me today have that hope of spring in them. 

Gerry Stewart, A Change of Appetites

I’ve been in London for a few days, to see family and for a reading at the Broadway Bookshop, a lovely place on Broadway Market in Hackney. Also an appearance on Poetry Breakfast, on the erotic, for Valentine’s Day. Back the day before yesterday, now slipping back into my usual writing: mornings writing and reading, afternoons: maybe more writing, maybe biking (in the Vaucluse, or walking (Paris) plus a Tai Chi class two evenings a week. I’m reading Heaney’s translations, Will Eaves’ new collection, working on Leopardi. Also reading Eli Weisel And the latest PNReview. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. My edition, which I bought second hand, much foxed, a little brittle. It includes the shorter poems that William was working on in the period she was writing her journal.

Weather cold and sunny. There’s a church (St Sulpice) across the street, and yesterday a team of rock climbers with helmets and ropes began placing climbing ropes on the church.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Paris, Tuesday 18 February, 2025

I ask, “With what eyes should poetry look at the harshness of our world?”

I reply, “With eyes that refuse to look away.”

[…]

I ask for a poem like the skin of a
snake. The kind that will be moulted,
will be renewed, as wounds heal, as
spring comes, as a dark nimbus must
rain, as words must make way for
words, as life must make way for life,
as love must make way for love.

The sun tells me even a lament must
end in hope. Derive a possibility.
Everything is moving, I say. Snakes
and worlds and wounds and water
and words. And love. Look how hard
everything is trying to fall into place.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Not that kind of a love poem

This week: inhabiting dissonance, time’s ragged lace, the museum of a life, the sexiness of grammar, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m inhabiting dissonance, here in scary October. How can I plan roadtrips, hope for the little poetry world to pay my little book a little attention? I just booked tickets to New Orleans, where Chris has a conference this January and I’ll go along for the fun of it–then, before I hit “confirm,” really looked at the date. January 5th. I remember scrolling through Twitter nearly four years ago, before the news sites picked up the story, then texting my friends that a violent mob was storming the Capitol, and they answered with the “ha ha” reaction button. What will happen in January 2025?

Even when I’m not hopeful, though, it feels important to behave hopefully: to vote. To write spells for connection and peace and lucky turns of the wheel. To stay open to students and strangers, knowing that being your best self sometimes brings out the best in others. Yesterday, after grading, my spouse and I took a walk in the woods, tried a new brewery, and went out for Mexican food. This has been our ordinary Saturday thing since the kids moved out. It was lovely, even though I doomscrolled in the passenger seat all the way home.

Lesley Wheeler, Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)

Last Wednesday, October 16, 2024 wasn’t just a red letter day, it was a fully-colored-and illustrated-initial-with-flowers-and-animals-and-shining-gold-leaf day! I’m so incredibly lucky and honored to share “Dead Reckoning” was featured on Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets!

My most heartfelt gratitude to Sarah Gambito for inviting me to send work. It’s a grief poem, which feels right with everything happening now, the horrors in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, the escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula, the hurricanes that devastated communities here in the US. So much loss in the world. So much suffering. But also joy, and beauty, and light.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

What right does a poem have to fly? Isn’t
it the privilege of birds, of angels, of comets
that race through our visible sky? The poet
wants to hold the poem like a mirror. A
mirror that swallows the truth: every
depravity, every debasement, every sin.
The poem is overwhelmed. Its lines bleed.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Look! The ninth poem is airborne!

It’s been less than a week since my mother left this earth at the age of 87. It’s new, this kind of grief, at times sharp and fresh, then dull and distant. It’s too early to think of seeking any sort of solace. Solace from what, I ask myself. How will I ever recover? Is recovery even possible? […]

I saw my mother a few bours before she died. She was still my mother then, even though I could plainly see that she was dying. Her breath came deep and slow. I touched her arm, which was warm, a little too warm, actually. I placed my hand on her forehead the way she’d done to me countless times when I was a child, checking for a fever. Her skin stretched across her skull in lines.

I saw my mother’s body a few hours after she died. Her wrinkles had vanished. Her olive skin was an unearthly pale green. Again, I placed my palm on her forehead. It was still warm. That broke me, that meager warmth, that diminishing sign of life. I held her hands. I waited for tears, which came briefly and then stopped. I felt an unreasonable anger at the sun, which shone brightly through the blinds hanging in front of the window over her bed. Tactless star, I thought. I wanted clouds, rain, fog, anything but this absurd light.

Erica Goss, Since my mother died

History as collective dream; memory as a story with you in a major role.
As a child, you couldn’t bear separation from mother. What did mother feel?
You were warned about leaving, felt guilt at leaving others behind.

*

Such pain when the milk dries up, when mother changes out of nursing clothes.
The world is always warning about leaving. Who has not been left behind?
Let’s say only the whole have never been left, have never been cloven.

*

But who has never been left behind, or even threatened with leaving?
Who can say they’ve always been whole, never been broken?
The seasons are always singing songs about return.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Timelessness

What would be crux. Lap maker, taker. Open
to flights of love, supple translucence,
tasty weightless all supple flesh. Open-legged

to deep creation, crowning heads of my babies.
Wandering poet, shooting from the hip.

Jill Pearlman, Dear Hip

I wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems about my children the past few years, trying to catch my breath. It isn’t the anniversary yet, but it’s close enough for me to feel it, so I’ll share one from the collection I’ve written about Kit, this poem about when I was still able to imagine that everything could be ok:

[…]

I would grip the steering wheel
and drive as fast as I dared,
my child unaware of the death
that pursued her, and I pretending
it wasn’t with us even there.

Renee Emerson, (a departure from book reviews) thoughts on five years since she died

W: Do you want to hear my evil laugh? Me: After you play the Bach. W and I discuss a lot of things during his violin lesson. We’ve talked about poetry, painting, dance, sculpture, (his favorite story is me getting thrown out of the museum for sticking my fingers in Balzac’s eyeholes) architecture, mathematics, history, science, running, swimming, and the ever looming OUTSIDE (he’s terrified of the OUTSIDE.) We talk about insects, books, composers, color, clouds, boats, snails and the fact that making a lanyard is never going to really be a fun thing to do. Today, W had this note for me: WRTING MAKES ME NRVS I had to agree.

Rebecca Loudon, Functioning as an adult

I am intrigued by this second collection (and the first I’ve seen) by Carlisle, Pennsylvania poet Jordan Windholz, The Sisters (Black Ocean, 2024), following on the heels of his full-length debut, Other Psalms (Denton TX: University of North Texas, 2015). The Sisters is an assemblage of short prose poems interspersed with illustrations, and includes this brief caveat in the author’s “Notes & Acknowledgments”: “Written first as bedtime stories for my daughters, these poems were largely private affairs until they weren’t. I owe almost everything to Erin Ryan for her attentive reading and care, and for her urging me to put them out in the world.” Across fifty-four prose poems, Windholz offers such fanciful titles such as “The Sisters in the Emperor’s Gardens,” “The Sisters as Points of Infinite Regression,” “The Sisters as Two among the Many,” “The Sisters as the History of Blue” and “The Sisters in the Dream of a Giant.”

These are charming, even delightful story-poems that play with children’s storytelling, and a way of narrative and character unfolding through a sequence of self-contained prose poems reminiscent of Toronto poet Shannon Bramer’s full-length debut, scarf (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2001), or even Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster’s Three Bloody Words (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1996, 2016)—one might also be reminded of Berkeley, California poet Laura Walker’s story (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Victoria, British Columbia poet Eve Joseph’s Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] or New York poet Katie Fowley’s The Supposed Huntsman (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) [see my review of such here]—through shared shades of fable, fairytale and the fantastical. As with any appropriate foray into fable, there are shadows that unfurl, unfold, through these pages, and hardly bloodless, echoing the best of what those Brothers Grimm might have salvaged. “It didn’t surprise them, exactly,” begins “The Sisters as Regicides,” “how cleanly the blade slipped between the bones of his neck, how, with just the slightest heft of their bodies on the hilt, his screaming—like a child’s, really—cratered into a singular whimper, then a wheeze. With his head off, the King—but was it right to call him that now?—was nothing more than what all corpses are: a heap of flesh, a sinewy mess, time’s ragged lace.”

rob mclennan, Jordan Windholz, The Sisters

You know that you’re in the presence of a special talent when you read a collection, and you realise that you have never experienced anything like it before. That was the case for me when I first read Welcome to The Museum of a Life by Sue Finch (Black Eyes Publishing UK, 2024). The collection is split into 7 parts: a foyer, 5 galleries and a gift shop. Each of the galleries contains exhibits, such as a blue apple, a pelican dancing on a patio, a blade of ice and a pound coin, which provide the subjects of anecdotes, sometimes fantastical and sometimes sharply authentic, but always providing the reader with a profound insight into the nature of the human condition.

As in a conventional museum, these exhibits are organised into themed galleries. In Gallery One, we meet exhibits on the subject of childhood. It is portrayed as a time of irrational fears, naivety, recklessness and unrestrained curiosity.  Always written in the first-person, Finch allows us to see her world as a child. For example, in When I Saw Jesus in a Tomato she writes, ‘I ate him; he was a woody version of grass./ I swallowed him hard/ not wanting him to get stuck/ in my throat.’ This is so well observed with its naive fear of getting Jesus stuck in her throat and its description of the taste of a tomato that draws on a narrow frame of reference so appropriate to a child. Above all, Finch presents childhood as a period of infinite curiosity. 

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ by Sue Finch

Make-believe games go a long way toward helping kids develop self-regulation, including reduced aggression, ability to delay gratification, and advancing empathy. One form of make-believe, more common in children who have lots of minimally unsupervised free time, is called worldplay. This is considered the apex of childhood imagination and is linked with lifelong creativity,

Preliminary studies indicate the less structured time in a child’s day, the better their ability to set goals and reach those goals without pressure from adults. Childhood play is even correlated with high levels of social success in adulthood.

And, as if we didn’t already know this, free play generates sheer joy. The BBC series “Child of Our Time” studied play. They found the more children engaged in free play, the more they laughed, particularly when playing outside. The kids who played the most laughed up to 20 times more than kids who played less. This is surely the best reason of all to play.

Laura Grace Weldon, Not Enough Time To Play

The day after the hurricane, I noticed all the acorns and pine cones on the ground.  I decided to pick them up.  I made sure to pick up enough so that each student could have an object.  When I picked them up, I had no idea it would be so long before I returned to my in-person classes. […]

The room was amazingly quiet.  For the first chunk of class time, everyone concentrated on sketching.  And here’s what really astonished me:  no one reached for their phones.  It is the only–and I mean the only–time in the class where no one even considered reaching for their phone.

We did a variety of sketches.  My favorite was a variation on an exercise that we did in a seminary class (which I wrote about in a blog post).  I had them divide the paper into 6 squares.  We sketched for 30-40 seconds and then switched squares–quick, quick, quick.

And then I had them write a description of the object again.  I had the students compare the two writings, and we discussed what they saw.  Some of them said they wrote in more detail after sketching.  Some did not.

We talked about the value of doing something else, like sketching, an activity that wasn’t going to be part of the grade.  I talked about the value of taking a break from intense studying or writing.

In English 101 class, from October 21-Nov. 1, we’re doing a variety of these kinds of approaches, and then students will write an essay about what we did, what they experienced, and analyzing the effectiveness of these activities.  I’ve done variations of this kind of writing project before, and the writing has been phenomenally better than more “standard” essays.

But more important, watching my students sketch and write helps me feel less exhausted.  It helps me feel like we’re doing something post-hurricane to return to normalcy and to affirm the value of writing, sketching, and other endeavors.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing, Sketching, Writing

This will be my fourth full collection, my seventh collection in all, if I include my two short collections, and I feel it marks a change in how I write and where I write from. Though the collection is not about neurodivergence, and I should add the usual imposter syndrome led caveat that I am not officially diagnosed with anything and still awaiting an assessment (and will be for some years to come I imagine), admitting to myself my oddness, accepting myself as different actually freed me to write the way I wanted, or needed to write, it gave me a permission slip to explore creatively and shake up my writing habits. I was no longer writing with the purpose of being a poet, I was writing as art, as exploration and using poetry as the tool to dig. This sounds terribly pretentious, and if you know me you will know that I’m not, but perhaps we avoid talking about poetry or writing as an art form, as something a bit magical. I see a lot online about how to craft a poem, but less about the utterly ridiculous magic that is creativity. Why shouldn’t we admit to the strange, evolutionary trait that we as human beings have, that is to explore and express through a process that is, essentially, observing what are own brains are doing and putting that into a medium that can be shared and communally experienced.

Wendy Pratt, Lifting the Curtain on the Writing Process: Blackbird Singing at Dusk – Five Weeks to Launch Day

Every writer I know wants to improve their work, listen and learn from other writers, generate new work in community, and have time to focus on their practice away from their busy lives. This is easier said than done. Yes, reading helps. We can check out and read craft books and literary criticism from libraries, and we can read our peers widely to learn from them. And many writers have peers for workshopping or quiet writes, but sometimes it’s helpful to get inspired by people outside of your circle.

However, attending writing workshops/conferences/residencies is not necessarily an affordable or time-manageable option. Just a small sampling of popular conferences/workshops bears this out. […]

This is not an argument that everything should be free. Instructors and readers and organizations should be paid for their labor. It is a lot of work to plan and run a course or a workshop, even a generative one. I have spent money to attend conferences like AWP and have found them to be valuable. But unless one is granted a fellowship or a grant, this model is not one that can be accessed by many writers most of the time, especially those writers who are outside of academia and have no funding support for attendance, or those who cannot take two weeks or more away from family or work obligations.

Luckily, there is a veritable treasure trove of free/affordable resources online that can fill some of those needs. I have not even scratched the surface with the list below, but I will share just a few of my favorites. 

Donna Vorreyer, An Embarrassment of Riches

You are particularly known for facilitating ginkō (haiku walks) and workshops at environmental and haiku conferences. I’m curious if you have a saijiki to aid in writing haiku? What books would you recommend for people to become better acquainted with the names of the diverse species of trees, plants, birds, etc.?

Haiku are little poems that showcase a moment in a season. Ginkos are a great way to run into those moments, face to face. As a naturalist, I have a deep sense of the local phenology, the timing and sequencing of these phenomena. I don’t consult a saijiki when writing haiku since I am writing from an outdoor experience in the moment. This autumn, the haiku journal seashores is publishing a saijiki issue which I look forward to reading. I would recommend Bill Higginson’s Haiku World which is a saijiki that offers haiku for each of the highlighted season words.

Climate change is clearly wreaking havoc on local phenology and timing of phenomena. Spring is arriving earlier and autumn later, thus the growing season is getting longer. The traditional saijiki is in constant need of rewriting.

rewriting
the saijiki
climate change

Mariposa 34
Spring/Summer 2016

Truly, the best way to get acquainted with the local plant and animal species is to spend time attentively outdoors. Any naturalist, even with no knowledge of Basho, would advise you to go to the pine to learn from the pine. As I write this passage, the crimson leaves of my dogwood are falling on me in my hammock; Golden crowned and Ruby crowned kinglets are coursing through the remaining foliage of my trees and shrubs; a Blue Jay is calling out, perched on the freshly filled bird bath, alerting others of the presence of water during this big drought; and the paw paw patch is turning a brilliant gold.

While observational knowledge makes one richest, you can use any series of field guides to learn the names of what you are observing. I grew up with the tiny Golden Guide series in my earliest years and graduated later in elementary and middle school to the Peterson Field Guide series. These are typically taxonomically arranged, focusing on groups of organisms (insect, trees, wildflowers, etc.), but habitat guides are out there as well. If your goal is to identify an organism that is right in front of you, I would check out the iNaturalist app, which can be a great aid for identification and linking you to further knowledge about other beings that you meet.

What are a few of your favorite places where you’ve led a ginko walk so far? What made those particular ginko walks and places the most memorable? What are a few of your favorite haiku workshops that you’ve led?

Oh, I have led ginkos in so many locations for several different audiences – haiku poets, educators, and students. For the New York Metro group of the Haiku Society of America, I have led several ginkos in New York City. I think my favorites were on the High Line, an abandoned elevated rail line converted into a nature trail, and Stuyvesant Park. In the latter, we were creating and assembling a gallery of the haiku following our ginko. One of the maintenance staff of the park started removing them, and I confronted them, peacefully, telling them that my research showed that there were no rules against this. I was told it was trash and that her job was to simply clean up the park. We made a bargain on the spot – she let this activity continue, and I removed all the haiku at the end of the event. The poets left, and I was slowly removing these, when a flashy jogger stopped in her tracks to read two adjacent haiku, illuminated by the sun, while jogging in place. When she read the second haiku, she stopped jogging, reached into her back pocket, pulled out her cellphone and took a photo. I wished the other haiku poets had witnessed this.

Jacob D. Salzer, Jeff Hoagland

Helping Kath at a yarn show on Saturday helped me to get out of my own head this week. Before we set off, I drank water from my ‘There is Only Time’ glass. It holds just enough water to hydrate me before a trip and also carries a good message about time. Words on it include, “There is no such thing as down time/There is only time.” I like the design, and I always remember to wash it by hand so that I don’t wash the art and writing off. Having said that, I might once have learned that lesson the hard way.

After I had helped Kath to set up her patterns, I went for a walk and saw a beautiful heron. Two egrets first and then the grey majesty of a wading heron. The sight of a heron is always wonderful to me, but this felt particularly apt because Nigel Kent’s review of ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ had just been published, and one of the poems he mentioned was ‘I Hate You’ which features a talking heron.

I must admit that I returned to Nigel Kent’s blog to reread the review a couple of times because his words resonated with me, and I rather enjoyed the feeling of being proud. I am hugely grateful to Josephine and Peter from Black Eyes Publishing UK for putting my books into the world. It’s good to work with others and see your dreams become reality. Writing poetry is a pleasure for me and I enjoy setting things down, but there is another lovely tingly pleasure in being read.

Sue Finch, ONLY TIME

I read My Kindred in August. I was sprawled on the guest bed in my friend’s daughter’s house in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Everyone else was napping (baby, grandma, mama). I was basking in the light of Paulann Petersen’s poems claiming kinship with bees, plums, big-leaf maples, totems. Oh, and family.

I’m indebted to Petersen for such epigraphs as these:

—Surely our parents give birth to us twice, the second time when they die. —Anaïs Nin

and this:

—One pound of honey contains the essence of two million flowers. 

The poems, too, are packed with honey, and surprise. A sister, “so full of yourself / when you’re rain” (“Her Sister Tells Water What’s What”). A poem titled, “Had the Matriarch Been Born a Bat.” A poem titled, “Where Is the Saint If Not in the Slightest of Things.” Everything is related, A poem titled, “Whitman, Me, Hermes.” Petersen (like the bat with its umbrella-spine fingers) encompasses worlds. “Mythic, voluptuous” worlds, in the words of Kathleen Flenniken.

Bethany Reid, Paulann Petersen’s MY KINDRED

Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.

Rob Taylor: Burning Sage is your debut poetry collection, written about the 2021 Lytton fire which destroyed your café, most of your neighbours’ houses, and almost your own. To say the least, it’s not your typical debut. Could you talk about the way this book came into being? 

Meghan Fandrich: When the fire destroyed our little village, it wasn’t just the buildings that were gone. It was my community, the place of my childhood memories and my daughter’s, and the future I was building for us there. It was everything that was normal in my life, everything I trusted would always be there. Past, present, future. All gone.

About a year later, summer meant another fire was burning homes and farms near Lytton. Support and stability, and even a precarious “new normal,” were still impossible. I was living in fear and trauma and knew I had to focus on something, a distraction, so that I could be a present parent—a present person—again. I decided I would do an art project for a friend (a love), the “you” of the poems: I would write out some memories and musings from my life, things we hadn’t talked about yet, little pieces that make up who I am. I decided to start with a memory from the fire.

Up until that point, I think, I had just been focused on survival, on single-parenting, on adjusting to life in an isolated burned-out place that kept getting hit with natural disasters, even after the first fire. I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I probably couldn’t have. I couldn’t have acknowledged the depth of the experience when I was in the worst of it.

So I sat down at the typewriter on the living room floor, and memories came pouring out. They weren’t the memories I expected, but instead subconscious memories, scenes and feelings that I had never put words to before, even in thought. When I took the page out of the typewriter and read the words, I started crying—for almost the first time since the fire.

Rob Taylor, Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich

Cheng’s tattoos act as translator between the observer and the observed, the latter using tattoos to guide the former’s interpretation of the story told by the observed. “Master Narratives” observes, “I translate my flesh into empires, possessed/ by the thing that also reads as 東西 eastwest.” She uses Cantonese and Chinese phrases (there are notes) in primarily English poems, offering spaces where a reader may find themselves interpreting a phrase, an illustration of possibility and challenging assumption. There are a couple of poems that use a source text in a grey text with specific words in black text to form the poem, again offering a space for interpretation and understanding. This isn’t a black/white, good/bad world but one of nuance that appreciates well-intentioned people can do bad things and ill-intentioned people can do good. Cheng’s concerns are justice and cohesion, how language is used to shore up colonialism and silence dissent. Her poems show how those traditionally silenced might use their language and voices to retranslate their histories and understand themselves.

Emma Lee, “The Tattoo Collector” Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press) – book review

I read The Odyssey in University and it’s certainly a different experience in this translation by Emily Wilson. The first line in the Wilson translation is “Tell me about a complicated man.” There’s a great essay on Vox by Anna North, where she talks about why it matters that the epic poem is translated by a woman:

“It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.””

North talks about how Wilson embraced the fact that there are many uncomfortable parts in the text. She lays them bare rather than trying to tidy them up or wash over them.

*

There are any number of ways, and lenses, through which to read the poem, but I’ve been picking it up each morning and just sort of “speed reading” it, looking for the themes of xenia. It reads quickly I think because I’ve also been imagining it as an action / adventure movie. It careens along, you know?

Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – The Odyssey and Xenia

There are surely many reasons for the particular early modern enthusiasm for the Song of Songs — scholars have analysed, for instance, the way aspects of its allegory could easily be adapted for theological and political purposes, as well as devotional ones. (Theology and politics were, in any case, rarely very far apart in this period.) You can’t read material from the seventeenth century for very long before noticing this. But I wonder whether part of the explanation for the vogue is, as it were, grammatical. Any early modern learner of Hebrew already had Latin and Greek, and for anyone with that linguistic background what my first teacher would have called the “sexiness” of Hebrew grammar, its pervasive awareness of gender even in comparison to Latin and Greek (already much more ‘gendered’ than English), is one of the most immediately striking things about this new and different language.

The Song of Songs, probably originally an epithalamium (formal marriage poem), with its highly erotic series of exchanges between a man and a woman, is both a poem about sex, and one of the densest and most vivid examples of this feature of the language. Grammar has its own romance, and unfamiliar grammars most of all. The very rich interpretative tradition of this poem has allowed readers to hear in it many different versions of the erotics of difference — a call and response between the bride and the groom; the soul and the body; the individual and God; Christ and his Church — but also, perhaps, between the Semitic and the Indo-European.

Victoria Moul, When he is mine and I am his, what can I want beside?

Learning Spanish involved getting to grips with the subjunctive. For instance, cuando vas and cuando vayas are two very different animals. Both might well be translated into English as when you go, but the indicative would imply habitual action, whereas the subjunctive would suggest potential consequence, the former followed in English by the present tense, the latter by the future, as in when you go, I’m happy or when you go, I’ll be happy.

This understanding of the building blocks of another language then fed back into my view of English. Once I recognised that it’s a syntactic way of expressing what might happen or what might have happened, I also realised that the subjunctive mood is an integral part of any poem in any language, whether it’s invoked explicitly or not. And thus my view of poetry also shifted. The counterpoint of bilingualism is always enlightening.

Matthew Stewart, The subjunctive

For this poet, one of the most sanguine objects that traverses the span of transcendentalisms is the Aeolian harp.

 “He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire,” Emerson said of his “beautiful enemy,” Henry David Thoreau. [Charles] Ives quotes Emerson on “the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his [Thoreau’s] poetry.” Of course, the lyre bears an an ancient association with poetry and Orphism, but Ives’ takes Thoreau’s writing as poetry for more immediate reasons, namely, genre-porousness and fluidity characterized Emersonian transcendentalism as well as Ives’ own compositional strategies.

Besides, it’s not as if Transcendentralists refused the existence of poems, as such. In his Collected Essays, for example, Emerson framed each essay with a poem that he did not bother to explicate within the text. The poems perch above the doorway of his prose like levitating address markers. What seems blurred is the idea of the poem as a holier form than the prose. Let’s go back to that. Let’s go back to how Ives’ gets seduced by Thoreau’s fascination with the Aeolian sounds of the telegraph wire in Walden. In Thoreau’s words:

“… like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by Gods.”

At one point in “Sounds,” Thoreau mourns the vanishment of background hum. “Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever,” he admits, while feeling his way towards a soundscape of place, and doing what many of us do when wandering through a city to map its soundscape for a poem. Sounds tell time; they are life’s beat, its rhythm-track.

Alina Stefanescu, Charles Ives in 33 notes.

I’m the other side of a flimsy partition
trying to camouflage my listening ear

I can’t pull out pen and paper
to record his every heartfelt word

Can I?

The poem wags a finger in my face
Whispers: this one’s not going to happen

Paul Tobin, DECONSTRUCTION OF THE HEART

Susan M. Schultz’s I and Eucalyptus is visually stunning; twenty prose texts each prefaced by a close-up photograph of the surface the titular tree taken by Schultz, with a 21^st at the end and that have the appearance of organic abstractions. The exception is the photo before text 20, which is a full-length shot of the tree with the colours toned down. These photos are all printed on the verso pages, with the texts printed on the verso pages only. Text and blank pages are a kind of marbled paper featuring a grey horizontal pattern representing tree bark. It’s a visual feast.

The texts are a kind of conversation with Martin Buber’s I and Thou, a book I’ve never read, and some quotes from Buber are woven through them; the quiet I and You pun in Schultz’ title is an echo of his. Buber’s idea, as I understand it, is that for true relationships we need to move from a subject-object view of others (I-It) to a subject-subject one (I- Thou), where others include the non-human, and Schultz’ book is, amongst other things, a charting at an attempt at just such a relationship with a tree via the lens of her iPhone.

What emerges is, amongst other things, a complex set of meditations on the relationship between art and life, set against a backdrop of climate change and Trump’s America. There’s a kind of pivot moment at the end of the ninth text when the reality of this relationship is stated clearly:

We trust the camera, our teacher says, though increasingly we lie with it. To see is already to interpret, and to interpret is inevitably to lie.

Repeatedly we see the photographer at work, editing the images she has taken (‘I take photos of the tree, and note the verb.’) And this activity has the almost inevitable consequence of returning the tree to an ‘It’ state, the object of activity in which the photographer is the active subject. ‘The tree is not art, but photography is’’, the opening sentence from text 5, establishes the central paradox; the tree is the subject of the art in both photographs and texts, but its status as subject there makes it the grammatical and logical object of the artist’s activity; ‘I’ photograph/write about ‘it’. And so, the process of trying to record a Buber-like ‘I-Thou’ undermines itself. In fact, the photographs are not really of the tree at all, but of forms and colours that the tree happens to present.

There are moments throughout the book when art and reality beyond the eucalyptus intersect:

Let me tell you a story. Let the story enter your mind without a screen. You inhabit a French novel, one that insists that you become an adulterer. You do that in “real life,” then return to the pages of your book, replacing one fantasy with another. The novel tempts you to become pregnant by the handsome guy on the motorcycle. Your real pregnancy, terminated, results in your execution under a proposed law in South Carolina. History brought forward is a horror movie, both for its content and its form.

The quality of Schultz’ writing is such that the horror of contemporary life for women in the USA is contained, presented cooly, as if through a lens; as she writes just a few pages earlier, again using the vocabulary of the camera, ‘We think anger focuses us, but it only distracts us more violently.’

The eucalyptus is, she reminds us, an invasive species and one that is quick to ignite, it has an otherness that might be read as dangerous. Consequently, there is a risk that it comes to ‘stand for’, not just simply stand. 

Billy Mills, Recent Reading October 2024: A Review

My trip to Fife was amazing, mainly because it was so laid back. I wandered the beaches when the weather was beautiful, the woods when it was a bit grayer and museums and churchyards when it was raining. I got to stand as close as I dared to the Forth Rain Bridge which I’m a bit obsessed with. None of these things would entertain my kids, so it was a good chance to entertain myself.

Here’s a few new Scotstober posts, some inspired by my recent holiday in Scotland. I’ve combined them to catch up on those words I missed, although I have been unable to come up with anything poetic for Day 6 – boak – to throw up, the feeling you’re going to throw up. That may be beyond my poetic ability. […]

Days 18, 21 and 22

tuim – empty
sook – to suck
heid – head

ahm tuim av thochts
staundin in thi wat leaves
thi wind sookin at mah skin
hair beelin around mah heid 

Gerry Stewart, Back To Reality: Scotstober

One way of dealing with professional setbacks is to simply say that you’re better off without that press, or editor, or job, or agent, or whatever, and look to the next thing. I’ve never been laid off or fired from a job, but I sure do feel “fired” from the job of poet these days. I’m trying to get up the energy to pick myself up, dust myself off, and get back into it, but I’m also thinking, maybe it’s time to stop? Maybe it’s a sign? I’ve struggled with this thought many times since I started writing as a kid. In fact, I did give up creative writing for at least a dozen years or more. Turning 51 last April, I did think to myself that wow, am I STILL trying to get published in X journal, or get any professional recognition at all in terms of grants, awards, prizes, good review venues? Am I still trying to find the right publisher, the one who really believes in my work? After all the years of volunteering and AWPs and writing and submitting and getting degrees and even teaching for four years in an MFA program? What am I doing? Why do I feel like I need a mentor more than I ever have at my age? I do not expect you, dear readers, to have the answers to these questions. Just know that I’m struggling. I am visiting pumpkin farms, and eating kettle corn, and watching horror comedies, trying to keep up morale. But sometimes it’s just…hard. It’s maybe harder than it seems.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Halloween! A Rough Week, Election Sunday Scaries, When You Feel Like an Outsider (and How to Deal with Professional Setbacks)

Right now it’s sunny, but a fierce wind is beating against my studio windows. The weather is more volatile and violent than I ever remember. It scares me to think about the state of even the best-managed forest, fifty years from now. I feel privileged to have lived most of my life appreciating and being comfortable in nature, and hope I haven’t ever taken it for granted. This was a major factor in my voting, and may be in yours, too, although I have no illusions about either party’s commitment to the level of significant change that’s necessary.

Those of us who care should do everything we can to raise awareness of the natural world. I feel like a relic of some long-lost era, as someone who knows the names of ferns, mosses, flowering plants and trees as well as wild living creatures, who’s comfortable in the woods and mountains, able to walk and sit quietly without disturbing the inhabitants, and knows something about foraging as well as how to grow her own food. Our remoteness from the natural world, and our blithe subjugation and overuse of it, mirrors what we’ve done to indigenous people; if there’s anything that could be called “original sin,” surely this is it.

Beth Adams, Glorious Golden Days

Earth feeds and eats us. What we understand between
is nurtured on an invisible food: time.

Earth soothes our painful unfolding with its cycles.
Walking in circles, we breathe in time

With the beauty we have been busy fleeing.

Rachel Dacus, A New Anthology of Ghazals in English

I was thinking the other day about the last time I saw my Granny. I’d just awakened from a nap and was in that semi-groggy, semi-paralyzed state that didn’t used to happen to me but now happens all the time. At first, I was thinking about my mom. Maybe I’d been dreaming about her, I don’t know. Suddenly, I was in Granny’s hospital room with my mom and my aunt. The three of us were there when Granny took in her last long ragged breath. It didn’t come out again. It was a very strange moment seeing a person you love here one minute and gone the next. Just like that. […]

There’s no one left that shares that memory. Granny, my mom, my aunt – all gone. It’s just occurred to me that experience only lives in my head now.

Abigail Thomas recently wrote about memory in her Substack. I’ve been thinking about what she wrote which made me think about the memories I shared with my mom that no one knows. I think about things we did together and there are blanks I can’t fill no matter how hard I try. I’m the keeper of those memories and she’s not here to fill in the gaps. Write it down, people. Write it all down.

Charlotte Hamrick, Keeper of the Memories

Boot/reboot to ward off viruses and false idols.

Keyboard, monitor. The karma of a well-placed comma, a pause between thoughts, words, and actions.

Hack into the mainframe of you and me. Greed versus the God seed. Avarice versus the actions of love and uplift.

Double-click on the database, the breath and space between crib and cemetery. The vast open fields of a well-lived life. 

Rich Ferguson, Earth Is My Computer

After I finished my last collection, I considered I wanted to spend the next three years obsessing about. It should be something that fascinated me, something rich in poetic and metaphorical potential, which would allow me to research and procrastinate to my heart’s content. I came up with three options – caves, ruins, and ghosts.  

In the end, ghosts got my vote. Every house that I lived in as a child was haunted, and it seemed, every property we visited. It’s only in very recent years I’ve realised that not every childhood is coloured by floating lights in the attic and disembodied whispers. 

There’s a common belief that poltergeist activity is associated with troubled teenage girls: we had plenty of them, and troubled boys too. Did we attract the bad spirits? Or did the creative and chaotic energy of our troubled minds manifest itself in the remote moving of objects, the unexplained noises and visions? And is poetry the right place to make sense of these experiences?

In our Catholic, working-class Burnley, belief in ghosts was not unusual – break into a good ghost story and people are almost certain to join in. It’s not so true in the secular, middle class world I now inhabit. Here, seeing ghosts marks you out as superstitious, uncultured – to be honest, a bit common.  

But I’ve been told enough times in my life that my world view is mistaken or just plain mad – so a hierarchy of knowledge which dismisses millions of people’s accounts of their own lives as uncivilised nonsense is something I’m not just going to accept. Even more than that, I’m fascinated by the assumptions and processes which underpin of knowledge of the world. How do any of us know what we know?

Clare Shaw, Talking with ghosts: how my new collection leads me to unexpected places.

Several days before my father went into the hospital and never walked out, I wrote a single word down in a notebook in all caps as I was working on a home decor article. 

“RUINPORN” 

The piece was on beautiful abandoned homes intended to inspire your interior design. Mostly the images I found to accompany the piece were filled with delightfully chipping paint, lowly decaying wood, paneless windows, and beautiful light, sometimes filtering in through ceilings that no longer existed. Shrubs and vines encroached through windows and wound around stair banisters. They were the kind of places you imagined were inhabited by ghosts that  shook the broken chandeliers and rattled the doors barely on the hinges. Sometimes there were relics–an old book on a shelf. A dingy bathrobe hanging in the closet. The spaces  were far more vast than any house I’ve ever lived in, but appealed to me for their open and dilapidated spaces. Their vacancy and beauty. […]

Five years before, I had lost my mother, not as suddenly as my dad, and after a rough year. But still somehow just as much a shock.. A year later, I finished a book about our relationship called feed, dealing with the complexity of growing up in an environment that fraught relationship between a mother and daughter,  both my own and through things like fairy tales and myths. Strangely, for my father, there didn’t seem to be a book on the horizon. That particular relationship being much less wrought with artmaking material. Or at least I thought at the time. 

What emerged instead were poems that were modeled on decor writing headlines about haunted houses. About how we leave the ghosts of ourselves behind in the spaces we inhabit. 

While I could not have told you at the time what I was writing them for or towards, later it became clear that that particular loss had its fingers all over them. I was already calling it ruinporn long before I compiled the manuscript.

Kristy Bowen, the houses we haunt

truthfully i’m not sure who is dead anymore.
the hot chocolate poured from
a wound in the cake. i licked my fingers.
you laughed. my brother used his fork
to plunder the whipped cream.
everything was easy & none of us had
to have a gender. in the dark you watch
your horror videos. all the tongues
like ribs. a paisley pattern knit across
the screen.

Robin Gow, 10/28

I have experienced two autumns this October: one in New Mexico, one in Pennsylvania. In the American Southwest, high up in the world, the cottonwood trees that hug every available water source were going a brilliant gold while I was there. Any view above a creek or river revealed a winding path of yellow–along the Chama, along the Rio Grande. The tiny-leaved oaks were turning brown-leaved and dropping scads of acorns along the paths. The oranges and reds are mostly there year-round, on the mesas and in the canyons.

It was wonderful to experience a poetry workshop with Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan and to learn how books are made by hand, wonderful to draft some poems using color imagery and ekphrasis, wonderful to meet some fascinating people with whom I enjoyed pushing past my/our comfort zones and into art forms we may have been a bit less comfortable with.

Ann E. Michael, Two falls

I drove home tonight at 6 o’clock, through the winter darkness already. I had to roll down the window to stay awake. I know we think of this kind of thing as winter depression, but I am trying to look at it from another perspective. Maybe the desire to be quiet, to lie wrapped in something soft, to listen to the wind, and maybe imagine the cracking of wood in a fire in a cabin somewhere, about an hour’s drive from here, where the real mountains begin and the snow comes early—maybe this introversion isn’t depression at all, just a close connection with the season.

Last week, walking Leonard in the early afternoon, I saw the first—and likely the last—hedgehog of the year. Not big, but likely big enough to survive. I said sweet dreams. Then looked around. Talking to Leonard is one thing. Talking to a hedgehog is another.

Ren Powell, Between Hedgehogs and Lapwings

Last night I was rehearsing with our Simhat Torah band. One of our hakafot (circle dances) will be to the song Bashanah Ha-ba’ah. “You will see, you will see, just how good it will be…” But sometimes it’s hard to hold fast to the faith, or the dream, that better days will come. Here, or there, or anywhere. The drumbeat of sorrow and loss and injustice feels relentless. Here, and there, and everywhere.

This path is a deep groove worn in my heart from a year of grieving. I step outside to mail my ballot and I’m startled by how warm the air is, how beautiful the sunlight filtering through yellow leaves. What if I stop trying to find the right words (as though there were right words) that would make meaning out of all of this — and just let myself be, breathing here, in the beauty of the broken world?

Rachel Barenblat, (Almost) A Year

will you visit is a thought in a corner
high up beside the light glowing
from the cherry’s burning leaves
in the autumn of our regrets
the words lifting like motes to settle it
once and for all they are set in this story
of how a moment is forever just a moment
and a poem is a moment for eternity
sit you there a moment
let me explain
earl grey?

Jim Young, the studio with the arched window

I had occasion to spend time in one of my favorite spaces of possibility recently, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA). A visit to a museum like this one is layered: initially, often, bewilderment, if not downright befuddlement, but sometimes slightly confused enchantment, or transport. Then I like to settle down on a bench with the curator’s or artist’s notes about what I’m looking at, and then return. Sometimes thusly armed, I’m still bewildered, or fairly unmoved, but often reawakened, seeing anew, reperceiving. After a while in this space, a campus of former factory buildings transformed, everything seems like art: the way paint has worn off a pillar to leave the labrynthine white tracks of wood grain, the way rust has made its cloth of metal, elaborate and multihued, a bright leaf caught in a net of bare gray branches. And I come away feeling like the very day is a creative act. My own created day is a creative act: how I pay attention, where I put my attention, what I say and how I say it, and with what wonder.

And inevitably I turn to the news of the day, which makes its own work on me, I am the metal to its rust, and not so beautifully done. But for a while anyway, this sense of art everywhere can linger.

So, reader, I offer that notion to you: the day is yours to create. You are yours to create. The hour is full of consternation, indeed, of fear, of lack, of struggle. And the hour is full of wonder. The steady tick of time itself a beat to dance to. If you can manage, make it a jelly roll.

Marilyn McCabe, to tease me in my bleak office

I’ll pass the hours remembering
forsythia in April, the softness 
of a baby’s skin, campfires, the smell 
of bread fresh from the oven. I’ll sleep 
where the milky way tumbles 
through the night sky and trees whisper 
to the wind.

Sarah Russell, What I Picked for the Journey

This week: words with friends, a loving attendance on the world, histories of brokenness and violence, lithium wasps, the Mouth of Hell volcano, and much more. Enjoy.

A girl kneels to stroke the head of her dead little sister
in a rubble-strewn street where a hospital used to stand.

I buy a book of poetry. Words are homeless, says the poet.
She stares out of the cover, intent, unfaltering, the beginning of a smile.

Bob Mee, No Good at Endings

Most of us know what it’s like when a persistent, agitating force pushes us to cast something off. I certainly do. Sometimes, you just gotta get out of Dodge. Metaphorically *and* literally, you have to leave someone, something, some place behind.

I am who I am because of all the running I’ve done — and also because of my commitment to interrogating the running itself. Flight is an instinct. Protective, sure. But also generative. Creative. A move toward a closer-to-true self, a self you may see reflected in a new poetry collection by Rachel Edelman: Dear Memphis (River River Books).

Carolee Bennett, Reading Notes on “Dear Memphis” by Rachel Edelman

I’m working on a manuscript—Words with Friends. Rather, I’m attempting to make poems amid the rubble of my basement, as the drywall dust settles and saws whir and nail guns bang. I have only been able to use the basement as an excuse since March.

Meanwhile, the words sit in Word, the names of their owners in parentheses.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a poet who can no longer write a poem from scratch. I can’t just decide I’ll talk about a Hercules beetle; someone has to give me the word rhinoceros to help me get there.

I have turned this weird writer’s block into a game. On Facebook, I solicit one word from each friend who wants to participate. It’s kind of like when songwriters ask you to shout out words, and they put them right into a song, then and there.1

Sometimes there’s a word that throws in a wrench (on this one, I struggled most with “the pope”), but I manage to get it done.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Mating Rituals

Wonder-rig is an interesting collaboration, with texts by Lee Duggan and David Annwn (with no indication of who wrote what) and graphics by artist Nigel Bird. These take the form of concentric circles (with one instance of overlapping ones) surrounding a void, somewhat reminiscent of the Spirograph of childhood. A biographical note at the back tells the reader that many of these graphics are visual representations of the artist’s experience of the sound of a murmuration of starlings as heard from beneath. Having read the book before the note, my experience of them, in my graphic ignorance, was of the irises and pupils of enormous single eyes looking out at me, the book reading the reader.

This understanding of the visual element of the book sat comfortably beside the text as it hovered around ideas of perception, of how we see and understand the world through subjective filters in ‘snippets of attention’, and how the world views us equally subjectively.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading April 2020: a Review

A house finch built her nest
on the garland of the front door next to ours.
This is a week when our dear Soul-friend
has just departed. We first noticed twigs
on the doormat, then sticking up
above the round of faux leaves.

Then we heard the cheeping.
Now a finch mom and pop sit on eggs
at our passageway. Coming and going,
we must be quiet under our avian blessing.

Rachel Dacus, A Poem of Remembrance, with Birds

The theme for [World Book Night 2024] is In Praise of Birds. WBN United Artists invited people to read and respond creatively, on a postcard, to a text or book about birds. Over 200 artists responded and over 250 postcards were sent in. The postcards are now on display at Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, UK from Friday 19 April – Tuesday 2 July 2024. […]

For my postcard, I chose the beautiful poem ‘The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab’ by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, inspired by the line “You who would not kill a mouse, a bird.” […] I photocopied the text of the poem in a small font and pasted it onto the right of the postcard. On the left, I pasted a small cut-out of Picasso’s dove of peace on top of the colours of the Palestinian flag which I made with coloured Sharpie pens.

The only downside to making a postcard is the itch to want to make more and more! I am so looking forward to visiting the exhibition in Bristol. In the meantime, Linda Parr has been sharing the huge array of fantastic contributions on her Instagram account. If you can’t make the exhibition in person, take a look!

Josephine Corcoran, World Book Night 2024 – In Praise of Birds

It’s time to shrug off the working week and slip into urban nightlife and the glossy promise that after dark offers, chiefly poetry. And poetry from the streets that edges in to slams and spoken words and skirts around academia. One of the “Three Anarchist Poems”, “The Anarchist’s Vow” promises,

“I search for the black unicorn
that grazes in the red forests of desire.
When I catch him, I will set him free. “

There’s an ambiguity, “the black unicorn” could be the mythical creature or Audre Lorde’s poems. I prefer the idea of the latter and setting those poems free into the world.

Emma Lee, “Lady Anarchist Cafe” Lorraine Schein (Autonomedia) – book review

My other running friends have become breakfast friends. I with D. on Saturday discussing butter as we ate eggs on toast – our conversation was something along the lines of everything being improved by it: everything food, D. clarified (the sentiment, not the butter). With D’s confident endorsement of something I’ve always known and discussed at length with my longest-serving friend, I enjoyed my toast even more. 

The thing is, I got excited earlier in the week by an email. It was marketing from Candlestick Press, famous for its commitment to publishing poetry in the form of ‘not greetings cards’. They’ve published ‘Ten Poems About Bikes, Dogs, Breakfast, about XYZ’ . The email was advertising their latest pamphlet. ‘At last,’ I thought ‘Ten Poems About Butter’. Could life get any butter? (Sorry…). 

After yesterday’s 10K in which I clocked a lifetime personal best, J., a skilled listener, suggested hot chocolate. As we neared the order point, I asked ‘Are you going to have cream and a flake?’ Cream is a couple of levels above butter on my list of life’s indulgences – not everything is improved by cream, but a few things you wouldn’t want to put butter on are. J. heard what I was really asking – something along the lines of ‘I’d really like cream and a flake but I’m not sure I’m allowed.’ ‘Of course,’ Julia answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

When I re-read the Candlestick email later on yesterday, poised to order a full fat poetry pamphlet, I read more carefully this time, ‘Ten Poems About Butterflies.’ Well, at least the landscape is clear for my own work. I quite fancy having a ‘Butter Phase’.

Liz Lefroy, I Burble On About Running / Butter

How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

This is a tough question! I’m a planner, which means I spend the bulk of my time researching my way into a new project’s architectural framework, then considering how individual poems could work to negotiate the project’s craft-based strategies. Then I proceed to write those poems, slowly at first, and generally around the crests and troughs of an academic semester. Summers are glorious. I think it is important to say this: I give myself time to process the emptiness of completing a manuscript. It may sound ironic, because publishing a book is joyous, yes? Yes, it is! However, when a collection of poems goes to press, it stops being mine and enters the canon of contemporary poetry—and that’s a bittersweet combination of both celebration and loss. I become filled with questions: What is the next project? Will I be able to write it? Can I approach it with an open mind and an open heart, writing from a place of emotional honesty? What do I need to do and how do I need to prepare myself to say what I need to say? That last question made me laugh (at myself): if only one could see my notebooks. Copious would be one way to describe my note-taking process, well, and messy (I am left-handed in every stereotypical way possible)! First drafts look nothing like their final shape, usually, and I find the real work of writing exists in how I revise my way toward what the poem is trying to do and say, not necessarily what I want it to do and say. I am frankly jealous of other writers whom I talk to who write a poem when called to do so, poets who wait until enough poems are written in this way, and then look for how the poems talk to each other. There is something truly organic and beautiful about going about writing in this way, but to put myself in that position? Just thinking about it gives me hives. Maybe the next lesson I need to learn is to take a deep breath, let go, and let the words take over.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Henning

Are you writing? Does that question cue competition? Inadequacy? Cringe at failed new year’s resolutions? A frisson of excitement about your newest?

Why are you not writing?  Is it work? Butting your head against the bathroom door of perfection? Is it fun that gets trumped by life maintenance? Fatigue? Hustle?

Are you writing to improve or make product? There is a season and use for each. if you’re writing as mental exercise it is the process, the muscles trained that matter not the arcs made through space that have to be a captured performance and product.

The more you write the better you get. Is it true? Look at these kids with spectacular passion and effect and little experience. The poets that get more abstract rather than more powerful with each book. If one internalizes writing as identity, it puts pressure to perform, produce, end-product rather than processing life. Role rather than real.

Write not half-assed but whole-assed. Let yourself be captivated, fascinated, fallen into an iridescent bubble of yes after yes.

Pearl Pirie, Writing(,) Life

This morning there’s a breeze off the ocean, scattered clouds tempering the sun’s weight and heat as I run north towards the pier, keeping right, rather than left, passing walkers, strollers, dogs on leads, the sudden stop-to-chatters, loud phone-talkers, and, where the boardwalk narrows, a woman who shuffles from side to side, unsure of which direction she should go to avoid me until I stop in front of her and ask her if she wants to dance and we both laugh.

That, I think, is the answer to so many things: remembering to smile when encountering confusion and fear, my own and others, remaining still for a moment, before picking up the pace again …

breathing in the ocean moving forward

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Stop. Smile. Run.

Love poem, lust poem, breakup poem, prayer poem, curse poem, contemplating-mortality-while-looking-at-a-dead-animal poem, nature-sure-is-beautiful poem, nature-sure-is-weird poem, language-is-weird poem, art-inspires-me poem, what’s-the-point-of-poetry poem, I-miss-my-home poem, escape poem, world’s-going-to-hell poem in its environmental and political varieties, people-are-shitty poem, I-have-hope-anyway poem, my-body’s-failing-me poem, struggling-against-despair poem, hey-I’m-not-dead-yet poem, apology poem, not-sorry poem, I-fear-for-my-children poem, grief poem (a category much bigger than elegy).

Can you tell I’m neck-deep in the Shenandoah submission pile? […]

April bursts at the poetry seams, for me, between student conferences and grading and submissions, not to mention reading poems on social media because ’tis the season. I can fall into the weary state where nothing surprises. I start to wonder if the zillion of us (including me) holding our poems in the air saying “pick this one” represents just too much of a good thing.

The better frame of mind I struggle to cultivate: a zillion people working on poems IS a good thing, in spite or because of war, an awe-inspiring wave of political protest, and the fucking Supreme Court. It’s certainly joyous to accept work for publication, while painful to reject good stuff (choosing 18 poems out of 500 batches of 5 each=tough math, although I’m grateful to Siew Hii for doing 1/5 of the screening). But I don’t have to eat and breathe poems, not right now when the dogwood is blooming. The kitten wants petting. Poems keep.

Lesley Wheeler, So much poetry month

The purple onions grow soft
inside, tough as leather out.
Poets collect names of words
flying loose from life, never
to be heard again in their
original voice. “Compost”
is only centuries old.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 23 #NaPoWriMo

I have finally been connected with an eye specialist and two physical therapists who have explained that my brain cannot handle much reading/writing/driving/skating/movement because my binocular vision is not right and my brain is working extra hard to integrate sensory data from both eyes into one coherent whole. My vestibular system is also not liking much movement (of my head, or of things moving in front of my head). Thus, I can do a lot of things but not do a lot of anything.

One of the things I am doing every day are exercises to heal my brain. I get to look at beads on a string, and wait for things to focus when I’m looking through a prism, and wear funny-looking glasses while reading charts with random letters on them. I also get to look at objects stuck to my finger and track them while I move my finger back and forth.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Still life with brain injury

All sorts of things have to happen before I get to sit down and write – cat feeding, laundry, emails, coffee – just normal everyday stuff but doing these things with M.E., even on a day when I’m less ill means that they take an age. Everything is broken down into 15 minute bursts with breaks in between…you can imagine how quickly time passes. I used to get a bit stressed about this, thinking “I’m must prioritise my writing” but now I understand that once these tiny tasks are done, then I can sit and write without my mind wandering or the tension in my shoulders growing so knife-like that I fear blood may emerge.

Dramatic as ever. Anyway, all the little tasks got done and I sat down to write. If I’m honest I wasn’t feeling it this morning. I’ve a few things I want to do on the Kathryn Anna Writes Bespoke side of things and I toyed with focusing on those’ but I remembered my promise to myself at the start of the year and ploughed on. This is important – it means this work is as valuable as more commercial work which is a vital step in terms of valuing every aspect of what I try to achieve.

Enough – what have I actually been doing? Well, it’s been poetry day again. The poem I’m wrestling with caused a proper head in hands moment which transformed into a Eureka moment. It’s really coming together now.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Creative Tuesday

after breath, soil, myth from mud, and pitiless creation;

after ocean swell and drought sorrow; fog and fire, feather and forgiveness;

after collision and embrace, boulder and burning;

after a dog’s life and the cat’s meow, stanzas of raven song and alphabet honey

Rich Ferguson, after

Regular readers of this blog will know that its intention is to promote debut poets. Sometimes, however, I come across a collection that is so impressive, so beautifully written, so engaging, that I cannot resist the urge to share my excitement and pleasure. Hence today I am reviewing Matthew Stewart’s impressive, well-received. second collection ‘Whatever you do, just don’t’ (Happenstance Press, 2023). It consists of four parts: Británico, Starting Eleven, Family Matters and Retracing Steps. Linking them are the notions of change, adjustment and belonging.

In the first section the poems focus on life in Spain. The poet has moved his family permanently to a country where life is very different. He has to learn a different way of living, a different way of being: ‘You’ve taught me to sip a cafe solo, / to let its bitterness seep through my gums/ and mark the end of our tapas and wine,/ just as you’ve taught me to relish silence/ in the slow, shared sliding by of minutes’ (Los Domingos). The pace is slower, the verb ‘relish’ suggesting something satisfying and fulfilling. Yet the reference to ‘bitterness’ creates a tension in the stanza, a tension that is developed in the poem that follows, Vámonos. Here we see the frustrations of living in a community where there is a lack of urgency, that allows ‘the minute hand’ to wander past the ‘scheduled time for departure’ and that culminates in the annoyance at ‘another Sunday slamming shut.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Whatever you do, just don’t’ by Matthew Stewart

When a book sells out, to reprint or not to reprint? This is hard. A number of titles first published by CBe are now with bigger publishers so this is their problem, not mine. Some titles, very few, I’ve let go out of print. Some titles sell only a handful of copies a year but feel core to the list, so I keep them in print. Each book is a special case.

Above, new reprints of Fergus Allen, New and Selected Poems (first published by CBe in 2013) and Carmel Doohan, Seesaw (first published in 2021). The original editions had brown card covers and endsheets; the reprints don’t, because the prices of the printer who offers the brown-card option have risen steeply. And the cover prices of these reprints are higher than for the original editions – because printing costs have increased generally, and because when I order a very short run (as for these reprints) the unit price goes up.(There are still some copies of Seesaw available from the website at the original price.)

Conversely, of course, the bigger the print run, the lower the unit cost. It’s tempting. And money being money, the risk of having to pay storage for unsold stock can be covered … The water gets murky here, but let’s say you are a poet who is published by Faber, who expect your book to sell well because they are Faber, but if it doesn’t here’s the get-out: remainder merchants. To whom, when a title stops selling, they will off-load copies, while still keeping some in stock. See, for example, the website of Pumpkin Wholesale, who currently offer 36 Faber poetry titles (including five by Christopher Reid and four by David Harsent, plus others by Muldoon and Hofmann and Paterson and Ishion Hutchinson et al) at knock-down prices.

Nothing illegal is going on here, but regular booksellers who want to stock those titles have to pay more to Faber to order them in than, for example, I can buy them for at second-hand shops who also stock remainders (such as the excellent Judd Books). Faber contracts used to promise, maybe still do, that if they remainder stock they will offer the books first to the author; but I’m pretty sure Reid and Harsent and Muldoon et al have no idea this is happening. When I last queried this practice with Faber they avoided the word remaindering altogether, talking instead of ‘modest stock reductions in order to control inventory’ and assuring me that this is ‘standard practice in the industry’.

Charles Boyle, On print runs and reprints

I moved into the house my husband bought with his late wife, and even though I’ve lived here now for 20 years, it doesn’t really feel like “my home.” Whatever that is, whatever that means. And more and more I define “home” as people not place, not a structure, per se, but the life in and around it. Or maybe I just have never found the structure that holds me. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not a “homebody” (which actually is the name of that poem I finally finished and liked, and can be found in Lily Poetry Review, btw). Or like a hermit crab, I just carry around with me what I need. Or I’m adaptable and can figure out how to fit in any number of types of lodging. As long as I’m with people I love, am warm, and know where my next meal is coming from, I can settle in to some chair and call it home-enough.

So perhaps perversely I love this poem by Patrick Rosal, “Yes It Will Rain (or Prayer for Our First Home.” This is a love poem, really, not for the “home” but, as the epigram says,” “to Mary Rose.” And I appreciate it all the more as a love poem because it’s not all hearts and flowers. There is pain named here, and a prayer, after all, is a supplication: a please-let-things-be-okay. I like a poem that shows the shadow that helps define the light.

The way the poem details the “home of our dreams,” its limitations and flaws described with affection, how the speaker imagines the two people who will live there, their small intimacies, the unimportant yet vitally important moments and small things — it confirms for me my burgeoning notion that home isn’t a place but an action: a paying attention, a loving attendance on the world, rain and shine.

Marilyn McCabe, Like two huge nets

Like most readers, I’m sure, I don’t usually read magazines like this straight through with concerted attention, but this time, for fairness’ sake, I did. I enjoyed some of the pieces in this issue, but my strongest feeling — even as someone who is pretty up-to-date with Anglophone poetry — was of being somewhat shut out or talked across, with a hint of hectoring. I did not feel like the target audience, and sometimes felt actively excluded, even though I actually do belong to the Poetry Society, and have done for ages. Since the society states as its aim to ‘champion all types of poetry for audiences of all ages’ I thought this response was worth a bit of analysis. If I feel “talked over” by The Poetry Review, how would someone new to poetry feel? […]

These four pieces of prose, taken together, are by some margin the most accessible poems in this issue. In fact, I think a new reader would be forgiven for concluding that if you want to write a straightforward poem, which uses language in a fairly conventional way, or has any significant narrative content, then you do so in prose. Almost all the rest of the poems are more or less ‘difficult’: in almost all cases, either the form is very disruptive for the reader, or the meaning of the text is obscure, or (often) both. I enjoy a lot of difficult poetry and poetry which requires a great deal of explication (hello Pindar!) and that’s not to say there is not good writing here, but the majority of these poems are challenging to the reader in quite similar ways, so I also found the experience a bit “same-y”.

Victoria Moul, What is a poetry magazine for?

For as long as I can remember, people have complained that all modern poetry is indistinguishable. And for as long as I can remember, the principle way critics have tried to separate the ‘good’ poetry from what they implicitly agree amounts to a rubbish heap is through insistent use of subjective epithets. In other words, in place of an ongoing exercise to document what distinctive characteristics may or may not be possessed by an individual poem, book or author (the appropriate answer to accusations of sameness) we have perpetuated a game of ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’. The loudest, the most repetitive, the most passionate, fawning or grandiloquent claims are those that stick, and these on behalf of, inevitably, the better-connected, better-resourced, more shrewd and more well-behaved poets — though that point matters less than the fact that the qualities which are thereby attributed to them are vague, bland and frequently preposterous. Rather than teaching readers to discern and prize myriad specific attributes, and thus to tell one kind of poem from another by sight and feel, this process teaches them to think predominantly in terms of how ‘important’ a poet or poem seems to be, and to feel warm, fuzzy feelings that should on no account be interrogated further. It is one almighty confidence trick, at the expense of any sense that the new thing is much of a departure from the last thing. Gaze! Gasp! But do not look behind the curtain.

This in turn affects the way poems are produced and distributed:

• It incentivises (for both poet and publisher) high output with minimal editing, since only recently released work is regarded as sufficiently exciting to swoon over, and right-place, right-time has more to do with it than content.
• It incentivises broad, bombastic claims about the scope and purpose of a publication, lest it fail to speak to some common mood.
• It de-incentivises investigative reviews or cautious responses to a less visible work, since the only currency the reviewer may deal in is applause or heresy.
• It positions the reviewer, or critic, as someone lesser than the poet, someone who is merely affected and reports the effect, putting people off a role that is potentially vital in leading to the formation of individualised tastes.

Most frustratingly, for me at least, it steers what ought to be healthy debate about and around the artform toward a sluggish kind of territorial warfare.

Jon Stone, AI is no threat to poetry; we’ve already got it licked

i loved the cannons most.
how we kneeled & filled them
with grapefruit. in the united states
the biggest enemy is always secretly
your peach pit dream. the rotting self.
where the worm lives
& talks about salvation. the weeping soil.

Robin Gow, valley forge

One of Passover’s big themes is water.  The Sea in the Desert sets the stage for crossing the sea, coming through narrow straits, through a “birth canal” towards your own life, passing from received ideas towards self-awareness and freedom, singing in the liminal spaces; singing. 

“L’Eau and Behold,” a long sequenced poem that I wrote in the fall, is also about obstructions, blockages, and the joy when water flows and liberates us from stuck places.  I was thrilled when La Piccioletta Barca short-listed it for its poetry contest. The contest’s theme was “Amorphous,” quite fitting as freedom is an undefined field of opportunities. The poem has been published on their website: https://www.picciolettabarca.com/posts/amorphous-competition-shortlist

Please take a look!

Jill Pearlman, L’Eau and Behold

When we were experimenting with glass etching cream on Thursday, my spouse wanted me to look up the Latin phrase “Baptismo Sum.”  We’ve both been taught that Martin Luther used it as he washed each morning, saying “I am baptized” in Latin so that he remembered this essential truth each day.

So I Googled it and said, “Look, there’s my poem.”  It was published in Sojourners in 2005, and I am so delighted that it comes up first or second in a search for the Latin word.  True to Google form lately, I couldn’t find out what I wanted to know.  But instead of my usual frustration at how bad search engines have become, I had the happiness of being bounced to a poem of mine–a poem that holds up.

I’ll paste the poem below, since Sojourners does limit how many articles one can view.  But if you want to see it at the Sojourners site, go here.  Sadly, the artwork that originally appeared with it is not there, but the poem is preserved.

Baptismo Sum
In this month of dehydration,
we keep our eyes skyward, both to watch
for rain and to avoid the scorn
of the scorched succulents who reproach
us silently, saying, “You promised to care.”

And so, although we thought we could stick
these seedlings in the ground and leave
them to their own devices, we haul
hoses and buckets of water to the outer edges
of the yard where the hose will not reach. […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Baptismo Sum

The man who cuts our grass every two weeks likes to stop
and chat in the middle of mowing. This week, he pushed

his headphones down to his neck because he wanted to talk
about the book he’s reading and can’t seem to put down:

histories of wartime in the Pacific, including the Japanese
occupation of my country. He’s stupefied by the record

of atrocity after atrocity: young girls herded off to become
comfort women, babies shishkebobed by bayonets for being

in the way of advance. When we say back then, supposedly
we mean golden years we might look at with present-day

nostalgia. But histories of brokenness and violence keep
coming back, weeds wanting to overtake any good growth.

Luisa A. Igloria, Every Wound is One Wound

This week though, a terrible shock. The ivy at the front of the house, next to the porch, had climbed over the windowsill and was making its way over the window glass, and across next door’s walls. It has gotten out of hand before. I took my secateurs and carefully cut back the overgrowth, just down to the windowsill, and across the wall where it was new growth, not thickened yet. It’s been raining heavily for such a long time, and now the sun is making an appearance the ivy has exploded. It is fast, it almost walks up the wall on those tiny little clinging feet. I am careful, and conscious and yet, still, when I stepped back, looked at where I had cut, so carefully, taking each individual leaf off at a time, a tail. A dark, feathered tail, poking out just under the top layer of the ivy, just under where I had trimmed the windowsill leaves from. A bird on a nest sitting still as a rock hoping not to be noticed. Possibly a blackbird, more likely a house sparrow. I did not hang about to identify it, I left, immediately, and hoped I had not disturbed it too much.

All day long afterwards, a terrible sadness. All day long a sadness that compounded the very profound sadness that I feel for the world right now, for the people, the trees, the environment. For the last week or so I have felt tired of living in a world that is so at odds to how I feel it should be. I am simply profoundly sad, and feeling a bit hopeless. Although I can see how hard some people are working to right that, it feels like humans have turned a corner somewhere, and can’t find our way back. And even though there is a definite awakening, a push forwards to do something, to make the connections, to close the distance between people and nature, it feels too late. This then, being completely unaware of the nest in the ivy, of assuming that I would know if anything was nesting there, feels like a metaphor for something bigger, the arrogance of mankind, that we would know, that we would know and own the world around us and control our impact on it.

What am I trying to say here? A Reform UK leader said people trying to cross the channel should drown. This just after people, including a child, literally drowned to death trying to cross the channel on a small boat. A life that was valuable just for being a life is gone and a man with no need to flee thinks it’s ok. Someone chopped down an entire row of cherry trees in blossom in the night in Dublin, for reasons no one knows. Their white-brown inner trunks exposed to the light like broken bones. I watched a TikTok of a farm worker filming new born calves and singing ‘baby steaks’ to the tune of the children’s song ‘baby sharks’. A substantial portion of woodland has been poisoned by people dumping illegal waste on the site, the council so slow to act that now everything is poisoned – the woodland, the ground, the water.

All this stuff – it layers itself in sadness in my head, in my heart. I feel poisoned by the sadness of it all.

Wendy Pratt, Notes on The Starlings in the Porch Hole

In those long days I was
no threat, a quiet object
natural in the grass and breathing
at the meadow’s pace.
I had not lost, yet,
the birds’ confidence
nor learned how not to trust
my own body
in the world’s embrace.

Ann E. Michael, Close of the cruelest month

Lithium wasps are aphid wasps. Solitary, some females tunnel underground to nest. All of them lay their eggs in or on aphids, which the larvae eat before turning themselves into what the researchers call mummies. As adults, they chew their way out.

And then they try to survive as an adult. Like all of us. Escaping our childhood by the skin of our teeth.

Yeah, I know, that was a metaphor too far.

This whole time I’ve been uncertain about how much of this collection would be rooted in memoir and how much in pure, imaginative zoomorphism.

You’d think that the fact there’s such a thing as a lithium wasp would read like a prescription. But it doesn’t. I don’t want to document my life, or specific generational traumas with these poems. The idea of pinning memories down—even trying to—summons fragments of a high school biology class on dissection. Isn’t it funny how memories work? I can, and I can’t remember the smell of the formaldehyde. The thick pins—surprisingly dull—puncturing a bit of worm and pushing into the wax. I do remember the sensation of resistance.

That’s a good title: Sensation of Resistance.

I’d like to just throw everything in a potter wasp’s nest, seal it, and see what comes out. But blueprints are comforting. Everything has order, whether we see it or not. There is so much to learn from the order of the natural world.

Ren Powell, Curl into a Ball & Keep Your Eye Out

I don’t know what it is about volcanoes, but they fascinate me. Being the Mary-Oliver-loving nature poet that I am, they seem spiritual, supernatural. A way to see into the Earth, and look under its surface, a rupture beneath the green. A furnace that heats pools, creates ash, feeds the soil. 

Also, a great place where you can throw virgins.

Most of my life I’ve wanted to see one. Yet, somehow, I’m thirty eight years old, gone to Hawaii, lived in Costa Rica for two years, but have never seen a volcano up close. Looking at something as dangerous as a volcano requires planning, savings, in short, capital. You need a vehicle to get to the top. You need a park pass and a guide to make sure you don’t fall in. […]

Once COVID restrictions lifted enough to head to do our mandated expat sojourn outside the Costa Rican border, I got my hopes up. A man in a cab would come up and say, “I’ll take you to the volcano for $20” and then we could talk him down to $10. We’d pop over, have a quick life-changing experience, and make it back in time to catch the bus. 

But it was wishful thinking. What happened instead is that once we got to the other side of the border, I stepped out of the immigration building for five minutes and saw hovering over the horizon, a volcano. I can’t say for sure, but looking at the map, I believe it was the Masaya volcano, very faint in the distance. A mountain, pale with tranquility, a giant green tower on the face of the earth, one emblem of mystery and longing. It was a clear day in the tropics, but clouds flew around the volcano’s tip. In front of me were busses and concrete and fencing, people in bureaucratic uniforms filling out paperwork. Tourists and expats came back from San Juan del Sur with their surfboards, and bags of inexpensive rum and tequila. 

Tresha Faye Haefner, How We Almost Saw the Mouth of Hell Volcano

I always knew, having grown up with parents in the lower third of middle class (or the upper third of lower/working class depending on the year) being a writer would not be easy. That even saying you wanted to be a writer made you sound like you were saying you wanted to be a mermaid or a ballerina. Completely unrealistic and unlikely. Despite having a fairly bookish childhood where reading was prioritized and creativity encouraged (my dad a huge reader of many things and my mom was a hobby painter of figurines and decor items when I was younger.)  While my mom stayed home and babysat neighborhood kids in my early years, she later went back to work as a mail clerk/ phone operator for a manufacturer. My dad, who was laid off from a payroll job as computers hit the scene in the mid-80s, later worked as an airport janitor and postal worker.  So while there was a certain bit of whimsy or fancy allowed, I was still expected to turn my interests into something like a solid career. My first plan was, of course, to teach, either high school or college. When I discovered I was very unsuited to that, it was libraries. Writing was intended to be something done on the side for enrichment and enjoyment, but certainly no one was making any money from stories or words.

And perhaps I should clarify that no one still makes money from writing POETRY. However, to my own amazement sometimes, I’ve been lucky enough to hobble out a living the past couple years writing other kinds of things–design articles, DIY tutorials, neighborhood and city guides. The world of journalism that once supported writers like Hemingway or Dorothy Parker is probably long gone, but there is still writing work to be had with some experience, hunting, and SEO savvy. It is a vastly different world than the one of printed magazines and newspapers. I can eek out something of a living by writing, but its certainly not like “middle-class comfortable” by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet this morning, I woke with the knowledge of how lucky I am that I get to spend my day among words, if not my own poems til later today, still pieces that are engaging and interesting to me. Or even that, when I was working a 40-hour-a-week job, I was able to do the sort of things poets do–publish work, write books, get my MFA in creative writing, do occasional readings, engage in community–all on the side. They are two very different ways of existing, and believe me, I like this one far more. I am a little more in control of income and my head is clearer and less stressed. I still put in long hours when you combine poems with editing and freelancing, but it feels more realistic and tenable. 

Kristy Bowen, poetry and po(v)erty

Dolour not dollar
Latin dolere to grieve
Sorrow

Dolen, mediaeval English
give out alms to the poor
Doled out

Angela Topping, Three Poems I wrote for The Brown Envelope Book

GloPoWriMo is almost over and I’ve managed to write a draft of something every day of April. A lot of it is dross, but I spent 20 minutes or so every day writing, so that’s worth celebrating. I no longer struggle to write something, it’s just trying to find a way into the theme or to write something I like that is the difficult thing now. I have a pile of interesting drafts and bits of poems to play with once this month is over. 

In some ways, I like that part best, to try and push my original idea into something that stands on its own. I often know what I’m saying, but sometimes it becomes wrapped in symbolism and images that others don’t understand. I have my own personal mythology and vocabulary, certain words and images mean specific things to me. Some of the images make sense or are easy to figure out, but often readers won’t get what I’m doing, so I need to broaden my ideas and make things work without me explaining them. 

Part of the process is adding and chipping away at my poems, playing with form and theme, another part is sharing with my writing group to see what they get and how close it is to my original idea. Or to see if I’m happy with their alternative readings. Often I am. 

I think the personal language is for myself. I feel my poems are an internal conversation that I sometimes want to share. I could be working out a dilemma or having a moan or rant or just playing with memories or wishes. If I decide to share the poems, I want them to work without me, but I don’t mind if my some of my personal references are missed if the general idea of the poem still works. 

Gerry Stewart, Sharing a Personal Mythology

Hubble site-
impatiently waiting for another galaxy
to load

Tom Clausen, spontaneous combustion

If you follow me on instagram you have possibly seen my funny little angel drawings. A year ago, maybe longer ago, I also began drawing or scribbling something I call a “letter of inspiration” to myself in my morning session. The practice is inspired by Cy Twombly’s series and book, Letter of Resignation. The book is out of print and used copies are cost prohibitive, so I usually am looking at the repros in the Schwenger book.

The art critic John Berger, said of Twombly:

“He doesn’t see language with the readability and clarity of something printed out. He sees it, rather as a terrain full of illegibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises, and obscurities….Its obscurities, its lost senses, its self-effacement come about for many reasons — because of the way words modify each other, write themselves over each other, cancel one another out, because the unsaid plays counts for as much, or more, than the said, and because language can never cover what it signifies.”

And so, at first, I was very captivated by the at times restrained anger in the marks in Twombly’s letters. Schwenger says that “the dominant ductus in the Letter of Resignation series, though, is the cancellation scribble…” He says, “For what is a letter of resignation if not a complete rejection of what has come before?” And he says those strokes “sum up the emotional trajectory.” We can read the letters as a series of drafts, says Schwenger, and we can find the writer/artist in the discovery that “the words he has begun to set down are inadequate.” There is a bit of violence in the marks, and no salutation. Who is he quitting? From what does he resign? Well. Who knows. Simultaneously, as he was creating this series, he was also working on his now famous “blackboard paintings.”

I love Twombly’s work and I love the idea of saying things without words in this way. I’d been doing asemic writing for years without having the name for it. I’ve been doing what I’ve always called a morning scribble for a lot of my writing life. It loosens the fingers up, and frees up the brain, in my experience.

So, while I love the letters of resignation, what I wanted at this time was more of a letter of inspiration. A words similar in sound and syllables to resignation. Like Twombly, I have no salutation but I do remind myself what the practice is by writing it at the top of the page. I’m basic like that haha. I write them to calm my nerves, and to get into the flow….to say things that it’s been tricky to say in words.

Shawna Lemay, Letter of Inspiration

In my rush to be happy about Pear Rust going up at CBTR last week I totally forgot to mention how happy I was about a poem being accepted by Scintilla. Not sure when it’s out, but it’s nice to see poems that pre-date CtD finding homes, and I’m sure I’ll go back to some for whatever the next book is, but the next phase is finding homes for new ones. Actually, the next phase is writing some new ones, and yesterday may have moved things on.

An actual draft has appeared. It’s the most miserable thing I’ve ever written, but hey ho. I started something else and had the sense too top before it took a turn that wasn’t warranted…Yes, I could have “free-written”,. but it would have been free-written horse shite…No one needs that; least of all whoever has the misfortune to catalogue my archives when I’m gone.

Mat Riches, Pincer movement

full of the useless
yet i pull a few weeds
study knots on the faces of trees

Grant Hackett [no title]

Looking back at college thirty years later, the two most formative experiences and communities for me were the Williams College Feminist Seder project (about which I’ve written before) and the Elizabethans, the madrigal ensemble of which I was a founding member in January of 1993.

For all four of my years of college we sang together — if memory serves, for six hours a week? We held concerts. We piled ourselves and our luggage into a school van and drove all over the Northeast (and some of the Mid-Atlantic) bringing our blend of “madrigals and sundry chansons” and geek humor. […]

I love about choral singing the same thing I love about community writ large: together we are more than the sum of our parts. We are all needed, and we all work to make space for everyone’s voices. Together we make something beautiful, even sometimes ineffable, that none of us could make alone.

Thirty years ago I never thought I would be fortunate enough to get to be a rabbi for a living — to do the holy work of serving God and community as my actual job. And I certainly never thought I would be lucky enough to have something akin to the Elizabethans in the synagogue that I’m blessed to serve.

Two other founding members of the Elizabethans live in town — a therapist, and a librarian — and both sing in my shul choir now. That brings me extra joy, though I’ve come to feel connected with all of my fellow singers: the ones I’ve known for decades, and the ones I’ve met through the choir itself.

Harmony itself may be the deepest form of prayer my heart knows. Meeting every week to make harmony with others is such a gift to me. Especially during this heartbreaking year of war in Israel and Palestine, and divisions across American Jewish community, harmony matters to me more than ever.

Rachel Barenblat, A love letter to song

This is, I guess, what social media might call a ‘timeline cleanse’. There’s a lot to be anxious or angry about, but also a lot of people making an effort to do something about it all – people restoring landscapes, saving species, campaigning for refugees or the disabled, developing projects for people with mental health problems, working for peace or for better working conditions, trying to stop some of the unjust and downright irrational things going on. More power to them all, but also, a time of refreshment and reconnection. Here’s a few photos, and a bit of bird and flower chat. […]

I am beginning to realise how much there is to know about a new territory, and though I have now been here for two and a half years, I’m barely scratching the surface. Because I’d been in Stirling for ten years before I started writing about it, I forgot the slow accumulation of things you notice, patterns you begin to recognise, knowledge built through experiment and failure. It can’t be rushed. I can see the shape of the hopes I had for the garden beginning to emerge, but I feel that this garden is talking back to me, shaping its own destiny and mine along with it. It’s a very different experience – I’m less young and gallus, but though I have to go slower, I think I might notice more, think more carefully, and maybe write better.

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Hill of Stones in April

Have I said already (I have already said) that one
dog’s cold nose could turn the world to ice, and
a cat’s tongue warm it all, in the space between 
the first line and the third? Well, it’s left undone, then,

and the sun lays rude and violent hands on me,
shakes me awake and tells me all the things still left to do.

Dale Favier, Aubade

Too much bad news, not enough writing – not a good state for the soul. Looking at art, spending time in the garden, with friends and family – I know those things help, at least they help me. I wish you a happy ending to National Poetry Month, to April, and wishing you some peace instead of anxiety, some inspiration instead of discouragement, love and kindness instead of injustice and meanness. I wish you lilacs in your path.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Do People Buy Books? Followers and Publishing, Plus a Reading and Class Visit Reports, Typewriters, Art Birthdays, and More

This week: the shadows of children, a different kind of faith, ellipses like off-ramps, poets as secret agents, and much more. Enjoy.

Never forget the empty swings in the park
and the shadows
of children swinging on every swing

Bob Mee, THE BLUE STONE and TWO OTHERS

These children –
we see them
what they’ve become
ghost-eaters
dirt-diggers
what they would give
for a taste of khubeezeh
a drink of cold water
a wash in the Red Sea

They push their steel pots
their plastic bowls
to the front lines
their eyes on those
with the stronger arms
the longer reach
the elbows out and ready

Maureen E. Doallas, The Children / We See (Poem)

Martyrdom was great for Jesus. He now has followers all over the world. And what, I ask you, has that gotten us? Less “do unto others” and more “other the others.”  But Jesus didn’t nail himself up there. I guess if you’re done living, self-immolation is one hell of an exit interview. I’m just not sure it shines as bright a light on the thing you’re protesting as it does on you.

On the flip side of that, the whole “vote” thing is bullshit. By all means, vote! But voting shouldn’t be a protest. (Besides, if you think your side has a poor record on certain wars, the other side’s is way worse.)

There are plenty of ways to protest. I particularly like withholding the patronage of certain businesses and disrupting the sleep of certain politicians.

But my personal favorite form of protest is to make something—a photograph, a painting, a song—something that brings awareness to an atrocity in a way that resonates with people who might otherwise not feel anything.

I’m not naïve enough to think a song could end a war. (“Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die,” anyone?) However, it often moves people to action with their dollars, and that’s what hurts the soulless the most.

But what do I know? I’m not good at this. I make lamps that shine a light on coffee tables. I write poems that smash the patriarchy with a frying pan. I take pictures of my dog showing off his phantom balls.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Fixin’ to Die

What kind of unbearable reason will
allow you to forget? What are their
names, what should we call them: the
mother, the child, the protest, the
man, the dawn, the fire, the morning,
the execution, the immolation, the
full moon, the drone…the death?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Not just a question

I’m coming to believe that a goal of bringing about a particular kind of world through our work with language is probably the wrong reason to teach or write or read or run libraries or have conversations. That kind of motivation too easily leads to silence—because the work too easily falls short of achieving what we hope it might—and with silence we lose our memories. We lose our history. We lose each other.

I’m coming to believe it’s a different kind of faith I need to cultivate now. […]

Maybe the kind of writing that I—and so many other ordinary people like me—do in places like this are simply a way of having a conversation or of leaving tracks.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Of work and healing

If my life were written in its fullness on a huge piece of paper, could I smooth it out, step back, feel a rush of compassion and then acknowledge: “It is what it is”?

Then fold up the paper – hell – maybe even burn it, and go outside and see the trees on this morning, as they are, as they have never been before?

Ren Powell, No Shame

It’s time, it’s long past time, to see that the future is totally unknown. That we can lose and be annihilated. Time and chance happeneth to us all. It’s good that it should be so, actually, because we are a little, trivial people, pettifoggers, engaged in endless litigation, swollen full of indignation and self-righteousness, unable to endure a moment’s quietness. Our disappearance is not going to be a bad thing. Suffering there is, and suffering there will be, but that was a given from the start. We are not capable of making a new world. We never were. Get over it: go home, change a diaper, wash the dishes, mend a window. Cold weather is coming.

Dale Favier, Collapse

I’ve been feeling a bit of despair about my lack of coherent poetry writing.  I jot down a line or two, or a stanza or two, but very little comes that feels worth revising and polishing.  Perhaps it’s the state of the world we’re in.  More likely, it’s that my writing energy is being channeled in other ways right now.

Take the past three days for example.  I’ve written 3300 words for just my church job.  That doesn’t count any of the writing that I’ve done as a student.  It’s no wonder that there’s not much wonder left for my poetry brain to feed on.

I’ve been in this writing state before.  Poetry has returned, often in a richer way than before.  I will be patient and keep the garden bed mulched.  At some point, sprouts will emerge.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hearing “Beth” (Yes, that Song by KISS) in a New Context

It was only March
but already bees were on the blossom,
blue tits were nesting,
too many things were happening too soon.

He said he’d heard it on the radio,
The Last Spring – by Grieg,
and I, thinking it a good thing to do,
bought him the CD.

We sat and listened to it together
and he said nothing.
Not thinking, I said it was beautiful
and he said nothing.

The days grew longer
and the time shorter,
the blossom faded
and the blue tits left.

When he died in May
then I knew what it was he didn’t say.

Sue Ibrahim, Too early, too late

When you watch
a funeral
from there
what do you feel?

Did you organize
a welcome party
for the new arrival —
chains of illness
thrown off
like light bedsheets
in the morning
— and is she already
making art
with steady hands?

Rachel Barenblat, Questions

A lot of people have asked me how can poetry be magical realism. Isn’t magical realism a genre of fiction, and isn’t it defined by unexplained or magical-seeming things occurring randomly in a contemporary setting?

You can argue that poetry does that all the time, but I would say it usually makes clear that the unexplained or magical-seeming pairings are metaphorical. Things are “like” other things, or “seem like” different things. They even become other things, but always suggesting a similarity, not a random magical event.

I would say that magical realism in poetry (and fiction) removes the argument of “likeness”. It plunges the reader straight into an altered world, offering only mystery as a doorway. It isn’t always an easily entered door, but once you walk through, things have changed. Life has changed for you.

Consider Louise Gluck‘s poem, “The Wild Iris”. ‘It doesn’t use metaphor or simile. The story is simply told from the point of view of a flower that is somehow conscious. The iris comprehends death differently than a human being does, and yet its experience resonates with ours in some way. To become a wildflower, to die and be reborn from your essence, these aren’t our ordinary states, but the poem takes us on that imagined journey and by the end, our reality has shifted.

That is what magical realism does. It shifts our understanding of reality, loosens it, invites entry into other dimensions and altered possibilities. Maybe reality isn’t as solid and predictable as we thought. Maybe a flower can be conscious. Maybe we can be dead and yet alive.

Rachel Dacus, Magical Realism in Poetry – Louise Gluck

What I like about Stephen Spender is that I disagree with him as much as I agree with him, sometimes in quick succession. In both poetry and prose, he seems to alternate between making a good point and then missing the point entirely, seeing clearly and then muddying the waters. But this makes him more interesting rather than less so because it makes him more human – it makes him, to use Auden’s phrase about Yeats, “silly, like us”.

Chris Edgoose, Two Poetries: Spender, Poetry and Ideology

Could I print cheaper? For large print runs the cost per unit comes down, but CBe books are short-run books. And if I’m putting a book into the world – adding to the world’s sheer stuff – I want, obviously, this book to be a decent thing, so I’m going to add in from the extras on offer, as I think right for each book: endsheets, flaps, inside-cover printing. I’m currently paying around £3 per copy, which dunks that 2-pence profit into the red.

No Arts Council funding (after three rejections I’m not going there again) and I haven’t even mentioned design, typesetting or time, because if I costed those in this would make even less financial sense. So not a business model. More a declaration that it can’t be done without privilege (I’m 73, no mortgage, pension, know-how picked up in previous employment: kill me) and luck; but with those it can be done. For sixteen years and still running. So yes, a model of sorts. An anti-business model. And if the whole thing feels about to collapse, every day, that feels right.

Charles Boyle, 2 pence

It’s 9:47 a.m. and I am watching a movie called Hope Gap, a title worthy of the Hallmark Channel. But it has Annette Benning and Bill Nighy which is why I chose it and why I’m still watching, even though I realize I’ve watched before. In one scene, Bill is sitting at his desk, a huge, beautiful, simple wood desk in front of a huge window. The English landscape displayed through the window like a piece of art. Suddenly, I have desk envy. This is not like me at all because I simply don’t allow envy into my life but also because desks don’t normally attract me. My experience with desks have always been school or work. School is fine – I actually liked school. But work? Not so much. Desks remind me of years spent inside shuffling papers or entering data on a computer that, at the time, was important in it’s own way but now feels like stolen time spent on minutia. Most often when I write, like now, I’m sitting on my couch with a cup of coffee or tea on the side table next to me, my laptop on my lap, and Albert my cat, next to me snoozing. It’s comfortable and encourages mulling and writing. Plus, I can’t collect clutter like you can on a desk. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less about things and more about simplicity. Little tchotchkes sitting on tables, or desks in this case, are dust collectors and I don’t like dust or dusting dust.

Charlotte Hamrick, Saturday Morning Musings

Ideally, the place where we do our concentrated work needs to be functional and supportive; it needs to suit who we are, and help us to feel good when we’re in it. There are plenty of writers who’ve done their greatest work in rooms or chilly cabins piled with books and papers  — think Seamus Heaney — and artists, like Lucien Freud, who’ve worked in chaos. It’s a question of knowing yourself, too.

It’s hard for me to concentrate and work well when I don’t have, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “a room of my own,” even if that room is mine only part of the time. For most of my life, I’ve worked in somewhat makeshift studio spaces: repurposed or multi-purpose rooms in the same place where I was living. That’s been OK when I was able to close the door and have some solitude and privacy, less so when I was working in a larger but shared space, or a space that other people walked through. For much of our time in Vermont, I did my design work and writing in a room that had, literally, six doors — it was a former kitchen, with front and back outside entrances, a bathroom door, and doors leading to other parts of the house as well as the basement! I couldn’t do artwork there at all, but, with my back to most of the doors, I was able to write.

Beth Adams, Spaces of our Hands and Hearts

Now we are all in Plymouth, enjoying the endless wind and rain even though it is March and should be spring. One of the advantages of moving is that all of your books get clumped together and sent to the same room on arrival in the new house. I had forgotten about the overflows in Exeter. The anthologies. The ones that couldn’t fit anywhere else. The new-since-lockdown collections, which I got rid of a lot of novels to make space for (and now kind of regret). We are all here, in the same room, for the first time, since, oh, moving to Exeter, maybe. Tony Blair was not yet prime minister, Princess Diana was still alive, and there was no internet to speak of.

At a rough guess, the collection has at least trebeled since then. I am happy to be with them. Reunited, you could say. I did not realise I had so much Mark Halliday or Hubert Moore or Jackie Wills. I spend time with them now, enjoying who sits next to who alphbetically, as in the old days, before Instagram, the names a kind of incantation: Bo Carpelan, Peter Carpenter, Raymond Carver, Julia Casterton, Blaise Cendras, Danielle Chapman, Linda Chase. It’s a good team. I think they are happier now, too. It is still raining. But here we all are, together.

Anthony Wilson, On having my books in one room

Time doesn’t fit quite like it used to, getting short in the sleeves and tight around the neck.

Add to that, reality’s cataleptic slot machines spitting out slug-nickel dreams while epiphanies suffering from allergies have lost their voice.

Here is the memory that holds a lost friend’s ashes, the guitar that sings a city’s dying streets, the incense that burns away time with the sweetest smells.

Rich Ferguson, The Rush and Raw Wonder

I don’t want to write it all into some kind of false eloquence because it feels so very heavy. My fingers feel heavy on the keyboard, my eyelids heavy in my skull. It makes me want to sleep. I recognize this feeling from very early journals I kept as an adolescent. They were filled with details about what pop stars I loved (Prince, Howard Jones, George Michael ), what boys I was obsessing over (A, A, M), how much weight I needed to lose (a lot), and other teenage ephemera. They also included cryptic, unfinished entries that housed and shrouded the darker stuff of my life: “Something is happening with my parents. I can tell. I can’t write more. Too much. Too tired. Maybe later…” So many ellipses like off-ramps from honesty. Like pillows I’d bury my head under to block the sounds of anger and unhappiness echoing throughout our home.

Sheila Squillante, Dot Dot Dot

don’t answer the door
it was vile
down in the cellar

blue and ripply
uncontrollable marbling
strange bits of silvery fungus

it’s dangerous
it’s going to change
it might fall apart

how is it done?
with open folios
like the tower of babel

the bottoms could be dipped
into a dream book

Ama Bolton, ABCD February 2024

Last week, I was talking to my lead editors at HD about some recent work and they startled me a little by mentioning that I was a poet (it’s not currently in my bio there, which is focused more on decor/DIY writing, but it was when I started) It’s obviously not, of course, a secret. since anyone who looks at my website or socials can see it or buy my books. But I also spend a lot of time writing things for other people, far more time than I spend on creative work. And it is a mix of subjects and publications, most of which have their own unique style and voice. But, then again, I’d never considered how the “poetic voice” of my writing impacted those. My editors thankfully encouraged me to bring more of that poetic voice into my pieces, the idea of which I loved, since I had tried, these last two years, to stamp it out completely. […]

I don’t go about in the world exclaiming I am a poet. My mother, right before she left the care facility a month or so before her death, was one day boasting to the aide who was helping her, that I was a poet and it seemed sort of ridiculous in light of the sort of important work this woman was doing. Somewhat frivolous, as all art is, and not at all necessary. Mostly because I always feel that no one cares. Or that that sort of work isn’t valuable in the world. The real flesh and bone world, not the poetry world. Which I know isn’t true, but if I wanted to be valuable I would have persisted in my desire to be a scientist or teacher, both things I gave up and decided to forge a life with words. There’s a line in the American Psycho musical that always hits a certain way when I listen to the soundtrack:

“You’re not moving mountains. Or changing lives.

You’re just killing while you’re killing time.” 

Still, sometimes it does feel like I am a secret agent. That I’m like Batman, except I write my little lines and tell my little stories instead of solving crime. Like there’s a secret code word all of us poets know and reveal ourselves accordingly. 

Kristy Bowen, secret agents

Simon West is the author of five collections of poetry, including Prickly Moses, published in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and The Ladder, which was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. He is also the author of Dear Muses? Essays in Poetry and The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The themes that recur in the poems I write today are similar to those in my first book, First Names, published back in 2006. Maybe I’m less shy about them today, more willing to accept them and give them the space they need to ring out. If there was a moment when poetry suddenly changed my life, then it came when I read Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’. I was a teenage boy growing up in country Victoria. The experience of early motherhood that Plath evokes in that poem was not something I had much interest in. But I was amazed by how those words and images bristled and came alive, as if a spirit leapt off the page and entered me. Perhaps everything I have written is a homage to that spirit as I have discovered it in many poems and poets since. My new book, Prickly Moses, is no different. […]

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?
If I could write a poem to resolve climate change or the mess in Gaza I’d do it today. But poetry works not so much by answering questions as by following intuitions.

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?
Blow the minds of readers, connect them to a richer human culture. Although I’d try to formulate it in a less grandiose manner, I like what Wordsworth says:

‘[the poet] is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.’

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Simon West

Here’s a poem I wrote when my daughter was three years old. She’s an adult now, but the moment described in the poem might as well have happened yesterday, so vivid is its memory. Time is strange and it changes us, true, it bends us to its will, but some things time cannot bend. Imagination, for example. Memory. Love.

I know what some people might say—I tell this to myself often enough—that memory is flawed, that we tend to forget things, or misremember them; that love is perishable like everything else, but isn’t the very fact of our existence on this earth, the simple truth that we have lived here, made a mark, however small, that we have loved and have been loved in return, already miraculous?

I love this quote from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It’s the very last paragraph in the novel and it’s the one I keep coming back to whenever life is a bit harder, whenever the world is a little more cruel.

“We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Romana Iorga, Wolf-Child

most days
only the spiders know who i am.
they tell each other, “that is a traitor.”
don’t get me wrong, i want to be liked.
dear god, i would do anything
to be liked. eaten with a tuning fork.
threaded through the eye
of a chicken skull. get rid of the glass.
get rid of a mirror. live off nothing
but mirages of animals.

Robin Gow, mirage boy

I’ve been working my way through my AWP reading pile, and I’ve been enjoying and learning from all the books I’ve read so far. I have been particularly aware of some excellent opening lines that have me thinking about entry into a poem.

I’ve also been finishing up a class on using the language/forms of music in poetry with the brilliant Alina Ştefănescu. In our last class conversation, she shared an idea (hers? someone else’s? I can’t remember and didn’t write down a source…) that a title is a sign on the door, an epigraph what one can see from a threshold; that an opening line seduces the reader to the lip of a lake, and the second line coaxes the reader into the water. I like that idea very much, but I also have been enamored with the idea that a first line can be a cannonball directly into the lake.

Donna Vorreyer, Entries

March has come in, not like a lamb or a lion, but like a jerk, bringing hail, sideways snow, heavy rain, sunshine and all in two days’ time. The flowers continue to bloom through it all, and a bobcat comes to visit. Meanwhile, I’m reading a ton, trying to do some submissions this month, and getting ready for a ton of readings and talks later on in March and April. […]

I’ve been trying to come out of my plague-years hibernation—doing AWP, my book launch, and visits with family last year, my first travel in seven years last month, and so, I’m trying to get out there in the world a bit more. I’m currently also working on my next book, sending out poems, doing serious edits (as opposed to those lighthearted edits of the last several years). But like the Northwest’s weather in March so far, it’s been a bit of a stop and start, with my energy and health being good for a while, and then having to rest and recover. Here’s looking forward to the warmth of true spring, better weather, and the opportunity to get out and enjoy it!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Podcast on BeautyHunters, Bobcat Visits, and March Comes in Like a Jerk

I’m writing this from my happy place. If you’ve read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, you know where I am: a little cottage in the woods in southern Ohio. I gave myself a weekend writing retreat to try to make some real progress on my next book. I’m wrung out in the very best way.

My biggest joy since I’ve been here, other than being incredibly productive? The Merlin app. I was hearing some unusual bird calls—loud, shrill, almost seagull-like in pitch. I wondered if it might be a hawk or an eagle. Thanks to this very cool app, I know what it was: a red-shouldered hawk. […]

I read a bit on the deck yesterday because it was so warm and sunny. I’m always reading multiple books at once. Picture a bee in a meadow, sundrunk and dusty with pollen, visiting flower after flower after flower. It’s me! Reading! Right now I’m dipping into Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, which I really like so far; my old, tattered copy of William Stafford’s The Answers Are inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life; and Mark Doty’s The Art of Description from that terrific series of craft books Graywolf publishes. (That whole series is fantastic. All hits, no misses, as far as I can tell.)

I’m also awaiting the arrival of Diane Seuss’s new book of poems, Modern Poetry. I preordered that book so fast! Bianca Stone conducted a fascinating interview with her that’s in the current issue of Poets & Writers, if you can get your hands on a copy.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

I first read Pindar in a rather unsatisfactory university reading class with an elderly academic. We sat around a table in a side room of the library, rather drearily reading out our prepared translations one after another. The main thing I recall was the frustration engendered by the teacher’s significant deafness, to which he didn’t want to admit. I prepared very carefully for these classes, but he obviously found the higher pitch of my voice (and that of the one other girl) difficult to hear and would regularly ask one of the boys in the small group to “have another go” at the passage I had just translated, regardless of what I had said. This was particularly irritating because one of my fellow students, with a nice resounding bass voice, was just reading out the Loeb translation which he had under the desk: our teacher, who could at least hear what was said in his manly tones, would then praise it extravagantly. Annoying!

Annoying but also immaterial, because there is nothing quite like Pindar in Greek. When I read Pindar I feel the true shiver of critical impossibility: of just how hopeless it feels, in the face of the greatest and strangest art, to say anything other than a more-or-less sophisticated version of “you should read this, because once you’ve read it, you might find that nothing is quite the same”. And as Horace (via Cowley) puts it: ‘Pindar is imitable by none; / The Phoenix Pindar is a vast Species alone’. So there’s not much of a way round him.

Victoria Moul, On Pindar

‘Cinematographic’ or ‘filmic’ aren’t habitual adjectives when describing the vast majority of contemporary U.K. poetry, but they provide an ideal point of departure for discussion of Nicholas Hogg’s first full collection, Missing Person (Broken Sleep Books, 2023).

In the above context, the last two stanzas from ‘Starring Role’ seem especially relevant:

Then a tea with the lads,
            the ruffle-haired cub. I wander off
from the gang — cue plaintive strings (not too loud)
            as I stand and stare from a new-build shell.
A reviewer may write
            that this is rather mawkish,

the boy at a window
in an empty home. What the critic
has failed to gather, is how the man will carry
            this void
            into every room he walks
            for the rest of his life.

These lines read as a statement of poetic intent. They’re comparing an individual person to a character, a fictional scene to a supposedly factual event, highlighting the blurred lines between the two, while they’re also anticipating a potential film critic/literary reviewer’s reticence at the poem’s struck poses. And all this, of course, plays out alongside a reference to an archetypal musical soundtrack for the event or film. Via these references, Hogg is implicitly asking us questions. Are we reading a poem or watching a film? Is it fact, faction or fiction?

Matthew Stewart, Scenes from a film, Nicholas Hogg’s Missing Person

TRIPLE NO. 17: “Crossings,” Susan Landgraf. Ravenna Press, 2022, pp. 49-82, $12.95, paper, www.ravennapress.com.

Ah, the Triples! This is an amazing series from our local Ravenna Press, and well worth your time. Triple No. 17 offers not only a chapbook by Susan Landgraf, but also Philip Quinn’s “Home Movies (from The Afterlife),” and Suzanne Bottelli’s “American Grubble.”

“Crossings” (with a subtitle: “Past to Present to Future and Between”) includes 22 poems, divided into 3 short sections. There are multiple threads, but a dominant one is wings. From the first poem, “Crowkeeper,” to the last, wings and winged creatures are both literal and symbolic. Birds cut the air with slick wings, painters molt like birds, a newborn gets his wings “stuck // like the moth / in a jar” (“Crossing Over”), an old woman’s head bobs like a pigeon’s, feathers poke out of pockets and men yearn to turn into birds: “he raised his arms again and again / and the sky turned a rainbow / of green, black-tipped, blue and white” (“Birdman”). Even Pegasus makes an appearance.

Bethany Reid, Susan Landgraf, Crossings

I spent the afternoon working on a new poetry film. I’ve been a bit behind schedule with this one, mainly because I wasn’t sure how to tackle it. I aim to use my own images for the bulk of my films’ content (fortunately I take a lot of random photos) but images for this poem stumped me.

Inspiration came from an unlikely source. A friend recommended a heart monitoring app, which happens to record my pulse. Voila. after much tech-wrangling, I managed to capture the image and set to work creating the film.

My first step is always to record the poem and place markers on parts I want to emphasise, either through image or text. My goal is to create an entity that is enhanced by the film, rather than simply illustrating the poem. When I’ve mapped out my poem, I continue to add the key images and effects. It’s easy to get carried away with these, and I’m careful to challenge myself about the purpose of applying glitch effect 10 or teal overlay. Once I’ve built my framework I begin to experiment, tweaking, untweaking, reviewing and revising until I feel I’ve achieved what I need to. Creating these films is way of delving into the meaning of the poem, and I love the alchemy of bringing image and language together.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, When I think of my heart

Here, in the part of the village where I live, in the old ex council houses; ex farm labourer houses from the 1950s, it has been the jackdaws who dominate, nesting in the chimneys and watching the village from the roof tops. Until recently.

The crows are beginning to take over. It is not an all out war of claw and beak, but rather insidious, a gentle creeping into territory, a taking over of branch and chimney pot. It seems calculated, but am I simply overlaying my own human-strategy onto these clever birds? I first noticed the tension between crows and jackdaws a year or so ago, when, looking up from my computer on its battered old sewing table, surrounded by research books, I saw a jackdaw have its tail pulled by a crow on the roof opposite. The jackdaw, understandably upset, ran after the crow who simply sloped away as if it hadn’t done it. Slowly, over many months, this sort of behaviour increased. The crows refused to move from the roofs even while the jackdaws dive bombed them. There were more jackdaws nesting down the lane now. I watched a pair of jackdaws shout down a hole in a tree for three days until the squirrel that was living there with her babies, left in a panic. The jackdaw moved in. But they have always lived and nested in the beech trees here, I thought.

Last summer I heard a jackdaw mimicking a crow. It hadn’t got it quite right, there was something just off in the tone of the call – perhaps not quite as defiant as a crow’s call. I have only heard this a couple of times and I don’t know the meaning behind the behaviour. I want so desperately for it to be a kind of piss-take, a mocking of the crow hierarchy, but I imagine this is some sort of deterrent, or camouflage for the jackdaws. It was an interesting development in strategy. If it is strategy.

I wonder where instinct leaves off, and intelligence takes over. I wonder this about humans too. We seem to be driven by instinct but dress it up as intelligence, and I wonder if this is why the world is the way it is, so many people reacting to the fear they feel as tribal, primal animals, and using those big clever brains we carry around with us to build weapons, kill children, annihilate countries because of that fear. It is never as simple as that, of course. Or maybe it is.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from the War Between Jackdaws and Crows

We’ve entered the dirty socks part of March, the dingy linen stained grunge metal time when winter’s rough hide pokes up in earth’s skin.  It’s the shoulder season – not white shoulder, not tanned shoulder – the prickly wan unexercised but already slapped into a strapless dress season.  

You can see it in the raw mud and thawing wood planks, the expanding pot holes. The cheeks and legs of twiggy yards are in bad need of a shave.  They have been caught off-guard – they are still thinking winter, and no one told them it is time to emerge!  

In a way, it’s fabulous…there is physics of sorts in the works.  A physicist on the radio explained that not every part of an organism gets news of change at the same time.  There’s an information delay.  The head of a slinky knows it is falling and begins to collapse after a hand has released it.  But the lower rings defy gravity, hovering and remaining in suspension for a fraction of a second.

Jill Pearlman, The Dirty Socks Part of March

There is a language that restores,
and a language of betrayal. Casualty comes
from casuelte, meaning chance,

incidental; unfortunate loss viewed
against the big screen called history.
How do you make sense of that

which happens, and what befalls
another? How do you make sense
of the blankness on one side of the page,

versus the dark stain where a body
burned on the sidewalk? There’s nothing
that falls, that happens, purely

by chance. Wind whips through
the night, making the shingles clap.
Another strip of paint peels off the gutter.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Casualty

coming up from the basement to a house still standing

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: love and chocolate, the return of light, bringing scarecrows to life, the cost of beauty, and much more. Enjoy,

Each holiday is apt to spread out like water or ice over a flat calendar’s square and become a season unto itself, yes? Witness the Boxing Week Sales, Black Friday month, and the Christmas quarter. […]

Now we are nearly there. Heart’s Day. Another 8 days. And because crowds, the bookings for the 14th, probably start on the 9th so 3 days. And because it’s the month of red, chocolate, and love, my Valentine’s reading is on the 15th. There’s a spillover of St. Valentine’s to the 17th in a Hummingbird chocolate tasting which I probably won’t go to.

But love. And Poetry. Set aside poetry. What is love? A relationship? A sensation? An immersion? Is it a choice or is it a thousand habits of behaviour? A lens or framework to interpret the world? A word imposed categorically around things, not inherently a thing itself? An excuse for chocolate? All those questions could stand for poetry as easily.

Pearl Pirie, A Valentine’s Week Reading

i don’t need to be turned into chocolate
to be devoured. here is my cordial cherry.
here is how i gut myself
in the interest of becoming a swan.
dear lover, haven’t you ever
taken yourself apart without a manual?
become a tiny wreckage?

Robin Gow, tunnel of love

What are you in love with? Chocolate? The origins of the Japanese Bobtail? The lifecycle of periodical cicadas?  There is so much to fall in love with and so many ways to focus and research that curiosity can become overwhelming. I frequently feel lost in a mire of information and beset by a creeping sense that there is not enough time. Not enough. Not enough and I am wasting it by wondering what, where and how in a recursive loop.

I read a beautiful piece on Wendy Pratt’s Notes from the Margin a couple of weeks ago, detailing the work of writers who are truly in love with their specialism. I am in awe of those who devote their energy wholeheartedly and with such excellence. My first response was to think that I’d find a subject to get properly in to and write about it. Of all the things I love there must be on that is top of the tree. And there is, for a moment or a day, a week at best. But then growing delphiniums, or Persian cooking, or planning an expedition in Anglesey comes along and my focus is taken. […]

I stepped a little further back. Is there a thread that links these things? What attracts me and forces my attention, my falling in love? It’s a certain feeling, one that has been with me since my first walks on the hills near my home, one that was a companion through the fissured landscape of childhood and one that I’ve only recently been able to name. It’s a feeling of strength and self-belief, a feeling of connection with nature and the elements and there are times when it’s the only thing that has kept me going. This wild feeling that threads my work, my day, my dreams.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, This Wild Feeling

I’m out early. After running the Dawn Chorus zoom writing club at seven am and seeing a sunrise smear of gold along the horizon from my desk I want to get into the fresh air and apricate in the sun, feel its warmth on me, let it energise me. I have to be back in 40 minutes as the builder’s are putting a new kitchen in, finally and I’ll have decisions to make on plug sockets and backboards. My whole life feels like a clutter of different things I must do to make progress in all the areas of my life and yet, at the same time a strange inability to focus or get anything done is upon me.

I know what works to unstick me when I get like this. It’s being outside. It is a mile of walking down to the river and back, it is the letting go, the feeling of one part of my brain being overtaken by another – the part of my brain that must adhere to the life of a human is taken over by the part of my brain that is free to react instinctively to the world. As I turn and head home, away from the river, swerving back around the contour of a fresh ploughed field, two hares appear, completely oblivious to me. They chase each other, zig zagging, kicking back, sailing over the deep ruts of fresh plough lines. I feel something pulled up from my stomach into my chest that is hard to describe or define; it rises, it is excitement, thrill, a kind of ecstasy to see this, to be present in their world, and to know that their world is also my world.

Wendy Pratt, Two Hares

I’ve noticed my writing follows patterns that follow the season. Winter is often a fallow period and if I do write poems they are full of ice and darkness and grumpiness at both. It’s been a tough winter, twice the car’s battery has drained and twice the electric car has been stuck on the driveway because it’s not powerful enough to make it over the 4cm of ice. A pipe has burst in the shed and I have shovelled a mountain of snow, over and over. I hate winter at the best of times, but this one can seriously get tae as they say in Scotland, with a colourful flourish at the end. 

Proper spring is still a long way off. Finland is still buried under a blanket of snow and the temperature is currently -15C and these both show no sign of easing up. However, the light has returned. My poems are starting to show hints of hope, sun and an activity that they don’t show during my winter hibernation. I’m hoping that I’ll start writing more and this will help lift my mood. 

I joined Angela Carr‘s January online writing course and though I don’t have a lot of time or energy in the week to write, I have been dipping into her prompts at the weekend. I’m also considering Wendy Pratt‘s What to Look for in Spring course. I often find this sort of prompt-based online course gives me a boost to get back into writing after a quieter period and I’ve done various courses with Wendy and Angela over the years with good results. 

Gerry Stewart, Return of the Light

I’m sending you a brief postcard from snowdrop time. Virginia has always had “midwinter spring, its own season,” to quote Four Quartets–a balmy few days in February–but never, that I can recall, so early in the month. Omens everywhere.

Lesley Wheeler, Divination by poem

As is not uncommon in our region, we have a warm and sunny spate of days that evoke thoughts of spring…often thoughts that are dashed by late-arriving snow and ice storms. The days are an hour longer than they were at the December solstice, and some plants bloom or start to bloom: witch hazel, snowdrops, hellebores, skunk cabbage, winter aconite.

In the Chinese lunar-solar calendar, these weeks mark the start of spring: 立春 lìchūn. (Hence the new year commences, celebrated this year on February 10.)

I love the emergence of new growth in springtime and enjoy looking for buds and leaf-tips, but winter’s crucial to this environment. It plays its role by enforcing dormancy and restful, unperceived rejuvenation. Nonetheless, sometimes I resent the way it teases–knowing that the freezing will return and that mid-March snows are not uncommon here.

Ann E. Michael, lìchūn

Ice pellets making hieroglyphics, spilling secrets.
Though I can’t read them, I stare,
feeling them as drifting thoughts or
distant town heralds calling and foretelling
news too big for me to perceive.

Cumulus, nimbostratus, undulatus
asperitas. Noctilucent clouds, mare’s tail,
mesospheric bubbles and nets of cream
floating over the town the way love
and sorrow float within me like giant pudgy babies of emotion.
Dressed in white and shade, they form
my perceived self only for moments,
while misty to my companions.

Rachel Dacus, When Clouds and Poetry Seem to Rhyme

They congregate in clouds, turn weather into a verb, conjugate it into every form of severity, turn once blue skies into atmospheric rivers of misery.

These rains aren’t wet behind the ears. They’ve got cousins named Evacuate, nieces that topple trees.

Stalled out over L.A., the rains wanna tour the stars’ homes, wet-walk Sunset, get a massive star on Hollywood Boulevard.

When one raindrop meets another, then another, it quickly becomes a flash mob of flash floods, a roaming gang of rising rivers.

Come spring, everything will be green. But for now, massive downbursts of down.

Rich Ferguson, It starts with one raindrop, then another, and another

Is there a
word after which there can be
no sound? A breath after which
there can be no more life? A

tipping point beyond which fish
see themselves in the sky? Yet we
live in the promise of tomorrow.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Tipping Point

In a television interview, the filmmaker we both admire mentions how she never uses bookmarks. She has always been able to remember the last page she read of any book, and is constantly baffled by the inability of others to do the same. She glances, distractedly, behind her as she says this, somewhere off-camera, in the direction of the studio floor. What might she be looking at? Her films are like distances we have yet to reach, capable of articulating broad silences. When so many others are unable to comprehend that silence has a language at all.

~

It was not so much that we crave suffering, but to understand precisely what the suffering means.

rob mclennan, Little arguments: stories

My current project of delving into the history of my hometown, through exploring the lives of ‘ordinary’ people buried in the church and graveyards there, generally favours the medium of prose to the tell extended family stories. But sometimes what I want to say fits into the shape and concentration that poetry offers – a measured and gradual revelation, down the page, of image and emotion.

When I first started writing poetry it was ‘all about me’! I was totally unaware of the idea of needing to craft my experiences and language choices so they spoke to a (much!) wider audience. 

In 1992 I attended my first ever residential writing course at Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, in Llanystumdwy on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. The course was called ‘Poetry in Mountains’ – and, true to the description, we were encouraged to write poems and climb mountains, including a couple of sessions of rock-climbing. And if that wasn’t enough to make me fall in love with poetry combined with the natural world, some advice given to me by one of the course leaders, Terry Gifford, completely changed my approach to writing. 

‘At some point, Lynne,’ he said, ‘Catharsis has to give way to communication.’

This wasn’t just the proverbial light-bulb switching on. This was a whole stadium of floodlights illuminating my understanding of, and relationship to, writing poetry.

Lynne Rees, Poems about and for ordinary people ~ Before

All across the country, writers are headed to the middle of the country, to the AWP convention in Kansas City.  I will not be going for a variety of reasons.  I’m grateful that I’m not going for a variety of reasons: I’m glad I’m not spending the money, but chiefly, I’m grateful because I’m not being exposed to all the diseases that are running rampant.  Between the airline travel and the packed conference rooms and all the people who will attend even if they are sick (and when they think they aren’t contagious yet/still), I’m glad to be staying home.

Yet even as I write those words, I feel a bit of a pang.  It would be so wonderful to hear Jericho Brown give the keynote address.  Some of those sessions would be inspiring.  I’ve given up on making connections that might open literary doors, but some part of me still wishes it could happen, and it’s not likely to happen while I’m sitting in my house in North Carolina.

Part of me wonders what literary doors I’d like to have open and what I think would happen if they did.  For decades, I had the hope of a better academic job or maybe some other form and fame/fortune.  I thought about something that might turn into something I could turn into a lecture circuit.  But now, the thought of all that airline travel makes me very, very tired.

And here’s what’s strangest to me:  I am fairly satisfied with the life I have right now.  One reason I went to AWP in the past was because it was a way to get away from the crushing drudgery of my regular job, and I could do it without having to spend precious vacation days.  That opportunity was worth the expense to me.

These days, I’d rather be here than just about anywhere.  I am not used to this feeling.  And I hope I never take this feeling for granted.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, AWP (Or Not) 2024

While looking at what happened to twenty-three people who were included in ‘The Young British Poets’ anthology, published in 1971, I read that towards the end of his life, aside from a few individual poems here and there, Brian Jones gave up bothering to send his work to publishers.

This is an attitude very close to my own, though technology has now afforded me an outlet through this blog. […]

In that old book ‘The Young British Poets’, my teenaged self had circled one poem of his called ‘I Know She Sleeps’ and underlined bits of another called ‘Visiting Miss Emily’. I’ve seen his work in various places since, including another substantial anthology called Scanning The Century. Jones was a working class boy, born in Islington in 1938, raised in Ealing, where he went to the local grammar school, before a scholarship to Cambridge. He went on to teach in psychiatric units and prisons and lived his later years in France.

Between 1966 and 1990, I think he had nine collections of varying length, and then nothing aside from a few individual poems in magazines for the last nineteen years of his life. The excellent, independent Shoestring Press from Nottingham published his ‘New and Selected Poems’ in 2013. [Not that new, given he died in 2009, but we get the drift. Ed.]

According to his obituary in The Guardian, he had a deep-rooted sense of alienation ‘and his Cambridge days were not kindly remembered’. I can imagine the prejudice and disappointment he had to deal with there, given he was a working class ‘scholarship’ boy. The respectful obituary also said that in his later years ‘he recognised that it was the writing that mattered to him, not what happened to the work afterwards’, an attitude that contributed to his relative critical neglect.

Bob Mee, WHEN BEING PUBLISHED JUST DOESN’T MATTER ANY MORE

I’ve been thinking about poetry for children recently. That’s partly because our youngest is a toddler, and I’ve been reminded all over again just how many of the best books for the very youngest children are in verse. Quite a lot of poor verse, of course, but plenty is actually excellent. I’d be very surprised if any poet in English sells better than Julia Donaldson, and deservedly so: she’s a good poet, whose poems not only bear repetition but — truly an acid test this — remain charming and enjoyable even on the fifteenth rendition in the space of twelve hours. (All the same, my absolute favourite toddler picture book-poem remains the delightful, and metrically extremely satisfying, Peepo, by Janet and Allen Ahlberg.)

But verse disappears from the landscape of children’s literature quite rapidly after the earliest years. You can still buy illustrated anthologies of poetry for children, but I haven’t seen any recently published examples of the sort of un-illustrated but hard-wearing volumes designed for a parent or teacher to read aloud, several of which were still knocking around when I was a child, even if they weren’t exactly new then, either. In fact, I had such fond memories of the contents of one particular volume, The Book of a Thousand Poems, that I bought a second-hand copy to read to my own children.1 It starts with the simplest sorts of nursery rhymes and counting rhymes, but then expands to encompass an enormous range, grouped loosely in thematic sections but with everything otherwise cheek-by-jowl: plenty of pieces by authors like Enid Blyton and dozens of other forgotten or largely forgotten authors of the early 20th century, but also a huge range of poems and extracts reaching back to Shakespeare, Herrick, Watts, Bunyan, dozens of 18th and 19th century poets, and forward roughly as far as the 1930s (there are some pieces by Laurence Binyon and Siegfried Sassoon, for instance). Taken together, it’s actually not a bad entry point into English verse for anyone, child or adult, if you take a long view and don’t mind a version of English poetry which essentially ends before modernism.2 (A version which, after all, remains the standard, or at least preferred understanding of what “poetry” is, for most people outside self-consciously literary circles.) Three of the best represented authors are William Blake, John Clare and Christina Rossetti. (And in case any of my readers have sleepless children, it also has a very substantial section of cradle songs and bedtime poems.)

Victoria Moul, On poetry for children

I’m sitting in the gods of Windsor Royal theatre with Mum and a couple of my friends, and I’m wearing a pale brown Biba dress with loops from tight fitted sleeves around my middle fingers. It’s my 16th birthday treat and a young Ian McKellan is playing Hamlet. 

Roll on a lifetime and I’m walking along Western Road after pilates, talking to a new friend about McKellan’s return to Hamlet, on film. 

The memory of that teenage theatre trip is so powerful and visceral, that McKellan’s name always evokes that Biba dress, how great it made me feel, the sense of life in the wings, the language of Shakespeare.

Jackie Wills, Biba, a villain and Ian McKellan as Hamlet

I know writers who say they hate titling their work, or that they’re terrible at it, and they often seek feedback from others on what to call their stories, poems, or books. I actually love titles, though I admit they can be tricky. Often, a title will come to me first before the poem does; it’s the seed from which the poem grows. Similarly, my book titles have been talismans I’ve carried with me through much of the process of writing the book itself, representing to me the soul of the project I’m pursuing and keeping me on track. There are lots of different kinds of titles, but often, when they’re working, I think of them as existing somewhere between a label and a prayer. They capture something of the essence of the thing, sometimes in ways I can’t articulate. 

But the soul of a thing can also shift, subtly, revealing new aspects of itself or refining itself as through fire. In these cases, sometimes a new name must also be born. 

This happened to me with two of my four books: the title that carried me through the composition process was no longer quite right by the end. These books needed new, truer faces with which to greet the world. For example, my first poetry collection, Best Bones, which was published in 2014, had two long-term titles before it was accepted for publication. The first iteration of the project was my MFA Thesis, which was called The Only House in the Neighborhood after one of the poems in the collection about an off-kilter dollhouse, and I carried that title with me after graduation as I added to and honed the poems therein. The following year, I had the great fortune of spending seven months as a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where I was able to be a full-time poet (a vocation which, it turns out, includes a lot of long walks and watching the full Criterion Collection film catalog from the local library). Given the history and setting of the place I was in, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the title of my collection-in-progress became Blue Whale. In my thinking, the “house” from the original title was now the whale itself – the final line of the titular poem being “O to be a mansion steering itself.” But by the time the book was accepted for publication a few years later, I came to feel that Blue Whale, which I loved, was too soft a title for the book I’d written – a book of beauty and tenderness and domesticity, but also of power dynamics, loss, and anger. It had softness and curve, but also bony elbows that might jab you now and again. Or, like a sister, it might “accidentally” pull your hair. I settled on Best Bones, letting the skeleton become the frame for this book of wobbly structures – bodies, families, homes. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, A New Name

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da consists of four sections, each section developing a particular theme. As a poet who writes a lot about silence, I was particularly taken with the first section, which examines its different facets. [Sue] Spiers’ silence can be a moment of peace, wished for in her witty, utterly relatable spell-poem, To quell garrulousness, offensive chat and bombast. In Everyone as Mannequins, however, she offers us a typically original perspective on the minute’s silence called to remember the fallen. It is a time she says when the participants ‘can hear the voice/ that speaks to each one, knows all/ their obedience/prayers/guilt.’ Yet in classic Spiers’ fashion she challenges the need for this. Why do we need silence to honour those who have sacrificed themselves for us? Instead, she demands that ‘respect should be shouted/ loudly/thankfully/passionately. / Let all these still bodies/ sing/holler/roar against destruction.’ In other poems she presents silence as something sinister: a sort of aggression in which ‘Stone still, the argument halts; hatred grown/ stone-eyed, nose to nose, wills pitting in silence’ , In Silence); a mask for the results of violence (‘Bruises under foundation, a thousand excuses; / bruises covered by sleeves, fists hitting in silence’ (In Silence); the unwelcome symptom of disability ((Jealous of the Listening Air); a form of bribery used by the teenage daughter in Disappearance to persuade her parents to let her move abroad; and the moment of realisation of the unthinkable, when the loss of a loved one becomes inevitable ,  ‘Her mouth moues/breathless unsound     /        meaningless and true’.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’ by Sue Spiers

Traditionally an Ember Week would mark the summer or winter solstice or the spring or autumn equinox, a time of reflection to celebrate achievements so far and acknowledge plans for the future. Also a time to reconnect with nature and the cycles of the natural world, the balancing of light and dark. Mary Gilliland focuses on the natural world in her poems along with consideration for individual selves – how people relate both to others and the world around them. “Infinitives” starts “To admit the fields are on fire, oil fields,/ though we do not yet see them burning” and urges readers to remember how grandparents worked

“to savor our craving—to satiation;
to be free of litter strewn beyond us
steering through the Hesperides, sacred
groves, Blessèd Isles, past the ghost
of a man on the moon’s new frontier,
our course set for the destitute sunset.”

It harks back to days before consumer excess, when people cared enough to clear up after themselves and reminds readers of why need to care for our world instead of seeking the next new shiny thing.

Emma Lee, “Ember Days” Mary Gilliland (Codhill Press) – Book review

Kim Addonizio
skewers you ab initio.
Her first lines
have tines.

These notes were written to introduce Addonizio to the Finding Poetry book club, at a meeting in which we considered ‘Wild Nights’, a selected poems published by Bloodaxe.

‘Near Heron Lake’ is the second poem at this link: http://www.forpoetry.com/Archive/kaddonizio.htm

I don’t often like the blurb on poetry books, but the blurb on the back cover of ‘Wild Nights’ does a good job, I think, in picking out the most obvious and distinctive qualities in Addonizio’s writing: ‘provocative and edgy’, ‘intense’, ‘gritty’, ‘raw’…. but also, and importantly,  ‘a wild tenderness’.

I discovered Addonizio’s work through her collection ‘Tell Me’, which was recommended by one of my first poetry tutors, Grevel Lindop.  Grevel had a recent (at the time of our book club meeting) essay about Addonizio in an edition of the poetry magazine The North, in which he makes the observation about first lines that my clerihew celebrates.  

Stephen Payne, Finding Kim Addonizio: a reading of ‘Near Heron Lake’

I’d already received Ronna Bloom’s book A Possible Trust when she messaged me to say hey, do you want to do a book exchange? I’ve read, I think, all of Ronna’s poetry already, and this is a selected with an intro by Phil Hall whose work I also love. Her work is what I have down as an “insta-buy.” I don’t need to know anything about it; I know I need it. And I was not wrong about this book either, because it’s such a gift to have so many all-time favourite poems in one place. Banger after banger. This is the book, I can tell already, that I’m going to press into the hands of others the most often in the coming year.

Ronna lives in Toronto, and for a minute I was excited because I’m launching my book in Toronto at the end of the month. As luck would have it, she won’t be there then, but that’s okay, because as I wrote to her, I know that we’re fated to someday meet. I mean, c’mon, Ronna and Shawna….it’s gotta happen! Bloom and Lemay! Amiright??

For now though, we meet through words, and I really think we’re in conversation, especially with our two current books. If you like mine, I would recommend Bloom’s book.

Shawna Lemay, More, more: On Ronna Bloom’s A Possible Trust

I have been a follower of J. I. (Judy) Kleinberg, Bellingham poet, artist, and blogger for a number of years. If you have not already subscribed to her near-daily blog The Poetry Department, you must do so immediately. You’ll find there all sorts of poetry-centric announcements—for readings both local and world-wide, for book and journal recommendations, for great quotes, and more.

Kleinberg posts her own artfully collaged, found poems at her personal blog, Chocolate Is a Verb, and this, too, I recommend.

What a delight to have not one but three collections of poetry by Kleinberg released to the wild in 2023. (I am breathlessly awaiting a full-length collection.)

In The Word for Standing Alone in a Field every poem brings to life a scarecrow—part Dorothy’s Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz; partly an actual scarecrow, hung in a corn field, immobile, abandoned; partly dark witness to the world. I want to write to “the world on fire.” We meet him, and get to know him through the voice of a girl, who seems to me beyond lonely. But, once she has her scarecrow, she becomes his friend and amanuensis, and through her we learn the scarecrow’s secrets, and through him we glimpse her secrets.

Bethany Reid, J. I. Kleinberg, THE WORD FOR STANDING ALONE IN A FIELD

I’ve been thinking of Anne Lamott’s line in Bird by Bird recently, where she talks about the writing life not being ‘like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself’. And how much I love that. And (as Lamott would say), how much I hate it, too.

Because I like to persuade myself that that the sofa calling to me with yet another rerun of, say, NCIS (Law and Order is also available) is actually of more universal importance than the line break I have been struggling with, or that (probably doomed) submission to Really Great Poetry Now.

But as we know, Lamott is (always) right. So I went back in the other day, at a time of day when I should really have known better, the better to outwit my inherent laziness. (This is on the advice of another Ann in my life (Sansom), who once told me the best time of day to get any writing done is when your unconscious is at its most open and the resistance (NCIS, etc) is at its most vulnerable. For me this is very early in the morning. Or last thing at night. Or when I am poorly. As you know, having done a fair bit of the latter, last thing at night it was.) And while the results were not exactly Lamott or Sansom level of greatness, something did get done i.e., completed and sent out to Even Better Poetry. And at this grey time of year, after what feels like a month of rain, that feels like something.

Anthony Wilson, On going back in

I watch a lot of YouTube style and thrifting videos, where women bloggers spend a lot of time apologizing or fending off potential attacks about their hair, the detergent they use, what they put on their sandwiches. Which seems silly until you actually look at the comments, and sure enough, they are responding to a sort of watchfulness on the part of other women who somehow like to spend time leaving negativity on other people’s videos. This is especially true in body positive spaces, where many comments seem to say, how dare you?  Have a body and put clothes on it and enjoy them?  You’re supposed to be miserable. Shut the fuck up. 

And then today, a Taylor Swift Grammy’s win and some news of a new album, and my feed is filled with people who are tired of her being so much and so productive and just everywhere now, she should dial it back. To be less. Take up less space. And really it’s the same bullshit. If she seems that nice in real life and is that successful, she must surely be a raging bitch and super problematic, cannibalizing those around her in pursuit of her own glory. She’s surely not successful because she just works really hard. 

Not that I am in any way as famous/successful/rich as TS, but even I’ve felt it in some lit circles, at my old job in the library. That demand that you be less. Write less poems (because how could you be good if you’re prolific), promote yourself less, publish less, take up less space, stop doing extra work that really needs to be done or you’ll make co-workers look bad. Stop stepping on toes or over bodies that haven’t moved in decades.   When I was in my MFA and dared win a contest or start a press or publish a first book (the same things my online writer friends were already doing in spades). But still, who do you think you are? 

Kristy Bowen, just who does she think she is?

While everyone was in Kansas City for AWP, I had the opportunity to escape Seattle’s February gloom for Palm Springs and Palm Desert, thanks to a residency at Desert Rat Residency in Palm Desert. […]

So we drove from Palm Springs into the desert to Shield Farm, which is a huge date and grapefruit farm. Bought dates and grapefruits, plus fresh grapefruit juice and date shakes (a little too sweet for my taste, but kind of cool to try!) Then we checked into the beautiful Desert Rat Residency, started by poet Jeff Walt, in a lovely neighborhood next to fancy restaurants, great shopping, and tons of lush spas and famous golf courses – none of which we got to experience, because we were so focused on how beautiful the residency space was! A fully stocked half-fridge – a soaking tub – a pool – fully stocked bar, tons of eclectic art everywhere you look, so many books and magazines you wouldn’t be able to read them all in a week. Really a dream. Here’s me in the front yard garden. Happy to be there! It was still a little cloudy and chilly the first day there, but Glenn was game to try the pool – about four steps worth! Every morning and evening was full of birdsong. I saw hummingbirds (they have nine species in the desert!) and mockingbirds and hawks, barn swallows, finches – this was just from the front yard! And every morning I woke up and walked by the lemon trees, which have the most amazing smell – not like perfume, not like lemon – just divine. Wish I could capture it! Better than coffee as a wake up perk.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Palm Springs, Palm Desert: Sun, Cocktails, Art, and a Desert Rat Residency: Part 1

The moon is something that looks
like I could put in my mouth, says the child.

While we talk on the phone, picking
at the remnants of our meal, star
fragments wash up on the beach.

Small bodies shed their tiny houses in the sand,
looking to move into an empty nautilus.

Luisa A. Igloria, Molting

What will we not sacrifice to exert our power? We even sacrifice each other. Seemingly readily. By the tens of, hundreds of thousands.

This idea of “trying to befriend the soil/we must become” moves me. We have done so much damage, we human beings, to the soil, so much poison, plastics, destruction, uprootings, claiming and reclaiming. But that act of kneeling to the ground: in the end, we are it, the soil. It is us. We forget, and remember, forget and remember.

There is no more unruly weed than the human species. No invasive as harmful. Is it our nature? Are we helpless against our own harming? We can’t have it both ways: control everything else, but not ourselves. If we must exert control, let it be against our own worst tendencies toward controlling everything else.

Let’s let things be. A few things, anyway. In our brief lives, their fleeting taste, let’s work on letting, on letting go, on letting be.

Marilyn McCabe, The cost of beauty is partly pain

distant sound of a steel stake
               in failing light
being driven into our earth—

Grant Hackett [no title]