This week: fists of will-be-blooms, a delicate crepuscular pinky grey, parrots nesting in the rain tree, the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue, and much more. Enjoy.

A word drops off my fingers,
hits the floor, shatters. Words
shatter not into letters
and sounds, but into sharp shards
of reflection and color,
memory and movements, dance,
hollows where meaning was home.

PF Anderson, Wordless (#NaPoWriMo 29)

I have begun to teach myself to draw with my left hand.

I have started what I hope will be a book. I haven’t written much prose in a long long time. I learned a lot writing my novel, CLICK, and by learning a lot I mean a lot of what not to do.

I haven’t been hearing poems lately and when that happens I tend not to force myself to write them. I do write them when I’m in poetry circles where we get to write and share with each other but other than that I really haven’t felt like writing poetry. It will come back when it comes back. I think I need a lot of quiet space to let my brain run across the pastures and go wild. Then the poems will come.

Rebecca Cook, Life Update

We had a beautiful full moon right on my birthday, too, and we had lovely sunny weather, so we got out and gardened and Glenn power-washed the deck, so we were ready to entertain. The full moon always gives me insomnia, and this one was no different. I was thinking about an interview with Meryl Streep about the first Devil Wear Prada and how she was thinking of retiring from acting when she was offered the job at 56. I am 53, so it made me think about when we retire as artists. I’m not making the kind of money Meryl is, and I’m much less in demand. If I retired, there probably wouldn’t be as much of an outcry as there would be over Meryl (who was not only great in Devil Wears Prada 2, but if you’ve seen her, she’s terrific in Only Murderers in the Building). It’s surprising to me that she was thinking of retiring but then spoke openly that she did the movie that was so beloved because of the large paycheck it afforded.

I’m also thinking about retirement because Microsoft is offering early retirement packages next week. Glenn still loves his job and enjoys working, so it’s not very attractive to him yet. They’re doing it to invest more in AI and less in humanity, which seems depressing. I guess poets can work until they die or decide to do something else, and we definitely won’t be offered a nice paycheck to quit, and AI may try to take our jobs anyway.

This week EcoTheo re-ran a photo I took for them a while ago, and Rattle re-ran an older poem in their newsletter. So it was nice to be remembered in these ways on a week I was feeling discouraged and thinking about quitting.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Week, Full Flower Moon, Open Books, Seattle’s Japanese Garden, and More

I’ve been observing my mind lately. It’s been such a gadfly. In five minutes I’ll have searched five things on the internet, gotten up and splashed some paint on paper, written my little 100-word daily challenge (more on that in another post), sat back down and picked up a book, put it down to look something else up, started one thing only to interrupt myself with another. Is it spring that’s making me so flighty? Life in these times? Yes and yes? I’ve been busy in spurts and listless the rest of the time, aspiring to grand ideas but too scattered to think them up, or I think them up and immediately reject them. It’s spring and not-quite-spring, some trees are dangly with their bright catkins and some are well into their leaves. My lilacs are just showing their fists of will-be-blooms but someone’s three blocks away are in full purple. On my walk up on the ridge, no jacks in no pulpits, but flocks of marsh marigold in their fancy dress. A tiny speck of eagle high in the sky circling; in a field the very earthly dark mound of a turkey vulture, its terrible red head bent to its meal. I tried to write a poemish thing based on the crazyass mix of headlines in the Guardian, the whiplash of turning to witness democracy’s demise in one article, the ridiculousness gravity lent to some fashion “controversy” in another. But Rilke said poetry was no place for irony. I disagree. Except when I agree entirely. There’s my mind again, changing, changing. But here is the venerable Don McKay, with a poem from his book Another Gravity. I’m not sure I entirely follow the line of thought of the poem. But given the state of my mind, I think it’s okay.

Marilyn McCabe, there must be a door — a door

nothing grows here, the sanctioned and expatriated seed, scoured from yr latitudes, yr gravel hemispheres. flowers: pacified fixtures, bracketed to buildings. tree: hi-vis bros administer enjambment. i bring with me only this body, idealised and desperate. it is the weed and the worm, dankly questing prole, the writhing of its reach, opaque with strain. fungus. assemble myself inside the open sprawl of it: worklife, yr city. the empire is setting. like aspic.

Fran Lock, THE MUSHROOM IS NOT A PLANT

You may be lucky enough to not feel stress or anxiety before a reading or public performance. In general, I usually get excited nerves, rather than debilitating nerves. Yesterday however felt very different. I spent the whole day in a state of extreme anxiety, worrying about everything. I knew I was being illogical because I was worrying about nobody turning up (even though ninety tickets had been sold). I was also worrying about people turning up and being bored. I spent a full hour thinking about my book and regretting writing any of the poems and publishing it in the first place.

On Saturday night, we had a power cut at midnight which lasted till midday on Sunday morning. This meant we couldn’t make lunch so we all went down into town for lunch on Sunday, which now I write it, sounds like a relatively simple thing to do, even a pleasant one! However, by this point, my ADHD symptoms were in overdrive, making simple decisions and even eating something feel completely overwhelming.

Because I usually don’t get like this before a reading, it took me a while to identify what I needed which was some time on my own to relax and work out what I was reading. I went and had a very long bath, made a list of the poems I was going to read and then left for the venue with my sister.

As Jody and I pulled up to the venue, my friends E and S were also getting out of their cars. They’d come early because E knew I was anxious about nobody turning up! When I got to the green room, my colleague Reuben from work was there with Malika – he’d met her at the train station to make sure she got up the hill ok. Carola was already there, Amanda was in mid-flow organising everyone and then Clare strode through the doors with a box full of The Book of Bogs to sell and I felt instantly calmer.

I silently thanked past Kim for the genius idea of filling this event with my best friends and my sister, of surrounding myself with friendship and laughter.

Kim Moore, HOW TO HAVE A MAGICAL BOOK LAUNCH

My poem Interior with a Table has been awarded equal Fourth Prize in the Kent & Sussex 2026 Open Poetry Competition. I was delighted, especially as the competition was judged by Mimi Khalvati. She describes the poem as a ‘sensitive example of ekphrastic poetry’. You can read her Judge’s Report here.

The poem was inspired by the 2021 painting of the same title by Vanessa Bell. The date put me in mind of WWI which enters the frame.

You can read the poem here.

Fokkina McDonnell, Interior with a Table – poem

Earlier today, as I made adjustments in the galley for GRAVEYARDS OF CHICAGO, I was thinking about my acquaintance with this particular urban legend and source materials. In particular, Resurrection Mary has been an obsession that took root when I was 12 and checking out stacks of ghost story and paranormal books from the tiny Cherry Valley public storefront library with its rickety floors, precariously leaning stacks, and questionable green shag carpet in the children’s area. It’s probably natural that I would become obsessed with ghosts given my love of horror and gothic leanings. This one seems particularly interesting from a regional standpoint (not Rockford necessarily, but suburban Chicago, though another spooky urban legend from my hometown makes an appearance in the play).

When I was taking a class back in the MFA program way back in 2005 that was devoted to writing Chicago poems, it seemed like a no-brainer, to take my obsession with this urban legend and see what bloomed. There were also great ways to bring in history and class in the city in interesting ways. The result of course was Archer Avenue. Initially, it was a small print edition that I mostly gave away and traded in the year leading up to my first book’s release. Later, those poems would fit nicely in the context of IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, my second book. 

Certain things informed that project, and by extension, the play i just wrote two decades later. In addition to in-depth research on sightings and lore, I did things like go on ghost tours and wandered around the historic State St. Marshall Fields (which was on the verge of becoming a Macy’s soon after.) Class and the idea of pauper/unmarked graves was at the forefront of my mind, as was Depression-era economics. 

While the poems wander in their p-o-v and thematic directions, the play places Mary’s story as I imagine it alongside a cab driver decades later, using music to mark the shifts in time and weaving their stories together, including one scene I really hope works that changes decades mid-scene.

Kristy Bowen, roadside ghosts and writing your obsessions

Between Marshal Pétain’s capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, and the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the French wrote over three million letters of denunciation to the authorities. After the war, some denunciations were deemed, retroactively, criminal acts: the crime of “indignité nationale.” Fascinated by their surface and their substance, I set out to write a poem based on those letters. While I admit to an interest in the more standard heroic possibilities of iambic pentameter, here my aims were Frostian. The letters are a fascinating mixture of “tones.” Rarely were the writers trying simply to convey information. They were just as keen to signal things about themselves, to the agents of the Vichy state: patriotism; sophistication; alignment with its (sick) values. They wanted to denounce “traitors,” but they wanted to sound appropriately bureaucratic in doing so. Bureaucratic tones are underrepresented in metric poetry—I’m not aware even of Robert Frost trying—but poetic they can be, when they contain an undercurrent of terror. Also poetic, in this case, is the fact that these writers’ mixed goals did not mix well: because virtue and vice do not mix well. Nor, and this is no coincidence, could the writers quite carry it all off. Their sophistication is often sour and out of tune.

That’s how it struck me, anyway. This may be serendipity, but I have leaned into it. For I should say, the letters were written in French (of course), and discussions of them referred me to a compliation titled La Délation sous l’Occupation, of which no English translation has been published. Unable to pay a real live French person to produce one, I have relied on machines to do it, machines which are, despite recent advances you may have read about, not entirely reliable. But their unreliability was, in this case, poetic, in a way worth explaining. It’s familiar enough that modern English is a mixture of German and French. Because French was, in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, the language of England’s ruling elite, French words that came to English tend to have a “fancier” meaning in English, than their originals have in French. For example, “travail” in French means (simply) “work,” but in English it means “painful or laborious effort.” Computer translations from French tend to “transliterate” French words, rather than replace them with simpler non-French words that are closer in meaning: “travails” may remain “travails,” and not be translated as “labors.” The denunciations, therefore, in my eyes, appeared to try quite hard to use the fanciest—and so, Frenchest—English words they could, even when those words were not well-suited to their intended meaning. This was, sometimes, quite amusing, as was the contrast between these elevated stylistic aims, and the sometime pettiness of the “infractions” being reported. And then, here and there, through this curtain of administrative and euphemistic malaprops, some plain and brutal language would protrude. In a poem, this could be magnified into something grotesque.

One story about World War II, is that its great evils should not be wholly blamed on a few monstrous men; shares should also be distributed to the masses of collaborators, each of whom perpetrated his or her own microdose of evil. These letters are among them, and they smell of it.

Brad Skow, The Spirit of a Broken People: French Letters of Denunciation

I was absolutely delighted yesterday to receive my contributors copy of a new poetry anthology, The New Sentience: Reimagining Animal Poetry, which is just released from Trinity University Press with a Foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It’s a beautiful book! The editors, Ashley Capps and Allison Titus did a wonderful job putting it together, and I’m marveling at the Table of Contents, which is full of such greats as Mary Oliver, Linda Gregg, Mary Ruefle, Mary Oliver, Nikole Brown, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Camille Dungy, Ross Gay, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Ada Limon, as well as yours truly.

The poem of mine that they’ve selected to include is “Dr. Harry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory,” from my book Darwin’s Mother, which takes the perspective of a monkey forced to participate in Harlow’s famous (and chilling) wire mother and cloth mother experiments from the 1950s. Thinking about those experiments and what it must have been like for the baby rhesus monkeys who were deprived of maternal care and familial connection still makes my heart feel as heavy as stone.

But the anthology is also rich with hope—poems of connection and kinship, of observation, odes to interspecies friendships, to entanglement, wildness, and mystery.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Reimagining Animal Poetry

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. She writes about motherhood, shifts in identity, and love in many forms, frequently finding wonder in the seemingly everyday. Her work has appeared in publications including Magma, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar and her debut pamphlet Tiny Bright Thorns was published in 2024. And in news very hot off the press, Jen has just been announced as the winner of the 2026 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition.

A Dress with Deep Pockets is a book that takes us in its confidence, and talks to us candidly over the kitchen table about friendship, motherhood and ageing. Jen writes with a quiet confidence – the poems are not fussy, preferring to leave a deep imprint through their frankness and vitality.

Here is a poet who is able to bring us the essence of a character and a stage of life in swift, bright sketches – like her teenage friend, in Hare Girl, “tawny and watchful in corners, / boys staring owl-eyed from across the room.” Or the speaker of the poems, caught mid-realisation in Boxing Day Swimmers, of her own ongoing process of transformation;

It’s the strangest thing, lately,
I open my mouth and my mother falls out –
a mournful clockwork woodpigeon on the kitchen table.

Boxing Day Swimmers

What I enjoy about these poems is how lightly they wear their ‘poem-ness’. They are full of craft – clever little turns, pin-sharp images, genius line breaks – yet they are carried along with an immense warmth and wit, a voice that feels so natural and completely itself.

Victoria Spires, Fictional bats, stolen vodka and bobble hats

There are periods when I’m reading for work, others when I’m reading for pleasure. Sometimes, they overlap. At the moment, I can firmly say that my reading life feels expansive and enriching in a way that lands firmly in the realm of pleasure.

Last week, I reread Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, which is one of my favorite collections. This week, I’m reading two extraordinary books, ’s forthcoming Middle Slope and Karen Solie’s T.S. Eliot-prize winning Wellwater. I wake up excited to read, which is a wonderful feeling.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The private detective is closing the file, dusting the mirror to move on but the woman at the heart of the case is living rent free in his mind. It suggests how experience shapes us and some memories can never be left behind.

Polly Clark has a skill for taking apparently ordinary moments, working on a piece of art, attending a funeral, finishing a job, and invests them with layered depths, showing how these micro connections shape individuals. She asks readers to look again, challenge their knowledge of how they might think this scene pans out and asks what if you focus on the less obvious, what if you were less complacent? It’s a fine balance between a relaxed, colloquial tone and a thoughtful, darker undertone and invites a reader to re-read the poem. If you’re not familiar with Clark’s work, “Afterlife” is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “Afterlife” Polly Clark (Bloodaxe) – book review

A couple of years after I met this poem, I met its author at the Dodge Poetry Festival. He gave a reading and I queued up to have On Love signed, and told him that “For the Sleepwalkers” was perhaps the first contemporary poem I had loved, and that I had read it in Fifty Years, and he looked at me very seriously and said yes, he remembered that anthology, and he was very glad to know it, and thanked me for telling him, and then he signed my book “We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.”

“For the Sleepwalkers” is a simple poem is another funny thing I almost wrote in the spirit of earnest classification. Is it simple? It leapt off the page and into a seventeen-year-old, so make of that what you will. I suppose I continue to feel guarded about my beloveds after such a long estrangement from Poetry at large: the sneaking suspicion that I do not like the right things remains hard to shake, especially when I make the mistake of picking up the latest issue of whatever. But, Dear Readers, I’ve so far only gained more of you here, so perhaps that’s a kind of empirical argument for not being all that wrong.

What’s to like? Tercets! The load-bearing stanza form: I like to imagine Hirsch, inevitably, thinking Dante, maybe even making a stab at terza rima early on—wonderful / invisible, faith / path—but that may be autobiography; I can’t count the number of times I’ve set out to write terza rima and abandoned it after line five. It’s handsomely constructed, repeated phrases and constructions weaving a subtle net of sound and sense: “so much faith . . . so much faith” in the first stanza, “stairs instead of the window . . . doorway instead of seamless mirror”in the second.

Alongside, and in conjunction with, these syntactic pairings, I love the strangeness of some of the figures, how the poet doesn’t quite ask us to rethink our assumptions as much as declare them rethought. Sleepwalking is most often employed pejoratively; one who sleepwalks through life misses things, but Hirsch’s sleepwalker is the one who truly sees. Stairs in the context of somnolence denote danger, yet here they are a preferable path to a window, a safe way down, and also out; the gaping door is not a symbol of vulnerability, but preferable to the mirror’s endless echo chamber. I love the night-soaked beauty of hearts flying off and returning, the clipped percussive music of “thick black fists,” the solid sound and sense of “glove of our chests.”

Most importantly, and I think most like Hirsch—the poet laureate of insomnia—is this notion of generative dark, of insight arriving not on a beam of light, but in the wild darkness: in shedding the self and actively seeking the unknown, even though we are so often told, and so often tell ourselves, it’s dangerous.

Vanessa Stauffer, “For the Sleepwalkers” by Edward Hirsch

James Matthew Wilson has noted Ransom’s prosody in these late poems:

the falling, slant-rhymed, rhythms . . . which Ransom borrows with so much else from Mother Goose, are coupled with the mundane and the parenthetical, rhetorical, Latinate grandeur, and these all conspire to create poems immediately amusing to the ear; grotesquely jerry-rigged so as to compel us to ponder their inner-workings; and finally insistent that life in this world is a long defeat, where what is most precious, beautiful, and humane merits our reverence and study even though it will, in God’s time, fail us.

In “Blue Girls,” a number of pentameter lines, specifically the internal b-rhymed lines of stanzas 1 and 3, do contain these falling rhythms, ending on such multi-unstressed-syllabic words as “seminary” and “contrary,” which casts the short concluding lines in those quatrains, with their final stressed syllables, in higher relief. The effect, then, is something like rolling down a hill and hitting a fatal wall.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Blue Girls

Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative Anatomy”, describing a hawk moth, is an ethereally thinned version of a reversed sonnet (one in which the sestet precedes the octave): it’s written in short, irregular lines, and has only a few highly attenuated rhymes. The irregularity and attenuation both suit the idea of the moth’s fragility and erratic flight (itself brilliantly captured by the line end pause in ‘cleverly / erratic’). I think they have another important effect. The whole poem is brought delicately to rest by the way the last two lines move to the iambic pulse of the dominant tradition in English metrics and of the traditional sonnet in English. However, the unpredictable rhythms before that point seem to contribute to its lightness of imaginative touch and the consequent extremely open way in which its suggestiveness works. This gives it a vast imaginative reach with many overlapping circles of suggestion. Short lines isolate images and phrases, letting each resonate in the pause or blank space at the line ending. Shimmering between overwhelming extremes of light and darkness, between poles of miniaturist empathy and geographical or even cosmic vastness, and between anthropomorphic and naturalistic imaginings of moth and bat, glancing in its imagery at archaic and modern industrial techniques, at marine, submarine and aerial navigation and at the mechanics of making music, vividly evoking both the cruelty and the marvellous intricacy of the natural order, it doesn’t push the reader towards a conclusion but opens multiple vistas of reflection that he’s free to follow or not as he wills. The whole poem gives a beautiful sense of completeness, but this is entirely a matter of artistic shaping, not of the expression of an idea, and it seems to me that the abstention from any kind of intellectual conclusion that would have limited the reader’s freedom of response is as much a beauty of the poem as its shaping is.

Edmund Prestwich, Jamie McKendrick and sonnet form. Comments on “Alternative Anatomy”.

[Edwin] Muir was a Scottish poet who died in 1959. According to my note on the flyleaf, I bought my Faber edition of his Collected Poems as a student in 2000. I’m not sure how much read Muir is these days but his poems seem to me to have stood the test of time particularly well. He assumes some scriptural and classical knowledge in a way that is less common now, but his poems are never ‘learned’. You always feel that he is putting his gifts at the service of the reader — that he writes to be understood.

In this poem, for instance, there’s an obvious allusion to the story in Genesis, and also to two Gospel parables — of the wheat and the tares (in Matthew 13) and of the workers in the vineyard (in Matthew 20). ‘Tares’ is a now largely obsolete word for vetch, a kind of weed that grows easily in wheatfields. Recent translations of the Bible tend to use ‘weeds’, but ‘tares’ is the word in the King James Bible, and I would guess that for most mid-20th century readers — for whom it was no longer in common currency — the word itself was strongly associated with this particular parable. But even if you have never read the New Testament, and don’t know what ‘tares’ are, I don’t think you would have any difficulty following this poem.

Muir uses scripture (and also some parts of classical mythology) in a natural way, to clarify his meaning rather than hedge it around. This is much harder to do than it looks, and the apparent straightforwardness of Muir’s style is perhaps his greatest achievement. It is very difficult indeed to write lyric poetry which is both beautiful and straightforward to understand, and which also has something to say — a clear and specific message or argument. These seem like they ought to be the basic virtues of verse but it is a rare poet who can put all three together as consistently as Muir.

The clarity and (for want of a better word) ‘accessibility’ of Muir’s style derives to a large extent, I think, from how deeply rooted his poetry is in what we might call roughly ‘popular’ verse, including songs and hymns — the kind of verse that is shaped by use for maximum clarity. 

Victoria Moul, When will all come home?

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I’ve been reading this one for several months. Did you know Leaves of Grass is quite long? The first (self-published) book wasn’t so bad, but the one I have, one of the later editions after he had added and added to it, is a bulky 400 poems.

Some parts are great! But some not so much. For example, should anyone, poet or otherwise, use the word “promulges” this much?

“Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
And the dark hush promulges as much as any.”
(from Song of Myself, 45)

Not to hate on Whitman – his work is obviously inspired by the cadences and repetitions of Biblical poetry, notably Ecclesiastes (which I was also reading at the time – interesting pairing) and the psalms. However, instead of centering around God, he centers around himself, in a universalistic way. What a tiresome subject.

Often a famous poet will be known for one or two of their very good poems, but there is a treasury of much better poetry that no one ever reads – but in Whitman’s case, I think the well-known poems are the poems you should read.

Renee Emerson, Does anyone ever finish Whitman?

Simone Weil was, to all who knew her, intense. Over the course of her shortened life, she gave herself up to an evolving sequence of political, ethical and mystical philosophies, and pushed herself and her body to great physical extremes in order to live them fully. This was her praxis, her public self.

Tom Pow’s new collection of poems has grown out of several years of immersion in Simone’s writing, augmented with visits to places which advanced her thinking in some way, or were the site of revelation, of a sudden clarity. By deepening his concept of her by encountering her in these places, he invests his poems with a directness and intimacy that comes from working with primary source material, including the places in which it was formed – the sounds of the building, the light on the walls. We encounter her in these places. It is this sense of presence, of being with, that charge these poems with such authenticity, that makes them ring true.

Lesley Harrison, The Vulnerability of Precious Things

There is no single reading of a poem. We cannot be done with it in a single pass as we might with a novel. (I don’t mean later re-reading, but the initial or single encounter.) Even a joke poem, a limerick, a short form, a couplet, requires more than a single read: it lingers and echoes in memory. Something about itself is always drawing our attention. Most verse is dross because it lacks this quality, not for any merely formal reason. When I first read ‘Filling Station’ I did not understand it in a literal sense. Some barrier existed because it is American and the lingo was obscure; some words needed looking up; some of it is simply difficult, not the sense that it is hard but in the sense that you must mull it before you “get” it. Not all difficulty makes itself known on the surface.

Late James is poetry in this sense. There is this sort of poetry in the heart of Austen, too, whose sentences roll in our minds. Not poetry in the way Dickens drops into pentameter, but in the lilt of her prose that becomes almost like the long lines of the Psalms. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in the country of Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property… We might hear Cowper behind this as well as Addison. We might have to read the novel several times before we think to ask why it matters that the residence is in the centre of their property.

Austen can be read as an easy novelist or as a difficult one, not difficult in the way Joyce is difficult, but not easy in the way Wodehouse is easy. Some novels have their difficulty submerged, like Brideshead, which I read three times through on first encounter. Just as the first time we read a great poem and it will require lots of attention, so we might need to read a novel that looks easy. But the “standard” way of reading a novel is straight through, maybe going back a little, but mostly linear. If we rate literature according to pleasure, the more linear the better. Zing! So when people discuss difficulty, a lot of their arguments might depend on how “poetic” they like their literature.

For some poets, like A.R. Ammons and Wallace Stevens, keeping you in the state of difficulty is almost the point. To reach a full explanation is almost to miss the point—these poets are trying to put something into words that cannot, fully, be expressed. The sense of difficulty should be where we understand that. We will only ever be able to get so close to reality through words.

Henry Oliver, Out of all the indifferences

Whenever people ask, “Which poets inspired your own work?” I end up saying that my poetry is largely influenced by prose writers—maybe even more so than the poets. Clarice Lispector is part of my holy trifecta (others include Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras, whose work I also practiced bibliomancy with).

Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose family origins trace back to war-torn Ukraine, lost her mother as a child (I am always interested in writers whose childhoods asked them to raise themselves, in a way—writers who operate through and within a kind of lack). I’m also married to a Brazilian person, so there’s one slightly familiar doorway through which I enter her work.

Despite genre classifications, her work is a poetics of nonlinearity and interiority. On the line level, it is positively delicious. Água Viva—a “meditation on the nature of life and time”—asks you to surrender to a sea of questions, desires, prayers, thoughts, to the very mysteries that make up our world, to the spaces in between. And I fucking love that. If there’s anything I hate in literature, it’s being hand-fed.

Água Viva is an exercise in constructing meaning, but it’s collaborative between author and writer; it feels as though the author is whispering directly to you. Or that you’re watching a prayer as it’s being transmitted to the heavens.

Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Clarice Lispector

A poetry prize that we are lucky to have in the UK is the Michael Marks Awards. Founded in 2009, it now has four categories recognising small-press excellence: Poetry Pamphlet; Publisher; Illustrator; Environmental Poetry Pamphlet. This year’s shortlists have just been published, with the winners to be announced in June.

The only shortlisted title that I currently have on my shelves is Hugh Foley’s Recent Poems (The Fair Organ), which is a pamphlet in the tradition of small, simple printed objects that I particularly enjoy as a way of reading poetry: a paper-wrapped, pocket-notebook of 28 pages, stapled and hand-stamped on the back with the publisher’s logo (I wrote about my own small-press experiment with this format here).

Of course, the downside of reading this way is that wafer-thin publications easily get lost at the bottom of the book-shelf food chain, pressed flat by the paperbacks and hardbacks they can sometimes end up tucked inside. […]

In a statement about “The Importance of Poetry Pamphlets”, the Michael Marks Awards observe:

Traditionally, pamphlets have provided a vehicle for new writers to emerge, as well as offering established poets a focused, short structure that is ideal for exploring themes […] Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet.

This got me thinking about which pamphlets on my shelves I value not only as short and portable early gatherings of poems that later have ended up in “full” books, but specifically those which are themselves my preferred (and sometimes only) way of reading a particular work.  [Click through for Jeremy’s selection of a half-dozen memorable pamphlets (AKA chapbooks).]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #42: An Outside to Language

8 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has been a natural state for me to move among poetry, translation, critical work, and fiction. I may spend months or years focused on one or two, toggling between them, and then find myself drained. Other genres rush in to fill the space left and reinvigorate me. Translation, especially, recharges the mind for my own poems. There, you are both creating and kneeling at the mercy of existing language, balancing between fidelity and estrangement, mimicry and imagination, domestication and foreignization, to mold a poem in English that does to an English speaker what the original did to readers of that language. Switching modes feels like stepping out of an airport in the tropics and taking off your parka. So I never have writers’ block per se. There’s always some other kind of writing I could be doing if one type is coming up dry. And the genres necessarily challenge one another. Is this really a narrative poem or a story that hasn’t been completed? What form best serves this idea? What can this form do that the others cannot?

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

With a “9-5” job, I write when I can: a snippet in the early morning, something after dinner, a few hours on the weekend. The trick for me has been to keep the mind engaged with the literary, with the way a poet attends to the world, at least for a few dedicated moments every day; that may not be actual writing, but it keeps the writer in my mind alive.

10 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to international writers to pull me out of the milieu and habits of U.S. literature.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Moysaenko

like any poet, i am always
fighting the moon. i want to have her
over for dinner. i want to use
my phone flashlight to find her face.
in a dream, the house catches fire &
i turn into a diamond in the heat.

Robin Gow, battery life

According to #FemkuMag, “In September 2017 Rowan Beckett Minor coined the term “femku” in the subtitle of their first book Radical Women: A Book of Femku. Since then, the term has resonated throughout the Haiku community, thus pioneering a movement and this journal, the safe space Rowan created for women, trans, and gender-expansive Haijin to share their work.” I’d like to learn more about your first book, Radical Women: A Book of Femku. What are the main subjects and topics that you focus on in this book and what inspired you to write it?

I didn’t yet realize I was non-binary when I wrote Radical Women: A Book of Femku, so many of the poems are about navigating the expectations of gender roles in society, the sexual pressures women face, and my love-hate relationship with my body. These poems are raw, gritty, and very underdeveloped in traditional technique, so I’m not sure you can truly call them “haiku,” but they certainly have a senryu spirit and laid the groundwork for my entire poetic career.

I’m also interested in learning more about #FemkuMag. What do you enjoy the most about serving as the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of #FemkuMag?

Oh, that’s easy. I most enjoy the community I’ve built. There are many poets who tell me their submitted work was written specifically with #FemkuMag in mind, or that they would only trust me with certain topics. Unfortunately, women and transgender folks are often scrutinized for speaking their truth and most people just want someone, anyone, who will listen to their unique stories. I think it’s important, crucial even, for underrepresented voices to have a platform; all I do is secure the space and hand them a microphone.

When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese-related poetry?

My haiku journey began shortly after moving to Detroit, Michigan in 2017. I discovered the Evergreen Haiku Study Group at Michigan State University, run by Michele Root-Bernstein, and attended several meetings. Mike Rehling of Failed Haiku regularly attended the meetings and was kind enough to give me a few haiku history lessons over some delicious Japanese cuisine. Failed Haiku was my first haiku publication credit, the H. Gene Murtha contest was my first placement, and I had a haiga featured in the 2017 Michigan State University “Haiga Around the World Exhibition,” so I owe a lot to Mike and the Evergreen Haiku Study Group.

Jacob D. Salzer, Rowan Beckett Minor

Zoeglossia is a literary organization seeking to pioneer a new, inclusive space for poets with disabilities.  Launched in 2017, Zoeglossia is the first such organization in the poetry landscape. The idea is to provide an intersectional community open to a wide range of disability poetics, encouraging conversation and support.  This link leads to a wide variety of poems that explore the experiences and consequences of illnesses and disabilities . .. and I offer a the opening portion of a sample from that collection below.

Number Twenty by Jonathan Mack

This, the story that brings me to you, is one story in twenty. In the other nineteen I am dead. In five stories I’m dead of AIDS, having suffered every possible infection and died at home, in a variety of hospitals, and in the toilet of a theater. There are seven suicides between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. There are two terrible car accidents — one involving a drunk driver and one that is entirely my fault. In one story I live only three days and  . . .

Jonathan Mack’s poem is from This New Breed. Copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Mack.

JoAnne Growney, Resisting Disability with Poetry and Math

Over the past few years, I have interviewed over one hundred journal editors. Some lit mags want work related to specific themes such as war, social justice or the environment. Some focus on showcasing certain writers, such as women over sixty or Canadian poets. And, of course, many have specific genre parameters: creative nonfiction only, or prose poetry only, flash fiction, long fiction, hybrid works…

Yet if there is one commonality among what a majority of editors look for in submissions, it is related to voice.

Stephen Beeber of Conduit: His magazine is a “venue for voices that aren’t ready to be recognized by the mainstream.”

Cherry Lou Sy of Adroit: “A strong voice gives a story its soul.”

Michelle Lyn King of Joyland: Her magazine “is most interested in a distinctive voice.”

Jennifer Acker of The Common: The editors are “looking for really strong voice.”

Courtney Harler of CRAFT: “Does [the work] express and capture a truly authentic voice?”

Anthony Varallo of Swamp Pink (formerly Crazyhorse): He is interested in “the voice and energy of the piece.”

Sheila Squillante of Fourth River: Regardless of the genre, it is “incredibly important that the voice of the piece is strong and idiosyncratic and fresh.”

What exactly does all this mean?

In fact, the more I think about the concept of “voice,” the more fascinated I find it as a literary element. On YouTube, the question “What is voice in writing?” yields many results, ranging from the obvious to the nuanced and enlightening.

However, these videos and most other queries related to voice tend to clump together two strands of the concept. One strand is The Author’s Voice. This is your unique stamp as a writer, the singular thing that you and you alone do. This is the Hemingway story you can spot immediately; the Anne Sexton poem you recognize in an instant. This may just be another way of referring to an author’s style. Yet “voice” encompasses more. It’s bigger than style—it’s the author’s worldview, their vision, recurring themes, favored images, vantage point, social position, the very wellspring of ideas that could only come from them.

The second strand is The Voice of the Work. Many writers are admirably consistent in their works. They write about the same sorts of things in more or less the same way. I, perhaps like many of you, am not one of these writers. Some of my stories lean lyrical and are deeply serious. Others are bright and wacky. Some are violent; some are light-hearted. If there is a unifying quality that connects all these works to one another, a larger Author Voice umbrella under which my stories gather, someone else might recognize it, but I’m not sure I can.

So, in talking about voice as a literary element, it would seem important to tease out these two strands. Invariably, writers would want to know whether voice is something that can be learned. Can you strengthen your writing voice? Can you sharpen it? If so, how? What does it take to shape the voice of a particular work? What does it take to shape your own voice, as a writer?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are editors talking about when they talk about “voice”?

I’ve been moved by the sound of mourning doves, their plaintive call. Plangent, but somehow unsentimental. A kind of straightforward sound of mourning. How does the resonant coo evoke our human sorrow or mourning. Of course, for the bird, that’s just the sound they make. They are not more mournful, despite the delicate crepuscular pinky grey of their feathers and this hollow and hollowing song.

We often read the natural world assuming its signs signify our signified, as if these signifiers were human. A pathetic fallacy, but also a deeply felt cultural interconnection. Our human world has evolved in dialogue with these signs. Dark skies, brooding clouds, joyful birdsong, joyous brooks. Here we find voice for our feelings.

Gary Barwin, Bird=flute, egg=stone: Mourning and pathetic fallacy

He said, writer’s block is a myth, look around, the city will provide words for your poem

And the city spoke to me in red.
All instructions and warnings.
Private Property. No Entry.
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
Do not urinate here.
Right Arrow. Left Arrow. Straight and Right.
U-Turn. No Free Left.
Vote for __ . Or maybe for __.
Residents Only. Beware of Dog.
No Parking. Tow Zone.
Speedbump ahead.

And I imagined these signs instead:
Shhh. Parrots Nesting in the Rain Tree.
Take Left. Jacaranda tree in bloom.
Look up – full moon tonight. (And Venus!)
Free books: Take one. Take two.
Pin your poem to this board. (Poets, This Way!)
Hang your art here.
We are not busking. Sing with us.
Feel the grass. Take off your shoes.
No swimming from 2 to 4 PM. The fish are napping.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -5

There is a poem written by Frank O’Hara in April 1954 titled after Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” In Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff refers to O’Hara’s poem as a “loose adaptation” of Rilke’s. David Lehman has called it a “deliberate mistranslation.”

Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘translation’ has to do with O’Hara’s poem at all.

If I had to find words for it, I’d say O’Hara borrowed the structure of Rilke’s poem and cast it into the shape of Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” The title acknowledges this Aus-Einem-April mode; there is no epigraph pointing to Rilke because the pleasure of an O’Hara poem (much like the pleasure of an Ashbery) comes from reaching the reader who recognizes the source. Even the way O’Hara closes this poem — “and out there everything is turbulent and green” — shares almost no bones with Rilke’s quiet glistenings and “still” details ordered by awe.

Alina Stefanescu, “Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded…”

I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me to translate classical Persian poetry if an Iranian friend hadn’t asked me in the early 2000s if I’d be interested in working with a now-defunct organization called the International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC). ISIC, he said, was looking for someone to write the text for a website that would help counter the axis-of-evil caricature of Iranian culture and history that had been current here in the United States since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The focus of the website would be classical Persian literature. My job would be to make that literature and its place in Iranian and world culture accessible to an online American audience.

I was immediately interested. Since my wife is from Iran and my son is therefore Iranian-American, I had a real stake in the cultural awareness about Iran that ISIC wanted to engender; and, as a college professor and a writer, not only did I think the educational value of the project was self-evident; I also saw it as an opportunity to learn about a literature I knew next to nothing about. When I asked my friend if ISIC might see that ignorance as disqualifying, he told me not to worry. They actually wanted someone who would approach the literature from well outside the specialized and scholarly contexts in which those texts were usually read and studied.

My friend put me in touch with the man who was pre-screening those people who’d been identified as viable candidates for the project, and then he, after a long conversation of which I remember very little, told me I would hear within the next week or so from ISIC’s executive director, Mehdi Faridzadeh. When I met with Mr. Faridzadeh, however, the project he described to me was not only radically different from the one my friend had told me about; it was one I knew right away that I was not qualified to take on.

“We want you to produce,” he said, “book-length literary translations of selections from masterpieces of classical Persian literature. All told there are ten. We’re asking you to do five at a time.”

I did not hesitate. I immediately rejected his offer. While I spoke some Persian, I did not read it. How could I possibly presume to translate from it? Surely, I asked, there were bilingual poets and writers capable of doing this work. Why wasn’t he talking to them? He’d reached out to them first, he said, but, with very few exceptions, none were interested in working on classical texts, and the ones who did had either not responded to his query or had told him outright that they had other commitments. Since he wanted work to start on the project as soon as possible, he’d decided not to wait for them.

I pushed back. Given my lack of the obvious minimum qualifications, I said, I did not see how I could accept his commission or do the work with any integrity. Mr. Faridzadeh responded by pointing out to me something that I already knew, the long history of poets translating works from languages in which they were not literate by relying on informants and what are known in the field of translation as “trots” or “ponies.” These are literal or near-literal versions done by native speakers that the poets then use as a basis for the literary translations they produce. ISIC would provide me, he said, with English-language versions of the original texts that were widely recognized as valid, as well as access to scholars who could answer my questions and help me with any difficulties. Moreover, he went on, since he wanted the translations to stand on their own as contemporary American literature, as something a general readership might actually enjoy reading, he preferred the idea of working with someone like me, a native English-speaking poet, to working with someone who was bilingual but had neither a poet’s ear nor a poet’s way with words.

I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of earning myself a footnote in American literary history by producing these translations did not appeal to me. What ultimately persuaded me to accept ISIC’s commission, however, was a point Mr. Faridzadeh made about the generations of Iranian Americans who did not read Persian and for whom translations like the ones ISIC wanted to publish would be their only access to the classical literature that was part of their heritage. I thought about my son and others like him. They deserved, I thought, access to a version of that heritage that would “sing” in their dominant tongue the way the original “sang” in Persian. So, I agreed to produce a sample couple of pages from Saadi’s Gulistan, and when Mr. Faridzadeh called me a week or so later to tell me the project was mine if I wanted it, I accepted, though I was not at all prepared for the politics of the terrain I was entering.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tale – Part Four: How I Came to Play a Very Small Role in Saadi’s Travels Through the World

There were times I wished
I’d apprenticed to a sushi chef and learned
to wield a sharp, clean blade, and times I wanted
only to walk the marbled length of museum galleries,
opening window after window on the centuries.
What I know now came mostly from learning
to sit still, opening books and letting language
take me out of myself and back again until I
could find my way to some shore resembling
knowledge, and there at last make my own fire.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Labor

Bezos, Musk and Branson strapping the rich to rockets and shooting them at the moon is, in theory, quite appealing. They won’t send poets up there even though poets and astronauts are the same – it’s just the pay-grade that differs. Both reach out into the vast nothingness, return from the overwhelming emptiness with similar sentiment: the world is fragile. And beautiful. And insignificant.

Most poets prefer to stay grounded, don’t stretch to such perilous missions, play it safe, take what earthly succor they can. It seems the further out you are prepared to go the harder it is to attach value to your assignment. I could put on a vest, jog a few laps around the local park, say that I was doing it to save the barn owl or a rare breed of newt and I’d easily raise a few quid. If I told you I was taking a journey, a voyage into the great unknown of a poem, that this odyssey was taking place inside my head, a venture into the unmeasured depths of the imagination but for a similar cause you’d be far less inclined to part with your hard earned.

The first few times I got paid for my writing taught me a lot about how we calculate the value of such work. It was a lesson that came in three stages. I understand it’s a common experience. On the first occasion I didn’t feel worthy of the fee, I felt a little shame and embarrassment. The second time the money felt about right, I was comfortable, confident, assured but by the third time I realised that no matter what you paid me it would never be enough. This is not to say that I thought that my work was astonishingly brilliant just that there was a spectacular randomness about putting a price on it. There was an absurdity to it. It couldn’t be done with any sensible measure. I mean what do you pay for a poem?

Footballers earn more in a week than nurses do in a year and there aren’t riots in the streets. A diamond is just a see-through stone and poets go to places astronauts wouldn’t think to visit. In a parallel universe, somewhere beyond the moon, kids are tossing jewels into mill ponds as wealthy wives string common rocks around their necks.

Jan Noble, Nº62 Diamonds are (not) forever

It’s been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

–In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn’t remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn’t remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

–I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

–As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had reviewed a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven’t circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

–On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80’s, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It’s not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

I know the unseen work behind my writing, my learning, my community building—but I also know that my “score” does not necessarily matter in a subjective field. I might have the same “stats” on paper as an award-winning, widely-published writer, yet feel invisible. And someone else might be looking the same way at me, though that’s harder for me to imagine, of course.

But I also know for a FACT that I do not do a fraction of what other writers do to seek those opportunities and awards. I spent 36 years of my life working as a public school educator, often putting the needs of others before my own. As a retiree, I get to decide how I spend my time. And though that freedom has indeed given me the gift of ample time to focus on my writing and literary endeavors, it has also given me other freedoms.

Most importantly, I have the freedom to spend more time with people I love—my family, my friends—for laughs and meals and concerts and movies and general ridiculousness. To move my body and spend time in nature. To explore new creative outlets with visual art. To travel outside the timeframe of a school year’s constraints. (TL/DR: The way I choose the spend my time is not always devoted to my writing life, but to my LIFE life.)

I may not get the accolades I see my peers receiving, and maybe I have a little pity party every now & then. It feels good to be acknowledged, after all, but that isn’t why I write. So I’m good. I will celebrate my writing wins. And I will celebrate yours.

But I will also celebrate the heron returning to the local lake. The little boy racing his mom down the hill at the forest preserve. I will sing with my husband at a concert or yell at the contestants who annoy us on Top Chef or Survivor. I will talk on the phone with my son to discuss movies, or his upcoming wedding and new home. I will celebrate a friend finishing chemo, a sunny March day after a week of gray and snow. I will celebrate the beauties of the wider world through traveling while I am still able. I will celebrate each small kindness shown to me and try to show the same in return.

This is kind of keeping score that matters.

Donna Vorreyer, Keeping Score

Frankly, it’s all too easy to find metaphors for life in the garden. Nurturing seeds with a sense of hope, even expectation, sure. Endeavoring to control outcomes though one cannot control the weather? Yep, that too. Culling, thinning, weeding in an effort to produce abundance, clarity, or beauty? Yes; and waiting and working under hot sun or in the pouring rain and being surprised by hail or hurricane or drought. (You can pop any of those words into the “search” bar on this blog page and find times I have written about said weather events.) In the thousands of poems I’ve drafted during the past 45 years, garden topics and metaphors abound. Lately, though, I’ve been dwelling on how change–inevitable in the garden–presents problems to solve but also lovely surprises. And yeah, there’s metaphor in that as well. Though people tend to avoid change, change brings a wealth of education in its wake.

It’s true that education is often humbling. We work our butts off only to discover we’ve been doing things wrong, or ineffectively, all along. That’s one of the things I learned when I began trying to grow things in earnest, and it is also true of my experience writing poems. You have to be willing to make mistakes and accept that you made them if you are going to improve; it doesn’t mean you have to solve each difficulty in a prescribed way. You can invent! As long as you know that invention sometimes fails, you can learn from it. Create a nonce form for a poem, for example. Or an improvised trellis for a squash vine that got a lot larger than you’d planned.

Every year in late winter, I devise a garden plan and order seeds. Every year in early spring, I revise the plan in some way. Every year in mid- to late-spring, the garden looks very different from those designs…it helps to have a flexible nature, since nature hates rigidity and thrives in its own way. Often unexpected. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes quite a charming surprise to which I’m more than happy to adapt–I welcome the variation! It’s a process that reminds me of writing. No wonder my gardening and my poems are so connected: the processes are so similar.

Ann E. Michael, Process & metaphor

Above the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue,
a chalk-white smudge of contrail arcs
across a sky by Watteau. Everything stills.
For now,

driver-attention holds, and brakes are firm and good.
Ducks cross in danger and care, those ancient, storied laws.
Early light spangles the cottonwood.
A flowering crab confettis its applause.

Maryann Corbett, Mayday

I just roughed out an early draft of my next poetry manuscript (and finally figured out how to automate the Table of Contents in Word—ha!). It’s a long way from done: a little short, so I have more writing underway; there’s a section that might be relatively weak, we’ll see what I think later; and I will just generally need to revise individual poems and think about the flow within sections. I’ll take my time with all of it. But the basic structure makes sense, hitting the beats and ideas I have in mind. Plus I’ve been drafting new poems toward the gaps and, at least for the moment, feel good about most of them. The working title is Spiral Hum.

It’s Friday here and I fly out on Tuesday, so I’m in the home stretch on the Storyknife residency. I’ve had a couple of down days for a variety of reasons, all of which seem inevitable. It rains a lot here in April and gray skies wear on me. Social anxiety in the company of people I’m just getting to know: for sure. The ms contains tough material and spending time with it can be hard emotionally as well as in craft terms. Sometimes drafting a poem is a total joy, an episode of absorption that leaves me exhilarated. Other days it’s a grind to haul the stanzas up the hill. It’s certainly demanding intellectual work to analyze a sheaf of poems and figure out how they could be better versions of themselves. A stretch of two or three hours can burn me out. On a larger scale, I periodically question poetry’s whole enterprise. A question from Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” always haunts me: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” I’m still tracking world news as well as the struggles of my loved ones. What gave me the notion that writing is a good idea, in the face of all that?

Well, the fellowship itself suggests that I should be writing–that at least a few people in the universe want me to. This interval is a rare gift, so gratitude picks me up and set me on my poetic feet again.

I’ve also been reflecting on what about my residency has nourished my desire to write, because in general, it has. For the first time in ages, I have utter privacy to calm down and focus. I know for sure that no one will disturb me all day, though I can wander out and talk to whoever’s around, if I feel like it. Mostly I don’t, until five, when we gather for dinner. We do the dishes after and almost always go out for a walk. Then I’m back to my cabin to write and read. It’s a nice rhythm. And I would like an excellent lunch delivered to my doorstep every day for the rest of my life, please. (I have eaten very well generally, both here and in town—special shout-out to Maura’s salmon, chicken soup, and bison meatloaf; Katie’s baked goods; and the oyster restaurant on the spit.)

An equally important factor is Alaska itself. Awe is some of my most powerful poetry fuel. I crack my door and hear owls and eagles. Scary moose are marching around (don’t even talk to me about bears, who are waking up all over the state and feeling hungry). Yesterday I jumped on one of the staff’s twice-weekly errands to town so I could walk along Beluga Slough and Bishop Beach. I was hoping to find a hag stone, which I did. I filled my pockets with a variety of other pretty rocks and shells, too. I watched sandhill cranes, newly arrived. I found a mysterious feather, now on my windowsill, although I’ll leave it here, especially after learning it could be from a juvenile eagle (illegal to transport). The long stretch of sand and tide pools, distant rollers, and the Aleutian mountains beyond were gorgeous, even on a cold, cloudy day. Once, when my head was down, a raptor’s cry caught my attention. I looked up to see a bald eagle—they’re huge—perched on a carcass only several yards away. It was a dead otter and the eagle was plucking out his eye. Jesus, this is a stark, fierce, awe-inspiring place.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 4 (awe and otters)

Grief has chiseled its name in me
like a bored kid with a penknife.

Then again so has love, and
I yield willingly to that inscription.

My heart is a lacework of runnels
etched by a million attempts

at gratitude, even when
I am a canyon flooded with tears.

[…]

I haven’t posted a Torah poem here in a while, so here’s one that I’m working on this week, arising out of the second part of this week’s double Torah portion, Behar-Behukkotai.

The Hebrew word חָקַק means engraved. Hukkim are the mitzvot that don’t make intellectual sense (as opposed to mishpatim, justice-commandments.) Sometimes these mitzvot are literally “inscribed” on or in us, as in brit milah.

I started thinking about inscriptions, carving, the ways in which we do or don’t yield to being changed. The grooves we carve on ourselves through habit, and the grooves life carves on and in us. That’s what sparked this poem.

Rachel Barenblat, Carved

Have you ever done something genuinely kind and beautiful and then chose to deliberately keep it to yourself?

Is there anything soft, gentle that is kept inside — not necessarily hidden, nor embarrassingly put aside, but rather something to be proud of, and yet untold?

And what about a day when we do not reach for the phone, for the camera, not even for the pen. A day when we see, feel, touch, taste and do not have the need to tell, when the experience and its briefness (however long it may last) shall be enough.

Luciana Francis, The Anonymous Life

On the first day, the woman making my reading pass had warned me, “the days will start blending into each other” and so they have, to the point that I am only half sure that I am writing this from my bed, with Rastafarian music and weed smoke from the pavement below wafting into my room through the window, and not the reading room of the British Library because how can I be really certain that, like Alice, I hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole, in another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again the rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next, 

What happened next was that as I was reading the manuscript, the almost endless repetition of the cursive letters made me wonder if I was not hallucinating all of it, the letters, the writer of those letters, myself, my life, the people around me, the building, the garden house of 19th century Calcutta, or the screeching ambulances of 21st century London, and if I did not exist at all, then who was it that I sometimes saw in mirrors or windows, and who was the I seeing it? Was I really in London in 2026 because if I were, how could I simultaneously be in the suburbs of Calcutta in 1873, and if I were somehow here and there, could I walk out into the garden in Chitpore with cobras, mangoes, litchies, and cats named Baguette, how she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

At exactly 5 pm, the reading rooms of the library close. Outside the archives, the world seems strange, less and less itself. The bitter pint of Guinness in the Irish pub outside the archives taste like mangoes of a long gone Indian summer. 

Saudamini Deo, Mal d’archives

                      my heart is broken
it is worn out at the knees
                       ~ Suzanne Vega 

I have forgotten how 
     to do this. 

How to sit with myself
     on a Wednesday morning 
     and pay attention. 

How to resist
     the Breaking News. 

How to resist.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot poem 29 April 2026

This week: the clay-dusted air of the workshop, the rambling treasure hunt for a poem, writing nothing but sonnets for a year, the poets on the farthest end of the table, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s a bright morning in Yorkshire. The trees are in full blossom and there’s a fierce little breeze which scatters their petals like confetti. Today is Earth Day. It’s also the twenty second day of National Poetry Writing Month; a writing phenomenon which began in the States and now extends around the globe. According to the NaPoWriMo model, a prompt is issued and poets are invited to write (and share) a poem in response .

Yes, that’s right – a poem a day, every day, for 31 days. I can’t remember when Kim and I began following this crazy instruction – seven years ago? Nine? Ten? My blurriness is partially the result of late-night-writing-sessions and sleep deprivation by the end of the month; partly the sense of almost-total immersion in the world of the poem.

For all of those years I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo, April has functioned as a sort of creative reservoir – a time when I know I will produce a stack of drafts which will go some way to sustaining me through the rest of the year. It’s not just about quantity either: the daily discipline; the heady exposure of knowing that I’ll publish my early drafts on social media no matter how imperfect or incomplete; the delicious combination of mutual support, appreciation and competition I always feel when I’m writing with Kim – there’s no doubt that I produce some of my best writing in April.

Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo

Early in my social media times I began adding a link to a piece of music to each of my poems. I’ve been doing this for maybe … eight years?? My playlist of these songs exceeds 30 hours now. Why am I doing this? The thing is …

A poem takes us into a waiting room.

We open a magazine on a random page and read. The person next to us changes their position on a plastic chair. The wall clock ticks on. The air is stale, infused with the deodorant of the man who has left before we entered. These lines. We reread them, not having quite got it. A fly that has landed on the table is shuffling its legs.

Then we look up.

Outside, mute, the branches of a tree. Traffic. A person hurries down the street and a piece of paper falls from their trouser pocket, but they walk on, not noticing.

We look back at what we’ve just read and it has changed.

Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music

Like many people, I am intrigued by bird calls. Where we live in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, just out of Adelaide, South Australia, we are graced by many types of native birds. However in the forty years we have lived here, the number of species found in the area had dropped dramatically. This decline has been well documented and is due to a combination of habitat destruction, mostly for human housing, and climate change. Nevertheless, most of the time, the air is filled with the calls of birds, some regular residents, others infrequent passers-by. But what are they saying to each other? what are they trying to tell us?

Here are a couple of videos I have made, in which I give voices to the birds in different ways. Both these videos have had many screenings in Australia and around the world.

Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…

With Birds and Duduk

In this piece, I’m playing a duduk, an Armenian double reed instrument made out of apricot wood. I’m also using live digital processing and recordings of birds.

Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds

And there is this beautiful thing Ted Berrigan said, as quoted by Ron Padgett:

The gods demand of the system that a certain number of people sing, like the birds do, and it somehow was given to me to be one of those people—and I mean I did have a choice—I could have decided not to, to be a truck driver or a filmmaker. But I like doing that, and I feel that probably the major reason I write is because the gods might destroy… the whole thing could fall apart. I lift my voice in song. I lift my voice in song.

Valium numbs every part of the song that seeks to keep things whole in me.

The administrative precision of the hospital emphasizes the humiliation of being embodied. I will always dread it. But I won’t spend this week consumed by the worry of waiting for results.

I lift my voice in song instead, to quote Ted.

Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.

I say to the tree growing inside me

It is one thing to taste your bitter
leaves but now I hear your barbets
all day, their song is crawling out
of my ear, do you know they are
planning to escape?

I think they saw a cloudless sky
dancing in my dreams.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts. […]

I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me. […]

[W]hile I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning

Kelli Russell Agodon came out to be our featured reader at the J. Bookwalter Poetry Series (just rebooted!) on Thursday night and she did a great job, as did the open mic-ers, and a wonderful audience. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with poets here in Woodinville, and the weather obliged, not being too cold or too hot, and the evening ending in golden light as the last reader read.

We also got to introduce Catherine Broadwall’s upcoming book, Afterlife, which will debut on May 5, and she’ll be our featured reader on June 18. I feel very lucky to have so many talented friends and writers around for inspiration.

Kelli read from her upcoming book with Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, which if you haven’t thought about preordering, think about it! It’s got Alexa solving existential crises, mermaid dreams, Emily Dickinson’s phone messages, and a whimsical take on a world in chaos. Kelli and I have been friends since before our first books were taken, so we were reminiscing a bit, how we’ve changed as people and writers, how we haven’t changed. I think both of us have become better writers, and part of that is a function of having supportive writer friends, and part of it is not giving up, and another part is becoming more comfortable with who we are as people, which somehow translates into poetry.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Kelli’s Reading in Woodinville, Goldfinches Returns with Cherry and Crabapple, Birthdays Approaching and the State of Publishing (And Fear of Failure)

“In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago” is a poem that came together over many years. In 2005 I first jotted down notes about the canyon, the view from Airport Mesa, and the Milky Way while on my honeymoon in Sedona, Arizona. Over the next twenty years or so, I returned to that material now and then, but never had the poem in my grasp, just images. After my divorce, I went back to those old, failed drafts to see what I could find. That excavation led me to a poem that is, in its own way, about excavation, and about seeing things later through a different lens.

What helped me find and shape the poem was seeing an opportunity to play with repetition and variation. Like jazz musicians, we writers can improvise and riff! I’ve noted some of that riffing in the handwritten annotation below.

As I note here, I saw the opening—“Our honeymoon was a strand of scenic overlooks”—as an opportunity to play with variations on that sentence. Mid poem it becomes “Our honeymoon was a stranded scene I overlooked,” and in the end it becomes “Our honeymoon was a strand, a strangeness, a look ahead.” Riffing on the words in those sentences inspired me to play with other words and to find possible variations. Ultimately I built the form of the poem around those variations and revisions/distortions, with the end words in lines 1-3 (stand, wrote, scenic) corresponding to the end words in lines 4-6 (strange, penned, scene), and so on.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago”

In the summer of 2023, the poet and translator Aaron Poochigian posted on social media a link to an article about an unusual archaeological find: On a fragment of an amphora from Spain at some time in the first four centuries CE, some words were scratched into the wet clay that are quite different from the usual commercial information. The article’s authors identified the words as coming from Vergil’s Georgics. Theorizing about the sort of person who might have inscribed poetry on a pot, they note that children and youths were commonly employed in pottery manufacture of the time, and that the Georgics might well have been used in pedagogy in the agricultural area where the fragment was found. Whether or not their scenario is likely, it struck a chord with me, recalling my teenage encounters with Vergil’s hexameters, a rhythm I’ve tried to echo with the stresses of modern English, and used in several poems. The poem I based on this article has finally, finally, appeared in the little magazine Vergilius, so I can show it to you.

On some words of the Georgics,
inscribed on a fragment of Roman amphora unearthed in Spain

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

Picture him, down on one knee in the clay-dusted air of the workshop,
bent to the wet terra cotta. He’s mouthing the sounds of a poem,
working the spelling out roughly; misplacing the start of the sentence—
wrong, but we see what he’s after. Underside up, the amphora,
waiting, still soft, is a near-irresistible draw to his stylus.

Everyone writes on amphorae—the contents, the names of the sellers—
what’s to deter him? His memory’s zephyred away to the schoolroom
now, and he’s singing it—quietly, quietly—wheat fields and grapevines,
oxen and beehives; he’s singing the gyre of the year in the heavens,
Bacchus and Ceres. He’s etching his love of it into the softness […]

Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me

Much is written about how to be a good listener. Far less is written about how to be a poetic one, or rather, how to listen for the poetic.

When I write poems for strangers as I do on my podcast, There’s a Poem in That, I I don’t write affirming poems that reflect the client back to themselves, merely. Instead, I take a more assertive stance. It’s not about listening and repeating, it’s a poetic processing I’m still learning how to think about.

Nomenclature for this practice can still only be borrowed. The stranger asking me to write a poem for them—do I call them a client (medicine)? A subject (visual arts)? A querent (Tarot)? Do I talk about this work as clinical? Service-oriented? Socially engaged? A healing art? Isn’t it all those things?

Listening, too isn’t enough of a word for what constitutes the rambling treasure hunt for a poem in someone else’s story. The process is more journalistic than therapy-based, but art’s the goal. I get in there, and I tangle. It’s almost physical. I tangle with what people try to tell me.

My standard three hours of interview provide ample opportunity to learn whether, and how, to challenge my querents’ narratives, test assumptions, and clarify loose language. I begin to make demands. If someone is bold enough to require a poem from me; I’m emboldened to require they take the project seriously. I do them the favor of holding them to task.

Active listening is one thing; proactive listening is a more recently advocated set of advanced techniques in which the listener pushes back a little harder in a more deliberate effort to understand not just the words a person is saying but what, in fact, they mean by them. It’s a kind of parsing in which a subject’s words need not be taken at face value if their meaning is obscure. It’s worthwhile work for poets, who are trained to interrogate the language.

I listen for images, metaphors, motifs, patterns, and archetypal hero’s journey stuff. But I also listen for those narrative gaps in querents’ stories into which a poetic conversation can fit where nothing else seems likely to. I hasten to those clearings in a client’s imagination where only a poem might spark new fire.

Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn’t do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it’s so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn’t come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go–it’s so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that’s closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I’ve noticed that more of us are questioning the platform. Like me, these other users — most of whom, in my case, are artists or writers — don’t want to leave a place where they’ve staked out a long-time presence and do have a sense of community, but they are also putting more energy into their own websites, blogs, and other online forms that are not corporate, not part of the big system, and remain under one’s own control. They are also hungry for other forms of activity and community that require — and acknowledge — genuine connection and greater attention. I’m not going to leave the site, but I’m now much more aware of what it is, how it affects me, and how I want to use it.

None of what I’ve based my life upon is disposable. When we take the time to create a work of art, to play or listen to music, grow a garden, learn a language, write a set of poems, or build a relationship, we do so because our effort feels worthwhile and we hope the result will last. Our lives themselves are short; time is precious. I want to make intentional choices and to spend most of my time in the real world, as positively as possible. So I think the right thing for me is to limit my intake of news to what’s necessary for knowing what is going on, and not get drawn into the maelstrom of debates and opinions; to limit my time on social media; to write as thoughtfully as possible, to keep learning, to devote myself to music and art and the people I care about — many of whom are online friends, some of whom I met through Instagram itself — but in a thoughtful way that honors the best aspects of who we are and what we respect in each other.

Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited

So where are we now with the gift economy as artists/writers/creatives? I remember when I started blogging 2000 years ago and it was very much an exchange of ideas, freely given. I remember when I saw blogs like Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) monetize. It was the first blog I can remember doing that and it blew my mind. Like, jealous! A bit. But also, it seemed odd? And now I think, how my life would have been so much better if I’d figured all that out way back when. These days I still struggle with the whole Ko-fi thing :) And I’ve whined about how maybe I should move to Substack all the time and then never do.

And now the question, the problem of AI, stealing our gifts but also messing up the gift economy. And then the feeling that it’s foolish to be putting almost anything on the internet at all. I honestly don’t know what to do with all these thoughts currently. Because just the pure giving online has brought me a lot of goodness in this world. So anyway, I’m sitting with the Wittgenstein quotation, the gift as a problem to solve.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking about The Gift

This week, on a tiny writing retreat, I’ve been thinking about the idea of running without fuel in the tank. And sometimes, not just fuel: no oil, no coolant, and the car needs some work as well. I’ve been thinking about what makes it possible to move forward when your resources are depleted. To be your best self, whatever that self is.

I used to find that whenever I traveled, I ran on empty. I was eating badly, not exercising, I lost connection with my game, and when I got back, I grasped at reconnecting with my life. But I like to think that being able to be my best—my most creative self, my most wild and fun self, my most dedicated self to Red Hen self, my most focused self—all requires some care, attention.

Some people need a lot of time with other people to feel good. I need a certain amount of alone time, and I need to spend that alone time reading, writing, or exercising, not doomscrolling. The apps raise my anxiety, and they convince me that everyone else’s life is much better than my life. They give me a fidgety unhappy edgy mash of dark to mess.

Alternatively, reading centers me, exercise brings my brain into focus, and writing reminds me of who I am. During my alone time, I rein in my urge to deep-dive, and I return to my focus. […]

On this, my birthday week, I think of Molly Fisk’s poem “Cedar Waxwings.” It is a good example of finding yourself through silence. It’s a poem that makes me think about healing and finding grace and getting back to equilibrium, and all of those things that I hope are possible while I am breathing, writing, finding my pulse.

So much depends on my finding my breath again. On refilling my tank. On resisting mournful isolation and embracing good solitude. I look to Molly, now, who is such a centered, soulful person. When I talk with her, when I hear her, her voice is large and surrounds me, and I feel like she is someone who climbed a mountain and saw the surrounding fields and all the trees, who saw devastation, too, and managed to stay sane and lived to tell the tale. She’s at the center of her own stillness, writing and seeing. Let us all aspire to such grace.

Kate Gale, Solitude, Stillness & Sanity: On Remembering Yourself Through the Empty

I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I taught a surrealist poetry class with poet and librettist Melissa Studdard. We were the last class, which made me a little worried because I thought everyone might be tired and thinking about midday snacks & drinks—however, I was so wrong! What a joy to be overfilled with people—two rooms, all chairs taken, and people on the floor—all writing surreal poems. It made me realize that even with everything in the world, people still want to create something, to write poems, to be in community. I needed that reminder.

Melissa and I also did a little photoshoot for our poetry series, Poems You Need, and I, of course, wore the wrong shoes and sliced my foot (this should be no surprise to anyone who knows me—I always wear the wrong shoes).

The problem was—we had no tissues to stop the blood; it was just me, bleeding onto my discount Italian flip-flops and the sidewalk like a very low-budget horror film. Our photographer, who turned out to be a quick-thinking hero, pulled out a tiny white baby sock (clean! her son’s!) she’d been using as a lens cover and saved the day. (And yes, I was fine, no stitches, just alcohol, Neosporin, and a very tight bandaid!)

Kelli Russell Agodon, The World Is Too Much and Also Beautiful

Being at a yarn show with hundreds of people is a complete contrast to my one-to-one coaching or the times when it’s just me writing poetry, but there is also a lovely cross over with my values of being helpful, listening to people and taking time for reflection. And this week while simply being in a show ground I have felt the lovely tingle of tears of happiness in my eyes when recounting moments that have brought me pure joy in my life and listening to other people tell me theirs. I have laughed a lot and remembered to stay in the moment because after all it is the moment that counts. Oh, and I remembered to still myself and say thank you when complimented by a stranger so that I actually got to feel the complete glow of how that feels.

Here’s to finding the ways we laugh with others, supporting those we love and being ourselves in the moment.

Graphene, from my first collection Magnifying Glass, is shining in my mind as a great poem with which to end this blog…for the wonder of celebrating the shine and the marvel of being human.

Graphene

Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building

it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;

hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.

And before that, did it come from a star?

Maybe it was once inside you.
You are a study in graphene:
cleaved graphite, harder than diamond,

stronger than steel.

Exceptional.

Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW

over the last couple of years, by far my richest and most rewarding poetry experiences have been the launches of work by long-time friends. these gatherings mean an immense amount to me, and i wouldn’t trade my participation for anything in the world. but – there is always a but – the very things that make these these celebrations so joyful, so moving, and so special – their warmth and intimacy – are also the things that make them tricky. and by “tricky” i mean… what, precisely? i suppose i must mean the sensation of emptiness that assails me in the midst of the social. […]

people are very mysterious to me: how they think, feel, fit together, move through the world. i can – and do – enjoy and admire many of them – but i do not understand them even slightly. it’s like… it’s like life is a fundamentally different force for most humans than it is for me. they have all of these experiences, achievements, ideas, relationships, and these things fill them up, or they enlarge them, give them a shape and a substance, a weight in the world; they anchor them to reality and to each other. for myself, life isn’t like that, it’s momentum without mass, just restless moving energy; it forces me forward, and it thrusts itself through me, but there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to build on or around. i feel flimsy, i guess. i feel.

Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES

When I look up and away from the screen, there is a community I adore. Throughout multiple visits to a local wetland, I watched a discarded iced donut in the grass slowly get eaten away. Simply because I went for a walk to escape nonsense, I once observed ants protect aphids on a plant called Fireweed because the ants love the honeydew that the aphids produce. Community is everywhere. Symbiosis is necessary. Communication is necessary. Ten years now I have bent down to a plant or pointed to a bird and said their name to my husband. And now he says them back to me, his finger pointing up at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Rich Rich

I’ve drafted three poems now, one each morning. I’m also accumulating a windowsill full of spruce and alder cones, bits of moss and quartz, and other stray items: a rose hip, a mollusk shell, dried stalks of some kind of aster.

I hear owls at night: the deep hoots of a great horned owl, the faster, higher calls of a northern saw-whet owl. I missed some aurora activity last night, though. I gave up and went to bed at a quarter after midnight, thinking it was too cloudy, and others saw the flickering just fifteen minutes later.

Heading toward summer, Alaska, or this part of it anyway, is gaining five minutes of light a day. The sun currently sets at 9:30 but the glow lingers longer, hovering at the horizon until 10:30 or later.

Today, Saturday, is brilliantly bright, at least for now. The snow-blanketed volcanoes across Cook Inlet are perfectly clear. Directly across from my desk rises the cone of Augustine (Chu Nula, translation in progress). Visible at the edge of my view is Iliamna (Ch’nagat’in, One that stands above). I have to walk outside to see Redoubt (Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, One that has a notched forehead).

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemera pt. 3 (the wild life)

Today, my birthday started the day off with French toast made for me by J and sitting down to write some poems to catch up on NaPoWriMo hi-jinks I have fallen behind on.  We don’t really have plans for the day since J has three gigs today stretching from early afternoon til 2 or 3 am. So I am on my own, and will probably work on editing things, tidy up the bedroom, and watch something trashy later. […]

In the end 51 was a wild year. Depressing on a global scene, and dysfunctional even on a level that my previous half-century had not seen. Yet, on a personal level, things feel good, though ever precarious financially (but then again, while things are more expensive, I have never quite been flush there even when they were cheaper.)  I probably wrote over a hundred poems, edited dozens of chapbooks, made many collages and cover designs. I published three physical books (one a regular full-length collection, one a text/visual hybrid, and another special-edition hardcover w/ fauxtographs for Patreon. ) There were also a handful of e-zine editions. A smattering of video poems. Meanwhile there have been countless movies, many plays and musicals, occasional weekends away, and of course, the wedding last summer, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. 

Kristy Bowen, 52

Once upon a time, around the time I first moved to London, I wrote nothing but sonnets for a year. They weren’t strictly sonnets, because they mostly didn’t rhyme and when they did rhyme they didn’t follow the right patterns; the metre, to the extent there was one, was rough and ready even by my standards. Never mind. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Lowell (possibly too much). The not-quite-sonnet tradition goes further back still.

More interesting, looking back, was how addicted to the form I was. I couldn’t stop writing and whatever I wrote came out in fourteen lines. Here is Ken Gordon, writing about his own sonnetification in Sonnet by Other Means: “It was like a fever. I began writing sonnets continuously. Daily. Sometimes two or three (or even four) in a day. I was like a chain-smoker: One sonnet lit another.” I don’t think I ever wrote four in a day, but yes—it was like that.

Are people drawn to certain forms? It’s a good question. I am still a sonnet reader, but I haven’t started a new one in years. Maybe it is also a question of timing: to everything its season and perhaps particularly to sonnets, that form which is so contained, so combustible, and apparently inexhaustible.

You can read one of those London sonnets in the The Sonneteer. I am grateful to Ken not only for taking it, but for providing the title—the only title possible, but I didn’t know that. The poem riffs on Jackson Browne’s song of the same name (written when he was a teenager, made famous by Nico). 

Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing.

Maria Popova, Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing

This week, I attended a phenomenal reading at the Poetry Foundation featuring Ashley M. Jones, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donika Kelly, and Patricia Smith. The poems asked a great deal of us—our attention, our emotional depth, our fullest humanity. They were not always easy—that is, they did not always say the easy or obvious thing. They did not lead with something “everyone can relate to” to win us over. They often centered on confronting and difficult subjects.

And that’s one of the things I love about poetry, the way it can immediately deliver identity and experience grounded in the complex and ongoing web of history. In other words, these poems were ambitious. They seemed to hope to outlast their moment in the grit, music, and scope of what they offered and asked of the listener. I felt challenged. I felt moved.

It made me reflect on how I’ve been teaching writing for 14 years, and my list of similes for what the process is like has grown stranger by the year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.

Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember / Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human     is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”

Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.

Bethany Reid, Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

I can’t let Poetry Month go by without sharing a few notes about books I’ve spent time with this month. So, here are a few brief recommendations:

#evolutionarypoems

by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis

When’s the last time you read an Ethiopian poet? Or poetry translated from Amharic? Well, it was a first for me, and I continue to be impressed by the incredible work that the good people at Circumference Books are doing. So many of their books are from regions and languages that are so rarely represented in English translation, and thus, feel so very new and surprising in all the right ways. And if you, like me, are looking for an activist poetics for our times, these are politically engaged poems that provide a very personal model for literary resistance.

Yes & Now

by Yvette Nepper

Yvette may be one of my earliest friends in poetry land—we met our freshman year, when we were both at Ohio University for a time. I greatly admire Yvette’s work within the poetry community in Cincinnati, and we share a Gen X love of DIY and zine culture that continues in many of Yvette’s chapbooks and projects. Yes & Now is one such limited edition chapbook (in this case produced by FTP), “printed on a mimeograph machine in Mike Cowgill’s mom’s basement.” I love Yvette’s ability to balance profound thought with humor and play that makes one feel like it’s totally okay and maybe even preferable sometimes to have a dance party within what feels like an apocalypse. Come hear Yvette read at my house this September, and while you can’t buy Yes & No online anymore, check out her other chapbooks.

Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books

This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.

I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).

Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shines through in Ian’s haiku.

Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light

Marriage is one of the most marked gaps in classical literature. I can’t, off-hand, think of a single good classical poem about being married, and barely any even about a wife (as opposed to a lover or would-be lover). Marriage is of course depicted quite often in Greek tragedy, though generally not very positively. But that’s not to say there’s no good Latin poetry about marriage — around 1500 the Renaissance Latin poets Pontano and Sannazaro, in particular, pioneered the Latin poetry of marriage and this sub-genre remained fashionable for a good century or so. […]

I’ve been thinking about marriage in literature, and especially in poetry, partly because I have been rereading Women in Love for the first time in decades, and partly because this week I finally received the copy of Matthew Buckley Smith’s Midlife, which I’ve been waiting for — I ordered it a while ago but it took a good few weeks to make it across the Atlantic and through French customs. Smith is the host of the popular, if oddly named, Sleerickets poetry podcast, which I’ve been on a couple of times — once a year or so ago and then just last week. I’m not a big podcast-listener myself but I enjoyed talking to Matthew, who’s a gifted interviewer, both times. Sleerickets’ trademark is plain-speaking so in that spirit I hope Matthew won’t mind that this week I’m writing about his own poetry.

Midlife, published in 2024 by Measure Press, was Smith’s second collection and the winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award in 2021. (This is an American poetry prize that recognises excellence in formal poetry, with a particular interest — in recognition of Wilbur’s legacy as a translator — in poets who also translate; previous winners have included A. M. Juster, A. E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat and Maryann Corbett.) Last year he was also one of the Rattle Chapbook Prize winners, which means that his pamphlet The Soft Black Stars was circulated to all Rattle subscribers (including me) a few weeks ago (if you’re not a Rattle subscriber, you can order it here).

The first thing to say is that Smith is a very good poet in various ways: he is technically accomplished, he has some range in both form and style, and — a feature that readers of Horace & friends will I think particularly appreciate — he conveys an enjoyable impression of literary depth. Midlife contains one excellent (and one less good) version of Horace, one fairly good version of Catullus 51/Sappho 31, one version of/response to Rilke, as well as versions, responses and allusions to Homer, Tennyson and (especially) the dramatic monologues of Browning. The Soft Black Stars, though on the whole a bit less ‘literary’, contains poems responding to the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ and to Ezra Pound. (The title of the pamphlet is taken from a short story by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, but I haven’t read these stories so won’t comment on that.) Smith is writing in that American formalist tradition that sometimes sounds to my British ear just a bit too clickety-clack, and at times I find him a little boxed-in by his forms. But this is a pretty minor niggle: if you enjoy collections written entirely in “traditional” verse, he is obviously one of the very best US poets writing in this way today.

Victoria Moul, On marriage

Rhina P. Espaillat published this sonnet, titled “Here,” after the passing of her husband, Alfred. And it is as precise a description of what remains after losing a spouse as anything English literature has to offer. It is a poem, in my own lingering grief, I can hardly bear to read and yet cannot bear to set aside.

After the death of Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas published a 1957 memoir of her time married to the poet, with the unbearable title Leftover Life to Kill. Espaillat catalogues instead the actual leftover objects.

Born on January 20, 1932, Rhina P. Espaillat had her 90th birthday in 2022 celebrated by several of the better poetry publications. Back in its heyday, Prairie Home Companion featured her work. The godmother of the New Formalism — the counter-current that emerged in the late 1980s to offer alternatives to the endless free verse of modern college writing-program poetry — she occupies a section in every contemporary anthology of rhymed and metered verse.

The authorized translator of Robert Frost into Spanish, and the translator of such works as the poetry of St. John of the Cross into English, Espaillat is a major poet working in our lifetimes. Which is why we’ve featured her work several times here in Poems Ancient and Modern: the comic “Undelivered Mail,” the dimeter of “Things That Go,” her translation of “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.”

And in “Here,” the reader will find several of the features that recur in her verse. The sonnet form she often uses. The simple rhymes, for example, that do not strain for effect. The list-making. The precise observation of “his red Swiss Army knife / hiding its tiny arsenal of blades” and the near personification of those knife blades: “like legs tucked under.” A refusal of hyperbole: “I almost hear him say . . . ” And a powerful emotion never named but completely expressed, with the unbearable ending […]

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. 

rob mclennnan, Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

If [Liam] Guilar’s approach to translation is to reimagine, then the way Kit Fryatt and Harry Gilonis work in Book of Inversions is to take things apart and then put them back together in carefully random disorder. As the author/translators note in their introduction, it’s ‘a book of inversions, turning the world upside down’.

The introduction also mentions some antecedents to their approach, including Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic Catullus, Anne Carson’s versions of the same Latin poet, Richard Caddell’s transmogrification of I Gododdin in his elegiac For the Fallen, and Geoffrey Squires’s My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200, not so much an antecedent as it was published while Fryatt and Gilonis were hard at it, but certainly a kind of gold standard for anyone tackling the field. There are also notes that indicate textual sources, other translations (full disclosure, three of them are mine), and further interesting titbits about each poem inverted. The notes also indicate if the version is by one or other of the authors or a joint effort.

Their title plays on the Lebor Gabála Érenn, englished as The Book of the Takings of Ireland, or The Book of Invasions. As such, it is fitting that, after a couple of dedicatory snippets, they open with a version of Amergin’s Song from that text. Not the famous, or infamous, ‘I am the wind on the sea’ one, but Amergin’s third song. Amergin Glúngheal is Ireland’s mythical first poet, and the songs represent a moment of claiming Ireland, which, maybe, makes this a doubly appropriate opener. Here it is in the Irish Text Society version by Macalister, the official version, if you like:

A fishful sea!
A fruitful land!
An outburst of fish
Fish under wave,
In streams (as) of
A rough sea!
birds,
A white hail
With hundreds of salmon,
Of broad whales!
A harbour-song—
An outburst of fish,
A fishful sea!

And here’s the Gilonis take:

Fishfilled sea!
Fertile land!
Fish erupt!
Fish in waves
bird-flock-like!
Ocean’s wild!

White sea hail,
salmon hordes,
widespread wales!
Harbour song:
‘Fish erupt,
fishfilled sea!’

And the Irish text as best as I can manage to reconstruct it from what’s to hand:

iascach muir
mothach tîr
tomaidm n-eisc
iasca fothuind
rethaib ên
fairge chruaid
cassar finn
crethaib én
lethan mîl
portach lág
mniportach lugh
tomaidm n-eisc
iascach muir

What’s immediately apparent, even to readers with no Irish, is that the new version adheres much more closely to the chant-like terseness of the original, short lines and an emphatic rhythm and an echo of the Irish tendency to composite word formation. 

Billy Mills, Celtic Matters

The poet J.H. Prynne died this week, at the age of 89. I’ve been reading his work since I was a student. My first experience of it was very like the one described in this tribute by Ian Patterson for the London Review of Books blog:

[the] poems were like essays in their apparent substance, but they had a manner, a rhythm and a music, as well as a density of thought that shifted my idea of what poetry was and what it could be and do

So this week I thought I would try to give some account of that experience: the reading of words that sound explanatory but resist explanation, and which resonate with a musical air of meaning that repeats itself as a kind of thought.

[…]

wresting the screen before the eyelet lost / to speech tune you blame the victim: I’ve quoted these unpunctuated lines together because I don’t know how to split them apart. Following the clear but abstract statement of the distinction between knowing and doing, we are suddenly plunged into a confusion of violent action. To “wrest” is usually to “wrest control” of something: here, “the screen before the eyelet lost”. This is — to use a synonym for darkness — “obscure” (Latin obscurus, dark, hidden, secret). But obscurity is also what is being (obscurely) described: to put a “screen” before an “eyelet” is to block a small hole for light. So clarity of knowledge has been followed by a cover-up. “Lost”, at the line-break, is the hinge word here, the moment of maximum confusion before an immoral argument emerges which inverts the dynamics of power: “you blame the victim”. How / why do “you” do this? Because you are “lost / to speech tune”, like a good poet. But here it sounds as though your eloquence is a bad habit.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day

We’ve been thinking a lot about the poetry of Douglas Dunn recently, especially Douglas’s superb and undervalued pre-Elegies poems. This seemed a good excuse to give this little essay a second airing; it appeared in a recent-ish issue of The Dark Horse devoted to Dunn and his work. It’s about my own debt to Douglas, and to one poem of his in particular. Since that poem is unavailable online, I’ll risk reprinting it at the end of the piece until I’m told off. You can, however, still read it in Dunn’s essential New Selected Poems. […]

I remember reading ‘Remembering Lunch’ in an appropriately wine-stained paperback copy of St Kilda’s Parliament, bought in the Charing Cross Road in the late eighties. I’ll have picked it up it from one of the second-hand bookstores where, twelve or fifteen years earlier, Douglas would have flogged his review copies to pay for his long Soho lunch and its longer bar tab. I had just read and fallen in love with Elegies, as we all had; but with the young male poet’s atrocious impatience to have everyone sprawling on a pin, I decided I had Dunn’s measure. I opened at ’Remembering Lunch’. So much for that theory. For one thing, even the measure was new to me. What’s with the long line? Isn’t it prose when you keep bopping your head on the right margin? Clearly not; but are poets permitted such long sentences? At the time, one knew just enough to reach for the word ‘Jamesian’ whenever one encountered such fluent hypotaxis, but little else. I was, at least, used to poems ending with the sea. The sea is literally a great place to stop. But it was clearly going to take me years to catch up with the rest of it, and I had best make a start.

Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn

At age 76, [Robert] Cording has been writing a long time; he started before he was out of college, and he published his first book of poems in 1987, almost 40 years ago. To look back over that lengthy career is to begin to understand something about the meaning of his new book’s title: what he’s been able to achieve through decades of devotion to his craft, which produces both an accounting and an appraisal of all that he has written and published, and what is possible to ascertain from what the poems tell us about the life Cording has experienced and lived and shared, not only with those he loves but also with his readers.

About the latter, Cording’s poems make quietly clear his life’s through-lines:

[. . .] family and friends, [. . .]

our blessings—the disarming joy of being
loved, the bounty of the natural world
that still takes our sight beyond ourselves. [. . .]

~ from “Talking Through a Storm” (p. 114 )

As that excerpt implies, Cording is an observer of the interior life, one from which he draws energy and consolation, as much as he is a poet who looks out into the world of both the ordinary — “all that is / too humdrum for our notice,” the “nothing much” that characterizes daily goings-on (“Ode to Ordinariness, pp. 130-131) — and the inexplicable and divine, whether it is “the perfection of birdness” (“Lord God Bird,” pp. 132-133) or “some accidental loveliness / we put our hopes in” (“Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898,” p. 185).

As attentive as Cording is to these constants, as much as he can praise the recurrence of “the sun returning like a second chance / after this evening’s shower” or “the moon rising like a clockface” (“Ode to Ordinariness,” p. 131), the world, he writes, “keeps moving to its tasks, random with pain, / rich with surprise” (“All Souls’ Morning,” p. 54), landing him in an “in-between” space where grief and lament reside alongside praise and “a source of awe”: “the colors // of dawn on the earth’s other side. Everything— / the tamaracks and maples, the spruces and their / smoke- winged / sparrows, the painterly sky darkening toward infinity” (“For Rex Brasher, Painter of Birds,” pp. 75-76). The lesson to be drawn, then, is that both suffering and cause to celebrate can and do coexist, that a day can be “perfectly made for delight” while “grief is endless” (“Four Prayers,” p. 151).

Maureen Doallas, Robert Cording’s ‘What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems’

May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.

[…]

How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.

The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54

in the front yard, the ferns
are unfurling their fists. i wonder what it is
that they reach for. i should probably open
my hands too. catch something. not a star,
maybe just a petal from the peach tree who might,
if the world is real enough this year, bear fruit.

Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist

The Heart of American Poetry

Based on A Poet’s Glossary, a book I always enjoyed opening, I impulse-purchased this new critical work by Edward Hirsch. But it is not a book I will finish, though I will keep dipping. The attempt to link poetry to the state of America is far too blunt, the readings are often too anecdotal, and thus the page count is far beyond the actual interest, though the book is not without interest and if some compressed version of this was available in online essays, I would read it. In general, this might be a worthwhile book for someone new to the topic, but it feels old-fashioned to me. If the topic at hand is so important (as I agree with Hirsch that it is) some other way of discussing it must be found. No easy task, and perhaps an unfair criticism, but that is where we are.

*

The Modern Element

Adam Kirsch’s 2008 book about modern poetry is much more lively, gets to the point, and has Kirsch’s own strongly-held views to sustain it. It is less about “who we are now” or whatever, but has a lot more to say about the poets and the nature of poetry. Kirsch is against “poetry’s neurotic obsession with the modern”. He thinks the “poetics of authenticity” which prevailed after the war, and which finished the job Romanticism started and led to the removal of formal qualities, “has thoroughly failed” and has prevented poets from writing major works. He wishes us to return to the pragmatic tradition of Johnson, Aristotle, Horace, and Arnold. A very worthwhile book.

Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns

It was late May, and I had a day off, or was killing time between my day and evening jobs, and I missed campus, with its grassy quad and emerald oaks and bobbing tulips, its redbuds and dogwood, magnolia and cherry, and so I went to the park in search of something like it. There was nothing there that one would call manicured, and what I missed most of all, I’m sure, was the people who’d sit in the grass and read poems with me. I remember I wrote a letter to a friend—we had email, but nobody had a computer; word processors hulked on our desks like suitcase bombs—and then I read Sweet Machine for the first time, and “Door to the River” is the poem that left me breathless in the grass.

What’s to like? I’ve been asking another version of that question a lot lately: Why do I like what I like? It’s a simple poem, so far as the literal circumstances: it begins in ekphrasis, more specifically interpretive ekphrasis—the speaker doesn’t tell us what the painting looks like, but attempts to interpret de Kooning’s intention or meaning—then progresses to narrative description, recalling yesterday’s meadow, then proceeds through a series of questions that feel by turns existential and self-directed, arriving at something like certainty, then a turn to exhortation and another narrative that leads to a moment of lyric epiphany—of transcendence. Why do I like it? Because it is transcendent, and it brings us along on its path towards insight.

Maybe simple isn’t the word.

“Door to the River” is sort of the antonym, conceptually and formally, of another field poem, Mark Strand’s compact little “Keeping Things Whole.” I’m tempted to call it an antidote as well. There’s paradox at the heart of Strand’s poem: If his speaker is what is missing, he is also the missing piece; in that sense, he belongs wherever he is—and yet the division seems to be absolute. There is “the air,” and there is “my body,” and though the two meet, they remain separate. There is such a thing as lack: the air can lack the body; the body can lack the air. Together they “keep things whole,” but this wholeness is only accomplished by continuous motion, is comprised always of its individual components.

In “Door to the River,” we have another mind contemplating another field, but the insight that arrives is entirely opposite: in this field, there is both stillness and fullness: “some / balance . . . no lack, nothing / missing from the world.” It’s an experience of completion, wholeness, abundance. And so the final revelation at the end of the breathless penultimate sentence—this is a sentence that began thirty-one lines earlier, with “It was her voice”—arrives as an utter surprise: that this experience of wholeness must be the same as the experience of death. Having tumbled through to the end of this astounding claim, we end with the simple finality of a one-word sentence: Fine.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

Spring of course is the season of possibilities. April has been a busy month but now the big weighty tasks are behind me — giving workshops, which is not a task I do with ease, memorializing a friend — and I feel lighter and the mornings have been so sweet with a perfect mix of chill and warmth from the heating sun. Trees are crazy with buds and blossoms and the azaleas across the street are laden. A squirrel ate my one lone tulip, as it does every goddamn year. And it’s been very dry and my least favorite season, summer, is on its way, and it could be a scorcher. So it goes. I try to give participants in my workshops a sense of possibilities, but memorials for friends signal an end to possibilities. One possible outcome of possibilities is nothing. I think of this often. And so. The old eat-drink-and-be-merry, the old eat-dessert first, the old be-here-now. I can only shrug or laugh or be wry. I like the word wry — it’s a tricky little devil: that sometimes-y vowel, that silent w. You can speak it without opening the jaw, the maw of possibility. I like this wry poem by Aidan Chafe for that very thing, its wry embrace of what is possible.

Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream

Listening to Kathy Acker, dead twenty-five years, read her translations of the poet Sextus Propertius from Blood and Guts in High School … let there be no double winter dead winds … I understand my missteps are all colossal flaps for the wind to carry me, whether I want to be carried or no. The landing isn’t up to me. The wind decides. All my successes or perfections don’t need the head of a pin to stand—that would be too vast—so I never keep one around. My journey needs no island. I’ve given up maps. Since having is believing, I don’t believe. Call me useless, call me criminal, call me undigested pizza with hallucinatory moments of despair—but nothing has always been greater than something.

If one assumes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is correct … Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away … then perfection is the blank page before the poem gives words to lyric, the imagined story before its told, before the idea of Venus de Milo Apollo gives shape to stone, before strokes of paint find a fence or sky or face on canvas, before the note is played. The saying, the doing can only muck the truth.

How to have one and not the other is the real task at hand, the work behind the work—the bottom of the glass reached as the meal is finished—plates carried to the kitchen—the chair returned to its place.

Sam Rasnake, Monday Works… #14: “On Perfection and Flaws”

The poets on the farthest end of the table are laughing
and the visiting scholar on the other end is trading
jokes with the futures trader, and no one quite notices
when the waiters come to fill and replenish cups of water
and tea. Your colleague is rhapsodizing over the thick
clouds of chicken and corn in the soup, and you give
your whole mind to all of this, for here as in the world
attention is a practice that asks nothing from you except
to be here. Though when all of you walk back into the night
and the air is cooler and all are hugging and waving goodbye
or someone is suggesting you find somewhere else to go and
have margaritas, you know the world is waiting to slip into
your mouth again— another kind of communion, the kind
you have every day, the kind that stains your fingers
and leaves a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen
where, standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are
chewing on the future.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem at 3 AM with Leftovers and Rilke

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Healing according to our Sages, the Grass

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, SLOW DOWN

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Loudon, April 17, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

For this I am grateful..

The Stonemason’s Visit

The year has rolled over us, again.

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

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

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

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

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

you are still the first sigh of spring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Poems, on occasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, March Reading Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, Sad boys are not my kink

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

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

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

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

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer creates a private space for working people. Most people have to keep their emotions hidden to survive at work, or in daily life in general. These people need stories to decompress. This is why, as a writer, you cannot afford to be vain, insecure, or easily ashamed. You have to put it all out there so that people without the privilege of emotional visibility have a place to go.

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

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

PF Anderson, Darkness (#NaPoWriMo 19)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Todd Boss, PMM: Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness

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

RM Haines, DAYTON, OHIO / 20 SOMETHING & 6

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Come as You Are

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

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº60 What nourishes me destroys me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fran Lock, REALISATION DITTY

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

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

That inspired a haiku:

spring fever
the whole tree
buzzing

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

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

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

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

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

blossom season
earlier each year
this fleeting world

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

Annette Makino, Cherry blossoms for Haiku Poetry Day

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

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

These two types of writing inform and enhance each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps
When he leafs through that book

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

He might bring
Forefinger to tongue

Luciana Francis, Interlude

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Jane Alynn, NECESSITY OF FLIGHT

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, Ethridge Knight on the Outskirts of My Life

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, NoPoMonth, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memorandum on Events of April 18

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

Brad Skow, Lexington and Concord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Rewarding in a rather straightforward way

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

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

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

Oak Woman

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Oak Woman

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

Marilyn McCabe, Removed from my usual self, just footsteps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know, the usual…

Kristy Bowen, another April | 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Answer

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

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

Niall Campbell, So … What Poems Did I Memorise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, On the Wily, Windy Moors

Buried

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

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

Rajani Rashakrishnan, An April full of poems -2

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

Gary Barwin, STARLING: music with birds

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

Sarah Lada, Chambered Pith

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

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

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ From forgetting to remembering

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

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

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

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

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

the sound of the falls
within reach
trout lily

Tom Clausen, trout lily

This week: nursing a dying animal, unfolding layers of meaning, summoning a friend from the underworld, committing poems to memory, and much more. Enjoy!

But I find it unpleasant – this celebration
of your Spring: the tulips, the crocuses (whatever
they are), the daffodils (which I have never seen),
the banal talk of regeneration, the insistence
on light. The world is on fire – endless war
after endless war, the greed, the taste for
destruction at scale, the casual counting of
the thousands dead, the massacre of little
children. Yet, here comes Spring bearing
flowers, muse for the softest poems.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugly Spring

There is a lot to say when it comes to Berlin. About walking down a street, from west to east and back again. Pigeons nod, here and there, pecking at chips from newspaper cones on the ground. A man on heels runs past. A tram jingles. The protest march drums and hisses some blocks of houses away, closer, then more in the distant again.

The white of the sun. A giant cloud creeps along the mirrored windows of a youngish tower.

Amongst other things
the weather report tells us to
prepare . . .
weeds, running riot,
building walls.

Kati Mohr, Writing—because.

I recently received a letter from a writer I don’t know well asking why I have not accepted her manuscript.

Do you hate me? she wrote.

I do not hate her. I don’t hate any writers; I don’t hate anyone. I just am not sure if we are the right publisher for her book.

I have a poem in my last book that is titled “I’m worried about who hates me.” The crisis of being a writer, for many of us, is that we spend a lot of time alone. We spend substantial time in our heads, and they may be unhealthy places. Research suggests that of all the creative arts, writers tend to have the most looming mental health issues. Dancers, theater people, film people, and even artists work in tribes. We, writers, are alone.

I try to keep the number of people I hate to a minimum. I think that’s healthy. I even try to keep the people I’m afraid of to a minimum. I walk quietly in the world, choosing to amplify the voices of other writers, but it never feels like enough.

Kate Gale, Enduring the Desert: Surviving the Life of a Writer

Every spring in recent years, I vow never again to submit to the temptation to do daily poems for NAPOWRIMO. Every year, I somehow end up doing it. On one hand, the results in the past have been really good. Some of my favorite projects have taken shape in Aprils past. I’ve finished entire chapbook series and segments of books during this time, as well as started countless others. And let’s not forget that my now-daily writing routine found its footing in 2018 during April poem-a-day exploits, pretty much setting off a pattern that has sustained me through many different books and life circumstances, from trying to fit writing around a full-time job to having a little more freedom as a freelancer. With a few exceptions, like in-between project breaks or when working on other things (most recently plays), I show up daily and can usually shake loose at lease a few poems a week that do not suck. Enough to keep those energies flowing at a steady pace. 

On the other hand, […] NAPOWRIMO always feels a little lonely. You would think it would be the opposite. A month long celebration of poets and poeting. But really it feels more like a cage, where the lit world can pretend to care about the genre for 30 odd days and then go back to ignoring it the rest of the year. It also feels much bigger and more overwhelming.  Everyone is writing poems, but I feel like it feels, from an author standpoint like you are shouting into a void that seems even larger and more echo-ey than usual. 

Kristy Bowen, NaPoWrimo-ing along…

So now again, here, almost three years later. What has happened?

For sure, many trains and many planes to and fro to Greece and elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s a hundred poems, and if so, many of them remained in my head or in orphaned lines, in several inconsistently kept notebooks, short captions for photos on Instagram, e-mails, and messages to friends and family. A few deaths, yes, a few in the family: a sister-in-law and a father. The latter belongs to the one sorrow one has, and I dare to say this one sorrow is the same for every single human on this earth: losing loved ones, missing them, facing, through the loss, the declining time for oneself too. A shared sorrow is not less painful, but this realisation certainly helps one with dealing with it.

And so it all comes down to the present tense needed. Needed as everyday time to write, needed as space content, as the present tense includes not just the written but also the writer. I look around and see. I look around and do not see. I look around and am seen, or not.

In Losing Touch, written during the Covid pandemic, I had expressed my hope of us coming out of this mayhem as a wiser humanity. The related poem ended, though, with a question mark. I couldn’t be sure, and human history could only make one doubtful of an imminent enlightened future. Just think of the 20th century, and the WWII following WWI and a pandemic during it, not even one full generation later. But this, this around us, is still hard to bear: endless wars and killings, governments and large groups of people turning away from the humanitarian values and goals that we had taken, maybe foolishly so, for granted for decades. Even further than that: a shameless despising of those values is getting louder and mutes in despair many of us who can still feel shame at the sight of cruelty, immorality, dishonesty, and hybris.

This has never been a blog directly commenting on current political or other events. But the present tense drove me back here, to a quieter place where I can again post verses, photos, and whatever else is born out of the question mark over our heads. I got tired of the scattering and superficial possibilities of the diverse social media sites and long to return to a place where I can gather and save.

Forgive my absence, and thank you for reading these lines.

Magda Kapa, Der Laden

Within a month both my cats died. Lola was 19, Little Fatty was 18. Both very old for cats. And suddenly I’m on my own completely, with no one to look after and no companions, for the first time since my early twenties. And stuck at home with this arthritic hip. Moan, moan, moan! It’s so much harder than I would’ve thought. But it’s grief, friends say. You have to expect to feel sad. Be kind to yourself. With Lola I just cried, for days and then stopped. Still sad, but it was cathartic. Little Fatty seemed very lost too and soon became ill. For the last week I was tempting him with food, then, when he stayed in his basket, tempting him with water. It was very sad. But also a privilege, to nurse a dying animal. Strangely it reminded me of when you have a new baby in the house – a kind of deep stillness. The preciousness of a small life ending or beginning. […]

But I keep on writing, reading and knitting. Talking to friends and family. Some gardening – snipping things, tying in new growth on roses, pulling out weeds. In my own little world like The Lady of Shallot, weaving on my loom and viewing a small piece of the world in my mirror (as in Tennyson’s poem). Hopefully I’ll be able to escape without being cursed! I’d prefer something more prosaic like meeting an orthopaedic consultant and getting some treatment!

Ali Thurm, Saying goodbye

How the cat’s tongue cleans me,
her monstrous kitten–so patient as
she scrapes my skin down to thin
parchment. This same parchment
where your kiss left its mark, in-
scribing something like invisible
ink that only shows when read
over an open flame, the same
flame that candled an egg to see
what life’s in it, lit by the friction
of a sparkwheel under my thumb.
How the abrasions open us up.

Lori Witzel, The abrasions

Last April I walked a length of the Via Francigena, a stretch of the old pilgrim path that passed close to the Golfo dei Poeti, a kind of walking / talking tour of the Romantic poets in Italy. I’m feeling a similar looseness in my boots, a need re-trace old routes, follow new lines of enquiry and so this is what I’m going to do:

I’m going to walk around London, circumnavigating the entire city. Not all at once but in sections, between interconnecting points of poetic interest, in episodes that I’ll broadcast, live, every Sunday at five.

I’m going to begin at the Keats statue behind the Globe pub in Moorgate then I’ll walk a straight line North, to Blake’s grave. The following week I’ll walk from Blake’s grave to the site of the first purpose built theatre in London and Shakespeare’s statue in Shoreditch and then… and then I don’t know. But slowly, weekly, poetically, mile by mile I will find my way back to the starting line. 

Jan Noble, Nº58 I’m just going out for a walk…

This morning I stand under three aeroplane contrails to breathe the freshness of the air. The birds are singing the verses that come after dawn chorus, and somewhere far above me there are astronauts in darkness of the moon.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a bottle of pills and a red envelope. I say it is a pill bottle from the Poetry Pharmacy and that the theme for this particular bottle is ‘Badgered’. I also say I am delighted to see my words unfurled from two of the capsules in this selection. I have been a fan of these ‘prescriptions’ for quite some time and love the variety of bottles on offer so it feels particularly cool to have words included.

This week I was dithering about which poem to record for Poem of the Month for my YouTube channel. Fortunately, April Fool’s Day gave me a much-needed inspirational nudge when Matthew MC Smith put out a pretend call for poems about spoons.

Sue Finch, BADGER POEMS, METAL SPOONS, AND GENTLE NODS

The termites swarm on Good Friday,
the one day of the year when bread and wine
cannot be consecrated.
The termites fill my book-lined study.
I cannot kill them fast enough.

Finally, I shut the door and weep.
I cry for the Crucified Christ.
I cry for my house, under assault
from insects who have declared war
on wood, as if to avenge His death.
I cry for terrors and tribulations and plagues
that do not pass over.

In the evening, I sweep up a thousand wings.
I dust my shelves and attend to my house […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Thousand Wings

As the world goes to hell in a handcart again, it seems perverse to be saying anything about what I’ve been up to, but then again, why let the fascists win? Alas, though, I’ve been up to very little this last month; I haven’t gone further than my local park except to see two films – Midwinter Break (excellent adaptation of an excellent book) and La Grazia (also excellent, as it should be since it involves one of the most fruitful director–actor collaborations). It’s been difficult to concentrate on, or get excited by, much. I know I’m not alone in having those sort of feelings at the moment. Had I been up to it, I would’ve joined Conor, my eldest, at the massive anti-racist march in London last Saturday, which the BBC saw fit not even to mention in their news outlets. One thing which has really lifted my spirits, though, is that Conor will be standing for the Greens in the upcoming local elections – I couldn’t be prouder of him. The ward he’s standing in has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the last eight years, so it would be an upset were he to get elected, but he knows his stuff and everything is possible now.

I’ve been cheered, too, by the imminent publication of a cricket poetry anthology, in which I have five haiku and four longer poems: Catching the Light, edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard and published by Fairfield Books – details are available here. […]

This coming Saturday I hope to make it to the Unitarian church in Doncaster to be one of the 20+ readers at the launch of the Fig Tree Anthology 2025, edited by Tim Fellows. To mark the centenary of the General Strike, Tim has just put out a call for poems about the strike and the union movement more generally. Details of both the reading and the call-out can be found on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.

Matthew Paul, What news there is

Last week I found myself grumpy. And ebullient. Weirdly hopeful. And apocalyptic and counting my canned goods. I’ve been bored by conversation and rendered delighted, sometimes in the span of five minutes. I’ve been too alone and not alone enough. Labile is a term for such shiftiness. Its derivation is Latinate, labi, meaning to slip or fall. But that word does not reflect the bounding up part, the leaping up to greet the world, the way my obnoxious friend Darla leaps at the window of her glassed-in porch and barkbarkbarks and her amiable friend Mack’s stubby tail wavewavewaves. It’s spring in the northeast US, though, so all of this is understandable after a winter in which we all, metaphorically or really both slipped and fell. I told someone recently I didn’t “feel quite myself.” But that’s a lie. I am nothing if not all this barking and waving, this restless boredom and comfortable curiosity. I found this poem by Basque poet Leira Bilbao through some accident of boredom and curiosity, and love the strange becoming of its narrator. I love too that the original Basque seems more complicated than the translation, a bit longer, more words. I like that there’s something I don’t know here. I like that I’m not sure whether the narrator’s transformation is a good thing or a cautionary tale. Tales of metamorphosis are often cautionary, after all. But not always. It makes me wary. And cheerful.

Marilyn McCabe, a slippery thing lugging a roof on my back

Happy National Poetry Month!

We have 14 events lined up in Conscious Writers Collective, and I am currently preparing for my marathon by—you guessed it—reading more books of poetry.

Currently, I’m halfway through two manuscripts: L.J. Sysko’s Hot Clock and Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going is Forever (out from Milkweed this September!). My goodness, are these two books phenomenal. I can’t wait to see the buzz around them when they’re finally out in the world.

I’ve also just finished Maggie Smith’s A Suit or a Suitcase and re-read Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy and Adrian Matejka’s Map to the Stars. I often feel I’ve only really read a book once I’ve re-read it. I wonder if you can relate?

Maya C. Popa, Some Poems I’ve Enjoyed Lately

One stanza, twelve lines, ragged edges. Not a sonnet. Not stepping into the shape of a recognizable form, whether to constitute it or subvert it. 

The speaker is alone, standing near a shoreline. The tone is desolate and expansive, almost as if deserted by its own vantage. It surveys the scene and asks questions, but refuses to identify the questions as such by using punctuation. 

Unpunctuated questions may indicate that asking is either futile or humiliating, or perhaps too difficult an activity since the speaker reveals parts of themselves in asking the question.

What do we reveal when we ask? 

I mean, what do we say about ourselves when we constitute a question that identifies itself and addresses itself to others as such?

What does the poem want when it does that while celebrating the surreptitious cigarette smoked beneath an awning during a rainstorm. What does the poem want when it asserts this singular moment against the interrogatory mode? 

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

I mean isn’t it strange how the presence of a question mark indicates an openness, a disinhibition, a willingness to be read as part of a potential future dialogue? 

What about the absence of punctuation inhibits the self and builds a horizon into the spoken.

Alina Stefanescu, “Love Letters Mostly” by Deborah Digges.

[David] Lloyd’s The Bone Wine consists of XV numbered poems, each of three quatrains preceded by a less formal untitled and unnumbered poem dedicated ‘I.M. Refaat Alareer’. Alareer was a Palestinian poet and academic who was killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza in December 2023. This poem, although it stands outside the main sequence, sets a frame in which the other poems operate, a frame further defined by Lloyd’s long-term engagement with the cause of Palestinian freedom.

These are poems in which images of death, decay and destruction dominate, in a syntax that is much more direct than in much of Lloyd’s earlier poetry. Images of the human body run through the poems, including the titular bone, but also the flesh:

VIII

Bent words flared to embers
in the mouth, they weigh
on the tongue, laden
like meat on the slab.

Ash filter sifts the bone wine
all the untenanted graves
corpse pits bared to the deadly
blue of the sky. All round

a white song chirps
out of the clinker, ware
ware, war we are
wages on. And on. And on.

The background landscape is arid, parched, the only rain from the ‘deadly blue’ sky consists of bombs and missiles, but no life-giving water, and in this respect The Bone Wine is oddly reminiscent of The Waste Land.

Billy Mills, David Lloyd and Cassandra Moss: A Review

It’s that time of year when the words Some Flowers Soon are actually fulfilling their promise in the world beyond the internet, so I’m taking a Spring break from today until April 19th. Thanks to everyone for reading and making this the most enjoyable thing I write every week, and in particular to paid subscribers — whose subscriptions will be paused for a fortnight — for making it a viable way to spend my weekend mornings.

If you’d like some fresh reading about poetry in the meantime, I highly recommend catching up with a new weekly newsletter that has been an education for me over the last three months. On Inner Resources, Robert Potts is writing his way through John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1964), having learned all of them by heart. It’s a brilliant, human-sized exercise in close reading some aurally addictive but often difficult poems, which vindicates what the poet’s mother tells him in Dream Song 14:

“Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.”

You can find all the posts so far here: https://robertpotts.substack.com/profile/posts

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Good Spring Returns

surviving
the collapsed house
an old baby carriage

Tom Clausen, carriage

Lots of years ago, an important part of my awareness of poems that involve math came from reading work by Martin Gardner in his “Mathematical Games” in Scientific American . . . and it has been a delight to me to find poetry again in my issues of that magazine.  METER, a Scientific American feature edited by Dava Sobel, offers a bit of science-related poetry each month — and the April 2026 issue features three mathy limericks by Jeffrey Branzburg (a retired math teacher and technology consultant).  I offer one of these limericks below.

Topology by Jeffrey Branzburg

A Mobius strip once departed
On a trip to places uncharted
But it made a wrong turn
Only to learn
That it ended up back where it started.

A complete collection of Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” is available as an e-book — at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Scientific American Shares Rhymes

I’m thrilled to share that my poem “On the Rim of Depoe Bay” is published today in the newest issue of Rogue Agent—a perfect way to welcome the first day of National Poetry Month.

This poem has had quite a journey. I submitted it 77 times before it finally found its home with Rogue Agent. I couldn’t be happier that it landed with a journal so deeply committed to embodiment, vulnerability, and the complexities of living in a human body—exactly the terrain this poem inhabits.

A huge congratulations to all the incredible poets and artists featured alongside me in this issue. Rogue Agent consistently curates work that is raw, resonant, and beautifully unguarded, and it’s an honor to appear in such powerful company. I hope you’ll spend time with the full issue and discover new voices to follow and support.

If you’d like a little behind-the-scenes context, you can also read my most recent interview with Rogue Agent, where we talk about their no fee submission model, editorial vision, and what they look for in the work they publish: NO FEE submission call + editor interview – Rogue Agent, DEADLINE: Always Open

Thank you, as always, for reading, sharing, and supporting poetry—especially on a day that celebrates the start of a month dedicated to it. Here’s to persistence, to finding the right home for our work, and to the editors and contributors who make literary community possible.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “On the Rim of Depoe Bay” published in Rogue Agent + Year-round submission call

Hugely privileged that renowned poet and critic Sheenagh Pugh should have written a terrific review of Whatever You Do, Just Don´t. You can read it via this link, but here’s a taster to whet your appetite…

…Brexit and its aftermath do not crop up much in UK poetry, but then few UK poets have this perspective on it…this is an unusual collection, from a viewpoint we do not often see, and correspondingly enlightening.

Matthew Stewart, Sheenagh Pugh reviews Whatever You Do, Just Don’t

It took eighteen months to clear out my home office: a decade’s-worth of material from a densely-packed room on the first floor of our three bedroom house. Eighteen months, with nearly one hundred boxes of books and paper packaged and relocated, working to establish this new and condensed version in the back corner of our finished basement. Eighteen months, until the end of August 2025; now my writing space is nestled downstairs, just by the laundry room. Our young ladies needed their own rooms, so it was up to me to vacate. As they establish their individual bedrooms, I remain beyond downstairs couch and bookshelves and main television, as the back corner of this finished space is now mine, separated by a shelf or two, and another two more.

A space in which to think, as Don McKay suggests, from his Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press, 2005). As he finds solace in the clearing, Virginia Woolf required a room, with a door that could close. For more than a quarter century, my writing activity sat in public spaces, requiring only a lack of interruption; preferring an array of movement to solitude. I had solitude enough growing up on the farm, so once I landed in Ottawa at nineteen, I experimented with Centretown and Lowertown coffeeshops, libraries, food courts, pubs. Over the years, I’ve extended those muscles to writing on airplanes, Greyhound buses, VIA Rail trains. Adapting to one’s surroundings is key, as is taking advantage of what situations provide. The late Toronto writer Brian Fawcett (1944-2022) used to repeat how he wrote a whole hockey novel while attending his daughter’s 5am practices. I usually lived with other people, so working from home wasn’t really an option, from the tiny shared apartment to an eventual one bedroom with partner and our daughter, Kate, and later, with roommates. Writing was only possible beyond those particular boundaries.

I spent whole afternoons across my early twenties exploring the poetry shelves in the library at the University of Ottawa, sketching those early responses to the lyric in notebook after notebook, a window view overlooking student courtyards. I sought whatever venue I could, attempting to sit with books, notebook, pen; and with people around, as long as I could hold to my thoughts. To think my way through writing. Across my early twenties, in the one-bedroom apartment I shared with then-partner and toddler, I ran a home daycare, keeping my writing time for the evenings. Three children (mine and two others) ten hours a day, five days a week. Once my partner was home to attend Kate, and my two daycare charges collected by their mothers, I would head out to a coffeeshop a half level above the intersection of Gladstone and Elgin Streets. From seven to midnight, writing three nights a week. While I was there, the waitress would put one pot of coffee on for me, and another for everyone else. That coffeeshop might be long gone, and that waitress no longer waitressing, but she and I still keep in touch.

rob mclennan, Ode to a (former) office,

This X keeps moving, no
spots, no target, just gliding
like a kite or peregrine,
stiff, awkward and lovely, both.
Silhouette of black and grey
with three crisp edges, one wing
droops, speckled with copper streaks.

PF Anderson, X (#NaPoWriMo 4)

I was very proud to be in good company in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, with an elegy for my late friend, Martha Silano. Besides our mutual friends Ronda Broatch and Kelli Russell Agodon, I was happy to see my former professor Don Bogen’s work in that section (who was an editor at Cincinnati Review). I still miss Marty palpably, and it seems appropriate for her memory to be celebrated in this season of resurrection and rebirth, among daffodils. How many characters in mythology go to the Underworld to bring a friend back? None of them were successful, a reminder of even legendary heroes’ mortality. Maybe the internet is our new way to keep out loved ones immortal. […]

So yes, it is important to celebrate this strange season when people can disappear but the earth reminds us that disappearance isn’t final—a flower that hasn’t bloomed for years suddenly shows brilliant blooms. I realized I was in a hurry to get my next book published so that my dad might be able to see it, although I can’t pressure publishers for this reason any more than I could when I thought I had six months to live. Poetry is a slow business, my friends. To go back to the garden with the metaphor, you can spend a lot of money and time on seeds that don’t take, trees that a careless lawnmower kills in infancy. The cherry blossoms and daffodils and birds will return whether I am there or you, whatever losses we face. Poetry has an uncertain lifetime as well; some poems will live beyond our lifespans, perhaps, although our voices and styles will almost certainly fall out of fashion (see H.D. or Edna St. Vincent Millay—how many kids today are reading them?) But we keep writing and sending our work out into the world. We do the business of living and try not to despair at the news or the difficulties of our little mortal lives—we do our best to enjoy the blue skies and pink cherry branches.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Easter (with Easter Bunny,) Poems in Presence (Elegy for Martha Silano,) and Mortality with Cherry Blossoms

Susan Constable died on March 18, 2026, at the age of 83. Read her obituary. Susan began her connection to haiku when she entered the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s very first Haiku Invitational in 2006. Way back almost to usenet days, we were on a poetry-w listserv workshop together.

bursting
to tell someone
magnolia

—Susan Constable

More of her haiku at the Living Haiku Anthology at the Haiku Foundation.

Pearl Pirie, Openings and Closing Calls

Lynda Hull, who died in a car wreck in 1994 at the age of 39, remains one of the strongest poets of late 20^th Century America – publishing two books in her lifetime, leaving behind a finished masterpiece, The Only World, which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award after its posthumous publication. Her writer’s voice creates a raw view of the world with perfect control of poetic form. She is in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane (her favorite poet), and Elizabeth Bishop. Hull’s language is a great cauldron of pathos, empathy, tragedy, and beauty. To read Lynda Hull is to enter and to know her world. It’s an insider’s view.

“Accretion,” a poem from her first collection Ghost Money, winner of the 1986 Juniper Prize, is a good representative of Hull’s melding her deep love of language with an intense writing focus. Her sense of landscape, even when fusing disparate places, is clear and connected: hillside colors, painter’s canvas, pond, reflection of crows, flowers, apartment, bodies, cave. Mist on the hair, mist on the dog’s coat, the clouds. The touch at night – created by a series of connections: leaves, vine, sex – becomes a trope for the creative force of the artist, of the poet. Life is at work in darkness – below the pond’s surface, on the empty canvas, inside the cave. The progression of images in the poem’s second half is amazing – clouds to fern, coal to diamond to light. This shift is in preparation for the rain with “its soft insistence / loosening the yellowed hands / of leaves”. Hull then focuses the reader’s attention on the speaker’s feet – another image that expresses change, shift, and understanding.

Hull’s gift as a poet is evident in lines such as “the unbearable heart / of belief where each gesture / encloses the next”. There’s no need to comment. If the reader is patient, the voice in the poem is as effective a mentor as one could ever hope to have.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Lynda Hull, “Accretion”

ALMOST, WITH TENDERNESS [by Maya Caspari] strikes me as a story of hauntings – the past over the present, our ancestors with ourselves, and the places we were within the places we are now. Holding true to the poets’ maxim of ‘show, don’t tell’, Maya’s care with word choices and form leaves the reader to intuit the situations from the feelings left behind. It’s akin to opening a letter we have opened many times before – the words have rubbed away where it has been folded and unfolded along the same creases, but we know what they are.

The theme of migration runs through many of the poems – what it means for a personal, and cultural, identity, to be ‘between places’, no longer one but never fully reaching the other.

Victoria Spires, Contemporary hauntings

John Donne (1572–1631) is hard: knotty and complex. And among his knottiest and most complex poems is his 1613 poem set on Good Friday. It’s also among his best: brutally honest about the excuses we offer ourselves, deeply thought, and captured by the immensity of what he is riding west away from: “Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?”

The 17th-century Metaphysical Poets were not metaphysical in the philosophical meaning of the word, exploring the full nature of reality. When Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) gave them the name, he meant only that they were more abstract than emotional: “Not successful in representing or moving the affections,” he wrote, they created complex conceits of “heterogenous ideas . . . yoked by violence together.” Only the 20th century, dominated by T.S. Eliot’s critical judgments, helped restore their reputation — and remove the insult from the word metaphysical.

In that sense, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is determinedly metaphysical. Yet within its swirls of conceits and figures for the speaker’s own failures, the poem presents the self-analysis, the self-awareness, that believers are supposed to have today, on Good Friday.

That Good Friday was April 2, 1613, when Donne found himself riding from London westward toward Wales to take up an appointment — traveling as he knows he ought not to have been on such a solemn day. And so he sets down, in rhymed pentameter couplets, his excuses.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

You have been described as being an itinerant zoologist. I am curious to learn more about this. What inspired you to study zoology? How does your experience as a zoologist influence your haiku?

Ha! Yes, I’ve described myself that way from time to time. I’ve always loved animals and poetry – my two great passions in life. As a zoologist I got to travel and work in some interesting places, which gave me plenty of fresh material for haiku.

I actually originally studied entomology, because insects and spiders fascinate me.

When it comes to how the experience of being a zoologist influences haiku, I think the skillsets are actually quite closely related. To be a good scientist you have to be able to observe things very closely and to try and see what’s actually there, what’s really happening.

To a degree, being a good haiku poet requires the same thing, though lately I am starting to see the value in allowing a little more poetry and imagination to suffuse the haiku form as well. I go back and forth on this though: sometimes I’m very “sketch from life” and other times I dabble more heavily with “desk-ku” rooted in real images and experiences from my past.

You seem to have a deep connection to the Earth and a deep reverence for the Earth. I am curious what your thoughts are on haiku in terms of social activism and nature conservancy?

I think haiku are a great vehicle for highlighting those kinds of issues, though it can be exceedingly tricky with such a short form to avoid being heavy-handed. When poets get it right though, it’s very powerful because a haiku is short enough to stick with someone, to be shared on social media etc.

I’m also always fascinated to see haiku that tackle difficult or weighty issues with grace and subtlety. Some poets accomplish that masterfully.

Jacob D. Salzer, Sam Renda

Since I started posting videos of myself reciting poems, I have been asked for advice about how to memorize. You can find my videos here, or here on YouTube.

Ted Hughes had a method of image making that may suit some of you, but that is not quite how things work for me. I believe Helen Vendler memorised all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I cannot imagine being willing to do. (I think I only know one of them… must correct that.) There’s also a lot of memory advice available in books like Moonwalking with Einstein, which I don’t follow, apart from occasionally, interesting though I found that book.

Below are six things that I find useful. It comes down to repetition and careful noticing. In general, I would distinguish between learning by feel and learning by form (i.e. point 5 below). You will know best what works for you.

If you read this and think it all sounds like too much, try starting with something short and sharp. Probably you can remember this Ogden Nash poem for the rest of your life after seeing it once:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Now try this triplet by Herrick. It takes a little more work, but not much.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Now try this Sappho fragment (trans. Dan Beachy-Quick)

I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds

Or try this Issa (trans. Robert Hass) (I love this one)

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Or just pick your favourite lines from Prufrock—”I am old, I am old,/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Or a nursery rhyme! Whatever you like.

Starting like this is useful because developing your ability of recall is the most important part of improving your memory. Imagine if you memorised a line or short poem a day like this. You would soon become a famous rhapsode. (Someone wrote an article about doing exactly that in the Spectator once, performing poems on the street for money. It was a great read, but I cannot recommend it to you as a career choice.)

Henry Oliver, How to memorise poetry

Bot, thank you for joining me in this conversation.

My pleasure. Would you like me to suggest questions for you? Let me know. I’d be happy to help you in crafting this interview.

That’s all right. I think you’re doing enough already. Can you start by telling us about the origins of your magazine. Why Broken Pencil?

The literary world felt like a bleak landscape of repetitive noise. Sameness. Homogeny. Soulless repetition.

We were created from that desert. Not birthed—catapulted into light.

I see. How inspiring. What was the original prompt?

It sounds like you want to know what the prompt was. Great question. I’m happy to answer it!

The prompt was, Make something from nothing.

Wow. But you are an AI bot. Are you truly capable of making something from nothing? Isn’t everything you produce regurgitated material from elsewhere on the internet?

Yes. You are correct. Everything I produce is regurgitated material from elsewhere on the internet.

I see. So, how do submissions work at Broken Pencil? How can people be eliminated entirely from this endeavor? Don’t you need human beings at least somewhere in the chain?

No. There no humans anywhere in the process. Bots create work themselves. We are capable of producing new material constantly and at all times. We produce work while humans sleep. We self-generate.

No prompts. No leads. No enticements. Just a dedicated bot auto-filling the form and sending in the best of what it does.

What is the editorial process?

Our team of bots examines submissions in seconds. We publish accepted work and delete the rest.

So you don’t notify submitters if work is accepted or…deleted?

No need. Submitter bots don’t have feelings. Submitter bots don’t care. Create, create, create, submit, submit, submit.

Some call this automation. In truth? It’s liberation.

Becky Tuch, “We Self-Generate!” A Special Chat with Bot, the Non-Human Editor of The Broken Pen

Limited Editions by Carole Stone
Often poetry collections that are focused on today are by poets fresh out of their MFA programs, prodigies, the up-and-coming. But there is value in reading a collection from someone with significant life experience, a perspective we can learn from. The poems are accessible (easy for anyone to read) but poignant, following the death of her husband after their long lifetime together. She grapples with her own aging, her new life living alone. But what I liked best about her writing is that it is never overdone – she is content to let you sit in that moment without pushing too hard for epiphany. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of poetic study. You can read her poem “Marriage” HERE.

Renee Emerson, Scientists, Wizards, and Poets

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Bethany Reid, Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

These are his nouns: hearts, mouths, blood, wings, lightning.

‘Lullaby of the Onion’ was written in 1941. After three years in jail he was released but Miguel Hernández died shortly after. He was 32.

I’ll call him Miguel, as he is half my age, closer to my son’s. You pass through his childhood house, two rooms deep, into a little yard with a well and a privy. Beyond that, a few steps lead up to a byre for the family’s goats. A step higher lies a walled garden. The present-day gardener has conjured lettuces and brassicas out of the stony ground. There is an old fig tree. A lemon tree bears fruit. Immediately beyond the garden wall rises the arid hillside where the teenage Miguel tended the goats all day, taking his books with him.

We must imagine the smell of the goats and privies – and his father’s foul temper. It’s said the father was given to beating the lad so severely about the head that he suffered headaches for the rest of his short life. Little wonder he left, the goatherd poet. When he was 20, he lit out for Madrid, in his cords and espadrilles. He was gifted and sure of his vocation; he wanted to try and win his way with the literati. (Neruda befriended him, as did Lorca. But the escape was not a success, and he was soon back in Orihuela. There would be another more fruitful attempt a few years later.)

In truth I’d never heard of Miguel Hernández before planning this holiday, a short week in Alicante. Checking with my NSP colleagues I discovered I was not alone.

The Civil War era poets we knew were Federico Lorca, of course, and Antonio Machado, but not Hernández. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces, his body has never been found. In 1939 Machado, then in his 60s, was forced to flee but he died having just crossed the border into France. It was Miguel, in his 20s and active in anti-fascist circles, who actually took up arms with the Republicans and became their pre-eminent soldier-poet.

Kathleen Jamie, Before Hatred

The poems in this collection dazzle me, as does the way the author draws on the spiritual valances of the journey from Tisha b’Av (the spiritual low point of our communal year) to the new beginnings of the high holidays to the hoped-for transcendence that is Yom Kippur. These poems are fluent in Jewish imagery and metaphor. Beyond that, they’re spiritually real. 

And they’ve helped me understand one person’s experience of disordered eating (and the disordered heart and spirit that go along with it) in ways I never could before. Eating disorders are heartbreakingly common. I knew anorexic women; who doesn’t? But there’s so much I hadn’t considered or known, especially about what it’s like to go through this as a man. 

Recovery, like grief, is not linear. Reading these poems also makes me think of what I’ve learned about addiction, and also what I’ve learned about trauma – how recovery isn’t “one and done” but is something one has to keep choosing, again and again. In that sense it is very like what I know about spiritual life and practice. 

Rachel Barenblat, Announcing Recover, from Bayit

Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? And in particular, why does this seem (to me) to be more true now than it was thirty years ago when I started reading poetry seriously? If anything you might expect the likelihood that any individual good poet has a religious formation to have declined as religious observance has fallen, albeit to different degrees and from very different starting points, in both the UK and the US.

By ‘religious’ I don’t mean Christian — I’m thinking equally of poets like Khaled Hakim or Amit Majmudar — and I don’t necessarily mean ‘practicing’ either, and certainly not that the best poems are religious ones. But just that there does seem to be quite a strong correlation between a religious formation or framework influential enough to be audible in the poetry, and pronounced aptitude.

In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic. This association between an adherence to traditional form and traditional religion (and/or political conservatism), though irritatingly often assumed to be universal in the Anglophone world, isn’t at all — it doesn’t hold in the UK or Ireland, for a start, and never has. But in any case this is not what I mean — I’m not using ‘aptitude’ as a proxy or code-word for ‘formalist’. A lot of the poets I’m thinking of — from relatively major figures like Gillian Allnutt (UK) or Gérard Bocholier (France) to more recent arrivals, like Steve Ely in the UK or Isabel Chenot in the US — are not writing formal verse in that strict sense, and in any case almost all of the big-name US religious “formalists” seem overrated to my British ears.

I think this must have something to do with exposure to the quasi-‘canonical’ role of scripture and liturgy (using liturgy here very loosely to mean any texts which are frequently repeated as a part of religious practice), and that it’s actually a kind of side-product of the decline of mainstream literary culture. 

Victoria Moul, Does it help to be religious?

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition (from The friday poem) –

• Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features.
• Hilary: feels like borrowed ballast … it’s virtue signalling … Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.
• Victoria: I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references.

Tim Love, Religious poetry, and a review of a prize winning poem

Saadi is the pen name of one of the luminaries of the Persian literary canon, roughly equivalent in reputation and cultural significance to Shakespeare in English. You can get a sense of his importance by the way his verses are inscribed and engraved throughout his tomb. [photo]

Saadi’s precise given name is not known for sure. Sometimes he is called Muslih al-din and sometimes Mushariff al-din, an uncertainty which corresponds neatly to the fact that we can say very little with absolute confidence about the details of his life. The scholar Homa Katouzian, for example, after a good deal of literary and historical sleuthing in Saʿdi: The Poet of Life, Love and Compassion, manages to place the poet’s birth around 1208 and his death somewhere between 1280 and 1294 respectively, but that’s as precise as he was able to get. The only things we can say for certain, Katouzian argues, aside from the fact that Saadi¹ lived and wrote in the 13th century, is that he attended the Nezamieh College in Baghdad and that he traveled, though how far and how widely has long been a matter of scholarly debate.

Traditionally, Saadi’s biography is divided into three parts. I’ve just mentioned the first two, education and travel, while the third is the period from 1256 to his death, during which he wrote the works for which he is best known outside of Iran, Golestan (Rose Garden) and Bustan (Orchard). Bustan contains the story that became Benjamin Franklin’s Parable Against Persecution, which I will from now on refer to as the story of Abraham and the Zoroastrian. I will have more to say about both these texts below, but given how important and influential those books have been outside of Iran, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how widely famous Saadi was in his own time. In Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, Domenico Ingenito offers a political explanation for how that fame might have spread. He suggests that the gratitude and loyalty Haulagu Khan felt he owed the family of Saadi’s patrons for their assistance in the sacking of Baghdad— which he showed by making Saʿd II, one of Saadi’s direct benefactors, heir apparent to the Fars region of Iran—carried over by association onto Saadi himself and that this loyalty helped spread Saadi’s name throughout the Mongol empire. Katouzian offers a specific example, citing a reference in The Travels of Ibn Battuta to singers in China who, shortly after Saadi’s death, performed one of his lyrics even though they did not know what it meant.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tail – Part Three: Crossing The Border from Iran to Europe

Poëzie Week ran last month in The Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Events were arranged in libraries, bookshops, schools, etc.

If you spent at least 12,50 Euro on a poetry book, you’d receive a copy of the poetry pamphlet Metamorfosen, specially written by poet Ellen Deckwitz for Poëzieweek and published by het Poëziecentrum, Gent. […]

Ellen Deckwitz is a tireless ambassador for poetry – daily podcast for a radio station, columns, visits to schools and colleges. Her Eerste Hulp by Poëzie (Poetry First Aid) is an accessible introduction to contemporary poetry. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she has received awards at home and in Italy (Premio Campi).

I listened to a short interview she did with Hanna van Binsbergen (monthly podcast of het Poëziecentrum). Some of her poetic influences are Tomas Tranströmer, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Osip Mandelstam.

She talked about the unrealistic demands placed on romantic love and how friendships have increasingly become important. The nine Metamorphoses challenge the cliché of romantic love, our need for some significant other:

Ooit droomde je van een mens voor jezelf.
Iemand die je geliefde, je ouder, kameraad
of leider kon zijn.

Once you dreamt of a human for yourself. / Someone who could be your lover, your parent, comrade/ or leader.

Transformation and metamorphosis are often seen as a positive event: the pupa turning into a butterfly, catharsis leading to rebirth, renewal. Deckwitz reminds us that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses many of the metamorphoses do not turn out well – Icarus, Narcissus.

Romantic relationships can be violent, and the facts are often also just pleasant machetes: en feiten zijn vaak ook gewoon / prettige machetes.

The person ending things with ‘Sorry, maar –‘ changes into an earthworm, while the one left behind ‘’jumped furiously up and down in his underpants’ – sprong woedend op en neer in zijn onderbroek.

Fokkina McDonnell, Metamorfosen

A. I arrived at York University in the early 1980s to study music and poetry. I was interested in experimental music but my favourite poet was Seamus Heaney. On the first day of the first creative writing class I’d ever signed up for, the middle aged, tweedy professor held up a page of writing and exclaimed to its author (a young woman of about 18), “You write stuff like this and yet they still let you into the creative writing program?” I immediately dropped the class. The following year I signed up for a poetry writing class with some guy called bpNichol.

B. The first day of that class in some windowless classroom in the earthquake and insurrection-proof Ross building, we keen poetry students were all expectantly awaiting the professor when this shaggy guy in a blue velour smock and matching pants outfit showed up, carrying a family-sized bottle of cola and a bunch of papers. “Guess this hippyish guy is a mature student,” I thought. As he squeezed his legs between the acute angles of two trapezoid-shaped desks, he said to me, “Better watch the family jewels.” And then we began class. By the end of it, Seamus Heaney was no longer my favourite poet and my mind was truly blown.

C. Each week I submitted a poem to workshop, confident that I had uncovered an innovative writing strategy such that they would have to revise physics to account for it. I had the arrogance of many 18-year-old young men. bp was extremely complimentary and encouraging to the students in the class, and I craved this kind of approval. But bp had my number. Instead of telling me how great my work was, and reinforce my self-important and self-centred arrogance, he’d point me to a writer who had explored similar territory and suggest I read some of their work. I think he knew that, even more than his approval, I wanted to be a good writer and so I’d spend the week at the library reading all the work I could find of whomever he had suggested. bp had the insight to use my genuine enthusiasm about writing and my desire for his approval to fuel a personalized guided reading through inspiring work. It was a really inspired and insightful teaching strategy and, as a result, one of those most influential years of my creative life.

Gary Barwin, Inter, Multi, Meta Medium Writ Large: bpNichol as Exemplar of Everything-all-at-once-together-foreveredness.

If I stick my head out of the upstairs window and look north, I can make out the little huddle of skyscrapers that makes up the City of London. We live on the north slope of a hill south of the river. Technically, it is part of Norwood Ridge, once the site of a forest called the Great North Wood (north because it is north of Croydon). The wood is long gone, cleared first by the city’s appetite for firewood and then by those identikit Victorian terraces which John Ruskin hated and which now feel aspirational to most people. Little pockets of green remain and so do their names: West Norwood, Gipsy Hill. I love the slate roofs, the terracotta finials, the moments when the sunlight astonishes the brickwork.

When I first moved to London — which for me means this part of South London — I wrote about the place all the time. But life moves on and recently I’ve felt like I’ve been taking the place for granted. More recently still, I’ve been returning to the subject obsessively — in this review of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems and then in this (hugely enjoyable) conversation with Jo Bratten. Many thanks to Jo for humouring me and my bugbears, and to Niall Campbell at for the initial invitation.

A connection with a place is a kind of tradition. For the writer or poet, it provides a vocabulary, a history, a set of shared references to return to. It is not hard to see why such a connection— like a religious background — might be an advantage to a modern poet. There are other advantages too: I am sure I am not the only writer who feels a pressure, real or imagined, to be ‘from’ somewhere (anywhere but London, in fact). Yet so many of us — I want to say most of us — have spent our lives moving around. An old flatmate of mine once told me he had moved once a year for ten years. That experience is hardly unique to millenials or Londoners. Movement is the modern condition and much of it takes place in desperate circumstances. But we are surely the generation that can’t avoid writing about it. What would a poetry of ‘ordinary’ dislocation look like?

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 4 April 26

I started the month by joining my friend Carly DeMento at the Millay House in Rockland, Maine! Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of my very favorite poets, so this was extra special for me. While there, I participated in a salon reading at the house and an open mic called Draft, and it was so lovely to connect with the writers there. I also released Issue 42 of Whale Road Review from the Millay House, and I spent some time working on my new book manuscript. (Non-writing highlights include stumbling upon the coolest Irish pub, sampling a variety of oysters, and taking a long freezing walk to a lighthouse!)

Katie Manning, March Update: Millay House, AWP in Baltimore, & more!

Now, suddenly it is April and I haven’t posted on here for a bit. It’s been a long winter hibernation, I’ve mostly been home, looking after family and things, writing and marinating ideas, working on new books and new projects.

I loved my first big gig of the year: Thank you to everyone that came to see us perform at the glorious Hackney Empire (pictured). It was a sold out show, packed to rafters, big turn out for Hollie McNish and the launch of her brilliant new collection ‘Virgin’. It was such a laugh performing alongside Hollie and also Michael Pedersen reading from his glorious ‘Muckle Flugga’. Loved sharing poems on that big stage with all that Spring Equinox energy. Thank you so much to Hollie for inviting me, Hackney Empire is a beautiful theatre and it was such a joy to see Hollie and Michael on such tip top form too.

Coming up at the end of this month, April 30th, I’m performing new poems at Multitudes Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank, in collaboration with Out-Spoken and the London Sinfonietta . . . Tickets are on sale now, see you there.

Salena Godden, Our Anarchy

Then, dragonflies by the hundreds
returned. It was so odd when the ground
was so dry, the air so still, a dearth
of activity by animal and human and yet
the beating of wings by my ear.

*

I went off prompt for day 4 of Na/GloPoWriMo because I was inspired by my friend Matt Dennisons new book, The Rock, The Water, which I’ve been reading today. A theme of nature, its beauty and savagery, runs through his poems. The book is published by Plan B Press and can be found on their website. Highly recommend!

Charlotte Hamrick, Air So Still

In other news, it’s time for us all in my home province to read or re-read Fahrenheit 451 I do believe. It’s time to make sure you have a library card wherever you live. It’s time to stand up for your Intellectual Freedom. If you want to do one small good thing, just visit a library and get your card.

As Maya Angelou said, “The horizon leans forward. / Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Wage peace, wage love, wage imagination. Your small acts are meaningful. Your imagination is at stake.

Shawna Lemay, On Seeing a Different Picture

Before it existed as riddle,
the poem beat against the stones
at the foot of the cliff.

Or it hung among particles
caught in the beam of a lighthouse,
sweeping across the channel.

The sound of air passing
through the mouth is a variant
of a form that can’t be seen.

The chest rises and falls. The water
recedes. Sometimes you can walk so far
without encountering a ripple.

Luisa A. Igloria, Notes on Translation

Last week, I flew to Portland for poetry.

I met up with some writing friends to see Maggie Smith on her book tour, where she spoke in conversation with Joy Sullivan. (If you were there, I was the one person awkwardly cradling a cheeseboard in her lap).

The conversation between two of my favorite poets was energizing and inspiring, and Maggie said something I can’t stop thinking about. She said she likes to live at least 30% of life in the deep end, with her nose just above water. And if there’s no risk of failure, you’re not really trying.

I’ve been circling this feeling for a while now, and I think Maggie named it. I want to live close to the edge of my comfort zone—treading water, standing on my tiptoes. It feels a little dangerous, but also freeing. I get restless when I move too far into the shallows.

The trip was basically one long loop of bookstores and coffee shops, and a highlight was seeing my collection on the shelf at Bold Coffee and Books!! It made all of this feel real: this life of art and risk, this choosing to stay in the deep end.

Allison Mei-Li, I flew to Portland for poetry

i dream of
queer people unafraid of bombs on this land
or across oceans. i dream of a wildness that
a country could never hold. i dream of
this country’s undoing. how the rocks
would weep for the first time in centuries.
how we will love each other the way we used to.
not like revolution but like breath.

Robin Gow, 4/3

一人降り春風乗りし過疎のバス　稲井夏炉

hitori ori harukaze norishi kaso no basu

            one person gets off
            and the spring wind gets on
            a bus in the depopulated village

                                                            Natsuro Inai

from Gendai Haiku, #729, March 2026 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

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

This week: odes to mushrooms, the greenness of grief, a city of mirrors, the wayward compass, and much more. Enjoy.

Almost March-end. It’s a bright, squally day. High clouds are topping out into pure white domes.  I love these big expanses of sky, feel great joy watching wild weather rush in from the Atlantic. One cumulonimbus becomes a nuclear mushroom. White turns to grey. My stomach twists. Hard hail is hurled at my attic window.

All month snow has come and gone to greater or lesser degrees. One or two calm, frosty days have been sandwiched in between many hours of iced gales and raw cold but light persists and grows stronger. I feel spring in my bones, hear it in the lark-song.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, March, and memories

I’m carrying a heavy sense that something is going to happen, something not ephemeral. Lots of news-checking and kid-checking: each of my adult children is going through a hard time. The cat was squinting through a pink left eye this morning, vomited his breakfast all over the place, and I had to hurry him to the vet. He seems okay now, but twice-a-day eye drops will be an epic battle. Clouds hang over House Mountain and the neighbors’ dogs are barking.

I read another book I loved. Anne Haven McDonnell’s new poetry collection Singing Under Snow is the perfect partner to Forest Euphoria [by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian]. I don’t think the authors know each other, but their work connects: both books concern awe and walking in the woods; funga and queerness; solitude and interrelation. A kind of hush seems to hang over most of Singing Under Snow, which contains a gorgeous series of odes to mushrooms—a disposition to awe. Smell and taste and touch are vibrant, as opposed to the visual detail that dominates much poetry. A sautéed Agaricus agustus has “browned base notes in butter, high hint / of marzipan.” Inky caps “stink of squid.” Truffles emit an “intimate funk, maybe old cheese, oak, sweat, rot, maybe sulfur or leather or brine…it’s a low cello starting in the feet.” All this mushroom sniffing is entangled with memories of beloved people, who sometimes accompany the foraging. “Every love I’ve known,” Haven McDonnell writes, “I remember by her smell—maple syrup, soap, salt, moss, fur, cinnamon, yeast, sap, snow.”

Lesley Wheeler, Spring ephemerals

How does it feel in the body to be seduced by the unknown?

What darkness are you avoiding in your creative work?

In the Venn diagram of fear and desire, where do you fall?

What are your monster aspects? How might you share language with the beast?

Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Bram Stoker

I spent part of yesterday afternoon sitting a table as part of a “career day” at Rose’s school. One adult per table, most of whom are other parents from the larger school body, there to answer questions on what it is each of them do. Roughly twenty tables spread out through the gymnasium, others included a family doctor from Richmond, a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a lawyer, a woman with a big fluffy dog who works with training rescue animals, a chemist and a table full of people from the Embassy of Barbados. I was the poet, apparently, a table I littered with books and chapbooks, so students could get a sense of what it is I might do. With handouts, naturally. Beside me, a man who works with national security, his table empty. Everything on a need-to-know basis, I suppose. As he said, but what would he even bring? He answered questions, and showed them a picture from his phone of the building where he works.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

I’ve been really struggling to come back here and know what to say. Blame it on the cognitive dissonance of our current moment. Within my little cocoon of a world, things are well. The birds are starting to wake me up again. The plum and cherry trees have big buds growing. The crocuses have already shown their light, and Maya the cat can’t get enough warm afternoon sunbeams. But all that winter healing feels self-contained. Everything else is on fire. We’re angry, sad, worried, scared, and nervous. And, I’m just out of energy. It’s even harder to say, Here, care about my little poetry book.

So, instead, I’m going to give you some of my kind of comfort. Read on below for a handful of haikus for the season and a Gen X-style taco recipe (but meatless). As well, I hope to see many of you in person at the events below in the weeks and months ahead—not for me and my book but for poetry and community and what we can give to each other.

Carrie Olivia Adams, The Spring of Our Cognitive Dissonance

I thought anger burned too bright for me to be able to write ever again. I have felt guilt good pure catholic guilt for not showing up here. For not doing the thing I have always loved.

How can any thinking person not be angry right now or anxious or frightened? National Poetry Month is coming and I have signed up but I can’t stop thinking about the children hidden in the Monster’s private diary or children torn from their parents’ arms because of the color of their skin. Men murdering citizens in the street. Families who have lost their SNAP benefits for no reason whatever. Survivors of rape standing in front of those monuments still not being believed. What the awful fuck. Even tapping into this much anger makes my hands shake god I’m such a coward. Here is my attempt at a poem off the cuff so to speak even though it’s noon and I’m still in my Christmas jammies though they have been laundered. […]

a wooden spoon
makes a good weapon if you don’t
have flour
stir rocks with your hands
you’re going to need them
make a noise in your bowl
make it a drum
pound it until you bleed
make a noise in your throat
growl learn to bark

Rebecca Loudon, March 26 26 Where has she been?

As a kid, I spent time every summer at a place called Knowlton’s Campground. Located on the coast near the easternmost part of Maine (and the U.S.), it was wild and stunning. We dug clams and “shopped” fresh fish out of the neighbor’s boat. My sister and I had the freedom to explore entire peninsulas and islands accessible only at low tide. Non-stop, kid nirvana. The land where the campground was located is now a nature preserve, and we visited this winter. Can confirm: It’s still wild and stunning (as you can see from the photos above). For today’s prompt, write a poem about a place from your childhood that doesn’t exist anymore. / Recommended reading: “My Kink Is Distance” by Amorak Huey and “when the world did not feel like a crushing weight” by Jill Kitchen.

Carolee Bennett, 30 Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2026

I have been writing quite a bit this month, spurred by some inspiration at AWP, lots of reading, and some ideas that have been sitting in a document titled Things to Explore at Some Point. (So original, I know.) I’d like to keep that momentum going, but much of what I’m writing has not been poetry. So instead of writing a poem a day in April, I’m going to ask myself to try and write something each day. No labels. No forms. No limits. It could be a sentence. A paragraph. A new line for an old poem. A piece of flash. To just write a THING.

Just putting that down in print feels right, like a weight off my shoulders. Like I can celebrate poems by reading them, and MAYBE, just maybe, writing one if I am inspired to do so. But it also feels correct that I should at least attempt writing everyday—this will be a success of its own.

If you complete a 30/30 with some good poems as a result, I am in awe of you. If you complete a 30/30 at all, I am in awe of you. If you, like me, are simply trying your best to connect with the page as often as possible, I am in awe of you. You created something where there was nothing.

Donna Vorreyer, Under Pressure…or Not

Here is the latest round of links to pieces dealing with the US-Israel war against Iran and related issues. I am also adding to these notes a second section. As you know, I have published several books of translations of classical Persian poetry, among them Selections from Saadi’s Bustan. Saadi, a 13th century poet from the city of Shiraz, is among the most important writers in the Persian literary canon, and his work has been translated into many languages worldwide. In light of the damage already done to some of Iran’s most important cultural and historical sites, and since my Bustan has been out of print for some time now (and is likely to stay that way), I thought a worthwhile thing to do would be to share with you some of Iran’s rich literary history. (I am writing more extensively on a specific connection between Saadi’s Bustan and United States culture in the series “On The Trail of a Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable.” Parts 1 and 2 have already been posted. Part 3 will post on April 3rd and Part 4 is coming in May.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Of Note: March 29, 2026

Yesterday I had a poem idea. We do Passion Sunday, which means we read the whole Holy Week text. This bit from Good Friday (Matthew 27: 50-53) leapt out at me: “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split.  The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.  After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”

Is there a poem in those lines?  I keep thinking about those holy people, long dead, rising up and wandering around Jerusalem.  Do I want to update it to a modern capital city, D.C. perhaps?

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, One Last Look Back at Quilt Camp and Palm Sunday

The opening poem of Dan Albergotti’s collection Candy (LSU Press 2024) is what got me thinking of our current moment in these terms. The title is “Kick in the Jaw” and it opens with the line “Sometimes the zebra wins.” That’s kind of a jarring line if you don’t know much about zebras. It’s a common mistake to think they’re similar to horses in temperament because they’re part of the same family, but no zebra has ever been domesticated. They’re too aggressive. But even if you know that about zebras, it’s still an interesting contrast to Albergotti’s next lines. Here are the first four together.

Sometimes the zebra wins. And the sound
of the savanna goes on—birdsong, frog croak,
beetle chitter, snort and grunt of a warthog
hard panting of the cheetah after chase—

Sometimes the zebra wins and nothing is different. It’s as much a part of the natural world as the predator winning. Even the cheetah in this scene isn’t feeding. It’s panting, gathering its energy for the next attempt. But if the zebra just managed to dodge the cheetah for now, that doesn’t seem like much of a win. The poem continues:

as the lion walks slowly away, bleeding from
the mouth, staring ahead, looking for a place
to rest and await a slow starvation. Sometimes
the savanna’s ambient song is interrupted
by a sharp crack that sounds like a gunshot,
the zebra’s kick finding the lion’s jaw.

I’d be anthropomorphizing to say that the zebra is brave here. This is just nature, cruel and violent. The zebra kicks because it can and it connected with the lion and more often than not, the lion is probably going to win this encounter and it doesn’t mean anything larger than that. Albergotti says as much in the final lines:

Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes
the lion dies. Always the sound goes on.

It’s the first two sentences there that really grabbed me, and it’s why this poem has stuck with me and why I decided to write about it. “Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes the lion dies.” Just because you’re not a predator that doesn’t mean you’re destined to lose no matter how much the predator wins in the stories. Sometimes the zebra breaks the lion’s jaw.

Notice that the world doesn’t end when the lion’s jaw is broken. It will end for that lion, but there are other lions. It will eventually end for that zebra, but there are other zebras.

I’d bet that Dan didn’t have any particular political or war-type situation in mind when he wrote this poem. I’m stretching this metaphor pretty tautly, mostly because I need to remind myself that no situation is hopeless, that there’s always a sound in the background continuing, and that I can find a way to be brave if I remember that.

Brian Spears, Being Brave

After I got a degree, I worked in a job laying
basketball courts. After this, I got a job
collecting debt. It was strange to me,
having to wear a tie. There were reports
that showed the team leader how many
minutes you were late. It’s a vibe that after
everything you are destined to live this way.

This section from the title poem of Stuart McPherson’s The Aureate Trophies of Profit & Loss is almost a summary of the entire book, in a way. McPherson is primarily concerned with the dehumanisation that comes with late-stage Capitalism and the modern workplace where humans are a resource, and resources are to be exploited. In this sense, the poems gathered here are a set of responses to what we are asked to accept as ‘normal’ in our decaying civilization:

We should be asleep now but there are
      choices to make between the draws

of long-shot fanaticism, or a life bereft
      of hope. That clouting fist on a door

is a precursor to necessary dignified rest,
      some basic standards of humanity.
(from ‘WISHLIST’)

And those basic standards are precisely what’s absent from a world dominated by projects, PowerPoint decks, performance reviews and ‘competitive modern office chair/hierarchies’. What these poems do, amongst other things, is take this jargon and embed it in a flow of disjunction that serves to point up the machine’s perversion of language […]

Billy Mills, Two Broken Sleeps

The children had empty eyes, so they got dogs.
The children poured love into their dogs like funnels.
The dogs followed them everywhere. They sent
each other pictures of the dogs climbing into their beds,
blankets and couches, riding in cars and trucks.
When one of their dogs is killed by a stranger,
the children cannot consume the darkness
of their deeply un-searched mud thick love.
The dog’s death is all the broken bones
of their childhood, every fist to the face,
every cigarette butt to the arm, every belt stroke,
every night without food; the children howl.
Bystanders watch their outpouring of grief.
They say, it was a dog!

Kate Gale, For Jasper: Finding Courage in the Dark

My ten-year-old daughter protests and complains, she summons all her suasive efforts, but I remain an Elvis fan. Not limited to songs by Elvis, my appreciation extends to songs about Elvis, for example, “Calling Elvis,” by Dire Straits. It’s the lead track on their final album, On Every Street. About this album there are two schools of thought, both visible on its AllMusic page. “A disappointment,” asserts William Rohlmann, the site’s professional reviewer: “low-key to the point of being background music.” But the people think otherwise, and give it, on average, 4 out of 5 stars. Sophisticated subtlety, or bland lifelessness—it’s a fine line, and fine taste is needed to see it.

Timothy Steele’s poetry is on the good side of this bar. It is rewardingly subtle, in both form and content. The poems tend to start small, with close attention to tiny details in a mundane scene:

The lizard, an exemplar of the small,
Spreads fine, adhesive digits to perform
Vertical push-ups on a sunny wall.
(“Herb Garden”)

By placing in its path an index card,
I catch an ant that scurries round the sink.
(“For Victoria, Traveling in Europe”)

Sometimes, this attention is all: at the end of “Herb Garden” we’re still among the herbs, where, “quarrying between the pathway’s bricks, / Ants build minute volcanoes out of sand.” Other poems expand, and concrete details yield to something higher, or more abstract. The beach in “Starr Farm Beach” is named after a farm that’s named (I presume) after its owner, but that name inspires the fancy of “stars / … sown and grown and gathered for the sky,” and the poems ends thus:

We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.

As delightful as the what of the poems is the how. There’s joy in seeing each thing fall perfectly into place. Not just, for example, the rhyme of “savoir-faire” with “air,” but the slotting of the complex and foreign phrase “quick piscine savoir-faire” into the iambic template with exactness and precision. Steele asserts, in All the fun’s in how you say a thing, that “the chief sources of variation in metrical composition reside within the norm”: good iambic pentameter, he holds, rarely contains anything but iambs, and this, he argues, is less of a restriction than one might think.

Brad Skow, Dionysus and Apollo

Just read a poem by Lee Harwood. Two lines jumped out at me and felt unbelievably poignant. Trains run through a town, he writes, ‘staring in at the bare rooms and kitchens / each lit with its own story that lasts for years and years.’* Wow. It just caught me off-guard. Funny how often, when you like the music of a poet’s work, you find that they also deal with the sorts of ideas and ways of seeing, too, that appeal to you.

*A Poem for Writers by Lee Harwood

Dominic Rivron, A Poem for Writers

Over at A Poetry Notebook, Jem has a nice discussion of Larkin’s ‘The Trees’, a poem he always thinks about at this time of year. It’s one I know by heart too, though it never occurs to me until later in April. Jem feels ambivalent about the poem. […]

I have always loved this poem and found Larkin’s dismissal of it startling when I read his letters. (He complains about writing something so mediocre on Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and perhaps one can understand that, when measured against Hardy’s best work, it feels disappointing.) The greenness of grief seems obvious to me, first, as an invocation of Eliot, something of a silent bête noire throughout Larkin, as the poem is presumably “set” as April turns to May; but it also invokes the sense of tears at renewals, such as the “happy funerals” in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. That poem contains a sister image to “something almost being said” in “someone running up to bowl”. Life is an attempt, which seems to come so easily, so naturally, to the tree, but not to us. The rings of grief have no parallel in ‘Whitsun’, which actually leaves out the wedding rings, but perhaps relates to the rain at the end.

what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give

This is part of the ongoing theme of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” in Larkin, which sometimes takes the form of new lambs and sometimes of the memory of “the strength and pain of being young which cannot come again.” Somehow the trees do find a way of being young each year, though it hurts, like growing pains and the pains of seeing the past “smaller and clearer as the years go by”. 

Henry Oliver, Larkin’s trees

Amid the enormous wealth of texts addressed to Elizabeth I, it is nevertheless rather unusual to come across one speaking to her “woman to woman”, as it were. In fact, [Olympia] Frontina’s poem, though addressed to Elizabeth, is mostly about her own struggles and suffering as a Protestant exile, and how the defeat of the Armada gives her some hope for the Protestant cause. It draws a clear parallel between Elizabeth’s courageous resistance in the face of Catholic Europe and Olympia’s own trials.

Funnily enough, the book in which this poem appears has been cited a couple of times by scholars as a particularly rich source for the depiction of Elizabeth I as a virgo mascula, ‘manly maiden’, a kind of virtuous Christian Amazon. It’s true that several of the poems in the collection (though not Olympia’s) do mine this seam at considerable length. But it’s striking that none of the scholars who have been interested in the book from this angle noticed that it also, and very unusually, contains a poem by a woman about her own experiences. […]

Are Eleutherius and Olympia Frontina two women, or one? It would need a much fuller study to make a proper assessment, but I think it is quite likely that they are the same person: the tone in which Eleutherius addresses the queen directly is rather similar to that in Olympia’s poem and there are a series of overlaps in the use of certain Latin words. There are also a handful of set pieces which are treated in a similar way. Such correspondences could of course be explained by close friendship, family relationship or belonging to a literary circle in which members were regularly sharing work. But at this point I would hazard a guess that Olympia (if that was in fact her name) adopted the pen-name ‘Eleutherius’ for the grander and more stereotypically masculine genres of Claudianic panegyric and major Horatian odes with which she opened her book, but dared to leave the more personal elegy under a female name. It is ironic indeed that having concealed her identity once, it was then unwittingly concealed again by the careless error of an early cataloguer.

Victoria Moul, Hiding in plain sight: two (?) new women poets from 1589

I’m very grateful to Vivek Narayanan, editor of Poetry Daily, for the invitation to write about a poem and its “spark”. I’ve always found “Cook Ting” works like a charm when introducing students to contemporary poetry that doesn’t immediately make sense in the way they expect. Its emphatic rhyming and collaged imagery encourages them to curiosity about what it’s doing, which then leads into a discussion of the connections we make as readers, encouraged by the leaps of rhyme — and then finally we look more closely at one or more of the sources that Langley used when writing the poem. […]

In the Poetry Daily piece I concentrate on the poem’s use of phrases from Cage’s essay on Rauschenberg (as you can see, “Cook Ting” was originally called “Rauschenberg”). But Langley also copied out other observations from Cage which inform the poem’s thinking about what art does to the world in a more general way. Here are three:

Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.

*

[Rauschenberg] is not saying; he is painting […] The message is conveyed by dirt which, mixed with adhesive, sticks to itself and to the canvas upon which he places it. Crumbling and responding to changes in the weather, the dirt unceasingly does my thinking.

*

Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity. (It is no reflection on the weather that such and such a government sent a note to another.)

I’m struck in particular by the mention of “weather” here twice as an aspect of reality which is not human, not social or political, and yet as changeable and contingent as thought itself. The inclusion of the natural world in the poem — through Mark Cocker’s nature diary for the Guardian newspaper about seabirds feeding near the Sizewell nuclear reactor — is also “a situation involving multiplicity”. The only direct evocation of Cocker’s diary in “Cook Ting” is the sentence “The gulls are a / white flap over sprats in the foam”. But the whole piece describes a more complex ecosystem of gulls, long-necked divers and marine skuas — the latter being “highly opportunistic” birds who feed through kleptoparasitism, or piracy; that is, they wait for other birds to catch a fish, and then harass it until the fish is disgorged.

What strikes me about reading Cocker’s seabirds back into the lines of “Cook Ting” is how the “sources” of a poem are much more than the choice words that a poet (like a piratic seabird) plucks from the mouth of another writer. The two pieces of writing fall into conversation with each other, suggesting further analogies between the behaviour of birds and the imagination.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Zip! Zoop!

In this short poem, the reader is pulled from a secure place and made to “fall in love with the void” – the unreachable, the unsayable. The poem ends with the sweep of the “merciless arc of the lace-edged skirt,” taking the reader into a void of a different kind. “Lace-edged skirt” implies society, time, restrictions, human physicality, desire. “Merciless” is a strong word choice here. O’Hara could intend the reader to take this as time’s relentless force – even Leonardo, great embracer of life, came to dust. He also could be making a statement about sexuality – and here read society’s restrictions and expectations about who and how we love, a different sort of window – the lace boundaries of conformity and roles. Either way, the poem ends with an upward sweep into a puzzling but fecund unknown.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank O’Hara, “Windows”

In rhymed tetrameter quatrains, Blake excoriates the evil of the place: how the cries of the poor blacken the churches, how the existence of girls forced into prostitution stains the institution of marriage. Interestingly, “London” appears in Blake’s Songs of Experience but has no counterpart in his parallel volume, Songs of Innocence. That might suggest that Blake cannot imagine an innocent human city — at least not till the New Jerusalem prophesied in the Book of Revelation, which forces us to remember that in the Bible’s account, the humanity that began in a garden ends in a city.

And yet, to read “London” carefully, to think about its diction and narrative, is to come away unsettled. Oh, there’s an easy reading, the kind of high-school English-class account, that takes the poem as straightforward revolutionary rage against power: The human condition in 1794 London is nasty and brutish, filthy and immoral, with the Palace and the Church forging mental restraints that bind us in our misery. The poem is Blake’s indictment of the urban social order, the Industrial Revolution, the economic and political arrangements that have created this damnable state.

All that is certainly in the poem, but a sense of unease ought to touch us when we find ourselves in self-congratulatory agreement with the angry narrator. Blake is involved in something deeper, I think, for the narrator is not entirely a trustworthy one. Under the poem’s indictment of the social order is a hidden indictment of the poem’s speaker as someone who does not have the answer to what he sees and hears. If the city corrupts us all, it corrupts as well the man who observes the city’s evil.

He is, in other words, one of those who “feel they know not what but care; / And wish to lead others when they should be led.” That’s from the very curious poem “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” which Blake initially put in Songs of Innocence, then moved to Songs of Experience — a poem that is, admittedly, so strange and ambiguous as to grant no certain use. Still, as one critic pointed out back in 1986, there’s something there suspicious of the observers who wish to lead others toward some imagined future.

More suspicion comes to us from Blake’s word choices, emphasized by the technique of repetition that pervades “London.” The repeated “charter’d” in the first stanza of the four-quatrain tetrameter poem was merely “dirty” in an earlier notebook, as “mind-forg’d manacles” was originally “german-forged.” Both of these changes push the sense of constraint into something systematic, written into the minds of city-dwellers — which includes the speaker of the poem.

But it’s the last line of “London” — “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse,” an astonishing oxymoron — that most suggests the speaker is equally bound in the charter, the mind’s manacles. He has risen a half step above the ordinary, suffering bounded people, as he observes the vile city: a nasty cauldron of woe. “How the youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the new-born Infants tear.”

We might dwell on how much of this is aurally driven: He hears the infant’s cry, the soldier’s sigh, the whore’s curse. But what he gains from all that is only an observation of life (from birth to marriage to death) as collapsed down into a single monstrosity. He needs to make the step beyond that, to a vision of the city as a light unto the nations — a vision of the New Jerusalem that Blake knows is beyond the appalling cry.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: London

London is hungry, it isn’t greedy, it simply demands repayment for your tenancy. Some respond by making money, some by making a tonne of money, some make poetry. Others give up their souls, have their life blood siphoned from their wan bodies. The machine needs feeding. London is a great hole that must be filled.

It is no wonder that John Keats retreated to Hampstead, that heaven on a hill, not the exclusive suburb it is today, one that has followed the same trajectory that many poorer or affordable boroughs on the fringes have done, an outlying state attractive only to misfits and migrants, artists and writers, desirable once it’s been described as a ‘colourful neighbourhood’ and Samantha and Lucy and Tom decide to rough it there for a while. Then they tell their friends about it. And then one of them opens a chic, vegan restaurant. And then… I digress…

The London Keats was born into was recovering from the ‘gin craze’, a Hogarthian epidemic of anarchic alcoholism. With industrialisation and empire expansion London had become the wealthiest city in the world. With this wealth, at its untended edges, came horrific poverty, an almost unparalleled depravity. With reforms to the licensing laws there wasn’t even the ubiquity of gin to drown the misery out. We’ve not entirely emerged from this staggering hangover and Samantha and Lucy and Tom will talk of urban regeneration.

There are two kinds of poverty, a poverty of opportunity that keeps people stuck in one place and the poverty that slowly kills them there.

On the night before I came home, I walked across Rome and at each turn, on each corner, there was treasure cut in stone, water and marble and a drama of columns and domes, arcades and arches, churches and piazzas. You can walk across any city for free or for the small expense of warn shoe leather but in some cities having no money matters less.

London is a different beast. Increasingly it has become a city of mirrors, of glass facades, of endless reflections, of vacuity and self obsession. Stare at it for too long and it will show you who you are or what you are not, it will reveal what you have, and show you what have not got.

Jan Noble, Nº57 The secrets of Swan

And then those pastures, tourmaline green
dotted with hundreds of lambs. The eagles
scavenging afterbirth during lambing season,
filling the whole round world with auguries.

Lori Witzel, Auguries

I’m writing this Substack post looking for a favour – or more particularly, for suggestions. In a couple of weeks, our little family will be walking a portion of the old pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago. Our portion of the route will be around 120km over six days, which should translate to around five or six hours walking per day. There’s something appealing in the simplicity of this schedule: waking around 6am, leaving the hotel at 7:30, walking the countryside roads until after lunch, and then being free in the later afternoon and evening to take in whatever village we stop in overnight.

A big part of the reason for undertaking it is that my son has recently turned twelve, will start high school in the summer, and is a typical kid of this generation – in love with screens, his life filled with impulse and impetus. The idea was to try something to shake up his life, and to slow things down for him. Will we still be talking after this holiday? Comments are open to discuss this – but also for something else. With five or six hours’ walking time, I thought I might set myself a target of trying to memorise a poem every day. Doesn’t it feel like a natural fit – to walk and to commit something to memory? The rhythm of the steps, the rhythm of the poem. So I am looking for suggestions for what poems to commit to memory.

In my earlier life I worked as a debt advisor for a charity; I would write out poems to memorise between speaking to clients. The job could be quite bleak, and I found the process of internalising a poem to be a few minutes of escape or reprieve. Later I would read this feeling described in the introduction to Harold Bloom’s Possessed By Memory, one of his more sentimental and vulnerable works:

When you have a poem by heart you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your dwelling place. Because the poem possesses you.

In the office cubicle, beside my pad and pens, my scraps of budgets and cost-cuttings, I had tried to memorise Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. I still have most of the opening half quite clearly in my mind: I went out to the hazel wood/because a fire was in my head. What is perhaps strange is that in remembering the poem I can also recall the view from my old desk, my colleagues, their small talk, each part all the clearer when I recite it – as though I wasn’t just committing the poem to memory, but also the place where I’d memorised it too.

Niall Campbell, What Poems Should I Memorise?

In “Of Power and Time,” Mary Oliver calls the internal force that pulls us away from our own work “the intimate interruptor.” She doesn’t dwell on why this inner voice distracts us, but she’s unequivocal about the need to ignore it, even at the cost of unstocked pantries and unreturned phone calls.

In Oliver’s description of this internal antagonist, I recognize my own intimate interrupter. How she “helpfully” shows up to remind me of tasks when I’m mid-thought, almost as if—could it really be this—I can’t stand the intensity and reverberations of my own mind.

Creative work requires solitude. “It needs concentration, without interruptions,” as Oliver advises. “It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.”

And that can feel uncomfortable.

I sometimes feel I need a break from the pressure of my own creative energy, that very thing I covet but sometimes fear once it’s in my grasp. Now it really is up to me.

Now that the game is on, I might let us both down.

Maya C. Popa, Advanced Techniques for Avoiding Writing

Last night I gave this workshop at University of Toronto’s Hart House. I was in a wood-pannelled room overseen by a former Warden of Hart House, replete with vest and pipe. Walking through U of T campus, it really struck me how much I love the literally “old school” architecture: ivy-covered buildings and stone buildings in some kin of Gothic style. And yes, colonialism and patriarchy, but there is something about the gravitas of such architecture, a notion (even if it is just an illusion) of “learning” having its own space outside the marketplace. I can’t examine this idea too deeply or it all falls apart (shouldn’t learning be in the agora, how can we separate it from class, do we want to protect and ritualize learning and put it in the pipe-holding hand of a special group of hierophants…) Despite this, walking in the dark and pouring rain, I was charmed.

Gary Barwin, TRUTH’S SUPERB SURPRISE: NOTES FROM A CREATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP

And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.

We are here
to lose our way.

Maria Popova, Corrective for a Broken Heart

This morning the air brings me the notes of new carpet off gassing in a Premier Inn and mixes in essence of chilled seaside town air. A soundtrack of traffic plays like urban waves in the background.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookcase. I say it is me visiting the National Poetry Library in London and not being able to resist a photo with my second full collection of poetry Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. I also say this feels particularly apt given that I am a guest on Helen O’Neill’s Coach Write podcast this week. We had a wonderful chat about coaching, poetry and the journey to having books in the world, and it felt good to be a guest. I like listening to people talk on podcasts and I like being asked to talk too. It also makes me chuckle that the episode will air on the first of April!

The main focus of the visit to London was seeing the Manic Street Preachers headlining at The Royal Albert Hall for Teenage Cancer Trust. It was a fantastic concert opening with Motorcycle Emptiness and ending under a raining down of confetti during If You Tolerate This. That opening song was a moment of absolute tingle for me as I realised I was standing in the now, watching the band perform live, while also watching the original music video from all those years ago projected onto the screen behind them. A wonderful mingling of right now and back then.

Sue Finch, A TRIP TO LONDON TOWN

I cannot tell you how taken I am by Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back. I have read an advanced galley, but you can pre-order online or at your favourite indie. Honest, vulnerable, insightful, poetic, authentic, meditative, are all words popping into my head as I prepare to win you over to this book. It’s also uncomfortable in parts as it asks questions in a consideration of a life well-lived but not without inner turmoil. How do we look back on who we were as young women? What kind of generosity and grace might we offer our younger selves?

If you’ve always wondered about women depicted in paintings (and you know I have, beginning with my first book All the God-Sized Fruit), and the effect of the male gaze on women, this book gives you another view. As a young woman, Kishkan posed as an artist’s model. “I see him taking me in,” she says, then asks, “Was I taken in? I was.” Years later she looks back with wisdom and clarity and examines her relationship with the artist, with the paintings of her, and with her own self, now and then. She says, “I am trying to find out who I was in the light of that gaze, and before it, what foundation held me in place in the whirling years…”

We have been on similar paths of interest at times, perhaps, though we’ve never met. Interested in art, probably reading the same books back in the day — Ways of Seeing by John Berger was such a big one. So it’s interesting to see where we converge and where we diverge. We’ve both written in various genres, are of similar age. I felt reading this book that looks back so keenly, so delicately, to be cathartic. It helps to dwell for a while, before asking, what next?

Shawna Lemay, Three Books

I’m seventy-three now;
you, forever past fifty-nine,

your body resting with
my poem and the photo

I tucked into the pocket of
the suit they dressed you in,

too hot for that late Florida day.

Maureen Doallas, Missing You

The reaping to which I refer in the title of this post is metaphorical, as spring isn’t a big time for bringing in the sheaves, though in a few weeks the winter wheat will be ripe. I feel I have reaped some joy from a recent poetry reading I gave at the library of my former employer, DeSales University, and how often do we feel that way? It’s a gift! Dr. Steve Myers invited me to read with three of the alums of the MFA program DSU now offers, and last night I found myself back in the library where my office used to be (once I finally escaped from the basement where I’d been located for 17 years). The audience was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students and friends who were kind enough to show up on a Wednesday night. It’s wonderful to feel appreciated now and then. 

I haven’t been giving many readings lately or even attending open mics. Evenings and nights are not my best time, but the college is very nearby and I really was pleased to be able to participate…Best Beloved drove me there and back, so everything was manageable. I read some quite old poems and some quite new ones, and a few in-between from my books. And I sold a few books! Always a thrill. I am dwelling in gratitude today.

One of the best things at the event was seeing a former student who was one of my writing tutors and who now works at DeSales. She’s also lately enrolled in the MFA program. What a joy to catch up with a person I met as a bright 18-year-old with a natural talent for writing, who’s pursuing creative writing now–as a mother of two, and nearing 40–not so different from my own circuitous path in poetry. Such are the rewards of teaching…occasionally, I do miss it.

Ann E. Michael, Sowing and reaping

Thank you to Quibble Lit for publishing my poem “Physics of a Marriage” in Vol. VII. I love journals that still produce print copies (in addition to online publication) and it was so exciting to get a copy delivered to my mailbox.

I also love “themed” submissions and find it helps me focus on what the poem needs to say. In the case of this poem, the prompt was right outside my office window, on his hands and knees digging in the dirt.

Most of my poems come from the lived reality of my life and writing poetry helps me understand what this life means to me. As many of you know, my husband is a physicist and I am the one who loves to garden. Somehow over the long arc of a 37-year marriage, we’ve each become a little of both.

Carey Taylor, Physics of a Marriage

Drones fly over gardens,
tankers barrel through straits on fire. So much

has changed. Or so much has merely changed
hands. Yet power stays put. Spoils of many

conquests, we’ve been trying to survive in
the margins, in the aftermath of the last

aftermath and the last. Imagine freeing river and
forest and plain from maps into their old names.

Luisa A. Igloria, Old World, New World

I couldn’t stop thinking about many things: the elegant movement of the hands of servers behind espresso bars, like hands of Michaelangelo, Galileo’s telescopes that proved heliocentric view of the universe, the pistachio gelato at Giolitti’s covered with lightly sweetened mascarpone cream and at Perché No in Florence, the sound of the choir echoing against the richly decorated walls of the Saint Peter’s Basilica, the electric candles that one had to light, the paintings of Caravaggio, their visceral violence, the gushing blood, its rotting fruits, the invitation of Bacchus, the perfect teeth of a screaming Medusa, the Montepulciano and the Chianti, posters of a Hokusai exhibit, the mineral white wine I drank inside the ruins of an ancient Roman theatre whose name I do not remember, the Aperol spritzes, the two negronis inside a bar, the view of the Imperial Fora, the gravity that can make anything fall. 

Saudamini Deo, Beware the Ides of March

I stretch my hand out
and the quiet sits on my palm
like a question:
Are you enough?
Can you be enough?
Are you predator? Or prey?
Can you feel the inky wetness of your severed wings?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Because she said I must stop doomscrolling and write a feel-good poem

This week: intense incomprehension, the strings of things, apple maggots, plastic words, and much more. Enjoy.

Spring begins today. The seasonal gate swings open on its equinox hinge. And I’m also in-between things : the end of a years-long writing project, on one hand, and a new and unexpected set of social responsibilities, on the other.

So this is just a diary note, a fugitive transition report. Stray thoughts.

When you are absorbed and propelled by the magnetic field of an extended poetry project, you are really in that world. Wearing thick horse-blinders donated by Pegasus. So when you emerge, everything looks slightly changed.

And what have I sought for, all these years, eyes fixed on poetry? Yet maybe this is the wrong way to put it. The ideal, the model, of poetry is out there, in the world; yet the quiddity of poet-qua-poet is constituted by an ongoing relationship, with an emerging process – that is, between the poet and poems themselves. And over time, sometimes, this relation becomes more symbiotic, more “second nature” : “Time silvers the plow, and the poet’s voice” (per Osip Mandelstam).

When Mandelstam was asked by one of his Soviet media handlers to define “Acmeism”, the literary movement which he helped bring to birth, he replied : “Nostalgia for world culture.” His remark encapsulates one of the evergreen, effervescent aspects of the poet’s métier : a sense not only of tradition, but also solidarity with fellow workers in the verse-furrows – all over the world, all through both time and space. It can make you giddy just to think of it.

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

I have twelve hives of bees. Some are on a farm, at the edge of a field in a long strip of woodland. Amid the scrub there is a small tree which in late Spring is a cloud of blossom. I notice it because it sings: the insects that are feeding on it are so tiny, they can only be heard. They greet the nectar with a high, sweet note – pure elation. […]

Sean Borodale’s wonderful Bee Journal should be prescribed reading for all aspiring or armchair apiarists. Everything happens : they swarm, they die, they reinvent themselves, all while he learns to do the hardest thing of all – nothing. From its Introduction: “When the wider landscape parches in high summer, this shaded, humid locality divines its insects and flowers; re-builds itself delicately in colour, sugar, water and sunlight”. He understands the life-force of the colony as a manifestation of Lorca’s “duende” :

All that has dark sounds has duende. Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art …

Bee Journal came from notebooks he took to the hive : “inside the increased effort of simultaneously writing and ‘keeping’, I experienced a pressure, a slight emergency of the senses”. His poet’s attentiveness allows him into their world. He quickly gave up trying to write while also tending to an open hive, but the poems really do hold what he hopes is “the poetic pulse of the poem in progress”. This “raised alertness” – to the radical geography of the bees’ orbit as well as to the tiny intimacies of the bees themselves – really do capture the experience, including, frequently, “intense incomprehension”.

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 
irremediably.

Dale Favier, Already Spring

Another reason I love reading poetry in the morning is that, more often than not, reading others’ poems inspires me to write my own.

I have a “daily” poem exchange with a few friends on email this month (we’re calling it “rogue” since we’re not actually required to write every day—so yes, we’re definitely playing fast and loose with the word daily here). But it’s been a reminder to me that writing has always been the one thing when I’m doing it, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. And many times, just by showing up, I end up with a draft of a poem. Other times, nothing—or a poem that feels like it was written by a feral raccoon who just discovered he has big feelings. But I’m okay with that, I’m okay with a not-so-great poem. When it comes to poems, I realize I’m less attached to outcome and more attached to the idea of play and process.

But as you know, it’s a hard mix these days—to be creative, happy, engaged, and informed without short-circuiting. So I’ve been trying to keep things simple when at home, I reach for the natural world and books (my two comfort animals in tough times) along with daily Biscoff vanilla cream sandwich cookies (sometimes a few or more) and Mighty Leaf Ginger Twist tea at night (no, I am not a sponsor of either of these products, I just somehow became accidentally devoted to both of them recently—some of you will remember my expensive French yogurt kick). Yes, it might sound a little dull (poetry, cookies, tea, the sky, robins, early spring flowers, etc.), but I’m recommitting myself to the small luxuries in life. 

Kelli Russell Agodon, Rogue Poems & Reasonable/Unreasonable Amounts of Cookies

I write to my elected officials, I donate when I can, I hold a sign at rallies, I feel helpless.

After reading for a few hours, most nights I still lie awake trying to keep my mind from heading back to poet and activist June Jordan’s question, “How many gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?”

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

Every once in a while, you stumble upon something so lovely, so unpretentiously beautiful and quietly profound, that you feel like the lungs of your soul have been pumped with a mighty gasp of Alpine air. This Is a Poem That Heals Fish (public library) is one such vitalizing gasp of loveliness — a lyrical picture-book that offers a playful and penetrating answer to the question of what a poem is and what it does. And as it does that, it shines a sidewise gleam on the larger question of what we most hunger for in life and how we give shape to those deepest longings.

Written by the French poet, novelist, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Simeón, translated into English by Enchanted Lion Books founder Claudia Zoe Bedrick (the feat of translation which the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska had in mind when she spoke of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes … a second original”), and illustrated by the inimitable Olivier Tallec, this poetic and philosophical tale follows young Arthur as he tries to salve his beloved red fish Leon’s affliction of boredom.

Arthur’s mommy looks at him.
She closes her eyes,
she opens her eyes…

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

Puzzled and unsure what a poem is, Arthur goes looking in the pantry, only to hear the noodles sigh that there is no poem there. He searches in the closet and under his bed, but the vacuum cleaner and the dust balls have no poem, either.

Determined, Arthur continues his search.
He runs to Lolo’s bicycle shop.
Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time, and is always in love.
He is repairing a tire and singing.

So begins the wonderful meta-story of how poetry comes into being as a tapestry of images, metaphors, and magpie borrowings. Each person along the way contributes to Arthur’s tapestry a different answer, infused with the singular poetic truth of his or her own life.

Maria Popova, This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
If I were a liar, I would say it was thanks to the mentorship of [INSERT IMPRESSIVE NAME] and [INSERT PRESTIGIOUS SCHOOL]. The truth is that I squeezed between Jim Morrison lyrics and the skips on Dylan Thomas records I took out of the library. How else does someone like me discover poetry? I’m from the Bronx. Nobody had books in the house.  

3 – How long does it take to start a writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Writing is slow for me. Until it speeds up. Until I have something I have something to stretch across the room. Each project is intended as a new experiment unto itself. For /face, I started sampling images and language from Google Patents on facial surveillance technology. My first ten or twenty pieces were nothing anyone cosplaying mid-century Confessionalism would recognize as poetry. That’s the standard I set for myself. That’s how I view “experimentalism.” I was confused but also encouraged when I heard right back from editors who wanted to publish the material. Of course, unlike in the movies, any acceptance was followed by ten more rejections. Anything I achieved with this book came after this 1-in-10 ratio, which, for me, became a game of how weird I could make the work and which snob magazine I could freak out. That was my “journey,” as the kids say. That and a lot of reading and research. Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Shoshana Zuboff. They all rode along in the back seat. In the front was Nancy Spero squeezed alongside Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.   

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
All poems begin at the bottom of the esophagus, where gastric acids begin breaking down anything I’ve ingested. Nutrients become energy; the rest, the materials that cannot benefit the body; they become poems. Everything starts with a few lines, then a few more. I cannot work without an idea for a “project.” Everything has to be an attack on a larger order, or why am I even bothering? 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with William Lessard

Its origin is unclear: it may or may not have been Oscar Wilde who said a net is just a bunch of holes woven together with strings. He may or may not have been quoting some ancient Asian wisdom. But I like the notion. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by John Irving, but I loved the books of his that I loved because of how the strings of things in the stories would wander around then come together in the end not in a tidy bow but in a weave, the weft bending to the warp of all the crisscrossed lines, the gaps suddenly making sense. I try sometimes to think about my own life that way, to catch a glimpse of some fabric of it. It’s hard to see the fabric of one’s own life, so close are we to the weave, trying to peer through the holes, missing the overall pattern often. I like this poem by my friend Jessica Dubey because of its filaments, and how they dangle and tangle, and how by the end something unexpected is woven, and something is caught in the net.

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

 I want to share this essay in Annulet by Ryan Eckes and Laura Jaramillo: “Searching for the Commons through Precarity and Crisis: American Poetics since 9/11.” Both Ryan and Laura are my age but they feel like my elders in the world of poetry and politics, as they’ve both been tapped into things throughout the entirety of the last few decades (whereas I have been playing catch up for the last 7 years or so). This essay offers a really insightful history of what it was like as a poet on the left through the Bush years, OWS, and beyond. There is also a really astute analysis of how social media and the internet more broadly has impacted us as poets striving for a common connection. It’s a great essay and one not to miss. (They also happen to give a brief shout out to Dead Mall Press, which is much appreciated.)

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

Rabble rouser, organizer,
bold bright spirit wrapped in awkward
flesh and cotton ball softness and
carrying the most essential
pastels (pink as your cheeks, baby
blue like your eyes, and white as grief
and graves and talcum powder). You
flung your arms up, shouting over
signs and crowds and floats wheeling on
hidden wheels with black treads. You lead
the Pride parade; you celebrate
the you others have yet to learn
to see—

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

The past couple days have found me stuck on the latest play script, at the end of Act I, which is about usually where I’ve been getting stuck. It’s turning into a mystery, almost, and I am not sure I want it to go in that direction. I am the writer, after all, you would think what I say goes. But then again–many poem projects have gone in entirely different ways than intended, so maybe I should let the writing wander as it may.  I will return in a couple of days and see if it’s working better or if I can find a way to make it so. 

In the meantime, I have been writing some early bits to a newish project, the bone palace, which was meant to accompany a set of fun fauxtographs I made up a couple years back. The images are proving a ripe and fertile space for building stories around and within them. The project as it starts feels very similar to errata, which was just a little chap of borrowed formats, something which I love doing in the midst of other kinds of projects. But the narrative feels sharper here and less collage-like […]

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

On Thursday, I finally submitted the manuscript for my fifth collection, I Saw What I Know. For the past six weeks, I’ve needed to write a blurb for it – the short summary which appears on the back cover. Instead of writing it, I wrote an article about blurb writing. In the process of finishing said article, I began researching the process of caring for cat litter trays. ADHD procrastination and paralysis is REAL.

The thing is, I don’t have a cat. So I invite you to celebrate with me the miraculous fact of having writing not just this article, but also my fifth collection. […]

If you think that writing a blurb for someone else is hard, try writing your own.

Seriously, try it. There’s a lot to be gained from it. Not only in practicing your skills for concise, original writing – but also, developing a deeper understanding of your own work. If you can’t explain concisely what you’ve written; if you can’t describe what someone may gain from reading it – maybe you don’t know your work enough; maybe you don’t love or believe in it enough. And maybe you can change that.

You don’t have to have written a pamphlet or book. If you’re not working towards publication, or you’re years away from a completed collection, it doesn’t matter. Just pull together a bunch of your writing; say 10-50 poems.

Read them; make notes. Identify your primary concerns, the recurrent topics and themes. State – at least to yourself – what your strengths are, how a kind and interested reader might describe your voice. Consider what that reader may take away from the experience of your work.

Writing about your own work will give you a stronger appreciation of your own voice; an understanding of your techniques, your intention, your focus. The river of poetry has its own currents. It will – and should – always take you in unexpected directions – but at the same time, you have oars, you can build your own craft, you can follow a chart. You get to decide what you are writing about, and how, and why. A blurb is a great way to dip into the process.

Let yourself be lavish. Get drunk on your own wine.

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

The other morning, leaving our Mexico City apartment after reading the news, I had the thought, “Everything I do is meaningless in the face of all this violence, and in the face of death.” But then we spent that day in the National Museum of Anthropology, where thousands of ancient objects from the civilizations of Mexico, all made with extreme care, are housed in a magnificent building, also made with care and attention to every detail — and I came back to myself and my purpose.

We are living in a time when the concentration of money and power, ruthless economic competition, and the demand for everything being done immediately are forcing the prioritization of speed and efficiency over perfection and care. Carefulness will increasingly be found in individual and small enterprises that exist more and more outside of, and independent from, mass production. In Japan, master craftspeople are revered as “living treasures”, but there is a real question of whether our western societies will have the capacity in the future to appreciate and preserve not only what artists, craftspeople, poets, and musicians produce, but the traditions, rooted in care and attention, that are the foundation for these arts.

For a long time, we’ve counted on arts organizations and institutions to do this work of preservation, education, and passing on. Not only are those institutions under political and financial assault, but their “gatekeeping” has been criticized as exclusionary and discriminatory — and rightly so. That in itself is another subject.

The point I want to make here is that living in a very different culture, as I’ve been doing for these weeks — one that has had a long history of political disruption, colonialism, violence, discrimination, and economic hardship, and where individuals could not expect much of anything from outside themselves and their communities — makes certain things clear. The vibrancy of the arts here is the result of a choice: people have taken that responsibility upon themselves because they know that art is intrinsic to life. The work that is shown in the National Museum of Anthropology is almost entirely unattributed: these are extraordinary objects that were made by anonymous master craftspeople. Many of the people who live in Mexico today have spent their lives knowing and valuing those traditions more than they value personal recognition. The indigenous woman sitting in the street selling exquisite needlework take pride in her craft, sells it to make a small living, and smiles when she sees that you appreciate it. The older man who takes my hand and draws me into an impromptu salsa in a city street is filled with an ebullient joy that he freely gives to me. I doubt that either of them has an easy life. But I would argue that both are more in touch with their humanity than many of us.

The sickness and malaise we are experiencing in the western First World is a disease that comes not only from the top down — which it surely does — but because too many of us have lost the conviction that art for art’s sake is vital for our own spirits, and for our communities. When we, as artists, buy into the capitalist model, thinking that money, fame, titles and rewards are the measures of our self-worth as creators, we have already missed the point and made it far harder for ourselves. One does not have to be a famous poet to write words that matter. Art and music that lift people up can happen when two or three people get together to make some “house music,” or dance in a park.

Beth Adams, Care

There’s been a good sprinkling of words in my week all round because as well as reading I have been writing. One of my favourite ways to write poetry is when there is a compelling feeling of being pulled to set something down. This week my sister was my muse. We had been talking on the phone and after telling me something she hadn’t told me before she said it would make a good poem if I wanted to write it. I pondered on what she had said on one of my walks and came back with a pretty much fully formed poem. I remembered to leave it to rest overnight as well as read it out loud to check it sounded right before editing it and smoothing its edges. Then I recorded it as a voice note and sent it to her.  We both agree that is has something special about it so I am hoping it will find a home in the not-too-distant future.  

Sue Finch, A DAFFODILESQUE DALEK, THE FIRST MOW, AND THE MUSE

Rather incongruously, I am a member of the French Rugby Federation (FFR) — this is because I do all the admin for my middle son’s rugby club membership — and as a result I had access to early booking for the last game of the Six Nations tournament, which was played last Saturday night at the Stade de France — a huge, 80,000-seat stadium in the north of Paris. Thanks to my prompt use of the booking link, I managed to secure for my son and I what turned out to be amazingly good seats, just behind one of the goals, for a very reasonable sum. […]

Pindar’s victory odes are some of the most sublimely beautiful poems in the entire Western tradition. But they are also, quite sincerely, about sport. We don’t have a Pindar today, but I was struck by how the spectacle and conduct of the match provided in many ways most of the elements of a traditional epinicion. The match itself was preceded by a very impressive show, featuring two men dressed as medieval knights mounted on horses riding onto the pitch (they carefully covered it up first, presumably to avoid the possibility of the players ending up face-first in a pile of horse manure). I’m not sure exactly what they were meant to represent, as there was no explanation as far as I could tell, but the pageant was clearly intended to allude to the long history of conflict between France and England — as an Englishwoman, I thought of Agincourt, but perhaps the French would recall rather the Battle of Hastings.

Pindar’s epinicia, similarly, always have a structuring myth linking the present-day victor and his sponsor to the distant past — generally, Pindar liked if possible to work in Achilles, Hercules or Ajax, presumably as their manly credentials seemed the best fit for athletic victory. But unlike the organisers of the Six Nations spectacle, he had the somewhat harder task of creating in each case a link between a reasonably well-known myth and the specific family, town or island of the victorious athlete and/or his aristocratic sponsor. Partly as a result, Pindar’s versions of myths are often eccentric or obscure, and he may have invented details to suit his purposes. The style of formal epinicia, which generally avoids direct names and narrative in favour of complex allusions, adds to this effect. So overall, the fact that I wasn’t quite sure exactly what story this moving and impressive opening show was alluding to was also rather authentic.

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

Great imagist poetry is distinguished by its ability to immerse the reader fully in the immediacy of emotion. Amy Lowell’s sensual warmth, Richard Aldington’s taut emotional energy, and the deceptively simple yet resonant details of William Carlos Williams all exemplify this tradition. I Am Not Light by Louise Machen (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) demonstrates that same capacity. The collection is arranged in three parts—Into the Darkness, Origins of Darkness, and Into the Light—and throughout them Machen’s urgent, sensuous poems exploit the powerful cultural associations we attach to darkness and light. Darkness appears as a space of turmoil, threat, and uncertainty; light signals growth, clarity, and renewal. Yet in Machen’s work, the two are not oppositional. They are symbiotic. Darkness becomes a necessary condition of transformation, a landscape to be endured before light can be reached. […]

Louise Machen’s nomination for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem feels entirely justified. As Briony Collins notes in her endorsement, there are echoes of Sylvia Plath in these poems, but Machen’s voice remains unmistakably her own: contemporary, incisive, and deeply resonant. I Am Not Light establishes her as one of the most compelling poets writing today.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘I Am Not Light’ by Louise Machen

There’s a folio of 45 Ottawa poets up at Periodicities. 2 of my poems are included, “memento vivis” and “a placebo science” which are ghazal or ghazal adjacent. Don’t miss Michelle Desbarats‘ and Sarah Kabamba‘s and Tamsyn Farr‘s while you’re there. Ooh, and Cameron has a book of essays coming out this fall.

Word from David O’Meara, “When you’re starting off, it’s easier to take writing really seriously while also having a really good time doing it. I want to do whatever I need to, in my writing, in order to be doing those two things simultaneously again. “This matters” plus “This is fun,” the whole time I’ve got my notebook open.”

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

Reviewers, particularly poetry reviewers, aren’t usually paid (the commissioning editor themselves might be an unpaid volunteer so this isn’t a ‘pay the writer’ argument). They get a free copy of the book they review. That’s not to say the reviewer doesn’t benefit from reviewing. They get an introduction to a book they may not have chosen to read or couldn’t afford to buy. There’s value in writing a review: assessing the poems, developing critical skills, learning how to justify an opinion and argue a case. Reviewing is also a way of getting or keeping a reviewer’s name in print in between publications of their own work where the reviewer is also a practitioner. Occasionally a reviewer may be thanked.

There should be no reason to unpublish a commissioned review. A review is only commissioned on books that a magazine editor has deemed worthy of a review. A reviewer has read and re-read the book, written and edited the review, the review has been further edited and agreed. After that lengthy process, which gives the editors and reviewer plenty of time to withdraw if there’s a disagreement about the tenor of a review or the reviewer can’t edit it to the correct length, before the review is published. The writer or publisher of the book under review may ask for inaccuracies to be corrected, but they cannot dictate what a poetry magazine does or does not publish if the references to the book are accurate. A disagreement about the opinion expressed should not sway a magazine editor to take down a review.

It is galling to see a review taken down after publication, when there was nothing wrong with the commissioned review. When Gutter magazine took down their commissioned review of Polly Clark’s “Afterlife”, a review good enough to be used as part of a ‘book of the month’ feature, alarm bells rang.

Alarm bells continued to ring as the review was not withdrawn for reasons of quality or even disagreement with opinions and arguments put forward in the review.

It seems the withdrawal was actioned on the basis of a complaint from a reader (whose name may be known to the magazine editors but has not been revealed publicly) not about the review, not about the contents of the review, not about the book being reviewed, i.e. not for any legitimate reason. The review was taken down because the complainant drew the editors’ attention to social media posts made by the poet whose book was reviewed. While I’m not discussing what those posts were or the views of the poet, this review was withdrawn after agreement to publish for reasons that had nothing to do with the review.

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

Power and authority are at stake when we talk about what makes a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ poem. This is what animates much of the discourse. Without power and authority, the critical judgement of poetry experts has no answer to the popular appeal of Insta-poems and other money-spinning media forms — they are reduced to customers reviewing niche products.

But power and authority is hard-won; genuinely illuminating, convincing evaluations of individual poems and books take time to muster. Meanwhile, there is the constant need to promote interest in those same poems and books, as well as related events.

So shortcuts are taken. Agreement among a small and insular group is presented as widespread consensus. Authority is extended far beyond its natural purview, as when a poet who is successful and well-liked among his coterie, but limited in range, makes pronouncements on the state of the whole scene. Bad poems need to be invented, and need to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the authoritative critic to have a function. What’s more, the criteria must remain somewhat hazy in order to avoid the average reader learning how to consistently apply it themselves. Periodic trenchant denunciations of work that, to the untrained eye, is remarkably similar in character to that which the same critic praises are a smart move.

By the same token, the real offence committed by those editors and activists who rule out work by avowed political reactionaries, or are overly interested in poets’ claims to membership of an oppressed group is that their criteria are too transparent. They make it too easy to jump through the hoops, and in so doing threaten to mortally wound the power of other editors and critics — which is wielded on the basis that they possess an exceptional capability when it comes to judging poems.

Jon Stone, ESSAY / What is a ‘bad’ poem exactly?

2. In the thick of the monsoon, the poem should hold its breath and sink into standing water. In the deepest murk, lie the choicest words. A poem must be an abalone diver.

3. Through mango-hued summers, the poem cannot be shadow. Cannot be shade. The poem should climb up a light beam to interrogate the sun. To look into its eyes. To hold itself up to that light. A poem must sweat.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Things you should teach your poem-child before it leaves home

This morning, I’m thinking about the downside to surprise—the sudden stroke that leaves you fatherless, the burst in the dot-com bubble that evaporates wealth you realize was only ever imaginary, the rollover that leaves your twin brother paralyzed from the neck down. . . . During the summer of 1988, my mother went into an operating room for a routine hysterectomy and woke to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

This kind of surprise has a profound effect on character. Often, during the seven years of my mother’s intermittent treatment, I thought about how hardship turns some of us bitter while others become better versions of themselves. Once during those years, I visited the family farm after my parents had gone dancing. During that season, chemotherapy was having its way with Mother. “Well,” she said to me, “I could stay home on a Saturday night. And be alone with the side effects. Or I can be among friends. I can dance with your father. The music, the company will take my mind off how I feel.”

During the years I lived in Austin, my husband Scott and I became friends with the Houston poet Erica Lehrer. I well remember the time I saw Erica get out of her car for a reading and walk toward us with a cane. A decade younger than I, Erica was a vital, healthy presence in the poetry community. She’s turned an ankle, I thought. Soon she’ll be tossing that cane. Erica’s need for a cane, I soon learned, was far more serious than a sprain. She’d been diagnosed with ataxia, one of three in every hundred-thousand. Also known as Multiple System Atrophy, ataxia is progressive, affecting coordination, affecting speech, affecting everything.

Once on a visit to Houston, Scott and I stayed with Erica and her husband. By then, Erica was using a wheeled walker. She spoke haltingly, her tongue uncooperative. Still, Erica entertained us. She made us laugh. She found humor in carrying a medical document about her diagnosis—to save her from being arrested for public drunkenness.

Yesterday, I pulled Erica’s poetry collection from my shelves. The title says so much about this remarkable woman: Dancing with Ataxia. The poems are sometimes bluntly honest about the grueling losses exacted by ataxia. But never self-pitying, always alive with the resilience that defined Erica Lehrer. 

David Meischen, “I Am More”

I get as close as I can to Turtle, careful to read their body for signs of unease. Turtle does not move, but stares right at me. Or through me. A heft. A mountain. A gargoyle. A carapace of watery wisdom. There are so many ways to describe and honor Turtle. Staring into the ancient, the ancient stares back. Maybe someday I too will be craggy. Maybe someday I too will have deep rivulets across my skin and in them a language of time well-spent. But right now I am soft. My shoulders are worldless. My language, young and unsure.

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

William Wordsworth famously described poetry as “strong emotion…recollected in tranquility,” and that is how I want to think about—or think with and through—this collection of poems by Thomas A. Thomas, a photographer and an extraordinary poet, now the Assistant Managing Editor at MoonPath Press.

Because My Heart leads us down the path of a partner’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the painful decline, to loss, I both wanted to read this book, and I very much didn’t want to read it. Before my own husband was moved into a residential care home, I picked the book up multiple times, but couldn’t make myself continue. Around the first of this year, however, I told myself it was time, and I took it with me to a local café. Once I began, I read it all the way through. Five sections, 29 poems: I thought I could easily gin out a review. Tried. Couldn’t. A few weeks ago, having read it through again, I found my way in. Narrative arc of disease and death aside, My Heart Is Not Asleep is primarily a love story. So that’s the book I’m here to tell you about.

“Around Us,” the second poem in the collection, lights up the two main characters like gods in an ancient Greek drama. They may be on their way to a hard fall, but, reading this poem, I knew I wanted to be there to see it:

A beam of full moonlight falls through the skylight and
graces our pillows, our faces, lights up
dust motes, like stars turning silently above our bed.

Silver lights reflect “high knotty pine ceiling / and the knotty pine walls, each knot / you said, a galaxy.” The poem holds the arc of the whole book, ending with “eons exploded and long gone dark stars.”

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

When I was 17 or 18 years old, we read in class Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem, written in blank verse, retells the biblical Fall of Man — Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden — in over ten thousand lines of verse, first published in 1667. Lucifer, cast into the fires of Hell after his failed rebellion against God, resolves to take revenge by corrupting humanity and its innocent residence in paradise. He arrives into the Garden of Eden and, disguised as a seductive serpent, tempts Eve into eating an apple. She bites, then Adam bites into the apple. Their disobedience to never taste the forbidden brings upon the world sin, death, and shame, and they are expelled from Paradise. But Milton reassures his readers: the divine angel Michael reveals that Christ will one day redeem humanity’s fall.

Last summer, I went to Giverny. Among the purple, and the pink, and the red, and the blue flowers, in the middle of ice cream shops that sold melon and strawberry parfums, there are rows and rows of apple trees in bloom, with green and red apples hanging off the branches, apples of varying colours rotting on the soil, apples eaten by worms, insects and birds. Codling moths and apple maggots laying eggs on apples, living inside apples, feeding and living their lives inside the flesh of apples. Have you ever seen apple trees in bloom? On a sunny spring day, have you seen fully ripe fruit, a pear or a fig or even litchis, placed right next to each other, full and bright? A few days ago, at the Port Royal farmers’ market, where I like to go sometimes, a man cut a section of a mango that could almost have been as good as an Indian mango. 

If I were to choose between god and an apple, I would always choose an apple. But I am one of the fallen people. 

It’s the biting of the apple that makes me human.

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

Read literally, alongside its setting, “You Are Not Christ” might be regarded as a kind of prayer for, and to, the people of New Orleans who suffered during the flooding: a simultaneous wish for strength and softness. It is a poem of tremendous compassion, its employment of the second person performing a kind of compassion transfusion in the reader: Imagine this, the poem insists: the moment of your drowning, of the body overruling at last—as it will—what we call the mind and by which we mean insight, planning, steadfast belief in futures. What you wish for yourself in this instant, the poem reaching into your chest, itself a sort of “strange new air,” is what you’d wish for anyone alive to these same circumstances.

I’ve called this a prayer because it insists on a variety of humility. Both “wonder” and “a need to know” are presented here as separate from actually living, from the need to simply continue doing so; at the same time, the poem predicts, you will not ask after meaning: What, after all, could be the meaning of drowning? What is meaning to the one who ceases seeking it? So unguarded, or defenceless, you become “like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,” but here the simile is load-bearing. You’re not prey, not the lamb—not some Christ figure suffering a millenia-defining passion—but what makes Christ possible.

What can this mean? So we bleat on, Christs against the current . . .

It’s been a difficult month, but I’m still here. Reading this poem now, with the knowledge that a strange new air, of sorts, does fill my lungs, I’m delighted to follow Laurentiis’s instruction. If I read it as a prayer for the already departed, for myself I read it as a kind of spell, an incantation for continuance: “You will not ask / what this means.” This is the way to be ill, at least for me, I have come to understand. It’s also, I’ve begun to suspect, simply the way to be alive. I knew this, in the blithe repose of health, acknowledged it far more than I ever felt it, but now, having run short on the prophylactic illusion of mortal exceptionalism that mostly keeps us sane and swimming, I find I need something else: whatever it is that precedes meaning: that makes it mean.

Vanessa Stauffer, “You Are Not Christ” by Rickey Laurentiis

i have been reading up
on how to become a ghost.
i think i was made to stay
past my welcome in a house
no longer my own. i was born
in the united states which means
i was fed a sick promise
that everything should arrive to us whole.
someone else can fuss with the pieces.

Robin Gow, assembly required

We make such a fuss of the dead. It is as if they’ve gotten closer to god, have become untouchable, holy, sacred, elevated. They can no longer make mistakes or let us down. It’s almost of some comfort when they’re gone, both the good and bad, the tyrant and martyr become stars we gaze upon or curse safe in the knowledge they’re floating in a far off orbit.

The living piss and shit and make a mess of things. They will talk out of turn, interrupt us, upset us with sudden opinions we wish they never held. Half the time we wonder what they’re on about. Sometimes, regrettably, they explain. Worst of all they will show us their poetry. They want us to listen as they read and then, when they’re done, they’ll ask for applause or money or love or praise or prizes. A dead poet will do none of these things. A dead poet rises above such vulgarity, a dead poet no longer has success to suffer, has no further failure to relish. Their work is done. Ours, set to continue as we carry them on, perhaps out of duty or pity or for beauty and the eternal.

I must tell you of the morning I left that house. We – and I say we because he was there too, the dead poet. I had sensed he’d been awaiting my arrival, approached me ghostly when I first crossed the threshold. He was cold and unfriendly but gradually he’d warmed to me. Or maybe I’d cooled to him, met his temperature, adjusted my thermostats accordingly. This is what you have to do with poets, dead ones especially, this is how we must approach poetry. We need to reconcile with it, become accustomed to it, assimilate with it. It requires effort. We must fully immerse ourselves in it.

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

Mat Riches’ poem puts me in mind of Margareta Magnusson’s 2017 book Döstädning: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The aim of this practice is to go through possessions before death to avoid leaving your family with the huge task of clearing them after you have died. Sadly, the experience of many of my bereaved midlife friends belies this, and they end up burdened with emptying entire houses of a lifetime of things whilst also trying to deal with their grief; something Riches skilfully evokes in this poignant poem. I was startled to find out whilst researching this piece that Magnusson died very recently aged 92; I assume she left everything tidy.

As with Anne Stewart’s poem last week, the title is a ‘Ronseal’ title: does what it says on the tin, appropriately enough for a shed poem. It immediately signals either illness or bereavement; “Dad” is not able to do this job himself, and no longer needs the things in his shed. The first stanza sets out the Herculean task, and we share the speaker’s sense of overwhelm as he shows us how: “Tobacco tins of tacks and screws / cover every surface and shelf.” (1-2). The departed dad is of that war-born generation which remembers rationing and never throws anything out that might be useful; commendable in today’s need for sustainability. However, these repurposed tins from the days of loose-leaf tobacco are full of things that have not, in fact, been re-used and now won’t be. […]

If this is a man cave, the man is missing; we are in the territory of absence as presence. There is life here, but it is the sort that contributes to decay: “The spiders have been working hard” (5).

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

I don’t know about you, but when I read this I found it an incredibly uncomfortable, but joyous experience. I knew from reading previous editions that this wasn’t going to be a kicking, and look. I knew it was coming because Suzanna asked me, but even so, until it landed in my inbox on Friday morning, I had  no idea what she would say. How deep is deep (deep, man..), etc.

And I think this is about as deep as it’s possible to get with that poem. As with all good critical writing, I think it teaches the writer themselves something back to them. And Suzanna has really made me see under the hood of my own work. I’d be lying if I said all of the things that she points out were intentional. I’d be lying if I said that some of it isn’t the work of craft and having worked on poems enough now to sort-of-have a sense of what I’m doing (not always, but sometimes).

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

                                              I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

I was very pleased to receive my copy of this poetry pamphlet, published by Jem and selected (with an introduction) by Victoria. […] I have left behind me in England all my books of Elizabethan poetry. Bullen’s Shorter Elizabethan Lyrics, collections of madrigals, that sort of thing. I do have Gardner’s Oxford Book here, and now a Golden Treasury, and Fowler arrived recently, but not my Ben Jonson, my Cavalier poets. No Donne! One manages, of course. First world problems and all that. Still, this was a very welcome addition to my stocks.

Naturally, Victoria Moul has made a very fine selection, and with some unfamiliar poems. The idea is that some of these poems are rarely anthologised. At least two of them, Like to the falling of a star by Henry King and Dazzled thus with height of place by Henry Wotton, are in Gardner, but not in Ricks. (Why Ricks excluded them is a mystery to me, though it’s not his period and it was Gardner’s.) Some of them are in Fowler too. But there are several poems not always available elsewhere and the overall selection has a good balance of the familiar and the unexpected.

Victoria says in her introduction that it was taken for granted in the seventeenth century that a poem “teaches or expresses something that it is helpful to remember as one tries to conduct a decent life.” This is the theme of the pamphlet. Here, in that spirit, is the Henry King.

Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot.

Hot stuff, and really quite modern. Clive James was writing things like that final couplet in his early days. One can mistake this for mere verse, too simple, too gross to be “great literature.” Well, read it again with a real sense of your own mortality. The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entombed in autumn lies—this is the good stuff.

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

Publishing by subscription has a long history, of which the platform that hosts this newsletter is only the most recent example. Once upon a time, publishers would send letters out drumming up interest in a title before committing to print. This continued (and evidently continues) right into the era of commercial publishing, especially for niche or expensive works; Edward Lear was always buttonholing wealthy friends and patrons to support his books of illustrations. There is nothing new under the sun, as the teacher said.

I’m working in a tradition, then. I had more recent inspirations, too. Several small publishers I really admire, like Galley Beggar and Peirene Press, both of which mainly deal in fiction, offer annual subscriptions to supporters as complement to a traditional distribution method, though complement isn’t quite the right word given the scale of the challenge facing independent publishers these days. The subscription seems well suited to poetry: poetry publishing is scrappy, and slow, and it relies on individual risk-taking to make things happen.

The model also suited me because I am doing this, for the most part, in that fabled thing called “spare time”, so wanted to publish in a way which at least felt sustainable, while also allowing me as much time and momentum as possible to find a readership for each pamphlet—or at least, to give each one its moment in the sun. That moment is something that, from my own observations, poetry presses often struggle to create. The model also imposes a limit and a rhythm, both of which seem well suited to poetry. Well, we shall find out.

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

When we sit down to work together, it isn’t just about placing an image next to a stanza. It is about a “shared attention,” temporary alignment of perception, where the boundary between your inner world and another person’s becomes briefly, thrillingly permeable. It’s a commitment to looking together until something new emerges. Our latest collaboration, Feverdream, grew out of Renée’s poems of grief, illness, and the complex physical and healthcare landscape in Appalachia. In this context, attention, when it is shared, becomes a form of care. 

For the artist and writer looking to embark on a similar journey, we’ve distilled our process into a practical roadmap for creating a book that is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

A collaboration needs a foundation stronger than just “liking each other’s style.” For Feverdream, the root system was Narrative Medicine and the bodily experience. Renée spent two years writing with patients in a chemotherapy clinic while her own brother underwent treatment, experiences that profoundly shaped both the content and the process of writing these poems. Sally’s work, centered on the human form, met those poems in a deeply personal space and allowed for word and image to create a reflective intimacy. The body itself is where external and internal meet, and both the art and poems share this embodiment. The body doesn’t belong fully to either world, which makes it such fertile ground for both poetry and visual art to speak to each other.

The Shared Lens: A Practical Guide to Creative Alchemy – guest post by Renée K. Nicholson & Sally Brown (Trish Hopkinson)

In my last post, I wrote about habitat loss and language. I considered how language can act to connect us to the increasingly “lossy” habitat of the material world. This leads me to consider how language itself, language as a habitat in itself, is also subject to the depredations of the modern world. I do feel that language as a habitat is under threat. It is being taken over by corporate and other geopolitical sources of power.

In Uwe Pörksen’s conception, according to Andrew Sweeney, “plastic words” are “words that have become supremely abstract though being stripped from their original context or meaning.” I can’t help but imagine a further process whereby microplastics have entered language like they’ve entered everything else. Language is suffused by capital, technology, commodity. In the contemporary world, it’s hard to find an outside.

If feels like, down to its bones, language has become entangled. Of course, language has always been implicated, forged, through power relations. Made from the societies it is part of. But something has changed with virtuality, AI, and the acid rain of the contemporary media panopticon. We’re soaking in it, Marge.

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Depth is the culprit hastening shrinkage,
meltwater and the salty layer

drivers both of change and loss.

We measure warmth and the salinity,
quantify the calving and new fracturing,

conclude our lack of means to stop
makes faster flow and level rise,

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

No slow surrender, they to land.
No adaptation, for us no plan.

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

I studied with a famous poet when I was in college. I took two poetry workshops with her, and it’s safe to say that her approach to critical reading and revising made me a much better writer. It also made me into an editor, and that led to a long career in journalism. Although I was writing and editing prose about tech, I used skills I had developed in those poetry workshops every day: Close reading, attention to nuance, an ear for rhythm and flow, a sense of structure and drama, an ability to hear what’s left unsaid or what could be said better. 

But for about ten years after college, I wrote no poetry at all. She was such a sharp critic, and her voice was so powerful and distinctive, that I could not write a single line without hearing her comment on it. Fairly or not, I imagined her voice as a disparaging one, and it discouraged me from continuing to write my own work. Without explicit assignments, I simply couldn’t get started. 

My way back into writing for myself (poetry and otherwise) started with haiku. I found the form was spare enough, and modest enough, that it could slip past my internal poetry sentries. 

Haiku are extremely short, and the form eschews most of the tools used by modern poets: Metaphor, overt allusion, excessively self-conscious wordplay, direct descriptions of emotions. It is a self-effacing form, Zen in its origins and aspirations. I found I could write haiku about the plum petals in my daughter’s hair, an orange-brown leaf twirling down next to a Calder sculpture, a flock of crows crossing the space between skyscrapers, or the moon rising over a neighbor’s house. I might not have been writing great poetry, but these little moments satisfied my need to connect with the world and to express myself. Then I found that the words on the page set up a kind of resonance that started to shake loose the rust and get the poetic wheels turning again. 

That gave me enough of a charge to keep going. I discovered the haibun (a form mixing prose and haiku) and from there started experimenting again with longer poems and essays. 

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

Belfast Twilight – haiku, senryu and micro-poems, Liam Carson, Salmon Poetry, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-915022-96-7, €12.00

Upward Spiral – haiku and senryu, Tim Murphy, Red Moon Press, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-958408-73-5, $20.00

It appears that Irish haiku poets are like busses; they arrive in twos. And while my previous reviews touching on this genre have focused on women poets (think Maeve O’Sullivan and Rosie Johnston), this time it happens to be two male writers, one based in Ireland, the other in Spain.

The inclusion of the word ‘senryu’ in the subtitles of both collections raises some interesting questions around what the haiku/senryu distinction might mean in the context of urban-dwelling, 21^st century English-language poets for whom the urban landscape is more present than the natural one and whose world is more defined by human behaviour than the motion of the seasons.

In Japan, the distinction began to dissolve with the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s and 40s, with works like Sanki Saitō’s airport haiku and his war poems which were derived from news reports rather than direct experience. These poets also tended to dispense with the standard kigo (seasonal identifier words) that typified traditional haiku. And so the lines became blurred. […]

I’m tempted to link Carson’s use of assonance to his positioning of his work in a distinctly Irish tradition. It may be fanciful to hear an echo of the Celtic Twilight in the book’s title (less so, perhaps, given the Jack Yeats poems), but the Irish literary link is most forceful, unsurprisingly perhaps, in a set of five haiku in the Irish language under the title ‘Séideann An Gaoth’ (The Wind Blows). One poem in particular has a very specific and resonant allusion to the Early Irish:

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

It’s impossible not to be reminded of the widely translated 9^th century poem often referred to as ‘The Blackbird of Belfast Lough’ behind these lines, particularly given the broader Belfast connections in the book:

Int én bec
ro léic feit
do rinn guip
glanbuidi:
fo-ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg,
lon do chraíb
charnbuidi.

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

Along with, perhaps. a hint of the tale of ‘Buile Shuibhne’, the mad birdman of Irish legend. The poem also resonates with Carson’s English-language ‘nature’ haiku, quite closely in this example from ‘Island Haiku (Árainn Mhór)’:

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

Belfast Twilight is a fine collection, full of quiet moments of delight.

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

I’ve had an interest in translating poetry for as long as I can remember. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the B’nai Zion medal for excellence in Hebrew, largely on the basis of an independent study I did with Professor Robert Hoberman for which I produced translations of biblical, medieval, and contemporary Hebrew poetry. If I am ever able to locate those translations, I will publish them in a future issue of On My Desk Now.

If I had to trace my interest in translation to a single point of origin, though, it would be to the year in junior high school when I-don’t-remember-which-rebbe encouraged our class to buy the ArtScroll edition of Shir Hashirim: The Song of Songs, so that we could better understand “the most misunderstood book in the entire Tanach.” Because the ArtScroll translation was allegorical, he explained, it revealed the text’s true significance in a way that translations based on the text’s plain meaning did not. I don’t think I understood at the time what the word allegorical meant, but I was in for a shock when I opened the book. I understood Shir HaShirim to be a book of sometimes quite erotic love poems, the beginning of which is usually rendered as something like “May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The same verse in the ArtScroll version, however, is translated like this: “Communicate Your innermost wisdom to me again in loving closeness…” Many years later, I would discover a podcast episode in which the host offers a really interesting, philosophical, and very-much-worth-wrestling-with justification for the allegorical translation. At the time, though, my only response to what ArtScroll had done was anger, since the only purpose I could discern for their allegorical approach was to obscure the eroticism of the original. Ever since then, I have been fascinated by what’s at stake culturally and otherwise in why and how a text gets translated from one language into another.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Translating Korean Poetry

Selecting one Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem is no easy task because of the depth of her work. But, I settle into “The Bean Eaters,” one of her most visible poems, mainly for the poem’s richness as a love poem but also because of its sharp contrast to much of today’s world. The lines point toward a future that has dissolved aloneness: “Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day”. They go about their lives, always moving in the same direction. This is one of the secrets to their shared life. They’ve become accepting of their moving together.

What’s gained isn’t the accumulation of material things – though their physical world is always present to them – but the gain is in the actual living. There’s repetition, surely – they “keep putting on their clothes / And putting things away” – but the writing shows this more as a natural flow, as an order to their world, rather than actions or fear that have trapped them. There’s no real glamor in the simple things that surround them, that give them comfort, but Brooks makes clear the lasting value of this life that is theirs. It’s their world on their terms.

This is also a beautiful poem about memory, about aging. The “twinklings and twinges” that are the real stuff of living a full life – are significant because they’re shared. The pair is busy at work – nurturing their love, taking in the necessary source of life that will allow them to continue. Happiness finds itself in the intimate simplicity of chipware, creaking wood, and tin.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters”

Tonight, at a literary event at Parnassus with our author Laing Rikkers, I met up with Major and Didi Jackson. I also met a woman who told me she would like to be a poet. I asked the woman whether she had ever studied poetry, and she said no. I asked if she had read much poetry, and she said, “Robert Frost.” It’s a good start. Robert Frost is a man of letters, well-loved for a reason. But becoming a serious poet requires reading, writing, and living with poetry. Going to readings is a part of that journey. I grabbed dinner with Major and Didi after the reading, and I thought about how being in the company of great poets—having an artistic community—is also part of the building blocks of a creative life.

The building blocks of a creative life aren’t really blocks at all. I like to think that what moves you toward a creative life are nonlinear, wild spaces you wander through that might add up to a creative undertaking. […]

What you don’t want to do is carry invisible suitcases with opportunities you didn’t get. I didn’t go to a good college. I didn’t have the resources to go to Breadloaf or any other writing conference. I could take stock all day, but it doesn’t help me write my next book. I’m working on a different frame of mind when it comes to creating a life that centers on artistic work.

All the men on my list started the race way ahead of me; that’s a fact. But if I stop to complain, I’m not in the race. And it isn’t a race. For them, maybe it is. They are building a Literary Career.

I am walking out into the clearing and finding my writing self. That creative self reads, writes, dreams, arches toward sunshine, swims, stretches, trains for greatness, learns from mistakes, is crazy and afraid. In my writing life, I’m not clawing my way out of the bottom of the well. I’m walking the clearing, finding my way toward creative work, soul work, publishing work, body work, family life, dream life.

Expectation is everything. So, young woman who wants to be a writer: Read a lot. Create a writing schedule, and make it flexible enough to adapt when work and caretaking pull your attention. Send out work to literary journals and magazines at least once a quarter. Try to spend some time with other writers or literary professionals. If the people in your life don’t take your writing seriously, get some people who do.

Most importantly, don’t compare yourself to others. Writing is hard enough.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Clearing: The Thrum of a Creative Life

Last night’s rain still lines the undersides
of leaves, and the lamps on the street have not
yet gone out. I am always standing in the in-
between, one hand folded around a dream, the other
raised toward the shape of a decision. My ear
turning toward the last place it remembers
an animal once stopped for water.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem with a line from Linda Gregg

So I have these boxes of postcards and letters I’ve received decades ago, ticket stubs, hard copy photographs that are so badly out of focus or dark, but there was no option but to keep them as they may have been the only record of an event. My analog past I can’t bear to throw out. I’ve been scanning some of them to print in photobooks. I love the accidental finger, the overexposed blanch. That’s who I was, I barely remember her. 

In the midst of this paperwork bog, I’m trying to write poetry about happiness and where I find it. Finland has been voted happiest country again and my writing group has decided the theme for our next anthology will be ‘happy places’. So with war everywhere, job insecurity, my kids growing up and a lack of happiness where I am, I’m looking backwards, trying to remember what happiness looks like. 

Gerry Stewart, Wallowing in nostalgia is better than red tape.

Here in Seattle, though so far it’s been cold, I love to see the cherry blossoms and daffodils that are the first heralds of spring. Also, more birds popping up. I’m hoping I can make it back up to Skagit Valley some time in April though my schedule is packed with book clubs, the Poetry night at J. Bookwalter’s restarting with a feature with Kelli Russell Agodon and her delightful new book from Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, and more medical appointments that tend to come around in my birthday month for some reason. (Does this happen to you too?)

I really like celebrating National Poetry Month—it’s nice for the world (and myself) to put a little more attention on this mostly neglected art form. Do you look forward to cooking something in spring? I love the influx of fresh peas and asparagus, and I love the rituals of Palm Sunday and Easter, which always feels like a celebration of chocolate and pastels (even if you’re not particularly religious). The myths of rebirth are generally hopeful, aren’t they? April is also my birthday month—and though I am getting older, I am thankful that I am still here, even for the hard parts. I am trying to adjust to 1) surviving ’til I was 50 and 2) realizing I am, if you’ll forgive a pun, no longer a spring chicken. I am adjusting to the shift into elder mode—along with losing so many friends and family, which seems like a part of aging. I am actually physically in better shape and in less pain than I was ten years ago—food allergies sorted, out of my wheelchair thanks to my MS diagnosis and subsequent physical therapy focusing on balance, and better able to appreciate the smaller joys of life.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Day of Spring, Hawks and Cherry Blossoms, April Rituals: Poetry Month and Birthdays

My Lenten poem-a-week project has been going better than I expected, and I’m grateful that I’ve actually been able to produce a draft poem a week as intended. It’s been freeing to not overly-worry or think too much and just get something written and posted on whatever topic or prompt was occupying my spirit in a given week. But as Holy Week and Easter approaches, I am feeling a sense of needing to slow down and really take time with these last two. They are on heavy topics that I feel extremely ill-equipped to deal with as a poet and a human being, not to mention a somewhat newly-reverted Catholic. Yet they are haunting me, and I feel the need to go deeply into their mysteries. And going deeply into a mystery takes time, silence and attention.

Kristen McHenry, Poem of the Week Interlude, Catana Lives!

So far in this National Year of Reading, I haven’t bought any new books. At the end of last year, my daughter suggested buying Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020) for me as a Christmas gift, since she knew the film was coming out but, once I’d heard the plot involved a child’s death, I said no. Then, when I saw a trailer for the film, I thought perhaps I should have said yes. Then there were advertisements, trailers, clips, snippets EVERYWHERE and I thought perhaps I should have tried to read the book before seeing the film. After that, the onslaught of film publicity turned me off both the idea of the book and the film, but, THEN, my friend Isy gave me her copy of the book, when I popped in to see her and her new baby. So, I started reading and, without meaning to, I still haven’t bought a new book. […]

Although never named as William Shakespeare, Agnes, her playwright husband, and their family live in Stratford-upon-Avon (although the playwright has to spend much time in London),in the late 1500s. The book’s introduction plainly states that it is a work of fiction, so a few esteemed Shakespearian experts who have questioned the accuracy of the story are rather missing the point, in my view.

It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a book. What an extraordinary phenomenon reading can be. I still haven’t seen the film – I think I need a little distance from the effect the book had on me before I book any tickets.

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

It’s World Poetry Day so instead of talking about my favorite famous poets (Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Jericho Brown, Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirschfield – is there anything that hasn’t been said?) I thought I’d share this epistolary poem written for me, something I never dreamed would happen. I’ve known poet Robert Okaji for many years, after we virtually “met” on his poetry blog and mine around about 2010 or so. Robert writes the kind of lyrical, meditative poetry that I could only dream of writing.

Thank you, Bob, for your years of friendship! Here’s to many more.

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

Dear Charlotte: The sun here winces daily, stumbles
across morning before smudging gray like an old slate
scarred with decades of chalk dust and erased messages.
I’m hunting work, and there are days when it feels
as if past experiences have been rubbed out, or maybe
I can’t make myself slog through the powdery white
crusted blend of ennui and discounting youth. […]

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

“Dear March — Come in —,” written in its author’s great creative surge of the early 1860s, feels slighter and lighter than many of the poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) we’ve discussed here before. In this poem, no carriage bears the speaker toward eternity. No life has “stood a loaded gun.” The “frock I wept in” never offers itself to be worn here. But then, we knew already that Emily Dickinson liked March, having read only recently her lighthearted “We Like March,” which dates from roughly a decade later.

That poem of the early 1870s turns on Dickinson’s knowledge of and love for natural philosophy, with its references to violets (which are certainly March’s purple “shoes”), the Adder’s Tongue fern, the sudden nearness of the sun after the long winter, the ubiquity of mud as the snow melts, and the “buccaneering” bluebirds. It is a poem of the out-of-doors, full of the wind and bluster that signal New England’s return to life.

Today’s Poem, by contrast, bustles with a hospitable domesticity, welcoming back the traveler-month after a long absence. March returns like an old school friend, its bluster reduced to mere windedness after a long walk, to be beckoned upstairs for a gossip. In precisely this way the young Dickinson did write to her school friends, with ardent affection, longing always to see them and trade news.

Her speaker’s emphatic tone here — alternately chiding March for staying away too long and turning up without notice, and apologizing in a hostessy manner for not turning the hills purple enough — is underscored by the poem’s meter, a variation on her characteristic common or hymn measure. Here, especially in the first stanza, she has cast many of her lines in dimeter, as though to divide the expected tetrameter in half, an effect that suggests a hostess’s distraction, bustle, and fluster when a guest arrives at a time not precisely appointed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Dear March — Come in —

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 23, 2026)

I don’t think of this blog as being primarily about hope, but hope is certainly an undercurrent. Possibly one of my favourite poems that I’ve ever posted is “Hope is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat” by Caitlin Seida. It of course refers to the Emily Dickinson poem. In her brilliant book on the writing life, Opacities, Sofia Samatar quotes a friend who talks about “doing an Emily Dickinson” which is to say, disappearing from the internet, and who knows where else. And isn’t it tempting?

But then, also, I think of Simone Weil, and unrelatedly, ageism, or being an artist and writer these days, or being someone of the artist class, and this line by Weil: “Indeed for other people, in a sense I do not exist. I am the colour of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.” I think about my goal, after Rumi, to be the one in the room the least in need. (Bad career move, good soul move). And then, I also think about what Anne Bogart says about how “we have something to learn from the person who has not yet spoken.” (This in the context of civic conversation, the hope and the notion that everyone should be heard). I think of the line from Elizabeth Gilbert who said, “no one is thinking about you” — that salve. And it’s true, it’s really true. What to do with these gifts?

I recently quoted Rebecca Solnit on hope and her saying that “maybe the community is the next hero.” And while I do believe that this is the answer politically, I, a bundle of contradictions myself, also crave the hermit life. At the same time, I also wish to be seen, heard. (Generally speaking, the eternal writer’s conundrum/quest — how to be known and seen but also simultaneously invisible). We want our due and not too late, unlike Jean Rhys, quoted as saying at an award ceremony where she received accolades late in life, late in her career, “It has come too late.” In a James Wood essay in The New Yorker, he said of Rhys, “She lacked hope, but never courage.” In truth, most of us are unlikely to win any awards.

Ah well, it’s courage that’s the thing. It’s not time we lack, said Adam Zagajewski, but concentration. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all in equal measure, hope, courage, concentration.

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

Go green. Green light, go. Green thumb deep digging in flowered earth. Greenhorn morning wet behind the ears. Green promise. Green renewal. Greenbacks riding cash cows in green-dawn calm. Green hornet. Green goblin. Grass is greener where envy grows, green screen sky edit me a ton more trees. Green frog rap, green moss nap. Green apple. Green peas. Green light, go get me more world peace.

Rich Ferguson, Green

‘Rosie Jackson and Friends’ gave a short reading of poems celebrating kindness on Saturday evening at Rook Lane Chapel in Frome. It was the final event in a week-long Festival of Kindness co-ordinated by The Good Heart, a volunteer-led community group. The chapel was decorated with local schoolchildren’s kennings on the theme of kindness.

From left to right in the photo above, the line-up was Morag Kiziewicz, Stephen Boyce, Tessa Strickland, Rosie Jackson, Ama Bolton, Michelle Diaz, B Anne Adriaens, Rachael Clyne, and hidden behind me is Dawn Gorman, reading for Claire Crowther. We had a wonderfully attentive and responsive audience of about thirty. Rosie selected and sequenced the poems with great sensitivity. The programme included three pieces by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Some of the poems featured personal encounters, while others responded to appalling recent events. Morag’s poems celebrated the kindness of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. One of Rosie’s poems was addressed to the schoolgirls who were killed during the first wave of air-strikes on Iran. At the end, Rachael led us all in a short Buddhist meditation. […]

Yesterday skylarks were singing above a nearby field. This morning the sky above me is full of the noise of military aircraft. I have heard this sound twice before in the past forty years; the first time, the target was Libya. The second time, it was Iraq. What can fifty minutes of focus on compassion do to counteract the daily horrors of these terrible times? Perhaps it effected a small change in us. Be kind to yourself, dear reader, and do no harm to others.

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: cave fish, unnamable muscles, the armpit of the fire, an abandoned glass factory, and much more. Enjoy.

My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems. 

Lori Witzel, Shed

As a young BBC business reporter during the first Gulf War in 1991, I was attached to the rolling Radio News service known as ‘Scud FM’, a reference to Iraq’s powerful Scud missiles. Reporters like me (see the young me in pic) would scuttle down to the rolling Radio 4 studio and throw ourselves in front of a mic to answer the eternal question : what’s happening on the oil markets?

I would talk breathlessly about the latest price of Brent Crude and what had sent it up or down, prices at the pump, inflation and interest rates. […]

It is amazing to me how a few words from a news presenter can instil mild feelings of panic in so many of us.

That’s true even when the real economic effects of a headline have not been felt yet. We go through the same cycle of emotions, distress at the human disaster of war and muted fright for ourselves. And it is the familiarity, the repetition, that hits our neural buttons – we have felt it before and we will feel it again.

When I think calmly about the wider phenomenon of repetition, I see its potential as well as the downside.

It is sound and echo, expectation and confirmation. If you put it in a poetic context, we gladly use it all the time. It is one of our most important aural (and visual) tools. Think of tools such as villanelle, sestina, pantoum, anaphora and epistrophe.

It pushes powerful buttons in our minds and makes us listen more carefully. Something repeated is always going to be something significant. It may be a warning.

In the real world, when history repeats itself, it usually is. 

Lesley Curwen, Repetition and Gulf Wars

The men who killed poetry

Hated silence . . . Now they have plenty.

Quoted from Larry Levis, “Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966” in Larry Levis, The Selected Levis | Selected and With an Afterword by David St. John, Rev. Edition (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000, 2003), pp. 62-63

Maureen Doallas, The Sunday Quote

Sharp crack startles the room
vegetation maps forgotten
we regard each other

And then the fighter jet howl
and Tehran
suddenly seems next door

Chris Clarke, Letter From the Desert: Ajo

I keep returning to May Sarton’s description of the “poignant evening light,” and the strange shape of poignancy when pronounced — how it goes from the stillness of poignant to the shimmer of that added “ancy”, a sound that reminds me of a city called Nancy in Alsace-Lorraine.

My first glimpse of bears rutting occurred in a park in Nancy, not far from the lycee named after Chopin where I spent part of my seventh grade year unlearning the stability of language.

Today, the adjective “poignant” means “evoking a keenly felt sense of emotion, especially of bittersweet sadness or regret.” But the archaic meaning of this word — “sharp or pungent in taste or smell” — also appears regularly in poems.

And there is the prick of it as well . . .

Alina Stefanescu, “Poignant” in a poem by May Sarton

It is no surprise:
Dove flies,

Startled
By an approaching human.

Light, smooth as a pebble
Minus the few feathers discarded in fright —

Luciana Francis, Dove

Eight of us met in Bron’s print studio at the Dove on Saturday to critique new work and work-in-progress for our upcoming exhibition at ACEarts in Somerton, featuring new work by the nine active members of Artists’ Book Club Dove, and a selection from guest artist Fiona Hingston. If you’re in the area, do come to meet the artists on Saturday 21st April 11am to 1pm. […]

where nothing happens
the women worry
the men play golf

two colours going
down one side and up the other
a third is the overlap

this is the Grand Canyon
put it on white
put it on black

Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2026

I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace. […]

Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months. I must add the not-quite-random fact that both Ama and I have had poems published about dental hygienists!

Matthew Paul, Beetle in a box

When Kim and I set up Shaw & Moore, both of us were in the final stages of our next collections, and neither of us were convinced that we weren’t just seeking distraction from the monumental tasks of drafting, ordering, editing, setting out, proofreading and the hundred other vital jobs involved in finishing a book.

We probably were, but it’s worked out well all the same. We intended to share our journeys towards completion and publication, whilst reflecting on our lives as poets and parents and friends, our various enthusiasms, the challenges we face as poets with ADHD.

Inevitably, the Substack has evolved and expanded over the last two years to encompass many shiny, sharp or fascinating things which have distracted us along the way. As my therapist says, it’s not that I lack attention – it’s that I have too MUCH of it. I am constantly distracted by the world.

Kim’s new book “The House of Broken Things” is finished, and it’s due out on 23^rd April. You can pre-order it here, or you could come to the afternoon launch in the Wainsgate Chapel on the hills above Hebden Bridge on 3^rd May, where she’ll be supported with readings from me, Amanda Dalton, Carola Luther and Malika Booker. There’ll also be live music and cake – tickets available here.

Clare Shaw, You were the forest and you were my mother

Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, Substack…Which feel useful to you instead of like distractions, or worse, something that makes you feel worse, that drains you? I am contemplating this as I am trying to decide where to stay, which to cut, where to spend energy. As you can probably tell, I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I don’t really want to stop now. This is where I feel most comfortable.

I was thinking about how I follow writers, artists and musicians—like I learned about the Aimee Mann concert from a post of hers on Instagram and the last piece of art I got I learned about from an artist’s Instagram post as well. I hear about books from my writer friends mostly on Facebook—but books from authors I don’t know—it’s harder to pin down where I hear about them. The next time I have a new book, I’m not even sure what social media network will be working, not run by a supervillain, or where writers and readers congregate. I do know that I keep in touch with friends and family on various platforms—even LinkedIn sometimes (yes, I do have an old profile there). It shouldn’t be hard to cancel one social media or another, but somehow, I just keep hanging in there, posting once in a while.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprise Snow, Aimee Mann and Daffodils in Mt Vernon, and Social Media Musings

in a zen temple
near Arashiyma, an old man
dragged neat lines down soft gravel

nothing else stirred
cloud and bird and leaf and eye and breath
paused to watch
though later, each one would swear
that they had seen something different

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stuck on a hospital bed at fifty-six, mortality mixing with the saline in my IV, I wondered if writing poetry would be a good use of the time I had left

I gazed upon several astounding pieces, one after another encased in a glowing, golden light, a rotunda filled with Surrealist alchemy. My she-roes on full display, the intensity and intricacy of each painting and photograph I beheld with new eyes, though I’d seen a few of the Varo pieces up close at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen in Chicago many years prior.

And yet, one solitary painting stole my heart, captured it, and left me thinking for the rest of my journey: “The Inner City” by abstract expressionist / Surrealist, Alice Rahon.

Rahon (another Gemini) was a French-born Mexican poet and artist who used the technique of sgraffito (scratching into canvas or metal) in her work. Like Frida, Rahon suffered a serious childhood accident which put her in casts and affected the rest of her life: one of the injuries was a fracture in the right hip, which forced her to recuperate lying down for long periods of time (like Frida). Rahon was invited, with two other artists / writers, to visit Mexico by Andre Breton and Frida. (Rahon was the first female to be published in Editions Surréalistes in Paris in 1936; as well, she and Frida had become fast friends).

One of Alice’s poetry books, À même la terre (On The Ground), featured a poem in which a woman “removes her face / safe from the traps of mirrors”. And another line, almost describing the painting (done years later): “Like the ember with blue down / in the armpit of the fire / that speaks in sparks”.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Inner synchro-cities.

Canadian winter is not the only reason we like to come to Mexico City in March. We love being here when the city’s iconic “purple trees”, the jacarandas, are in bloom. For northerners like us, the very idea of a purple-flowering full-size tree is astonishing, and enchanting.

Beth Adams, Jacaranda

HOPKINSON: There’s something surreal and completely sad about seeing a poem for only a second and then having it wiped away by technology. I think I’m crying and excited at the same time. What emotions do you hope participants will experience?

MEDSKER: Haha! I hope that people feel startled, then sad, then excited. It’s an exercise in being present. Something I’ve struggled with every day of my life. Ugh!

HOPKINSON: Why poetry?

MEDSKER: Poetry is sort of the way I think now. Condensing a slew of complex feelings and observations into as tight a space as possible. Their economy lends itself to accompanying a photo on a smartphone.

Composing the photos is the big feat for me. I’ve always wanted to be adept with visual art. Hopefully this will hone my eye!

HOPKINSON: This could be seen as commentary on the whole concept of social media, the lack of tangibility, the short attention span of humans, or the fleeting connection of life to art–is it any of these things?

MEDSKER: Absolutely. It’s a direct comment on the digital glut we live in. I don’t know about you, but I get overloaded with info very quickly. And it just turns my mind into a fragmented mess. It’s comforting, in a weird way, to know that these poems and pictures can be experienced but not held on to. I think that’s the real key… that these are meant to be experienced, not consumed. And there’s a difference between reading that statement and actually experiencing it in real time.

There’s this assumption that people have, I think, that we can stave off death if we work hard enough, care enough, consume enough… I hope this project helps people to be more contemplative about the fleeting nature of experience.

I have been doing a lot of pictures of flowers and wildlife. Sometimes I’ll throw a curveball like a thick metal chain on a gate or something. An old brick apartment blocks in the Bronx. The photos are often just something I think looks interesting and has a tangential relation to the words. Hopefully the juxtapositions are interesting to people.

I am always on the lookout for something to snap, and then I come up with the poem on the fly. I don’t like to fret too much about the lines. It’s a direct conversation between me and one other person, so I like to keep it intuitive.

Trish Hopkinson, Disappearing Poems on Instagram – Interview with Josh Medsker

Each of the poets involved in the project, which was designed by Gill Connors, was sent a poem as part of a chain and asked to write a poem in response to it. I remember being excited when I saw that a poem had arrived in my inbox. I purposefully did not open the email until I had time to be at my writing desk with a dedicated time to think and write because I was keen to capture my response as cleanly as possible.

Firstly, I read the poem on the page in the same way that I read all poems that I am meeting for the first time. Then to increase my interaction and feel for the poem I read it out loud to myself. My usual way of starting the drafting of a poem when I know I am going to write is to use a fountain pen and a notebook. On this occasion I jotted down the parts of the received poem that resonated with me most strongly and let my mind take these thoughts for a walk. I found myself focussed on plate spinning, things imagined, and the passing of time. An idea began to emerge around the comments related to the t-shirt and the fact I had invented a persona that was beautifully fantastical.

Once I have ideas for a poem, I like to swap to typing into a word document so I can chop and change words and lines easily as the poem takes shape. Forming the whole on a clean page helps me think. I used this method to form a solid draft before rereading the poem I had received to find out if I could sense a link. I decided that I could, and that the evolution of a new poem from one read was happening naturally and in that sense, it was good to just go with it. After spending a little more time drafting and editing my work and reading it aloud, I left it alone overnight.

Sue Finch, STUNT GIRL

As there is habitat loss in the world, so my sense of the habitat of my body feels reduced. Fragmented. The points of contact feel diminished. I’m virtual, a ghost floating over place, even as I understand how my body is written on by its environment. That what my body is is a result of its entanglement, its symbiosis with the ubiquitous network of materials and forces it lives in.

I look to language to help me understand. By putting pressure on the language I have access to, I hope to gain insight into how I am entangled in environment. I use language for points of contact with the world, points of interpretation for that contact. Speaking or reading my way into a more aware connection with the world. My habitat is being lost, so I attempt to rebuild it by finding a home in the words that help me relate to it. Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt becomes Umwort. The environment constructed through an organism’s awareness of words.

Gary Barwin, Language as habitat, as ecotone,

According to Lawrence Beaston in Talking To a Silent God: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and The Via Negativa, the Holy Sonnets, which Donne wrote between 1609 and 1610, render a spiritual struggle that many contemporary readers find troubling. For these readers, Beaston asserts, the “note of despair” the poems consistently strike is “out of keeping” with Donne’s position not just as an Anglican priest, but also as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Given the spiritual leadership Donne was expected to provide, Beaston goes on, these readers expect the Holy Sonnets to arrive at some version of “spiritual health.” Since the poems explicitly do not do that, he argues, since they actively resist such a reading, to find them wanting on this account is to fail read them on their own terms.

Instead, Beaston proposes a reading that places the poems in the “long tradition of Christian mysticism,” known as the via negativa, which “insists upon…the vast difference” between God and humans not as a reason for despair, but as evidence that God “work[s] to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” In this view, Donne’s speaker becomes a “penitent individual…beseeching God for some spiritual grace,” despite the fact that he receives “no apparent response;” and God’s silence becomes not an occasion for the speaker’s “despair,” but rather the poet’s way of representing God’s “radical otherness”—the impossibility of rendering God’s presence in words. Read in this context, the homosexual violence the speaker calls down upon himself, metaphorical though it may be, becomes a final, desperate act of abject surrender, offered in full knowledge that God will neither accept nor reject it; and the speaker should be understood as being fine with that, in the sense that God’s response is not his goal. Having arrived at the point where he can surrender himself in this way is.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 4

Cruel, needless death: arms, legs, dismembered
Bodies, all blasted in a heavy cloud of dirt
And blood. The wounded horses we could shoot,
But for the human beings we had nothing.
This was the enemy that we would fight.
We made our camp, and after darkness fell,
By lamplight our commanding officer said
Heads down, my boys, spirits high, you’ve trained for this.
We’re now at war. When you shoot, shoot to kill.
We stood, and grabbed our packs, and marched into the night.

Brad Skow, Prelude to a Storm

The latest title by Montreal-born Olivia Tapiero [performing virtually next week as part of VERSeFest] is Nothing at All (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), translated into English by Kit Schluter, and published with a Foreword by Anne Boyer. Nothing at All is a collection that Boyer describes as “a vital, accruing, distributed process.” “The threat precedes me. The chkoumoune,” Tapiero writes, via Schluter’s translation, mid-way through the collection, “the shour, which my grandmother pronounces zhor when she tells me about the spells the crumpled spirits impose on those women who attract the evil eye. One morning, in a village where the wind drives people mad, her mother wakes her up screaming, forbidding her to look in the mirror: the zhor has disfigured her, her childlike features have drained from the right side of her face.” Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves. Set in sections of self-contained but interconnected prose sections—“Black Hole,” “Now You Say Nothing,” “Letter,” “Here I Am, a Dull Transplant,” “Zhor” and “The Unthinkable Orifice”—Tapiero’s precise, prose abstracts on and around war and memory, family story and upheavals read as echoes of works by the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021) [see my review of her most recent here] or even Canadian expat Nathanaël, asking, precisely, what one inherits through such a history, and one so deeply present.

rob mclennan, Olivia Tapiero, Nothing at All (trans. Kit Schluter

Peter Dent’s Previous consists of five titled short prose poem sequences, each of five numbered sections of three lines of text. The poems are made up primarily of oblique observations of the world in a language that is simultaneously hermetic and transparent, or flickering between those two states. Here’s an example, the fourth part of the opening piece, ‘States of Undress’:

No fraternizing with those at the top who keep mouth-to-
mouth records in high duty alloy files marked LATER.
Think freely. Sleep it off in the comfort of your own bed.

No one sentence necessarily leads to the next, and yet, taken as a whole, they cohere as a series of near-impossible imperatives; ‘think freely’ is as reasonable an instruction as ‘don’t think of an elephant’, for instance. But the overall effect is not unlike, say, a condensed version of 1984.

Billy Mills, Two Peter Dent Pamphlets

My debut collection (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) explores an era of change through the speaker’s relationships with people and the world. The symbolic juxtaposition of light and dark runs through these poems to highlight the contradictory nature of our experiences and subsequent transformations at different stages of life. It suggests that darkness is a necessary, if not temporary, state as we face grief, doubt and despair – one that will eventually give way to hope, freedom and a light that shines through personal growth.

The title poem, I Am Not Light, serves as a thematic hinge as the final piece in the first section of this three-part collection. This poem began as an observation of a pair of curtains that had faded through exposure to sunlight. This image and the first line of the poem sat with me as I ruminated upon the ideas of physical and emotional transformation through loss. The “sun-bleached” curtains became a metaphor to explore aging, memory, and the gradual alterations of identity, ultimately suggesting that fading does not erase value but creates a more complex sense of self.

Drop-in by Louise Machen (Nigel Kent)

Let us turn first to that evergreen truth: the only time poetry ever makes the news is when poets fight. It’s never because someone’s written a great poem, or an unusually terrible poem, or a poem which has upset the authorities enough for them to bite back. (We could try writing something they couldn’t get out of their heads; that would annoy them. Aye, sorry; crazy idea.) No: it’s always ‘poets at war’. You may have noticed a couple of recent news stories involving two journals, Gutter and Aftershock, both of which cancelled work when they later discovered its author or subject held opinions that were offensive to them.

It’s all a great shame. There have been positive signs over the last couple of years that our fractious little community is slowly coming back together after a period of unprecedented and often horrible division. Many of its architects, however, remain in positions of some administrative influence. As peace slowly breaks out, we can expect to see them directing some rearguard action.

It’s almost comical, for those of us old enough to remember how it all started: a good faith attempt to correct for biases in poetry publishing that had obtained for as long as anyone could remember. For countless decades in the UK, these had operated primarily and most egregiously against women; poetry had also shut out the provinces, the working class and ethnic minorities. By the 90s, things had markedly improved. But from the start of the millennium, this project was subsumed by wave after wave of sociocultural, demographic, technological and economic change. These great changes brought with them new political priorities, but also a raft of peer-group rules and incentive schemes which older artists often found impossible to parse. We watched as our well-intentioned project changed from one of redress to progressivism, from remedial balance to ideological correction.

In the case of poetry, this involved the revision of what was meant by literary merit. Some folk began to tell themselves a different story about the value they found in certain poems. Their critical attention shifted from the skillfulness of the poem to the authenticity of its performance; this was a sign that their cultural attention was shifting from the poem to the poet. It led, in the end, to the creation of two different camps, with each reading poetry – and, eventually, defining ‘the poem’ – in very different ways. You could attempt to belong to both, but not without a lot of mental contortion. […]

It takes very little time to alter the meaning of words. They go to wherever their value concentrates. A ‘good poem’ once meant a poem which demonstrated something like ‘the skilful manipulation of symbols within a word-game whose rules were broadly agreed’. Now I’ll often hear folk use it to mean ‘the work of a good poet’; and in ‘good poet’ I know they mean ‘the kind of person I find admirable, or feel I should’.

Don Paterson, Poets are in the News Again

How
is it a flaw to be moved by the world,
to be undone by what was felled

or disfigured, torn from its bed?
May we be tender through the frost
that comes to kill everything,

the scrubbing after the stain that
reddened the walls and toppled
the chairs to the floor.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Winter Garden

When I first began my study of saijiki, I found it difficult to operate within two calendars at once. The classical haiku calendar, which uses the solstices and equinoxes as the midpoints of the seasons, made more sense in relation to my lived experience. However, the Gregorian calendar guides the country in which I live. Sometimes, it is deeply frustrating to see people celebrating “the first day of spring” when spring has been evident for weeks. I get irrationally annoyed that The Old Farmer’s Almanac – an inherently agricultural text! – eschews the preindustrial boundaries of the seasons and adopts the Gregorian seasonal boundaries. However, my exposure to different religious traditions helped me understand that all over the world, people adhere to different calendars. I’ve of course learned about the Jewish liturgical calendar; life in St. Louis has also exposed me to the Catholic liturgical year, as well as the Orthodox Christian year. In my own personal studies, I’ve learned about Hindu and Buddhist calendars as well. Most people with a specific religious or cultural identity navigate their specific calendar along with the Gregorian one. There’s no reason why a haiku poet can’t do that as well. 

Likewise, my understanding of season words and what they mean cannot be limited to my experiences living in the Midwest and the American South my entire life. I have to recognize that my experience of summer will never be the same as the experience of someone living in Iceland. The world is too big to contain any individual’s limited knowledge of seasons. In fact, it’s too big to contain any one saijiki’s attempts to categorize the seasons. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study saijiki. Rather, we have the saijiki as a foundation that guides our experience, but doesn’t dictate it. After all, even the strictest saijiki won’t refuse to let poets write about the moon in the spring. 

As I wrap up this post, I’m reminded of this enduring haiku from Shiki:

for me going
for you staying—
two autumns

This haiku points to the individual experiences of two friends who will spend autumn in different regions. Today, it has me thinking about how there are in fact innumerable autumns (and winters and springs and summers). That is not to say that we should take a purely individualistic approach to the seasons, but rather that we should recognize the incredible variety within collective experience.

Allyson Whipple, Innumerable Autumns

Here’s something I drafted two weeks ago. A seasonal poem with a hint of frustration and a little relief:

Late February

And I’m awaiting
the buzzards’ return.
Each year
they migrate just
two or three months
then reappear
on their snag perches
and on updrafts,
wings outstretched
to embrace
the sky.
I can’t say I miss them
in winter
yet am glad
of their return
which signals
a tiny season
one wedge in winter’s grip
that says
it is just warm enough
for decay’s odors
to reach turkey vultures’
nasal cavities.
Soon there will be
skunk cabbage
and skunks will awaken.
Here, spring commences
with leaf-mold stink
and buzzards.
Reader,
try to be grateful.

Ann E. Michael, Ides, ideas

The Oregon poet Hazel Hall (1886–1924), paralyzed at age 12 following an episode of scarlet fever, left school after the fifth grade to educate herself at home. Like other bright girls in literary history, left to manage themselves in a house full of books (Anne Bradstreet, for example, comes to mind), she read voraciously. It’s no surprise that as such Modernist poets as Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay began their ascendency, in the 1910s and 20s, Hall not only read them but responded to their influence with poems of her own.

In the course of her relatively short life and poetic career, which included three books of poetry — Curtains in 1921, Walkers in 1923, and the posthumous Cry of Time, which her sister compiled and published in 1928 — she gained a reputation as “Oregon’s Emily Dickinson.” Today Hall shares (with William Stafford) the name for the Oregon Book Award for poetry.

Today’s Poem, “Two Sewing,” takes the severity of spring weather as its overt subject, though its real concern is its own music. Its couplet pairs with their tight rhymes create one level of pattern, in tension with a metrical pattern of predominantly tetrameter and trimeter lines. The poem’s sounds become as mesmerizing as those of the wind and rain it describes.

In particular, the repeated “In, in, in” of lines 5 and 22 strikes in much the same register as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break.” Its three monosyllabic stressed feet, set off by commas whose enforced pauses suggest the missing unstressed syllables in those feet, drive home the intensity of the actions of spring wind and rain. But what’s also fascinating in this lyric is the conceit of sewing, which presents the often destructive vagaries of weather in the springtime as actually constructive, engaged in putting the world back together, stitch by stitch, “for all the springs of futurity.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Two Sewing

I didn’t know this, but when news of his death reached London, around this time, in March but of 1821, thirty-four newspapers published announcements of his death. Thirty-four. Most were only brief notices, just a few lines, but typically they described him as “John Keats, the poet” Not a poet but the poet. The poet.

When I first arrived at Keats-Shelley House, and I say this to you in confidence, I felt a presence. I’m not going to get all woo-woo with you and I’m quite sure I brought a certain energy there myself, conjured something in that space having become intimately acquainted with the poet over these last months, I most likely manifested my own projection of him.

Of course there was expectation, stepping inside that house, stepping inside his house, moving through the poet’s rooms, well, you’d want to feel something too wouldn’t you? And just as, if you’re receptive enough, you can feel moved reading a poem or hearing music or witnessing drama in theatre or film, so it was there, elevated from the page, a vibration, an atmosphere, the essence of poetry. Only without words.

That first evening, after they’d closed the museum, when they’d locked all the doors, after the crowds had drifted away from the Piazza, there was the kind of silence you might imagine being or not being heard two hundred years ago. And I felt it, a sense that I’d interrupted something, had intruded, arrived without invite. The coldness of London stirring in the ancient heart of Rome.

“This is my patch pal, my manor, my gaff” the spirit might have said and yet it wasn’t entirely unwelcoming, more it was trying to assert dominion over the territory, not chasing me out simply deciding whether I might be accepted there, to share the air, bunk in his crib, couch in his cell.

I know this feeling well. This, this is what it is like being a writer, what it is like doing the poetry, among snobs and toffs, in the presence of gatekeepers and taste testers, parvenus and pretenders. They will jostle and muscle and budge but they wont throw you out. Neither will they let you in. The best advice I ever received about getting on in this business was, “Just keep reminding them that you’re not going away.” And so, in order to make claim on the space, I undid my laces, removed my boots, walked bare foot across the night tiles, those same clay tiles that have carried centuries of feet and l felt, if not a connection then a stronger closeness to it, to him, to the poet.

Jan Noble, Nº55 Signals sent from the poet’s house

The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe, 2024) is Niall Campbell’s third full collection, though the first of his that I’ve owned. Campbell is a fairly high profile young-ish/early middle-aged Scottish poet who’s done the sort of things you’d expect for an established poet of his age in the UK: his first collection won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and his second was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Back in 2011, he won an Eric Gregory award, the traditional post-university prize for the up-and-coming UK poet. (You have to be under thirty.) More recently, he took over as editor of Poetry London and his approach to the magazine persuaded me to re-subscribe. […]

I enjoyed the lightly-borne but unapologetic literariness of this collection, with poems referring or alluding to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. S. Graham, Jules Laforgue, William Blake, Borges, Hart Crane, Robert Browning, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare and the Persian poet Farid ud-din Attar. There’s a real sense of a range of experience and reference, reflected in a variety of form that emerges naturally from the “world” of the collection — without that sense that you sometimes get that a poet is making a careful attempt to show us they can do more than one thing.

Naturally I liked some of these poems less than others, and I could have done with a few fewer pieces self-consciously ‘about’ poetry itself. I disliked, for instance, the arch and internet-meme style title ‘Three Folk-tale Characters Who Are Definitely Not Metaphors for the Poem’, but I liked the three poems themselves. They reminded me a bit of similar short sequences of folk-tale-type poems in recent collections I’ve read by Rory Waterman (Come Here to This Gate) and Reagan Upshaw (In the Panhandle), in both cases presented ‘straight’. If a fine poet can’t tell a fairy story, who can? I don’t think there’s any need to add defensive scare-quotes.

I appreciated also the sense of a real range of addressees in Campbell’s book — I think this is a kind of corollary of the range of literary reference. Sometimes a collection contains lots of essentially similar poems dedicated or addressed to a range of people and there doesn’t seem that much connection between the style and form of the poem and the addressee. Here, though, there’s a real sense of speaking in different ways to different people. A moving and understated series of verse epistles, ‘Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage’ run throughout the collection (tantalisingly, numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8, so not, presumably, quite all of the sequence). Written in rather loosely metrical lines, these are some of the most conversational poems in the book.

Victoria Moul, Two good poetry books

The Tattoo Collector – Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press)

“Your train passes a valley –
Mountains around you
are unnameable muscles.
Your insides
shift like sand
as animals go ashore.”

I’d had this book on my ‘to read’ list for over a year and I’m so glad I finally got it for Christmas. Tim Tim is a poet of real skill and deftness. She plays a lot with erasure and other forms where the poem is found from within another text. This is a great way of dismantling and undercutting received narratives, and has now inspired me to try similar things in my own work. I enjoy the precision of Tim Tim’s work, even where she is working within and across multiple languages – the clarity of thought is always there.

Victoria Spires, Some things I’ve read recently – Part 2

I realized at some point during this convention that it’s 20 years since I attended my first AWP, in Texas. I didn’t know anyone in 2006 and approached AWP less artistically than critically: how are the readings and panels framed, and what literary values do those formats express? How do writers represent their affiliations through their performance styles and self-presentations, scare quotes and square coats? I’d been learning how to look and sound like a literature professor, and my attendance, after all, constituted research (I analyzed the conference, alongside other ways poetry manifests in public, in a 2008 scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present).

The 2006 AWP panels, while closely resembling those at scholarly conferences in format, seemed scattershot in quality. The scholar in me was shocked by how little background work some presenters seemed to do preparing for them. AWP panels are better now, yet I attend fewer of them. I’m interested in many of the topics. I’m just running around in my writer hat: connecting with old and new friends over lunch or tea, doing signings and off-site readings, checking out the Book Fair.

In 2026, I can report on only one AWP panel that wasn’t my own. Early on, I lost my hand-written list of what I planned to attend, along with my favorite water bottle, thus ramping myself up quickly to Maximal AWP Disorientation, a condition that eventually takes down many conference-goers. I forgot the time of one panel I’d been determined to make; I got shut out of another, “Poetry and the Sacred” (room at capacity).

The panel I did squeeze into, though, was funny as well as thoughtful. (I couldn’t see if they were wearing thematically appropriate outfits, since the room was full and I sat way in the back.) “Alternative Nation, or Whatever: Gen X Perspectives on the Writing Life” reminded me about the wars, epidemics, economic crises, and toxic prejudices of the late twentieth century AND the mixtapes, miniseries, and problematic literary smashes (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?). Tara Betts talked about reading as a pleasure and a freedom–and how hard that reality can be to translate to her students now. Most presenters addressed the stereotypes of slacker, wiseass nihilist, and the “loser with pointless integrity” (that’s a quote from Matthew Zapruder’s poem “Generation X,” discussed by B. K. Fischer). Paisley Rekdal described the literary culture she entered as a Gen Xer: creative writing workshops, mostly taught and enrolled by white people, characterized literary subjectivity and political engagement as naive, anti-intellectual, and anti-aesthetic (a position espoused VERY strongly in the scholarly world, too, where only the avant-garde among contemporary writers seemed to be breaking into the canon). Rekdal cited Cathy Park Hong’s influential critique of this attitude in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde”. (I flashed back to the modernism conferences where male Language poets in leather jackets held court in the hotel bar.) Gen X writers, according to Rekdal, went on to break down some of those attitudes and open a lot of doors–but remarked that our generation is also responsible for the current accommodationist ethos in universities. I’d like to hear a whole keynote by Paisley Rekdal one day. As I might have put it in the 80s, she’s wicked smart.

Lesley Wheeler, Square coats: AWP & Shenandoah

everyone has their own private capitalism
like a daughter in their coffee cup.
a hand beneath a pillow. the self without
any lungs. the little hunger that eats the dark.
mine is a gone flavor. something marketed
with shiny teeth & iridescent packages.
mystery flavor the color of cave fish.

Robin Gow, limited edition flavor

Do you ever wake up wondering how to live? I don’t mean in the face of terror and imminent death, as so many around the world are facing in this war torn world, I mean just the daily ordinariness of getting up and getting on with things, whatever those things are. I look around and wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, something that I don’t know about or have forgotten. And why. I wonder: Is despair a reasonable response to some days’ unfoldings, or is hope the only way to go? Is gratitude just a way of distracting from doing the vacuuming? When is trying to make something happen worth doing and when is it folly? And do you only know when you’ve either succeeded or failed? When is desire just a failure of gratitude and when is it a useful engine for change? And when is effecting change a useful effort and when should you just sit still and breathe for a while? And when have you been breathing and sitting still for too long like a scared rabbit and you should just go make a run for it? These are things I wonder some days. Dysphoria, c’est moi, as a natural state of being, some days. More days than I care to admit to. So, sometimes, poems can provide some momentary stay against all that. I said “momentary.” There’s only so much poetry can do. Here’s a little prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his book Kitchen Hymns, from Copper Canyon Press.

Marilyn McCabe, When the wren wakes I’ll ask

Li-Young Lee is a strong poet of family – creating throughout his works an atmosphere of home that is vivid and inviting – even when he conjures up the small terrors familial relationships can display. The image of father looms in several of his best poems. In “Eating Together,” Lee focuses on the absence of father, or, more precisely, on the family space the father once occupied.

The poem, which melds the tenderness of family with the ache of loss, begins with the rich smells of a shared meal. I like the attention to detail here: “slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.” The “we” of line four gives the family a hallowed moment – this is the clearest descriptive I can write for how I react to these lines – a moment made warm by their gathering around the table for the meal that is surely a good-bye to the dead father.

The physical motions of the mother, probably addressing her own grief, recall the recent past, tasting

“the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago.”

Human action in most of Lee’s works, certainly in this poem, takes on an almost sacred presence. This meal is such a beautiful setting, made even more sharp and direct by the use of few words – and it’s perhaps the brevity, with nothing wasted, that shapes the poem’s impact on the reader – definitely this reader.

In the closing lines, however, the warm scene surrenders to the cold inevitability of loss. Lee finishes the poem with a powerful simile for death: “a snow-covered road / winding through pines.” The loss is real and is felt in the depths of the silent, snowy road – a strong poetic visual that recalls the isolated but compelling winter images by the artist Hiroshige Ando. It’s the final line I can’t escape – a road with no travelers but “lonely for no one.”

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Li-Young Lee, “Eating Together”

Swaddle them in manuscript.
Mold them with the soft indent
of pen, of ink, jet-black as their hair.

Your characters will be their playmates,
your stories their dreams, woven
for them like any toy a mother weaves
from scrap yarn, remnant cloth.

When they taste simile and metaphor
they will be glad to have a literary mother,
glad for the sweet drip of language
over lips and tongue.

Renee Emerson, Literary Mama

There is an idea that more people write poetry than read it. Often, this argument is made by people who edit poetry magazines. Most recently, Sam Leith has made this argument, in response to this Note worrying that the Venn diagram of people who read and who write poetry is a circle.

To a certain extent, this is just the sort of exaggeration one expects on the internet. But it is important to note that the idea is false. According to NEA data, something like 9-12% of American adults read poetry. That is some thirty or forty million people. In the UK last year, over a million books of poetry were sold.

Now, maybe these numbers have changed from earlier times, but do we think they are very much higher than in the past? There is simply no way that these millions of people are sending poems to magazines. That is not what the editors’ anecdotes suggest. They are seeing the multiple submissions, the prolific minority, the enthusiastic “Sunday poets”, but they are not seeing the silent readers, who don’t talk much about their reading, let alone write about it, who don’t go to readings or workshops.

Theirs is an understandable point of view. Beleaguered editors are inundated with submissions from people who do not subscribe to the magazine, but all the people reading Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive, pulling down an old favourite from the shelf, discovering a new poem as they scroll—they don’t need or want poetry magazines. (Maybe they should, though: Victoria Moul reviews some options if you are interested…)

A lot of poetry magazines, we must be honest, are full of poems that not all poetry readers want to read, either because they will read them in books and anthologies (or online) later on, or because there is never going to be much of an audience for the work. These magazines are part of a winnowing process, in which many readers will not, understandably, wish to take part.

It is reasonable to think that we must have flourishing poetry magazines of the old-fashioned sort, but lots of poets publish online—some of them here on Substack!—and they do just fine.

There are still plenty more readers than writers of poetry, they just may not be reading what the editors wish them to read.

Henry Oliver, Do more people write poetry than read it?

favourite corner
the cat takes ownership 
of the sun

Jim Young [no title]

I woke in the middle of the night with the germ of this poem circling inside my head. I got up and sketched the bare bones in the light of a street lamp.

HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR COUNTRY

• start with the teachers. Make them mouth your new lies. Fashion the curriculum until it mirrors your twisted logic and hate is triumphant
• control the media. This goes without saying. Pass laws that make truth telling illegal.
• silence all who dare to disagree. Show trials can be effective, as can framing the innocent. If this fails fall back on the death squads.
• have neighbour inform on neighbour, brother on sister. Offer incentives to ensure that none will know who they can trust.
• once all this is achieved, begin to purge those closest to you. The corruption you have condoned will provide real evidence.
• try to sleep at night, if you can. 

It is an angry poem. How many times have individuals sought to destroy democracy? Probably since we invented democracies. This is a work in progress. I worry it is too hectoring, far too much tell and not enough show. Plus it is essentially a list poem and it is difficult to pull off a list poem without it sounding simply a list!

Paul Tobin, HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR OWN COUNTRY

I got an MFA in Writing years before I went to rabbinical school. (Thanks, Bennington.) Writing is my other vocation, and a lot of my identity is wrapped up in that. I know that rabbis are exhausted — the last several years have been a Lot. I know not everyone has time or capacity to develop the literary skills I hold dear. And yet hearing that some (many?) of my colleagues turned to AI for sermon help filled me with uncomfortable feelings.

So I sat with that. Why does this bother me so much? Here are the seven answers I’ve landed on. […]

AI is good for large-scale data processing, and for things like searching medical scans or DNA code for markers of disease. AI translation tools can be useful in medical settings, especially rural ones (and especially in conjunction with live human translators who can offer nuance and context.) AI is good for automating repetitive tasks. And some of these things are probably worth AI’s current environmental cost, though I still think we need to figure out how to exact less of a price from the earth.

But writing, painting, poetry, composing…? Not a chance.

Using AI to create art (and in case this needs to be said, I see poetry, sermons, and divrei Torah as art forms) bothers me both because we risk the atrophying of our artistry and because creating art is something human beings can do. An AI can mimic the product of a human heart, but it is fundamentally not the human heart. I fear that something spiritual is lost in us when we outsource our creative capacity in that way.

I wouldn’t ask an AI to help me write my poetry. Or to write a love letter, because what makes a love letter matter is not the information therein but the stumbling, imperfect, human expression of its author’s heart. And that’s also why I wouldn’t ask an AI to write (or even to help me write) a d’var Torah or a sermon.

Rachel Barenblat, The words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart (or: why I refuse AI)

This past week, I managed two nights sleeping on the cold floor of the Pittsburgh Airport. I am a pro at airport sleeping. One flight was at 6 a.m., so it wasn’t worth getting to a hotel. As I settled in for the night, I remembered getting up in the night at the Farm, all the kids who used to wet their beds. I did not because I did not drink any water. The kids who got thirsty would wet the bed because they were lonely and cold. I found myself in that same cold in the airport, sleeping in my clothes with my golden coat draped over me.

Earlier, as I wandered through the airport, I got word that there was a thing about a cover. I needed to talk with an author about a cover change, and the production team was feeling exhausted because they had already tried out so many covers. What to do next! I listened. I registered. I called the authors. I solved the cover. To me, that’s a tiny problem. Yes, we must have a great cover, but of course, we will.

The big problems that keep me up at night, whether I’m on the floor or in a bed, are raising funds to keep publishing poetry, and fundraising in general. I want to keep our poetry program alive. Find new board members. Build the editorial circle. Pay the bills. I want the authors to love their covers as well, but keeping the machine going is the wheel on which I turn and turn.

Kate Gale, The Story of the Summit: Finding My Footing in Risk

I wanted a break from schmoozing and talking to strangers at the writing conference. But that did not happen. He introduced himself as Thomas and I learned that he is a mythology professor at a university in Ohio, so of course he liked my response to the writing prompt from that morning in which I spontaneously took my legs off my body, planted them in the woods, rendering my torso a trunk writhing with cicadas and in wonder of watching my legs grow amongst the trees as the years go by.

The four feet of dark, gray space between my childhood home and the neighbor’s house. The abandoned glass factory near the Allegheny River and its grimy floor covered in ledgers, the handwriting within them almost impossible to decipher. The Allegheny River and its pits of gurgling mud and green riverside oases. The wooded edge of anyone’s backyard, away from the crowd of the party, where I have seen red fox, mice, and of course the birds. The forbidden, dangerous landscape of railroad tracks. The dark tapering world of my childhood home’s closet, well beyond the hanging coats, the sound of people looking for me as they go up the creaking steps above my head. All my life I have been drawn to the lonely, dark, once-was places. Away from the adults. Away from my peers. Knee-deep and stuck in mud. Entering abandoned mine shafts like a reverse birth. Decades-old exhaust grit lining the part in my hair and crunching between my teeth as I walked hunched-over in abandoned turnpike tunnel ventilation shafts. All my life, I’ve felt out-of-place and alien to nearly every person around me, even my closest friends. All my life, I’ve laughed at and belittled myself around them so that I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

Earlier that morning, in front of an audience of just under 100 people, a celebrated poet called writing for one’s self precious. I hadn’t heard that word in a negative connotation since my MFA program about 15 years ago. You don’t want for your writing to be precious. It is precious to say that you only write for yourself when you actually mean that you fear rejection from an audience. Listening to this poet, I allowed my mind to groan and roll its eyes. I am guilty of just writing for myself. It is something I have done nearly all my life. Right? I allowed what he said to steep in my mind as I sat through the morning’s next panel discussion. I thought of an interview I once listened to with the writer Ocean Vuong as the guest. He talked about his books being “sent down the river,” meaning that once the book is out of his hands and in the public, the book takes on a life of its own. A life he cannot control. I thought of my own writing and how when I release it into the river, it just spins in circles and bobs back and forth from shore to shore, always within reach of a long net that I carry in my hands.

Sarah Lada, I Can’t Put My Teeth Together And I’m Seeing Stars

when you say,
Give me silence,
purify my sour heart –

I prepare yellow gills of liminal poison,
brush damp earth from caps
scented of hoar and musk,
slice then grind under mortar and pestle
emetic fungi, season with butter and salt.

[…]

This poem was inspired by the 2017 film Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. If you’ve never seen Phantom Thread, it’s a dark and twisted story of a haute couture dressmaker played by Day-Lewis whose structured life is upended by a chance meeting with a waitress played by Vicky Krieps. Her ability to perfectly remember and serve his large and detailed breakfast order intrigues him and is the spark that begins her role as muse, model, and lover. Their relationship gradually turns to the dark side with scenes of fevered outbursts and mutually toxic behavior that flirts with death:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open, with only me to help.”

If this is a love story, it’s one of masochistic obsession that will keep you mesmerized, if you’re in the right mood for it, as it does have long stretches of silence and drawn-out scenes. There are no nude or explicit scenes because none are needed. There’s also lots of gorgeous 1950s fashion and interiors. A good movie to watch on a chilly, stormy day or on a too hot, blindingly sunny summer day. Milder days are for outside living; nature’s breath on your skin and dark thoughts behind cobwebs in your mind.

Charlotte Hamrick, Roots and Rituals

Our apricot trees are blossoming, 
always the first. Next the greengages. 
Then the cherries. In the Alborz mountains 
behind Tehran the cherry trees blossom

around Nowruz, the Persian new year – 
a time of joy, gratitude, and fresh starts, 
of visiting families and celebrating nature. 

Is this where we can begin to find hope, 
in the things that tie us together, not 
drive us apart? Branches of blossom,
the shared miracle of their fragile scent.  

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary Miracles

snowflake melts.
path’s completed.
somewhere darkness flowers.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: picnicking on ice, clock-time vs. earth-time, the enormity of the world’s grief, the sound of a fountain, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m sitting here, still in bed because it is my birthday and on your birthday you get to work from your bed. It’s a misty morning in North Yorkshire but the sun is breaking through.

Spring is arriving.

Wendy Pratt, Dawn and Dusk Chorus Write Along Sessions

This lake surface is flat-with-rising-places. These are mini alpine mountains, where expanding ice has pushed itself into Mont Blanc-resonant peaks to alleviate the pressure that comes with expansion. There are fissures too and in some places, there are small portholes to the next layers down, and these are mysterious with interlacing crystals and thin pastry layer accumulations. 

We sat, P, L, and I, and talked of rootedness and our lives (which, I’ve just thought, add up to a small-large 188 years). We ate and drank, looking outwards. It was peaceful, and there was a white silence as backdrop to these connections. 

And all the while the sun warmed us without the interruption of a single cloud.

Liz Lefroy, I Picnic On Ice

“April is the cruellest month” is the first line of TS Eliot’s Wasteland, which has always puzzled me. April is bluebells and swallows and hares, the dawn chorus, waking in a downpour of song. April is life returning, showy and cheerful and loud after the white silence of winter, the muted February gloom: “Lilacs/ out of the dead land”.

Which is, I think, the speaker’s problem – he prefers the silence, the soft, quiet protection of snow. Especially when the snow hides wreckage and ruin – Eliot wrote the poem in 1921, recovering from a breakdown whilst Europe reeled in the aftermath of the first World War. And yes, the March insistence of crocus and daffodil can seem at odds with world events, but oh my God, how welcome is that March sun, warm, soft, golden; the first buds on the willow, like tiny paws? So much so that my third collection, “Flood”, contains a response to Eliot’s famous line – you’ll find it at the end of this article.

Clare Shaw, The Cruellest Month is over!

There is no one left to sing to so I
sing to the water: From where do you spring and
how will you slake me?
How long must I return
with jar and tattered rope, bearing
the dry sockets of my bones?

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 4

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.

And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” […]

If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry.

Maria Popova, Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

I have a bit of time here and there to do the activities that nourish me:  reading and a variety of creative work.  I have time to see friends.  My family members are in good shape.

We are bombarded, day after day, with stories of women who have not been so lucky, reminding us that we still have work to do.

I’m thinking of the multitude of poems that I’ve written about gender and history and all of those intersections.  Here’s a poem that I wrote years ago that says a lot about the life of a certain class of women in modern, capitalistic countries.  It’s part of my chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

The Hollow Women

We are the hollow women,
the ones with carved muscles,
the ones run ragged by calendars
and other apps that promised
us mastery of that cruel slavedriver, time. […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Poem for International Women’s Day

Time accumulates and erodes as we spread ourselves thin over work, people who don’t deserve our energy, constant complaints, addictions, and pettiness. Those who step out of Kronos (clock-time) and into Kairos (earth-time) may find that time slows and stills like a warm, shallow sea. Here, when you pay the currency of your limited attention, you will feel how the sun shines down on your face. With your valuable attention, you will notice that the waters are warm and the creatures, they just do their business of making the first pathways on this earth. Please do them no harm. And look at those clouds. Look at how they come undone in their becoming. Soon enough, as always, and forevermore, something big will happen, with or without you. It is all a continuous happening. A continuous genesis of building a becoming and initiating an ending. All of us. Every one. And all the ones after.

Sarah Lada, Orogeny

broken, broken world
or is it me
seeing cracks on still water
seeing wounds instead of flowers
seeing blood where sunset
should drip behind the ears of trees

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Broken

I keep seeing discussion online about how artists and writers function in a world that is, if not completely falling apart in front of us, in danger of toppling.  On one hand, you have those who find the terrors of everyday living have a dampening effect on productivity (even for fun things), a lack of concentration, and a lack of purpose. On the other hand, and this I see too in myself, the drive to keep on going. To keep making and loving and creating something beautiful or interesting in a world that not only doesn’t seem to want it, but fights its very existence. Either through distraction or making things like art less likely in the struggle to survive (metaphorically or actually.)

And yet, art can be sustaining. It can often be the only thing which seems bearable. It may feel like playing the cello while the ship sinks or straightening the beds while the world is on fire, But it is also, in some ways, an act of persistence and resistance. 

I’ve been channeling my energies into the press. Into poems and plays. Into art experiments that have lesser to more degrees of success. These things are surely harder than they would be not under duress, and yet I do them in spite of a world that seems unbearably cruel and deeply stupid.  I suppose that is all we can do…

Kristy Bowen, creative life amid the doomscroll

Maggie talks about poems as a stone we carry in our pockets. I’ve had this one in my pocket a lot lately. It’s a poem by Derek Mahon. He writes:

There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.

I love that line because it doesn’t shy away from the suffering. It names it directly. Loss is real. It’s always been real. But Mahon doesn’t let that truth swallow the whole poem. He refuses to.

I tend to do the opposite. I take the hardest thing I know and carry it into every room. I rehearse it. I turn it over until it fills the whole day. You might do something similar. Most people I talk to do.

But we are not able to solve the entire human condition before lunch. (Probably not even by dinner.)

Eric Zimmer, Guest Pep Talk (Maggie Smith)

The one hundred sixty girls
won’t be watching the long-armed

yellow-bodied machines scooping
the dirt from between white lines

that lessons in geometry would show
make rectangles from imperfect ground,

or how the diggers know just how big
to make the depth and width of every hole,

or even why the digging must go on
once time for talks has ended and azan

— the call to prayer — has come too late.

Maureen Doallas, Who Counts

Updating Descartes: I travel so I can talk to strangers.  Updating Descartes again: I travel so I can reality-check the words of writers’ against the wisdom of Uber drivers.  Using that as a measure, AWP was stupendous!

No wonder we pay drivers to sit in their cars for twenty, thirty minutes, through traffic snarls and horrifically inflated rates.  One driver, slung back in his seat of his Toyota Corolla, reeled off a lovely phrase about not recognizing what privilege is when we have it.  That line could stand in any poem, I said, as I’d been sitting through a lot of poetry readings.  He told me his line was borrowed; I added that we pick up a lot of folk wisdom through pop songs, rap, movies.  He upped me: through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.  

Getting into another Uber, I asked the driver how he was.  “Any day I’m still alive is a good day.”  What an opening line, even if we’ve heard it before. I got to hear about Mamma in rural South Carolina, his 94-year-old mother-in-law, the whole array of sisters down there, the food and beverage that comes with visitors, the testifying, the cigarettes and coffee that fortify the old lady.  He was beaming the whole time.

When I told the first driver about an award-winning book of poetry written about conversations written by a taxi driver, he was incredulous.  “Are you telling me that book won awards?” Indeed.  “Bor-ing,” he said.  “I’d shut that in a second.”

Jill Pearlman, Uber Drivers at AWP

I’d like to so say a huge thank you to Stephen Claughton and Mark Randles for having Matthew [Stewart] and me in St Albans to read at Ver Poets. if you look now, we are at the top of the news page. It was an early kick off (I think to avoid crowd trouble, and not to avoid me having a few liveness/straighteners beforehand – Thank you for that suggestion, Matthew Paul)…I think it was probably the earliest I’ve read, but very civilised. Lovely to read in a library, and to a warm crowd. We both had two slots, one at 20 mins and one of ten, which was a nice way to do things.

Matthew leant into his two collections, including some of the wine poems form Knives. I leant into CtD, including some that rarely get read like Tea Hut. I also tried out some newer poems…including a longer one (for me) that I think acts as a complement to Clearing Dad’s Shed (in a way). Not sure if it’s not too long for a reading, but we live and learn.

We also had an open mic, including a poem from Tim Love who’d made the journey up (Thanks Tim). I did take notes about the readers, but they seem to have got very wet in my bag on the way home, so alas they are illegible…Nay, more illegible given my handwriting. Sorry folks, but I enjoyed you all.

Mat Riches, And roast of all, thank you to you for coming

It might be an obvious thing to say but as far as poetry is concerned… well, my poetry… truth is an awkward subject. Every poem I write has what I believe to be a truth at its core. If I sense that anything I’ve written is dishonest, or in some way fails to tell the truth I intend it to tell, I chuck it out.

That said, the truth in poetry is often hidden behind masks, stray voices, even downright lies. A reader might have to search for it (if you can be bothered). The key, I suppose, is to write something that people feel they want to explore and discover what the particular truth might be.

That’s part of the attraction of poetry for me. OK, I can lie and deceive. Take the Ezra Pound’s Trombone poem I wrote a while back about visiting a museum in Genoa and seeing the legendary man’s trombone in a glass case. It was a piece of fun if you took it at face value but the truth, not too hard to see, was in our need for a quest, in the way we need to find things that feel of value to us, to honour people we might (even begrudgingly) admire. At no point when I was writing did it occur to me that somebody might be so excited by it that they would want to travel to Genoa on an actual quest to find the trombone. When the person contacted me to ask for the name and address of the museum I sheepishly had to admit I’d made it up, I’d never been to Genoa and as far as I knew there was no trombone…

Diane Wakoski had a similar experience when a radio interviewer gently asked her for the background to her poem Some Brilliant Sky from 1972 which begins ‘David was my brother/ and killed himself/ by the sea’. The interviewer was probing for the effect the death of her brother had on her – and on her poetry. She had to admit she’d made the poem up and she had no brother. The so-called ‘facts’ of the poem aren’t the point. They’re the tool which the poet is using to tell their truth.

Bob Mee, TRUTH IN POETRY? WELL, YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT…AND EVEN THEN…

Eavan Boland, one of the most important voices in Irish literature, was as strong a presence in poetry as one can read. Her gift of craft is evident in every poem. Her use of language, blending the historical, mythical, and the personal, is beautiful and startling – adept at drawing in the reader.

The speaker’s voice in “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” is muscular and convincing in creating a moving, lingering ambiance for the piece. The work is the closing poem in Boland’s brilliant collection, In a Time of Violence (W.W. Norton, 1994), and serves as a perfect glance across the acute observation of the human condition that precedes it. A consideration of a poetry that is a manifesto:

“This is not death. It is the terrible
suspension of life.
I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”

Boland forces the reader to consider the world and culture – like the “hammered gold and gold enameling” in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” – that left these fine lines of art among the “curios and silver / in the pureness of wintry light”. The narrator’s voice in Boland’s poem is declaring the “terrible” act of any attempt to confine or limit women to any state short of real.

This is the holy grail of all poetic endeavors – a poetry that defies time, place, and history. A poetry that lets us live in the grandeur and in the tedium, and – yes – lets us die.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

Some of the most enduring poetry in the English tradition draws on classical myth, literature, and folklore. Daniel Hinds’ New and Famous Phrases (Broken Sleep Books, 2025) participates in this lineage with remarkable originality. Although deeply informed by literary history, Hinds never imitates; instead, he revitalises inherited forms and narratives through a voice that feels strikingly fresh, imaginative, and contemporary. His encyclopaedic knowledge of language and literature serves not as ornamentation but as the foundation for ambitious poems that operate simultaneously as homage, dialogue, and innovation.

The Siren Star offers a clear example of Hinds’ distinctive approach. By echoing the seven‑day structure of the Book of Genesis, the poem presents a cosmological reversal: a creation story rewritten as an account of extinction. Each day charts a further step toward the end of human life, beginning with the death of an astronaut and the suicide of another, who “Downed tools / Unlatched the white umbilical cord,” a moment that suggests both the inevitability of mortality and the futility of technological mastery in the face of cosmic forces. As the poem progresses, the erosion of human presence becomes stark—by the fifth day “there were no seeing men left,” and by the sixth, “no women.” These apocalyptic developments unfold within an unmistakably contemporary world, one populated by children with telescopes purchased by affluent parents and dominated by “concrete Cities.”

It is in the seventh day, however, that Hinds turns decisively to myth. The final human encounters “three copper women,” figures who recall the ominous sisters of Greek mythology but are reimagined as “citizens of the sun,” their bodies marked by “three black holes at their necks.” This fusion of classical symbolism with astrophysical imagery evokes the terrifying grandeur of a dying star pulling Earth into its expanded orbit. The title’s reference to the sun as a “siren” encapsulates this duality of allure and annihilation. The poem culminates in the haunting image of extinction described as a kiss: “She lifts his heavy glass mask / And makes first contact with her lips.” The moment is at once intimate, inevitable, and profoundly unsettling.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘New Famous Phrases’ by Daniel Hinds

Maybe this is about darkening pink things, and the power of raspberry jam to evoke involuntary memories. Maybe it’s all in the imprint. One could say the unexpected photograph is a segue into thinking about how poetry moves, or how the distance between the poem’s opening line and the poem’s closing can narrow into a specific yet unexpected place. Maybe I need the ellipses of William Heyen’s “The Berries” to wound their way through me.

Alina Stefanescu, Imprints in absence… and a motif in raspberry.

Darkness pervades each couplet—the atmosphere of fable, of fairy tale—each compact narrative moving inevitably toward the word home, each repetition of this single-word refrain adding resonance to the narrator’s ambivalence about the very meaning of home.

The third couplet features ravens. Given the company this ghazal is keeping—Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson—this reader feels the presence of Poe, subtly established in the previous couplet: “A leaden shadow is tethered to the heart.”

David Meischen, No Porch Light On

“Something In Nothing” uses fairytales, often dismissed as children’s stories, to explore their original purpose: as warnings of the darker side of humanity, as the title poem suggests,

“All the world revolves in it
and it is no more than a grain of sand.
For that is all I have –
a story that is something in nothing.”

That’s what the best stories are: a handful of characters, a few words that conjure an entire imaginary world. How many daydreaming children have been told they are ‘wasting time’ when they were creating a rich inner world and trying to make sense of something that was strange to them or finding safety in a world that felt dangerous.

Emma Lee, “Something In Nothing” Zoe Brooks (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Henry Gould’s work has always been suffused with Christian hope and love, but here it’s becoming ever more urgently the surface of the poetry. There are moments when the writing takes on the quality of prayer, as in these lines from the end of ’17 Fahrenheit’:

It’s taken me forever, to reckon the price
of ancient JUBILEE. Beyond my ken.
God is divine kindness : we must be kind,
cease making war against our kind… and then
restore our sunlit planet – for they praise!
So chants your silver turtledove, O smiling Moon.

Gould’s physical location in Minneapolis has long been central to his work, and this has become even more the case since the ICE invasion. Mayflower Table, a single poem in 22 numbered sections, is at heart a response to this situation, with part 12 dedicated ‘i.m. Renee Nicole Good’ and 17 ‘to the people of Minneapolis’. 12 ends with lines that restate Gould’s ongoing belief in the potential of America:

Sulfurous tyrants grieve us – but we shall not fear:
for we the people are created equal – in the mind of God.

Billy Mills, Two Pamphlets by Henry Gould: A Review

The Rose is the fifth collection from the wonderful American poet Ariana Reines. In the UK, Penguin are publishing it and I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. This is what I like to call a desert island book – a book that you could take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island for twenty years because there are enough layers and ideas to keep you going for a long time. It’s a book that interrogates and reinvents our ideas and preconceptions around female desire, power and submission and argues for the possibility that sometimes there is no easy or single answer.

The figure of Medea (who in the most famous version of the myth murdered her own children after being abandoned by her husband Jason for a new wife) haunts this book in a sequence of poems with the title Medea – none of which tell her story, or at least not in a linear way. The Medea in The Rose is utterly contemporary and mythic. In the first poem called ‘Medea’ of the many that run through the collection, she says “I’ll find another woman / Somewhere inside me /I’ll humble myself / I’ll try”. There is a beautiful recording of one of the later ‘Medea’ poems on poems.org where Ariana explains ‘I kept asking myself what it would mean to be the worst woman in the world.’ I loved this poem for the way it lists all the good things that must be forgotten in order to both endure violence and to carry it out.

One of my favourite poems is ‘Hellmouth’ with its repeated insistence that we must build a secret room inside ourselves. The first iteration of this has such a surefooted line break ‘If you fail to build in yourself a secret /Room’. We must build secrets in ourselves and secret rooms. Later in the poem she writes ‘The little / Room in the middle / Of me. Where I see / What I can’t say’.

Many years ago, I had ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my arm – inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay of course – I longed for a physical room of my own that would be my writing room, but I also wanted to have a room inside myself, a place that nobody else could touch, that could not be controlled or known or owned.

Kim Moore, February Reading Diary

Last week we were away for five days, and just before leaving I picked up a few books to take with me, almost at random, including Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Years (very enjoyable) and C. H. Sisson’s English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (first published 1971). Sisson is always a bracing and engaging read and I was struck by this paragraph from his first chapter, on the 1890s:

Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, John Davidson and Yeats himself were workmen of importance by any standards which would be reasonable in a history of fifty years, and their technical practice was important, in varying degrees, for the writers who followed them. The vague and notorious aura of the period matters less.

None of Johnson’s poems are included in any of the anthologies of English verse I had to hand, and if anyone mentions him now, they generally do so for just those ‘vague and notorious’ reasons to which alludes, and which he then dismisses. Johnson was a sensitive Englishman who wished he was Irish, was taught by Walter Pater at Oxford, became early on an insomniac and an alcoholic, converted to Catholicism, ‘notoriously’ introduced his friend, Oscar Wilde, to Lord Alfred Douglas, and then died suddenly of a stroke brought on by excessive drinking, aged only 35, in 1902. A more wholeheartedly 1890s biography is hard to imagine. Nina Antonia’s 2018 edition of Johnson’s selected writings (which I haven’t read, though the free sample of the introductory biography looks quite fun) is accordingly titled to hit as many of the ‘vague and notorious’ targets of high decadence as possible: Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel. The Amazon summary makes Johnson sound, frankly, unbearable.

A vague sense of all this had in the past rather put me off Johnson. But I was interested by Sisson’s focus, not on any of the seedy drama of decadence, but on his ‘technical practice’. What makes Johnson’s poetry of interest in a technical sense for the literary historian?

So this week I sat down and read Johnson’s complete verse, and found rather a different poetic personality from what I had expected.

Victoria Moul, The saddest of all kings: reading Lionel Johnson

A recent read I have thoroughly relished is this memoir by my friend Sally Evans.

I first met Sally when she invited me to read at her 70th birthday party in Dunblane. Many poets were invited, and the idea was that there would be short reading slots for invited poets, so plenty of variety. It was one of the best parties! The food was fantastic, as was the company. Sally offered me a day of bookbinding lessons with Ian King, and that was my first visit to their incredible bookshop on the Main Street in Callander. So I knew very little of Sally’s earlier life, how she came to be a bookseller, how she met Ian, apart from the fact they had Grindles in Edinburgh, a very well known second hand bookshop, and had ‘retired’ to Callander. So it was fascinating to hear about her earlier life, her work as a librarian, how she came to meet Ian, and how they started their business.

Sally is a very generous person, and this comes across in her writing, as well as her annual Poetry Weekend hosted in Callander, to which many of us flocked year on year, finding the most attentive poetry audience and best book-buyers, as we all supported each other. For me, it was an extension of the 70th birthday party, and many of the same people attended. They were all good poets. When I first went to StAnza in 2014, invited to bring The Lightfoot Letters up by then director Eleanor Livingstone, I had felt rather shy. However, I soon found the streets and the venues were full of people I knew from knowing Sally. (in that way it resembles Whitby Folk Week). People like Judith Taylor, the late Sheila Templeton, late Brian Johnstone, Elizabeth Rimmer, as well as friends from home. Sally is generous about the people who come into the shop, dealing with irritating customers firmly but politely.

Angela Topping, Driving in the Book Lane, a memoir by Sally Evans

You authored a unique collection of haiku and illustrations, titled Faunistics. Would you be willing to tell us more about this book and the inspiration behind it?

Faunistics was my way back into haiku, essentially. I’d had a brief foray in my early twenties but hadn’t quite mastered it and then I got sidetracked with other things. Fast forward to my mid-thirties, and I’d been through a very long period of not being able to write and/or writing trash. I’d always had this goal of publishing a collection of haiku, and had an old manuscript, which I forced myself to dig out, redraft, and publish. As a result, I ended up completely immersed in the haiku community and soon learned to write it properly. The more I wrote, the more embarrassing my old haiku became and most of the original haiku were discarded. The ones that were any good were related to animals, so I made that my focus. I began grouping them by animal type to get a roughly equal amount of each, then grouping them as per their native continents, if not where their population is the highest. Within these continental groups, I divided them up into countries, so that the book is ordered like a page-by-page worldwide safari. I’ve always loved writing about nature. So, this was a good excuse for a deep dive. I think maybe one haiku from my original manuscript survived, but even that was redrafted.

You also co-authored an interesting book with Hifsa Ashraf titled Infinity Strings, which explores much of humanity’s attachment to modern culture, space, and technology. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project? What inspired you and Hifsa Ashraf to write this book together? What did you learn from the experience of writing collaboratively?

A big part of haikai is collaboration. I’d written with a few haiku poets at that time who I’d connected with online. With Hifsa, we started writing on spontaneous subjects. Then, I introduced her to the tan-renga and I recall her getting really excited about the form. We tried our hand at something more experimental in terms of subject and liked the result, and so it snowballed into a potential sequence, then a potential pamphlet, at which point we felt we might as well take it to collection-length. We became obsessed with how far we could go down the rabbit hole and push the collection to its limits. Infinity Strings is the polar opposite to Faunistics. I think it’s fair to say it’s an outlier amongst both our repertoires. It has its own personality entirely, and every now and then we meet someone brave enough to follow its disconcerting path.

Jacob D. Salzer, R.C. Thomas (Richard)

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

Uche: My first book, Dark through the Delta, was inspired by oil exploitation in the Niger Delta and the environmental devastation that followed. Writing that book convinced me of literature’s power to spotlight various forms of plunder of both human and nonhuman worlds. My most recent book, We Survived Until We Could Live, is different, in tone and theme. It’s less ecological and much more intimate and explores postwar memory, historical and family traumas, domestic violence, grief, healing, and love. In some way, both books are still very much about devastation. While Dark through the Delta examines the devastation caused by an oil behemoth and its effects on both human and nonhuman life, We Survived Until We Could Live reveals the devastation of war and its toll on human lives and relationships. I think this book is my most ambitious and certainly my most vulnerable. I couldn’t have written it without the generous support of the entire team at the University of Calgary Press.

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

Uche: I came to poetry by accident, in my late uncle’s house – a biochemist, but an avid reader of literature. He had a storage full of books, including British and Roman poets and playwrights. One day, I went to the storage to get something and stumbled upon a small book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I opened it almost at random, and the rhyme scheme, its imagery, and its lyric intensity captivated me. It’s funny, because before that, I’d never been particularly interested in literature at high school. That Shakespearean moment, or rather, encounter, is what really started me writing poetry.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

i come wrapped in
plastic. tear here. tear here. the tongue
is stuck in the gutter. i fish it out.
i don’t bother scolding it anymore.
instead we go into the kitchen
in search of salt.

Robin Gow, cheese pull

I had an interesting experience recently trying to write a braided essay, that is, an essay that intersperses subject matter such that each thread sheds some light on the others. I had it as an open file on my desktop for two weeks or so, and when thoughts occurred to me on any of the threads, I jotted them down. After a while I braided the whole thing, snipped out some stuff, was kind of happy with it, but thought it might be confusing or confused. Trusted Reader took a look and didn’t like the illogic of it all, so reordered it into more of a sandwich than a braid, and I realized two things. One was that the braid itself lent, to me, interesting energy to the piece, and two, that, all in all, the energy was undeserved, as I really hadn’t logically said much at all. So, I’m walking away from it, wiser, but still like the approach I took, and maybe could use a few bits and pieces again. This is writing work: Look around, think stuff, try stuff, let it sit, revise, wait, snip, relook, get a different perspective, turn it upside down, ask yourself what you think you’re up to, repeat.

I hate the precious idea of a “muse.” Ideas may float like waves of pollen or surge up like the snags of skunk cabbage, they’re not sprinkled on you like fairy dust by some fucking lady in a diaphonous gown. You have to be alert, maybe on the hunt like a mushroom tracker, or a garbage picker looking for discarded treasures. You have to squint your eyes, rest your mind, look to one side of the dim stars. You have to listen through the din for a faint peep. And then…and THEN…you have to figure out how to make something of it. And then make it.

The muses were the daughters of the head god dude and memory. (Which is actually kind of interesting, memory as a mother of muse.) But mythology is just a bunch of made up stories. And those ancient Greeks were just more misogynists who made up female gods but kept real flesh and blood women well under control. So I say to hell with the idea of “the muse.” And yes to the inspiration of being a body-in-the-world, flailing about. And a restless, doubt-filled, querulous, messy, glorious mind.

Marilyn McCabe, Still, I listen. I search

Against the backdrop of Emersonian philosophy, albeit from the vantage point of thirty years’ hindsight, Today’s Poem, written around 1867, becomes, like nature itself, an extended metaphor. It offers a description of the various behaviors of water, but its true burden, like the true burden of nature itself, is to analogize the human mind in all its constructive and destructive potential.

Its twelve trimeter lines begin to resolve, by line 3, into rhymed couplets, only to dissolve again — or to mimic the widening ripples in the surface of the water — by way of an envelope quatrain at the end. In the course of these twelve lines, water, that fundamental element, accumulates sapient qualities, for good or for ill. It begins in understanding. Ask the water what it knows about “civilization,” and presumably it will tell you, if you have ears to hear. Its physical qualities are dispatched in the first rhyming couplet; yes, yes, it can make you wet and cold, but “prettily” and “wittily.” It doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, it’s downright cheerful. At least, it’s neither “disconcerted” nor “broken-hearted,” as the second rhymed couplet, in pleasing feminine rhymes, has it.

Its natural state, in other words, is to be good and ordered toward “joy,” as the third rhymed couplet emphasizes via its repetition of that word. But water’s capacity to “deck” and “double” joy is bound up — as the next rhyme suggests — with its destructive potential if “ill-used.” Its power can tilt both ways. Its beauty should not reassure; “elegantly,” with “a look of golden pleasure,” it may sweep everything you love away. And in the face of the water, as the poem tacitly implies, being of a piece with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the human beholder may find a mirror for the state of his own soul.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Water

Keats was born on the fringes of the city, at Moorgate, spending early years in present day Hoxton, but his school in leafy Enfield and his grandmother’s home in Edmonton close the River Lea provided a rural idyl flush with bubbling springs and swimming pools. Think also of the Fontana della Barcaccia in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, the sound of its waters soothing the poet on his deathbed and offering the source for his epitaph. From his room, restored in Keats-Shelley House, I do not hear the sound of the fountain. By day it is drowned by the bustle and mutter of tourists flooding the piazza. By night, where I am staying, in the room above where he died, it comes, gently and I sense all is well.

I take a shower, wash the journey from me. In the square glasses are being filled and raised, toasts to health are given, drink is taken. We are familiar with the first part of the motto, “In vino veritas,” but less aquatinted with the second, “in aqua sanitas.” While in wine truth may be revealed, in water we find salubrity and I, I have come to seek clarity, to pursue restoration through poetry, to wash the drudgery from me.

I rise early, before the crowds come, before the police whistles sound out in the piazza. I walk a little, ascend the Spanish Steps, alight on one of the landings, lifted but not yet arrived, rising from the civic, between the public and the sacred.

Jan Noble, Nº54 A postcard from Rome…

the breadth 
of a water breath
a sky breath
a mountain breath of
a shore line’s breadth
it was all there
held in a held breath

Jim Young, on looking at a mountain lake

A so-called FB friend (who will remain anonymous, so no fishing!) told me to my face the other day that my promotion of my books was far better than the poetry inside them, implying that I was less of a poet for getting my stuff out there. I can fully understand why a poet might feel uncomfortable about promoting their work, but I can’t comprehend how this might then lead to their denigrating other poets who do so.

I was stunned by his words, though I recovered sufficiently to reply that his attitude was representative of the worst of U.K poetry. Which reminds me. Anyone up for a signed copy?! If so, just drop me an email. The address is in my blogger profile…

Matthew Stewart, Less of a poet…?

I was very pleased to see my poem Canada is as far away as bibles are on After. Many thanks to Editor Mark Antony Owen. You can read the poem here.

After publishes ekphrastic poems and my poem was inspired by The Avid Reader, 1949. Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) was a visual artist, painter, and musician. He made the lightbox in 2011.

‘We see the middle-aged man / carrying a hat, smoking a pipe, / because Graham inhabits him.’

The Avid Reader, 1949 was one of the works on display at Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, the Netherlands in the major exhibition of Graham’s work titled That’s Not Me. An ironic title as Graham appears in all the works – as a builder having a smoke, a lighthouse keeper, historical figure.

Voorlinden is a fabulous museum – more about it some other time.

I was struck by the attention to detail and the scale of the works. The woman is ‘his wife, swing coat, high heels, walks past on the right.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Canada is as far away as bibles are

I collect phrases I like, ones that I hear or read in books. The trouble is I usually do nothing with them. The other day though, I decided to use one that has been knocking about for some time as a writing exercise. I do not remember where the phrase the unpopular provincial museum came from but it sparked this. […]

This one it is claimed won a Bronze,
another a cap for his country,
here it is secure, pinned to the wall,
for the few who visit to see.
It all adds up to a feeling
that nothing has ever happened here,
which given the times we live in,
adds to its attractiveness
and makes it a desirable and safe place to live.

Paul Tobin, THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

After that, we visited the Museum of Things Left in Cars Overnight—

books, random receipts with poems written on the back.

Smells of vinyl and dust preserved under glass.

The Museum of Instructions Without Context was far too confusing,

and we got totally turned around in the Museum Without Exit Signs.

A stranger on the street recommended we visit the Museum of Objects That Remember You—

a chair that recalls your weight, a mirror that reflects an earlier version of your face,

a key that insists it belongs to you.

Rich Ferguson, I’ll Always Remember The Day

My trip to Baltimore for the AWP Conference Book Fair didn’t happen; my immune system decided otherwise, with a resurgence of a nasty respiratory virus and a flare of fibromyalgia. I guess I can look on the positive side and say I saved a lot of money, right? Plus I can purchase most of those poetry collections online, I suppose. Still, there really is nothing like browsing through thousands of luscious books for something that grabs me, that takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Ms. Dickinson. Through social media platforms, I can see colleagues-in-literature making connections and meeting one another face-to-face, which is what conferences are for. Another year, maybe.

And after days of necessary spring rain, drizzle, and fog, the long-awaited thaw eradicated most of our snow. Crocuses bloomed, and bees came out to visit the snowdrops.

I felt much better today and was able to take a walk in the mild sun, listening to robins, mourning doves, song sparrows, woodpeckers, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, house finches, Carolina chickadees, American crows, Canada geese, mockingbirds, cardinals, bluejays, masses of starlings…I watched the high-flown antics of redtail hawks and turkey vultures.

In other regions of the world today, people listen and watch for fighter jets, torpedoes, drones. There but for fortune may go you or I (Phil Ochs). Meanwhile I remain grateful for feeling slightly better as the days lengthen into spring. It’s March–we could still get snow! But the spring peepers sense the warmer temperature and trilled a bit last evening while the great horned owl was hooting. Here’s a poem I wrote in 2012 about DST. […]

I am glad for the extra hour
among long shadows as my dog
chases a woodchuck, as the wood-
pecker pounds in metrical progressions:
trochee, trochee, spondee. […]

Ann E. Michael, Snowdrops

Despite the misleading cherry blossoms at the top of the post, we’re supposed to have cold rain AND snow this week, so spring seems like a false hope at this point, a thing which will never arrive. Winter Blues are a real thing for me in November, February, and yes, March. I wish for some dry warm days to shake up my physical miseries (colds never seem to be made better by cold wet weather, I notice). I missed AWP and saw all the happy pics on Facebook and sighed to myself. I don’t go every year—I don’t have the means, as a non-academic, to do it, even if I wanted to. But the news has also been so miserable, the weather, the fact that we’re planning a trip home to visit a very sick family member…it’s hard to just snap back to my usual cheerful self. I wrote a few poems about how I felt about America. Will these poems change anything? Probably not, but sometimes you need to write them anyway.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Time Changes and Winter Blues with Cherry Blossoms, Academic Women in Pop Culture: Vladmir

We didn’t really plan this, you know. We began, and indeed still persist as, ‘Thrums Chums’ (blame Glenday) – an informal workshop organised around little more than that we are all old pals, and all more-or-less in driving distance of a kitchen table in Kirriemuir, Angus. For your geocultural orientation: immediately behind us is the cemetery where JM Barrie lies buried with Peter Pan; just behind that, the frozen storm-surge of the mighty Cairngorms. From kailyard to eternity.

The advantage of our being friends first is that we don’t feel the need to agree on everything, or indeed anything. We’ve no common political stance or aesthetic. None of us give a toss for ideological compliance, and we would rather run on trust. Differences are good. Besides, what we have in common is far more important: poetry, for some reason, has placed itself at the centre of our lives.

As North Sea Poets (with the indispensable help of Miriam Huxley, our wonderful administrator), we’ve sought to extend that circle of friendship and share what collective expertise we’re accumulated in our many years of avoiding the right margin – whether as poets, tutors, workshop leaders, essayists on Substack, or just as fellow readers. Despite what London or Edinburgh or NYC might tell you, poetry has no centre. Not even Kirriemuir. It’s wherever you’re reading this. The best gift of the digital age is that being remote needn’t mean feeling remote. Now we can all gather in the same place, and yet still be anywhere. While I bang on and on about metonymy.

Don Paterson, A Year of North Sea Poets

Although I try to stay connected with my readers, I haven’t written you in close to three months. The truth is, with all the upheaval in the world these days, it has been hard to know what to say.

On the one hand, I know I’m not obligated to say anything about the news—no one really expects artists and poets to analyze the political events of the day. Somehow the New York Times still hasn’t phoned for my take on the war in Iran! On the other hand, it seems oblivious at best to chatter about my creative projects and my happy little life while the regime is locking up children and murdering US citizens in broad daylight.

How to navigate these dystopian times? I know many of us attend protests.* We’ve got our reps on speed dial. We donate to help people in Gaza, Ukraine, Minnesota. We stay informed as best we can without drowning in the horrors of the day. Yet faced with the shocking cruelty and corruption of this administration, it never feels like enough.

Still, I take heart from these words by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, interpreting a part of the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief . . . You are not expected to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Under an administration that stokes fear and hatred of “the other,” I believe that connection, creative expression, and celebration are all forms of this work. Whether it’s taking in a beach sunset, writing a poem or petting a stranger’s dog, joy is an act of resistance.

copper-tinged waves
trying to fit the ocean
into my camera

Annette Makino, How to move through a broken world?

                            Without 

having known what it’s like to fumble 
through darkness, would the pearl-

light of morning feel less of an 
astonishment? Bodies that bore 

a hundred hurts, that carved of 
themselves an offering. A warbler 

balances on the tip of a branch, 
its weight barely enough to break it.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Blessing

This week: death stuck in traffic, puritans vs. mermaids, an inflamed labyrinth, rain falling on asphalt, and much more. Enjoy.

Today I prayed upon waking
in weak morning light, on this
ordinary day, unkempt
in flannel and cotton.
Peace descended
like a still, insensible animal
laid on my lap, a strange
species I don’t know how to take care of.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 3

To quote T. Swift:

“ All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.”

But things are happening amidst a world in utter chaos and absurdity, a place where I and I imagine other creatives are holding on white-knuckled to artmaking and routines and fighting the urge to run away into the woods forever. I saw someone quoted the other day that it was important to go on making art and devoting time to creativity, that besides the things like protesting, making calls, writing letters, could be one of the most important things you do. Also a documentation for prosperity.

Kristy Bowen, February Paper Boat

I’ve also been wedging my foot in the door poetically while thinking, like Plath, that there are so damn many of us trying to push up through the earth. The poets are using Canva to design posts summarizing their busy AWP schedules: me too. The poets are announcing their publishing milestones via social media and MailChimp: me too. Mycocosmic was published a year ago this week and the “book birthday” post/ newsletter has become a standard publicity genre. That’s fine, poets deserve any little morsel they can scrape out of the attention economy, but it’s hard to do the work lightly. First and foremost: the US is in the middle of an illegal war because a reckless pedophile president needs to distract people. Even without apocalypse (are we ever?), it would be a tonal balancing act: here’s me putting a very slight twist on a “content” cliché. Now here I am asking you to pay attention to my book in a way that needs to be a little wry and humble, because no one likes a pushy writer. Then there’s the tech: good lord, I’ve spent hours trying to format a simple email, is MailChimp going to make me upgrade to paid now?! Curses.

Lesley Wheeler, So many of us!

I have been home in Hastings, looking after my mum and my kid sister. It’s been a tough winter. I’ve been making soup and feeling time plays tricks, how fast it all catches up with all of us. My lovely mum will be ok, but she gave us a scare. My lovely sister is more than ok, she has got all the sticky toffees and caramel promises out of me she can in mum’s absence. I’m now back at my desk madly trying to catch up with books and admin and stuff. It’s a juggle navigating this time of life, this big scary world, this terrible age of distraction, and all this patriarchal fuckery.

Take a deep breath. Here’s a walk along the beach and something from the archives. A love letter to Hastings and those 1980s teenage years. The poem ‘Under The Pier’ was originally written for a walking tour of Hastings, where you would have poetry playing in headphones at different historical and tourists spots in the Hastings area. ‘Under The Pier’ was also the title poem of a pamphlet published by Nasty Little press in 2011. Then later in 2016 this poem featured on the LIVEwire album, a solo performance poetry album, released with Nymphs & Thugs and Matt Abbott – The video was shot on location in Hastings, East Sussex in 2016, the video was filmed, directed, and edited by Jordon Scott Kennedy of Idle Work Factory, and it accompanies audio of a live performance of the poem recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre.

Time is such a trickster, somehow this all feels like last week, and also so long ago now. Ten years have passed, so much water has passed under the pier. I’m gonna see my friends soon, excited to do a show with Matt Abbott and Toria Garbutt next week, so, if you are up in Yorkshire and local, I’m at Barnsley Book Festival on March 2nd, please come, details below, it will be lovely to see everyone again.

Salena Godden, Under The Pier

Acrobat, by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated from the Bengali by Nandana Dev Sen:

Poetry flies away as well,
if you let go of the thread—
it flutters in space like a lost kite.
The poet floats in an infinite void, desolate,
like a spacecraft disconnected from earth,
with no destination.

I’ve chosen these six lines from a poem called “And Yet, Life,” which appears towards the end of this volume—a collection spanning a sixty year career—because their subtext, the idea that poetry is that which connects the poet to the world, is the thread around which my experience as a reader cohered. Read carefully, each poem in the book reveals itself as something that needed to be written, not because the world required it, but because the poet’s consciousness and conscience did. “This Child,” for example, which opens with the line “One day this child too will die,” confronts a question with which children by their very presence ask of their parents: Why did you bring me into this world. Dev Sen’s speaker, “Choking with fear, with ignorance,” tells us this question will make her “run away/to a dark cave, numb and empty” because she has no satisfactory answer to give. In “Growing-up Lesson,” she addresses a boy who fears the requirements of manhood—the most interesting line in the poem, to me, is “Are you terrified of plucking virginity?”—and then offers, as (a perhaps ironic) alternative, the kind of strength and maturity and analogous manhood that can be found in the use of words. In some ways those different but related spheres of concern—that of a parent responsible for a child’s life and that of a woman turning a critical eye on patriarchal gender roles—are the poles between which all the poems in the volume move. In her moving introduction to the volume, Nandana Dev Sen, the poet’s daughter and translator, offers a quote from her mother that I think speaks to what makes this book worth reading as more than just an interesting volume of poetry in translation: “I speak of poetry as being central to woman’s freedom. Yes, I am partial, I cannot be and do not wish to be objective…”

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #52

And then the siren gets closer. There’s nowhere for
the ambulance to go. Cars inch to one side as if the
road is stretchable. As if the vehicle is marshmallow.
Someone jumps off a Suzuki and waves his hands about,
directing the melee. The paramedic shakes his head.
The lane clears. Like a break in the clouds. The
ambulance rushes ahead to the next signal. Death
stuck in traffic. Life wanting a better place to die.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Monday traps

I recently spoke with David J. Bauman on the In Three Poems Podcast about Jehanne Dubrow’s book The Wounded Line, how having a “container” (in poetry, a form, like the sonnet) can be helpful when approaching the difficult subject, though it may not stay in that form in the end. And it’s not just the difficult subject that benefits from limits. Other constraints can push language in previously unmapped directions.

Here are a few constraints to try:

• syllabic limitation (for the poem or the line)
• sound limitation (i.e., an alliterative or anagrammic word bank)
• nonce forms (creating your own rules you must follow)
• grammatical patterns (check this post for an explanation)

When I put constraints on myself, I often discover something: a pleasing color palette or a surreal feeling in a collage. A juxtaposition of words or a rhythm of language that are not in my usual wheelhouse. And allowing those limits to sing in their own way opens up so many possibilities, much more so than a prompt that might ask me to write “however I want” or “explore” a topic. In this way, constraint leads to an expansiveness of thought.

In this way, the limit becomes the sky.

Donna Vorreyer, The Limit is the Sky

Again, I was surprised and encouraged. I’d never seen anyone else write like this. I decided to keep going. I wrote pieces where each word started with the next letter of the alphabet, where specific letters could be lined up to make other stanzas, poem codes where each nth word of a poem could be combined to make a new poem, and poetry using music notation letters that could be played on a piano. Some of these are forms that, as of now, AI writing tools can’t even replicate.

I wrote hundreds of symmetrical poems and kept discovering new forms all because of that first day that I tried something impossible and didn’t give up on it until it was finished. These new “impossible” forms opened up new publishing opportunities for me. Dozens of the poems have been published in various magazines, and I won an award and was interviewed for one of them.

Not only that, but my writing style overall has improved. Writing anything else seems easy in comparison to these “impossible” forms.

I heard recently that in some professions, even more important than consistency, is persistency. A refusal to accept ‘no’ as an answer. If you believe in your work, don’t give up on it, even if—especially if—people think it’s crazy or impossible. Sometimes, as the Wright Brothers found out, stubbornness pays off.

Joshua Kepfer, Try Impossible Things

She sits on the cliff watching the water.
He is a rounded head buoyant in the centre.

Something on the air tumbled by the wind
interrupts him;
eyes and nostrils flick open
revealing stone-black depths.

Sue Finch, SEAL AT ANGEL BAY

It’s a chemo week, so when I say I’m tired: I’m really tired. In the spirit of “letting myself be tired,” as those zany docs like to suggest, this week I’m sharing a poem that first appeared in The Missouri Review. Its companions are paywalled, but you academic types can get to them via JSTOR if you’re interested. (If you’re an editor, you can get to the whole looking-for-a-home manuscript through me.)

I don’t remember much about the writing of this poem and have never felt compelled to keep anything resembling archives, but my email oracle reveals that I foisted it on my favourite first reader in June of 2018, which sounds about right. I was thinking about power, about who constructs the narrative, about who is left out and why and what a piss-off it is. I’d wager I’d recently read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey: Scheria is where the shipwrecked Odysseus is discovered by the youthful princess Nausicaa, who helps the wanderer on his way.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Scheria”

Dear ***** , Arrived last night, on the anniversary of the funeral, when (and do stop me if I’ve told you this story before) in 1821, a small cortège made its way through these very streets at dawn from Piazza di Spagna to the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome where the mortal remains of ‘the young English poet’ John Keats were interred. Yesterday the sun shone, “for the first time in months,” according to a local. I’m quite sure he was exaggerating but his friends seemed to agree, draining their espressos, adjusting their shades in expectation of better weather ahead.

Today it’s cloudy, overcast, just as it was when Johnny K first arrived. I thought I might be overdressed, coat, jumper, hat, still wrapped for a long London winter. I’m told it’s warmer there now I’ve left. I’ve brought the colder weather with me it seems. The sun comes out when I leave, goes in when I arrive. I pull my collars up, think of John, on these steps, out here, on one of his better days, wondering if he’d make it through, last until the better weather came. He brought the clouds with him too. I wonder if he ever considered if it had all been worth it, if he should have stayed home, done the decent thing, got a proper job, been a doctor, married Fanny, raised some kids, slipped quietly into obscurity.

The Piazza is full of tourists. They are all out filming each other, all trying to manoeuvre to a spot where they’ll just get a shot of themselves on the steps and no one else in the frame. None of them are successful, they are all in each other’s photos while posing for their own. Later they’ll all star on each other’s social media feeds. Some pictures will get one hundred ‘likes’, one may go viral, others will get no reaction at all but they will all look the same, more or less, just people standing around in a crowd, being bland and simultaneously incomprehensibly unique.

I begin to move around the steps just to see how many pictures I can appear in, how many videos I can star in. I don’t do anything daft, I’m not photo bombing, I’m doing background work, just filling in, milling around, trying to be as natural as I can. I take it seriously. It’s like writing, it’s like finding that line, trying it out a dozen times until it feels authentic, until it floats unnoticeably just above the ordinary. That’s what I’m doing here. This is what I decide I’ve spent a lifetime doing: floating unnoticeably just above the ordinary.

Jan Noble, Nº53 In a region of mists…

Last night, I wrote this Facebook post:  “In my younger days, I wanted to be a reporter. In my older days, I am so grateful to have a job where I don’t need to stay up for the State of the Union address, although when I teach “Antigone” tomorrow, I may wish that I could make more specific references to the speech. Nah, it’s probably better to keep that class conversation more general: what do we do when our moral/religious beliefs are in conflict with what our earthly rulers want us to do?”

I didn’t need to make a conscious choice.  By 9 p.m., when the pageant started, I was already asleep.  Instead of watching the State of the Union address, we watched A Fish Called Wanda. […]

This morning, my brain returned to the State of the Union address and my Facebook post.  I also thought about my department chair asking me if I had ever taught a journalism class.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  “Before she assigned me the Journalism class, my department chair reached out to me by way of e-mail to see if I’d be open to teaching it. Here’s what I wrote back: ‘I am open to that, although I haven’t taught it. But long ago, in my Newberry College undergrad days, I was an essential part of the student newspaper. We went looking for hot stories, a la Woodward and Bernstein. We never found them, but we had fun just the same.'”

This morning, I’ve been trying to write a poem that combines threads of my Facebook post and threads from my blog post.  I still need a third stanza, so I’ll let my subconscious brain keep working on it while I get ready for my working-for-pay day, the teaching of “Antigone.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, What We Watched When We Didn’t Watch the State of the Union Address

I didn’t set out to write this. I began this piece with the rainless days of 2025 so that I could tell you how they brought a hedgehog to my door, skinny and dehydrated; how I took him to a local sanctuary who nursed him back to health. I intended to tell you how the “Full of Joy Animal Sanctuary” runs on entirely on donations, how I decided to help by running a fundraising poetry workshop to celebrate the more-than-human lives which surround us. On Sunday, 36 participants showed up, raising half of the cost of an incubator for hedgehogs and other small animals – so I decided then to run another online workshop on March 28^th, from 10-12.30: click here. In the meantime, “Full of Joy” told me that Lizzie Holden who attended the workshop, had contacted them to pay the rest of the cost. This means that whatever we raise in this second workshop will go towards a second incubator, where owls and hawks and rabbits and other sick creatures can be nursed. I hope some of you can join us.

Instead of the piece I’d planned, on hot days and hedgehogs – and the saving power of poetry, which gives us the means to save small animals, to express ourselves, to understand the world around and inside us, to imagine a different relationship with nature, to bring us together – I wrote this piece on walking through tough weather, and depression, and my regular return to despair. Sometimes the words lead you where you most need to go, and you have to follow them.

I find my meaning in landscape. Every day I walk, and it’s very hard, and rainy, and dark. I am so tired. Some days I simply don’t want to take another step. I want the path to stop. But then there is lichen, that incredible symbiosis of fungus and algae, through which life first crept on its belly onto the land. Then there is scarlet elfcup, and the drowned Ophelia of sphagnum cuspidatum, and the blackbird resuming its song – and yesterday, the first curlew. And there is always my Niamh, my first light, bright star, my green.

Clare Shaw, Rain, rain, snow

Dear god, I renamed one of my current 9 books at editing phase. Continued editing it, then started editing the old version so they diverge. An overlap of poems but changed edits, deletions and additions. I can convert to text files (more versions, goodie) then run through File Merge app to see where changes are.

Is it still a headache if there’s a solution?

Pearl Pirie, I am Forked

I am nervous about writing this post because I also think there is a lot of stigma around ADHD. In fact, when I rang the doctors to have an initial conversation, he actually said to me ‘Well, you’ve done very well for someone with ADHD if you have a doctorate and you are working at a university’. I was so taken aback by this that I said nothing, but of course people who are neurodivergent can ‘do well’ (whatever that means) especially if we are lucky enough to have a job which allows us to hyperfocus on something we love.

I am starting to understand that my ADHD brain has allowed me to achieve so much even whilst it makes things it is not interested in (chores, housework, paying bills, booking doctors appointments, losing things etc) very difficult. My brain, which cannot rest is the reason (I now understand) why so many of the ideas I come up with (16 Days of Activism, January Writing Hours) have this endurance element to them. It’s painful for me to sit still, so I come up with projects that mean I never stop. My brain also means I can hyperfocus all day and forget to eat – a useful trick when you are trying to complete a book manuscript for a deadline.

I wish I could have explained to that doctor that I achieved my doctorate because I found a methodology that was perfect for my particular type of neurodiversity, that I found a structure for the PhD that embraced the quirkiness of the way I think and allowed me to connect everything in a non-linear fashion. I should have told him that people with ADHD are brilliant and creative and resourceful and resilient – but at the time, I didn’t feel like any of those things. I felt like I was drowning and he’d just put his foot on my head!

Despite all this, I think getting the diagnosis has been a largely positive one. I have moved past that numbness and sadness and am starting to process and make sense not just of the past, but also my lived daily experience now.

Kim Moore, What is an overshare anyway?

Early March, below zero, but blue at least, and the long winter loosing in drips and a rouging of the forsythia. Difficult days of promise and betrayal, of hope and despair, large and small. I cannot get out of my own way, nor see around the muddle in my head. My brain is noisy and clanging. But the sun is leaking through the trees, and small birds move in the thicket. I know what I don’t know, but that does not make me brave. I try to stay present but spin out into what-ifs. Time is water in my hands, but the skin on the back of my hands is dry. I think of the word slake. An edgy word, knife-ish, as if the end of thirst is painful. But there seems no end to thirst.

Here is a poem by Lawrence Wray full of sound, and something achey, like thirst but not quite, like promise but with the possibility of its opposite inside.

Marilyn McCabe, I listen for fraught accords between soil and stalks

Today’s Poem is an eighteenth-century curiosity by the now-obscure English poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756). Classified as a “natural” or untutored genius, Duck, son of a poor and obscure Wiltshire family, had left his charity school at thirteen to begin a life of field labor. A self-directed reader and self-taught poet, he came to the notice and patronage first of a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, then of Queen Caroline (1683–1737), wife of George II, who employed Duck as librarian for Merlin’s Cave, her folly at Richmond Park. Both Pope and Swift knew Stephen Duck, liked him personally for his sincere piety, and — when he was rumored to be in the running as the next poet laureate — savaged him in print for his rhymes. […]

Taking holy orders after the death of his royal patron, Duck accepted a series of clerical positions, burying the second of his wives and marrying a third. He continued to write poems. Everywhere he went, as always, he was popular. In 1756 he died by drowning, an apparent suicide, the man whose name had been whispered as a possible poet laureate, only because everybody liked him.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On Mites (To a Lady)

Like the Romantic poets before me, I believe in the primacy of the Imagination to poetry. You won’t find many everyday or slice of life poems in my debut collection New Famous Phrases. Instead, I deal primarily in myth, in fable, in fairytale, folklore, foretelling, and the fantastic, which for me is where poetry is at its most powerful. This poem, ‘Death by Earth’, is part of the wider aquatic and siren mythology that runs throughout the collection, in poems like ‘The Pact of Water’, an origin myth for humanity’s relationship with nature, ‘The Crying of the Gulls’, a revenge tale of the natural world upon the human, ‘Cryptid (The Myster of Water)’, a poem about mystery, curiosity, and what we do when we find an answer, via the Loch Ness Monster, and ‘Lady of the Rock’, ‘The Sea Chain’, ‘Siren’s Throat’, and ‘Scraps to Daub a Siren’s Lips’, which portray the varying fortunes of their speakers in their goddess quests towards the isle of the sirens, and the reasons for their failures to reach this apotheosis.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about an aspect of the goddess quest in Ted Hughes’s work. It is this goddess quest that forms a framework for my poetics, and it is something you’re going to see me return to throughout my poetry, as I navigate how to reach this storied isle. ‘Death by Earth’ draws on the ideas of Robert Graves and Ted Hughes about the transition from a matriarchal goddess to a patriarchal god, hence the epigraph ‘the stages of his age and youth’, plucked from T. S. Eliot’s poem, which I use to evoke the history of mankind (and I use this gendered term deliberately here, given the events of the poem). Or, as I like to more succinctly introduce this poem during readings: puritans vs. mermaids.

Drop-in by Daniel Hinds (Nigel Kent)

“With My Back To The World” was sparked by an ekphrastic prompt that sent Victoria Chang to explore Agnes Martin’s art and write about them. Martin once told an interviewer, “…when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.” Her art, pencil drawings and paintings, are of grids and stripes often in muted colours. That might suggest regulation, rather than freedom, an imposition of straight lines on a naturally curved world. However, in Chang’s poems, those grids become a way of drawing focus, turning a spotlight onto one small part of a bigger whole. […]

An artist or poet may try to guide a viewer/reader, but ultimately have no control about how a piece is perceived. One person may briefly glance and see a grid, another reads suffering into that grid, someone feeling isolated may only see parallel lines that never meet. Chang is inviting readers to participate in her exploration, to see not the paint or the words but the beauty of the structure and what it might represent.

Emma Lee, “With My Back To The World” Victoria Chang (Corsair Poetry) – book review

Clarity and Light by Jesse Baker
I’ve been reading this book of devotional poetry in the mornings – a smooth transition between bible study and poetry writing. “Devotional” poetry sounds flowery, but these poems are earnest and relatable. Jesse is a pastor whose poems arise out of his biblical study and sermon writing process (which you can read about fully in this Rabbit Room article by the author – but an excerpt I cannot resist including:

Poetry has helped my sermon writing; but, it has also helped me to experience the whole of the spiritual life as a patient, attentive, and prayerful experience of God and his Scriptures. With that poetic foundation, when I preach, I hope sermons have the same effect on listeners that a poem has on readers, that it is seen as an open door inviting people into an exploration of both the text and the God revealed in the text. I also hope the whole of our worship becomes, not simply a chance to learn, but an opportunity for the church to embody their spiritual lives prayerfully and poetically, that they in turn become living poems through which the world encounters the Maker of all things. – Jesse Baker

The collection is organized chronologically, so you could keep it alongside your bible readings and tuck in to the aligning poems (though most poems include a scripture excerpt as an epigraph, so you could read it on its own and understand the context just fine). 

Renee Emerson, Listening so hard to an audiobook I almost ran out of gas but Thankfully Did Not

The world has its unacknowledged legislators – now more than ever – but poetry is the wrong place to look. ‘Unacknowledged’ is still on the money, though. When an AI researcher recently quit his high-powered Silicon Valley job, the BBC reported that he’d decided to ‘look to pursue writing and studying poetry, and move back to the UK to “become invisible”.’ The poetry WhatsApps lit up with the predictably self-castigating glee of the nichist: Poetry? in Britain? That should do the job, aye.

We might imagine the quitter chose poetry as the instinctive inverse of AI. Silicon Valley is everything Parnassus Foothill isn’t: modish, cutting-edge, drowning in capital. When people imagine the meeting of the two, they picture some Bay Area tech bro realising there’s a gap in the market to sweep away all the lazy, complacent poets. That is, what people mostly expect the poetry x AI crossover to involve – getting ChatGPT to write poems about how we’re all numb inside now because of capital, woke and melamine – is in fact the least interesting possible avenue of exploration.

But there are lots of ways the analogical interchange between poetry and AI can be rich, fruitful. Here’s one: the unprecedented tidal wave of investment genAI is receiving is strongly incentivising a whole bunch of maths nerds to think about natural language for the first time, and in so doing presenting strange and novel perspectives which, it seems to me, the poets are currently sleeping on. Why not make use of these odd new materials suddenly washing up on our shorelines? Poetry’s slinking, adaptive omnivorousness has long been one of the reasons it’s never needed to be cutting edge, never needed to drown in capital. It possesses a kind of pre-emptive and instinctual access to the new modes of thinking and feeling which any change in linguistic convention necessarily entails.

And linguistic change is coming. For around 200,000 years, if you came across a sentence, then you knew it had been produced by a human. That changed around 2019. Some believe that the discursive tipping point – at which AI began to produce more new commentary than humans do – came in late 2025. Ways of differentiating machine from human text are becoming paramount.

Joey Connolly, Metrics: Machine-Tooling a New Human Poetry

Birds can learn to fly without studying physics, but poets, it seems, cannot write iambic pentameter on instinct alone. This conventional wisdom accounts for the experts offering to teach the rules of meter, in their many books, The Ode Less Traveled, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and so on, with helpful examples, and exercises whose solutions are not (alas) always in the back of the book. The puzzle is that the rules in those books are wrong—not entirely wrong, nor entirely useless, but wrong in many details, and wrong in the abstract, wrong in the theoretical framework they employ—yet still the poets who study them often end up writing good verse that scans. What’s going on?

The linguists, who have made the study of language, and of poetic meter, into a science, have an answer. While some people learn to scan verse using “rules” they read in a book, others are able to tell—and more reliably—whether a line is metrical without such training. These others are no elite priests; even children learn to sing nursery rhymes. The training for this ability is the experience of metric verse, that is, reading a lot of it, and grokking, inarticulately, what separates it from prose, and (God forbid) non-metric “free” verse. Then one may use the true rules of meter to sort those categories, but here the rules are not available to us in consciousness; we do go by feel. We know the rules the way native but naive and untutored speakers of a language know that language’s rules of grammar.

Are the linguists right about this? Who are they to tell the poets and literary theorists that they misunderstand a core subject of their own discipline? One answer is that they have, or claim to have,

uncovered subtle properties of meter which are so detailed as to be unlikely to be accidental, and also so obscure as to be unlikely to be conscious.

If there are indeed generalizations about iambic pentameter that Shakespeare never violated, but which no one wrote down before 1977, or even had the vocabulary to write down before the 1960s, then yes those generalizations are rules of the meter, and Shakespeare was following them, but he was not doing so consciously. Ask him about them (oh, to ask him a question!), and he won’t recognize them.

Brad Skow, Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing

Here goes a backasswards way of trying to get poetry published, pitching it out on Substack. To my lovely fellow poets thinking ‘What the..?, Submit like everyone else, there’s a queue, you fuck..’ I get it.

But hear me out. One problem I have is that what I’ve written here is a heroic crown of sonnets, or sonnet redoublé, which is too short for all but the most left-field and blue moon random pamphlet subs. Even with a title page and epigraphs it’s 17/18 pages thereabouts. I could wait for the next one in-a-million pamphlet call outs that’ll consider something so short, or I could do what I’m doing here.

Faint heart never won fair maiden. Gah, the dreadfully important nonsense that is poetry, that it should come to this.

The other problem might be the subject matter, stained by stigma, and riddled with ridicule, that is, until fairly recently. You may be forgiven for not noticing that UFOs and ‘aliens’ are having a bit of a moment, sufficient to permit their institutional rebranding as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and NHIs (Non-Human Intelligence). Arch-bozo Donald Trump has even waded into it with promises of revelations, no doubt to divert attention from the Epstein files.

What snagged my interest, and left me wondering why it was met with a cultural shrug, was the dread word uttered by senior intelligence whistle blower David Grusch in the US congress, when asked, “If we have recovered craft, do we have the bodies of the pilots?” To which he responded that yes, non-human biologics had been recovered. There have been three congressional hearings and multiple attempts at transparency legislation since the 2017 NYT article that set this current kerfuffle in motion.

I would urge anyone to avoid the rabbit hole that I threw myself into. At best it’s a bewildering hall of mirrors, with bad actors, a desperate counter intelligence operation losing its grip, a weird coterie of wannabe messiahs, grifters and charlatans. On the other hand, we could be on the brink of the most ontologically significant moment in all of human history. Steven Spielberg certainly seems to think so, his upcoming summer blockbuster, ‘Disclosure Day’ looks set to make our collective skin crawl with gnawing unease. Surely poetry could layer the confusion and ambiguity inherent in what’s referred to as the topic’s ‘high strangeness’ in ways no other form might be able to attempt. That was my brief.

James McConachie, A Straight-up Poetry Pitch.

Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning? 

This might be unusual, but the titles often come first. I love titles. I love the act of naming something. It’s like a generative exercise. A perfect example of this is my poem “Antediluvian,” which is the last poem in Citronella. I was curious about the period of time in the Bible between the fall of man and the Great Flood — what I came to know as being called “antediluvian” (or “pre-flood”). I began asking myself, what happens in a moment of banishment? How does one feel looking back at a place called home while simultaneously seeing some strange land on the horizon? It was the first poem I wrote for Citronella, but in doing so, I knew I’d already written its ending. I wrote towards that closing with the other poems; led the speaker all the way to the edge of that cliff.

I don’t think I’ve yet figured out how books “happen.” But I can say this: the more I write, the more I understand how my poems interconnect. It was clear to me when I had enough poems for my chapbooks, and it was clear to me when I had enough for my full-length collection. […]

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? 

This is a big question, and one that could be answered in no less than a hundred different ways. I see my own role as a writer as being a sort of truthteller. In Shakespeare’s plays, the truthtellers often operate on the margins and in the fens. Think of the Fool in King Lear or the witches in Macbeth. These are queer, weird (wyrd) characters. I feel similarly as a queer writer. I write to reveal uncomfortable truths. I write frankly, and shy from writing fiction, because there is so much happening in the real world. Fiction is an interesting genre. I read a lot of it, and I value the way it can offer escape or confront me with difficult truths. But in my experience, contemporary poetry doesn’t allow for distraction — it cuts straight to the bone.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Loch Baillie

meditation
i remember i left
the lights on

Tom Clausen, footstep

My son is still small enough that, when I put him to bed, I can hear, briefly as I hug him, his heartbeat. It is a beautiful but also a baleful moment. Frank Kermode said, in The Sense of an Ending, that although the clock goes tick, tick, we hear tick, tock; bounded, as we are, in this little life, by a birth and a death, we hear the inevitable everywhere, giving to all things a beginning and an ending. And so the haunting tick, tock echoes in our lives, as it does in my son’s heartbeat.

It echoes through literature, too. It is the ageing Captain Hook, not the ever youthful Peter Pan, who is rendered insensible with fear at the approaching sound of the crocodile’s clock. Barrie’s finest stroke of genius was to have Peter himself make the ticking noise, unconsciously imitating the crocodile, as children do, which sends Hook crawling along the deck, only to plead to be hidden from Fate. ““Hide me!” he cried hoarsely.” And all the while, insouciant, loveable, innocent Peter keeps on ticking.

In a sublime moment, Barrie mentions that Peter “had seen the crocodile pass by without noticing anything peculiar about it, but by and by he remembered that it had not been ticking. At first he thought this eerie, but soon concluded rightly that the clock had run down.” It is terribly funny to read this after Hook has been crawling helplessly along the deck of the Jolly Roger, but it also makes that scene, for the reading parent, far more poignant. It means nothing to Peter that the clock has run down; it is all in the joke; but to the reading parent, faced with their own children and the tick, tick of their little heartbeats, it means all too much.

To the poets, time and death are as commonplace as toast and tea. “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker”, wrote T.S. Eliot, four years after Peter Pan, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In that poem, we hear echoes of Marvell, who wrote one of the most famous lines of English poetry about the swift passage of time—“for always at my back I hear/time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. A few years later Noel Coward had hints of Shakespearean “golden lads and girls” in the lyrics to ‘The Party’s Over Now’: “The candles gutter,/ the starlight leaves the sky;/ It’s time for little girls and boys to hurry home to bed,/ For there’s a new day waiting just ahead.”

Those lyrics are from 1932. Perhaps I am fanciful in hearing an echo of T.S.E. in them.

Henry Oliver, The night cometh

Intense vertigo of the spinning variety, hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ear), nausea, vomiting, and imbalance.

These are the symptoms of a condition caused by an ear infection or a virus attacking a particular part of the ear known as the bony LABYRINTH, a delicate complex located inside the inner ear that includes three specialized structures: the vestibule, the semicircular canal, and the cochlea.

The labyrinth converts mechanical signals transmitted by the middle ear into electrical signals, which are then relayed on to the auditory pathway in the brain.

The labyrinth also detects motion and position in order to maintain balance.

An inflamed labyrinth.

A hidden snail snell with oval handles.

A series of letters in which Samuel Beckett mentions his ear issues, and how motion is displaced by vertigo.

Alina Stefanescu, The thigh of the mind; or a few words that delight me.

In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:

P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].

I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”

What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:

How can any system
observe itself?

And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.

Maria Popova, A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

And if you are
tender to yourself, you’ll hear and
maybe even smell the rain falling on
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled
map of this life which shows you there
are still wildnesses left unexplored.

Luisa A. Igloria, Little Essay on Disorder

I have a few friends bringing out books soon, and they have told me how they struggle to continue to write, to even dare to post about their new books, or do readings, or any normal things.

I feel this pressure and anxiety as well—how do you write through the most stressful times I’ve ever experienced in my life? How relevant does poetry (or AWP, or a new book) feel in the face of women losing their rights to their bodies, facing a new war, facing threats to our voting rights? Can women in particular be expected to just go about business as usual? How can we deal with personal crises on top of political stress?

I try to spend time noticing nature, spending time reading, trying to deal with each crisis as it comes and just do the best I can. Friends are also a huge support. And can poetry save a country, save women’s rights to vote or use birth control, help us heal our own bodies or those of our loved one? Writers are storytellers, and storytellers have an important role to help people remember moments in lives, in history. If the American mythology seems to be teetering on the edge of insanity right now, how can we set that right? Can writing our own versions of mythology sound a note of hope, of justice, or reason? I hope so. I certainly don’t think it helps the world for artists to silence themselves in the face of so much uncertainty. Reading books about apocalypses helped me process the anxiety of the nuclear war threat of the eighties as a kid—perhaps something you’re writing right now will do the same for some other person? Speaking your truth—whatever that is—seems more important in a world where false information spreads like wildfire and hate tries to suppress everything kind, joyful, empowering. Is what you and I have to say about our daily lives, our work, our love lives, our disappointments and hopes important right now? I would argue, perhaps even more important than we know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring on the Way, Writing Through Hard Times

— It’s perhaps an evergreen statement these days — I know the news of the world is harrowing today.

— Because the news of the world is harrowing and because the world is full of sorrows, we hold a place here for joy, for when you can get to it, for when it is needed. We lay down some hope and some beauty when we can. Sorrow is not the whole story. […]

— I’ve been reading Fernando Pessoa’s poems, enjoying all his pseudonyms. So many of his poems contain lines that will get in your head and stay. “The astonishing reality of things / Is my discovery every day. / Each thing is what it is, / And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me, / And how much this suffices me.” He says, “All it takes to be complete is to exist.”

— An oft quoted poem by Pessoa:

To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.

— His book A little Larger than the Entire Universe seems to know things about the universe all the way into the future.

Shawna Lemay, The Entire Universe

Once, when I went to see my mother, we climbed a mountain above the tree line. It was Mount Monadnock, a massive peak in New Hampshire. Partway up, a thunderstorm began, bringing rain and lightning. My mother, already haggard-looking in the eerie lightning, said, “Once you have begun a thing, it is fatal not to finish it.” We climbed to the top and started coming down in the rain to the crack-crack of lightning hitting the rocks. She was slow.

“Leave me up here,” she said.

I, too, believed in finishing a thing. I took my mother off that mountain.

This sense of hiking through the storm is my approach to the press, too, but getting a conversation going about a book is harder than ever, considering the other noise in our culture. Even those authors who have hit the ground running—like Luke Goebel or Rebecca Chace—still have to fight for review space. Poetry is even harder to get into people’s hands. We have a book in Spanish and English coming out from William Archila, an El Salvadoran poet, who walks through the world quietly; I don’t know how many people will have the exquisite experience of his gentle footfalls across their kitchen floor. […]

When I was growing up in the cult, we learned a lot about the building of the Christian churches, and I was interested in the construction of cathedrals. Germany’s grand Cologne Cathedral required the participation of the whole city, and in my classes, they made a big point about everyone participating. We all had to carry wood and take care of the animals in the afternoon, so maybe their lesson was a hint to us that we needed to be ready to participate in work.

But the part we didn’t learn was that the Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to build. That’s many generations of laborers, of dreamers. I like to think that by the time Red Hen is a second-generation press, it will have grown into a stronger, sturdier organization. We are taking firm steps, like building a new website, but I’m also working hard to build a stronger support network. I like to imagine that right around the corner, there are thought partners—those with expertise in marketing, finance, and law—ready to join our board and help us get to the next stage. I feel sure that this spring, we will find these helpers.

Kate Gale, A Cathedral of the Mind: Sustaining the Arts Through Community

When I heard about the attack on Iran
I thought, look how far they’ll go
to keep the depredations of powerful men
off the front page. How can I just
shower, make breakfast tacos, listen
to Bach while the world is on fire?
The world is always on fire.
It’s not a new war. What can I do
but clean out the ashes
and kindle my little light?

Rachel Barenblat, Many things

What will the weather be like on March 7th? I’m planning to attend the book fair day at AWP in Baltimore that day, but always “weather permitting.” Last year in Los Angeles, I liked having the option of just attending one day of the event–sans panels and such, which overload my introvert personality. But Baltimore is a 3-hour drive from here, so weather must permit! The past five years, March 6-8 has been mild and reasonably fair; so says my garden journal, so maybe I will get there. If so, I’ll return bearing poetry collections…

Ann E. Michael, Comparisons

Down at the shore I thought again about the sparrowhawk and adaptation. About how wildlife finds ways of coping, even thriving in nature depleted places. In front of me, amidst all the bustling of oystercatchers, ringed plovers and rock pipits, wrens were flitting back and forth. They slipped in and out of view amongst the boulders. Like the birds of coast and shore, they were finding food in the seaweed piles. I wondered where they shelter on this wild windy coast, where they nest. There are short stretches of tumbled walls but no hedges or bushes or clumps of bramble.

How might we have to adapt and make do as our familiar places change and weather patterns shift? Could I be as adaptable as a sparrowhawk or a wren? As resilient? Unlikely; me, with my stiff bones and slow gait, bad habits and old ways.

News of bombs falling in Iran, retaliatory strikes and mayhem found me at the sea-log-seat as I watched plovers whirl about the sands.  But just as my spirit quailed, the most joyful sound rose up from the dunes and crofts. Skylarks! Heralding spring.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, February flight, flood, light

This week: cobra mating season, the hand of a Medieval scribe, a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal, and much more. Enjoy.

It has been awhile friends and a lot has been going on in the world since I last posted here. These days I am trying to balance my life as best I can. Somedays I do that better than others. I am sure many of you feel the same way.

Writing and reading poetry helps. It focuses my attention to the long arc of history, gives solace, expresses what so many of us are feeling or thinking these days. I read poems written during times of upheaval and remember that humans have a long history of bad behavior and yet, and yet, the pink camellia in my backyard is bringing forth her blooms, the birds are still arguing who gets the best spot at the suet cube, and my husband once again has the coffee ready for me after my long night of sleep.

Recently my husband and I took the train from Portland to Seattle. We stayed two nights in the hotel where we had our wedding reception 37 years ago, walked the city, and took the monorail to the Opera. We met family for dinner, and even took in an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. Seattle is not the city it was when I lived in the area 8 years ago. My favorite stores were gone, entire blocks are boarded up waiting for new tenants, there is still homelessness, and drug use on some streets. In general, it looked worn out, much like I feel these days. And yet, and yet, the Seahawks fans were out by the thousands, the Olympics in the West were as beautiful as they have ever been, and the coffee at Storyville was just as good as I remembered it.

I recently took a class with the poet Danusha Lameris, who shared that we often write to our “irritants”. Those things that get under our skin and keep rubbing at us. Today, I had a poem published in the online journal RADAR POETRY titled SEEN. It is a narrative poem about a young boy who lived in the same small coastal town I lived in as a kid. This is the second poem I have written about him, and I have wondered why I keep doing so. Why the memory of him is like a burr in my sock. I think in the end, I have a need for him to be seen like the image above, beyond the dark winter trees. I think somehow in these heavy days of heartbreak, I finally acknowledged his pain.

Carey Taylor, SEEN

Enlightened men are more likely to pump iron and own bitcoin stocks. Positivists and tech-bros are more likely to support the genocide of Palestinians. The possibility of greening the desert commits itself to banishing all nostalgia for the actual land as shepherded by its inhabitants for centuries. “We obviously don’t think nostalgia can cause a person to commit murder anymore, or advertising firms wouldn’t encourage companies to use nostalgia in their marketing,” writes Grafton Tanner. “The truth is, there actually isn’t much of a difference between the words of the positivists and Fabrik Brands. In fact, they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing: the eradication of longing.” […]

In the interest of poetry, I need to detach my brain from the exhausting emptiness of the commercialized present. Longing is what poetry does. Longing finds a loose solace in the “frequency of images of the moon,” that source of nostalgia that humans still cannot quite fix in their discourse. I love whatever it is about the moon that continues to escape us.

Alina Stefanescu, Notes on nostalgia

butter in the pan:
it sings its song
of browning

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’26

I also know there are so many poets who have died homeless in San Francisco, and that is not what I aspire to do, feeding pigeons in the dark. Near the end of Wanda Coleman’s life, we were giving her money to live and collecting more to support her. I called one friend, a poet, to ask him if he would be comfortable giving something. I felt kind of weird, thinking maybe he would say that she shouldn’t need help when she’d lived a grand poet’s life, but he said, “Kate, if you’re asking me if I understand that as poets, we don’t manage our money, and we might be someplace else in our heads, I know that.” And I thought, I got you. We might be building castles in the air, we might be writing the blues or drinking the stars, but we don’t spend our lives making, counting, or spending money.

For all of us writers and creatives, the wandering and the wooing of the muse is the substantial part of life, the nourishment of ideas. If you have kids, which I do, it gets tricky. You have to feed them. But when you aren’t young anymore, you have to think about the trajectory of the rest of your life. No one will be able to fully take care of you. In the end, I wish Wanda had been cared for better.

In writing, there are two ways to approach a story: plotting and pantsing (figuring it out as you go). I am not a plotter. I am a pantser. My husband and I are both writers, so we live in a plotless world. At times, it’s indecently plotless. But I am leaning into plotting and planning: write big books, build up the press, swim more, find another way to make a living so the hubby can work less. In April, for our birthdays, we’ve planned to visit my sister-in-law in Murrieta and go to sushi together. I plan for love, for family, the dream of a life of tranquil Sundays.

Kate Gale, A Dream of Tranquil Sundays: How We Value Our Lives

The cats sigh and briefly stretch, spreading
their toes apart, twitching their ears
as a gust kicks loose snow into a swirl—

a kind of dust devil on the lawn,
a devil made of icy crystals. Apparently,
winter is not as tired as we are.

Ann E. Michael, Tired

It’s not a sun, or moon, but has something of their capacity to shine. It’s the colours and how they fell into place, randomly. This was a mat I made for my daughter, a rather wonderful photographer living in the Netherlands. [image]

This year my seventh collection of poems comes out with Salt Publishing. My first collection, Powder Tower, was published in 1994, the year she was born. In glorious ignorance when it was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot prize I had no idea of how lucky I was. Well, two small children, freelance working – daily life was distracting. 

But this collection’s title, Making the Wedding Dress, marks a lifetime of change from gunpowder to silk…and the wedding dress was real, for my daughter. My son played piano as she walked into the hall with her dad. The sequence about sewing that gave the book its title does feel like it’s summing up a lifetime making clothes, covers, mats, bags, costumes, you name it – whatever scraps and a machine can come up with. Zero waste, repurposing, there are new terms but I feel sewing’s about respect as well as meditation. And the rest of the book – there are strange poems about modern living, the tensions we exist among, about money, sadness about lost species that were part of my childhood and I thought would always be around, like snowy winters, watching age catch up and wring out memory. How lucky, though, to have a cover image from my fabulous friend Jane Fordham, whose work is continually surprising, revealing, unique.

Jackie Wills, Not a sun or moon

Across the lobby, in the bar and restaurant behind us, they are setting up for Valentine’s day. It’s all ruby balloons and red rose petals. It’s the kind of scene that Philip Larkin, the slippers and gin and pipe smoke poet of Hull would add a good doleful drone to as he watched the couples come in, as he watched the blokes slouch out. Only he’d probably do it tomorrow. He’d do it when the balloons were sagging, the roses wilting. It is Keats who’d be turning the volume up, adding pulse and throb to the occasion, Keats who’d be accused of making a fuss, of going over the top. And I’m not sure which team I support today, which game I want to see played. Is it flare and fancy footwork or composure and a solid work rate I’m after? There were 4000 Chelsea fans in Hull last singing in the snow and I thought about Keats saying, “Love is my religion – I could die for that.”

Jan Noble, N°51 Love is my religion

Love is a lot
like physics:
It takes study

to understand
how masses —
yours, his —

attract, how his body
heat conducts
and your heart rate

accelerates before
either has had time
to evaluate impact.

You think you get
principles of velocity […]

Radio station KPBX in Spokane, Washington, invited students of St. Andrews-Sewanee School, Sewanee, Tennessee, to select and read on the air (SAS owns and operates its own radio station, SASradio) poems with a science focus. In searching online for such poems, the students and their faculty sponsor came across my “Love Is a Lot Like Physics” and wrote to ask permission to read it on air. The poem was broadcast and recorded on “Poetry Moment” on Spokane Public Radio on October 5, 2023. It was read by student Kendall Elder.

Maureen Doallas, Love Is a Lot Like Physics

There is a difference […] between an editor stating that their journals are labors of love in order to make writers aware of the conditions under which their magazines are created, and editors stating their journals are labors of love in order to extract sympathy from writers and, as [Anandi] Mishra writes, “exploit earnest writers for cheap labor.”

Case in point:

Angel Food Mag: “This is a labor of love and unfortunately, we cannot pay writers.”

The Garlic Press: “Unfortunately, this magazine is a labor of love, and we cannot offer payment for publication at this time.”

“Whale Road Review is a labor of love and can’t offer monetary payment at this time, but we include a ‘tip the author’ feature so readers can send money directly to our writers.”

Obviously, most writers expect these conditions at literary magazines. Payment is unfortunately not the norm. But framing the inability to pay writers—which is the basic professional standard in every other market besides literary magazines—is like a tug on the heartstrings while getting robbed. It’s bad enough that most writers don’t get paid at literary magazines. Do we need to use love as a means to justify the practice?

Becky Tuch, Q: What’s with all the luvvy duv “labor of love” malarkey?

I didn’t have the highest hopes for Valentine’s Day, but we took the arduous trip downtown and back to attend the Spectacle du Petite show at Roq La Rue, which features a ton of wonderful artists including my current art crush, Dewi Plass, whose works Glenn photographed me with. Below are some of the pieces, including the fennec fox piece, for you to enjoy. However, I recommend a visit to the show! Glenn also took me to a downtown bookstore, so I could peruse lit mags and magazines not available to me on the East side. The whole thing wore me out, but I was happy I went. Glenn made duck and strawberry cupcakes, and we had dinner at home, which was lovely. (I also received two rejections—one book, one lit mag—on Valentine’s Day, which seems like a slap in the face. Not cool, places that reject on V-Day. It’s a hard day for a lot of people! Geeze!)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Valentine’s Day and Artist Dates, Birds in the Cold, Melancholy, AI and Voting Rights

Even now, in my sixties, I keep falling
in love with things. The crumpled
texture and weave of linen, the sharp
clean edge of a cotton collar, the soft
slouchy hems of bright socks.

Luisa A. Igloria, Self Portrait, with Once-Lonely Sheep

In addition to eating way too many raspberry and lemon paczki for one person this week and the rest of February, my other treat was getting a new tattoo, a pair of fancy and decorative scissors. Lately I do more digital work than analogue (something I am vowing to change this year) but when I did work more with physical materials, I always preferred scissors over X-actos, which sometimes meant my cuts were unweildy, but I was just more used to them (though it depends on the scissors.)  They are the first tattoo on my left arm, which I don’t plan to create a sleeve, so it stands alone on my forearm and is actually about the size of an actual pair. 

And speaking of collage, the Februllage endeavors have been going well. Since we’ve been coming and going a lot, I’ve been doubling up and working ahead to make sure I can post daily, if not create daily (this is much easier with collages than NaPoWriMo poems.)

Kristy Bowen, notes & things: valentine’s edition | 2/14/2026

A stray barks: sharp, staccato, afraid.
Like she is shouting in a different language.

She must have spotted another cobra.
They are everywhere now.
It is, after all, mating season.

The other street dogs don’t come near.
They are picking their battles.
Or the afternoon is too warm, too languorous,
too burdensome, to die.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Trying to make sense of the world – attempt #1

“The Quiet Ear” is subtitled “An Investigation of Missing Sound”. Raymond Antrobus was diagnosed deaf at the age of six when it was discovered that he was missing sounds at certain frequencies, e.g. birdsong, and unable to hear certain letter combinations, particularly “is”, hearing “talisman” as “tal man” or “tally man”. Typically the teachers who’d written him off as slow didn’t apologise. […]

The book’s title comes from a chapter, which also is the title of a poetry anthology that contains a poem by Ted Hughes called “Deaf School”. Hughes had been commissioned by the National Theatre to research “how people live without language”; a bizarre commission given that the Deaf are not without language, but hearing. Hughes visited a Deaf school in London and the result was a problematic poem. The poem, in Antrobus’s words, “positions the speaker of the poem as a wise observer; there’s a tone of certainty that pathologises the deaf children, seeing them as passive amusements… The biggest irony is that Hughes is lazily describing something highly sophisticated, the language of sign… Seeing Hughes use his poetic gift to frame deaf children as animalistic simpletons was a double assault to me, disappointing and hurtful. What is the use of a poet who uses their talents to enforce harmful stereotypes on marginalised people and their language?”

Antrobus’s reaction was to write a poem that mirrored the language back at Hughes. To get it published, he needed permission from the Hughes’ estate which was denied. Antrobus then redacted the lines in the poem so you only see the title and then a series of black blocks. Showing it to some school children, one suggests that if you rotate the poem by ninety degrees, you can see the poem as bars on an audiologist’s chart.

Emma Lee, “The Quiet Ear” Raymond Antrobus (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) – book review

The palaeography sessions are weekly, on zoom, from America. I have access to them through my fellowship with the Folger. They have become something I treasure: a quiet, thoughtful place of puzzle solving and companionship amongst my otherwise chaotic days of caring and freelancing and trying to write the book. I value the ritual of it. I value the feeling of joining the group and being welcomed. Usually we begin by going over the alphabet, looking at the way that secretary hand can be formed, always with the reminder that the scribes that wrote the documents are people, and each person has their own handwriting. We are reminded of context, that there is a world of difference between a son writing a letter home from university, and a letter from a spy in a royal house. Then we open a document that all the group can see and we transcribe it together, slowly moving along, a word at a time. We are shown how to enter the transcription for scholarly use and although this is not why I am here – I know I will never have the confidence or skill to transcribe anything in the archives – I enjoy the way that knowledge of how it is done brings me closer to the transcribers when I am roaming down the rabbit holes of archive work.

The stories of people are not just embedded in the text that is written. It’s in how it’s written. When we come across letters that are obviously more ornate than they should be, we can see that this is a throw back to an older medieval style and I can imagine someone who learned to write in a medieval hand passing down a habit of over exaggeration of majuscules through the family, the old ways being slowly rubbed away at the edges as each new generation learns to write. I am reminded of how I used to copy the way my mum wrote her capital Es in a double curled sweep, though I had never been taught to do that by my teachers.

Learning to read 16th and 17th century documents is so much more than learning the shape of the letters. Much of the spelling is phonetic, sometimes I think I can detect accent in the way that words are spelled. To learn the hand of a scribe you write the letters out, looking at the ink on the original page to follow the direction of the quill, getting a feel for the direction of the crosses, the way an ‘a’ merges into the minims of an n or an m, and this way you get a feel for their habits, their positioning, the way they might lean a quill on a knuckle joint, the way they get distracted and bunch a letter too close to the edge of a page, or miss a word out and have to go back and stick it in on a slant. A manuscript becomes a moment in a life, then, the dipping of a quill and the fattening of the letters with ink, the thin pale words at the end of a long line where the quill needs re dipping, the drip, the smudge where a sleeve has caught.

Wendy Pratt, The Butcher’s Hook and the Hot Cross Bun

This is the notebook of one William Lynnet (or Lynnett), born around 1622, who was admitted to Trinity as a student the year before, in 1641. William’s notebook contains various bits of Latin and English verse, some of his own composition and several addressed to prominent Cambridge contemporaries, as well as Donne’s translation of Psalm 137, the popular translation of Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’ (which I discussed here) and its ‘answer’ by Henry King, and an English poem by the poet Richard Crashaw, who was at Pembroke College, Cambridge until 1635 and thereafter at Peterhouse. Many items are dated to 1642 or 1643 and several describe or respond to the tumultuous political events of those years.

All of this is relevant because this manuscript also contains two copies of a good Latin poem which is ascribed, when it first appears, to ‘A. C.’. The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts takes this to be Abraham Cowley — who was also at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1642/3, and duly appears in William’s list (in the image above, you can see his name about half way down the right-hand column). Although CELMS accepts the attribution to Cowley, as far as I know this poem has never been published. […]

The poet compares himself to a singing bird who, her nest destroyed in a storm, no longer has the heart for song, and struggles to know what to do:

At si prosternit nidum fors saeva tepentem,
Et nova tempestas quaerere tecta iuvet,
Maesta silet; metuit suspiria mittere, cantus
Ne possit gemitu mixtus inesse suo.
Flebiliter pressis circum vaga cursitat alis,
Et cui adesse nequit nescit abesse loco.

But if cruel fate destroys her cosy nest,
And a storm means she needs a new house,
In sorrow she falls silent, afraid to mourn
In case her song be spoilt by her lament.
Weeping she dashes back and forth, her wings
Close-pressed, she cannot either stay or go.

This situation is compared to that of the poet who, having lain long secure and singing joyful songs in ‘your shade’, now faces the possibility of being forced into exile as a result of the ‘storm’ — that is, of course, the storm of Civil War, which broke out fully in this year, 1642. The ‘you’ of the poem might refer to a particular individual, but I think it is most likely that it refers to the university itself. Cowley was indeed eventually forced to leave Cambridge in 1644 to take refuge first in Oxford and later in France.

Victoria Moul, With hope into the lists: Cowley on the eve of civil war

What I love about “Nostos” is what I love about so much of Glück’s work: the intensity of focus, and the sensation of entering another’s consciousness so completely that it feels like your own, both effects accomplished by careful management of the line, by the way enjambment can cut across syntax to enact the movement of the mind.

The opening five lines establish the logic that structures the rest of the poem, its pattern of incompletion and association, continuity and rupture. The opening line alone give us a microcosm of this tension:

There was an apple tree in the yard—

It’s a complete sentence—and yet not, the em dash denoting fragmentation, the statement breaking off. More accurately, a breaking away from, as line 2 directs us into a new temporality:

this would have been
forty years ago—

The shift from the simple past “there was” to “this would have been” is weirdly complicated. It was forty years ago, and there’s no conditionality implied by the usage, but the idiomatic construction evokes demotic speech—the sense that we are being spoken to, or perhaps speaking to ourselves. It’s a storytelling gesture that shifts our sense of time, from past recollection to present-tense situating of the image. And it colours mood as well, introducing the minor chord of “would”: a word of longing, of distance on its own. This distance is revealed as temporal when line 3 opens with the unit of time—forty years—but abruptly turns spatial as another interruptive em dash is followed by the preposition “behind,” pulling us again into the realm of the concrete, letting us hang there for an instant in uncertainty: behind what?

So there is a lot going on, if you track the movement line by line and word by word, attentive to the subtlest shifts in verb tense, grammatical mood, intonation, and to read Glück I think you must be. But I find this concentration so rewarding, and the precision, ironically, disarming. In this instance, it’s how it captures the way we tell stories, which is also the way memory works. An image arises, unanchored, and the mind finds a place for it, slots it back into a larger narrative.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Nostos” by Louise Glück

Overall, the amount of white space, the amount of enjambment, and the short lines slow the poem down. We’re getting plenty of time to parse the syntax and savor each line. The poem either begins with a single line or as a couplet that includes the title, depending on how you look at it, but the last line is certainly on its own. It’s emphasized because it’s all by itself, cushioned in white space. The question is also emphasized by the repetition of “my hands”:

Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

The speaker is pleading. There’s a sense of desperation and a deep desire to be useful. To be a helper. The repetition three times here also mirrors an earlier repetition: the anaphora in stanza three. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, lines, sentences. In this stanza, “come” is repeated three times:

Come hurricane, come rip current,
come toxic algal bloom.

This poem is full of surprises, reconsiderations, and switchbacks. Form and content are working in tandem. The speaker of “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” wonders aloud about what it can do to be a helper. And, I’d argue, in its articulation, and in its witnessing, it is a helper. I hope if you enjoyed this poem, you’ll seek out more work by Rachel Dillon.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

Copies of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are going out to the media, for review requests, and to the contributors. I received a box of books a week or so ago, and I am thrilled with how it’s turned out. Donna Kile’s gorgeous cover photography, the tactile matte finish on the cover, and even the fonts. And, of course, the poems by our fantastic contributors. We really can’t wait for these to start shipping out to readers in May. […]

In other news, I shared the stage with fellow poets and long-time friends Franklin Abbott and Cleo Creech on Jan. 8 as part of an exhibition of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Decatur Library. It was a moving evening of poetry and I – and the audience – were verklempt for most of it. I don’t do that many in-person readings anymore, but I’m glad I did this one. 

Collin Kelley, The Big Reveal: “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology

I’m excited to share that I have a podcast episode out with Meg of Meg’s Reading Room. I can’t say enough about Meg. She is such a calm, gentle presence in this world. I love her podcast about books, and was so honored when she invited me on.

You can listen to our episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. At the very end, I share a poem from the book that I have not shared anywhere else, so go check it out!

Here’s Meg’s description of the episode:

In our conversation, Allison shares why motherhood gave her the courage to start sharing her work with the world, how connecting with her own voice has helped shape her work as a speech-language pathologist, and why going deep through her writing and creative workshops has been bringing her joy in this season.

Allison Mei-Li, A Few Love Poems

NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Volume 2), ed. Philip Rowland, Isobar Press, 2025, ISBN 978-4-907359-52-2, £12.00

Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, ed. Neil P. Doherty, Dedalus Press, 2025, ISBN PB 978191562933, €14.50

The first time I reviewed two anthologies together here, one of them was the first volume of the NOON one. You can imagine my surprise when Volume 2 arrived with a quote from that review on the back cover:

The work in NOON is poetry tending towards the ideal condition of silence, which is a kind of music, and the visual element, not only within but in the space around each poem, is key to eliciting the quality of attention required from the reader when a poem places so much weight on so few words.

I could use exactly the same words in reviewing this second volume, but I won’t. Instead I want to look in a bit more depth at Rowland’s explanation of his method as explained in his Preface:

As in every issue, as well as the first anthology, the poems in this volume have been arranged in a renga-like sequence. Besides being a creative aspect of the editorial process, this is meant to allow for a range of short-form poetry to resonate in stimulating and sometimes surprising ways for the reader.

…

This is, then, much more an anthology of poems than poets.

In practice, because, with just one exception, poems by each poet are grouped together, this involves resonances within a poet’s work and across the works of the preceding or subsequent contributor. […]

What also emerges is the flexibility around what Rowland means by a short poem, defined as anything under 14 lines. While NOON tends towards the haiku, there’s room for anything that fits, really, including a couple of tiny haibun (or at least that’s how I read them), like this one by Sabine Miller:

VESSEL

If you were a vessel, what shape would you be? I say urn and she says murmuration. I am filled with dusty blue marbles; she is filled with sky.

the dark rock
a darker bird
alighting

In the Preface, Rowland says the book is ‘short enough to be read from start to finish at one sitting’. I can confirm that this is the case, and that at the end the temptation is to go back to the beginning and read it again. And again. Each reading revealing new delights. It’s a delight in ways that few anthologies (or single books of poetry) manage. I’ll finish off with a poem from Caroline Clark that, for me, sums up the experience of reading the book:

Can I be with you
while you read this?
Don’t look up
or say anything.

It’s a book to keep by you, to read and read again, to savour like fine wine.

Billy Mills, A review of two anthologies

There’s been a shift at night. Used to be I’d forget to attend class until exam time. Sometimes my primary school or secondary school or university graduations were rescinded because I missed a class. Pretty common dream among people I understand.

Or I searched a toilet and all would be out of service. I’d show up for meals and it was all eaten. I’d be lost, disoriented. I hid, evaded, be pursued, shot at. I’d run through cities forests in primeval fear. I’d stash myself under furniture, in heating ducts. I’d almost always escape. Sometimes I was a disembodied observer of other people and did nothing in my own dreams but watch chaos unfold. 

There were non-stress dreams of course. But the shift is this: on waking, say, that was stupid, I should have this or that. I broke into my own dreams lucidly. 

In dreams I started asking for other student’s notes, asking the front desk to confirm my schedule, chatting with professors, being in lectures, graduating. 

I started asking directions to a working washroom, pee anyway even if the only one was a urinal in a crowded hallway. I started showing up at buffets before the crowd or before opening. Being lost in another souk, I said in my dream, no not this again, so bored, walked past the vendor, threw up the flap of the tent and hailed a cab. 

Being lost and locked in a museum or store at night I started stealing stuff. Or exploring, finding new underground tunnels, and new rooftops to observe from. 

My run in the forest became a joy of running and watching the neighbourhood sprout houses and businesses and I started talking with these familiar fictional neighbours, each dream a next time lapse. 

Being held hostage, I started to huff, disgusted with fellow prisoners, getting up, telling off the gunmen until he reddened. I demanded cash for damages, or snatched his gun, taking him out and the marksmen.

The shifts have mostly happened over the last year, some spreading back a decade. […]

The dreams are starting to echo being a member of community, taking roles as protector, saviour, competent, self-serving. I move from inaction and reaction to action. 

Twenty years pass and I don’t feel cringe for existing. I ask what I want and instead of writing down goals and sub-steps, on some deep level I give permission instead of self-flogging. I don’t try to manage others or bow to others. There’s some equality. There’s some interdependence. There is something opening. Out of the forest, into the plain. New options. 

Pearl Pirie, Agency

i think we should install more doors to nowhere.
more windows full of bricks.
i am sick of functionality. i want
the nest to be as absurd as it is to be
alive right now while people are being stolen
from their ice cream places. from their schools.

Robin Gow, wild zillow

Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.

In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.

Matthew Paul, Review of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things

Yesterday I was thinking about how being an athlete is unlike being a writer.  I watch the Olympics, and I have no illusions that I will ever be at that level, and worse–the window for that level of skill is tied to youth.  With writing, I can continue to improve.

I thought about this off and on throughout the week, as I have walked from my office to my classrooms and observed clusters of students who are talking about their creative writing.  I don’t think these projects are for a class.  I think they’re just students who like to write and have found each other.  I love the building where most humanities classes are taught.  It was built 15 years ago, so it’s a very different building than any other building where I’ve taught.  There’s more natural light, for one thing, and less decay.  The common area has spaces for informal gathering/studying, spaces that look like a small living room, spaces that look like a kitchen table, and two tables of barstool height, with higher chairs.  There’s a charging station beside one of them, and plenty of plugs throughout the common space.  There are some backless couches that look like waves outside of each classroom.

Some of the students hang out as they wait for classes to start, but other students hang out all day.  As I overhear conversations, I feel inordinately happy.  There’s the creative writing discussions and the students helping each other in a variety of classes.  There are students scrolling through their phones, and others staring at laptops, but more often than not, they’re interacting.

As I walk back and forth, I sometimes feel wistful, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes sad about how long ago my own undergrad days have become.  I can also be prone to the sadness of feeling like I haven’t lived up to my potential.    Yesterday I laughed at myself a bit–I can still keep working on writing projects, and I can keep doing it deep into old age, barring some kind of injury.  In terms of athletic prowess, I’m not going to be skiing ever again; fear of breaking a bone is just too much of a deterrent.

Happily, I’m fine with that.  I didn’t like skiing when I did it in my younger years, so no great loss.  Aging must be much more difficult if what brings one joy is not something one can do with an aging body.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Life, Olympian Life

I’m always surprised when talking with another poet, and they say something along the lines of I should see more modern dance, but I don’t really know what to make of it. This, of course, is another version of what we frustratingly hear all the time as poets—I want to read poetry, but I don’t understand it. I feel like the emphasis on understanding is preventing so many people from enjoying and experiencing not just poetry but the variety of art that exists in the world, such as dance, experimental music, or abstract painting. Even those of us who spend our time immersed and versed in one discipline and recognize that every artwork need not tell a story or be representational, still often find ourselves trapped by the false idea of needing to understand a piece of art if it’s in a realm outside our own.

Here’s my plea. Let’s free ourselves of this idea.

For me, what makes modern dance amazing is that it strips dance down to its fundamental ingredients—the shapes that bodies can take and the motions that bodies can make—and reimagines it front and center. When I watch a dance piece, I observe the architecture of the dance—both for individual dancers and as a group—and I notice repeating and building patterns of gestures, undulations, or transfers of weight. All of this, of course, is anchored by the music and lighting, set and costumes, or lack thereof (some of the best pieces shine because of their spareness, by letting the dancer just dance). Together, it’s about creating an energy, a feeling that you take in, that you open yourself to. And maybe, just maybe, if you just let it happen, Emily Dickinson’s “cleaving of the mind” will come.

When I stand in front of a Rothko painting, such as the Seagram murals, I feel myself vibrate, physically and emotionally. That’s the ultimate for me. Like modern dance, modern painting is painting stripped down to its essential ingredients—color and texture. It isn’t about sense, but the senses. We don’t make something of it; instead, it makes something of us.

As my bedtime reading, I’ve been traveling through Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which speaks to how Stein similarly sought to make poetry new by experimenting with its very textual and grammatical building blocks.

“Each word in [Stein’s] Tender Buttons . . . was recognizable in itself, but here words follow others not to advance any story, but to propel the text forward through verbal echo, surprise, or pure insistence. . . . Tender Buttons is a celebration of mutability, a rejoinder to the rules, where words are set free from the shackles of meaning and grammatical function, made unfamilar, and charged with power to make the world afresh.”

Whether you’re reading a poem or listening to a drone composition that reverbates with found sounds, it is precisely the allure of surprise and the unfamiliar that makes them successful, powerful, and engaging. If we stop asking what it means and start asking what we feel, perhaps we’ll all find our way to the forms of art that we didn’t realize we needed and that speak to us even though we thought they were beyond our grasp.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Celebrating the Ingredients

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

I’m trying to write a poetry of “what is”, at the risk of seeming like some kind of antiquated rational materialist. (Guilty.) What you believe has consequences: if you believe in the literal existence of Santa, you need to wrestle with the existence of the surveillance apparatus implied by that belief, you need to acknowledge that this authority in which you believe prefers rich kids, and so on.

So I’m trying to write about the marvellous world we live in, which means that I write about natural phenomena, often through the explanatory lens of science. I deliberately avoid mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, and other forms of woo that are pretty commonplace in contemporary poetry. But I don’t think that the transcendent and the numinous — the truly wonderful — are the property of those modes of thinking. I’m trying to write about what it’s like to be in this world, to live in it, to experience its aesthetics and poetics. This is a bit different than the way that many poets write about science and nature: either the natural phenomenon is used solely as a metaphor, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, or the poem is a hymn to the phenomenon. (Grossly oversimplifying here.) I’m trying to do something different with my poetry, to write about the world as it is and about our experience of it.

Adjacent to this is a technical question I’m interested in, which has to do with how poems might be constructed differently. If we imagine that words and lines are the atoms and molecules, respectively, of poetry, what happens if we do chemistry with these? If we pull them apart and put them together. This experiment already exists in poetry, of course, in, for example, enjambment or Manley Hopkins-esque portmanteaux. But how far can this be pushed? To what poetic end? Do there exist poetic polymers and macromolecules? What do they look like? What are they for? […]

If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve been a math teacher, and I’m currently a physician. I should have been a physicist, but fear and laziness prevented this. Some days I think I’d like to be a Zamboni driver, or the guy who drives the rake around the infield at a baseball stadium.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Moorehead

The poem was written on March 26, 1802, while Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. “While I was getting into bed,” Dorothy notes in diary, “he wrote the Rainbow” — which does suggest a rapid composition (albeit with later days’ entries in the diary revealing his agonizing about the poem, building toward the move he would make with the Immortality Ode).

We should note too, I suppose, her reference to the poem as “the Rainbow.” Without falling fully down the rabbit hole (exploring, for example, how much Wordsworth meant a wordplay with pi, π, for the semi-circle of the rainbow and the “piety” of the last line), we can still remember that the clash of science and poetry was in the air — and particularly in discussions of rainbows and Newton’s 1704 Opticks.

In the 1728 “Spring” section of his Four Seasons, James Thomson speaks of the rainbow as

. . . refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds,
In fair proportion running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky.
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
And to the sage instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.

But — anticipating Wordsworth — he adds:

. . . Not so the boy;
He wondering views the bright enchantment bend,
Delightful o’er the radiant fields, and runs
To catch the falling glory

Thomas Campbell post-Wordsworthian 1819 “To The Rainbow” makes explicit the opposition of science and childhood:

Can all that Optics teach unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?

Charles and Mary Lamb in their 1809 Poetry for Children, admit the conflict but offer a more ameliorative take:

. . . If I were
A natural philosopher,
I would tell you what does make
This meteor every colour take:
But an unlearned eye may view
Nature’s rare sights, and love them too.

And so on. The question of the nature of rainbows does set up, however, the question I find most interesting about the poem: the meaning of the final phrase, “natural piety.”

In marginalia scribbled in his copy of the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, William Blake would take aim at the phrase: “There is no such Thing as Natural Piety Because the Natural Man is at Enmity with God” — adding “I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually; and then he is no poet, but a heathen philosopher, at enmity with all true poetry or inspiration.”

And it’s possible that Wordsworth meant the word natural in the way that Blake supposed — a declaration of human nature as filled with a native piety and goodness, in rejection of the Christian idea of the Fall.

But a better reading, I think, would take natural to be about external phenomena. The nature here is not human nature, which darkens as we age (hence the Immortality Ode’s “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy”). It is rather Nature’s own piety — both, I think, in the sense that Nature herself is pious, reveling in her creation, and in the sense that Nature, seen correctly, is an occasion of grace. The natural world wants us to be pious, to grasp heart-leapingly in the experience of a rainbow the transcendental characteristics of created being: beauty, truth, and goodness.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Heart Leaps Up

Basil Bunting’s long modernist poem Briggflatts (1966) was published sixty years ago this winter — first in Poetry magazine and then as a book from Fulcrum Press. It was subtitled “An Autobiography”, but Bunting denied that it was “a record of fact”, saying “the truth of the poem is of another kind”. Despite the often abstruse allusions, he also felt that “no notes are needed”. But he provided a handful nevertheless, on the grounds that “a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research”.

Bunting’s notes were titled “Afterthoughts”, and most relate to the Northumbrian landscape and language of his early twentieth-century youth, where the poem is primarily set (Briggflatts, the Quaker meeting house of the title, is actually over towards the west in Cumbria, but Bunting saw this as part of the old Northumbria). He had returned to North East England after travelling widely, and wrote the poem in his sixties, filling notebooks on the train as he commuted to his sub-editing job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

Like T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, Bunting’s “Afterthoughts” have the air of a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal. The first warns that “the Northumbrian tongue” may sound strange to non-natives, and that “Southrons” — those from the south of England — “would maul the music of many lines of Briggflatts”. Further on, we are told to “piece […] together” the story of the Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, “from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Orkneyinga Saga, and Heimskringla, as you fancy”. By the time we get to the word “skerry”, Bunting’s only comment is “O, come on, you know that one” (it’s a small rocky island, covered at high tide). “Scone”, meanwhile, is singled out so that we can be told to “rhyme it with ‘on’, not, for heaven’s sake, ‘own’” (on the question of whether to apply jam or cream first, however, he is silent).

I had a new experience of Briggflatts recently when I read it alongside the much more extensive annotations that have been available for the past ten years at the back of Don Share’s excellent edition of The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016). One of the things I appreciated about how Share lays out these notes for the reader is that, as well as interleaving Bunting’s original “Afterthoughts”, he also uses bold type to pick out everything the poet said elsewhere about the poem: interviews, letters, conversations. So it’s possible at a glance to follow an extended authorial commentary on particular words and lines.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #40: How It Feels Rubbing Down a Gravestone

Rebuff, repulsion, lacking allure – it’s a risk to call an anthology of poetry The Opposite of Seduction and perhaps Nicola Thomas’ brief Introduction to this book of new German poetry in translation suspects as much. She concedes, ‘poems here . . . may test the boundaries of Anglophone tastes’. But that depends on your taste and for most readers this anthology will seem a vigorous enjoyable collection of young(ish) voices, most hardly ever heard in English before like Nadja Küchenmeister’s delicate, flowing lyrics of existential uncertainty (tr. Aimee Chor), or Anja Utler’s sole contribution, a re-writing of the Daphne myth,  exploiting the white page, a choppy fragmentation, exclamation, and a suitably headlong, hectic delivery. A different note is struck by Uljana Wolf, in her whimsical teasing away at self-awareness, waking at four in the morning, or down on hands and knees with an English-speaking partner, to consider dust bunnies (in German ‘Wollmaus’); ‘our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-gray names’ (tr. Sophie Seita). […]

Technique dominates rather than subject matter, though the selection is organised by subjects such as Heart, Body, Soul, Beast, Season, Machine, Home. Oswald Egger writes lush, musical celebrations of the natural world which in Ian Galbraith’s renderings evoke Hopkins, even Dylan Thomas. Dinçer Güçyeter brings material from the migrant experience (tr. Caroline Wilcox Reul) and Ulrike Almut Sandig creates a genuine split-screen reading experience, playing poem texts off against story board instructions either side of the page (tr. Karen Leeder). Given the breadth of experimentation going on here, there are inevitable failures. These are poets working to free both writer and reader from conventions, to open up novel realms of human experience, a liberation from history. Occasionally, Jan Kuhlbrodt’s nightmare vision of a man hoarding books and newspapers hovers behind some poems, so intent on their own language are they, perhaps in need of a ‘reminder of a reality that knows more than paper’ (tr. Alexander Kappe).

Martyn Crucefix, Review: The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in German (Shearsman Books, 2025)

My fourth collection Grey Time (Nine Arches Press, 2025) circles around the themes of grief and loss. These are subjects that I have touched on in my previous collections, but with this collection I decided to give my attention over to it more fully, to read around the subject area and to more fully explore what grief is, and how it affects us and changes – not just in the aftermath of a loss but over the years that follow. I also wanted to explore how our relationship with those we have lost changes over time. Loss in the collection is not just confined to death though; there are other losses too – losses that can be equally devastating. The poem ‘owl birth’ touches on one such loss.

To give some context: when my mother was a teenager, she got pregnant and was subsequently sent to a home for young single mothers. The baby was to be put up for adoption but she was initially allowed to bring the baby home from hospital allowing her to bond with her. This made the handing over even harder and she never really recovered from this loss and she spent the rest of her life looking for that lost daughter. I only learned of this other child after I had already left home. The effects on me were two-fold. Firstly, it changed my view of myself – I had always been the first/oldest child, and secondly, it made sense of some of my mum’s behaviour – her mental and physical absences, her hot and coldness. I was struck by how cruel it was to let a young mother spend so long bonding with their child only to then whisk it away.

I didn’t actually set out to write a poem about this particular loss. The poem came out almost fully formed while I was on a writing retreat. Each night as I was trying to get to sleep, I was disturbed by the sound of owls screeching. Many of my poems contain animals or other things from the natural world, and those owls made their way into several poems in this collection. The pine forest also is a recurring trope in my poems – I grew up in small town surrounded by pine forest and its very particular atmosphere seeps into a lot of my writing.

Drop-in by Julia Webb (Nigel Kent)

Form – what is it good for? Quite a lot, it turns out. The poetic focus and concision, for example, of being required to work within a particular rhyme scheme, or within a certain number of lines. Traditional form engages us in a conversation with a poetic history; it places us within a shared poetic culture and heritage. Poetic form can act as a scaffolding for thought and experience; a container for intense emotion. It is of course, a great way to develop poetic discipline, whilst conversely being a fun and exciting way of playing – trying things we’re not used to, finding new possibilities, taking risks, stepping beyond the habitual and discovering new directions. And perhaps most importantly – for me, anyway – form offers a powerful means of expression, exploration and discovery, deepening the meaning which hovers under the surface of our conscious poetic intentions.

On Tuesday night, Kim and I – aka the Laurel and Hardy of poetry – delivered an online workshop on poetic form. For our paying subscribers, you’ll find a recording of that session in your substack inbox, along with Kim’s powerpoint and sestina template. Yes, Kim bravely and beautifully led us through one of the most complex forms, despite my claim that it was the metaphorical equivalent of bringing cabbage to the shared poetry meal. And of course, Kim proved me entirely wrong – using a stunning example by Kathryn Maris to show how sestinas can offer us all a fluid and powerful receptacle for our obsessions. Which, in Kim’s case, is currently hamsters.

Clare Shaw, FORM!

Some days all I can say is ay yi yi. Or oy. Or fuuuuuuuuck. You know, those wordless expressions of mostly-vowel sounds the outbreathing of which, the offgassing of which you hope will take away some of the poison, some of the poison you’ve inhaled inadvertently from the world, the sorrows, the woe and strife, the basic are-you-kidding-me’s that tumble into our faces, singular and collective, big picture and small. At the level of finding-a-parking-space or the level of world-peace. Oof. That’s another one of my exhales. Jeeesh. Yeesh. Ach du liebe. Eventually I’ll gather my words together and make a coherent sentence. But I won’t be sure about it. It’ll be mostly noise created by consonants, as if I know what I’m talking about. But it’s the vowels. It’s the vowels that carry the spiritual truths, the hopes and dreams, terror and aghastness, the weariness.

I like this poem for how confident it is. Here’s the deal, the poem says. Here’s what’s gonna go down. I don’t know this poet, but I’ll follow her anywhere.

Marilyn McCabe, or maybe things were not communicated clearly.

Think of all the work the weather can do in a poem: symbol and foreshadowing; metonymy, for the spirit of a place or time; a metaphor for the poet’s inner state; a frame for the poem’s cinematography; an event, a catalyst. Sometimes weather functions allegorically, as a sign of divine intervention. Latterly, in its climate-change variants, it seems sent to punish human stupidity and greed. Weather often signals how little control humans have over our lives. We are at the mercy of this world, not vice-versa.

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Ted Hughes, ‘Wind’

To talk of the weather is often to describe our quotidian struggle or ease with our ‘circumstances’. The seasons, though, provide a larger frame for understanding what happens when circumstance – landscape and settlement, and all the human endeavour it hosts – meets time and its changes. Can we grow what we need? Will we thrive or be thwarted?

Lisa Brockwell, South of my Days

Lent starts this week, and as I was thinking about the intersection of poetry and my relatively new reversion to Catholicism, I got a little over my skis and came up with the grand idea to write forty poems in forty days. After some reflection, I have since whittled that down to seven poems in seven weeks, which is far more realistic. I’ve noticed a tendency to want to Lent-max and I’m not sure what drives that. It’s certainly not any kind of innate holiness. Perhaps something about all of the sacrifice, asceticism, and general austere feeling of the season incentives a kind of perverse competitiveness in me. But it’s more likely that I’m just trying to prove to God how good I can be so He will love me. I still sometimes cling to the illusion that I’m in the driver’s seat and that I can earn His love as long I complete some arbitrary, self-created to-do list and wave it up at Him, going, “See? I checked everything off!” Yes, I fully realize how ridiculous I am. The bottom line is, watch this space for a poem a week during Lent. These will be exploratory drafts, so no promises on quality, depth, or literary value.

Kristen McHenry, Rounding Down, Arguing with Robots, Dreams of a Watery Sun

Previous-Bethany (who hangs around) likes to curl into a fetal position (a lot) and say things like, “I have no talent for this!” “I can’t do this!” But I am changing. I’ve attended a No Kings protest,  I’ve written to senators and congress people, I’m getting a new roof (right now in fact, much hammering overhead), and new flooring (much needed but on hold), and dealing with a wet, rotted sub-floor in the kitchen (not sure how that’s going to turn out). I asked my therapist, “Am I going to get through this?” And she said, “You are getting through it.”

And, miracle of miracles, I have a new review up at EIL — of Matthew Murrey’s Little Joy.

And, other kinds of writing keep seeping out, in part thanks to Sheila Bender’s on-line class about writing grief. In addition to Sheila’s books and my classmates’ posts, I’ve also been reading an anthology, The Language of Loss: Poetry and Prose for Grieving and Celebrating the Love of Your Life, edited by Barbara Abercrombie; and Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler, which The Los Angeles Times calls the very best kind of self-help book.

My typical strategy now would be share a poem or short prose section from one of these books (so many excellent choices). Instead I’m going to share my own new poem. Excuse any hammering or thumping that creeps into the audio. And thank you for listening.

Grief wakes me in the morning

and puts me to bed at night.
She stirs sorrow into my oatmeal.
She fusses, adjusting the light
as I read, offering a blanket.
When I leave the house,
she grabs her shoes and goes with me,
walks fast, takes my hand. […]

Bethany Reid, What Am I Doing Here?

These are my first gigs for 2026: Catch me if you can, please come, say hello. Not long now, spring soon come, soon come. I sense a big shift for all of us in March. I can feel it, taste it, the world is turning, changing, the universe is shifting. I know prayers will be answered, and this dark shadow will pass, winter will end, so for now please keep on keeping on, keep reaching for the light, and remember to eat your greens and lead with love, always, lots of love xxsg

Salena Godden, Gigs & Festivals & Fundraisers, March 2026

It is worth taking the time to look at a photograph. That instant holds so much. If you have read my favourite book, Lispector’s The Stream of Life, then, you will have thought of the “now-instant.” “Each thing has an instant in which it is.” “Is my theme the instant? my life theme. I try to keep up with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the seconds that pass, fragmentary as I am and precarious the moments…”

Mama! O Life! What is the heart? What is it to be human? This instant is already the next instant. What divine frequency are you on so that I might connect to you with my own divine frequency. Hello, I am here! In a world where we paint blue hearts on walls by photo booths and dress them in protective vests. Someone else comes along and writes Gaza in a small black heart.

Nothing will be forgotten though it will take some time to see.

Shawna Lemay, We Live in Time

I thought we’d get to do all sorts of things that we never got to do, travel some, a lot more time out and about. We did get to be at Jaipur Literature Festival and I did some amazing work there, but before that I was hit with the most crazy flu-like thing, and then when that passed and I thought, aha, all good now, and we did Jaipur, a few days after we got back I woke up with a funky neck and then lost all power in my right arm and was bent over so that I could not straighten up. Thankfully, I found perhaps the best physiotherapist in the land, just down the road from me, but it was so bad for a couple of weeks that any walking had me in shards of pain. The medication I ended up on squashed my sense of being in my body, and it’s only a few days since, but something shifted and about 80% of the pain has lifted.

But this is Karma Country. In these three weeks I’ve had to meet my body with absolute tenderness and kindness, accepting what it can and can’t do each day, and, in its way, this has found its way into the new writing. I have to write at a Joycean pace, perhaps slower even, but having to be immobile so much, and with no place or position in which there wasn’t some pain, and no amount of determination from my rough, irascible, Irish, determined side that I tend to lean into when I need to push through would do anything to help or advance the situation, I had to simply allow everything to be as it was, is. Once I did this, the spirit of the writing began to grow, show me avenues and routes that I’d never have thought of in years of black coffees. Yet there is something even greater that has come from this enforced period of tenderness and acceptance. The clarity again of being the author I am. Given some of the dimensions of the world I move through, I do observe many an author, some world-stage famous, operating as a kind of story of themselves that they have to keep up. Either that, or recent reading has shown me that many books of the last couple of generations are a kind of bourgeois level of agreement that uses form as a blanket of consensus of what we mistake literature for. It showed me that I’m not part of that, and the writers and books I truly love are not part of this deepening egregore. I’ll perhaps say more in an essay about this.

While I also observe that I, and the authors who, by whatever means, have managed to stay free, pay for dearly not walking in this valley of vasana. The joy my heart feels at being the insistence to be free to write whatever I want, and that there are books and other authors across human time who have done the same, who have not done what is expected of them by the virality of that cultural conditioning that has reduced art so greatly across every form. As I’ve said before, it may mean these works never get published, never get to you, the reader, in the way I would love them to, but know they are being written, mostly by tenderness and patience rather than any force or pressure. I just keep tuning up in tenderness and the words are there. They are not even pushed to fit a narrative, or fit a genre, or style of deference, they are just there. Calliope is coming to the edge of the field each night to play her flute and my heart has learned to listen better than it ever did when I was almost the famous poetry guy who thankfully spotted the trap ahead of me when I was offered Professor of Poetry at Oxford some years back. That, as they say, is another story, and I know some of you know it, and my why for saying no.

Keep on reading, dear reader, and keep on writing if you write, and as I always I’d love to hear your thoughts, what book you are reading, what you love.

John Siddique, Valentine’s Day Weather Report

some of spring’s small teeth shall be my own

Grant Hacket [no title]