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

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

Dale Favier, A Compost Prayer

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

Rebecca Loudon, Deconstructing the panic

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

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

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

Leanne Ogasawara, How To Rule The World

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

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

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

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

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

Maureen Doallas, Memorial Day

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

Robin Gow, declaration

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

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

Maria Popova, How Not to Dwell on the Past

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

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

Drop-in by Satya Bosman (Nigel Kent)

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

Maya C. Popa, Four New Poems

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Rainy-day reading

Vasiliki Albedo & Lucy Holmes – Sardines (Dialect Press)

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

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

of yet another Bandol Rosé.”

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

Victoria Spires, The thing is… books!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, A bit of psychogeography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH FULL FILM

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº65 Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

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

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

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

Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

I asked AI
the price of milk.

She gave me a baby.

I asked AI
for breakfast.

She gave me
a potted plant.

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

Rebecca Cook, Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

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

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

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

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

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

Fran Lock, “GRANTAGATE”

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

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

Ira Lightman, Brief note on late Hill

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, The two-faced self-portrait.

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

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

Hold beauty.”

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

Saudamini Deo, On seeing men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Behind the SHIELD OF MNEMOSYNE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niall Campbell, Being Frustrated With One of the Greats

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Getting dirty for poetry

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

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

Sue Finch, FINDING THE SHAPE OF THE GARDEN

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, The Work

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Savage Truths of 7am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Writing Intentions

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

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

Kristy Bowen, May Paper Boat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Veined

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

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

Maryann Corbett, Asparagus

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Wildflowers and transphobia

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Healing according to our Sages, the Grass

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, SLOW DOWN

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Loudon, April 17, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

For this I am grateful..

The Stonemason’s Visit

The year has rolled over us, again.

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

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

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

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

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

you are still the first sigh of spring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Poems, on occasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, March Reading Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, Sad boys are not my kink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PF Anderson, Darkness (#NaPoWriMo 19)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Todd Boss, PMM: Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness

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

RM Haines, DAYTON, OHIO / 20 SOMETHING & 6

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Come as You Are

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

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº60 What nourishes me destroys me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fran Lock, REALISATION DITTY

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

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

That inspired a haiku:

spring fever
the whole tree
buzzing

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

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

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

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

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

blossom season
earlier each year
this fleeting world

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

Annette Makino, Cherry blossoms for Haiku Poetry Day

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

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

These two types of writing inform and enhance each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps
When he leafs through that book

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

He might bring
Forefinger to tongue

Luciana Francis, Interlude

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Jane Alynn, NECESSITY OF FLIGHT

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, Ethridge Knight on the Outskirts of My Life

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, NoPoMonth, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memorandum on Events of April 18

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

Brad Skow, Lexington and Concord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Rewarding in a rather straightforward way

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

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

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

Oak Woman

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Oak Woman

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

Marilyn McCabe, Removed from my usual self, just footsteps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know, the usual…

Kristy Bowen, another April | 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Answer

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

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

Niall Campbell, So … What Poems Did I Memorise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, On the Wily, Windy Moors

Buried

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

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

Rajani Rashakrishnan, An April full of poems -2

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

Gary Barwin, STARLING: music with birds

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

Sarah Lada, Chambered Pith

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

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

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ From forgetting to remembering

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

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

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

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

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

the sound of the falls
within reach
trout lily

Tom Clausen, trout lily

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

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, When I forget

Tell me, how are you surviving this April day?

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

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

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

When I collaborated with Dr. Stephanie Delaney and Hiroko Seki, I never imagined the incredible reception this book has had so far—and it is barely five months old. What I love the most, however, are the personal stories that emerge when I talk to both audience members and contributors alike.

Recently, one new friend told me that she reads a bird poem and bird note each night before going to sleep (much better than doomscrolling); a local poet told me that her daughter’s art teach has invited her into the classroom to talk about her contribution to the book, and another contributor gave a copy to her mother, the woman who first taught her about the birds.

Now when I see the common pigeon, I wonder how Jane Hirshfield is doing as this is “her” bird and the Stellar’s jay always reminds me of Harold Taw—whose flash fiction piece invents a language for the jay. Then there’s the chukar that lives in Eastern Washington, Texas, and in Palestine; this is Naomi Shihab Nye’s bird. The oddly named killdeer belongs to Kelli Russell Agodon, the cedar waxwing to Washington State native, Catherine Barnett. The Northern flicker is the bird that I claimed as my own. My gateway drug to the world of birding.

I know that filling the feeders with hot pepper suet and watching a piebald crow along the Puget Sound will not solve the global apocalypse it seems we are experiencing daily. However, without the birds I can’t look at the news from Gaza, Iran, Lebanon without being locked in despair. Birdbrains is the antidote.

Susan Rich, And Now for Something a Little Bit ~ Practical?

Water is trapped in mudflats, but there is also

shimmer in shades of purple. This is the time
before fruit ripens from flower, before
the bruise of summer. In a hurt world,

you try to understand these ongoing
lessons in wonder. Rain, when it returns,
remembers every surface it’s ever met.

Luisa A. Igloria, Living in the In-between

The poem’s most sustained suspension of pentameter follows line 10: “Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots. / Life in itself / Is nothing.” The pentameter line drops off into unsparing dimeter, then monometer, before expanding again into pentameter. The poem’s trajectory reflects not only the temperamental April weather, but the way that the beauty of spring presents itself as “enough.”

Enough to do what? To appear to vanquish death. This is the season’s cruel April Fool’s prank, and the poem’s speaker sees through it. Still, insistent in its utter insufficiency, that prankster and fool, April — given its own penultimate monometer line — arrives, “babbling like an idiot and strewing flowers.” There’s nothing small and clean about this April. It’s a mess. Yet even in the incontrovertible face of death, here it comes again: quixotic and possibly insane, but alive.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Spring

The oak being “unwired” in the second stanza is a wonderful image. I might be taking it too far to think of it as water in the electrics causing a failure, but the cables of the tree roots coming unstuck is a powerful one for me. It’s ironic that in a time like we are in now we will almost certainly be seeing the hosepipe ban news articles coming soon, but Jemma [Borg] paints a picture that is a mixture of beauty: ‘the flood that makes a mirror / on the lawn’ is a beautiful image, as is ‘Venus’s bright eye’, but these are counter-balanced or cancelled out (saying drowned out would be pushing it, Mat) by the “suffering cherry tree” and the lovely imagine and sounds conjured up by “the grass is tutting / with its many wet tongues”. Is nature judging us? No, but it should be.

Mat Riches, Here’s mud in your eye..

To think about trees is to think about generations before you, those who planted the trees that accompany us now, and the generations to follow. I suppose no poet writes about trees alongside men without remembering how Homer says men are like the leaves upon the trees. (Indeed, Larkin’s poem is, viewed from one perspective, really just a kind of riff upon these lines.)

οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίνεται ὥρη:
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.
(Iliad 6.146-149)

Like the generations of leaves are those of men.
Leaves the wind pours upon the ground, but the wood
thickens and births, as spring comes round again:
so the generations of men — one born, one gone.

These lines have been quoted, imitated and alluded to since antiquity. Horace himself writes a version of them in his Ars Poetica, but there he makes the leaves not men, but words — the language of men. My favourite translation of this passage is Jonson’s:

As woods whose change appeares
Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding yeares,
The first-borne dying; so the agèd state
Of words decay, and phrases borne but late
Like tender buds shoot up, and freshly grow.
Our selves, and all that’s ours, to death we owe.

The language changes, but the trees live on. Homer is dead, they seem to say; begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Victoria Moul, Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding years

It’s been too long since the last post. In late March, I posted an article on writing blurbs, which is still waiting for its Part 2. But true to our usual form, both Kim and I have been taken up with this year’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) – which involves writing a poem a day throughout the month of April. Many sensible people write these in the privacy of their own homes, perhaps sharing them with a few trusted friends, before eventually – after careful consideration and thorough editing – publishing a handful of their 30 poems.

But Kim and I publish them every single day on social media, often within minutes of writing the final lines. It’s incredibly exposing, exhausting – and beautifully compelling. And by mid-April, it tends to become all-consuming. By the end of the month, I’m exhausted and slightly crazed, but I do have a stock of 30 first, second or third drafts to sustain me through the subsequent months. Out of the 30 poems, there’s often a small selection of good poems which might make it into a collection. But perhaps most importantly, NaPoWriMo, and its crazy discipline, reminds me that I am a writer. That whatever else I’m doing or feelings in my life, the practice of writing is at my core. Like my therapist said – “whenever you talk about writing, your face lights up”. I’m still struggling with cyclical depression, and the practice of daily writing is a powerful reminder that on those days when I feel like I really don’t want to write a single word, I sometimes produce my best work.

Clare Shaw, A beautiful compulsion

April is National Poetry Month AND National Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month — and here in this blog we continue to celebrate poetry-math connections.  Below I offer the opening stanzas of an old poem of mine entitled “Time”.

The clock goes round —
making time a circle
rather than a line.
Each year’s return to spring
layers time on time. 

Circle or line — 
no difference.  Wrap
the line around a rim,
tuck the loose ends in,
or cut the circle, stretch it thin —

breaking an appointment,
or separating bites of lunch.
If the slit is not at midnight,
visit darkness by going back
or skip from light to light.

A second part of “Time” is available here.  The entire poem is available in Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010).

JoAnne Growney, April — Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

This past Sunday would have been my mother’s 79th birthday, a birthday she never quite made it to, and in a world that would have distressed her to no end. There are times when I wonder how both my parents would have navigated this world, and though my mother saw less of it, dying only a year into the madness, but my father witnessed much more. Both would be extremely vulnerable–to cuts to things like social security and medicare, despite my dad being pretty organized in terms of pensions and savings (this is not a trait he passed down to me.) And while I like to joke that I have unofficially retired to do freelance design/writing /editing work for others and run the press& shop, I know full well I will be working and hopefully still earning income up til my death bed. That is, if I survive–or even if we all survive this current dystopia. In a calmer, saner world of a couple years ago, it was a little freeing to accept that and just make that the plan. I have a tiny amount of savings that is really nothing, but serves as an emergency fund at the least. With J earning money and his business doing well, we are less strapped in general from month to month, but as prices rise on gas and groceries, plus healthcare premiums that are now much higher than they were the past several years, it becomes more challenging.   I still try to fit in smaller pleasures, like theater tickets and occasional new dresses, as well as things like art supplies and books, but it gets harder and probably will even more so. 

Much is afoot in the dgp world, with me still figuring out work flows and logistics on the new books. I’ve been sampling a few different POD operations, including Amazon and Ingram, and am finding there are benefits and drawbacks to both. The books are quite beautiful nevertheless, and I appreciate the easiness of filling orders with books I do not have to print and fold and bind and trim all on my own. I am still looking for the sweet spot in pricing that does not send us into the red.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/8/2026

There was candlewax in my hair for seven days and seven nights the clouds were old testament we watched the sky which plane would fall first which soldier would fall first which angel would descend shocked by a neutral wire you might be shocked at how many people are already dead inside which astronaut will touch ground first which child will fall first small and crumpled my mouth and hands inside this numb poem words didn’t disappear me they boiled away inside 

Rebecca Loudon, Jupiter at rest

I wonder if there has ever been a study of how poets’ work alters as they age. I don’t mean in terms of life experience or a switch of political interpretation or subject matter but the structure of the writing itself.

It’s a subject that’s been troubling me for some time. In day-to-day life I function well at 73. OK, I forget where I’ve put my phone, or go upstairs to fetch something and then forget what it is I’ve gone to fetch, but that seems to be because my head is full of thoughts and responses to whatever’s going on. I can do all the things I’ve done for years, maybe a little slower, but they get done and life works well enough. Physically I’ve survived heart attacks, can still lift and carry bags of feed and bedding, can spend hours on jobs at our smallholding, can still look after pigs, ducks, hens, travel to watch football.

My point is that when I sit to write the process is different. My brain is still capable of energetic concentration but I look at some of the ‘old’ poems from twenty years ago and know I cannot write like that any more. An example:

THE WATER DIVINER

The thirsty people pay
and crowd to watch, but
for now the trick is in
the drama, in the measure

of the stride, the heavy
dance of the methodical
tread, and in the way
water rises at full moon

to break the boundaries
of grief. My reward is in
coins, a place to rest,
quiet nods of respect.

Sometimes, too, after dark
women will seek me out
for more elusive miracles.
But that is not my craft.

There is a tightness and control here, a rhythm that I no longer possess – no longer feel. I could no longer write like this any more than I could write anything sensible in rhyming iambic pentameters. My writing sprawls, jerks about, voices talk to each other within it, it responds to the world, to itself, is restless and reactive. This morning I sat down to write and came up with something that made absolute sense to me, which for now feels right, yet on reflection might be very difficult for others to fathom out.

Bob Mee, HOW THE BRAIN CHANGES THE WAY WE WRITE AS WE AGE

My son and I took my ordinary walk today, along Woods Creek, and I pointed out things he could pull from the ground and eat. Weirdly, he seems to like this, and thought deadnettle was tasty. I never knew what that little purplish plant was until this year, although it grows everywhere—all part of the very long process of learning where I live.

Last year I read selections of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s work for one of those anonymous evaluations I’m not supposed to admit to doing. I admired it so much, I put in an advance order for her collection with snow pouring southward past the window, just out from Pitt. Funny how I keep reading books about foraging, but I especially wanted to taste this one before heading to Alaska in a few days. As her bio describes, Kane is “Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska… She’s raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is currently an Associate Professor at Reed College.” Stephanie Adams-Santos writes in her back-cover endorsement that the poems are “marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away.” Many poems in with snow have a quality of litany (although there’s also one called “No Litanies, No,” so maybe don’t trust my impression). In “Without Anchorage,” she writes about trying to “harvest the tops of onions flash-frozen with approximate winter’s sudden onset, haul the tenderest medicines inside losing only the laurel: hyssop, arnica, basketgrass sagrit.” The lovely precision, though, is framed again and again by the pain of displacement. To some extent art can conjure possible worlds and preserve in them what has been or will be lost. It’s never a fully adequate answer to grief, but I’m moved when artists try.

I’m at least as struck by how these poems witness and answer violence on many scales, including brutality in Kane’s childhood and massive cultural violence. There are also a host of poems about men being assholes. “Letters from Learned Men,” an erasure poem, documents a contemporary priest writing in a condescending way to someone who seems to be Kane herself (the name is blacked out)—and concludes with a hundred-year-old letter in which a priest condemns a Native woman in an overtly vicious way. I love how this poem levels a devastating argument by mere juxtaposition: historical racism and sexism are continuous with their lightly disguised contemporary versions. In fact, I love all of the many angry poems here—as well as the book’s lack of a Notes section. “The first thing I will do: make / myself indecipherable / to you,” she writes in “Elixirs for Words to Come.” So you don’t know my language or landscape or cultural context or even why I’m mad? If you want to navigate this poetic world, it’s on you to figure it out.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 2 (spirals, drafts, wildflowers)

the warehouse always wants more warehouse.
more places to hoard boxes of plastic beads
& plastic teeth & plastic gods. they want
everyone to go & work in the warehouse.
to have babies who know nothing
but warehouse. to turn our blood
into warehouse guts. to warehouse our houses
until we are nothing but their tightening machine.

Robin Gow, warehouse

The breakthrough moment came in summer of 2017, three years into submitting the manuscript.

I woke up that morning with the head of a smart stranger, having forgotten that I had ever wrote the book.

I laid out the manuscript, and what happened next felt like the best mix of expertise and instinct, discernment and intuition.

I began culling poems without anxiety or remorse, and I listened more clearly than I ever had before to what I’d actually written. The title changed without fuss as a result. I could feel when I had finally arrived at the manuscript that would be the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton prize judged by Ocean Vuong. I read the book over with the title American Faith—the title of one of the strongest poems in the book—and thought: yes, this is the book I’d been trying to write.

It was here, in this slab of marble (stack of printouts) waiting to be aerated, chiseled released. I felt a singular mix of relief and quiet confidence. It was a lovely,

Maya C. Popa, The Head of a Smart Stranger

You can stick two contact mics on a Singer
and go to town, letting the feedback wail
as the crunchy needle sounds distort
through one of the many barefoot pedals.
One light bulb shines
through the holes in the paper
as it travels, threadless, through the machine.

Fievel Crane, POEM: You Can Play A Shoestring If You’re Sincere

The best thing about finding fellowship with dead poets is that they don’t contradict you, don’t correct you, don’t talk over you. Thankfully they don’t talk at all. They are mercifully silent. I find this makes for a better connection. When I walked from Keats’ birthplace to Blake’s grave last week the commentary I gave was broadcast unscripted, unchecked, unedited. “You sounded quite posh” said Sue from Essex who’d tuned in to the live-stream. I thought about the voice that I’d adopted, the one I think I’d put on to lend authority if not authenticity to my report. Out of a kind of nervousness I suppose, an insecurity even, I’d acquired a voice that wasn’t entirely my own.

And I thought about that voice that poets put on. If you’re a poet you probably do it. And if you don’t, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about tune your dials to the next poet up on the open mic or to any of them broadcast on BBC’s Radio 4. They’re all at it. Listen carefully.

It’s come to be known as “poetry voice.” It’s rooted in a bluesy, jazz scat blended with a dash of watered down Dylan and a measure of white-Beatnik inflection. It can be subtle, barely detectable, an occasional raised tone at the end of each phrase, a single word in emphasis pronounced from the diaphragm. It is a strange example of diluted, cultural appropriation without any specifically identifiable origin. It is designed, I think, to add “feeling” to a poem when spoken, to show that you really “mean it.” You can sound like a poet even if what you’ve written barely resembles poetry.

Perhaps it’s just a way of disguising vulnerability or simply a means of elevating speech to ‘not quite song’ but a cut above straight ‘saying stuff.’ It is a middle ground that poetry can claim as its own safe space. But with such richness and range available to the voice why such conformity? The poet Auden was a notoriously poor performer. But it was deliberate. Appalled by the manner in which populations were enthralled by the exuberant but empty oratory of political fanatics he dropped his cadence to a near mumble to avoid any sensationalism. The poem lived elsewhere, the reading a gesture toward it, a mere suggestion of it.

Jan Noble, Nº59 Dead networking (with Keats and Blake)

I woke at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and about all the times I have woken at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and specifically about these fourteen lines of Milton, the attempt to recall and silently recite less variety of counting sheep than of slowing the woolly urge to go on leaping the mind’s endless fences and instead settle down in the wet green grass. It was no different today, until I stopped bobbing along on iambs long enough to realize the reasons I’ve been quiet here overlap reasons I haven’t yet shared this poem.

The question of how to be strikes me as the obvious one for a person in my present condition to be asking, though the longer I’ve sat with it, the clearer it is that it’s been the central question of my life. It’s why this poem bewitched and baffled me at twenty-two, and has alternately vexed and consoled me since. And yet I’ve been . . . afraid? To write about it here. I’ve forgotten more about my formal education in poetry than feels prudent to acknowledge in a publication wherein I purport to bring you some insight about the craft, though writing this out longhand—in an emerald green Moleskine cahier with at stub-nib Eco TWSBI; it’s now 7:15 a.m. and there’s a bird I can’t name chiming outside the open window—I am reminded, once again, of what I set out to do here, how I set out to be.

It has been a struggle, recapturing what I want to call the simplicity of being with poems. I have found it difficult to stop myself from slipping out of it and into the assorted personas, assorted ways of being, I have tried on over the years—academic, educator, editor, critic—each of which comes with its own set of professional and social obligations, or perhaps simply expectations, internal and external alike. Some of the resulting reservations about staking any claim to insight are fairly obvious. I have forgotten more about Milton and his poems and the vast ecosystem of scholarship surrounding both than I can remember ever having known. If a doctorate could be revoked, I don’t think I’d argue overmuch if some diploma-removal goons came knocking.

Some of the reservations are far weirder: things like the persistent sense that I have forgotten some lousy thing that Milton said or did or is reported to have said or done, something unsavoury to our twenty-first century sense of moral perfectionism, and has been summarily dismissed by the loudest of internet users. That the Aeropagitica fails to fully account for some local complexity or other and must thus be chucked wholesale.

Or something even worse, like that he believed in meaning, in the soul, in God.

The point of all of this is that Sonnet XIX is a poem that I love, and it has lived with me, and I with it, for many years, and lately it has been essential to me as I relearn, each day, how to live, how to be, something I have done perhaps all my life, and not just at what lately sometimes feels its nadir.

Vanessa Stauffer, Sonnet XIX: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ by John Milton

As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.

The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.

This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.

The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?

Matthew Paul, On poetry competitions and personal taste

One does not attempt to write a poem about foremothers. One is compelled to write it. In fact, it writes itself. You are simply the last hand in a chain of clasped arms, the last daughter in a lineage of daughters, the last mouth from which the song, fully formed, emerges.

I see Daughter of Sindh as a bridge poem – my ancestral mothers gaze towards me, I look back to them, and the legacy of colonial rule, the pain of India’s partition hangs between us.

In the great gamble of map-drawing, Sindh (and half of Punjab) ended up on the Pakistani side of the border; the wrong side for my Hindu grandparents (maternal and paternal) who crossed amidst carnage, rebuilding their lives from refugee camps on what politicians declared in 1947 was now their homeland. They never crossed that border again. Their ache never ceased.

Far from their slowly reconstructed lives in India, I was born and raised in West Asia (UAE), by a Sindhi mother and a Punjabi father who spoke with each other in English and were themselves raised in the shadows of unspoken wounds of their parents’ displacement. My childhood was a surreal split between Indian mythological universes and the moody landscapes of Austen and Bronte; I memorized Shakespeare and Sanskrit verses for their rhythm, learnt ballet and Bharatanatyam.

Like Daughter of Sindh, I have existed on bridges since I can remember – at the intersection of cultures, of worlds, of times. For a long while, when I lost my mother at 19, existence felt like one foot in the realm of life, the other in the realm of death.

For me, writing poetry is standing on thresholds in their purest, most luminous warmth, and allowing the words to remake me. It is to drench oneself in their light, in their fire, and taste honey. Much of my collection ‘Drench Me in Silver’ (Black Bough, 2025) is the gathering of such moments.

Drop-in by Saraswati Nagpal (Nigel Kent)

In my yard, hands on my hips, I look down at the collage of green foliage at my feet. I look for the familiar whorls and hues of ephemeral leaves. I count seven Bloodroot blossoms, little yellow faces with their manes of white. My favorite stage of their growth is just before the bloom when the lobed leaf is wrapped around the stem like a cloak. The flower appears to be holding its face in despair. Staring down at them, I feel my arms begin to wrap around my body. […]

Bloodroot’s whorl of leaf encases the delicate stem, protecting the flower until it finally blooms. Anyone who has started seeds in the still-aired confines of their homes quickly learns that the leggy stems are susceptible to wind as soon as they’re taken outside to adjust to life in the real world. The Bloodroot eventually sheds the cloak of itself and as it opens its face to the sunlight, its root nodules foster bacteria, nitrogen, and a gossamer intimacy with mycelia to nourish itself on the earth. Every green of stem. Every brown and gray of bark. Every green and red and yellow of leaf. Every pinnacle of thorn. All of it is miraculously rendered from the soil, and light.

Today is one of those days. Despite the universe in a seed, despite the success of transplant, the seven Bloodroot blossoms are just that: seven flowers. We all have days like these where the magic isn’t magic, but simply is what is. We experience the doldrums, all of us sitting on the edge of our beds, dragging a sock over the foot of another day. Opening a door and closing it in that repetitive muscle memory. Of course the seed bursts open; what is needed is there. The plant has sap. That’s what plants do. The sap has color and it happens to be red. I stand here and stare at the ground, though, and somehow I’m still entranced. Sometimes all the looking inward is just a sign that one needs to spend more time looking outward.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “I Go Down to the Shore” where she is humbled by the work and mechanism of what is […]

Sarah Lada, Finding the World

I hope to get together another manuscript out this spring (1 circulating, 1 bounced, 1 accepted to tbc), but I looked at 60 pages of this one, and said, nope and yanked that bit of viscera and will rebuild.

I spent 7 hours on a poem yesterday and look askance at it today. Hm, maybe it needs to sit and steep a while.

Recently I got a couple poems accepted at online places. Another going up April 9. Poetry coming out at +doc too. So that’s exciting.

Meanwhile I’ve continued to read at my usual voracious rate. I’m at 75 titles, varying from a dozen pages to over 700 pages. I’ve realized how inadequate even to myself to note a good one is. Or locate again given my current state of books.

Pearl Pirie, On our small marble

Much of my writing life is about waiting, for the ideas to form, for the stories to knit together. But today: writing, tidying, note making. Toying with flash fiction, bending and breaking rules, watching how tone and structure affect a story. I’m trying to write super short flash today – nothing more than 100 words a story. It’s challenging, but I need the hard edges of a challenge, as opposed to the loose, wandering path of the novel. I like the constraint. I like the fierce cutting and chipping and chiseling of words. When I look up it’s been an hour and a half. I take a break from writing and instead search online for writing opportunities and update a spreadsheet, begin yet another grant application then give up on it.

Suddenly, around me is a shifting and dragging of tables and chairs. A group of cancer hospital volunteers have arrived for a meeting. There are about fifteen people crowding into my corner. They keep asking if it’s ok for them to be around me like this, and it is because I’m not going anywhere. One of them has two therapy dogs with her, and I reach down and stroke the nearest one, who has a surprisingly wet beard.

They start by having a right old bitch about all sorts of work based stuff. I enjoy listening to it. It reminds me of my old job as a microbiologist. Oh, strange days to remember when I was a person who got up and went to a laboratory and looked down a microscope. Strange to think I was a person who worked with people. The gossip. The bitching. And let me tell you, no one can bitch like an NHS worker. The group move on from bitching to sharing their own experiences. Each and every one a cancer survivor. Then they are done, coffee drank, plans made, they move out, apologising to me for crowding me.

‘It’s ok, I wasn’t going anywhere, I’m supposed to be working’ I say, smiling.

‘Are you here with someone?’

‘My mum, she’s having chemo’.

‘Well, we’re all survivors ourselves, you’ll have heard, don’t give up hope…’

‘Stage four.’

‘Oh, well I hope the chemo gives her some more time.’

‘Thanks’

There is an awkward silence. Even here, in the middle of a cancer hospital, death is a place we can’t quite cross into. I think about that often, that I have been crossing into and out of places of death, that for long periods of my life I have lived in the doorway of both worlds, the liminal space of waiting and watching. They have all been there too, or at least to the edges, to view from some platform what is coming to us all. The moment passes.

We talk a little more, about what I’m working on. I say I’m a writer. She says I should write about them. I say I’ll put them in a short story, but I don’t, I put them in this blog instead.

Wendy Pratt, Much of what happens here is about waiting

In the context of a review culture in which hot takes, pseudo blurbs and cod-academic posturing are rife, it’s a huge breath of fresh air to encounter a critic who engages with a poet and their poetry, who gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of every line, who reaches far beyond a mere description of thematic concerns, all without lapsing into jargon or self-aggrandisement.

This is why I’m thoroughly recommending Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read today. It’s a regular Substack where she delves deeply into one collection at a time. Her writing and insights are terrific in their clarity, worthy of a wider audience and way more interesting than most reviews that can be found in major journals, even the essay-length ones, so I’m not taking restricted words counts as an excuse here. In fact, Fitzpatrick’s showing up a fair few bigger names in The Deeper Read. I suggest you explore its archive via this link, but with one warning: it’s likely to provoke you into purchases of poetry books that you’d never heard of and suddenly need…!

Matthew Stewart, Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read

I was struck recently by the pathetic persistence of my ego needs, that little creature inside who is constantly wanting to be seen, heard, applauded. “My god, creature, will you never stop?” I scold it. “Surely we’re of or approaching an age when we can be beyond all this,” I suggest to it. “Oh yes,” it says, “of course,” it assures. But next thing I know it’s having another little fit over a rejection, a perceived slight. Recently it was in a small tizzy over a competition we lost, even though we really didn’t expect to win in the first place. “But still,” it declares stoutly. I bemuse myself with all the ways I try to be seen — my poetry, art, opinions, and all the conversations I insert myself-talking-about-myself into. “Can you just shut up,” I demand of the ego. It makes that locking-the-lips motion. I don’t believe it for a minute. Can I blame society’s focus on productivity, success, competition — does every freaking thing have to be a competition? Competition means winners, yes, but it also, by definition, means losers. It occurs to me that I identify always with the losers. Does that doom me to self-fulfilling prophecy? “No, no, it’s not my fault!” declares ego. I think about how early trauma informs lifelong twists of thinking. “Yes,” cries ego, “it’s my parents’ fault!” Oh shut up. Just keep doing the creative acts, I tell myself, and ignore the ego beast. It blinks at me, unreadable.

Anyway, then I found this amusing poem by Matthew Olzmann (“so much better known, better published, a real success story in the poetry world, not like…,” mutters ego) and felt momentary kindred, as a poem can do. And then the ending! That’s what poetry is all about.

Marilyn McCabe, the savant who believes mustard stains

Comingling bodies brewed of holy water and borrowed time. Insomnia and 5 a.m. coffee atoms. Dog-tired highways and ragged folk-songs. Starched shirts and worn jeans atoms. Counterfeit and heaven-forged. A medicine bottle with hope listed as a side effect.

Rich Ferguson, Swirling through the universe, all the atoms of us

THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Bethany Reid, Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

‘A Comet Passing’ is an urgent, taut collection of 18 poems inspired by the events surrounding the Heaven’s Gate religious group during the approach of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. As we readers already know (or can easily find out) what happened during these febrile, fervid last days, Vanessa [Napolitano]’s job as the poet is to keep our attention on each part of the sequence as it unfolds. Through a kind of poetic speculation, we experience the build-up of events as though we were one of the Heaven’s Gate members – believing when they believe, doubting when they doubt. Vanessa sustains the tension through a careful layering of moments of high intensity with moments of calm, even boredom, as the group prepares meticulously for what is to come.

I’ve loved Vanessa’s poetry since I first laid eyes on it, and it’s especially pleasing to see the emotional intelligence and subtlety of her writing brought to bear here, on a subject outside of her usual range of themes. This is a pamphlet doing what pamphlets do really well – operating as a vehicle for a set of concerns at somewhat of a tangent to the writer’s main body of work.

That said, Vanessa’s attention to detail, to the fine grain of life, is all over these poems, from the “newspaper bags full of literature” in the opening poem Recruitment, to the pin-sharp character studies of Nobodyody, to the last frivolities enjoyed and documented in Levity – “chicken pot pie, cold lemonade”.

Victoria Spires, A mystery of bodies

Frank Stanford is surely one of the most important undervalued American poets. Few have read him, but his writing of a dark and fallen South is on par with the novels of William Faulkner and the stories of Flannery O’Connor. In writing ability and scope, Stanford is their equal. The subject matter, tone, and language are quite similar. He died at twenty-nine by his own hand in 1978, yet he’d already published seven volumes of poetry. Two more posthumous collections would appear within one year. His most mysterious work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, is an epic poem of more than 15,000 lines narrated by a twelve-year old boy, growing up in Mississippi.

A volume of selected poems, The Light the Dead See, published in 1991, serves as a solid introduction to Stanford’s work. For those who want to experience the poet in-depth, I’d recommend What About Water: Collected Poems and Hidden Water, unpublished works, fragments, and letters – both books published in 2015. A writer of enormous possibility. Readers can only guess what might have been.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank Stanford, “Their Names Are Spoken”

Several years ago, I came across Nicole Gulotta’s Wild Words, a book about letting creativity meet you where you are. As a new mom, in the midst of nap-trapped days and sleepless nights, I devoured that book. We’re talking highlights, underlines, notes spilling into the margins.

After I finished Wild Words, I moved on to Nicole’s podcast. I have distinct memories of walking around my neighborhood, pushing a stroller, headphones on, and Nicole’s voice in my ear. At the time, I had no plans of publishing a book. I only knew that I wanted to keep writing. So I did—over several slow, mostly unremarkable years.

In 2025, I published my first poetry collection, A History of Holding. A month or two after its release, an order arrived in my inbox.

From Nicole Gulotta.

I was shocked, confused, elated. How did she know I existed? Where did she come across the book? I reached out to thank her and tell her how much Wild Words meant to me, and she was as kind and gracious as I’d imagined.

A few weeks later, she sent me an email.

She’d finished my book. She liked it. She wanted to have me on her podcast!

Allison Mei-Li, Slow Writing

It’s good that CBe doesn’t have shareholders, because the figures for the financial year just ended wouldn’t make them happy. The only people CBe is accountable to are readers. Thank you very much to those who pressed the ‘Donate’ link on the website home page: still there, and anyone who presses it gets a copy of a limited-edition 32-page full-colour booklet called Vedute a colori.

Early next year – which, if we get there, will be CBe’s 20th birthday – CBe will publish its largest and longest book to date. Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) happens to be – and I’m not entirely alone in thinking this – one of the major English-language works of the past century, and has never been published in the UK. It was originally published piecemeal between 1934 and 1978; in 2015 in the US Black Sparrow, now an imprint of David Godine, gathered the whole thing (including the original prose version, out of print for decades) into a single edition, and this is the edition – large format, 608 pages! – that CBe will publish in the UK.

The poems in Testimony are derived from court records from across the US between 1885 and 1915. Other poetry titles from CBe based on documentary records of the lives of others (interviews, photographs, emails …) are Sarah Hesketh’s 2016, Caroline Clark’s Sovetica, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Long Cuts, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter and New Life, and Testimony may be the mother and father of them all.

Reznikoff is little known in the UK (the US too). But some people know him, and I’d be very happy if any of those who do get in touch. Publishing this book is a statement: about small presses (much of Reznikoff’s work was self-published and printed by himself), but it’s also about why write, why publish. Any history of Modernism in literature that doesn’t include this book needs kicking.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter April 2026: new book, and news of another

Claire Taylor is a writer for both adult and youth audiences. Her poetry collection, April and Back Again is available now from Publishing Genius. Claire is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.

1 – How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote and self-published my first chapbook, Mother Nature, during the pandemic. It’s a hybrid collection of poetry and essays about pregnancy, the postpartum period, and early parenting. I don’t know that it changed my life per se, but being able to find readers who connected with the themes and emotional vulnerability at play in that book helped solidify my desire to keep writing, to remain open to the experience of sharing my life and my feelings in this way. 

My new collection, April and Back Again, focuses on a single year in my life from the period of April 2024 when I turned 39, to April 2025 when I turned 40. It’s a sort of time capsule for that period, a point in time when when both my life and the US were on the cusp of significant changes. I think the themes of family life, aging, and obviously politics and trying to parent through a fog of existential dread are universal and extend beyond the single year in which I wrote these poems, but this book feels especially like a snapshot of a particular moment in time for me.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry as a kid. I had my first poem published at age 10 in Highlights Magazine. It was about what it might feel like to be a leaf. Then I wrote a bunch of angsty and lusty poems in high school, your typical teenage stuff. After that, though, I mostly shifted away from poetry and only came back to it after becoming a mother. I needed to write about that new experience but had very little free time to sit down and do any long-form writing. I would write poems in my phone’s Notes app while I was nursing my baby or when I was up in the middle of the night trying to rock him back to sleep. Poetry is a good outlet if you need to express your emotions but only have five minutes and one hand free. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think the main concern behind my writing is how to make sense of being human. I think about writing poetry the same way I think about parenting: It’s my job to illuminate the complexity of being human, to say, here is what is hard and here is what is beautiful about being alive and now you have to decide what to do with that information.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Taylor

I’m grateful to share that my poem “Dear Judy” was just published in Solstice Literary Magazine, a long-standing, mission-driven journal dedicated to diverse voices and socially engaged work. Solstice consistently publishes writing that leans into nuance, justice, and the complicated ways we move through the world, and I’m honored to have a poem included in their Spring 2026 issue.

This poem is part of a series I’ve been writing since my mother passed unexpectedly in January 2024—epistolary duplex poems addressed to her. Some are shaped by what’s happening around us; others turn inward, tracing the parts of my life and my mother’s life that continue to intersect. These poems have become a way for me to keep talking to her, to say what I still need to say, to stay close.

“Dear Judy” is the second poem from this series to be published. The first, “Dear Judy,” appeared in New Verse News  on September 16, 2025. I also wrote a short post about that publication and the project as a whole:
“My Duplex Poem ‘Dear Judy’ Published in New Verse News”.

Formally, this new piece is an extended duplex, a variation on the poetic form invented by Jericho Brown. A traditional duplex is a 14-line hybrid that braids the sonnet, ghazal, and blues through repetition and transformation. You can read more about the form on Poets.org in their entry on the duplex.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Dear Judy” and extended duplex published in Solstice

Like many others, I get the occasional e-mail that tells me that the sender can help me find new readers for my brilliant books, millions and millions of readers.  Yesterday I got a different e-mail, an old-fashioned fan letter of sorts.  

The e-mail writer told me that she had selected my poem for a specific reason:  “This is to let you know that as a member of a Lectio Poetry group that met this morning, I chose your poem ‘The Moon Remembers’ for our session. Because of the recent NASA mission to send humans farther into space than ever before, and to study the dark side of the moon, I felt fortunate to find your poem to share.”

The e-mail concluded this way, “In this world of chaos, ‘The Moon Remembers’ gave us an hour of peace, of joy, of hope.”

Wow–what writer could hope for more than that?  I mean that sincerely.  It is one of the reasons I write, in the hopes of bringing something positive to people.

I don’t get many fan letters anymore, and the ones that I get are usually about “Heaven on Earth,” perhaps my most famous poem, read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  Yesterday’s e-mail referenced “The Moon Remembers.”  It’s a poem I barely remember writing, and at first, I wondered if she was writing to the wrong poet.

Happily, my blog answers many a question for me.  I posted it in this blog post, and I’m guessing that’s how the group leader found my poem.  Even though it’s not one of the poems I remember, I’m still happy with it.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fan Letter for Forgotten Poem, “The Moon Remembers”

I had one of those moments last week where I thought I would put off doing something until next time I had the opportunity. Luckily my thoughts stopped me in my tracks and nudged me into thinking how good it would feel to do the thing and know I had done it. I liked the fact that my thoughts were giving me the nod that I could just get on and do the thing. And when I stood in the moment to think about it, I realised it would be the same feeling of being a little bit scary whether I did it this time or next, and therefore it made sense just to crack on and do it. My mission? To pop into a book shop and ask if they would be willing to stock my poetry books. Three things also spurred me on:

• Helen O’Neill asking, “Where can people find your poetry?”
• My commitment to being 10% braver (thank you Jaz Ampaw Farr).
• This lovely feedback from someone who messaged me recently after buying a copy of one of my books… “I picked up ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ today after reading two poems standing in the bookshop! I couldn’t put it down…. The Telford Warehouse poem stopped me completely…”

So this week I am celebrating seizing the moment, the positive role of self-talk and the things and people that spur us on.

Sue Finch, A ROAD TRIP TO NEVERN

My poetry calendar is getting crowded, and I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use the distraction.

This Wednesday at J. Bookwalter’s in Woodinville, at 6:30 PM we’ll be meeting at our monthly book club to discuss Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book, Accidental Devotions, just out from Copper Canyon Press. (Well, technically its launch date is in May, but we’re celebrating early, because Poetry Month!) Here are my cats jealously guarding their early copy. I have already read the book and know it’s fantastic. I recommend it.

And on April 23rd, J. Bookwalter’s Tasting Studio in Woodinville is re-starting its Wine and Poetry Night with Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new book. I’ll be hosting and doing an introduction. […]

And just in case this isn’t enough poetry for you, I’ll be reading at the Poetry Book Party for Catherine Broadwall’s new book Aftermath from Girl Noise Press on May 5th at Vermillion in Capital Hill, as part of the opening act at 7 PM. Catherine is the poet on the right in this picture with a Rainier cherry tree.

In between all this poetry month (and early May) excitement, I’ll be welcoming my nephew Dustin Hall’s move to the area, celebrating my birthday, and probably snapping pictures of tulips, daffodils and cherry blossoms along the way.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, It’s National Poetry Month! Poetry Book Clubs and Poetry Readings, Poet Friends and Book Parties, and More

Now that we’re one week into April, I thought it might be fun to think about the aftermath of a 30/30. All those drafts, in various stages of newness and disarray. How do you begin to approach deciding what to keep, what to abandon, what to revise? I always approach a first draft the same way after letting it cool on the sill for a while. I ask questions in my head:

• What’s working, both at the language level and/or in serving the poem’s purpose?
• What’s extraneous and should be removed?
• What’s necessary/working as connective tissue but poorly executed?
• Where’s the turn/volta toward purpose or layers of meaning?

Though I am not officially doing a 30/30 (see last post), I am trying to write something every day this month. So I started on April 1 with a prompt from Bluesky from Todd Dillard:

“Deconstructed Fable”
Write a poem in which every day you receive some fragment of a fable. A red cloak, the huntsman’s ax, a grandmother’s spectacles, etc. Write the poem in such a way that “solving” this fable directs you to return to your childhood home.

As it always is with prompts, I did not follow its instructions exactly. I only used one fragment/item and stuck with one fable throughout a return to the childhood home. (Surprise! It was a grief poem…oops.) Although the draft is okay, it’s certainly not what it could be.

Donna Vorreyer, What’cha Gonna Do With All That Junk?

Walk horizonless, gaze curiously,
recognize, understand the birds,
the trees, the entire sky.
It no longer feels impossible,

something peaks and it feels
like forever, where a song
is not rain, but
a delicate wing.

Charlotte Hamrick, Beyond & Within

Dear Friends, March was a fast month for me. With all of the preparation going up to Baltimore for AWP and coming back again, I hardly had any time to review and post the recent interviews I did. One is with Donna Spruijt-Metz and the other with Heidi Seaborn. (Both are below.)

I woke up this morning excited to finally get to re-listen to these interviews and post them on The Poetry Salon’s YouTube channel.

Before I could get the raw material of these interviews downloaded, I got on Facebook to mindlessly scroll for a bit, while drinking my coffee and waking up. Instead of getting my mindless scroll, I saw pictures of John Brantingham, being shared all over my feed. John, my friend, and founder of The Journal of Radical Wonder was scheduled to feature at Poets Inspiring Poets on May 18th at The Poetry Salon. At first I thought, “Good. People are promoting the event with John.” But then I read the notes under the photo and saw, as I so often do, that people were announcing our mutual friend’s passing.

I was so not ready for this; I was getting ready to see him again on zoom. People who have events scheduled with you can’t possibly die! I thought.

I turned off the background noise. I starred at the screen. I scrolled more mindfully now. […]

I spent a chunk of today working on an essay about John and what he taught me and inspired for me in the brief time I knew him. It connects quite a bit with my discussions with Donna and Heidi – personal grief and collective grief, the environmental crisis, and the resilience of the planet. It’s about using poetry to share and process complex feelings. It’s about what we can do for one another and for the planet.

It is also about acorns and making cookies.

I will share that essay soon. For now I want to say that we will open our April 18th event, Poets Inspiring Poets, to everyone who wants to celebrate John. Please bring a poem of his to read, or bring a poem of your own that connects with John’s work in some way. If you had work published by him in The Journal of Radical Wonder, bring that. Mostly, bring yourself!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Finding Radical Wonder in Difficult Times: Honoring John Brantingham

It’s not so much the lifeboats
studding dark water like stars,
as what lies beneath the boats,
free swimming, with hearts beating,
then ferociously attached
(armor and weapon), hungry
for the funk of horizons

PF Anderson, Barnacles (#NaPoWriMo 11)

It is surreal that war is raging while my surroundings are so serene. I think of rocket fire, explosions, thick clouds of toxic smoke. I think of people I love in Israel who are protesting the war with Iran. I think of a pregnant friend making sure she can get to the nearest bomb shelter. I think of all the people across the region who have no bomb shelters.

I wonder how any of us made it through last Tuesday (the day we all woke to “a whole civilization will die tonight”) without a nervous breakdown. My cat naps peacefully on the couch. The tree frogs sing their spring song. I’m not sure we’re out of the woods. Maybe we’re still on the brink of global disaster. And yet laundry needs doing, the groceries must be put away.

Rachel Barenblat, We made it

The news. The girl switches the channel to Chopin’s Berceuse.

They have been sending drones. Only half of the house is still standing, wires protruding from the walls.

The boy, dizzy, asks his mother if it’s time for strawberries—soon.

Spiders. The woman shies away from touching their cocoons as she clears the furniture out from the shed.

Naming a crater after their commander’s late wife, the Artemis crew falls into each other’s arms.

Kati Mohr, Beads

I’m scared. I’m guessing we’re all scared. I stop scrolling, I stop reading, I stop listening. I feel guilt. I feel shame I should be informed, I should be aware I should not bask in the privilege of being able to turn away. More than anything I should be changing things, I should be using writing to change things.

I am not. Take this morning for example – I have finished the first draft of a wedding poem for a couple who are looking forward to building their life together in a beautiful country cottage. I’ve written a slightly dark poem about a blackbird’s song for my Poem Whisperer’s group. I’ve checked my seedlings, wandered sunshine and tamped down the fear that grasped me yesterday. I have turned my mind away, I have basked in my privilege. I am able to choose the place that Marwan Marhoul talks about

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

– Marwan Makhoul

I have no lived experience, no first-hand knowledge of this. I am write outrage, devastation, fear, from a place where I can hear the birds. Will it not be hollow, even insulting to write about things I know of but can never understand? I can write about my own response, but what do I really have to say that is different than all the other sorrow and regret that’s out there? I look up the point of writing in terrifying times and read about poetry being a balm, a soothing presence. I read about poetry being a means to rail against injustice, to call for solidarity. I read about poetry being a way to connect and to empathise. I read that poetry captures the essence of what it means to be human. I read this wisdom and feel empty. I don’t know if I believe it anymore. I don’t know if art is powerful enough to overcome and rebuild.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Do the words of a person who can still hear the birds have any value in times of terror?

The image of the H above is from a series entitled the Scaffolding for the Alphabet. Is the alphabet all scaffolding? Is old writing scaffolding for the old? Or the other way around.

And here’s a poem that I wrote “after” A.R. Ammon’s “Poem.” I took his poem and ran it through a bunch of translation tools and then a wisp of something emerged which I made into this poem.

AFTER

lunch I
put
on my shoes
and stand just
above
the earth

Gary Barwin, Scaffolding for the Alphabet

This week: 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: reading poetry to pigs, yellow stretchy man, the canon of spiteful literature, and much more. Enjoy.

And so, there I was, sitting in a green chair, reading poetry to our new pigs. (Ten-week-old Middle Whites, an endangered breed).

They wandered about in the morning sun, rooting here and there, coming over for a drink every so often, checking the food trough, which they’d emptied an hour before. […]

I had a poetry book in the car – Broken Land, Poems Of Brooklyn – that I bought years ago in the magnificent Strand bookshop in Manhattan for ten dollars. It’s got lots of really good poems in it, centred on Brooklyn. I settled down to read as they milled about, coming close but not too close, always ready to retreat. I began with a bit of Walt Whitman. Sun-down Poem. It begins ‘Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you, face to face./ Clouds of the west! sun half an hour high! I see you also face to face’…

The pigs retreated. As I read the next verse, they took off to the far corner of the pen and stood, staring, waiting, as suspicious as suspicious animals ever get.

OK, I thought. Not Whitman then.

Frank O’Hara. Yes, well I prefer him to Whitman, I thought, so maybe they will too. And the result was an improvement. They came back out of the far corner to Ave Maria, which begins ‘Mothers of America/ let your kids go to the movies/ get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to…’ The pigs didn’t exactly rush over, but O’Hara didn’t seem to worry them the way Whitman had. They held a kind of middle distance, either watching me, appearing to listen, or nosing up some tempting root.

OK, I thought. An improvement. What now? I let the book fall open.

Ted Berrigan, Personal Poem #9, from 1969, which begins ‘It’s 8.54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 26th of July/ and it’s probably 8.54 in Manhattan but I’m/ in Brooklyn I’m eating English muffins and drinking/ Pepsi…’

Maybe it was the mention of English muffins that did it, or maybe it was something about Berrigan’s laid-back, matter-of-fact tone, translated by me, of course, in my flat Midlands accent. Anyway, first one, then the next, and then the third, came over and stood in front of me, staring. Then – I admit I was a bit unnerved – they settled down in the grass by my feet as I read the whole of Berrigan’s poem. They looked at me, all suspicion gone from their eyes. I’d go so far as to say they were relaxed and at peace.

Bob Mee, READING POETRY TO PIGS

Edward Thomas might be widely known as a war poet, but he is also a wonderfully accomplished writer of nature and place – just think of “Addlestrop”. “The Path” was written in 1915, and in “parapet” you can hear hints of war in the first sentence… Notice how that first sentence winds sinuously before delivering us, like a path, to our destination: “There is a path”. Then we shift into a child’s perspective, looking through the legs of the trees, just like children in a crowd will look through adults’ legs. And it’s as if the woodland itself were alive – magical in its gold, and emerald and silver … but ultimately leading nowhere – except perhaps the end of childhood, or the end of memory, or the beginning of war.

Clare Shaw, Walk with Me.

here, where I must
become common for now, wildflowers
are rampant, heraldic. I slit my eyes
like a sleepy lioness, sprawl out
in the grass. this is a change. sun,
heat, blanketing me with light; eyelids
not curtain enough for any shadow. instead,
thru the tangled lashes everything is hazy
with the red-orange of overripe pumpkins,
the gold of summer squash. heat in me answers
all the altered colours, the dangerous droning
of the pollen-heavy bees, their impossible
flight. there is no courage in me now,
no fear to overcome. around me, the bees
dance until my eyes are dizzy with them.

PF Anderson, Honeybees

I’m reading ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ by Annie Dillard. She has an extraordinary perspective which includes some direct observations about living, including: “We are here on the planet only once, and we might as well get a feel for the place.” For her, it’s not about the spectacular, but about seeing “what is there” (p.74).

I’ve found I can see what is there in lake Little Norrsjön by swimming. I don’t know about you, but I was taught to swim in straight lines. While I’ve since splashed out into lakes and seas, it’s never struck me before that swimming can be a form of exploration: slow motion, but motion nonetheless. I had this realisation during my second swim, when I went a little further than the first, finding a sandbank and river-mouth. 

Liz Lefroy, I Explore by Swimming

In the 5th arrondissement of Paris, next to the street of the cat that fishes, is an old 16th century building from the depths of which people can sometimes hear music. It seems almost like a surreal tableau or a real manifestation of an underground Biblical hell, with hundreds of people, half drunk, dancing late at night to orchestral jazz in a stone cellar. There is a balding middle-aged bartender, wearing skull rings, serving cocktails and flirting with customers. Back in the 1500s, the building used to be a meeting place for Templars and Freemasons and it is possible to fall asleep, with a grenadine drink in hand, on one of the stairs under the eyes of stone cherubs to the rhythmic silence of the mad rush while dreaming about Dom Perlet, a fishmonger from the 1600s whose black cat could catch fish swiftly from the Seine.

At or after midnight, beyond the smell of old urine and sound of scurrying rats, one can still see something like the shadow of a cat on the ancient green water of the Seine. Time, like water, runs forward and back. I am sometimes in the 21st and sometimes in the 15th century. What does it all mean? Nothing except that we don’t know anything.

Saudamini Deo, Rue du chat qui pêche

Just a river and a lake it feeds into. Neither very spectacular or busy, no cafe nearby for ice cream. Just an outhouse toilet and a changing room at the sauna. We can’t light fires, nothing interesting, but I didn’t even have to fight the kids to get them there. […]

Diving off that board into the lake is a reoccurring image in my poems, like watching the barnacle geese leave in autumn or the first anemones that appear in the forest. I write about them over and over in different variations, trying to capture something that can’t quite be put in words. Moments that mean more than just the passing of the seasons, though they carry that weight as well, the years sliding by much too fast. 

Stepping off that creaking board with no glasses and a fear of heights always feels momentous. I don’t really like swimming. I feel wobbly and uncertain high above the deep, black water, but desperately want to jump in. Water that changes around me, cold to cool to warm, golden to green to clear as I surface. Water that changes me somehow, every summer. So I keep going back, revisiting it in poems and pictures, expecting nothing new, but finding it as I step off that edge and resurface. 

Gerry Stewart, A Summer Ending

It was one of my favourite holidays in a long time. Yes, all inclusive holidays are cheesy, and kind of terrible, but I loved not having to cook or wash up. I loved watching my daughter grow in confidence in the water every day, becoming more and more independent, that pull of love and terror and pride as she moved further away from me. I loved watching her make friends with other children and seeing how she gives her heart so completely, how she falls in love with people. I loved that I did get some time to sit by the pool and read, but that I also found it easy to be present and join in with the water slides. […]

I’ll be hosting David [Morley] as the guest poet for the next “Go to the Poets” online event with Wordsworth Grasmere, so I have read his book partly to prepare for this, but mostly because he is one of the poets whose new work I always look forward to arriving. Passion has just been published by Carcanet and it is a wonderful collection of poems. If you know anything about David’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear that his poems are filled with the natural world – in this collection in particular, birds of every description fly in and out again.

Kim Moore, July Reading

Everyone goes insane the canal swarms over our heads our hair turns to weeds we float swiftly down the sharp V slopes of the Dishman Irrigation Ditch prehensile arms outstretched clothes then shoes then underclothes become loose a strange fear and release in the parking garage early in the morning before work the sodium lights sizzling no guards or cameras. I hit the concrete barrier with my car got out lay on the ground and faced a dead mouse oil stains and a fairy circle of cigarette butts. I lay there for minutes listening then sat up and pried my fender off my tire and drove home. I told no one not even my son.

Rebecca Loudon, Chicago

I carried my tv down the stairs buried it on a hill
with a beautiful view

by spring a small antenna sprouted in that place

somewhere under the earth
wispy clouds and the wingbeats of birds

Gary Barwin, I had a daydream where I gave a tree the Heimlich maneuver: on suicide

The baby goldfinches and other birds have been fluttering about, and so too the Anna’s hummingbirds. My folks are coming into town in a week or so, and we’re cleaning out the spare room in the basement, donating items that have been taking up space (goodbye, old television set!) and I’ll be going to the endocrinologist and the endodontist this week (hooray) to check my thyroid and my back tooth. These crowns are so expensive and not covered by my insurance, so every time it’s like an expensive piece of jewelry or a nice fridge. (Boo…hiss….) I hope a future America with universal health insurance also covers dental health…which might be wishful thinking, as this horrid government continues to tear down everything good (this week, PBS and NPR). In the meantime, I’m still thinking about how to earn an independent living as a disabled writer in this economy where everyone is facing layoffs and inflation. I’m not doing the Sealey Challenge this year because of my family visiting, and I’m also judging the SFPA poetry contest, so I’ll have plenty on my plate. But I do love seeing other people’s reads!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, To August: Broken Molars, Garden Parties, Cats, and Cutting Flowers

I was at a poetry retreat recently, theoretically to write poetry. I did a fair amount of reading of poetry, listening to, chatting about, if very little writing of. I had a couple of conversations about line breaks. My favorite poetry tool. I love the challenge of free verse line breaks — where, why, what’s gained, what’s lost. So many options, so much possibility. But look, just because you write some stuff and stick line breaks in, doesn’t mean you’ve done the art and craft of poetry justice. Sometimes a narrative is a narrative, and should just claim the page. Prose poetry. Short shorts. Flash fiction. Micro-essays. All legit. If what you’re really doing is telling a little story, well, why not embrace the prose form?

I think about these things as creating little rooms inside which an intense experience can be had. Or a loose one. Some rooms are crowded and fascinating or even alarming, some are spare, and the windows are open, and a breeze moves through. Some rooms you walk into and a short play is happening. No matter what, though, there’s an intensity of experience. I mean, it’s a small room! All those walls. The door shut.

Marilyn McCabe, past: spores, gills, fins. No roots or leaves. Then birds cloud the skies, giant animals

I’ve been sending out a few pieces of new work, and some old work that I’ve been revising. I’m also putting the (I hope) finishing touches to a new mini pamphlet, in a similar format to Foot Wear (in other words hand-made and self-published).  Working title is Yo-Yo. I plan to sell it at readings from the autumn.

Usually it’s autumn when I get that feeling of needing change, or a re-boot, but it’s upon me already. Maybe because everything in the garden is ahead of itself so I am too. Peter and I have decided to make some changes to Planet Poetry. It’s now our summer break, and we’re still coming back for a sixth season, but the time, energy and costs involved have taken their toll. We both need space to work on our own projects and even spend more time with loved ones. So it will be a slimmed-down podcast that re-emerges in the autumn.

The quarterly spreadsheet is also crying out to be something different. I’m still working out what that is! Answers on a postcard please.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a good summer. I’m sure we’ll all emerge refreshed in September.

Robin Houghton, Summer, busy, change, decisions…

審判のゐないテニスよ夏の雲　遠藤容代

shinpan no inai tenisu yo natsu no kumo

            tennis match

            without a judge…

            summer clouds        

                                                Hiroyo Endo

from Asu No Kaban (Tomorrow’s Bag), a haiku Collection of Hiroyo Endo, Furansu-dō, Tokyo 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 1, 2025)

[This is where I write then delete the paragraph about how world violence overshadows my small worries. Both the erasure of that perspective and its performance–briefly, apparently virtuously but with no special insight, to an audience with similar politics–feel wrong. No wonder this isn’t my best summer for writing. The world is so much bigger than the page.]

Yet I’ve been reading poetry gratefully, meandering through books I picked up during this injured but wide-traveling spring and summer, remembering the authors I met along the way. I’m giving the small-press books social media shout-outs, although I’ll hit pause on the Sealey Challenge while I’m in Ireland. I’ve never been successful, anyway, at actually reading a poetry collection per day for a month; one or two a week feels better suited to the genre’s intensity. But most people posting under the hashtag aren’t either. It’s still a kindness to other authors to use it, I think, because it slightly amplifies their accomplishments as well as the efforts of poetry publishers.

[While slightly amplifying the person doing the posting, too. Social media highlights the trickiest parts of poetry’s economy, mostly gifts but sometimes barter and, worst of all, in a way that’s monetized by tech bros. I still hope someone posts about Mycocosmic during this month’s Sealey Challenge flurry.]

Lesley Wheeler, Poetic feet [sprained]

The future ticks its out-of-tune
hours. Inside the cool marble vaults of mansions,
a taxidermied history hangs on the walls. Pelts
of animals tuft the floors and couches— bear
and raccoon, gazelle and leopard; the marbled
brilliance of their omniscient eyes.

Luisa A. Igloria, Exhibit

In yesterday’s post on this blog, I wrote:  “In a week of Churchwide Assembly considering the “filioque” and voting for bishop of the ELCA means there’s lots of discussion of the Holy Spirit. I have been thinking of a poem or perhaps a work of theology that talks about the Holy Spirit as the one who wreaks havoc–it might be good havoc, but it’s the kind of thing that can leave ruins in its wake, Holy Spirit as disruptor. We often think we would like that, but we often fail to consider how changed the landscape would be.”

I got to work and spent the day capturing lines that became a poem about the Holy Spirit deciding she has had enough.  It’s not the poem I was thinking I would write in the blog bit above.  In the poem I actually wrote, the Holy Spirit is decidedly female and so very tired of being in relationship (in relationship with the Creator, in relationship with the Son, in relationship with humans, and in relationship with angels and all the hosts of Heaven).

This stanza gives you an idea (and if it sparks an idea for you, feel free to run with it):
The Holy Spirit hides
in an unassuming house,
an old bungalow built
for a previous century,
cramped for a crowd,
comfortable for one.

In terms of title–I like “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday.”  But in the poem, is she on holiday or permanent vacation?  Perhaps the ambiguity works.  

It’s not a perfect poem, but it’s closer than many I’ve written.  It’s the time of summer when I’d be relieved to produce anything that makes me feel like my poet self–so to have a poem arrive close to fully formed is an unanticipated gift.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Process Notes–“The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”

Yesterday I shredded a letter from 2012 that told me something about the care we received when my daughter died in 2010, a letter that confirmed that clinical negligence had a part in her death. I still felt like I needed to hold on to it, as if I would need at some point to go back into battle again and fight to have policies changed, to have better checks put in place around maternity care at the hospital. I kept putting it to one side and not shredding it, as if that piece of paper, that proof of what happened might be needed as a shield. How exhausting is this grief – a kind of alertness that you can never quite put down. I dealt with the letter by picking it up and putting it down repeatedly, feeling for a weight in my heart when I did so. What purpose was it serving me? Had I actually escaped from that place, or was I chained to that experience by these physical items, these documents? I decided that that part of my life was past. I shredded it. I let it go. I have released myself from the weight of that single piece of paper. […]

I have a point here, […] and it’s this: rejections don’t happen in an emotional vacuum. They don’t always happen when your life is about surviving and not killing yourself from the sad, but they do usually happen when you are dealing with small and big griefs, work exhaustion, world events exhaustion, secret sads that you don’t tell anyone. All of this adds weight to the rejection.

There’s a real push towards accepting rejection as part of the life of being a writer, and it absolutely is a part of the whole journey, but you have every right to feel bruised about it. It’s another small sad to add to your pile and that stuff is overwhelming.

Delete it, shred it, bag it up until you re strong enough to deal with it, but don’t give up on yourself.

Wendy Pratt, Rejection doesn’t happen in an emotional vacuum.

How many times have I tinkered with a poem before realising that I’ve overcooked it, so then had to undo the change? It’s a good job I’m not a builder. Sure, no one wants to read the obvious word every time, but poets can of course overdo the tweaking by replacing the early-draft choices with alternatives whose other connotations are so far from being synonymous that they blur the original meaning and/or unbalance the syntax to an unbearable degree.

In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Robert Lowell said this:

You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out. And that’s related to boldness; if you put words down, they must do something, you’re not going to put clichés.

And this:

Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvring.

By that, I infer that he means how the emotional kernel of the poem is conveyed and encased by the rest of it. The best advice I ever received from another poet was to ensure that every poem, like the Tin Man, had a heart.

When Seidel asked him if he revised a great deal, Lowell’s answer was emphatic: ‘Endlessly.’

Matthew Paul, On revising poems

The past couple months I’ve been ferrying back and forth between projects, which is nice since it allows me to work without getting fatigued on one or the other, but also means they may be slower going and likely to be abandoned, at least temporarily, should I get distracted or mired in another bit of shiny. One was the swamp bird women poems, a shorter series, the second THE MIDNIGHT GARDEN, a prose-ish narrative project that will hopefully be more book-length when finished. The third of course, is another delve into mythology subject matter with CLOVEN. I’ve been sharing bits on IG and sending out individual poems this summer, including a couple of video poems (one of which you can catch this coming week as a Patreon subscriber.) These pieces number close to 30, and have some attendant collages I started a couple years back. It’s almost a reverse of GRANATA, its companion book, which was composed poems first, art second.

Kristy Bowen, summering with the greeks

Alt text says this week’s photo shows a yellow plastic toy on a wood surface. I say it is an intact yellow stretchy man who I am not currently stretching. Instead I have placed him on my writing desk for a photo opportunity. I am giving him a nod of thanks, and I won’t be pulling his arms too hard. In fact I am going to put him a jar of his very own to keep him dust free and away from my grip.

Some time ago I bought one of these for each of the people in my supervision group. Delighted to be able to play with mine at the meeting I was a little over zealous in stretching his arms out and perhaps enjoying the elastic stretch and boing of him rather too much because all of a sudden he snapped. I was left holding his arms whilst gazing at his body on the floor. I found myself laughing at the very surprise of how quickly he was altered at the same time as feeling rather disappointed that my toy had broken, and there he was simply smiling back at me.

Choosing to frame the moment in a poem was important to me for a couple of reasons. One, being to capture a moment in time and my observations of his “bitten muffin” shoulders. And the other being to remember the joy of that supervision group and its importance in giving me a safe space to be myself. A space I truly valued. A space where the busy world paused a while for deep reflection and thought. The members of the group brought listening ears, laughter, shoulders to cry on and made a real difference to me. A group that saw you step back out into the day with relaxed shoulders, a clearer mind and a focussed way forward. I think they would like the poem dedicated to the yellow stretchy man and I am glad that it has found its home in Steel Jackdaw Magazine.

Sue Finch, YELLOW STRETCHY MAN

Despite
everything, there is still this life. And in

this life, as you try to dream, a star will
give you a poem. If you just keep doing

the things you cannot but do, completely
unfathomable theories will curl together

in your mind and explain themselves to
you.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Despite

No, not a review. I have no right and no ability to do that. Instead, five reasons to buy it and read it. […]

3: the section ‘Starting Eleven’. Ah, gentle reader. It isn’t about concepts, is it? But… what a concept. One poem each to commemorate the bold sporting stars of a club we have followed. And this one the unglamorous, not-even-nearly-men of an unfancied 80s football team. In this section 12 players come together to be honoured in ‘Starting Eleven’ (I’ll just wait here whilst you catch up on that one). If you have ever mistakenly bought me a drink and listened more than you should have done to me talk about the difficulty of poetry you will have heard me say that the problem with poetry is that often the best poems happen outside of the poem. Outside of the raw words. We are not formalists, m’duck. And here that is the case. This section conjures the rare, pure belonging of following your sporting communitas. Millions of people will disagree, but actual proper football happens in the lower tiers, where intelligent people pay ticket money to see their team never win a league, or a cup, or even a sodding game for three years. And the reasons for that are complex. But, my word, you will find flashes of that complexity illuminated here. Sporting poems are not new, but good ones are rare. I recall SJ Litherland’s book of poems about Nasser Hussain from Iron Press. Like a moth you try to rescue from a high window, I would destroy most of these by quoting them partially – with the possible exception of ‘Ian McDonald’. Customary with these poems, Stewart gives us the flash of genius that maketh the sporting man; here it is the ‘knack for bringing long punts down’. All lower league and non-league fans will know that every player has their moment, their special thing that gets the faithful (ten? hundred? thousand?) faithful on their feet. Here these men are ennobled for that flash; they are not described as nearly man, or also-rans. And that just because you aren’t playing for Real Madrid your life, or your worth, is still fully appreciated. Go on, Basho: have a go at that, then. Stewart also touches on the way that crowds (dare I type ‘of men’ here?) find empathetic understanding and learn about what life is truly about on rainy nights out at Darlington, away. But back to Ian McDonald, who the crowd understands why he ‘lifts his foot out of fifty-fifties/ through the slurry of the centre circle.” Pause to enjoy that gorgeously ugly metaphor, ‘slurry’ and remember those 80s games (go and Google it, if remembering the 80s is not something you can’t do). The crowd, as one, understand the player’s past – the way that includes the horrific injury that ended his time at Shankly’s Liverpool but also brought him to them, at Aldershot. People think they know about football, but what they know is hooliganism mythology of the past and the Coca-Cola-isation of modern times. The human purity of bonding, and empathy is the beautiful thing – the game isn’t the beautiful thing; like certain other human pastimes it is used to divide us. Rather deftly, Stewart shows us how the regard we can have for others, our faith in them as people, and in not glory-seeking or vainglorious pride and affected tribalism. That said, I do totally understand Stewart’s admiration for ‘Ian Phillips’ who can put ‘right-wingers/ straight into the advertising hoardings’.

Andy Hopkins, Matthew Stewart’s ‘Whatever you do just don’t’ (Happenstance Press, 2023): Five Reasons to Read.

A few years back, I reviewed Mave O’Sullivan’s Wasp on a Prayer Mat, a masterful book of haiku and senryu. This new book, Where all Ladders Start, is, in many respects, a different beast. To begin with, while there are some haiku sequences and haibun scattered through the book, O’Sullivan experiments here with a wide range of western forms. These include sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, mirror or palindrome poems in two stanzas and poems in unrhymed stanzas. There’s even a foray into visual poetry, with the title poem being laid out as a stylised heart shape.

And that title is key, a quote from Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’, the lines that contain the phrase acting as epigraph to the book. In Yeats’s oeuvre, the poem marks a final turning point, an acknowledgement that the myth and mysticism that informed his life’s work no longer serves and that he now has to look to his own emotional experiences for poetry. It’s tempting to see O’Sullivan borrowing these words to mark a similar turning away from the relative impersonality of the haiku to a more personal, confessional, mode here.

And the poems tend to bear this out. There are poems on family:

Yourself and Eileen reared a brood so fine:
young men and women, smart and loving all –
oh grandfather, our lives barely entwined.

The Kerry accent was the only sign
of deep roots in that dark, secluded vale.
I pass your workplace on the way to mine.
(from ‘Civil Servant’)

on former partners and failed relationships, and for friends, especially women friends.

Throughout, O’Sullivan handles her formal experiments with assurance, and she has an unexpected facility for well-placed rhymes and a lightness of touch that carries over from her senryu, I suspect, as in ‘As Evening Draws In’, a sonnet in praise of a warm fire on a cold evening:

Oh speckled firelighter, square igniter,
I torch your corners in the cottage grate.
Don’t let me down: make this fireplace brighter.
The air is chilly and it’s getting late.

There are, however, moments when it feels a bit like the content is being squeezed into a predetermined form. On the whole, I feel that the most successful work here is among the haiku sequences and haibun:

hug on the street
the bagpipe’s notes
mellifluous

sponging champagne
from the check picnic basket –
new moon in Leo
(from ‘Situationship’)

A subjective view, I know, but the restraint, the coolness of these poems actually conveys more emotion to me than the more expansive confessional work that surrounds them. O’Sullivan is a fine, accomplished poet, but an exceptionally good writer of haiku.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading July 2025: A Review

My greatest pleasure just now is the long, slow process of unpacking all of my books. We left London four years ago now, but because initially we expected to be in France only for a year or two, we didn’t bring our furniture or most of our possessions with us. Most of our (many hundreds of) books as well as all the lovely — albeit unfashionable — nineteenth-century furniture I have bought at auction over the last twenty years has been languishing in storage somewhere near the M25. A great deal of my books are still in boxes, but a few have begun to emerge and today I thought I’d look at a random selection of poets who have ended up on a shelf together and whom I’ve enjoyed revisiting this week: a funny old mixture of Lawrence Durrell, Richard Murphy and Alex Wylie. […]

My copy of Richard Murphy’s Selected Poems is also a Faber edition, but a much older one, printed in 1979, which I bought at some point second hand (but apparently unread) for £3. (It’s currently available on Amazon UK for £2.79 + delivery, in case anyone would like a copy.) Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet who died not that long ago, in 2018; he was quite well-known I think in his day and was published by Faber between 1963 and 1989, but I haven’t heard anyone mention him for a long time. Some years ago I was on the interview panel for an academic job and one of the candidates was a specialist in modern Irish poetry: I asked a question about Murphy, out of genuine interest and not at all intending to catch them out, and saw a look of panic flit briefly across their face.

So possibly no-one reads Murphy any longer. I find his poems interesting because they are undeniably good in very many ways but I almost never find them wholly convincing all the way through. Different poems here reminded me of poems by Charles Causley (‘Years Later’), Keith Douglas (‘Coppersmith’) and Seamus Heaney (many of them), without ever quite living up to the parallel.

There’s something particularly self-conscious about Murphy’s diction which tends to break the spell of his verse: over and again I found myself distracted at just the wrong moment by an unusual word or uncommon usage. This is such a delicate thing to get right: of course you want a poet to have a wide vocabulary and know how to use it, and different styles suit quite different dictions. An unusual or unexpected word, perfectly deployed, can be the making of a poem and I often enjoy learning words from poets (Toby Martinez de las Rivas is particularly good at this) — but somehow Murphy’s word-choice too often gets in the way of his poems, making them feel overwritten. This is hard to demonstrate, because it’s a cumulative effect, but here for instance are parts of the poem ‘Care’, about a tame goat, which begins:

Kidded in April above Glencolumbkille
On a treeless hill backing north, she throve
Sucking milk off heath and rock, until

I came with children to buy her. We drove
South, passing Drumcliff. Restless in the car,
Bleating, she gulped at plastic teats we’d shove

Copiously in her mouth.

In these lines I was distracted by kidded — which you’d think would mean ‘having given birth to kids’, i.e., referring to the mother, but here must refer instead to the kid itself; then, though less so, by throve, which is correct but still unusual and perhaps a little ‘loud’; and then finally by copiously, which is I suppose partially transferred from the milk itself, which it would more naturally describe. These are all the sorts of detail and the kinds of poetic technique which could work very well, but somehow here trip me up rather than clarifying. The end of the poem, though is very good. The goat has been so carefully cared for, become so trusting, that it is accidentally poisoned:

So when a child mistook a sprig of yew
And mixed it with her fodder, she descried
No danger: we had tamed her instinct too.

Whiskey, white of egg, linseed oil, we tried
Forcing down antidotes. Nothing would do.
The children came to tell me when she died.

Here I think he gets away with ‘descried’, given the pathos of such a high register word applied to a kid. But too much of the rest of the poem — and of his poems in general — are spoilt by obtrusive words.

Victoria Moul, Three books from a box

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

I first came to poetry as a child. I began dancing when I was 3. I began reading and writing when I was 4. Growing up, my family was very mystical, musical, spiritual, so at home it was easy for me to “be” a poet, meaning I could explore and deepen my neurospicy sensibilities—I was a sleepwalker as a child, I had incredibly vivid dreams that I could recall with great detail, I began astral traveling, I was deeply connected with spirit realms, could commune with spirits, other entities, was incredibly sensitive (secretive), had a lot of imaginary friends, would spend hours preoccupied within the invisible realms in our backyard, on camping trips, or just drifting around aimlessly in my own imagination, I could easily imitate the sounds of other people’s voices, could sing lyrics to songs even if I had never heard the song before and was singing it for the first time, had an episodic memory that felt almost epic, for the most part all of this was fine in the context of my family. I went to a public, creative arts school, I was in a magnet program, so I was involved with various creative practices as a child. In first grade, I guess around age 7, I started reciting poetry by Harlem Renaissance poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, other greats like Emily Dickinson, because my teacher, mom, and assistant teacher—three Black and Brown women who were all about Black history and Black poetry—co-created a daily practice that they collectively reinforced at home, in the classroom, at recess on the playground, and in the world. My mom would have me read poetry aloud to her most nights when I was young, she taught me how to type on her typewriter at the kitchen table, she also taught me how to sew, so poetry became something embedded within my daily practice of reading, studying, playing, moving, making, breathing, speaking, being. Just this very natural thing. I finally began writing poems around age 14, which makes sense to me now because that was around the time when I told my mom I wanted to begin practicing witchcraft and I was no longer interested in going to our Christian Science church. Fortunately for me, she listened and supported my decision.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with fahima ife

In her ‘Notes on Spite’, Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) has suggested a productive new area for enquiry. What are the great works of art and literary criticism about spite? Hollis says “Spite may be the most undertheorized force in creative achievement.” Is that because spite is so hard to define? Even Johnson could only manage a string of epithets: “Malice; rancour; hate; malignity; malevolence.”

Spite is a species of hate, somewhere between revenge and contempt, in which our scorn for an enemy, pest, nemesis, or rival is made into a productive capacity, overwhelming us by becoming the motivating energy of action. Spite ruins mediocrities, but sets genius alight with a brilliant fire that sustains itself by consuming itself, attracting more and more fuel as it becomes notorious to others and preoccupying to the hater.

Spite is the release of unreasonable feeling; it is a partisan, chauvinist, personal expression; spite pretends to principle; alas, it has none. Politics is the great art of spite, followed by poetry, the allocation of capital, and family feuds. None of these is primarily, or purely, an art of spite, but each has the greatest potential to achieve something significant for the sake of malice towards another person. Some spites are general, as in the rage of party politics, the bigotry of policy, but all have some personal correspondence. We never hate entirely in the abstract. Spite is a kind of desire, the lust of despising, the thirst of dismissal.

There is a canon of obviously spiteful literature, such as the Dunciad and The Bickerstaff Papers, but a great deal of the traditional canon is full of spite, too: parts of Dante, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goethe, Gogol, Hans Christian Andersen, Zola, Hazlitt, Bronte, and Grimm; and so much of Shakespeare: what is Hamlet but a study of spite? (“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”); then there is Iago, Edmund, Romeo killing Tybalt, Beatrice (“kill Claudio!”), Bertram, Portia—, indeed, the great achievement of The Merchant of Venice is to show that the spite which underlies traditional comedy like The Comedy of Errors can be brought to the surface, viciously, unrelenting, and the play can still end with the final act where all are married (Antonio aside). We have a great tolerance of spite, even when it exposes itself and all our hypocrisy. Paradise Lost is the great epic of spite, providing this whole area of study with its epigram: “Done all to spite/The great Creator.” A motto for our envious, entitled, rash, and bloody times! Milton’s poem is often about spite, and provides another good definition: “the hateful siege/Of contraries: all good to me becomes/Bane.”

Henry Oliver, What is spite?

I was astonished to learn recently that Asymptote, “the premier site for world literature in translation,” now charges $10 for general submissions. I consider this fee outrageous. Should this become normalized, writers could spend hundreds of dollars simply trying to place one work. Many will be barred from submitting at all.

Upon investigation, I’ve found high fees at a surprising number of places. Minerva Rising, a press that “prides itself on building a supportive community of women writers,” also charges $10. Red River Review charges $15. 34th Parallel charges $14.50 for general submissions. Limit Experience charges $11.11. Half and One charges $9.

Clover + Bee does not charge a fee to submit. Yet if your work is chosen for publication, you must pay them. […]

This has to stop. The transition to online submissions and the use of submissions software was meant to make processes easier for everyone. If the process is harder, and therefore more costly, something is wrong. At the very least, charging $10 or more per submission is absolutely unsustainable for writers.

Going forward, I will not interview editors of lit mags that charge more than $5 for submissions. I don’t know that I ever did, but now this will be official policy here. I will also aim to focus more on magazines that charge no fee at all.

I’ve spoken to Ben at Chill Subs (who, special thanks, helped me gather some of this data). He told me that they will soon be introducing badges to identify lit mag fees ranging from “free” to “low” to “lol, no.”

Becky Tuch, I Need an Around the Way Lit Mag!

Notebook “tours” have popped up in my email newsletter subscriptions lately, complete with scans of handwritten pages from writers willing to share their doodles, scrawls, sketches, and scribbles. I find these fascinating from two perspectives: in addition to giving us a glimpse into a private space, they reveal something crucial about the creative process. These excerpts show, literally, the bits and pieces of language that might become a poem, essay, or story, or might just stay on that page, complete in themselves.

Handwriting grabs our attention in ways that printed words simply don’t. As I watched the recently released documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, images of Joel’s lyrics, penned on white sheets of paper, spread across the screen: long sentences filled with words and phrases, some crossed out, some traced over and over. Here was evidence of a creative mind at work; Joel’s words were like a sculptor’s fingerprints in clay.

I started keeping a notebook at the age of ten, continued on and off throughout my teens and twenties, and then in earnest in middle age. As I review these pages, what I left out often strikes me more than what I wrote. My earliest notebooks, for example, completely avoid the elephant in the room: my parents’ marriage was falling apart, a fact that haunts those brittle pages like a palimpsest of memory.

Erica Goss, The Notebook Tour – What Shows, What’s Hidden

Folded layers of scent draped in colours of the setting sun, the rose is a symbol of love, romance, sadness and joy. The RHS deemed it the world’s favourite flower, dedicating whole book to some forty varieties, Shakespeare mentions roses seventy times in his writing and a speedy google of “rose poems” delivers dozens of words devoted to this enduring symbol of emotion. There are those who despise the rose – in England it conjures ideas of old lady perfumes and suburban fussiness. I was largely indifferent to them, with a vague sense that they were rather old fashioned, until received one as a birthday gift, and was breathed in fragrance that is both exotic and familiar, watched the way the colours change as the rose ages and fades, the way shell shaped petals circle their central sun – I was in love. […]

Roses represent much more than romantic love. Their role within the socialist party dates back to the 1969, when Marc Bonnet drew the rose and fist logo, with the rose as a symbol of hope, and the fist as a symbol the activist commitment and solidarity necessary to achieve a better life for all. In Italy and Germany, the white rose was the symbol of resistance and pursuit of good. Give us our roses while we’re still here is the rallying cry of trans day of remembrance, held in November each year as powerful and moving reminder of the consequences of bigotry.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where the wild roses grow

the mountain
is known now for her wound. sometimes i would
call you before the tunnel on purpose.
i wanted to see if the call would get dropped.
only once did the signal carry through.
it is so human to try & test the limits of our voices.
from how far away can you hear me? i wish the tunnel wasn’t
a passing place. i imagine it at night when a car
only slips through every hour or so.
i wanted to walk with you there, the whole mountain
breathing above us.

Robin Gow, tunnel breath

Who we are is what we think about. I recently visited a friend who told me that she hadn’t been living in her body, and I thought, I can relate to that.

My life is being a writer, travel, exercise, family. My life at work is editing and running the press, but we are growing the press, so it’s become all fundraising, swallowing every breath I take so I can’t remember to focus on the other parts of my life, and consequently, I miss them.

Who are we when we lose our essential selves?

We must have realized at some point that our country is becoming a kleptocracy. Our president, a shadowy monarch, taking planes, swords, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from foreign governments, and, since his election, going from a net worth of 2 billion to over 6 billion. We watch friends get abducted by hooded men in broad daylight. Eventually, we won’t be able to remember who we were when we lived in a free country.

I remember.

I remember being a writer, a thinker. A goal maker. I want to be that person again. I want to have time to walk my dogs.

Which brings me to my vision of the future, my Black Swan dream.

The idea of Black Swan events, outlined in the works of statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, comes from the fact that for a long time, there were no black swans that anyone knew of. People thought they didn’t exist. We humans lived in a world of exclusively white swans.

Then, Australia was discovered. Here was a whole continent where there were black swans. This is the basis of a Black Swan event: it must create a shift in what we think, how we live. Unexpected. Unforeseen. The event may initially seem small, but it is followed by a cascade, ripple effect that changes the world.

When people think of Black Swan events, they think of 9/11, the 2008 crash, major events that reshaped society and the world.

But the original discovery of black swans in Western Australia was a good surprise, and Taleb argued that these events can be positive.

I believe in the possibility of a positive Black Swan in this country. America’s demise is not inevitable. We will not return to life as it was. We know that we have to fight for democracy.

I am not the girl walking down the path to feed the chickens, thinking of running away. I have a small garden with herbs and unsuccessful tomatoes and peppers. I think the pumpkins will make it.

I tell myself every day, “Go to work as if you are the beginning of a Black Swan event.”

Kate Gale, I Hear the Black Swan Coming

Everything has been falling apart for so long.

How long must our hearts be cracked open?
Sorrow seems our constant companion.

Help us to believe
that better is possible.

The walls have come down.
Here at the bottom, do we dare to look up?

Rachel Barenblat, Fifteen glimpses of Tisha b’Av

This week: the church of heart and hurt, beachcombing for the broken bits, children marching in the street, and much more. Enjoy.

As a water droplet cut with a knife
as the Red Sea parts, closes, makes us cross again. 

Everything that brought me to this moment

is carried inside, written in salt water and suffering
amidst nihilism and terror,

moistening my lips as I stand on the plain women’s balcony
near the rooftops, t-shirts and sweats blowing.

Jill Pearlman, Salt Water & Suffering

I’ve become an easy traveler in my old age. I’ll do everything and nothing. I need my daily pill regimen, good morning coffee, an afternoon IPA, a pack of smokes, and a camera. Taking a vacation from work is guilt-free for me. What could happen in a week or two? But it’s impossible for us to take a vacation from this administration. It’s everywhere. We’re like pieces of pumice, with a new hole in our skin for each atrocity that pecks away at us.

I still wake up every day to news from my new besties, Heather, Jessica, Rebecca, Robert H., Robert R., and Adam, and I read it all in lieu of leisurely puzzle-doing. Trying to pick through the bad news for something good is like combing the beach for a single shell that isn’t broken.

Artist’s Statement: I break things and put them back together in a random,
yet tasteful, order. I make the big small and the small big—
in words, photographs, and visual art.

But I’m not the typical beachcomber. I go looking for the broken bits. My shells are not destined for a Southern Living spread. I’m on the hunt for patterns, colors, textures. I choose weather-worn whelks, oysters with barnacles, tile-flat bits. My biggest prizes are moon shells and periwinkles, the ones that look most like they once housed a snail, their centers looking back at me like eyes or perky, non-protruding nipples. I found a piece of a helmet shell that looks like an evil, toothy grimace. With two periwinkles, I have created “The Face of the Resistance.”

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Woosah!

What was so exciting about Seville was that it felt ambitious. Perhaps a city that’s so vulnerable to heat and flooding can be brave. I don’t know anything about urban planning, but I loved the easy access to the great river that runs through it, loved what’s been done with older buildings. And this picture shows the contemporary art museum – not easy to find but that’s another story, perhaps it was me. It’s in an old monastery that became a ceramics factory, and is now a place to show contemporary art. Gorgeous, big, rambling almost empty when I went, and with so many different unexpected spaces. In a little courtyard, this business with the vines. I don’t know what they are, perhaps jasmine, perhaps passion flower but these are growing, live, curtains you can part and walk through and I imagine when they flower they’re probably scented and will sound of insects. It was the first museum I went to and arguably the best. I think I’m spoiled having a daughter in Utrecht because the Dutch are brilliant at museums so I have impossible standards. As for the prose project, it’s interesting and challenging to go back more than five decades and try to make sense of who I was then. The key seems to be in stone and trees. At least for starters. I went through the printout sometimes to the sound of flamenco from the flamenco school opposite my Airbnb studio, sometimes to the sound of rain gushing from a broken downpipe. And I understood how much I had to allow myself to fail over and over again as I attempted to put anything in my notebook. I dreaded trying. 

Jackie Wills, Living curtains of vines

But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.

Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.

Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.

Matthew Paul, On another haiku by Simon Chard

i am the cutting board god. i eat the carrot
unpeeled with dirt still dusting wrinkled skin.
scoop hummus from the plastic container.
every little morsel. lick the spoons’ head
& shoulders. i think it’s ancestral. a hunger
like a lightning bolt through me & all
the not-girls, mouths open in the dark. the desire
to be full always escaping us. just another handful
of wings. just one more lemon taste.
the shadow of an iris tree.

Robin Gow, girl dinner

I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.

The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Sunday 13 April 2025

First World War poetry does not have the same particular identity in France, and the war itself carries a different valency here, where men fought and died — in much greater numbers than in Britain — on their own land, amid the ruins of their own towns and villages. There isn’t, I don’t think, the same edge of romanticism or slightly-enjoyable sadness about it here, and ‘First World War poetry’ does not have the same quasi-generic identity. I did, however, find an excellent French anthology, Poèmes de Poilus, edited by Guillaume Picon. (The poilus, ‘hairy men’, are the soldiers who grew beards because they couldn’t shave.) […]

[O]ne thing that’s noticeable […] is how many of the best-known names are — unlike the English equivalents — not known primarily as ‘war-poets’, but rather as leading poets of the avant garde. In England, even those poets who, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived the war, remain known as poets mainly as and by their war poetry. The French collection, by contrast, contains poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy and Paul Valéry — all very high-profile French literary figures, none of whom (I think) would be considered “first world war poets” in the way that Owen, Sassoon, Brooke and Gibson are.

Perhaps this is partly just because most of the French poets survived the war (Apollinaire was killed in 1918), whereas the best-known English war poets, almost by definition, are those who died in it. (This is true of the second world war too — Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes all died in active service.) This must be linked, too, to another marked difference between the collections: the range of types of verse in Poèmes de Poilus is much larger, and much more obviously influenced by what — in England a decade later — we’d recognised as the first stirrings of modernism. To a small degree, this is perhaps influenced by the fact that Anne Harvey was intentionally choosing poems accessible to a youthful reader; but I don’t think any collection of British First World War verse would be very different. As anyone knows who has taught ‘modernism’ from a comparative perspective — as I did last year for a course here at Sciences Po — the idea that “modernism” emerged as a defined movement quite suddenly in the immediate post-war period is an Anglophone perspective. French literary history looks quite different. Pretty much all the things we associate with ‘modernism’ in poetry were well-established in French poetry already before the war.

Reading these two anthologies one after another this week made me think how interesting a mixed French and English (and even German and Russian) anthology would be.

Victoria Moul, In Time of War

Because in a perfect world, no word rhymes with war.
Because for a perfect verse, there can be no bar.
It is not day that ends night, nor night that ends day.
Where then will a poem end, when will its light fray?

***

Imayo: Of Japanese origin, this form has four 12-syllable lines (48 syllables) with a caesura between the first 7 and the next 5 syllables of each line.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, So can silence

The next panel I attended was titled “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges” (Shinelle L. Espaillat, Rashaun Allen, Keith O’Neill, Gail Upchurch-Mills). Here I learned about the efforts of humanities professors to “fight the commodification of higher education,” as well as the process of students being turned into “clients.” All of us are inherent writers, the panelists told us, and should be allowed to “dream on the page” without anyone’s permission. We write ourselves into existence, and communities only function when everyone participates. One of the problems all the panelists shared was how to instill a love of reading in students whose attention was being diverted, constantly and shamelessly, from exploring their potential as writers.

My third panel on the first day was the extremely enjoyable “Craft for Crafters: How Fiber Arts, Book Arts, and More Shape Our Writing” (Meg Cass, Felicia Rose Chavez, Emrys Donaldson, Genevieve Kaplan, Sarah Minor, Doug Van Gundy). As a person who enjoys sewing and crafting as hobbies, I was intrigued to learn how the panel would connect those activities to writing. It was an unexpected pleasure to see poet Genevieve Kaplan, whose book Aviary I reviewed in the December 6, 2021 issue of Sticks & Stones. Some takeaways from this panel: sewing is like writing—cropping, darning and weaving; crafting is like poetry—language is “bits of things” we move around to create other things; crafts connect to writing, playing, revisioning, re-seeing. I enjoyed Doug Van Gundy’s story of how his sewing practice began by making pencil cases because he couldn’t find any decent ones. That grew into journal covers and messenger bags. He also revealed that sewing calms him down, allowing him some much-needed relief from an over-active brain. Doug is also the MFA director at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a 7^th-generation West Virginian.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025

Subtitled a magpie’s pilgrimage through the psalms, my erasure project is finished. 160 handwritten pages. This week I have made a cushion on which to display it in Wells Museum next month. The top of the cushion cover is a remnant of embroidered furnishing fabric that I bought years ago in a rather posh shop in Saxmundham. I loved the bird and her nestlings. I knew I would find a use for it some day. The underside is made from a much older fabric, a coarse unbleached linen 40cm/16 inches wide, handwoven in the Soviet Union. It probably came to me from my mother. The one-and-fourpenny predecimal zip fastener is from Bourne and Hollingsworth, a London department store that closed in 1983. I think this too was bought by my mother. The inner cushion (which contains 3 kilos of rice) is made from a sleeve from an unfinished cotton lawn nightdress trimmed with hand-crocheted lace I recognise as my grandmother’s work. The fine white cotton thread I used for stitching it also dates from my grandmother’s lace-making days.

Ama Bolton, “The Soul as a Bird”

I’m behind on reviews, I’m behind on a couple of editing gigs, I’m behind on a few other thousand things. I hide in our wee house either at my desk, or downstairs, folding and stapling chapbooks. […]

Otherwise, I was recently podcast-interviewed by Hollay Ghadery, which was plenty fun. The podcast has been posted over this way, if you wish to hear our conversation, which was focused on my recent On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Kitchener poet and reviewer Chris Banks interviewed me recently, posted over at The Woodlot: Canadian Poetry Reviews and Essays. Michael Greenstein was good enough to review the collection over at The Seaboard Review, and Salma Hussain managed this absolutely stellar and breathtaking review of same over at The Temz Review; she gets me. She really gets me. It is a rare thing, I will tell you, to be read so well. […]

Oh, and my fall poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a direct follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), already has a pre-order page! (but I might have mentioned that already; did I mention that already?). I should probably be thinking about fall events, possibly. Where should I go?

rob mclennan, an update, an update, my kingdom for an update

As a rule, I find it difficult to pick a poem from my books because I think in larger structures, sequences or books, not individual poems. However, this piece is something of an exception. It’s the coda from my a book of sounds, but it started out as a response to a call for submissions for Stride magazine’s 2020 TALKING TO THE DEAD project, which asked for poems addressed to a dead poet.

Now, I don’t often respond to such calls, but this one intrigued me as I was rereading, again, Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, a book I’ve owned for almost 50 years now and read more often than I can remember, and thought I’d like to try to inhabit her formal methods to some degree. It’s not the first time I’ve acknowledged my debt to her work; a previous book was titles Imaginary Gardens, but this time I wanted to do something much more direct.

The stanza form I invented for the occasion is, like so many of hers, syllabic rather than metrical, and there are numerous words and phrases of hers woven into it. Unusually for me, there’s an overt rhyme scheme, while my normal practice is to create patterns of assonance. In fact, this poem is, on the surface, so different to how I usually write that I considered it as a one-off and unlikely to be something I collected in a book, as my books tend to be organic wholes, units of composition in themselves.

But when I put the original typescript of the book together it was clear to me that something was missing. The book is, on one level, a collection of songs (hence the title), songs that focus on the small things that make a world and on our attempts to map that world, those things, in words. But the ending as it stood seemed to me to call for a coda, a kind of final restatement of the (aural) themes that run through the book, and it slowly dawned on me that Ms Moore’s Menagerie was just what the book needed to close with a kid of half-echo of the opening lines, a translation of an early Irish nature poem that deploys a semi-syllabic four-line stanza and intermittent rhyme. The book is a cycle, and this poem is a kind of recapitulation, closing the circle while leaving the idea of song, of sound, wide open.

Drop-in by Billy Mills (Nigel Kent)

This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation. 

Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn’t close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.

“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, “The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures. 

A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.

Alina Stefanescu, “Short talk on whatever.”

When the brochure for next month’s Stratford’s Literary Festival dropped on to the doormat yesterday, I was, naturally, interested to see what’s going on.

We’ve lived here for almost forty years and I’ve lived in Warwickshire for almost all of my adult life, so I know the score. Stratford’s a posh(ish) place – well, some bits are – where literary types and tourists mostly gather to see what’s on at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Occasionally, but not more than anywhere else, poetry events pop up.

As to literary festivals, we know that in order to attract sponsorship they have to make money, or be seen to provide events in which ‘big names’ or at least people who are blessed with a dose of temporary fame appear. Some, like the Stratford one next month, also have charitable status. It’s good that they exist.

We also know that poetry is still, whatever those of us who write and read it might like to think, viewed as a somewhat embarrassing literary sideline, like an odd, eccentric, ancient aunt at a family party.

Except that this time that old aunt hasn’t been invited.

I read all 42 pages of the brochure scouring the listings. Nothing. I read it again to make sure I’d not turned over two pages at one. Not a single poetry reading. Not even an actor reciting a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not even the conventional sop to the poetry world, the open mic. […]

Whatever mad ideas the Criminal President is dreaming up today will have far more impact than a literary festival in Middle England, but I’d have thought that at least one of the ‘festival team’, as they describe themselves, would have pushed for, perhaps, at least the inclusion of the Poet Laureate. Or maybe he was busy. Or maybe the only poets they thought of turned out to be dead.

Or perhaps they were a bit frightened that poets might be a bit unpredictable and rowdy. (When I used to read to an audience, if, as did sometimes happen, I’d forgotten my reading glasses, I tended to shout and rave a bit in case of the need for improvisation.)

To cite an even less controlled, less egocentric example, I’ve just received a critical appreciation by Andrew Taylor of the poetry of that old rogue Peter Finch, who once, it is said, ate his own poems after he had read them to his audience.

Bob Mee, POETRY DOESN’T MATTER IN STRATFORD-UPON-AVON – OFFICIAL

National Poetry Month has brought with it a sad bit of poetry news: Harry Humes has died. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you might want to check Penn State’s PA Book site’s biography of him, and then find one of his books:

https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/humes__harry

He was an excellent poet, influential for many folks–especially for Pennsylvania writers–and while I never knew him well, our lives intersected in some surprising ways over the years… […]

When I was hired at DeSales University around 2005, I learned that DSU held an annual poetry event for high school students. I attended/participated often, and Harry Humes–who was a good friend of the program’s administrator (Steve Myers)–was always involved in the workshops and events. Humes had retired from Kutztown by then, and was writing more poems, fishing, and enjoying family life. He always greeted me with a big smile and asked about my writing. That sums up for me what kind of person he was: generous; possessed of a self-effacing, even self-deprecating humor; kind and encouraging to people just starting out in poetry.

Here’s a poem of his that I like a lot, which I clearly recall him reading that day at Godfrey’s so long ago: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=154&issue=3&page=13

Ann E. Michael, Rest in poetry

[Isabelle] Baafi’s “Chaotic Good” demonstrates an understanding of craft and poetic forms, knowing that form can enhance and underline meaning, guiding the reader through the poem. Baafi explores a personal journey from childhood to adulthood, through marriage to a single life, but broadens that journey to include family ties, inheritances, cultural heritage and the struggle to find self among the pressures of societal and familial expectations. The poems eschew self-pity and sentiment, preferring compassionate reflection into love, threat, suspicions, the inertia of staying in a relationship an individual is not yet ready to admit has failed and become toxic, using different forms to drawn attention to different aspects, until the traveller arrives, surefooted and redeemed. It’s a journey that includes the reader and rewards re-reading. “Chaotic Good” is as thought-provoking as it is liberating, acknowledging the work that went into building a sense of self-worth through a library of precise, crafted, lyrical poems.

Emma Lee, “Chaotic Good” Isabelle Baafi (Faber and Faber) – book review

Gilonis’ poem marking ‘the 3^rd Thatcher election’ fits with the overarching impact of Tory politics mentioned in the introduction. It’s there fairly explicitly in Duncan’s own work, and in poets like Simon Smith:

     The sun floats about the meadow crazy as Whitman.
Codeine does the job good. Make a note to myself. Can’t bear
    to look. ‘Codeine’. Debts bite hard. More jobs
will have to go. Lines crackle like a telephone call in danger.

But it’s there, too, in Khaled Hakim’s idiolectic talk poems of identity and confusion or in Andrew Lawson’s ‘We are enjoined as good consumers to juxtapose and meld appearance’. And it’s there gloriously in Elizabeth James’ satires on culture as consumer object, as meaningless status fetish or decor:

I am concerned with the interior as a “walk-in” still life.
I was always thought of as the “artistic child”.
The salon, in beige, was designed around my own painting,
entitled Landscape–

I’m going to make it like a country road
with trompe-d’œil dirt and leaves, my garden and courtyard
being so perfect that they don’t seem real.

While this political dimension was something I expected to find here, there were some real surprises, including writing that shows a move towards psychogeography in Frances Presley’s map-driven walking poems or David Rees’s semi-doggerel London pieces that link the influence of Iain Sinclair with the city’s long association with nursery rhymes.

Billy Mills, Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby (eds): A Review

We’re excited to feature Marcy Rae Henry at our upcoming virtual reading. Their work is full of sharp turns and soft landings, moving through memory, family, and fleeting conversations with a voice that’s equal parts tender, irreverent, and quietly profound.

In their poem “this poem appears in,” what begins as a casual walk home unspools into a meditation on growing up, ancestral survival, and the strange, aching limits of language. Capturing how life’s most private and public moments often blur, they write:

“If only we had more than 1–10 to describe / happiness, sex, last night’s Thai food…”

This is poetry that drifts and returns, that wonders more than it explains. It’s emotionally precise while formally restless—rooted in stillness and always on the move. I knew right away this was the energy I wanted to start the latest issue with.

José Angel Araguz, Salamander virtual event next week (Spotlight: Marcy Rae Henry)

The sun sets before we reach the mountains. There are three men from Turkey in the row of seats behind me. They’re having an animated conversation in their mother tongue about something that keeps switching gears from playful to contentious. In front of me are three Romanians. The woman in the middle is speaking non-stop. Her voice is a strange aria. Romanian is a quick and seamless rise and fall in my ear.

Memories seep slowly into my consciousness. Lying in the backseat of a car—in those days before seat belts were the law—staring out the window at the stars in the black sky, and listening to my mother and my stepfather—to their voices only, not bothering to work out words, or even tone. Utterly uninvested, but enveloped by the mysterious business of grown-ups. […]

But another of our hosts keeps telling people that I’m “really” an American. It’s strange perhaps that I’m so offended that she’s taking control of my narrative. Maybe I’m especially sensitive since memories of my childhood seem to be coming more often and more vividly now, and I want to put a wall between who I am now and those years when I had no agency.

All the years that I traveled often were a way for me to figure out who I am. Not in a linear way, and not in a pretty way—but eventually. Strip away the trappings of your national identity, of your habits, and your preferences for food and drink and music, and you feel naked and new. You eat trout with capers and tangerines and wonder what on earth you really ever liked best to eat.

Ren Powell, Traveling in Transylvania

Always crouching down, looking the same all over.
To men he tries to show those great big, endless eyes.
If you really want to know if you yourself are small,
Try seeing your reflection in a filled hoof-print.

咏虾蟆
坐卧兼行总一般，
向人努眼太无端。
欲知自己形骸小，
试就蹄涔照影看。

Another from the bantering poems of Complete Tang Poems books 869-872. Jiang Yigong was a Five-Dynasties guy from Suzhou who made a name for himself for righteous satires, finding much material in his troubled times. Unlike a lot of the other comic poets from this section, he also has poems in the main part of CTP. 虾蟆, háma is used for both frogs and toads—to keep it snappy, I picked one. That really is, I’m ashamed to admit, only there to fill out the meter.

Larry Hammer, In Praise of the Toad, Jiang Yigong

The Palm/Passion story also reminds us of the fleeting nature of fame. Don’t get me wrong: if I’m chosen to be Poet Laureate, I’ll do as good a job as I’m capable of doing. But I’ll start every day by reminding myself that the fame is likely temporary. The important thing remains: the work.

The Palm/Passion story reminds us that we’re characters in a larger narrative (as does the Passover story, which people across the world have heard/will hear this week too, both in Jewish traditions and some Christian traditions). We will find ourselves in great danger if we start to believe it’s all about us, personally. No, there are larger forces at work. 

To put it in poetry and Scouting terms: I’m put here to do my best writing, but also, to leave the poetry campsite better than I found it. How do I do that? I work to promote not only myself, but other worthy poets, I work to make sure that the next generations know about the rewards of poetry, I envision the kind of world we would have if poetry was valued, and I work/play to make that possible. I also work to have a balanced, integrated life: my work in poetry cannot be allowed to eclipse other important work: the social justice work, the care of my family and friends, my relationship with the Divine, the other creative work I do, the self-care that must be the foundation of it all.

I find many values to being part of a religious tradition, but the constant reminder of the larger vision, the larger mission, is one of the most valuable to me. The world tells me that many things are important: fame, money, famous/rich people, a big house, a swell car, loads of stuff. My religious tradition reminds me of the moth-eaten nature of these things that the world would have me believe is important. My religious tradition reminds me of the importance of the larger vision. And happily, my religious tradition is expansive enough that my creative work can be part of that larger vision.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Lessons from Palm/Passion Sunday for Poets and Other Creative Types

Wondering whose turn it is
to sacrifice this time, what
to give up, what bitterness
to ingest, accept. Arms full
of plush youth, wriggling, resting.
Arms emptied from work that came
before, that follows. Fatigue.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 407: The Second Lamb #NaPoWriMo

But what about the Instagram and LinkedIn and tumblr icons at the head of this page, I hear you ask. Good question. I think they may be about to go as well. Maybe. Perhaps. I’m just no good at them, you see. The Instagram I set up so I could feast on the photos and art of my friends R–, R–, and D–. But of course it is more complex than that. In an ideal world, I would follow only them. Once the cat is out of the bag, you have to follow everyone else you know who knows them, even the ones posting about their jam making. LinkedIn is harder. And I’ve been using it much longer. But it is useful. For example, it is the only platform of anything that my activist friend W– uses, and the only way I can see what she’s been up to around the world. So it has its uses.

But as Martin Stannard once said about picking up a copy of a very well-known poetry magazine, I can sort of feel the depression rising up through my fingertips and my arms as soon as I start using them. I’m back where I started, with that edge-of-the-playground-feeling of marvelling at the utter confidence with which everyone shares the minutae of their lives. Five minutes, tops, that’s all I can manage. Then the double-maths-feeling hits even harder. Everyone else has the answers: why not me? I have nothing to say. And who on earth would listen?

Anthony Wilson, On being useless at social media

My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.

I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.

It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.

Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know? […]

Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”

I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Finally, in a real way, warts and all

In my life, I have chosen risk over and over. We risked everything to start a publishing company. Keeping it going was wildly stressful, but we kept at it.

I cannot keep my kids safe. I want them to be strong. Independent. Compassionate community builders who know when to be fighters. But in my inclination for risk, there are limits. I wouldn’t suggest that my daughter and her wife move to Texas right now. The three billionaires who fund and control Texas politics have drawn a line comparing being gay to incest. To them, the two are one and the same. They want to outlaw gay rights.

I think the 1.7 million queer people in Texas are less safe than the 2.8 million queer people in California; hopefully, they make it through.

Several times, I have been to the Sharjah Book Fair. There are people who have told me that Tobi, our queer marketing director, could go there. Before I got on the plane, I researched the laws. I usually do before I go to a new country. I had the proper clothing. Tobi presents as a man. Tobi is a walking violation of Shariah law. As such, Tobi could go to prison for ten years or be sentenced to death. Not a risk worth taking. No reason ever to go to the Emirates or any country with Sharia law. Not necessary. I can go for Red Hen. Being in prison isn’t an adventure.

Kate Gale, Do You Feel Safe in America?

I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.” […]

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

Bethany Reid, Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

Do I lose myself over consequences and weird linkages I wish this story were different but here I am in my kitchen baking bread honey dripping into my sink not my honey not this honey I bake for children in the street children marching in the street am I property am I pleasure or a pretend god feeding pretend children maybe we could go into the mysterious history of god’s sisters I have given myself over to the hands of strangers mayday mayday here we are another war song another war another where was I when the bells last rang what was the song 

Rebecca Loudon, April 12

Above is a screenshot from a reading of the stage adaptation of The Other Jack, directed by James Dacre, with Jack (played by Nathaniel Parker) on the left and Robyn (played by Jasmine Blackborow) on the right. The script is by the US playwright and poet Dan O’Brien (CBe has published his poetry and essays). It’s based on the book of the same name by myself, published by CBe in 2021, with some material also coming from 99 Interruptions. […]

The original book is loosely constructed around a series of conversations in cafés between a man (a writer, ageing) and a woman (a waitress, much younger). They talk ‘about books, mostly’, according to the cover, but also about ‘bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas’. The man is me, or is me as much as Jack Robinson is me, and here I am being evasive again, something that Robyn picks me up on. The play is not the book and I could say that the Jack in the play is not me but Dan O’Brien’s script is self-effacingly faithful to the book so it is me, whether I like it or not. On the left, smug ageing writer; on the right, young woman concocted to demonstrate writer’s self-awareness of his smugness – so that’s all right then. There’s something monstrous here.

Charles Boyle, The Other Other Jack

Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.

five decades
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird

Jason Crane, haibun: 12 April 2025

The full Pink Moon was actually pink this weekend, so I tried to get a picture of it in its true color which is always challenging but this one got pretty close.

My birthday is coming up soon which is always a time of introspection, as is tax time (how is it possible I did so much freelance work for so little money? I ask every year.) I am hoping to find a new home for my next book, maybe a chance to do more lucrative work teaching or publishing, and of course, balancing the joys of life and the stress plus health stuff. I am trying to find more disabled and chronically ill women’s books to review (so definitely comment if you have a new book coming out), and besides the book club and open mic, trying to get together more regularly with other writers. AWP (and maybe the art gallery and protest, too) reminded me of the strengths of feeling like part of a community, rather than just a lone eccentric trying to live your lone eccentric writer life. Helping others, speaking up, these things are also part of feeding the soul, not to get too cheesy.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring is Here with Cherry Blossoms and Art Shows, Tulip Fields, Pink Moons, and Visits with Family

the night is still / as April’s pink moon rises / lying / in his hot and fevered bed / the billionaire will meet an angel / walking in the soft shoes of a nurse / moonlight washes the city / as the hungry cry and shiver […]

‘Pink Moon’ is published in ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance’ out now with Rough Trade Books. April’s full moon reminds me of this poem, I think it was written around 2020 in lockdown and commissioned by BBC‘sThe Verb, to me this feels like a poem from another version of time, but some feelings still ringing true in 2025.

Salena Godden, Pink Moon

An artist once told me that every person has a pose, and it is rarely what we think it is. A person, their body, will fall into a kind of muscle memory of posture. There is no replicating it or forcing it, it is unique. It is beautiful, but not in the way that bright smiles and a tilted head makes a good photograph, but rather in the way that nature is beautiful, the way that beauty is everywhere. This, she said, is what she looks for when she sketches people.

I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m imagining my body, observing images of myself at different points in my life, trying to pin down my unique pose. There is the head in hand of the writer who reads her computer screen in a curled question mark of spine and chair. There is the hands on hips of observing garden, shopping, practical tasks that need a certain type of robust physicality and household organisation – this is the pose that my sister and my mum all share. And then there are the poses my body falls into when exploring, when my senses are alert to the outside world and the time points poking through, the places that connect the past and the future. I’m thinking about it now as I think about what it was that made me want to include Seamer Beacon, and the bronze age burial complex around the mound, in the series of pilgrimages that would make up my memoir, The Ghost Lake.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon

                Sometimes the moon 
       looks like the flap of a creased 

envelope— whatever message or instruction
       it bore has slipped into its dark 

pocket. Now it is swimming so far out 
       at sea, to a country not yet discovered. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Missing

When I’m asked a question I’m not totally sure on or not prepared for, I just start talking and then find my brain running behind going, ‘What the hell is she on about? Somebody stop her!’ Luckily, it was interviewing for the job I’ve been doing for the past two years on a temp contract, so they know I am not an idiot, though maybe also know I’m prone to babbling. 

This is why I feel comfortable as an editor, especially of my own writing. In writing my poems, I often don’t know what I’m saying until I have the meandering mess of it down on paper or screen and can sort it out, clean it up, take out the waffling that isn’t needed, the details that are just too off the wall or unclear. 

I do the same thing with emails, write it all out then edit it appropriately. I have, in the past, sent out those in the moment, emotional, unfocussed, unedited emails and it never ends well, so I always try to pull back and look a second time. 

I may have mentioned on this blog before that idea as my best piece of advice every given me, ‘Look at everything twice’. It was said to me by a Holocaust survivor I met when I was working in a bookshop in my small university town. She came in some Sundays to buy the big papers and chat. One day as she was leaving, she grasped my arm and said this and it’s always stuck with me. 

I’ve never considered the phrase in terms of my love of editing. I’ve always just thought of it as take a moment to appreciate what’s around you, the small things we overlook. By looking twice at anything, we understand it better and our place in it. We should spend that extra time to consider what we’re seeing, doing and saying. 

This applies to our writing as well. Slow down and consider. I need to do that when I speak as well it seems. 

Gerry Stewart, Look at Everything Twice – Editing

I asked myself a question last week. Could I write with the same joy as I have when I garden? It turns out I can. Perhaps by putting these thoughts on paper I understood what I needed to do to help me fall back in love with my creativity or perhaps it’s being part of NaPoWriMo courtesy of Notesfromthemargin April write-a-thon that has made the difference. […]

If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll know that my relationship with my work goes through huge peaks and troughs (I suspect part of this may be down to having Bipolar) so I won’t be surprised if this joy ebbs away a little. For now though I’m going to write as though I’m writing for fun, for myself and enjoy the responses from my lovely Notes from the Margin group. I’m writing in a way I haven’t for a long time – I look forward to the prompts each morning and write with instinct and enthusiasm rather than fear and self-doubt. It’s a wonderful feeling – almost like when I returned to poetry after almost thirty years away from writing but with better results.

I’m also going to revisit the dozens of poems in my files, see what’s good, what sings to me and try to get some order. I’m terrible at keeping track of everything and feel so sad that work I’ve been proud of is languishing in a forgotten file, or misplaced entirely. I’m not looking forward to this bit quite as much.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, I have taken my own advice

TPS: Tell me about the genesis of this book. How did you start and when did you know it was finished?

MS: Terminal Surreal began with my diagnosis—late 2023. It was a way for me to process what was and would happen to my body, but to be honest a good chunk of my brain didn’t quite believe I really had ALS – I think that’s how I managed to write poems like “When I Learn Catastrophically,” “Is this My Last Ferry Trip?,” “Self-Elegies,” and “Abecedarian with ALS.” A few poems were written before I knew I had ALS but was experiencing—muscle spasms and these things Inow know are fasciculations (when a nerve twitches).

I was hoping all my mysterious symptoms were anything but ALS. I did the Grind (where you are grouped with others via email and post a new poem draft or revision daily) in January, February, and March 2024, and the drafts and revisions from those three months gave me about half the book. In May, I sent it out as a chapbook, then pushed to get it to around fifty pages. I then sent it to Acre Books during their open reading period in May 2024, and heard a month later it had been accepted. I had never put a book together so quickly, and by then I was already in bad enough shape that the amazing editor, Lisa Ampleman, put the book into sections and did the arrangement for me (I was having trouble looking at screens).

I guess Terminal Surreal was officially finished about a month ago, when my partner Langdon Cook and Lisa did the final edits, and sent Lisa one last poem I asked to be added, and she said yes!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano

The prompt today from NaPoWriMo.net is to write a villanelle that includes a song lyric. I’ve never written a villanelle and it reminded me of solving a puzzle. I kept referring to the pattern described in poets.org and this poem by Elizabeth Bishop for guidance. At first, my mind couldn’t translate the pattern into lines or stanzas but when I began really dissecting Elizabeth’s poem, it began making sense. So, thank you, Elizabeth! To be honest, I’m not sure the poem is technically correct but I had a hell of a time trying! […]

Initially, I had this scheduled to post this morning but I got cold feet and unscheduled it late last night. I thought, this villanelle is cheesy. This morning I thought, Who cares? I’m doing something creative every day and other artists (my readers & friends) know we can’t be perfect every time!

Charlotte Hamrick, Tom Petty & a Villanelle

How we remember the past isn’t always how the past remembers itself. As for what happens next, who knows? 

Tower, Star, Nine of Wands. Ace of Cups, Two of Swords, Lovers. 

In this mysterious church of heart and hurt, pleasure and pain are swallowed as communion. Inevitably, some preach hate louder than love.

It’s tarot weather.

Rich Ferguson, Tarot Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 2)

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

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

Rachel Dacus, April abundance & poetry month!

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

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

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

Beth Adams, One Brushstroke at a Time

In order to keep loving, we’ll

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

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

before our eyes.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Things to Love Today

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

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

Gerry Stewart, Poetry Snippets for GloPoWriMo

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

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

Shawna Lemay, April is Poetry Month: 2025

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

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

Salena Godden, Monsters In Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, New edition of the VR Haggadah!

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

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

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

Let’s have fun, for us.

Charlotte Hamrick, NaPoWriMo & Something Small Every Day

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Role model, mycelium

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

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

The catfish suck at the high notes
Percussive smacks of mistake

No, I sing, no, I sing, no

Ren Powell, Jackhammer Song

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

Victoria Moul, The embroidered earth: sapphics in the spring

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Collected Poems (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’ Likewise, in their adjudication, the 2014 Büchner Prize jury highlighted the way ‘Becker’s writing is interwoven with the times, with what is observed and what is remembered, what is personal and what is historical.’ […]

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

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

Martyn Crucefix, Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Archive

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

Jim Young [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Loudon, April 1, 2025

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, National Poetry Month: poetry book #1

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, Have you seen the White Whale?

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

Nin Andrews, Son of a Bird!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Reopenings vs Closure

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

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

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

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

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

Happy National Poetry Month, everybody!

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

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

Bill Waters, National Poetry Month @ Sked Street Park

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

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

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

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

Jacob D. Salzer, Vera Constantineau

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, What’s in a name?

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, FLAG

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Riches

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, What do poets do all day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then all the green, in a shower.

Kati Mohr, Aye.

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, But there is the fog

In this massive, end-of-the-year edition: gold paint and bird wings, throwing words to the wind, liquid understatement, stopping by woods, a river about a river, and much more. Enjoy.

Geography is elastic but night has reversed or doubled itself and it is not yet late but soon it will be if I am not diligent diligent being the rudder the bow the shoe’s heel and sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eves as the starlings shoot out.

Rebecca Loudon, Christmas Eve

I cleared my mind for Christmas photocopying outlines of birds and brushing them with gold. Paper birds flew across the front room and others, backed with pages from a dreadful novel, flew across the stairwell. I cut birds out of linen scraps and sewed them onto a tablecloth. I went down to the pier and watched them gather late one afternoon. I read my paternal grandmother’s fortune telling book, its auguries and instructions for interpreting the behaviour of birds (ornithomancy). 

I stopped by the sloe hedge opposite mum’s yesterday evening and listened to birds, far too late I thought, it was dark, and remembered the tunnel into the hedge used by the vixen who visits mum. The dark hillocky ridge beyond, punctured by rabbits. Mist sinking into everything. 

Jackie Wills, Gold paint and bird wings

Her eyes skirt the trees,
the marshy undergrowth
for a safe settling.
She tires easily now,
seeks sheltered landings
on timeworn wings,
her flight nearing
an unfamiliar shore
that beckons
with no promises.

Sarah Russell, Bird Woman

Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time of such profound pain and profound transformation that it fused reading and writing into a single, surprising act of the unconscious: I began making bird divinations to clarify the confusion of living and refill my reservoir of trust in the cohesion of the world. This daily practice left a great deal less time for other reading, especially anything new: The written word today seems more and more resigned to commodified virtue signaling and hollow self-help, so I found myself returning more and more to trusted treasures that have stood the test of time and changing moral fashions. 

Maria Popova, Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More

I want to read more – but I do need to clarify in my own mind what I want to read, and why.

I want to write more – but I do need to clarify…

I want to keep posting online.

I want to keep connecting with lovely people.

I want to see more birds (real life as well as photos), photograph more birds, post more bird photos, read and write about birds (oh look, I’ve done some clarifying right there).

Sue Ibrahim, Another year…

Perhaps this particular bird is a singular bird:
its fluting tones original to its temperament

and not to any other in the larger murmuration,
though each wears the same coat lightly stippled

white, flocked with purple, green, and gold. Yet,
a song only becomes what it is when one note joins

or swerves alongside another, the mystery of never
breaking off a single feather even as it curves.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mozart’s Starling

A mixture of fear and feathers in Mary Ruefle’s “Tail Feathers” which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain. […]

Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.

Moist.
Like flames.

The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.

I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language. 

Alina Stefanescu, Fear maps.

A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted on the images sometimes, which he created after comparing my words to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot images. There were moments I’d say yes, this is perfect, and others when an image had the wrong vibe and I’d suggest it went with a different Major Arcana card instead. I love the results.

Lesley Wheeler, Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

just cold enough
for puddles to freeze . . .
cubist moon

Bill Waters, 2 poems

The poets whose books I reviewed in 2024 addressed grief and loss, the experience of exile, infertility, and the natural world, of living in the spaces between illness and health, and the power of resilience. They wrote of how the abiding presence of Nature balances an acute awareness of climate change, how language connects family, and why the dead are never truly gone.

Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones: 2024 Book Covers and 2025 Reviews

I’m surprised by my own tears and wonder why I don’t feel this deeply when I read other, similar headlines. Though, occasionally, one will stand out and some detail in the article about strangers will hook me and deepen my understanding beyond the intellectual. Something specific that sparks a network of memories, not their specifics, but the silent knowledge inherent in memory that makes facts move from the part of the brain that understands words, to the part that comprehends lived experience.

We witness.

This is what reading is about, isn’t it? When literature can witness lived experience in a way that mirrors what we recognize to be true. When an external perspective shows us more than we can see on our own. I still find it amazing how words can bridge the gap of distance, and of time.

It’s strange to be working on two projects at once. One is nearly entirely factual, shaped with imaginative connections (The wasp memoir). While the other is nearly entirely fictional, set within a framework of a few facts (The Baroness play). Both attempting to witness the human experience.

Scientists say now that our memories don’t function like recordings, but that we recreate the memory each time we bring it to mind. Every time I get caught up in concerns about writing the truth rather than writing what is true, I think of this.

It is true that my great grandmother was a cuckoo wasp. That my grandmother left the cramped, hexagon cell in the strange hive to wander over the moor. Potter wasp, intermittent mother to my mother. Solitary down the line. I am a witness.

Ren Powell, What it Might Mean to Witness

She turns a page in the journal.
Blank. White. What’s the point?

And then, one day, a request for an interview.
A girl, student of history, inquisitive, gentle.

A canvas bag, a notebook, pens of different colours.
She has tied her lovely red hair into bunches.

Larissa invites her to sit by the window, says.
There’s nothing especially interesting about my life,

but do you know how Margaret Clitherow
was crushed to death beneath stones?

Bob Mee, TODAY I TRIED TO THINK ABOUT HOW ONE WAY OR ANOTHER SO MANY OF US ARE DISPLACED

Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.

I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.

Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.

Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.

Ann E. Michael, Post-exertion malaise

I used to diarize and write my ideas down on napkins. Now that I don’t go to many places that have napkins, I bring along my book.

I’m a chronic chronicler. Every day on Facebook for a lot of years (and Flickr for many years before that), I’ve been posting a photo I took that day and writing about that day’s events.

It started as writing practice for times when I didn’t have a blog-worthy post. It’s where I dumped my shit, almost literally, like details about my colonoscopy. […]

My friend Susan, leader of writing retreats and author of several books and the Substack Writing and Roaming, advised me at lunch yesterday to get out of my own way. She saw that I was constantly throwing up roadblocks to keep from advancing to the finish line with my own projects: two unfinished novels, an unfinished children’s book about bugs (a passion project) and my finished poetry manuscript, Words with Friends.

I bought that manuscript with me, and she said “It looks finished! Why haven’t you submitted it yet?”

“Because it’s not organized. I need to put the poems in order.”

She said, “The last thing I want to read is six poems in a row about bugs” (or something similar), and I thought shit! She’s right. “Take this manuscript and throw it up in the air. Pick the pages up randomly, and that’s your order.”

Then she flipped through the manuscript, catching on a poem called “Pine.” I kept talking to her while she was reading it, and she was so intently focused on that poem. She pulled it from the stack and said, “Except make this one first.”

What has stopped me from pursuing personal writing goals and instead sent me to the basement to make lamps? Is it a fear of failure? Is it money? It’s certainly not a lack of time, now that I have nowhere to go.

I won’t call this a “resolution,” but I’ll try to spend my time more wisely.

In 2025, I will post my daily diary, along with other content, here, with a TL;DR summary on Facebook and a link to the post. And I will throw that manuscript up in the air and start sending it around.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Throwing Words to the Wind

Since it’s a big job, the remodeling of this site to contain both blog and personal website, there’s much to be done, including getting my book and zine page updated to reflect this year, which has been a whirl ever since last January when I decided to create monthly zines of art and writing work. At first, it was largely because I had had to graduate to a paid Issuu subscription, which was going to cost almost 30 bucks a month and I’d better take full advantage of that and actually use it. About midyear, I actually found a much better and much less expensive platform for hosting e-zines, so moved to that. I still enjoyed putting out monthly zines though, even with most of them being electronic with a couple exceptions. 

There’s something very rewarding about collecting and publishing poems this way, especially since my work is typically written as a series, and though I occasionally publish bits and pieces in collab zines, journals, and anthologies, they are best experienced in tandem with each other and any attendant artwork. I also like offering the bulk of my work with no impediments like expensive printing and shipping costs, especially in this economy.  I’ve been saving the printing costs for longer projects like this year’s full-length collection, RUINPORN, or the larger book projects that had specifications beyond my own printer like GRANATA and GHOST BOX (which was half created in studio, half by the professionals.)

As I was making the collage above for the webpage that lists everything, I realized that is quite a lot of work out in the world this year, which feels really good, because more often in previous years I’ve sat on things for years before releasing them, really with no benefits (at some point, they are done, so its not like they are aging like wine hidden away.) 

Kristy Bowen, bookish things

Here’s a sneak peek of the likely cover of my next book, coming out in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something good to read, I highly recommend a new anthology, The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (edited by Todd and Noah Davis and and Carolyn Mahan). it pairs descriptions, habitat and lifestyle notes on key species in the region with poems about those species. Yes, I’m included (my entry is the mayapple). Among the other poets included are David Baker, Kasey Jueds, Chase Twichell, Lee Upton, Marjorie Maddox, K.A. Hays, Michael Garrigan, Jerry Wemple, Chard deNiord, and many more.

Grant Clauser, 2024 Update and stuff

Lately, it’s been about counting. Years. Runs. Words. Work. Breaths. Days. Trees.[…]

12,000 words – the number of words my novel has been stuck on all year. I lost my writing mojo in 2024, but I’ve found it again. Standby 2025, especially February 14th.

18 – the number of years I’ve spent at Wrexham University building a project which includes the voices of those usually excluded from education, from life, from being heard. A few days before my birthday, Outside In won an Above and Beyond Award for embedding Inclusion into the everyday life of the university. A day after my birthday, the group threw me a surprise party with more gifts than I could carry, some flowers that have lasted right up to today.

Breaths – who knows how many? But lately I’ve been practising Yoga Nidra as a way of grounding myself back into my adult self after the re-emergence of childhood traumas, counting breaths in through my nose, and out through my mouth. At first, I found this almost impossible to do. Now, it’s becoming more of a habit.

24 – the number of my advent calendar, and maybe yours: a treat I bought in the dark of November. Each day in December, I’ve opened a cardboard drawer to find a gift to myself. Lavender salve to rub into my temples, geranium hand cream, frankincense oil to rejuvenate my 60 year old skins. It’s taught me something about self-care that I don’t think I knew before – how to treasure myself each day, regardless.

1 – the tree that came to mind in a therapy session recently. This tree is real and imagined, a safe place of non-judgement, acceptance, strength, solidity and power –  somewhere I can go, in my mind, to find all that I needed when a child, all that I need now to draw upon when I’m thrown back into child-learnt fears. 

And so I find I’ve numbered my days, counted myself into my sixties and up to this Christmas  Day. And what have I found? 

Love. A growing into love for myself I’ve never thought possible. A growing into receiving love from others I’ve never thought I deserved. A growing love for this world, with all its darkness, all its lights.

Liz Lefroy, I Number My Days

Asterisks and diamond drops
and the cold, so cold,
Lording-over-us blue 

and the rose chill – 
sky’s bright rim of ear, 
so cold, asking to be nibbled

this renegade that escaped,
a maraschino cherry
a cocktail on ice

so raw and beloved
the song’s song be-
longing in our mortal ear. 

Jill Pearlman, Bright Rim of Ear Lyric

Is it wildly obvious that blue is my favorite color? I’ve recently learned that it’s scientifically proven that the color blue lifts one’s mood. I’ve just ordered the book Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols to learn more. Wallace’s focus is on blue water, but since I walk the shoreline where I live nearly everyday, I think that’s probably relevant, too. All I know is that the calm and peace the color offers me is real.

No wonder my most recent book is Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) has blue in the title or that the swag bags for Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women are also, blue.

It used to embarrass me that I had such an affinity to one color above all others, but not now.

Not being embarrassed anymore is one of the greatest gifts of growing older. Creating space in the world for others to walk through is another. Almost exactly, fifteen years ago, my good friend Kelli Russell Agodon and I dreamed-up the idea for a poetry retreat for women and Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women was born over a glass of wine, sitting by a roaring fire.

We had both taught at several conferences that featured a less than nurturing atmosphere: a small inside stairwell, an unheated room, and the list goes on. Kelli and I decided, at our writing retreat everyone would feel cared for and seen. There will be swag bags full of new books and everyone will have a one-on-one conference at no extra charge.

Over the years, we moved from Florence, Oregon, to La Connor, Washington. A number of years ago we started inviting guest faculty which have included Elizabeth Austen, Jessica Gigot, Claudia Castro Luna, Michele Bombardier, January Gill O’Neil, Rena Priest, Maggie Smith, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Jane Wong.

This year writer-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield and poet Susan Landgraf will join me on the theme of wonderment and joy. What could be better?

Susan Rich, Another Year, Oh My: Celebrating

Sharing a name with a famous actress was innocuous enough, wasn’t it? We had little in common other than being white women. I am American; she was British. I’m a poet and writer; she was a renowned actress of the stage and screen. I was born in 1977; she was born in 1934 and had already won two Oscars by the time I was walking. Surely we wouldn’t be mistaken for one another!

But, to my astonishment and amusement, once I started publishing books and having a more public life, and especially after my poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017 Meryl Streep read my poem “Good Bones” at Lincoln Center, as part of the annual Academy of American Poets gala. I wasn’t in the audience that evening, but when I listened to the audio later, I heard her say, “I’m going to read a poem by Maggie Smith.” The crowd murmured with excitement, and she said, in her unmistakable voice, “Not that one. The American.”

I laughed. From that day forward, my social media bio has been either “Not that one” or “The other one.”

I hope Dame Maggie Smith, who was known for her wit, would have found all of this amusing as well. As her character Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, once said on Downton Abbey, “Life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”

Maggie Smith, The Other One, Forever & Ever

For me, the year really got started in April with the solar eclipse, which Chris and I watched from Burlington, Vermont, in the path of totality. I still tell anyone who will listen that it changed my life. It sounds goofy AF and over-the-top, and I just don’t care. What I saw and felt was the most profound awe of my life. The magic and power were undeniable, and it became clear: that giddy feeling was what I needed more of in my life. And I needed it immediately, so I spent the year getting after it. [….]

I spent the first six months of the year dramatically revising my poetry manuscript and continuing to send it out. In the process, I crossed the 30-submission mark. And then? I pressed pause. Even though some of the responses included positive signs about the viability of the manuscript, all were ultimately rejections except two that I’m waiting on. I am writing still, just not as much as I used to. I completed Sarah Freligh‘s August Micro-a-Day challenge, gathered some free writes in my journal, attended a couple of local open mics and featured at one.

I’ll get more serious about po’biz again in the future, I’m sure, but for now I’m reassessing what I’m doing, who I’m doing it for and what I want out of it. […]

Art making has come and gone in my life over the years, but mostly, it has been gone. This year, it started calling to me again, however. I had lots of resistance and fear about it initially because I was taking myself too seriously. I’ve been working through it and trying to make it about play. I have some things I want to pursue in 2025, but for now, I’m just practicing and exploring. (You can follow me on an Instagram account dedicated to this art journey here.)

So what now? What’s up next? On the heels of this awkward ritual — the recap — there may be another one: the resolutions, the intentions, the goals for 2025. But if not, the main theme is this: I’m trying to channel the magic and wisdom from 2024 into a new model for writing and art making and being in the world.

That means returning to this idea that we can create what we need for ourselves and for our communities. Our strength lies there, not with typical measures like publications or likes or beauty standards or even elections. That’s a story for another day, but sticking to the theme I have going here, we got us.

We got us.

We make something out of nothing. Almost every day. And the worlds we make are as real as any we’ve been handed. And they’re ours. They belong to us. Imagine how powerful we are when we keep building. Imagine it like it’s already true — and suddenly it is.

Carolee Bennett, To Make a Safe Space for Myself

The final poem in our Palestine Advent series is Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.

Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1933 in the village of Saffuriya and died in Nazareth in 2011. His So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 24: Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali

I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees.  I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot.  But through the years, I’m less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.

In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever.  Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they’re not going to be scientists–that seems very important to me.  Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Success of Adopting a Tree in a Composition Class

When I was a child, my sisters and I were told (and believed) that on Christmas Eve when the clock struck midnight, for one hour all of the animals could talk to one another. This was a magical happening, and also a secret: if we were to try to stay awake and observe this convening (which I suggested on a number of occasions), the magic would be broken.

In my early childhood, we lived in a suburban house with a wide swath of woods behind, and always cohabitated with at least one cat and one or two dogs. Later, we moved to a seven-acre farm and in addition to the animals who shared our house, we also lived alongside chickens, Nubian goats, alpacas, horses and a pony, two barn cats, and a pig, not to mention all of the other wild creatures–birds, squirrels, mice and moles, raccoons, snakes and lizards, turtles and toads, deer–that shared the land. At that point, imagining the conversations that would take place on this sacred night became even more mysterious. What, given the brief gift of a shared language, would all of these creatures say to one another?

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Christmas

i read in an old grimoire
that if we are sick we should bury all our hooves.
we should prepare for winter. we must
boil a whole tree until it is
soft as flesh.
i pickle the moon to go with it.
sweet lemon divine. i collect the hooves.

Robin Gow, healing spells

I grew up in the same New England that Robert Frost wrote about. I saw the roads. Drifts of snow covered them. New Hampshire used to get an average of 174 inches of snow a year. Now, due to climate change, just a lousy 60 inches, a third of what it was fifty years ago.

Snow or no snow, the question might be, do we take the time to look outside at all? Are we intentional about looking up from our phones? The answer is no. We don’t have time—or make time—to look at the woods.

What could possibly be happening on Instagram or TikTok that is more exciting than driving, crossing the street, or interacting with someone at our local coffee shop? It’s all too apparent that we are sucked into our devices. We are absorbed by our longing for the pixels of a digital world.

The first time I realized the phone was a competition was at a Red Hen poetry reading at Poets House. Leaves fell in New York’s late afternoon. Li Young Li was reading with Peggy Shumaker, two accomplished poets. Before the reading began, no one was looking through the Poets House library, one of the largest poetry collections in the world. They weren’t observing the beauty of the space. They were playing with their phones. I realized that the event was competing with something that could fit on their laps.

This was twelve years ago; the phone hadn’t really taken us by the throat. It has now.

Kate Gale, Stopping by Woods: On Returning to Intention

sun dying
i become
part of the darkness

Grant Hackett [no title]

In an Afterword, [Robert] van Vliet briefly explains some of Vessels’ compositional background. A few years ago, in the midst of the bleakness and isolation of the Covid pandemic, the poet was tied up in a difficult, exasperating writer’s block. Taking up a popular creative writer’s manual, which offered a method of daily exercises – applying aleatory, chance texts as writing prompts – van Vliet leaned instead upon three much-valued personal sources : the I Ching, the journals of Thoreau, and the gnostic Nag Hammadi Gospel texts.

The poet emphasizes the generative effect of chance operations, comparable to casting the I Ching oracles – and these methods clearly had a liberating influence, opening wide, exploratory dimensions, adding variety to the sequence. But if you read his explanation carefully, you find that the process involved several overlapping steps : sorting, mixing, shifting, recombining. And in fact this step-by-step approach allowed van Vliet’s own voice to emerge : quietly, subtly, unobtrusively. For me it emerges in the refined lightness, the liquid understatement, the powerful simplicity, of his images of nature. Like ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry in its foreshortened, whispering force, its emotional accuracy, his short lyrics find a place where heart, mind, and soul – feeling, thought, and truth – seem to merge in a transparency of light, wind, water, seasonal change.

The ancient source material is by no means an artificial scaffolding, a crutch. It is the avenue for an encounter : because for this kind of Transcendentalist, philosophical writing (think, Thoreau), there is no Truth but lived truth; there is no Word but felt words, embodied words – words in-relation to others, to otherness, to Another. The divine, the sacred, washes through these poems like a wind (or rain, or drought) : the fear and terror are there, as well as the longing and adoration. Moreover the free, questing, skeptical, philosophical mind is there : the only dogma, the only authority, the only truth… you must live them. You must experience them yourself. This is the encounter (in my rough approximation) that the reader will find in this volume. It is supremely paradoxical, supremely mysterious – as is our mortal life in this mysterious cosmos. The poet challenges himself – and the reader – to find life again, beyond the fraudulent twilight realm of illusions, self-delusions.

Henry Gould, A New Song : a New Walk

I’ve been thinking about connections, networks, and finding angels in strangers. These past two months have been an odd kerfluffle of dinners with family and friends, stretches of quiet, paroxysms of activity, stretches of how-can-it-be-only-4:30. My husband has invited another crop of people over for dinner, and I feel resentful. And I feel guilty for that. I don’t know these people very well, or at all. He relies on me for my conversational skills while he finishes cooking, and then also at the table. I don’t feel like pumping up that particular energy. I don’t feel like hearing myself say brightly to someone, “So…” and ask some question about their lives. I don’t care. But I ask myself, what is my preferred alternative? Another quiet dinner and then Netflix? Really? Again?

I think these people coming to my table have nothing to offer me, but how could I possibly know? And why would I cut myself off from the possibility? Don’t I believe that in community lies all hope and possibility, all potential for the human species on the planet? Don’t I believe that these interactions with friends and strangers make rich a life? What is my problem? Something inside me is unsettled and bleating mutely, and something about the prospect of these people, these particular people and their particular connection, makes me feel trapped. Which is completely ridiculous.

But I found a kind of resonance with the shrimp in this poem by Catherine Barnett, from her terrific book Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space. Alone or not alone enough, is the question of the poem.

But I think the real question of life is the “sharing a patch of sea grass” she mentions. I know from another book I’m reading right now, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, that it’s not just a couple of shrimp sharing that patch of sea grass, it’s teeming masses of bacteria and other teeny things, single celled whatsits and multicelled whosits, and fleas and waterworld insects, all awash in waves and winds frantically trying to keep everything in balance. I learned in some other article somewhere that even though we are an incredibly destructive force, we human species have also had some positive effects on the planet, and were we to disappear, those positive effects would disappear too.

I guess my point is, we’re all in this together, we shrimp and insects, we whosits and humans and winds. And although we’re never particularly alone, sometimes it feels like it, and against our will. So look, Elijah could show up for dinner at any time. Just set the table. Prepare to look at a stranger with your brainy eyes, and to say brightly, “So…”

Marilyn McCabe, then they’re gone again

There’s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his ‘Celtic twilight’ poems as – I suppose – trivial and escapist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Carrying Jeffares’ MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason – I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don’t mean I now think of it as weak, or bad, or clumsy but that there’s something static and unchanging in its effect which means that it has lost its life through repetition. ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and similar poems have kept their freshness. I think this is partly because of the sparkling distinctness of their images. Each line brings a separate self-contained flowering of life as well as contributing to a developing narrative:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

The style of almost childlike simplicity is important. Aengus says things and we seem to see them with absolute clarity in a mood of wide-eyed, wondering but unquestioning acceptance. There’s no pushing of mood or meaning by the poet, and this is part of the difference from the Rose poems, and why this one seems to me so much more artistically resilient than they are. However, I think that there’s something entranced and entrancing about the feeling of the verse right from the start, before the trout transforms to a glimmering girl. What I started this piece hoping to do was to analyse how this feeling is given but that seems to be beyond me. All I can say is that the way we and the speaker are caught in the grid of these delicate iambic tetrameter lines with their abcb rhymes seems to have something to do with it, creating a sense of being in some sort of hyperreal, entranced state or space. 

Edmund Prestwich, Magic words: W B Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’

In the artist’s statement accompanying her “Poetry Recitation with Music: The Waste Land,” Beijing-based artist Wang Baoju concludes by saying that her recitation of a Chinese translation of T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 poem performed in time to a Beijing traffic light’s beeping is “absurd.”

But if we stop at simple dictionary definitions (or stop with Google Translate), we lose some important word play. Wang uses the word 荒诞, pronounced huangdan and meaning “absurd, ridiculous, over the top,” to describe the nature of her performance. In doing so, she echoes the Chinese translation of the title of Eliot’s poem: 荒原 huangyuan.

The character 荒 huang repeats, suggesting that not only is Wang’s performance inherently absurd (or, better put, absurdist in the tradition of art that reflects real-world absurdity), but that it also does something with and to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, that it, we might say, somehow wastes the poem, or uses the poem to waste something about poetry itself, or our time, or contemporary Beijing, that it somehow wastes the Waste Land, whatever that might mean.

What are we, as viewers, to do with this? 

Can we relate to interminable waits? 

To our time being cut up by machines, computers, algorithms, codes

Perhaps some of us might note that parts of Beijing look almost identical to parts of any other global megacity….

We might observe that traffic and people rushing about on their business in the city can, if we sit and watch for a while, seem somehow ghostlike, zombie-like, machine-like, unreal?

That we can feel unreal, too, in cityscapes shaped by the demands of commerce and technology more than by the needs of the human body, psyche, and soul? 

That maybe there’s something “dead” about this world we’ve made, with its pulsing energies and seemingly endless tearing-down and rebuilding, its material excesses, profligate consumption of resources, and flows of emissions and garbage?

That all of this is happening in a world that feels like it’s teetering on the brink of some kind of catastrophe, even as we drift through daily life as if things might go on forever just as they do now, distracted by our screens?

David Perry, Hurry Up and Wait: Wang Baoju’s Hyper-Unreal Absurdist Beijing Waste Land

Christmas himself was probably played by William Rowley, a famous comic actor who must — like Jonson himself — have been a large man, as he generally played jolly, plump parts (like Plum Porridge in Middleton’s Inner Temple Masque (1619) and the Cook in Jonson’s later masque, Neptune’s Triumph). But all the other actors were probably actually boys, drawn from the professional companies with which Jonson was associated. The contrast between their childish appearance and the adult jobs Christmas attributes to them (such as ‘Hercules the porter’) is part of the joke. The boy Cupid would certainly have been played by a child, as would his mother Venus, the only speaking female part.

Christmas has just got his show underway, and is part-way through his opening song, when he is interrupted, first by some noise outside, and then by the entrance of Venus, a ‘deaf tire-woman’ (that is, a dressmaker), who — a bit like Christmas himself — insists on coming in and, despite his protests, on staying so that she can watch her son, Cupid, who has a part in the play. Making Venus a deaf dressmaker and Cupid a local apprentice (to a bugle-maker, that is, a maker of glass beads) has obvious comic potential, and we duly discover that Venus lives on Pudding Lane (a poor neighbourhood, famous as the place where the Fire of London began later in the century); that she is the child of a fishmonger (a profession with a reputation for lechery and infidelity); that her husband was a blacksmith (an obvious reference to Vulcan); that Cupid is apprenticed to a bead-maker on Love Lane (slightly east of Pudding Lane), and so on.

The whole thing keeps nearly collapsing into chaos — more people want to come in; Venus keeps interrupting Christmas and then mishearing what she is told; Christmas’ children discover they have lost or forgotten half their props; and then Cupid begins his speech but, interrupted by his mother, loses his place and forgets his words:

CUPID: You worthy wights, king, lords, and knights,
O queen and ladies bright,
Cupid invites you to the sights
He shall present tonight.
VENUS: ’Tis a good child. – Speak out, hold up your head, Love.
CUPID: And which Cupid – and which Cupid [he keeps repeating it, unable to remember the rest]

There’s an energy to the piece, dependent to a large extent on the comedy of a performance going wrong — and never being quite sure whether all of the errors are scripted or not — which is quite a lot like a good pantomime, still a traditional part of the British Christmas.

Victoria Moul, Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?

Szirtes’ career illustrates what Pasternak discusses in An Essay in Autobiography (Harvill, 1990). Though our experience of the world is necessarily subjective, there is a sufficient underlying matrix that remains “the common property of man” – the hard-wiring implicit in being human. Superimposed on this is the softer wiring derived from upbringing, environment and education, and the self is ultimately a function of these base matrices in progressive interaction with individual decision-making in the flow of experience. So the objective world is processed through the individual’s particular matrices – his/her sets of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, texturised as it were, accordingly. From this, Pasternak argues that when an individual dies he leaves behind his own unique “share of this . . . the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul”. This, of course, is where “art finds its . . . field of action and its main content . . . the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience”. Art can be defined as the expression of experience playing across the matrices of the self, saying not this is me, but this is, this was, mine.

It is the raw imagery of stasis and movement that emerges in Szirtes’ early work as being truly his and it blooms into the maturity of the late 1980s. In short lyrical pieces the point of stasis is associated with the preservative of art in the spit ball gobbed by a foreign worker in ‘Anthropomorphosis’ which is caught and “suspended” by the poem. The afternoon rearranges itself around it and even the narrator “hung there / Encapsulated in that quick pearled light”. Versions of this encapsulation abound: girls creating a silver foil tree find themselves absorbed into a Keatsian “cold pastoral”. Such freeze-frame moments anticipate Szirtes’ sustained meditations on photography but early on, images of snow and frost suggest the ambivalent status of such suspension. In ‘The Car’ a snowfall is both beautiful and sepulchral: “Fantastic Gaudi-like structures hung / Under the mudguard . . . . / Wonderful, cried the girls under the snow”. A girl who is observed sewing causes consternation (“I do not like you to be quite so still”) caught in a stasis that can “eat away a life” that can “freeze the creases of a finished garment” (‘A Girl Sewing‘).

Martyn Crucefix, George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

on a notepad
in the stonemason’s yard:
names to be carved

Matthew Paul, My year in haiku

At the opening of The Grail, the final part of the trilogy, in a poem dated 31^st October 2024, we find ourselves back in the Providence of Roger Williams and Cautantowwit, in a sense Gould’s earthly Eden. But then circumstances plunge the poem back into harsh reality, with two poems dated the 4^th and 6^th of November, bracketing the re-election of Trump, and, as it happens, Guy Fawkes’ Night:

Election day, the traitor, redivivus,
golden-orange, breathing fire, emerges
from Hecate’s diamond basement (Hades)…
wearing Empedocles’ bronze shoe, Jesus!
No one could have predicted this. Amen,
howls each mesmerized hurt soul… He’s us!
Meanwhile… Roger, Coke’s fiery lamb… sighs.
These trials of conscience burden suffering MAN!
he shouts: Only soft-hearted JONAH can restore us.
(from ‘Twisted Knot’)

I want to pause a moment to unpack at least some of the references in this stanza, which is typical of Gould’s method. By association with Hecate, keeper of the key to Hades, fire-breathing Trump becomes Satan, the ultimate traitor, and with the figure of Fawkes, who figures in Milton’s ‘In Quintum Novembris.’ (On the Fifth of November), a poem that could be viewed as an early draft of ‘Paradise Lost’. Fawkes’ basement full of gunpowder being an analogical Hades of its own. And then there’s Empedocles’ attempted deceit, a brazen (pardon the pun) attempt at self-aggrandisement.

Next we have Roger Williams, whose patron, the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, prosecuted Fawkes for treason. Williams knew Milton and tutored him in Native American languages. He also founded Providence as an oasis of ‘liberty of conscience’. As it turns out, he also wrote about Jonah as being, perhaps, soft-hearted: ‘Jonah did not compel the Ninevites to hear that message which he brought unto them.’ (I cannot source the apparent quote that closes the stanza.) And it may be just me, but Jonah brings to mind Moby-Dick. One way or another, these lines illustrate Gould’s insistence on history as a kind of process outside time, or in which all times and places co-exist and illuminate each other.

Billy Mills, Three Books by Henry Gould: A Review

Over the last few days, I’ve taken some very long walks, several naps, and I’ve read What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, trans. and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill (LiverightPubl, 2025). It is being hailed as “a landmark literary event.” The poems, presented in the original German and in English, were never intended by Arendt for publication, and they don’t strike me as being poems one memorizes or writes out in a commonplace book. They compel, however, if taken as a diary of Arendt’s life:

The thoughts come to me,
I’m no longer a stranger to them.
I grow into their dwelling
like a plowed field.

(from Part II, 1942-1961)

If you aren’t already steeped in Hannah Arendt’s work, the footnotes and the introduction of What Remains are a necessary guide. Additionally, they offer the editors’ obsession with the poetry, and a direct look into one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century.

Bethany Reid, What Remains

Edward Storer (1880-1944) was born in Alnwick, England, lived in Rome, and then returned to England to live in Weybridge, London; “In November of 1908, Storer, author already of Inclinations, much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay attacking poetic conventions.” (Flint, A History of Imagism, 1915)

One of the founders of the ‘School of Images’ group in 1909, alongside F.S. Flint and T.E. Hulme, both of whom were also experimenting with free-verse, inspired by French vers libre, and Japanese tanka and haiku (the influence of tanka, for instance, is particularly obvious in Storer’s short poems, as well as in the stanza forms of his longer poems). The School of Images group also included Florence Farr and a young Ezra Pound, among others.

Storer published three books of ‘new’ poetry between 1907 and 1909—Inclinations (1907), Mirrors of Illusion (1908), and The Ballad of the Mad Bird (1909)—and was a significant forerunner to the ‘new verse’ movements which would eventually take both England and America by storm in the 1910s-1920s. In the 1910s he also published an influential book of Sappho’s fragments in translation, seemingly using tanka and haiku as a model.

Storer also wrote the one of the first truly ‘modernist’ essays on poetics, included as an appendix to Inclinations (1907), but largely ignored by historians. The basic tenant of modernist theory was that each art had its own, unique essence, which differed ‘absolutely’ from one another, and that an artist’s highest calling was to identify, and nurture this essence. Up until the late-1800s narrative had always been seen as one of the foundations of Western poetry, which Storer disputed. Narrative, as an inherently ‘realist’ pursuit relied on ‘believability’, which was fundamentally at odds with the poetic, he argued. Conversely, poetry ignored its own essence the more it engaged with narrative. This led Storer to argue for an ‘imagistic’ model of poetry, in distinction to any kind of ‘realism’, grounded in ‘suggestive’ linking and combination, rather than ‘narrative’.

Storer seldom gets sufficient credit for his theory of poetics, though Pound would go on to plagiarise Storer, Flint, and Hulme’s ideas, as well as those of earlier free-verse poets like Yone Noguchi, in his essays of 1912-1915, under the name of ‘Imagisme’. This ‘new’ Imagist movement went on to include numerous extremely talented poets like Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell, and remains one of the most well know—if poorly understood—movements of the 20th Century.

Dick Whyte, Edward Storer – 7 Short Poems (1907-22)

Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony comprises around 450 poems that tend to begin with a name, a place (farm, factory, saloon, boarding house) and sometimes a time of day or the age of the named person if relevant, and that tend to end with violence – gunshots, knife wounds, mutilation in industrial accidents. Their language is court-room plain, these are the facts; courtly, I’d say, respectful; no Henry James sub-clauses; the power is accumulative. Testimony was published in the US in several volumes by New Directions and Black Sparrow Press between 1965 and 1978; it was reissued in 2015 by Black Sparrow in a single edition – subtitled The United States (1885–1915): Recitative – that also includes as an appendix the prototype volume, written in prose, first published in 1934.

I’ve known of this book without ever, until this year, getting to it. It is one of the books of the last century; it has never been published in the UK. Repeat: it has never been published in the UK.

Reznikoff (1894–1976), by all accounts, was a modest man. He was born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He sold hats for the family business. He wore out a lot of shoe leather, walking 20 miles a day on the streets of New York. In his twenties he had poems accepted by the magazine Poetry and then withdrew them; most of his work until the 1960s was self-published, and typeset and printed by himself. His poetry is included in anthologies of the Objectivists alongside that of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (all of them immigrants to the US or the sons of immigrants). He studied law and practised very briefly but then ducked down, Bartleby-ish, and for many years earned his living by writing summaries of court records for legal reference books.

‘I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases – not a great many as law reports go – and found almost all that follows.’ This is Reznikoff’s brief prefatory note to his 1934 prose version of Testimony. Given that what comes to court is the bad stuff – murders, rape, theft, claims for negligence, property disputes and forged wills – Testimony is not a picnic in the park.

Charles Boyle, Late in the day, my book of the year

It’s nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden’s middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden’s travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.

Jee Leong Koh, Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY

The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.

I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.

I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.

As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s
younger brother Michael, a name I learned
in Catholic school.

The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.

I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.”

Brian Spears, Sometimes there’s nowhere to run

The surrendering in the above poem speaks to me. And whenever I read from my volume of Hermann Hesse poems translated by Ludwig Max Fischer I am always taken with the commentary by Fischer. He quotes Hesse, “To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of the great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence…”

I’m interested in his insistence on love. I like that he “saw himself as an advocate for the soul, as an activist for the spirit in everyone beyond ideologies and doctrines.” Hesse saw words as instruments for the possible, and which could lead us to joy.

How many thousands of time in a life do we need to relearn the path to joy?

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – Winwood, Hesse, Michelangelo

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?

Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinking about is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsized MEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop those effects up in a kind of shadow box?

A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility of a coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on the page.

Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection, vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .

In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types of writers) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally cool with being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the big questions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) of looking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within and beyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos that might help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansion of collective knowledge . . .

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 can help proliferate community and thus (quite actively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragile threads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate in service of surviving the horror of Now; 

can create literal or figurative occasions for what is also my current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;

can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes of witness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can be meaningful to any single reader; 

can, because Literature is a shared experience and requires many types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to a Jesuit high school LOL); 

can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for another human, which might act as salve or as awakening;

can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov) suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once give someone an onion when they need it.

That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on this again in ten years.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Olivia Cronk

From a construction point of view, the poem is a masterclass in the strong line ending, and the sounds of this…the ow sound of window, flower, over and glow vs the clipped ends of snapped, snipped, lapped, missed, and the rhymed couplets at the end, but beyond the technical details (in a book that is all sonnets) , I love it for its attentive nature, the partner noticing something that means something to their partner — I can’t always say I manage that despite my best intentions, but as I sit here at the end of a year that has very much done a number on me, it is acting as a reminder that I can and should do more to notice these little things.

Both R and me are struggling today to feel comfortable with doing nothing. She keeps wanting to do stuff (despite being knackered from organising Xmas and looking after my carcass for the last week). I am loathe to sit down having been ill for a week, feeling “better” but exhausted, so sitting still is hard, but we both need to remember we don’t “always need to be on the move”

Mat Riches, Uncareful Owner

the wild geese
are shitting on the snow
icy pond

Jim Young [no title]

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is poetry’s equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D – overused to within an inch of its life. I don’t care. Both are wildly popular because they are beautiful; simple enough to speak widely; complex enough to hold and engage. “You do not have to crawl on your knees repenting” is the line I’d like to live in the coming year. And this year, more than ever before, I found my place in “the family of things”.

More often than not, I forget to say that it’s Clare writing this article – but maybe it’s obvious from the different ways Kim and I write, and the things we say. For example – I want to tell you about how, decades ago, one of my girlfriends complained about the way I spoke about my family. It’s always THE family, she said – like it’s a unit. The Family is coming. I’m spending time with The Family. Like there’s no other family! Like you don’t exist without it!

But, I was the youngest of six – a Catholic family – and we were a unit. We were cubs, we moved and lived and rested in a pile. We had our own bible, our own lore. We shared our underwear, changed once a week and washed by hand, we bathed in the same water, smelled of each other, caught lice and worms from each other, ate choddy from each other’s mouths. The Family was my horizon and furthest place; the Family was much more than world. It was my fingers, my thoughts and all my dreams. It was my arterial system and my exoskeleton; my tastebuds and my lens. What do you do when your systems all fall apart?

Clare Shaw, Family Estrangement, December, and the Family of Things

How can we get a decent night’s sleep on a mattress made from fists and crumbling civilizations?

How can we turn a blind eye when reality’s mugshot is posted on the back of our eyeballs, continually reminding us of the crimes humans commit against one another?

A bullet isn’t like a trained dog. You can’t tell it to sit and expect a positive outcome when all it knows is kill.

But something I can say to you with optimistic certainty is this: the story of us has been woven from other stories; our stories will weave with different stories to create future stories.

A hymn about a hymn, a kiss about a kiss, a river about a river, forever flowing.

Rich Ferguson, A River About a River

Overall I read about 41,000 pages. That’s about 110 pages a day on average. It’s a ballpark because some were facing pages translations, some had no page numbers so I didn’t count or made a guess. I only counted up to appendices if I didn’t read those. Assist points go to my back and sciatica and energy crashes which left me capable of doing little more than reading.

I am always adding new questions to track. This year I added a couple new columns to the spreadsheet: re-reads (28 titles) and cost of title.

• 66% were free to me: downloads, contributor copies, review copies, gifts, jury copies, library, or little free libraries
• 19% were bought at full price, from the author directly, at small press fairs, by subscription, or else came from indie bookstores
• 8% from Amazon (sorry)
• 7% came from thrift stores or used bookstores (so 50 cents to $10)

[…]

Poetry comprised 60%. Most of the rest are novels or novellas. Chapbooks rang in around 20%. The next biggest categories were memoir or essays, then history or science. […]

What work is it that I want written word to do?

To expand me. To teach me how to be a better human. To understand angles of human nature. To conceive of a supportive world. To enter play and silliness, and to enter scary experiences completely unlike my own. To live more lives and to live a life I’m better equipped to understand.

Pearl Pirie, Self-audit and Best of 2024 List

About a week ago, I panicked when I realized I had promised two different writers blurbs for their next collections by the end of December. I had already read the books and taken notes, but I hadn’t started parsing my notes and my pulled quotes to make cohesive statements. I proceeded to put aside everything else I’d been planning to work on and make sure they got completed.

Being asked to create a blurb for another writer is an honor, one that I take seriously and one that takes quite some time. (See ’s excellent recent stack about writing and asking for blurbs.) It is the same with writing book reviews, something that I have done A LOT over the past five years. (Thirty-three poetry reviews at Rhino Reviews alone, six at Tinderbox Poetry – plus others at Limp Wrist, South Florida Poetry Review, and other venues. If you add them up, it’s around 10 reviews per year for the past five years – almost one a month.)

I’m not complaining. Reviewing has made me a more careful reader of poems and a better thinker about my own poems. I have considered this practice one way of giving back to poetry, one way of giving attention and respect to what poets do. I think about providing space for poets on my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey in the same way, and I hope that Asterales, the new journal I am launching with friend/writer Rachel Bunting next month, will be another way to showcase writers and artists with gratitude for what they create.

But all of these things take physical time and mental energy. The more time spent on blurbs, reviews, reading submissions, website work, booking, and promoting means less time on my own creative and personal pursuits, less mental energy for my own poems or freewriting, this Substack, artwork, or even pleasure reading. (Or other personal things like exercise, time with family/friends, traveling.) For this reason, and for some personal ones (including some travel plans), I have decided to make changes for the coming year.

I have decided I need to learn to say no.

Easy, right? Not so much.

Donna Vorreyer, Fa-la-la-la-Labor

Leaving aside the thornily persistent issue of whether ize or ise is the more authentic British spelling, I have to admit that U.K. poets who use American spelling really do grind my gears.

What’s more, I gather from other poets that certain U.S. poetry mags require American spelling and some U.K. mags demand British spelling. Both positions seem absurd to me. In fact, they’re only a short step away from asking poets to correct their use of an expression or a phrasal verb because the meaning is different on the other side of the pond. All these would be red lines for me, as my spelling and choice of syntax represent a key part of the roots of my poetry.

Mind you, before anyone starts getting twitchy about the potential politics of the above statement, it’s worth underlining that this is far from being a question of nationalism or Little Britain. Bearing in mind the negative effects of Brexit on every aspect of my life, I’m never going to be heading down that cul-de-sac! No, it’s more to do with how our uses of language in our poetry express our origin and identity. And we all write through both, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not…

Matthew Stewart, Americanised (sic) spelling

For the past two years, I’ve collaborated with haiku friends on what I call the Midwinter Day Renku. I created this renku variation in response to one of my all-time favorite works of literature, Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day. 

The story behind Midwinter Day is that Mayer composed the entire thing on Friday, December 22nd, 1978, the date of the winter solstice. The title refers to the fact that many older, lunar-based calendars consider the solstice the midpoint of the season rather than the beginning, which is the designation of the astronomical calendar we use today. 

Midwinter Day is a 100-ish page poem about the day in the life of a young family (Mayer, her husband, and their two children) living in Lenox, Massachusetts. Largely free verse, this poem is highly allusive, contains numerous lists, and frequently incorporates poetic devices such as rhyme. In Midwinter Day, poetry is not separate from parenthood and grocery shopping; it’s intertwined. There is no distinction between art and the rest of life; they are one and the same. 

Since first reading this poem in 2015, I wanted to create some sort of homage to it. But my attempts to truly imitate Bernadette Mayer fell flat, and didn’t feel true to the way I like to approach my own poetry. Once I went deeper into studying haiku and learned about the various forms of linked verse, I began experimenting with a linked form that I wrote solo throughout the day. But while you can certainly write a renku or other linked form alone, I found I didn’t really enjoy that. I wanted to collaborate. Midwinter Day might have been written by a sole author, and yet she is anything but alone. 

After a couple of years of noodling around ideas, I finally settled on a shorter version of the renku. I wrote the first one with my friend Claire, a poetry friend from my Austin days. Last year, I tried with a larger group: six people in three time zones emailing back and forth. Tomorrow, I will write the third-ever Midwinter Day renku with my friend Dan, who lives in another country. It’s the first international Midwinter Day renku! I’ve kept it just the two of us because juggling such disparate time zones is going to be a bit of a challenge, and I decided a smaller size would help navigate that. 

This approach to the form is still a work in progress. Not only do I keep learning more about renku, but I keep wanting to adjust the specifics of the structure itself.

Allyson Whipple, Midwinter Day Renku: First Notes on a New Form

Around this time of the year magazines ask contributors for their books of the year. Funnily enough, I am a lot less cynical about these than I used to be. But they are undeniably strange, in a way that should be familiar to anyone involved in publishing: you have to sign up to the fiction that the only books worth talking about were published in the last twelve months, when of course there’s no straight line between the year a book was published in and its relevance, let alone its quality. Many old books are painfully current. Plenty of new ones are out of date. […]

Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Glück (2021)

The first of Glück’s collections I’ve read, though I knew individual poems. Also her last book. So, I’m no expert and the Nobel Prize win probably speaks for itself. I will just say that the way her poems climb down the page is uncanny. And they are testimony to just how hard – in every sense – so-called free verse and so called-confessional poetry is, or ought to be. This is the beginning of “Night Thoughts”:

Long ago I was born. There’s no one alive anymore who remembers me as a baby. Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever. What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot. What harm could there be in that?…

Jem Wikeley, Books of the year

[I]t’s awards season in the literary community. Social Media is awash with announcements, congratulations, and virtual high-fives, as it should be. But I’d like to give a shout-out to writers who have never had a nomination for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of the Net, Best American Essay, or any of the other awards that I’m not aware of.

There are lots of writers who aren’t on social media and don’t have the exposure others enjoy because, life. Writers who are writing on their lunch breaks, in rush-hour traffic, after putting the kids to bed at night, before the kids get up in the morning, on bits of napkin, on back of grocery lists and bill envelopes, on post-it notes, or maybe only in their heads for now. There are writers writing in liminal spaces as noted in Amy Barnes’ insightful craft essay in Reckon Review.

Lots of writers aren’t in academia, don’t have degrees in anything or maybe in fields like healthcare support or general business, who went to a technical community college instead of an Ivy League university. There are writers who don’t belong to writing groups or attend workshops, who believe in the stories they create in their own heads. There are writers who are published sparingly because the submitting process takes time they don’t have or cost money they can’t give. There are writers who aren’t aware, or maybe only peripherally aware, of literary awards. The first time I was nominated, back in the day, I had to Google the Pushcart Prize. I’d never heard of it.

I want to celebrate the writers whose own life stories, and their made-up ones too, beat anything written by a Booker Prize winner. Keep writing, keep living, hang in there. You are seen. You have people who are like you that read your work and think you are the bomb. Believe it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Reading & Writing a Strong Sense of Place

This year I’ve written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I’ve radically revamped 4 old stories – by merging 2 of them I think I’ve produced 1 printable piece.

I’ve had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that’s about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I’d write some proper reviews. I haven’t, though I’ve read (or listened to) about 200 books. 

Tim Love, My Writing Year (2024)

I have to admit that this was a tough year for me. Is it because of my age? Is this a peri-menopause thing? A mid-life crisis? The election nearly wrung all my positive energy out of me. My last book’s sales were respectable but not great (not as good as my previous book’s), and my rejection vs acceptance rate was mediocre at best. I worked hard but felt a bit like I was butting up against a wall in the literary world. I am lucky to have wonderful writer friends but I’m missing the spark that usually drives me to write. Not sure if it’s plain disappointment or disillusionment or what, exactly. The grungy weather is bothering me a little bit more than normal, and my MS flared up worse this fall than it has in a long time—not sure of the cause, which left me unable to do much besides listen to audiobooks and watch old movies on TCM.

So, what do you do? Well, two good, very healthy friends—one died suddenly, the other experiencing a “surprise” terminal illness—have taught me a hard lesson. Maybe we should be kinder to ourselves, appreciating the days that we do have, and maybe not being so judgy about what we are accomplishing and focusing more and how much we are enjoying what we have, and experiencing things like “joy” and “awe”—things we often don’t put a priority on in our culture of productivity everywhere, all the time. While I am being scanned for tumors and tested for cancer and autoimmune problems, when I am dealing with yet another crown or root canal—I have to remember to prioritize the good days and take advantage of them. I have maybe, in the last four years, lived a too-circumscribed life, too safe? Certainly, too much damn time in doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Have I not been allowing myself enough adventure? Maybe that should be my goal for 2025—to live a more adventurous, joyful life—to maybe take a few risks in the days I have, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! Trumpeter Swans, Revaluating at Midlife after a Tough Year, MRIs, and Ballets

The sky is a persistence of cloud, its low mist erasing trees,
meeting fields, dampening my face, my hair; I feel like
a conduit between two states: earth and water. Perhaps
we always exist in dualities but rarely notice. Perhaps I am
beginning to understand both the beauty and decay
of my wondrous life, the gift and theft of inevitable death.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Superposition

[I]t’s less shocking than it is mesmerizing, even comforting, for me to see this evidence of my own aging, particularly as it means I get to see a little of mom every time I look in the mirror. It’s good to catch this glimpse every day because I need her—maybe actually I am inviting her, calling for her intercession with this very writing—to nudge me along on this book project which has already taken almost a year since I wrote the first unsure words.

I realized the other day that I need to look at it every day. I don’t necessarily need to write every day, but I need to keep it close to me because when I don’t, when I let weeks go by between writing sessions (because it’s painful to write about your mother’s alcoholism and recovery and death), my synapses get sleepy (a trauma response, remember?) and I lose the thread.

It took me 20 years to complete the book about my father. I do not want a reprise of that experience.

So. I hate resolutions, but let me try to keep this one.

Sheila Squillante, On eyeballs and grey hair and outlines

I made a decision at the beginning of last year to submit to publications I regarded as out of reach. Standards are higher, chances of success are lower – yet it’s a strategy that has paid off. Instead of chasing the dopamine hit of publication I’ve focused on becoming better at what I do, and really understanding what it is I want to say. I’m barely halfway to either of these things, but I am ending the year with two small collections of poetry that have a real sense of identity. Both have been longlisted in competitions I barely dared dream of entering and I am proud to have written them. Publication will come – I just need to be patient and diligent in finding the right home. I’ve had individual poems longlisted for publication in Butcher’s Dog, as well has being part of the final issues of Dreich and the fabulous Spelt Magazine. I’m growing braver in terms of style, and content as well as developing an understanding of what matters to me. […]

My morning has been spent looking at goals for next year – I’ve more work to do in terms of the nuts and bolts, but I’ve had a realisation that I need to give myself permission to focus on writing for its own sake, rather than as a potential income stream. My work as a bespoke poet and copywriter will continue, but as far as my creative writing is concerned I need to see the art as valuable for its own sake – which of course means seeing value in myself. I’m determined to connect with the poetry and writing community in a more meaningful way, rather than squirrel myself away in the safety of home. It’s hard to put myself “out there” but I can see how actively supporting others in their work offers a path to growth and nourishment for everyone involved.

I finish the year in a calmer place. I have a greater understanding of what matters to me, how I want to use my writing and where I want to be in this peculiar, terrifying world. I often bewildered and frustrated, and often filled with rage at my lack of confidence. I am proud that I keep going, and proud of how far I’ve come. As my mental health improves, I hope that the barriers I so frequently fashion will become less powerful and that I’ll be able to continue to develop my skills and build on the connections I’ve made.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I’ve learned this year

知らぬ間に冬の金魚となりにけり           遠藤容代

shiranu ma ni fuyu no kingyo to narinikeri

            without knowing how

            I become

            a winter goldfish     

                                                            Noriyo Endo 

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), February 2022 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 21, 2024)

This morning I stepped out of my little house in my little village on a day of low cloud and thick mist to head down to the river Hertford. It was the first time I’d been for a walk since before Christmas and I was ready for it. I was looking for fieldfares, which I found, along with a white egret moving through the grey like an omen, and the creak and tick of water dropping through the bare, wet branches of the beech trees. The air was full of the calls of crows, the rattle and croak made more gothic than usual by a mist that sucked the light but leant all sounds a crystallised ring. Through the village I went and out along the farm tracks, passing people from the village; dog walkers, bird watchers, who passed the time with me, telling me about what they had and hadn’t seen – owls in Parish woods, a swell of a storm on the brigg, less roe deer this year, but a fox like an burning ember in the top field and always, always the otter sightings for the luckiest, luckiest few. I have never seen the otters. Though I look or signs and sounds of them, not a single sighting. Maybe they are a village myth.

Out and along the farm track where the land opens up, where the turbine sliced steadily away at the low cloud, and down to the Hertford, straight and low in its man-made state, flowing away from the sea in its strange manner, the sound of water over pebbles bright and hard in the gloom. I stood on the bridge and looked down its length and imagined I could see all the way down to Folkton, Flixton, down past the paleolithic islands of the long blade people to the Mesolithic site of Star Carr and my lake-people ancestors. The cloud was too low today to see any of it, or the mound of Seamer Beacon, or even the lip of the valley, Folkton moor over the rise, the site of the Folkton drums only visible in my mind’s eye.

Here I am, I thought, at the edge of the lake again, paleolake Flixton, The Ghost Lake of my book, my landscape-nature memoir which defined 2024 for me, the year it was published. I have washed up at the end of 2024 satisfied, happy, rolling dazedly to a stop here with the publication of my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to The Ghost Lake.

This is like the ancient custom of beating the bounds, of returning and marking your land, the boundaries of your community by beating on the boundary stones, as if waking up the spirit of a place and attaching yourself to it. Though, obviously, without smashing small boys about. I have this in my head as I tap my gloved hand along the metal of the bridge. 

Wendy Pratt, Beating the Boundaries

After ten years of sharing poetry on WordPress, it feels like it has lost its raison d’être. Maybe I, maybe poetry, maybe the passion, maybe that ecosystem — something, some things, all things – have crashed into a wall.

Not that there aren’t still things to say. Maybe just not there. Not that there aren’t any more poems. Though I don’t really know what or where.

But it is a new year. Or it will soon be. Just like this year was new, once.

I think of Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote so evocatively in ‘Burning the old Year’:

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

And even if there are solid keepsakes, events that will crystallize into memories, some even fragrant or warm – like Kobayashi Issa says:

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

How does one look back at a year? Never mind the sun, the silhouettes tell a different story. Different stories. The sky rips open. Moonlight bleeds like a wound all night. And the poet picks at scabs. It is their job. Sometimes it is poetry that is contrary, sometimes it is life. Sometimes, it is the poet.

It is cold and grey today and the drizzle is a fine mist. The impending year has brought me to this poem. Cold and grey and wet. Beyond this lies 2025.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, One for the road

This week: hard rain, thoughtful grunts, vagaries of the heart, a family of dreamers, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s been a while. I’ve been coming through things, and still am, but here I am, writing again. 

In the café at Wrexham General station, the kind barista is putting up the Christmas tree while I drink my morning coffee. I choose to take it as a sign of hope. 

It may snow before November is out. I will love again the way snow falls through the street light outside my living room window.

And I’m listening to Haydn’s first cello concerto on ear-pods. It drowns out the hiss of the coffee machine. Moderato – cheerful, adagio – poignant, then upbeat allegro to the resolution. Three movements. Three moods. Nothing authentic can be expressed in a singularity.

I move through things by sitting still, writing, going with the music.

Liz Lefroy, I Write Again

My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy Fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected to look is not going to help matters. I’ll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)

I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, “You can’t make socialism without socialists.” Likewise, you can’t make democracy without (small ‘d’) democrats.

Dale Favier, Contraction

The fact is that you cannot have a social democracy and support a massive military budget at the same time. You cannot have a social safety net for all citizens, and also have a corrupt government that’s completely enmeshed with, and beholden to, corporate, military, and special interests, including foreign ones. You cannot reward corporations and the wealthiest individuals with tax breaks, power, and influence while the citizens who keep the economy going through their labor become poorer, and increasingly feel that they have no voice. And you cannot wage endless wars that destabilize other parts of the world, or fail to deal with climate change as the global emergency which it is, and expect other countries to shoulder all the burden of refugees fleeing desperate situations.

Into that situation of growing inequality, instability, fear and discontent rode Donald Trump, with his promises and lies, his anger and threats, ready to say whatever played the best to his audience, willing to subvert the law, and democracy in the process. It makes me think of a marriage that’s been failing for years, but the husband has been so busy and satisfied with his outside life that he’s refused to see the signs. Then one day, the wife comes down the stairs with her suitcase, and tells him it’s over; she’s leaving with Mr. Right. He’s astonished: “You’re such an idiot. You can’t possibly think he’s going to take care of you or treat you better than me! He’s a liar and a cheat, and everyone knows it!”

“Yes,” she says, “maybe that’s right, but you’ve been calling me stupid and fat and lazy for years. I’ve worked hard forever. I’ve told you what we needed to do to keep our marriage going, but you wouldn’t listen. There’s barely enough to pay our bills, and you’re always giving money away to strangers I don’t even know! Now I just want to feel some hope and some pride again. He may be everything you say, but he understands me, he seems to like me, and doesn’t talk down to me. He understands why I’m so angry and scared. I just want to try it. I want things to change.”

The husband can’t believe it. “What about your commitment to marriage? I thought you believed in it.”

”That’s just a piece of paper. I want to feel better.”

”Wait and see,” he says. “You’ll come running back to me. And I’m sure we can work something out.” She walks past him, out the door, and then turns for a moment, “By the way, I’m taking the car and the keys, so you won’t be able to drive for a while.”

Beth Adams, The Price of Arrogance

The roofing guy last week, the night of the election, told us that a new roof will come with a 50-year guarantee.

“Well,” I said, smiling, “that’s nice, but we sure don’t need one to last that long.”

“What?” he said. “What do you mean?”

I smiled. “Oh,” I said, “I guess we’ll be dead before the new roof gives out.”

He laughed in the way people do when they are startled and uneasy and don’t know what to say. I might have said something to smooth the moment over, but even then, even before we knew what was going to happen later that night, I had become tired of the ways in which we all avoid uncomfortable truths. Cane and I have entered the stage of life where, increasingly, we know that we might be purchasing some things for the last time. It’s unlikely that we, personally, will need anything to last for 50 years now. That’s just a fact, one we are both making peace with.

*

It can be hard to know the true beginning of something. If I told you that the water leak and all that came with it was the beginning of the end of my previous marriage, it might seem absurd.

It might be absurd; I can trace the fissures in our union back to its very beginnings—can even trace them back to before there was any kind of union at all. But the breaking of it? I could make a case that it began with the water leak and how we each saw and responded to it.

By the time everything in the house was repaired, all evidence of damage erased, the kitchen nicer than it had been before that October day when we finally learned what the bump was all about, the marriage was too far gone to save. Hard things happened during the months of repair and reconstruction, and then more, different hard things happened (a home invasion, a friend’s terminal illness, major surgery, a grandmother’s death). Interpretations of those events and their aftermaths were shaped through a lens created by the water leak.

You know how people lately like to say of great changes that they happen slowly, then all at once? After the bump and the mold and everything that followed them, I became aware of all kinds of leaks in our life. I saw how quickly everything could change if we didn’t repair them, how a person could leave for work one morning and not return to the same home in the evening. We were all fine, in the sense that we were all physically safe, but it does something to you when you are told you have 15 minutes to gather whatever you think you will need and don’t know when (or even if) you might return.

It changes you.

Rita Ott Ramstad, It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

I still sometimes imagine your face rippling beneath the surface, peering at me from pothole puddles and glasses of whiskey – your lips lifting and lowering in ambiguity. Your freckles, miniature galaxies of melanin, spiraling over cheeks. Pale eyes pin pricks of confusion. 

Your sister and I skipped school together, hid on the floorboards of her rust-pocked truck, her fingers entwined in your long red hair as she held down your head, tires slinging gravel out the gate after the bell. We’d spend the day smoking weed and sketching, you showering us with Fritos and reading Moby Dick out loud. 

You were the perfect foil for our willful ways, the tether to our hot air balloons. We wallpapered those crumbling walls with our trippy imaginings and your favorite passages, wrote our names in decades old dust. But for you we might have ended up in a ditch somewhere, might have become the drowned ones.

They say shafts of sunlight set your hair afire even as errant strands languished in sediment, in a turbid haze of creek and twisted metal. Your sister  used to say,

“Be kind and the universe will take care of you.” – but it didn’t take care of you, the kindest boy I knew.

Charlotte Hamrick, Aqua Pura

I still believe in “keep moving,” the way I still believe—must believe—that we could make this place beautiful. We can, and we must, despite it being an uphill climb that just got a lot steeper. “Keep moving” is what we’ll do, because what choice to we have? Giving up isn’t an option. And—not but, but and—I also believe that taking some time to be still, to listen to one’s own inner voice and to listen to others who are grieving, is essential. I want to move forward with purpose, intention, and care. I’m giving myself permission to slow down, to keep the door to my heart open, and to see what steps inside.

I’m listening hard, the way I might after hearing a sound in the woods. My experience tells me that sometimes the answers to difficult questions are whispered, and I don’t want to miss them.

Maggie Smith, On Stillness

These past days feel to me, in some ways, similar to the early weeks of Covid lockdown. People (including myself, those immediately around me) seem raw, a little shaken and bewildered, like they’ve woken up to find the wind has blown their tent down on top of them, and they’re pushing and pulling to find the shape of things, to locate the pieces they need to prop back up their fragile shelter. 

Also the same: A common desire to reach out to those most vulnerable, to support those most at risk, coupled with the need to care for the people in our own homes, families, neighborhoods (sometimes these two groups are the same or overlap). 

What’s blessedly different is that we can, safely, reach out to each other now, rather than further atomizing in our separate spaces, behind our separate screens. We can hold potlucks and book groups and hiking trips and dance parties and teach-ins and game nights and funerals. We can stand or sit alongside each other. Hold hands. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tangled in the Tent

I am
pulling the voices of people I desire
and love and trust and worry over
into me. I am inviting them into the bright
dark of my soul. I am gonna live forever
because all the money I touch looks at me
and says e pluribus unum, out of many,
one. I am the water Jesus drank in the desert.
I am god talking to herself. I am evicting
America from my body and making room
in the borders of my black bad bitch body
for everyone I was sent into this life
to love loudly.

Saeed Jones, “My Project 2025” A New Poem By Me

I dreamed that Trump had asked me to be in charge of the Department of Education.  In my dream, I thought, I don’t have the experience to do that.

I woke up thinking, well, I have been teaching since 1988, so there’s that.  And in the days since that dream, as various cabinet candidates have been announced, I’ve thought of that dream and who has qualifications to lead which parts of our national government.  I still think that I don’t have the right kind of qualifications to lead the Department of Education–that person should have K-12 teaching experience.

Of course, I will not be asked to be part of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and if I was, I would say no.  I hope to avoid that kind of toxic workplace going forward.  I feel incredibly lucky to be responsible for teaching, not administration, and that’s how I want to end my working days.  I am under no illusions that “I alone can fix it.”

In fact, in moments of despair, I have doubts that anything can be fixed (see hurricane in North Carolina mountains).  But then, through the magic of technology, I see good theatre, and I am once again inspired to write.

Last night, we watched Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a play I read long ago in high school.  It was the 2019 London production with Sally Field and Bill Pullman, and what a performance!  The play, which was written in 1946, still feels fresh and also timeless. 

It also reminded me that I’m teaching the American survey class next term, and I am so looking forward to that.  In these days where there’s so much happening to upset us, let me remember how much joy we can still have:  good literature, good teaching opportunities, good theatre, and vegan creations that give us autumn in a casserole!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Friday Gratitudes Two Weeks Before Thanksgiving

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Bethany Reid, Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

A few months ago, I had a meltdown. Societal and political discourse – not only where I live, but everywhere – has become so troubled, so vitriolic, so angry, so polarised and so polarising that I became overwhelmed by words. It felt, and still feels, as though everyone is shouting but no one is listening. No one takes the time to ask thoughtful, constructive questions, to examine assumptions or consider nuances. Humility and compassion seem to be absent.

I retreated from words. Silence, always precious, became even more so. I stepped back from social media, withdrew from poetry communities and book clubs, ceased tuning in to the news and consciously limited my reading. I cut back on social engagements. I stopped writing.

Instead, I sought refuge in the natural sciences. I turned to equations. 

Like passages of text, equations contain their own resonances, depths and layers of meaning. We can think of them as visual poetry. Yet they transcend the egocentric world view that preoccupies us much of the time. Their symbols, letters and numbers represent our efforts to understand, to seek coherence in a vast and complex universe.

Marian Christie, The Poetry of Equations

My college roommate, Tara Polek, who helped get me through Organic Chem and went to UC basketball games with me, who moved from Ohio to Seattle just like I did, who was the smartest, kindest children’s cancer researcher ever, passed away.

I feel like this is where I should have poetic thoughts, but I’m still mostly in sad mode. Tara had two young children and a husband, and I never heard she was even sick. In college, she was the friend who, when I caught pneumonia and the girl across the hall had to be airlifted to the hospital with even worse pneumonia, never even got a sniffle. She ran—for fun—ever since I knew her. She spent her entire life doing cancer research. I wish I had told her how much her 30-year friendship meant to me while I still had the chance. […]

One thing that the death of a good friend will do is make you reconsider your life and where you are in it. At 51, I have spent too much time in the last decade in doctor’s offices, not enough having adventures, traveling, seeing the world. The world seems to have shrunk, especially since the pandemic, and now, with the election, it seems more dangerous than ever to just elect the status quo.

So, I signup up for an online class called She Hits Refresh, about women over thirty moving out of the US, and I’m researching grad schools, cities, visas, vacation time, disability, and medication rules. It’s been my dream for a long time to live in France, and besides that, visit England and Ireland.

On top of that, I’m sending my next manuscript out to new publishers. I’ve got be braver with my art, and my personal life. I feel like I’ve seen my life shrink and I don’t want that to define the rest of my life, or my writing. I don’t want to live in fear.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, When You Lose Old Friends, Interventions at the Zoo with Snow Leopards, and Contemplating Changes in a Supermoon

It was a good run, better and longer than I could have imagined, and yet I’m still somehow surprised that it’s over. I thought I’d be the one to turn off the lights. 

Sorry, I’m not trying to be cryptic here. About a month ago, I guess, I changed my bio on the few places online where I post. I added a “Ret.” to “Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus.” I considered changing it “Emeritus” but that’s too academic both for The Rumpus and for me. Retired is the appropriate term.

I was with The Rumpus almost from the beginning. It was December 2008 and Amy and I were back in San Francisco for the first time since we’d moved away 3 years before. Amy had an interview at MLA and I met up from some old friends from my time as a Stegner and they told me I should meet a bunch of them later at a bar in the Mission to talk about this online magazine Stephen Elliott was starting because they were looking for someone to write about poetry occasionally. […]

We went live for real on January 20, 2009. Kind of a slow news day as I recall, though there was a bit of controversy on the internet about a poem by Elizabeth Alexander read during a ceremony that morning, a controversy that required (not really) a response from the new poetry columnist at this website that had just gone live. 

So that was the first thing I wrote for The Rumpus. Not a column of links, though many of those would follow. Nope, I wrote a response to the reaction to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.” (I didn’t even have to look that up.) I dug up the poem Robert Frost actually wrote for JFK’s inauguration (which is just goddamn terrible) as opposed to The Gift Outright, which he recited when the wind blew his papers all over the place. I looked back at the offerings from Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (who was one of my professors at Arkansas where I did my MFA) and came to the rousing conclusion that, as inaugural poems go, Alexander’s was pretty good, given the competition, and was certainly poetry no matter what some Impressive Critics had claimed.

It was published as the top story on the site for a little while. Maybe a day? Nothing stayed at the top for long in those days. And I have no idea how many people read it. But a day or two after that, I got an email from Stephen asking me if I wanted to be poetry editor instead of just a columnist. I’d be responsible for soliciting and editing book reviews and occasional essays and I’d still have my column and no we wouldn’t be publishing poetry yet but keep it in mind.

I almost said no. Seriously, I was torn about this. I’d never edited anything before, I’d never written a book review, much less solicited one. I had no idea how I’d even get books to reviewers. I’d never even heard of an ARC. So I mentioned it to Amy and she was like “Of course you have to do it are you nuts?” 

Brian Spears, Time and The Rumpus

So, in the video he talks about the Law of Assumption. This is different from the Law of Attraction, which, as I understand it, focuses on bringing something you desire to you. Positive thoughts attract positive experiences, etc. By contrast, the Law of Assumption encourages you to operate under the assumption that you have the thing you seek already.

Here is an example. You seek to have your poem published in The New Yorker. The next step would be for you to spend time envisioning exactly what that feels like. Close your eyes, picture a specific scene. Let’s say it’s the day the issue comes out. Imagine yourself holding the magazine in your hands. Where are you? Who is with you? What does the glossy paper feel like on your skin? How is the light falling across the page? What does your name look like in that magazine’s print?

In other words, the idea is not just to fantasize about getting your work in this magazine. (Or getting the fellowship, the grant, the teaching job, the dream journal acceptance, etc.) But really, go deeply into the specific moment of its occurrence. Live it out in your mind.

There is actually all kinds of neuroscience that explores how the brain does and does not distinguish between lived experiences and imagined ones. As one researcher has put it, “Neuroscience has discovered that imagination and perception rely on overlapping brain circuits.”

Anyway. I watched the video. Thought, Huh, that’s cool.

The next day, I was in the sauna at my gym (my thinking place). I thought, Hm, let me try that visualization-assumption whatever thingie. Can’t hurt, right?

What happened was the following. The simple act of trying to visualize what I wanted forced me to articulate what it is that I do want. As if my brain said, Okay, you have ten minutes to picture something. Anything. What is it you truly want to picture? What matters to you? Really.

I realized in that moment that the thing that truly matters to me as a writer is readers. Awards and acceptances are amazing when they happen. But to me, there is nothing like someone reaching out to tell you that your work meant something to them. To me, that’s it. That’s the gold star. That’s why I do this work.

For you, it might be different. Each one of us has our own path, our own vision. We all have to satisfy various demands and yearnings. But to me, in that moment, it was connecting with readers that I found myself focused upon.

I also realized, as I sat there, that I had not done a public reading of my creative work in a very long time. Could it be ten years? No. But maybe? Close? I moved from a big writing community in one city, had a baby, then there was the pandemic, then we moved again…and lo and behold it’s been maybe close to ten years since I’ve read my work in public.

I remembered that I used to love doing that. Hearing the laughter, the thoughtful grunts, the intakes of air, the listening. Creating something new, something alive, right there in the room with an audience.

So that’s what I pictured. I closed my eyes. I pictured the stage, the dark room, the rows of people in chairs in front of me. I knew the exact outfit I was wearing, felt the weight of my necklace, the white paper in my hands, the white glow of the spotlight. I heard my voice in the mic, felt the smile around my words, the excited jitters in my knees.

Then I left the gym and went home.

Two emails were waiting for me.

One was from a Facebook friend, not a writer, who used the contact form on my website. He was reaching out to me out of the blue. He’d found my stories online, wanted to let me know how much they meant to him.

The other email was from an old friend. She said she will be visiting my area in April. She wanted to know, would I be interested in doing a reading with her?

I kid you not.

This same day.

Less than one hour later.

Now, two things. First, some of you are thinking, well, that’s not a big deal. Writers get emails like that all the time. But I do not get emails like that all the time. Like I said, I have not done a public reading in nearly a decade.

Second, you’re probably thinking, well, that’s just a coincidence.

And yes. I agree. Obviously. It is a coincidence.

But I think perhaps that is the whole point. Visualizing very clearly what you want allows you to notice coincidences as they happen. Arguably, it is the noticing of these coincidences that allows you to feel that things are working for you.

Becky Tuch, Q: How woo-woo are you?

Turning to my own work, I wonder: what is the role of dramaturgy in a memoir in verse? How does the poet create the distance required to invite empathy, without eliciting pity, or demanding privilege?

I am looking to Schechner’s idea of “Restored Behavior”. While he analyses performance, I can see parallels to the written word: the ecstatic element in automatic writing, and the reconstructed events of first and second drafts. After all, aren’t theatrical rehearsals essentially sequential drafts?

History is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study. — Richard Schechner

A lot of dancers have said that dance itself is a language. But language is also a dance. It can move the spirit that would move the body.

I wrote about my Trauma Box last year, unpacking and repacking it after my cancer diagnosis. Some things become little more than artefacts, conjuring soft aches and compassion for the person who put it in the box for the first time.

Maybe the distance of time alone is enough to make a biographical work inherently a work of verbatim theatre.

I knew this person when.

Her narrative is meaningful.

But none of us owe her anything.

Ren Powell, The Trauma Box Redux

six thousand years we lay
face to face
in a fierce embrace

limbs twined together
as twins in the womb
we two entombed

with flint weapons
sharpened for the afterlife
arrowhead     dagger     knife

Ama Bolton, Contextual 31: a virtual reading

Among things from the intersections of yesterday’s notebooks, scribbled in a parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama, between pages of [Giorgio] Agamben’s self-portrait and the uncertainty of my own.

I have many times thought about writing a book that was only the proem or postlude of a missing book. Perhaps the books that I have published are something of this sort — not books but preludes or epilogues. (Agamben) I winced. Like blinking away the thought that hurts. As if to pick it up with a tiny pincer and drop it outside on the asphalt. The feeling of touching, not touching. Flamenco, and what the dance wants . . . is nothing like writing. The dance seeks to avoid the hand that could slow it or mold it; heat is the friction of what could happen. But you can smell the other dancer; they are not an abstraction. “Tangibilia”; from tangibilis, “what can be touched, is palpable.” On the object reduced, tamed, made familiar by the encyclopedic enterprise. Margins where semiotics creep in.

A writer’s secret lies entirely in the blank space that separates the notebooks from the book. Hypervigilance; hygiene of grammar when editing begins. Will do nothing with October’s Sacrifice to Priapus. So-called. As if naming itself provides evidence of its existence.

Alina Stefanescu, Agamben, and the self-portrait of notebooks.

“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning”
Giorgio Agamben on poetry, When the House Burns Down.

What luxury, this rage! 
It keeps me hot and vital as any 
heart medication.  First the human project, 
then the sputtered failure of words.

Bereft; the minutes and hours 
of flame give way.  My desire fades, 
no rays of sun light the heartbreak.

Jill Pearlman, Continue to Speak this Dialect

And J T Gillett is still writing his last poem somewhere in the vicinity of Ashland, Oregon. And talking of J T people, I think of J T Edson and all those paperback westerns and I find a photo of him on-line with mutton-chop whiskers and the information that before he died at the age of 86 he wrote 137 novels from his house near Melton Mowbray and sold more than 27 million copies. When he was feeling good he would write a novel every six to eight weeks. Before he hit on writing for a living he was an army dog trainer for 12 years. His first book wasn’t a western at all. It was Hints On Preservation If Attacked By A War Dog. He also ran a fish and chip shop and was a postman. He said he’d never even sat on a horse and had no desire to live in the Wild West. All this stuff comes from Wikipedia by the way. I only remember the Corgi paperbacks that were everywhere. I read one once sometime around 1968. Thought it was crap. I like J T Gillett’s This Is My Last Poem though or at least the version of it that’s in a book called Ends & Beginnings edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that I bought for six dollars second hand in 1999.

Bob Mee, THE WAKE AND OTHER SCENES FROM LONG AGO

Last night, I was thinking about Novembers past and all their pitfalls and was trying to remember what was happening in November of 2004, somehow impossibly two decades ago. I decided to scan through the most recent files and see if I could get a feel for that fall. Its tastes and textures. One thing that stood out to me was disappointment over the 2004 election and Bush’s re-election. Little did we know things would get ever so much worse. 

Also, there was, at the forefront, my book fever struggles. At the time I had completed what I thought was book #1 in late 2003, but I was also going through a lot of evolution and learning new things as an MFA student. Just reading a lot more contemporary poets who were influencing me in various ways. I was coming into a fall where I felt like people were just beginning to notice my work, having won a fairly large contest in the spring and starting to do more and more readings. That initial book wound up being just half of the mss. that eventually got a publishing deal a year later. The work itself was rough, but getting better. I was working on the errata project for a hybrid class, which was changing my basic style in new ways. The version I turned in was a little corset book that you unbound to read it. A year later I also issued a chapbook version. 

The book fever may seem, in hindsight that is 20/20, ridiculous–the poring over contests, the money and effort spent. I managed a couple of close calls and then found a publisher in a very old fashioned way. I queried, submitted, and they said yes. The result, the aptly named the fever almanac, was a beautiful book and a great start to my publishing career. Of course, all the handwringing about never finding it a home was bracketed by frustrations over suspect contest winners and bottlenecks. I was determined to self-publish if no one wanted my strange little book. Having both traditionally published and self-published these past two decades, its amusing to me that the latter is where I actually cast my lot these days, mostly due to control over when things are released and just making more income from my work than conventional royalties allow.  I also just write A LOT, which means finding that many publishers would be more exhausting than just issuing my own titles as they are completed. 

Overall, I was more trusting, more passionate, more enthusiastic in these entries, so they feel strange to have been typed out by my fingers all those years ago.

Kristy Bowen, from the long lost xanga archives

I needed some rest from exertion and from social media, so I’m re-reading Les Misérables. In which Hugo seems to be trying hard to convince readers that compassion and goodness can be awakened in the hardest of hearts through the process of gentle persistence and genuine decency. Radical decency, as a friend of mine put it. Well.

I won’t write that off as an impossibility, since lord knows many things that seem impossible are not. But yes, Hugo was writing fiction, and one turns to fiction for escapism but also for reference, and for understanding human actions and feelings, and for perspective, and for information. I just completed Richard Powers’ Overstory, which offers a vast range of perspectives on the above-mentioned and adds ecology and forest infrastructure and the psychology of groups into the mix. Novel-reading has been giving me a sense of overarching historical range that lifts me a bit from my too-close focus on my own small life and my ability to sustain hope and make art. That acts as a form of recuperation, if you’re me.

This week, though, happens to be full of poetry. Tomorrow, I’m attending a reading at a nearby public library, where I’ll see many poetry colleagues, the sorts of folks who create a community of local writers. Friday, I’ll be reading with Montgomery County’s Poet Laureate, my friend Lisa DeVuono, at the retirement community where my mother resides. Saturday, I’m heading down to Philadelphia to read with another long-time poetry community in celebration of Philadelphia Poets, a long-running zine established decades ago by the late Rosemary Cappello.

Ann E. Michael, Recuperating

I’ve been a keen poetry reader all my life, but one thing I still don’t quite get is the point of the ‘pamphlet’ (or ‘chapbook’). These are small collections typically of between 15 and 30 poems, not usually running to more than 40 pages, and generally — as ‘pamphlet’ suggests — simply stapled rather than bound. Publishing a pamphlet, either via open submission or through success in a ‘pamphlet competition’, has become a pretty standard way of launching oneself as a poet. Wikipedia quotes Jackie Kay as saying that a pamphlet ‘has always been a good way for new poets to reach an audience’. This seems to be the received wisdom — it’s a way of finding your audience. But can this really be true in any significant sense? I read — and, crucially, buy — loads of contemporary poetry in both English and French, as well as many poetry magazines, and even I almost never buy English pamphlets or chapbooks. For the first perhaps 15 years that I was reading poetry pretty seriously, I don’t think I even knew they existed. Pamphlets are hardly ever stocked in UK (or, I assume, US) bookshops so there are almost no chances to browse them and pick up a few on a whim, which you might think would be the point of a smaller, cheaper category of publication, and they are only very minimally reviewed.

Does anyone at all who is mainly a reader (rather than a poet themselves, scoping out the competition) actually buy the things? I would love to see some sales data, or even anecdata. (Do you buy them? Please let me know in the comments.) Or is publishing a pamphlet really just a kind of rite of passage, aimed only (really) at catching the attention of editors and judges. Perhaps it’s the tiny poetry world equivalent of the way in which junior academics are expected to publish at least a couple of articles in scholarly journals, which in 99% of cases almost no-one at all will actually read. Such articles may (though probably won’t) eventually be cited once or twice by other scholars working on the same extremely specific topic, but really they are there to establish that you are a bona fide scholar who has been assessed as such by several more senior scholars in a few bruising rounds of peer review. Publishing them gives you a crack at an academic job and/or a contract for a monograph or an edited collection.

As any academics reading this will know, the problem is that the skills and techniques required to write an excellent, or even reasonably good, article for a specialist scholarly journal are actually quite different from those that you need to write a good, readable monograph with an overarching argument or perspective — even in the case of monographs published by scholarly presses and aimed primarily at fellow academics and advanced students. 

Victoria Moul, What’s the point of pamphlets?

I’ve been happily giving away my writings for years to appreciative readers locally and around the world, but I’m sad to say I didn’t believe anybody would actually pay for my work. “Nice book!” I imagined them saying, followed by “Oh — you want how much? I’ll … I’ll think about it.”

Actually I don’t have a book, but recently I did make a little magazine and (smothering my doubts with courage) I hawked it at a small local poetry reading. I went with an attitude of objectivity — a market study of sorts. Would anyone be interested?

And the answer was … yes! :- D

The theme of my first issue is lo-tech — a nod to the unplugged life and to a time when “digital” referred to an LED watch and little else. The analog era was also a time where the only intelligence was human. The world was a simpler (though not necessarily better) place back then!

Bill Waters, This & That: A Creative Writing ’Zine (Issue 1: Lo-Tech)

I don’t know if you’re the same as me, but when reading a poet’s debut publication, you look for those qualities that have drawn the attention of a publisher. In the case of Desmond Childs and his The Vagaries of the Heart (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024), I believe it is his original perspective on one of the great enduring themes of poetry and his ability to produce economical, layered poems. In this chapbook of six poems we find Childs engaging with the nature of that elusive emotion that has fascinated and challenged poets through time, love. In the first poem, Verities Gown, he writes about the idolisation of the object of our affection and the inability to repress such powerful emotions. In Yield and Jig he brings alive the excitement and fulfilment of a loving relationship and in the aptly named Fracture, We’ll Meet Again and Stone he describes the effects of the end of love. […]

Jig, my favourite poem,  with which the chapbook ends, portrays a more complex picture of relationships through the use of the extended metaphor of the ‘jig’. The poem opens with the line ‘with her tune, she bound me/ her melody’. The comparison of love as music evokes its captivating, sensual quality, perhaps drawing on Shakespeare’s notion of music as the food of love.  Interestingly, however, Child, unlike the Bard,  uses the verb ‘bound’ to describe its effect. Not only does this suggest the compelling nature of his attraction, but it also implies loss of power or agency. The object of his affection is in control: an idea given further development in the remainder of the poem. We are told ‘she played the tune’, that she ‘subdued’ him, that he is metaphorically tied up by her (‘she wrapped heart strings around me’) and she brought him to his knees. These are not romantic images. He is totally subjugated by his feelings for her and there is something of a feeling of loss. This is reinforced by the poem’s concluding sinister lines ‘she drew the bow and slew me/ I dance a deathly jig/ to the tune that she plays me/ upon her violin.’ Whilst the bow is one for a musical instrument, it also references cupid’s bow and arrows, evoking the all-consuming love he feels for her that results in the death of self: she ‘slew me’. Childs suggests that love may be a jig, a joyful, wonderful, exuberant emotion, but it also, as one of the other poems suggests, necessitates ‘yielding’, a loss of control, the end of a former life.

Jig is a fine poem and displays Childs’ strengths as a poet. There is much to be enjoyed in The Vagaries of the Heart. At a time of crisis in poetry publishing, it is reassuring to find small poetry publishers like Hedgehog Poetry Press providing debut poets like Childs an opportunity to see their work in print.  Long may it continue.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Vagaries of the Heart’ by Desmond Childs

I discovered two of my favorite love poems in high school. The first is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. It is easily recognizable, and many people can quote the first line. I remember reading this poem in junior English with Sister Angele. (She used it as a cautionary tale about boys who say mean things about you behind your back even if they are nice to your face. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, and the nuns were always very concerned about our boyfriends. It was a little bit weird, yet a little bit sweet.) Shakespeare famously lists all the attributes of his mistress that do not match the beauty ideals of the time, yet uses the closing couplet to say she is valuable and rare. In this way, the negation in the main body of the sonnet turns from insult to inspiration.

The second is a little more obscure, but means a lot to me. It was given to me by a good friend who said that he saw me in the poem. […]

In [John Frederick] Nims’s poem, the negative aspects of the poem’s subject are alternated with her virtues, giving the reader a picture of a real human being with flaws, one who is seen and loved despite them. I am clumsy and awkward, and as a teen I was often unpredictable and felt out of place. (I still do in many situations.) But to know that someone recognized me as a person who was welcoming to others, kind, helpful and witty; as someone who exuded love for the world; as someone who brought laughter and joy to others? That was a gift, one that has stayed with me.

But writing a love poem can be fraught with worry. Will the beloved recognize the intention? Appreciate the images, the sentiments? Will the poem be interesting enough for anyone who is not the beloved? The concept of negation is one that is especially tricky. How do you ride the thin line between fact and insult? (This is something that the Nims poem does particularly well – even the negative aspects have an air of charm about them.) Well, you’ll never know unless you try.

Donna Vorreyer, From Dissing to Kissing

It’s been a while since I read Chris Edgoose’s admirable and enticing review for The Friday Poem, here, of Geraldine Clarkson’s second full collection, Medlars, available to buy from its publisher Shearsman Books here (with free p&p, might I add); and therefore about time I bought and read a copy. That I have now done, and what a deferred pleasure it was and is!

Mystifyingly overlooked for the major prize shortlists, Medlars is simultaneously both a state-of-England-post-Brexit collection and one which explores the nation’s folklore and psychogeography. It does so in rich, often tongue-twisting language; the wordsmithery of Shakespeare by way of Raymond Queneau and even, perhaps, ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin.

Matthew Paul, On Geraldine Clarkson’s Medlars

“Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” recalls family stories and heritage from ancestors along with the necessity of remembering in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide (1915-1917). “Morning Stories” starts with a speaker, a granddaughter, begging for stories from her grandmother,

Gram said, My grandmother made kufta
with me, and I carried lunch to my grandpa
when he worked in the fields. Sometimes
she rode the donkey, other times a horse.
Gram said never ride a horse, or a camel!
And we never did, in our Boston neighborhood.

I watched her story unfold in my mind.
Her final day home, when she and her sisters
returned from school and found the family murdered,
the locked church set on fire. A silent village now,
except for soldiers that gathered the survivors.

They walked from their mountain village,
part of the desert death marches,
thirsty, eating grasses and weeds,
anything they found.
Two sisters fell in the desert,
three trudged on to Aleppo
and onward from there, survivors.

It’s noticeable that grandmother’s story about taking lunch is in reported speech, a story actually told. But the story of the grandmother as a girl coming home to find her family murdered, is not in reported speech, but something the granddaughter/speaker pieces together and imagines. It’s a story the grandmother does not want to tell and it becomes a known secret with grandmother not talking about it and granddaughter not letting on that she knows. Or at least knows the facts and has to imagine the emotion.

Emma Lee, “Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” Elaine Harootunian Reardon (Finishing Line Press) – book review

Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?

Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it. 

Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma. 

Rob Taylor, A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

I was the guest for the Madrid Review podcast last week. Grace Caplan was the interviewer with all sorts of unexpected questions, leading to discussions on belonging and estrangement, on the difficulties of translation, and on the genesis of my new poems that are in Issue Two of the mag. And I even gave a reading of them! You can have a listen to the podcast on Spotify via this link.

Matthew Stewart, The Madrid Review podcast

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”

I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff

It’s a book of statements by poets about poetry. I’ve added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

• “the concept of poetry … as self expression has always repelled me” (John Heath-Stubbs)
• “a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all” (P.J. Kavanagh)
• “The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses’ hooves – bizarrely impressive, but finally useless” (Craig Raine)
• “Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result”, (R.S. Thomas)
• “I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left”, (Peter Whigam)
• “In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards”, (Hugo Williams)
• “one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn’t get a lot worse”, (Hugo Williams)
• “Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match”, (John Hartley Williams)
• “Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves”, (Christopher Logue)

Tim Love, “Don’t ask me what I mean” by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

I often say this in workshop, when you put something in a poem, even if you are describing a literal event, it becomes metaphorical. The reader might think of it as emblematic of something deeper.

This poem appears in Susan Rich’s book Blue Atlas, which centers around an abortion that the speaker of the poems had thirty years earlier. When I spoke with Susan on the podcast she said that originally this poem was titled “Self Portrait with Abortion and Beesting.” Even though the speaker doesn’t put it in the title or say it directly, I could tell that this poem was about more than just a beesting. The sting is a metaphor for other emotional hurts, the hurt of a losing a relationship, being coerced into an abortion, and about other hurts the speaker may not even be able to name. […]

The bee is bathing in a “galaxy of purple aster” when she accidentally elbows it. They accordion and then they seperate. But here the poem becomes about something else.

“We’re both shaken / by the brokenness of surprise.” This is about more than a woman encountering a bee or wasp. The phrase is about all surprises. It’s strange wording makes me wonder, are we broken by surprise? is a surprise just anything that breaks us? It’s an odd and intriguing way of describing the encounter and it elevates the experience from a singular instance in the garden to a more general meditation on life.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Self Portrait with Bee Sting by Susan Rich

I keep thinking about that scene
in The Morning Show where Chris
wrote ABORT THE COURT in pink pink lip
stick my house floor hort monster my abor shun
my aborted fast blood slipping out
of a woman’s sacred body I never write SACRED
it’s too

sacred

big or small or big tied with green garden wire
thump thump a war in the capital city is moving
SSslip sliding under my floors flooding out into

all you beauty
all you strong
all you sacred

women

bleeding for the land

Rebecca Loudon, red november

In my recent article about being a neurodivergent writer, I described finding it much easier to run – rather than participate in – workshops. When I teach and facilitate, I know what’s expected of me. I have a clear role, which I’ve practiced and finessed over years. I’m confident and comfortable – and I know won’t be bored.

I don’t experience boredom passively; it’s not the absence of entertainment. It’s an active state, akin to severe thirst. It hurts, physically – a sort of painful anxiety. When a facilitator stalls the start of the workshop to wait for late arrivals, when introductions drag on interminably, when the same voices are allowed to dominate, when the facilitator talks and talks, when there’s lots of theory and much less writing, when everyone reads out their work at length – my anxiety builds from pulse-racing alertness to sweat-drenched, frozen fear. Making the decision to attend a poetry workshop is a serious business for me.

As a participant, I absolutely have to be interested. And to allow myself be engaged, I need to feel safe: to know what is going to happen within the session, when it will start and end, when the breaks will be. Most importantly, I need to trust the facilitator – are they kind and authoritative, informed and prepared? Are they committed to the wellbeing of the participants, are they excited by the subject they want me to engage with?  It’s frustrating that my anxieties and hypersensitivities, my struggle to concentrate and keep still, can stop me from taking part.

That’s why I’m interested in learning from other neurodivergent learners how they manage to engage; and I’m delighted to hear examples of accessible and exciting workshops and courses – not least because workshops which are accessible to neurodivergent learners can be the most engaging for all learners.

I’ll offer you my own example: on November 9^th, I went to an online workshop run by Georgia Conlon –  Happily Ever After – which as you might expect, took fairy tales as its leaping off point. It’s part of a series of “Material Girl” workshops … with Georgia as the facilitator who supplies us with endless material for our poetry.  

I worked as a mentor with Georgia earlier this year. I’ll write more about the mentoring experience in another post – but in brief, it’s an intimate, committed relationship, so I only work with people I like, and whose work I respect. I admire Georgia’s work very much – especially how she tackles challenging subjects through form. She’s also an experienced teacher and tutor, with her own “Prompts for Poets” podcast series, which offers creative ideas and  prompts to help you with your writing. A quick scan through past episodes –  celebratory festivals through Nina Mingya Powles “Mid Autum Moon Festival”; magic realism in Richard Brautigan’s “Boat” – evidences wide reading and really interesting choice of poetry and subjects.  

It’s a rare workshop which keeps me engaged throughout, and Happily Ever After did just that – through Georgia’s ability to quietly yet firmly hold the space and guide participants through a series of really interesting prompts and discussions, in a workshop which felt rich and full, rather than rushed. In two hours I wrote five poems, two of which will be included in my next collection. Result!

Kim Moore, The importance of being interesting

You have a career background as a Clinical Psychologist. What inspired you to become a Clinical Psychologist? How has your career as a Clinical Psychologist influenced or inspired some of your poetry?

I was always fascinated with people and their lives. I could have become a writer, but it’s rarely a sustainable profession. Psychology was the route I took. I loved it. I see a lot of overlap between those two choices, so one fed the other.

In your book Sea Trails (Lummox Press, 2009) you include poems based on your 1977 sailing trip in your 22-foot sailboat and you include portions of Lognotes and charts. Where did you go sailing on this trip? What initially inspired you to become a sailor? 

I loved the ocean and wanted to be out on it, riding the waves and wind. It takes skill and courage, at times, and that appealed, too. We stopped at multiple harbors. Best to read the book for details, still on Amazon, but we left from Boston and ended up in Florida. We anchored out, except for bigger grocery runs. I loved secluded harbors. Some of my favorite non-secluded stops were Newport, Block Island, out to Nantucket (rich people’s haven, and breathtaking), City Island before the run down the east river past Manhattan, including a day in Manhattan, all through the Chesapeake Bay- such beauty, and then into the waterway with such exciting places as Albemarle Sound, Savannah, St. Augustine, and all the interesting places in-between.

Jacob D. Salzer, Pris Campbell

その奥に梟のゐる鏡欲し　正木ゆう子

sono oku ni hukurō no iru kagami hoshi

            an owl resides

            in its deep place

            I want such a mirror

                                                            Yuko Masaki

from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, March 2018 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 16, 2024)

Iris Murdoch—you know I love her—said that a bad review was about as interesting as whether it is raining in Patagonia. I tend to think about rejections this way. (Except: isn’t it interesting whether it’s raining in Patagonia? Shouldn’t it be, to a poet? Anyway, anyway…)

But here is the thing: I think about rejections as uninteresting when I am at my healthiest: mentally, physically, spiritually. When my chronic pain in under control, by some seasonal miracle/existential lottery. When my mental health is bobbing along like a rubber ducky in relatively calm bath water. When I’m not dwelling, to quote one Anne of Green Gables, in the “depths of despair.”

Roll back the camera to 2022, when I began trauma therapy, and found myself wildly outside my window of tolerance. I was hypoaroused after therapy sessions, which basically translates to a numb or dissociated state, which required (for me) a lot of processing time spent listening audiobooks and sewing. This whole year was not a good time for me to be submitting and receiving rejections on creative work—the emails literally made me flinch, and I deleted them as swiftly as possible—so I stopped sending work out. My inbox became peaceful, and my mind with it. I safeguarded myself, as much as I could. I wrote a little, but mostly I listened to audiobooks a LOT: Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—books I could not have read before the therapy itself.

Consequently, in the year following this intense therapy (2023), I published a single poem. It was in a small journal (shout out to River Mouth Review), with editors I knew and trusted. Which brings me to my first point: I was in a survival state in 2022, and I reeled myself back and in, made my world smaller. It felt safer. For those of you coming back to writing after an absence of any kind, it might feel good to start with smaller journals, or a journal with an editor you know and trust, OR you might feel great sending your work out to a wide variety of journals. Do what feels best to you at that time, and be open to the fact that you will feel differently at different times in your life: moving, changing jobs, having a child, elections, health events, new school—any life events also affect how you feel about your writing, yourself, who you are, what it means to be you in the world, sending your work out, sharing it with others. Be gentle with yourself as you recalibrate, as your life changes. It is yourself that you revise.

Han VanderHart, On Rejection and Dwelling in Possibility

I find myself connected to the physical land around me through the interface of my body, and that gives me the same thrill as being connected to the fast, organic rush of writing a poem. Perhaps they are the same thing. […]

There are lives here
that I will never know:
the hand that cut the tangle free
the fish that witnessed its descent
the people walking past
on the beach where it is washed up
in blues and greens.

It is too heavy to remove.
I leave it where it is
and worry about its dangers
for days afterwards.

I become a part of its story.

Wendy Pratt, Found Poem/Beach Walk/Found Poem

Everyone is shell-shocked from the recent election. I kind of expected it, but to be honest, I can’t summon up much emotion towards its aftermath. 

I’ve been on this slide into disbelief, dismay and depression after most elections since the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. Even the Tories being ousted this year felt hollow as I knew Labour wasn’t going to do anything differently, and the SNP faced significant losses. 

Now, I just kind of hang around in the numb depression area when it comes to politics and society. I can’t summon up hope in the run-up and don’t feel the raging disappointment others feel when it all goes badly. 

I don’t have the energy really, my personal plate is full. I’m balancing so many things for my kids, my own four and the sixty-plus I care for at school. Their needs are my full-time job, my focus is always turned towards them.

And then on the way home from work last week, I received a phone call that dropped another weight onto the pile. A small bump on my nose was found to be skin cancer. I’ve had it for years, but it was beginning to grow and change so I wanted it removed as it’s ugly and annoying to me. Both the doctor and I were surprised by the results. […]

So with all that’s going on in the world, selfishly I’ve turned my thoughts inward even more, towards the people I care for and even towards myself for a change. I just have to keep moving forward, holding so much afloat, as if there is a future for my kids worth moving towards. To give them the foundation and the skills to keep moving forward themselves. 

And poetry is left to fall between the cracks of all that. In the summer, my editor said we would try to get my book out in November and, of course, I haven’t heard from him since. After 5 years, I can no longer summon any enthusiasm for his promises. My other collections have been declined by 15 other publishers this year, yet I submitted to another publisher this week. 

Gerry Stewart, Turned Inward But Moving Forward

After I sent the book off, I went downstairs in a daze, and sat on the sofa and poured a glass of wine and watched the US election, or perhaps we could call it another episode of the end of the world as we know it. Then I got a phone call from Holland that a very dear friend and big sister of mine died, just as they started calling Trump the winner. I felt it, all of this, at once, letting go, saying goodbye, the changes and shifts, happening out there and in here, all at the same time. Needless to say, I finished the bottle of wine, and wept with you and the rest of the world.

We have so much work to do, to continue to do, but we know that. The work is continuous, the work is the journey, the work is the point, the work is what we were born to do. I cannot ever imagine thinking that all the work is done out there in the big world and in here in my world of words. We live in a work in progress, we are a work in progress, growing and learning and loving.

As for the book, this grassy new-born foal trying to open her wet eyes and stand on her wobbling legs, the new book ‘The Life of Life’ will be published in 2026 with Canongate Books. It feels so far away and in a future world. Who knows who will be here then? Who will read books, who will keep fighting the good fight for books, who will keep championing libraries and indie bookshops and find funding and platforms for all of our beautiful poets and story tellers and for literacy and humanity … and who knows what happens next to our worlds and words and hearts.

Salena Godden, The End … which is a beginning

The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all the terror and tenderness of knowing ourselves in order to know the world, of loving ourselves in order to love the world.

That is what Native American novelist, poet, and children’s book author Louise Erdrich offers in “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance,” originally published in a special edition of Orion Magazine — a poem evocative of Derek Walcott’s classic “Love After Love,” of Leonard Cohen’s lyric reckoning with resistance, and yet entirely original for the simple reason of drawing from the freshest spring of the universal: the most deeply personal.

Maria Popova, Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance

It is a small miracle we can still hold
gatherings around the kitchen table,
share meals of soup and bread and rice
piled on breakable platters. Here are
perhaps the first of those days we thought
would never come— war at every window,
drought kindling fires through evergreen
forests; men in suits and ties trading
our bodies and freedoms for a world
shrunk to the proportions of their minds.
But here we are, offering prayers to our dead,
sharing what they taught us of ritual and
remembrance—fruit for sweetness, water and
oil for balm; garlic and onions for strength.

Luisa A. Igloria, When We Gather

2 AM: a completed poem
a sated silence
a full moon in the sky, a full moon in the lake
only the poet –
empty, awake

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Fifteen lines is one quintain two many

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hyejung Kook [no title]

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Look! The ninth poem is airborne!

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

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

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

Erica Goss, Since my mother died

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

*

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

*

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

Luisa A. Igloria, On Timelessness

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Dear Hip

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

[…]

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

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

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

Rebecca Loudon, Functioning as an adult

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

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

rob mclennan, Jordan Windholz, The Sisters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Not Enough Time To Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing, Sketching, Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donna Vorreyer, An Embarrassment of Riches

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

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

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

rewriting
the saijiki
climate change

Mariposa 34
Spring/Summer 2016

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, Jeff Hoagland

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

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

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

Sue Finch, ONLY TIME

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

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

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

and this:

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

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

Bethany Reid, Paulann Petersen’s MY KINDRED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – The Odyssey and Xenia

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, The subjunctive

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Charles Ives in 33 notes.

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

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

Can I?

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

Paul Tobin, DECONSTRUCTION OF THE HEART

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Recent Reading October 2024: A Review

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

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

Days 18, 21 and 22

tuim – empty
sook – to suck
heid – head

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

Gerry Stewart, Back To Reality: Scotstober

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, Glorious Golden Days

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

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

With the beauty we have been busy fleeing.

Rachel Dacus, A New Anthology of Ghazals in English

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Keeper of the Memories

Boot/reboot to ward off viruses and false idols.

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

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

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

Rich Ferguson, Earth Is My Computer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“RUINPORN” 

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

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

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

While I could not have told you at the time what I was writing them for or towards, later it became clear that that particular loss had its fingers all over them. I was already calling it ruinporn long before I compiled the manuscript.

Kristy Bowen, the houses we haunt

truthfully i’m not sure who is dead anymore.
the hot chocolate poured from
a wound in the cake. i licked my fingers.
you laughed. my brother used his fork
to plunder the whipped cream.
everything was easy & none of us had
to have a gender. in the dark you watch
your horror videos. all the tongues
like ribs. a paisley pattern knit across
the screen.

Robin Gow, 10/28

I have experienced two autumns this October: one in New Mexico, one in Pennsylvania. In the American Southwest, high up in the world, the cottonwood trees that hug every available water source were going a brilliant gold while I was there. Any view above a creek or river revealed a winding path of yellow–along the Chama, along the Rio Grande. The tiny-leaved oaks were turning brown-leaved and dropping scads of acorns along the paths. The oranges and reds are mostly there year-round, on the mesas and in the canyons.

It was wonderful to experience a poetry workshop with Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan and to learn how books are made by hand, wonderful to draft some poems using color imagery and ekphrasis, wonderful to meet some fascinating people with whom I enjoyed pushing past my/our comfort zones and into art forms we may have been a bit less comfortable with.

Ann E. Michael, Two falls

I drove home tonight at 6 o’clock, through the winter darkness already. I had to roll down the window to stay awake. I know we think of this kind of thing as winter depression, but I am trying to look at it from another perspective. Maybe the desire to be quiet, to lie wrapped in something soft, to listen to the wind, and maybe imagine the cracking of wood in a fire in a cabin somewhere, about an hour’s drive from here, where the real mountains begin and the snow comes early—maybe this introversion isn’t depression at all, just a close connection with the season.

Last week, walking Leonard in the early afternoon, I saw the first—and likely the last—hedgehog of the year. Not big, but likely big enough to survive. I said sweet dreams. Then looked around. Talking to Leonard is one thing. Talking to a hedgehog is another.

Ren Powell, Between Hedgehogs and Lapwings

Last night I was rehearsing with our Simhat Torah band. One of our hakafot (circle dances) will be to the song Bashanah Ha-ba’ah. “You will see, you will see, just how good it will be…” But sometimes it’s hard to hold fast to the faith, or the dream, that better days will come. Here, or there, or anywhere. The drumbeat of sorrow and loss and injustice feels relentless. Here, and there, and everywhere.

This path is a deep groove worn in my heart from a year of grieving. I step outside to mail my ballot and I’m startled by how warm the air is, how beautiful the sunlight filtering through yellow leaves. What if I stop trying to find the right words (as though there were right words) that would make meaning out of all of this — and just let myself be, breathing here, in the beauty of the broken world?

Rachel Barenblat, (Almost) A Year

will you visit is a thought in a corner
high up beside the light glowing
from the cherry’s burning leaves
in the autumn of our regrets
the words lifting like motes to settle it
once and for all they are set in this story
of how a moment is forever just a moment
and a poem is a moment for eternity
sit you there a moment
let me explain
earl grey?

Jim Young, the studio with the arched window

I had occasion to spend time in one of my favorite spaces of possibility recently, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA). A visit to a museum like this one is layered: initially, often, bewilderment, if not downright befuddlement, but sometimes slightly confused enchantment, or transport. Then I like to settle down on a bench with the curator’s or artist’s notes about what I’m looking at, and then return. Sometimes thusly armed, I’m still bewildered, or fairly unmoved, but often reawakened, seeing anew, reperceiving. After a while in this space, a campus of former factory buildings transformed, everything seems like art: the way paint has worn off a pillar to leave the labrynthine white tracks of wood grain, the way rust has made its cloth of metal, elaborate and multihued, a bright leaf caught in a net of bare gray branches. And I come away feeling like the very day is a creative act. My own created day is a creative act: how I pay attention, where I put my attention, what I say and how I say it, and with what wonder.

And inevitably I turn to the news of the day, which makes its own work on me, I am the metal to its rust, and not so beautifully done. But for a while anyway, this sense of art everywhere can linger.

So, reader, I offer that notion to you: the day is yours to create. You are yours to create. The hour is full of consternation, indeed, of fear, of lack, of struggle. And the hour is full of wonder. The steady tick of time itself a beat to dance to. If you can manage, make it a jelly roll.

Marilyn McCabe, to tease me in my bleak office

I’ll pass the hours remembering
forsythia in April, the softness 
of a baby’s skin, campfires, the smell 
of bread fresh from the oven. I’ll sleep 
where the milky way tumbles 
through the night sky and trees whisper 
to the wind.

Sarah Russell, What I Picked for the Journey