Rich Ferguson – Page 11

July 11, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 27

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. Travel turned out to be a major theme this week—appropriately enough, as I had to drive 40 minutes to a place with good WiFi in order to finish the digest. Other themes included the body and its ailments, and how hard work affects writing and thinking.

Shapeshifter, it’s time
For you to be a human again.
James Lee Jobe, Fur and bone and feather.

I decided at diagnosis that I wasn’t going to dwell on it. There’s too much writing, traveling, and fun still to be had. I’m giving myself permission to have a whopper of a mid-life crisis; I might even start a bucket list.

The week before my surgery, I closed on my condo in Midtown. Moving in after the surgery was a fresh hell, but I’m here and happy in my new nest. Being able to walk a block or two to everything I need – supermarket, drug store, restaurants, MARTA – is even better than living on the Atlanta BeltLine.

Although, I can walk pretty easily to the Eastside Trail if the mood hits. I’m also in walking distance to the Proton Center, not that I’m eager to make that trek, but at least it’s convenient. A couple of weeks ago, I walked over and had a mold made of my face for the radiation mask. That’s the closest I want to get to mummification.
Collin Kelley, Living with the Big C

Due to mini-strokes and constriction of the blood flow in her brain, my mother has developed the same form of cognitive decline that my mother-in-law had: vascular dementia. In both cases, aphasia ravaged their speech as their conditions worsened. My partner’s stepmother also had aphasia due to stroke, so I have now witnessed the condition up close among three women who had very different backgrounds and personalities. As aphasia presents most noticeably as a loss of verbal expression (talk about being at a loss for words!), the condition fascinates me (a person who loves words).
And devastates me. My mother had never been “good at words” the way my father was, but she was a compassionate listener and often could find the right things to say when my glib and witty friends and family members could not. I recall many times when she would ask to talk to me alone and express something she’d been keeping to herself and reflecting upon, waiting until she could “say it the right way.” Now, she can say almost nothing “the right way.” Rain becomes snow; snow becomes green; hat becomes clark; tomato becomes red; table becomes place…and even these are unreliable substitutes, likely to change from one conversation to the next. The pronoun she has vanished from her lexicon. Her vocabulary is little better than a five-year-old’s, and she inadvertently invents words that are essentially meaningless while trying to convey meaning.
She can still read, a little, and slowly. A few months ago, I gave her a book by Eloise Klein Healy, Another Phase. Healy, a well-known poet, was stricken with Wernicke’s aphasia and–with a devoted speech therapist’s help–regained the ability to compose poetry again, though the work she now produces reflects her profoundly-changed expressive abilities. My mother was pleased that she could read the book and that Healy could make poems even with aphasia. And Mom understood the poems–had memorized a few image-lines that she liked. This stunned me–memory’s often wrecked by vascular dementia, or so we are led to believe. But my mother has a good memory. She merely has extremely limited verbal expressiveness–an inability to locate the right word, and a loss of numeracy and literacy. Alas, the result means she cannot make her ideas and thoughts known to others. Isolating.
Ann E. Michael, The right words

Who is she now/this body/after/all this wrack joy yes extraction no/shrinking fast/swimming the summery streets of lake current/his veins/the temporal slides/the bleeds/needle in her teeth/mending/mending/arched beneath/yearning toward in muscled reach/cut cleaved pressed lost/in utter clarity/when asked I wonder what has changed/she can only say it has changed/she does not know what that will mean/she is/she was/she will be/turning to bone as she sinks/whales and seals and salmon pour from arterial yes/and also/but why/something now is locked away that wasn’t
JJS, who now this body

Moon phase for July 4 is Waning Crescent,
says the moon app. The photo of the moon shows it
melting in the space darkness.
The surface is like the skin
of an old man who’s seen the world:
wounded, marked, dry.
When we don’t see it,
the moon forgets about us.
We don’t. We wait.
Magda Kapa, Waning Crescent on July 4

The government notes that self-isolation has proved an effective measure in reducing harm to others.
In light of this, the following measures also now apply to those who have not been isolated by current legislation.
Those with any physical illness which could be passed on to another person must now self-isolate.
Those with any mental illness who currently feel, or have felt in the past, that they may harm others, must now self-isolate.
These measures will be enforced immediately.
In addition, those with any physical illness which cannot be passed on to another person, but who are causing stress to another person who is having to look after them, should self-isolate.
Likewise, any person with a disability of any kind, or who is old, and requiring others to help them, and thus being a burden to those people.
People with any mental illness, who while not intending harm to others, are bringing the people around them down, should also now self-isolate.
Those who have self-isolated out of fear, whatever the cause, should continue to self-isolate.
No further action is required for those who are already isolated for other reasons, including, but not limited to, poverty, lack of transport, and/or lack of friends or family.
Likewise for those who have self-isolated because they simply prefer being on their own.
The government will keep this matter under review and further statements will be issued as required.
Sue Ibrahim, Government statement

In Stardew Valley, the game that I have nattered about extensively on this blog, the farm animals are simple creatures. They are either happy or unhappy. When they are happy, a heart pops up in the dialogue balloon above their heads. When they are unhappy, a gray scribble appears, denoting their displeasure with missing a meal or being cold or God knows what other lack they are suffering. This weekend has been a gray-scribble weekend for me. I have been walking around with a scribble above my head, unhappy and impervious to any of Mr. Typist’s usual cheering-up methods. It’s not grief, it’s not exactly depression, it’s just a deep sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. It’s a sign that something needs to change. In the past, I would find these periods of malaise daunting and would be intimidated at the prospect of change, but I’m not this time around. I’m ready. I have full clarity and intent and I know my worth. Interestingly, I did a Tarot card reading this weekend and came up with multiple sword cards, concluding with the Queen of Swords, a woman who stands in her truth and is ready to receive.
Kristen McHenry, Scribble Head, Bro Move, Pool Nostalgia

Iceland’s landscape is gorgeous, but its soundscape is striking, too. I expected to hear crashing breakers and waterfalls, but I forgot there would be a million unfamiliar bird calls. I spotted oystercatchers, terns, gulls, fulmers, eider ducks, redwings, and sandpipers, but more often I heard screeches, warbles, clicks, and chattering from birds I couldn’t see, much less identify. There was a sea cave near Hellnar full of gulls and maybe other white-and-grey birds–I couldn’t climb close enough to see them well–but their cacophony carried. From around a bend in the trail, they sounded weirdly like small children in a playground, some cackling, one crying from an injury. We never saw puffins or seals, but from steep field after steep field, the sheep had plenty to say.
What might stay with me most was the voice of ice on the move. The ocean beach near Jökulsárlón, noisy with sea-sounds and high wind, was so visually amazing we kept laughing with surprise at the black volcanic sands littered with glassy iceberg fragments, and just behind them, larger blue chunks of Vatnajökull bobbing on the waves. (The joy gets a lot more muted when you learn that this arm of the largest glacier between the Arctic and Antarctic is melting so fast that it will be a fjord in a few years.) We heard the ice much more clearly at a couple of less-visited glacial lagoons, Breiðárlón and Fjallsárlón, where we could tramp out to the edge of the lake and listen without other people nearby. The nearest floes were slushy; you could see as well as hear them crack then separate. Larger noises came from further away, including a rumble from the edge of the glacier. We froze to listen, wondering if it was calving.
Lesley Wheeler, Listening to Iceland

I’ve been in the garden a lot, dabbling as a gardener for the first time in my life and finding it very enjoyable, not to say relaxing and satisfying. I’ve combined my image-making and gardening interests by using flowers and foliage from the garden in my pieces, and adding text.
Andrew and I have been to London a few times, mainly moving our student son out of his accommodation for the summer and visiting our daughter, who’s lived in London for nearly a year now. How fast time has flown. I read somewhere that time moves fast when nothing much happens.
Josephine Corcoran, July Update

‘On the last morning, you’ll rucksack-up, / then lower your pack to the floor,/ consider the weight of things.’ My sons are moving on, and I’m travelling alone with the weight of a Brompton, folded. Companionship comes in many forms, and I have projected personality onto my bicycle – she is blue, she is named Boudicca.
Blame the blockage in the Suez Canal, or the pandemic rush to get bicycles out of sheds, but the cycle shop nearest to London Euston is all out of bicycle clips and reflective ankle bands, and has been for months. Whilst telling me this, the kind assistant passed me a clutch of rubber bands in assorted sizes. “Try these,” he said, with the confidence of someone who can speak several languages. Boudicca, were she able to do so, would have commented that I looked like a low-budget Tintin as I climbed onto the saddle, and set off for Tufnell Park.
‘This is the birthplace of four symphonies, the violin concerto, / a clutch of quartets …’ 2018 – Pasqualatihaus, Vienna. 2021 – the Tufnell Park Tavern, Tufnell Park.
‘This city’s a miniature of empire‘ – as true of London as it is of Vienna. The cycle route took us down the back streets, under railway bridges, past car repair shops, close to tower blocks. It took us over tarmac, and took us over glass. Nearing the pub, I felt Boudicca’s back wheel resist the road in the way it does as a tyre deflates: instant lethargy, forewarning of the need to lie on one’s back with one’s wheels in the air.
Liz Lefroy, I Repair to London

knowing your purpose is the fall of rain :: how gently can you live
Grant Hackett [no title]

When I was a kid, I sometimes played out entirely fake situations and conversations in my head, and sometimes, spilling out of my mouth. The car was one of my favorite places to daydream on long rides, and I remember crouching down behind my mother’s seat, whispering, conscious that she’d notice that I was mouthing my made up scenes, and already, at 5 or 6 kind of self-conscious about it. I was never one to have an imaginary friend–but more–had many that lived in my head an enacted out their stories, When it came to writing, before I even knew how, I would fill notebooks with squiggles I imagined as stories. While I often pulled others–my sister, my cousins, neighbor kids–into my play, I spent a lot of time in this imaginary life myself and it didn’t go away as I got older. When I wasn’t reading in other people’s written worlds, I would just sit in my room with music on playing things out in my head, something that continued into high school. Hell, maybe even adulthood.
I wonder often if novelists and other story makers live this way–esp. since I do even as a poet. How so much of writing and thinking about stories and characters and world-building feels like like a dissociative state sometimes. And is that all writing is? So much time in our heads with other people, other lives, that we are never fully in this one?
Kristy Bowen, film notes: writer brain

One day a door opens in the ground
and you know this is every door
you’ve ever read about in tales and fables.
The animals watch to see what you do
after you pass into the country beyond.
The trees are full of birds; at first
they make no sound, and then
they open their mouths in bursts
of rifle fire.
Luisa A. Igloria, Ex-Paradiso

Where does the time go, eh? It’s been a month of missed weekly posts and IT DOESN’T MATTER ONE JOT!!
In that month I can barely say what’s happened, but I can confirm I completed Race To The King and went to the funeral of the magnificent Lorraine Gray. I was asked to read, alongside my two closest friends, Adrian Henri’s ‘Without You‘ (and that reminds me, I must order Andrew Taylor’s book about Adrian), some other folks read Auden’s ‘If I Could Tell You’, so it was a beautiful, poetry-filled event…(Oh yes, and very, very boozy, but it’s what she would have wanted.)
So much of the last few weeks have been spent fixated on that run and then Lol’s funeral that I now find myself a bit bereft of focus. The football has been a welcome distraction, but concentrating on anything seems to escape me at present. I sat down earlier to try and look at a poem for the first time in a month, and while I know the ideas are ok, nothing grabbed me enough to want to write more of them. I was listening to Johnny Marr’s interview with our esteemed laureate yesterday while on a tip run and he talked about turning up, the act of craft, etc and I think perhaps I am out of practice. My habit of daily writing has fallen way by the wayside (as has writing these posts), so it’s time to do something about that. Not, again, that it matters either way…
Mat Riches, Falcon, Falcoff

I was off the grid for a week in early June for a family gathering in Michigan, and now it’s nearly mid-July, and I’ve been “off the grid” in all kinds of ways before and since. My last post, in early April, was mostly about March, and time still feels suspended. I wrote a poem a day in April, as planned & hoped, and I have continued to read books of poetry but am way behind in my reviewing,* as that takes concentration, re-reading, and a clear mind. I’m also reading fiction, nonfiction, essays, comics, and letters as a kind of escape as well as a way to focus. I’m walking to work. I’m swimming laps again, as this year the pool opened! I feel good but weird.
I guess I’m surprised that coming out of Covid isolation was somehow harder than being in. But why?** I’m not scared, just wary. I worked from home till June 1, 2020, and have worked masked at the workplace ever since. I’m vaccinated and go unmasked with other vaccinated people, friends and family I trust. I still wear a mask to the grocery store, though many customers, cashiers, and other employees don’t. Cases (and deaths) went way down where I live but are on the uptick again. I accompany my parents to medical appointments, where people all wear masks in healthcare settings. I was part of a masked theatre audience and will be again. But I walk to work unmasked, and it is so nice to see people’s faces again.
Kathleen Kirk, Off the Grid

What’s been (sort of) interesting about working through the pandemic is how difficult it’s been to think. I only work half time and yet, my ability to really delve deeply into a book or subject has been wanting. The library went through cycles of being closed and open but was always doing curbside pick-ups and this was quite honestly more like factory work. In the Zaretsky book [The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky] he says,
“The act of thinking, Weil discovered, was the first casualty of factory work. A few days into her job, she was already reeling from fatigue. At times, the unremitting pace reduced Weil to tears. In one unexceptional entry, she wrote: “Very violent headache, finished the work while weeping almost uninterruptedly. (When I got home, interminable fit of sobbing).”
In her factory work, Weil said that she profoundly felt “the humiliation of this void imposed on my thought.” What are the rights of workers now, and what are our obligations to them?
Shawna Lemay, What Are You Going Through?

end of a shift
floating in the tiredness
of cared hands that soothed
or could not soothe the some times
when
time had taken the intellect away
in ways that intellects could dissect in the pages
of books devoted to the subject
and yet
this tiredness is not to be found in
the pages of any book
it is to be found in the muscles
of a mind exercised with thoughts
of the left behind that were once
the foremost but are now
simply pity in your hands
the
empathy of a washed goodnight
in the glory of walking away
just one more time
until
is such an implosive word
Jim Young, night nurse

Folk festival folk:
They work in council housing departments
and sing sad songs of flooded seams and firedamp,
poss-tubs, pinnies, lockouts ,blacklegs,
disasters, deprivation.
Or tutors in evening classes
who know The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,
and Matty Groves by heart; they sing without
accompaniment. And slow. And flat. They never miss
a verse. They sing the chorus after every
one, bring unimagined nuances to
the meaning of interminable.
Some sell insurance; or work in call centres,
and sing, at length, about the whaling,
silver darlings, foundering trawlers, ice;
shawled fisherwives on shivering wharves
gazing at the widowing sea.
John Foggin, Stocking fillers (3)

Summer teaching started for me this week. Excited to start new conversations and encourage young writers to engage with articulating their authentic selves while navigating the rules of different spaces. Am exhausted, won’t lie, but that’s also the life.
Did want to share two quick things:
First, here’s another article to help navigate the ever-evolving pandemic we’re in. I worry I alienate people by coming back to the high stakes we’re living in, but then I wouldn’t be staying true to myself if I didn’t. I mean, carrying on like things can go back to “normal” alienates me, so, really, this be quid pro quo, no?
Second, here’s a poem I found while seeking out ideas for a post this week:
thank the weeds
for pulling you
closer to the flowers
(Rich Heller, Lilliput Review)
I purposely share it with my aforementioned sense of feeling alienated and like a harbinger of doom. In my case, I’m working out the weeds of worry and survival, all of which doesn’t bring me down, not exactly. It brings me down and it makes me look up and value what we’re surviving for.
Here’s to the weeds.
José Angel Araguz, not in the weeds, the weeds are in me, so to speak

I was going to post the old song “I’m glad I’m not young anymore” that Maurice Chevalier sang in “Gigi” but the lyrics don’t really apply in my case.
However, I am glad to be in the 70’s now, not back in the years of the 70’s. Glad to be here now.
Some regrets, and one of them is that there wasn’t digital photography until so recently. The film camera made one abstemious about what photo to take, since film cost money, and developing the film cost money and time. There were photos of events and persons that I simply wish I had, to help my memory along.
I am glad I won’t be around in thirty years to live in the world that is coming.
Anne Higgins, I’m glad not to be young in 2021

Before there were digital cameras, we took pictures and sent film away to have it developed. I loved getting the prints in the mail, and I saved all the negatives, in case I wanted reprints. I rarely wanted reprints, but I saved them.

Yesterday, my spouse and I sorted through the photo albums. We didn’t do any digitizing–that’s a much more complicated project. We knew that we had kept all sorts of photos, and yesterday it was time to look at them again. We haven’t looked through most of those albums in decades.

Here are some insights:

–I was worried that the non-archival albums might have bleached the pictures away, but they’re still in good shape.

–I use the word “good” rather loosely. These pictures were never high quality. It’s not like we had parents who gave us quality camera equipment. We had instamatic kinds of cameras–not Polaroids, not that kind of instant. The kind of cameras we had took 110 film. How do I still remember that? Probably from decades of ordering that film and sending film away.

–Then, as now, I kept every picture. Consequently, I have pictures of parts of the floor, a window here the side of a car, a strip of floor, all sorts of accidental photos.

–I also kept lots of photos of humans whom I no longer remember. I dutifully wrote names on the backs of pictures, but those names didn’t help.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sorting Photos

In a week in which, inexplicably, a kerfuffle was kicked up over Ange Mlinko’s not-extravagantly-unreasonable comments about Adrienne Rich in the London Review of Books, the poetry contribution to the same edition of the LRB, Emily Berry’s Paris, seems to have passed more or less without comment. I’m surprised only because Paris is a prose poem and prose poems always seem capable of getting someone’s goat; I would at least have expected someone to take to Twitter with a complaint about how this sort of thing ‘isn’t poetry’. I’m posting about it now not to bemoan the form of Berry’s offering (if interested, see more on the subject in relation to Jeremy Noel-Tod’s prose poetry anthology, here) but to celebrate it as a complexification of literary power dynamics, an exposé of authorial paranoia, and a parody of Proustian psychological observations.
This week is also of course Proust’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversaire, and so it is appropriate that the LRB should mark the occasion, even if it is tucked away in the sub-text of a prose poem. Berry is very witty in shrinking the vastness of Á la recherche du temps perdu to what is (prose/poetry debates notwithstanding) basically a single paragraph. And it is a paragraph repleat with ironic thoughts on that most thoughtless of modern mechanisms for capturing lost time, the selfie. What took Proust thirteen years to write, and most readers months if not years to read, is whittled down to a minute or two for readers of the LRB and a single moment of posing for the protagonist of the poem.
Chris Edgoose, Paris by Emily Berry

Composed in sections, halts and hesitations, Medin explores memory as a series of conversations, attempting to seek what might not otherwise be known or revealed without pushing too hard. Writing on her mother as part of “BROOKLYN, NOVEMBER 15, 2018,” she writes: “I have to be careful when asking questions, or else she’ll say it again: stop.” She writes between generations, from her mother and grandmother to her own children; she writes between geographies, from the family home in Paraguay to Argentina, to the United States. She writes a story and a prose in transit, in transition, perpetually in motion. To uncover another element of her own story might be to shift the entire narrative. In the same section, she adds: “She did not have time for documenting time. On top of that, who keeps a journal? Although she is writing this to me on a screen, I can hear her shouting: ‘I have never known anyone who keeps a journal.’”
This is such a remarkable book, and the ease of her prose is enviable. I keep having to hold back quoting page upon page, pushing the whole of this collection through my computer screen and in front of my own commentary. Medin writes of physical, emotional and temporal distances she wishes to travel; of cognitive distance. She writes of connection and disconnection, centred around family, and specifically, her mother. As she writes: “My mother’s domain. Her house. Was my house. this is no nostalgic writing. There is no desire to recover what’s gone. No need of further separation, of a wall built across.” As well, I’ll admit that I’m left to conjecture the purpose of the words set in bold throughout the text, but to read only those words through the collection, one can see a single, extended poem hidden in plain sight. There are layers beyond layers here. To thread such together, for example, from the opening poem, offers: “To open and close, to cut / into pieces / not your daughter, / not you. / yet, / a mother.”
rob mclennan, Silvina López Medin, Poem That Never Ends

Paul occasionally mentioned the poet Brian Jones (1938–2009) – not to be confused with the Strolling One – and a few years ago, his own publisher, Shoestring Press, published a selection of Jones’ poems. I must get round to buying a copy. In the meantime, I recently bought a lovely copy of Jones’s Interior, 25 poems published by Alan Ross in 1969. There is something Larkinian about his poetry, though without the misanthropy or suppressed bigotry. More than anyone, though, his poems remind me of Dennis O’Driscoll’s: droll, acutely aware of mortality and on the nose.
A three-part poem ‘At the Zoo’ was always going to appeal to me, because I adore zoo poems, and zoos in fact, hard though it is not to feel simultaneously thrilled by proximity to the creatures therein and repulsed by their captivity. The third part concerns Chi-Chi, the giant panda who was brought to London Zoo from Frankfurt in 1958 and was a major attraction until her death in 1972, and opens thus: ‘This is the panda that wouldn’t be shagged!’. After a superb simile, ‘wondering kids hoisted like periscopes’, he elaborates on the panda’s situation and attitude:
This is the girl
who would have none of it, who let the world
proclaim and plan the grandest wedding for her,
who travelled in state and with due coyness
one thousand miles in a beribboned crate,
who ate well at the reception, honoured the ritual,
and when the time arrived for being shagged
chose otherwise, rolled over, went to sleep.
Anthropomorphic, to a degree, this may be, but it’s fine writing, with a deceptively easy rhythm.
Matthew Paul, On Brian Jones (no, not that one)

A new episode of the New Books in Poetry podcast is up. I had an amazing conversation with Carl Marcum about his new book A Camera Obscura (Red Hen Press, 2021).
A Camera Obscura is a lyrical exploration of external and internal worlds. The heavens described in these poems could be the stars glittering above our heads, the pathways of faith, or the connection between human beings. Playing with scientific understandings of the world, along with the linguistic conventions of the poetic form, A Camera Obscura is a compelling journey that simultaneously drifts through the cosmos while being rooted to the ground beneath our feet.
Andrea Blythe, New Books in Poetry: A Camera Obscura by Carl Marcum

How rare to travel as an amateur or emigrant, so ignorant of a well-trod place that you let the place’s magic play with your “free gaze.” I, Rhode Islander, arrive with little knowledge of New Mexico. D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, retirees and moneyed Texans stay way in my back pocket. I take in a sightline that’s not East Coast congested, but vast and open. The roads are straight — endless — cutting through an artist’s range of pinks, ochres, yellows. The desert unfolds like an ocean of silver-sagebrush meets horizion. Everything breathes on thinner oxygen. The light makes rocks and cactus levitate. Cactus are wan and colorless until they burst into hot colors like cartoons. Veils of rain trail from navy-dark clouds you can see in some distance town. Sunset over a layered plane that looks like the bottom of the sky. In sum, an otherworldliness.
As poet Adam Zagajewski writes, to the emigrant, a rush of rain on a Paris boulevard can be Notre Dame’s equal. He also talks of how a workaday place falls prey to the “innocent sabotage of the free gaze, thus splitting it into disconnected atoms.” So the morning sunbeam opens the doors of vision. It doesn’t negate the tragedy of the native tribes but observing legacy of history in situ, witnessing the past in landscape, the native absence and presence becomes more felt. Paul Celan’s term “what happened,’ expresses the horror of what can’t be named here too.
Jill Pearlman, Santa Fe on Thinner Oxygen

I recently won a small amount of money in a poetry competition. Poem here. I have spent the prize money, many times over, on books.

I’d like to show you some of them. First up is Untravelling, an achingly beautiful new book by Mary Frances from Penteract Press. On each page a found landscape is paired with a few lines of cutup text. Every page is a meditation. It will mean something different each time it is read. It would be the perfect companion to take on a long journey, actual or metaphorical.
Ama Bolton, A binge of books

Sometimes the wind
in the Sandhills
wants nothing
and the cottonwoods
are happy.
Tom Montag, NEBRASKA SANDHILLS (30)

How to hold fear for so long
my shoulders learn a new shape.
How to watch numbers climb
higher, and then higher.
How to hold funerals
and kindergarten
over Zoom.
How to read subtle signals
via eyes alone.
How to re-grow scallions in water
because there might not be
more to buy.
How to feel our connections
though we’re apart.
Rachel Barenblat, How To

Remember last week’s advice to myself? Stay open to connections, calmly watch for sprouting seeds?
Yeah, okay.
So I tread softly through the noise and haste. Sat calmly amid the sun and rain. Tinkered with the poem. Tinkered with the poem. TINKERED WITH THE DAMN POEM.
Rolled the poem up and beat it against the desk.
Decided clearly I know nothing about writing poems.
Quit writing forever.
Decided to go back to school in the plumbing trade.
…Then I got an idea. …
Marilyn McCabe, Waiting on a friend; or, On Writing and Patience

I’ve seen an ink that refuses to write anything but trouble in the blood.
When the grenade demands a final cigarette before its detonation, ask it to reconsider.
See if it might like to put all that bang into creating a beautiful floral arrangement for a stranger.
Rich Ferguson, Meditations at 2 AM

July 4, 2021July 4, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 26

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This July Fourth edition begins with some great meditations on being a writer and a reader, and goes on to include musings on interconnectedness, division, independence days, and more — proof that deep thinking can and does take place even in a season traditionally associated with breezy beach reads.

What comes in on the tide?
An empty chair.
Upright, screwed to metal plates on a flat rectangle of wood.
It settles at the foot of the cliffs.
The tide goes out.
Does the chair go with it or stay?
If I were the chair, I’d go.
If the empty chair doesn’t want to move, it won’t.
If, trying to ease the aches that come with age,
it welcomes the wind off the sea, if it tips back
its head and takes all its weight on its heels,
stretches out its battered arms, why then perhaps
it will find a way to rethink why it’s settled here,
as the early sun breaks through clouds dark with
rain and hunger and lightens the leaves of
the late-flowering cherry planted long ago
on a whim by the lighthouse keepers inside
the white wall of their garden, now overgrown.
Bob Mee, THE QUIET MAN WHO LIVED ON THE CLIFF TOP RETURNS

I was thinking about the way we think about good news, and the way we poets are always waiting for good news, and get a lot of rejections, and steel ourselves against disappointment, sometimes so much so that when we actually get this long-awaited good news, we underplay it, to keep ourselves from further disappointment. Isn’t it hard to celebrate? So much easier to expect the worse than to even dare to think about expecting the best possible thing? Is this a writer thing?
And here are some flowers from my garden, a little bit of Seattle in July. In the garden, I expect the deer to come and eat some flowers, and for unexpected plant illnesses to kill some of my favorite plants sometime. I just shrug and go ahead planting different plants and hoping for the best. Gardening is so optimistic – you plant some seeds, and you hope some of the seedlings survive and flower. I planted a bunch of poppy and sunflower seeds last year, and although they didn’t all come up, a lot of them survived and gave me flowers I didn’t have before. If you plant a tree in the wrong place, or with the wrong conditions, sometimes it dies. But if you fertilize, and water, and protect it from predators large and small, eventually, you will probably have a full-grown awe-inspiring tree. Trees make me happy. Flowers do too. Maybe the attitude I have towards gardening should also be the attitude I have towards my writing life.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Poem “Divination” in the new issue of Shenandoah, Birds, Heat Waves and the Fourth, Good News and Gardening

In order to allay their fear of each other they want
To create a forest of their own, where every leaf
And root is of their design and in thrall to them.
But the basic matter of their being confuses
And causes them (a) to mistake this structure
For theirs alone and their opposite pilgrim
For a statue or an ants’ nest, or (b) to fail
In their fury to notice that all they are doing
Is gathering small stones and withering flowers,
Constructing a frame of brittle twigs
With such care and laughable solemnity.
They are making a little castle like children
In the soft dirt at the feet of trees.
Chris Edgoose, When Reader Meets Text

But I think one thing I am doing wrong — if I want to read as I did back in the old eat and read days — is that I am reading too many books at once, and taking my books as medicine, rather than as psychedelics. The whole point is opening the doors of perception, nicht? Washing the windows. Instead I’ve been primly reading improving books. No wonder my attention flags. I should take my reading in heroic doses.
—
As I walked this morning, before dawn, there was actually a little rain, or a least a heavy dewfall. It felt miraculous. A post-apocalyptic blessing.
Dale Favier, Eat and Reading

even in a parallel universe –
is there this longing,
this poem?
[…]
But, in the middle of pandemic listlessness, absent inspiration, disappeared muse and a time-devouring day job, I’m compiling a book. More on that, when the path stops being so utterly uphill. Hope to read all your posts this week and write more-post more-read more…think I miss this space… more than I realized. Stay safe all…the planet of the variants is not a friendly place.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, This poem

What do you want your poetry to do?/what do you want to evoke in the reader/listener?
I want them to sense the life in the poem. Recognise it – something palpable. I’m interested in that place where thought and feeling meet; my poems are my emotions distilled, framed. It’s been about trying to find language. I want a reader to notice if they have that feeling in themself. I’m curious about resonance, and often writing about the other side of that coin: loneliness. If a reader recognises the emotion maybe that leaves us both subtly less isolated. I know that’s the effect reading can have on me.
I’ve focused a lot of my poems on areas of my life that caused me distress over decades, however ‘irrationally’. All I can do is share my feelings truthfully. So that’s what I’ve done. I wanted to leave a record: a kind of refusal, eventually, to suffer in silence. I like that adage cited by Banksy(?): art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Yes.
Paul Tobin, interview with Charlotte Gann

From page one, Kay’s poetry resounds with a stunning sense of humanity that went straight to my heart. I had driven myself out into the woods in the search for solitude — and yet, here was this book, charged with heartache and spirit and and love, making me long for human connection.
I don’t mean to say that I was swamped with feelings of loneliness. Rather, this book shaped in me the kind of longing that carried its own pleasure.
A perfect example is the poem “Montauk,” in which Kay shares the story of a place her family would visit in the summers. While at a pool, she sees a little girl and is about to speak to her, when the moment is interrupted by an older woman cannonballing into the water. Kay writes, “She comes up coughing, flailing, water in her nose. She comes / up laughing. The little girl giggles. And me? Well, I am laughing, too.”
All of a sudden, three human beings, three strangers, are suddenly and briefly connected to each other through their shared laughter. And reading this, I smiled along, also connected to that simple, beautiful moment through the words on the page. I found myself hugging the book to my chest. I love people, I thought. Sometimes they’re wonderful.
Andrea Blythe, The Resounding Humanity of Sarah Kay’s ‘No Matter the Wreckage’

that moment
when the sea is yours
alone
Jim Young [no title]

The poems in this book are brave. There’s a co-existence of a huge zest for life with an awareness of the ageing process to such an extent that it’s impossible to read the collection without being infected with an urge to make the most of life. And then there’s Cox’s embracing and subverting of poetic influences to layer them with her own idiosyncrasies, as in ‘Marmalade’…
There’s a pot of your dark orange marmalade in my cupboard,
still unopened. It lasts a long time but I might never open it now.
The last time you gave me some jars I asked how much
you’d made and you said enough to see us out…
This poem doesn’t hide from its connection with Larkin’s ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’. Instead, it takes his male, filial perspective and filters it through an intensely female view of friendship.
In other words, Meg Cox’s poetry is a joy. Whether savoured in sips or gulped down in one, A Square of Sunlightis an excellent read. As mentioned above, it will probably lodge in people’s minds thanks to its excellent rhyming pieces. However, the collection’s greatest value perhaps lies in Cox’s diction. It’s claimed that the best radio presenters manage to speak as if addressing a single person, striking up a conversation, making the addressee feel special and unique, as if the presenter in question is talking only to them. Few poets achieve such an effect, but Meg Cox does so. Get hold of her book and let her talk to you too…
Matthew Stewart, Talking to you, Meg Cox’s A Square of Sunlight

I’m thinking about Piaget and his notions of assimilation and of accommodation, and what that has to do with the great fogginzo. I’m probably over-simplifying, at best, but I always took it to refer to two modes of learning (both essential. Not an either/or). The first kind consolidates your ideas about the way the world works. It doesn’t disturb you. We tend to read news that we agree with, or agrees with our model of things. Ditto fiction, and poetry. And so on. The second challenges and disturbs. It demands that you change your models and assumptions in greater or lesser degree…. like recognising, say, that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa. Or agreeing that the Bible might be written in English. People died for ideas like that. Being challenged by a feisty headmistress to accept a role no one gave you the lines for demands accommodation.
If we want to grow, we need to be disturbed (in good ways). What I look for in poems and poets is that challenge to see the world anew, and in ways that ultimately change me. And it’s what I find, in spades, in the work of today’s guest, Natalie Rees, and particularly in her pamphlet Low Tide from Calder Valley Poetry.
John Foggin, Catching up: Natalie Rees’ “Low Tide”

Inspiration is rare, precious, and best not relied on. It tends to occur when we least expect it. When it does, it’s as if the heavens opened up and it rained golden lollipops. Those lollipops can be deceiving, however, leading us to think we only have to wait for brilliance to occur.
An example from my own practice is the poem “After the Migraine,” which I sent to The Cumberland River Review. The editor responded a few weeks later: “We like your poem,” his email said, “but we think it needs a few more stanzas. It’s just getting started when it ends.” The first four stanzas of that poem wrote themselves, as they say, but now I had to write four more stanzas to stand a chance at getting the poem accepted. I worked hard, doubling the length of the poem, and after two weeks I had a new draft. I sent that one in and hurray! it was accepted. Needless to say, the last four stanzas were much more difficult to write than the first four, and I had to go deeper into the territory I’d begun exploring in the first draft. The effort was worth it, and I’m grateful to Graham Hillard, The Cumberland River Review’s editor, for giving me the chance to write that draft.
The harder you look, the deeper you go, the more you will rely on your skills as a story-teller. It’s fine to write what you know, of course, but don’t limit what you know to just a few experiences or topics. You will find that the more you write, the more your own writing becomes your inspiration.
If that sounds a bit existential, well, it is.
Erica Goss, What’s Wrong with Inspiration?

It’s here, it’s here! So incredibly thrilled to share my poem “Spring Coronal” is in the July/August issue of POETRY Magazine! Endless gratitude to Ashley M. Jones for including me alongside so many poets I admire and to all the staff for the care they’ve shown my work.
I would have to transcribe the entire table of contents to include everyone I’m honored to share space with, but it’s a particular joy to be published with Monica Ong Reed, with whom I attended my first Kundiman retreat. I urge you to get a copy of the issue for the sheer pleasure of seeing her beautiful work unfolding and unfolding out, celestially.
At bedtime tonight, my five-year-old daughter asked to read my poem–I hadn’t realized she meant she would try reading it aloud! It brought tears to my eyes to hear her.
Hyejung Kook [no title]

Last year, the mother / daughter duo Maternal Mitochondria created an installation of up-cycled metal fairy houses at the Santa Fe Skies RV Park. Inside each miniature dwelling was a little fairy poem on a beautifully wrought scroll that visitors could take out and read.
The installation was a success! In fact, people liked interacting with it so much that they left little tokens of their own: pebbles, pennies, painted rocks, and bits of their own art projects.
This year I was invited to provide the poems for the scrolls — an opportunity for which I’m very grateful, both as a poet and an advocate for poetry in public places.
Bill Waters, New scrolls in the fairy houses

It was lovely to follow a Tweet this morning and find my poem, “Catastrophe–,” in Issue 7 — the one year anniversary edition — of River Mouth Review.
So much has happened this year that my head’s all aswim, and when I get an acceptance or rejection email I have to remind myself of the 100+ submissions I made January-April, 2021. (Yes, this year, Bethany.) Most of them, I admit, are rejections. So, when I saw this blogpost, “How to Deal with Rejection,” from English writer Louise Tondeur, I eagerly read it. And was reassured. I thought you might be, as well.
Meanwhile, I notice that it’s about time to submit to Windfall: a Journal of Poetry of Place. Editors Bill Siverly and Michael McDowell publish only twice a year, and in the old, pre-Pandemic world, I would now and then run into a copy of this lovely PNW-focused small journal at Powell’s in Portland, or Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. When I blogged about my friend Christine Kendall’s new book (back in April) and saw that she has published poems there, I thought, I miss them! And I immediately sent a check for a two-year subscription.
Bethany Reid, River Mouth Review, Issue 7

My new book, Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart, will officially be published on July 1st but books are shipping now. I’m signing each one so if you haven’t yet ordered a copy, do so today! I’m planning a small, private launch party to celebrate both this book, and my first book, Beautiful & Full of Monsters, as I never got to celebrate that one. Damn pandemic ruins everything… I’m looking forward to this small gathering of friends.
I was interviewed by Melodie at Soren Lit – we talked the south, writing, and expectations put on women. Give it a listen!
Courtney LeBlanc, Long Time, No Post

What day of the week did you write
your poem about spiders? Where
did light fall, and in which
direction? I imagine
you by third-storey window,
facing Bank Street, possibly
nineteen eighty-six, or eighty-five,
cascade of businesses long emptied
along the Somerset to Laurier corridor,
dust clouds tunnelling the absolute.
rob mclennan, Four poems for Michael Dennis

This week I’d like to highlight the recent release of the latest issue of Salamander! If I’m being honest, it’s still surreal to me be in the position of Editor-in-chief. A literary magazine is a confluence and meeting ground; it is also a lot of work, often in solitude. […]
I have edited more issues of Salamander under the pandemic than not. I share these details in order to give an impression of how my experience of Salamander has been framed. The emphasis on survival and perseverance that colors and shapes my personal, teaching, and writing life also has its place in the work represented by these pages. The hours of reading submissions, followed by the hours it takes to organize and order the contents of an issue, and then more hours in front of the computer working out the layout and design, these hours have happened across a wide range of moments of my life. Hours talking and writing with friends and loved ones affected by Covid-19 as well as grieving for those lost; hours of preparing lesson plans and answering emails to students navigating their own unpredictable lives; hours poring over the news for updates about vaccines—these hours all blur together and live around the work put into this issue.
José Angel Araguz, new Salamander issue!

This year you won two categories in the Saboteur Awards – no mean feat. Can you tell me what it means to you to have been voted Most Innovative Publisher?
It was the second time we’d been honoured with this, the first time was in 2017 and it felt just as wonderful. It’s been a difficult time for us all and the indie publishing industry was no exception. Bookshops closed, printers and others with less staff/longer turnaround etc To not only survive this but emerge strongly and with sufficient people thinking we were worthy of their vote just made our hearts sing. We are acutely aware that these awards are mostly down to the energy and enthusiasm of our Indigo community: our Indigo Dreamers must have supported us in droves! We shepherd a team of fantastic poets and it highlights them too, which is terrific and deserved.
What exciting things do you have planned for next year and has this year’s win enticed you down the road less travelled to explore new ventures?
We’ll actually be publishing fewer books than recent years. The pandemic has taught us all to evaluate time, and we will be working on poetry projects that we commission or request, continue as normal with our 3 magazines, and our own writing. Indigo have just published an innovative anthology, Dear Dylan, which not only contained ‘poems after’ Dylan but ‘letters to’ him. What would today’s poets like to say to him? We have a few more ‘different’ ideas along these lines and will also be publishing the second anthology with League Against Cruel Sports (Ronnie is poet-in-residence). We published the first in their near 100 year history.
Abegail Morley, An interview with Ronnie Goodyer on Indigo Dreams Publishing and the Saboteur Awards

There was and still are still some poetry blogger holdouts-those of us who still like a more open space to occupy. We blog about writing but also about other things in our lives. I remember an argument in the mid-aughts, incredibly sexist, that the reason male authored poetry blogs were more well known & respected than women’s was because women tended not to limit their content to reviews and discussions solely about poetry and po-biz, but becuase their lives and personalities were too much in the blogs. They wrote about their children. About what they were reading. What they were struggling with. What they had for breakfast. But these were always the most interesting things about these little windows into author’s lives. While your review of the latest releases might be a cool skim through, I wanted to know what you were writing about, thinking about. What scared you, because I was was probably scared of that too.
In truth, my greatest opus, even with those earliest three years under lock and key, is this very space you are standing in. It’s not all genius or valuable. Some of it’s insecure and whiny and cringe-worthy in retrospect. Some of it helpful in guaging how my opinions have changed over time–my routines and general mood levels. Some of it useful for remembering things–almost like a photograph in words. The way the moon looked or the color of the lake. Sometimes, when I read old entries, they make me also think of what is not there–what was going on that I didn’t write about happening in the wings. Good things and really bad things. Things that I was too afraid to talk about lest I jinx them. Things I was too afraid of to put into words. But even still, so much is here–my giddiness over my first book being accepted. My MFA rants. The first photos of the empty studio space I spent so many years in. Readings and publication woes and notes for projects I was working on. Books I was editing and assembling. My first zine projects and collage exploits. Snippets of poems in progress here and there.
Kristy Bowen, little windows | on blogging

We are blessed to live at a time when we are largely free to embrace what we find meaningful, connecting our choices to what we truly value. That reconnection is profoundly restorative for us, but also resonates well beyond our own lives. Why? Because it’s a step toward healing much greater divides in ourselves and the world around us.
We’ve grown accustomed to division. Early on we learn to value our physical selves by little more than appearance and ability, turning to professionals to manage the symptoms our misunderstood bodies develop. We ignore inner promptings guiding us toward more authentic lives, then expect the resulting misery can be resolved by assigning blame, seeking distraction, or ingesting comfort. We cede our true authority to experts until we no longer recognize it in ourselves.
Laura Grace Weldon, Inner & Outer Coherence

Though I’m a relatively new Canadian, I am a North American of New England settler/colonial stock, and therefore share in the shame of what was done to the indigenous population of this continent. There is no way I can celebrate Canada Day, in light of the discovery of the graves of nearly 1,000 children who died at residential schools — and there will certainly be many more. I urge all of us to spend at least some time this day in reflection and sorrow about the tragedy that took place on this soil, and consideration of what can be done to make reparation.
In addition, the indigenous people have warned repeatedly about the damage being done to the natural world, and have never abandoned their sense of stewardship. Do we need any more proof than the temperatures and wildfires in western Canada, or the recent tornadoes and violent weather here in Quebec? This is a time of reckoning on so many fronts, and we can either bury our heads in the sand, or demand genuine action by our governments, and work individually for change.
Beth Adams, A Somber July 1

Later, I thought about what a strange morning it was–first the biohazardous waste guy shows up to pick up the rotting corpses of last term (safely stored, according to the law, of course) and later I’m asked about hot dogs and the lack of enthusiasm for a contest to shovel a lot of them down our throats.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, My Day in Meat

I made an apple pie my son’s favorite and had a slice for breakfast with coffee which was delicious which made me feel ~~my tiptop best~~ like crap

the neighbors have been shooting off fireworks since Wednesday fireworks that sound like cannons that sound like guns that sound like a rifle pointing at my head

every year on this day I relive my trauma my PTSD reels me to the floor (my bed my little boat where I hold onto the sides as I capsize) I used to think fireworks PTSD was only for soldiers even back in the 1990s before I had a name for it my anxiety cracked me through the roof which looked like my son becoming injured in a horrible accident or the house in flames or me losing my hearing or my cats running away the litany of woes dancing through my blood when I was still expected to show up to bring the giant bowl of potato salad make the pico de gallo with my tomatoes and peppers

bake

the pie
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

Happy Birthday, Red, White and Blue, our fragile young democracy. Young because all the people were given voting rights only with the Civil Rights movements of the ’60s, fragile because those rights to vote are being eroded by forces at the highest levels, democracy because it’s an aspirational idea that way back we dreamt, fought for and put on paper. We are as unstable as water, as pale though tough as volcanic rock, as shiftingly desirable as berries — one nation under an ever-changing composition of values and character beyond our flag’s colors.
Jill Pearlman, The Fruited, Tuffed Red, White & Blue

The next morning I got out the sprinklers to water the blueberry bushes. I thought I’d have a whole summer of berries from them, the way I did last year. Last week I bought a carton from the produce market, thinking they’d likely the be last one I’d have to purchase this year. I thought about childhood summers, where an 85 degree day was a scorcher, and about all the people who filled those days and are now gone from my life forever. I thought about time, and how events of the past year have distorted all my previous sense of it. Or maybe it’s just getting older, and having so many layers of memories that the earlier ones are getting soft as the mildewy pages of an old book.
For the first time since the heat broke, I really examined my blueberry bushes and could see that while my yield will be smaller this year, there will still be some. Among the shriveled husks of some are the plump bodies of others, already ripening and darkening. The morning after I say good-bye to my friend, I focus on those, on feeding them, understanding that I’m always going to want more of everything I love.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Dessication

And of course it is difficult to talk of what beauty can do for the human soul when so many think there is no element in us that could be named as soul. Dissect us, and the soul proves invisible, impossible to capture. We’re materialists! Why not get rid of the past when its beauties can do nothing for a non-existent thing? And so if people never pick up Emily Dickinson’s poems or Fielding’s Tom Jones, well, there’s just no finding out that perhaps works of arts do something strange and potent and stirring to an incorporeal, hard-to-pin part of them.
Meanwhile, in a time of chaos and lack of unity between peoples, Gogol goes on telling us to reach for the highest possible thing in the realm of art. Imagine a making so strong and beautiful and full of energies that it leads to the transformation of all those who encounter it.
Marly Youmans, Stay cool! Winter poem. Gogol on art and transformation.

a-bomb into angel, bullet into bird, catatonia into crazyhorse, drudgery into drum solo, edema into embrace, fear into flying, gag rule into galileo, hacksaw into haiku, inept into indigo, junk mail into jukebox, kaput into keepsake, languish into lambent, mutter into mother, nadir into nighthawk, odious into oath, puddle into parable, quandary into quatrain, reckless into remedy, seethe into symphony, tumor into tuning fork, ulcer into utopia, villain into vesper, weasel into wonderland, xenophobe into xylophone, yoked yuck into yin and yang, zombie logic into zydeco delight.
Rich Ferguson, the reason for meaning

Fences
in the Sandhills
don’t know
what to do —
to hold in,
hold out,
hold on?
Tom Montag, NEBRASKA SANDHILLS (25)

In this chapter there may be time to stop
the course of events. The roof of the world
hasn’t dissolved completely from the heat
of collected emissions. Everything
that would flower is a little bit late,
but it might still be possible to sow
fields without dreading the old
aftermath of armies rising whole
from under each rock. The clocks
haven’t morphed into oversized lips
sliding down from their towers.
Wind stirs the pages, fills sails. Wind
that might actually fuel the change.
Luisa A. Igloria, Penultimate

That we might be folded together like napkins in a drawer.
That midnight might find us close, night after night.
That we might breathe as one, and yet be two.
That time might be our bond, just as the river is bound to the valley.
Yes, like the river and the valley.
James Lee Jobe, Words that grow like sunflowers.

June 27, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 25

I usually like to run and immerse myself in a world of earthly delights. It’s a yes-world, a way of soaking in color, judiciously chosen openness. What would my first long-awaited travel be like, after being sprung from lockdown?
It was immersion, but not the same yes kind — a vast world of strangers, airports made of retractable bands and systems and uniformed people. Alongside immersion was interrogation. I don’t mean security and pat-downs, though that existed — I mean the world interrogating me, and me interrogating the world. It was made of strangers — better word: strange. The settings were familiar — I know airports and Denver, where I have landed many times, with its dung-colored scruff and line of blue mountains in the distance, emptiness that gives way to four, then eight lanes of black suburban highways. It kept asking questions, forming and reforming, my curiosity tinged with neither trust nor distrust. All real, this world I belong to but now, how exactly?
Under all the real things, something was walking with me — the violence of the past year. The idea that the naked truth had been exposed, and dark reality had emerged into plain view. After all that death, what was appearing was a posthumous world. Interrogate that!
Jill Pearlman, World of Curious Delights

One of my favorite juxtapositions in all genres is something beautiful that is also tinged or shot through with darkness. The Conjuring does not look like a horror movie usually would. Even something like Haunting of Hill House, while dark and lovely, seemed like a haunted house from the get go, with crumbling statuary and dark corners. But there is so much light, so much floral wall paper and sun swept floors in this film. How could ghosts live in something so filled with light? Some of the most horrific scenes–the hanging witch over the shoulder, the sheet scene, happen in broad daylight, not in shadowy dark. One of my favorite horror films, It Follows, does this well and has a similar seventies feel–lots of light and daylight and horrific things that live in it.
I have a line in my website’s artist statement about this juxtaposition of the beautiful and the terrible, and I think it may be one of the things I am always striving toward, both written and visual. Collages that seems pretty but are darker (the conspiracy theory pieces for example.) The whole of dark country flirts with this, scenes that seem pretty and subdued, but with a darkness underneath them. (My promo pieces for it are actually set alongside vintage wallpaper samples, and the footage I’ll be using for the book trailer has a similar feel.) The book itself, playing off the photo, is pink–a color I was hoping to be reminiscent of a teen girl’s pink bedroom. And yet, it’s very much a book about horror and things that go bump in the night. Sort of like if you scraped away the floral wallpaper and found the devil underneath.
Kristy Bowen, film notes | beauty and terror

Writing my way backward through intense joy writing my way backward through the beginning solstice writing my way backward through my newly shorn blonde blonde hair writing my way backward through pushing paint around until I stop judging myself writing my way backward to practice writing my way backward through miles (and miles) of jam writing my way backward through the farmers market kettle corn fresh fried doughnut spring onion pink dahlias lolling in my arms writing my way backward into summer dresses writing my way backward into reading writing my way backward I. Hope. Finally. into writing the full moon extraordinary low tides that salt air fragrant woodsmoke from campers at the state park the startled heron in my yard the hoard of giant monarch butterflies that suddenly descended drinking from my hummingbird feeders flickering in and out of vision and my joy unabated this morning I shaved my legs for only the second time in two years and opened all the windows to morning before drowning in cherry light there is no bell box on the door the lantern light casts down hard to my left near my heart I want to volunteer a standard method of gloriously happy
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

My trusty travel box of watercolors has been a good companion during the pandemic: even though I was going precisely nowhere, seeing it on my desk was often an incentive to do a sketch, and the small size of my sketchbook and the paintbox seemed to work in our small apartment, where there’s no place to spread out, or set up an easel. Though I went up to the studio once a week or so, just to check on things, I didn’t do any artwork there because we weren’t really comfortable staying very long. Too many young people and random strangers, too few masks worn in the hallways both by other renters and workmen (although they were required), and the necessity of using shared bathrooms. After getting a first dose of vaccine, I felt better about it, and now that I’ve had the second, I will work there more. Today, in fact, I started a large pastel and it felt like such a relief to work big, and in a different medium. There’s no way I could do a pastel in the apartment, the process is way too messy.
So I’m wondering if maybe these late spring watercolors are the last I’ll do for a while. Probably not, but part of the loosening of restrictions for me feels like it ought to include a creative expansion: bigger work in pastels, oil, and maybe some prints. Besides, I’m just tired of struggling with watercolor, the most difficult medium of all, and working so small. I need a break, and to shake myself up!
Beth Adams, Watercolor Wanes

My son and I head north, his first visit with his grandparents since Christmas, 2019–before Covid, before his discharge from the military. So much has changed.
We have a wonderfully unremarkable visit. We eat lunches out. We watch old movies at night. We sit on the deck and talk. My son and his grandfather go golfing. My mom and I go shopping for an outfit for her to wear to my dad’s high school reunion later in the summer.
After shopping, we get a slice of pizza from a sidewalk window and take it to a table near the beach. It is a perfect day; 76 and sunny, with a hint of breeze.
We reminisce about our visits to town when my children were children, when our time in each shop was limited and every outing included a visit to a now long-closed toy store.
“Remember when we used to talk about how one day we’d have enough time to stay as long as we wanted in the shops?” I ask her. She smiles and nods. “And now it’s that day, and we sit here and talk about missing those days.”
“Yeah,” she says.
We miss the children my children once were, those beings we’ll never get to spend another afternoon with, but This is nice, too, I think. I loved the earlier times–the earlier us–but I love this time, too, even as it contains longing. You’re going to miss this someday, too, I tell myself, and now the moment contains a different kind of longing.
“I guess we never get to have everything we want all at once,” I say.
“That’s for sure,” she answers.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Strawberry season

some kind of moth has settled
on the other lawn chair
here in the tent that keeps away the bugs
I’m listening to Verdi’s Rigoletto
for the third time today
it’s the soundtrack to the novel
that has caught me in its grasp
rain falls gently on the tent
the dog scampers toward me
but he can never find the entrance
somewhere up the hill a cow lows
(if that’s the word I want)
it’s all nearly perfect
which is probably close enough
Jason Crane, POEM: aria

The wind was creating conditions similar to the ones on the day the chop pounding into me created that awful spasm – but unlike that day, the sky was clear and the waves stayed short of whitecaps. It was gentler, and the water temperature could not have been more perfect if I’d calculated it myself. I wasn’t rushed getting in, I had enough space and time to acclimate even stiff muscle.
I wasn’t very conscious of anxiety about the place, because the water there is so glorious and clean, and in spite of the wind, the weather conditions so perfect – just about 85F, water warm on the surface and delightfully cool underneath – that I was just happy to swim.
I was tight with it at first, though.
The less-familiar body of her and how she almost crushed me once.
It was hard to loosen, to lengthen as necessary for a good stroke and easy breathing, so I spoke to her: hello, I said. Again. I’m happy to be with you today, will you have me this time? And she said, in taste and smell and texture and wave: yes, you’re welcome here, and I began to relax.
3,300/two miles later, we were besties.
My swim-mate and I made perfect sighting lines and clean corners, drinking in the sweet, wild, aliveness of the place: raptors soared above, one of them a bald eagle, another a peregrine, another a redtail. A family of geese, the cygnets still messy-feathered, tracked us briefly: a family of ducks, 7 ducklings not even teacup-sized, swam alongside later.
It was hard to stop, and I could have stayed for another round, maybe this time faster – but instead I added a couple hundred to hit 2 miles even, thanked her, and let it be: Highland Lake, amended. Mended. Made joy and safety, as water should be, and usually is.
So relieved, when I realized what sharp edges of past trouble had just been smoothed away.
JJS, Spasm Lake, revisited

In long years, long after the new webbing of my new grown wings
has extended and dried, after my first exultations in the air,

after I am so used to strength and freedom
that this present weakness is a dream: I will come home to this
cold green dark and shadowed river and lay my drops of fire

in the river mud, to glow and blaze and glitter;
you will need both hands to prise one up, should you
be so unwise, and it will carry heat like the pennies

so long ago, when you were a tow-headed boy
and the river-water made you gasp, and red coins
winked in the sun.
Dale Favier, Copper

I don’t want to write today. My computer screens’ backgrounds are black instead of showing the photo I have had on them for four years. It is one of those days. Everything seems to be slightly out of its respective groove. Out of focus. Grinding. Even Leonard, who is lying on the floor next to me, is breathing more heavily than usual. Arhythmically.
On the walk this evening I was thinking about work. Already playing out autumn term scenes in my head that are unlikely to happen and unnecessary to itch about. What’s wrong with me? I’m trying to breathe easily and to listen to the blackbirds. And the train that is passing. And the truth is that once it has passed, the fading sound is pleasurable to focus on. The quieting to a hush. The world goes on. Is going on.
Someone outside is scolding. Leonard takes notice. Stands up. Figures it’s none of his business and lies down again.
These tiny things make up my days now. Sometimes it is difficult to find meaning in them. I mean, isn’t that what we have to do when our lives are stuck: find meaning in/for the small, meaningless things?
I write. I suppose that is an attempt to make meaning. To dig up what’s needed from memory to construct a story I can be satisfied with. That will justify the extra glass of wine, the extra hour of sleep, the dropped obligation.
Dropped obligations – so many of them – swept up into closets and threatening to topple on my head like a bit of slapstick if I ever go there in my mind.
And yet. Walking in the sunshine felt good this evening. It’s been a year since I felt the sun on my face like that. The grass in the field has grown past my waist. A dozen or so oystercatchers were calling while they skimmed the surface of the pond.
Ren Powell, Circular Stories

Further up. Dense shrubs
thickets of berries slubbed
like raw silk, leaves daubed
with stippled insect eggs
or lichen, fungus, swags
of spider webbing, sacs and bags
and butterflies, brute gnats
undeterred by repellent. We swat
stobs, are scratched. The scat
along trailside I recognize as bear
but say nothing, though a fear
threads my ribs tightly where
instinct thumps.
Ann E. Michael, The berries

The television news never speaks of the health of the creatures in the forest or of the deeds of insects. The reporters do not give updates on the growth of the spruce trees or the douglas fir, and no one describes the sound the wind makes in tree branches to the home audience. But the number of COVID-19 deaths? That is information that you cannot escape. Grief is our cloak as the wind blows.
James Lee Jobe, 2 prose poems. Eh

It has been a week of horrifying headlines. I spent much of yesterday toggling back to accounts of the collapse of the condo building in Surfside Beach, even though I knew it was much too early for anyone to know the cause of it.
But I also want to remember this week as one of natural wonders. I began the work week seeing dolphins in a tidal lake near me, and I’m finishing the work week seeing a rainbow in the sky: [photo]
I also noticed the pots of milkweed that we grew from seed. Why does that ability to grow a plant from a seed always seem like a miracle?
Later this week-end, we’ll enjoy this pineapple, grown from a pineapple top that we planted years ago. It, too, feels like a miracle.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Horrifying Headlines and Miracles of Nature

Summer was rind and fruit;
then sudden, humid fermentation.
We held one ear in the direction of rain,
the other open to cricket call.
Not even locusts gathered
as clouds on the horizon.
The fields radiated in all
directions, as though in those
old dreams of possibility.
We tried to take the measure
of this intractable body of heat.
No one had the heart to open
one striped umbrella, one
gaudy beach chair.
Luisa A. Igloria, A Vision

After a long year, it was time to leave the house, and I knew where I was headed. To those early places of sand and sea.
I watched a tug crossing the Coos Bay Bar. Sat on the same jetty I climbed on as a young girl. Found comfort in the smell of ocean. The wind blowing my hair. Remembered bits of a poem by John Masefield called Sea-Fever.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of
the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day and white clouds
flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the
the sea-gulls crying.
It has been a long 15 months—a sitting on the knife’s edge of coming and going.
But I am one of the lucky ones, who has been lucky enough to walk the beach again, grow a garden, give peas to the neighbors, bouquets of flowers to the bedroom, create one small patch in the middle of a changing city, where bees, hummingbirds, and scrub jays, can find a place to land.
Just imagine if moving forward we could all find one small thing that would show this stressed planet how much we love being here and how much we long to stay. What if we wore amulets of sea water around our necks to remind us what holiness is?
Carey Taylor, Sea-Fever

a year and a half of survival
I lived three weeks in a cave
the beds were tombstones
Ama Bolton, ABCD June 2021

I’ve been dreaming of my mother as a younger woman, the way she looked when I was a child and teenager, although in these dreams, she’s also somehow elderly and dying. The night of the summer solstice, she was sick in bed staring at a crack that had just formed on the ceiling. It looked like a man with antlers, and she was afraid of him. The next morning I, of course, went down an internet rabbit hole reading about deer-deities and Horned Gods. Underworld guides and mediators. Huh.
I thought more about the dream as I caught up with fellow poetry bloggers and read Ann Michael’s post “Constricted” about literary blockages related to sorrow. I’m pretty healthy right now, aside from the usual trouble sleeping and some chronic tendonitis (ah, middle age), but I feel the draggy reluctance to work, cook, or take walks that I associate with illness. The heat and humidity, my husband said. Sadness for my daughter, who is going through a rough breakup, is in the mix. But grief for my mother is also moving through my body and mind even when I’m not aware of it. It’s a more complicated, subterranean, barbed process than I would have guessed.
Lesley Wheeler, Snagged in the antlers

A poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer titled, “How it Might Continue” begins:
“Wherever we go, the chance for joy,
whole orchards of amazement —
one more reason to always travel
with our pockets full of exclamation marks,
so that we might scatter them for others
like apple seeds.”
I found this poem in the “Indie Poetry Bestseller” — What the World Needs Now: Poetry of Gratitude and Hope. And to be honest, I almost did not pick up this book, partly because of the word bestseller, and because of late I have become so freaking bitter and jaded. There it is, the truth, haha. But then I noticed that Ross Gay who wrote a book I love, The Book of Delights had written the foreword. So I was first a little swayed by the word “indie” and then more so by the name, Ross Gay. And I was right to be swayed. I was worried that the poetry would be light and frothy, but instead found that it is steadying and real.
The thing is, that in the proper context, talk of gratitude is helpful. (When it’s just offered as a chaser to the usual, “remember to breathe and drink water” platitudes I can’t help but roll my eyes). In the intro, the editor, James Crews quotes David Steindl-Rast who said, “In daily life, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy.” Crews says that this book is a model for “the kind of mindfulness that is the gateway to a fuller, more sustainable happiness that can be called joy.” And “We may survive without it, but we cannot thrive.” I love that the book has reading group questions in the back. I would definitely choose this for a book club book at the library, for example. And as it turns out this book and the wonderful array of writers and poems did lead me back to joy, at least a little joy, a small pocket of joy. And you know what? I’ll take that.
Shawna Lemay, Pockets Full of Exclamation Marks

Excited to share that my next book, we say Yes way before you, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in March 2022! You can read about the project as well as two poems from it in this profile. Special thanks to Diane Goettel and the BLP crew for being so welcoming!
Been sitting on this news for a few weeks. I actually got the phone call a day or two before we moved all our belongings to a new city. I’ve been going through a difficult time specifically in terms of how I see myself as a writer. Getting this news was a win I didn’t know I needed.
Part of this new book process has me writing for permissions, something that is new to me and which this article by Jane Friedman gives invaluable advice about. Along with learning a new literacy and genre of writing, there’s the work of reconciling the metaphor in the language, the word permission itself. I often get stuck in such conceptual/metaphorical tangents while doing the “office work” type of things of a writing life. The very language of publication–submission, rejection, acceptance, etc.–is charged with (un)intentional and telling meaning.
José Angel Araguz, book news & co.

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?
I set myself deadlines, and find that concentrates my mind. I write notes on my phone and always keep a pen and paper on my bedside locker, ready to record a dream or some thought that comes to me in the night – if I wait until morning, the notion will have dissolved with the dark, and nothing I do will entice it back to me.

I need to be at my desk every day and write, waiting for inspiration is just procrastination and doesn’t work.

I try to get the first draft down in one or two days. Re-writes and edits can take days or weeks, longer sometimes. Often the completed poem bears little resemblance to the seed from which it grew.
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?
My poems used to arrive from ideas that needed to be shaped by words, but now my poems begin with phrases or words or things in the world that startle themselves, and me, by being things in the world.
Stories begin with language; I love listening to people talk, to steal a bit of their talk for dialogue.
Curiously, it’s not until I’m putting a poetry collection together that I identify themes running through series of the poems, which I put into sections in the book.
Poems arrive over time, often unbidden, and they will declare their bruises if they’re pressed into a ‘book’ shape for the sake of a theme.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eleanor Hooker

Go more wild, was the advice about a recent poem draft. I know what she meant. Sort of. But how?
She meant let the poem leap more, keeping the reader surprised and fleet on her feet. Let my mind go more wild, she meant.
So I said, Okay, mind, go more wild. But it just sat there. Jump! I said. Dance, you varmint! Nothing. I felt like Toad (of Frog and) trying to get his garden to grow, jumping up and down and yelling at the seeds.
But I realized, actually thanks to the Rick Barot book I’m reading, that when my poems get leapy, it’s not because my mind has leaped but rather because it has picked up shiny objects like a crow, objects that are similar, or reflect each other. In one poem in Barot’s The Galleons, he mentions an old woman at a casino, Gertrude Stein, time, a food court, lost languages, extinct birds, Keats. Some of these act as metaphors, some more as associations. Not so much “like” as “as.”
When my mind is usefully gathering, it’s catching the glimpse of connections as I read or listen or watch in the world. At times I’m stunned by the ways in which books and articles I seemingly randomly pick up to read begin to resonate with each other. At times like these, I can just reach out and pluck ideas as they whirl in front of me, so tuned am I to what I’m thinking about that the act feels almost mindless, like reaching for pistachios in a bowl. Later at the page, I’ll do the work of figuring out how to present the images or ideas in a networked way.
Marilyn McCabe, Can’t make no connection; or, On Poetry and Creative Association

reading a poem
i look for the like button
the book quivers
Jim Young [no title]

Happy to have an interview I did for Redactions Issue 25 with poet, friend, and publisher Kelli Russell Agodon about her new book with Copper Canyon Press, Dialogues with Rising Tides, available online and in the new print issue. Here’s a quick quote:
“JHG: You have an interesting philosophy about the attitude of competition and scarcity in the poetry world. Could you talk a little about that?
KRA: I guess I do have an interesting philosophy in that regards – I believe in the poetry world, there is enough for everyone. I reject the scarcity mindset that the field is only big enough for so many of us and only so many can come to play. That’s nonsense, we can always use another poet. And we don’t have to feel threatened by them, that now there will be one less spot for me to publish my poems…Just because a poet doesn’t win a prize, doesn’t mean that their book isn’t changing someone else’s life this very moment or having a profound effect on someone. I have never believed success can be measured in art – people try to measure it based on American beliefs such as “this book is better because it 1) sold more copies 2) won a prize 3) was published by a certain press 4) was featured in a certain journal or magazine 5) got an excellent review 6) made the author earn X number of dollars” and so on. . . . Who said that was success? Who wrote that definition? That’s not my definition of success – my idea of success isn’t built from opinion and numbers.”
Here is a link to read it.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, My Interview with Kelli Agodon in Redactions, Some Scenes of Hummingbirds, Supermoons, and Mt Rainier, 100 plus Heat Wave

A correspondence on haiku and then sonnets led me to dip into Don Paterson’s 1999 anthology 101 Sonnets (Faber). I was pleased to find Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ included. It’s the only poem I’ve ever ‘borrowed’ from – I used the equally punning phrase ‘blooming sun’ in the first poem, concerning a herd of cows in County Down, which I had published, in Poetry Ireland Review, appropriately, in 1987.
I bought a copy of, and was greatly affected by, Kavanagh’s Collected Poems in my first year at university, in 1985/86. That was around the time that Tom MacIntyre’s play adaptation of Kavanagh’s masterpiece, ‘The Great Hunger’, was finishing a triumphant run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which had revived interest in a poet whose posthumous reputation had, it seems, not been as high as it ought to have been, despite advocacy from the likes of Heaney and Montague. (The play incidentally reminds me of Paul Durcan’s poem, ‘What Shall I Wear, Darling, to The Great Hunger?’ which I saw him read at Coleraine in, I think, 1990.)
Paterson’s verdict on Kavanagh’s sonnet is brief but mostly spot-on:
This is about as good as it gets – effortless rhymes, effortless accommodation of natural speech to the form – and that lovely pun on ‘blooming’. Fine witty poem on the predicament of the provincial aesthete.
The Predicament of the Provincial Aesthete sounds rather like the title of an Angus Wilson novel.
I like the way that the first half of the octet is packed full of an energy and activity which is deliberately lacking from the second half, as if the ‘mile of road’ could be in a Beckett play or a Jack B. Yeats painting. The three phrases which stand out from the octet – ‘the half-talk of mysteries’, ‘the wink-and-elbow language of delight’ and (‘not / A footfall tapping secrecies of stone’ – are perfect: economical yet conveying some sort of magic in the air.
The turn of the poem is a large one: whereas the octet is entirely observation of the all-seeing narrator, the sestet moves into the personal. Poems which talk about poetry are often dull as ditch-water, but here the comparison with the model for Robinson Crusoe leads the reader, this one at least, to consider whether Kavanagh was doing more than a sketch of ‘the predicament of the provincial aesthete’. Do these six lines, especially the couplet, not give a sense, again, that a poet anywhere is as isolated as Selkirk was, and, like an old-time traveller or tramp, ‘king / Of banks and stones and every blooming thing’. That would do for me.
Matthew Paul, On Kavanagh, Hughes, Burra and Sisson

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading Marco Fraticelli’s Night Coach (Guernica Editions, 1983) this week. The book was published in 1983, so I’m playing catch up (as I am with haiku publications in general) but after reading Drifting, I wanted to get to know Fraticelli’s work a bit more. And reading Drifting beforehand really enriched my reading experience of this collection. Night Coach contains some beautiful haiku. Many are love poems, some tender, some erotic, and the illustrations by Marlene L’Abbe are spare and powerful, perfectly complementing the text. […]
The inspiration for the later collection, Drifting, came from Fraticelli’s discovery of some letters in an abandoned house, and there’s a sense of walking through some of those empty rooms in one or two poems in Night Coach. For example:
A religious calendar
In the dead man’s room
And maps pinned to the walls
There’s just enough here to hint at a narrative, while leaving space for the reader to construct their own. A small number of the Night Coach poems do appear in Drifting, for example:

Moonlight on ice
The farmer carries heavy rocks
In his dreams

I’m tempted to say that the word ‘heavy’ might be superfluous here, but it does add emphasis – there’s a sense of burden, of exhaustion, of getting nowhere, and that cold ‘moonlight on ice’ lights up the scene, as though we’re watching the man’s struggle.
Julie Mellor, Night Coach by Marco Fraticelli

Aside from tweaking yesterday’s poem, I have managed to lay waste to the morning without much accomplishment. Unlike yesterday, when I was a weeding demon in the garden, and also cut down the leaves of autumn crocuses (croci!) that will magically return as flowers in the fall… What a weird emblem of resurrection they are! The big broad leaves of spring turn brown and die, and the the autumn ravishment comes, dreamy and floating and leafless. Spirit flowers…

Despite having wasted my precious time, today I am pleased with the thought that at 4:00 p.m. for approximately 30 minutes (if you believe the prophecies of the weather mages), it will hit 80 degrees. I do not really believe the online weather mages but am still pleased (being a Southerner not adjusted to Yankeedom despite all these years here) by the hope.

And I am also idly, not particularly seriously, wondering if the world has changed so much that it’s really not mine anymore, and so it’s a good thing that I live a mostly unseen life in an obscure little village. Out there in the world, do people read books anymore? Do they read poetry? And if they do, do they read what’s called free verse and / or formal poetry (the thing we used to call “poetry”?)

Are poets and writers like modern-day lacemakers, addicted to making things of beauty and truth? Everybody loves the idea of beautiful handmade lace, but few have any. (What does it mean for lace to be truthful? Well-made, I suppose. Delicate but strong.) Maybe for a marriage? For a wedding dress?

Except some of us elope and need no lace.

I eloped.
Marly Youmans, Late morning thoughts

up and down the boulevard, we ponder, we prowl; we hope, we howl.
and while our grammar may be a bit rusty and restless from being stuck in the slammer of solitude for so long,
I hear our summer parades will only be rained upon by non-fretting confetti.
Rich Ferguson, Up and down the boulevard

June 20, 2021June 20, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 24

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: midsummer meditations on flow and current, invention and re-invention, translation and migration, food and domesticity, Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and more.

If you make a bowl of your hands
and let it fill with light, how will you keep it? It spills
and the moving air takes it. That high-strung English boy
thought it was seed for the west wind, but it is only the splash
of a ruined vessel. All of the made things break;
all of the leaves crumble. The pouring rain smells of tannin,
the mud runs clean, and the gutters fill with yellow and orange and red.
Please let this rain never end. Let this one be the last.
Dale Favier, A Prayer for the Last Rain

I’m open to doing other work, and the universe keeps putting job openings in my path that are enticing, but I haven’t applied for any. I’m making myself take a real break from employment first. I got my first job at 15, and other than the first few weeks of my freshman year of college, I’ve never been without one since. Even when I was on bedrest with my twins, I still did freelance editing gigs.
It all feels weird and uncomfortable and sad and strange and exciting. Sort of like being a teen-ager, but with a whole lot more insight and knowledge–about time, love, and myself.
I think I’m ready to start writing here again. Words have been knocking at the door of my head for a little while now, and I think there’s enough space cleared that I can begin to let them in.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Oh, hey there. It’s me again…

Juneteenth . . .
I free myself
from illusions
Bill Waters, Juneteenth

This week Peter Kenny and I got our 16th episode of Planet Poetry up and out … yesterday in fact… it would have been Thursday but I hadn’t finished editing it plus had a schoolpals meetup that afternoon then a Needlewriters event in the evening to co-host. This week the interviewee is Helen Ivory – a fine poet and a wonderful guest, fascinating, fun and generous. Do have a listen. Peter and I also chat about what we’ve been reading lately: Tomas Transtromer (me) and Robert Hamberger (Peter), then we get a tiny bit grumpy about this and that, as per usual!
There’s been so much to learn about podcasting and we’re still very much learning. Something we’re planning to have is an actual website sometime. We’ve got the domain, we’ve got the hosting and we’ve got the know-how. Just a bit more time required. Peter and I are a tad busier than when we started it last October! What we both agree on though is how it has opened us up to so much poetry that’s new to us and so many interesting poets and editors. It’s also super to get the occasional nice feedback, because when we’re recording it we do sometimes wonder if anyone’s going to be listening!
Robin Houghton, A sick kitty, Arvon, podcasting and MA latest

Here comes that voice of an out-of-tune piano going through puberty.
That voice of disillusioned lion tamers and agoraphobic elevators.
Here comes that voice of corpse flowers, halitosis, and half-witted party clowns down to their last balloon animal trick.
Here’s that voice of an expired driver’s license and siren lights in the rearview mirror.
That voice of an unemployed fortune-teller turned street preacher.
Here comes that voice of a grenade cross-dressing as a blade of grass.
Constipated jackhammers, clogged sinks, computers on the blink.
Here’s that voice of every moronic thing I’ve said and all the witty and insightful things I wish I’d said—
all those voices, and more, coming at me while I continue waiting on hold for someone from my bank to pick up the phone.
Rich Ferguson, Hardly a Party Line

The ghosts of COVID-19 are asking for new names and new faces. They come to me in the night and whisper their absurd requests in my ear. I am never frightened, but I also never oblige them; I offer them poems instead. So far not one ghost has accepted.
James Lee Jobe, 2 prose poems.

I only care about Bloomsday as a sort of cosmic accident. When I got to grad school and pored over the list of classes I could take, I discovered that most of them were full. As a new grad student, I was last to register. And so I found myself in Tom Rice’s class on James Joyce. What a life-changing experience that was.

I notice that several of the stories from Dubliners show up in anthologies, even first year literature anthologies. But would I have ever had the patience to wade through Ulysses all by myself? Absolutely not.
Bloomsday celebrates the day, June 16, on which all the action in Ulysses takes place. The book covers almost every kind of action that can take place in a human day: we see Leopold Bloom in the bathroom, we see Stephen Dedalus pick his nose, we see Leopold Bloom masturbate . . . and we finally get to the masterful final chapter, where Molly Bloom muses on the physicality of being a woman.
As with many books, whose scandalous reputations preceded them, I read and read and waited for the scandalous stuff. As a post-modern reader, I was most scandalized by how difficult it was. It’s hard to imagine that such a book would be published today.
But what a glorious book it is. What fun Joyce has, as he writes in different styles and plays with words. What a treat for English majors like me, who delighted in chasing down all the allusions.
I went on to write my M.A. thesis on Joyce, trying to prove that he wasn’t as anti-woman as his reputation painted him to be. Since then, other scholars have done a more thorough job than I did. But I’m still proud of that thesis. I learned a lot by writing it. At the time, it was the longest thing I had ever written–in the neighborhood of 50 pages. A few years later, I’d be writing 150 pages as I tackled my dissertation–on domestic violence in the Gothic. By the time I’d written my thesis, I had said all I had to say on Joyce.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Bloomsday Fuss

In the brain melting heat of last week, I pulled out a very short book I’ve read many times but it was the only thing I thought I could concentrate on. And what a pleasure it was again. Poet friends, if you have any interest at all in translation and you have not read this book, please find a copy of it: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger with additional commentary by Octavio Paz. My MFA experience was not my favorite life experience, but it brought me to this book, for which I am forever grateful.
Presented is a 4 line poem of 5 characters per line, by Wang Wei, a Chinese poet from the 700s, written in an ancient Chinese literary language no longer spoken. A rough character-by-character English approximation is offered, and then 19 different translations from both scholarly-oriented and poetry-oriented translators, each with a short observation by Weinberger, often containing some delightful asperity. For example, he says of one attempt: “Thus Liu’s version is more accurate than most, but the first two lines heave, the third gasps, and the fourth falls with a thud on the mossy ground.”
But even as he is being impatient with a particular translation attempt, Weinberger is very forthcoming about the enormity of the translation task, detailing some of the challenges of translation in general, and particularly, translating a tonal language with a tradition of strict syllabics.
Marilyn McCabe, Hey, that’s no way to say…; or, On Translating Wang Wei

Shash Trevett’s debut pamphlet, From a Borrowed Land (Smith|Doorstop) begins with what feels like a cleansing, or perhaps a renewal. As a recent arrival to the UK as a refugee from the Sri Lankan civil war, in the first line of the opening poem, ‘New Words, New Clothes’, the speaker declares: “I discarded the words first”, immediately evoking not so much a sense of loss as one of self-will . The verb discard is surprising here, it is a deliberate action, not a passive one; we do not get the sense, even in a strange new country, that the “mute silence” she finds herself in is something happening to her, but rather it is being done by her; and I think there is a manifesto of strength in this short opening line. The speaker then begins observing – “I watched and learned like a mynah bird” – and building, as she replaces one language with another, transmogrifies one into another would be closer, as Trevett uses Tamil script (“அ became A”) to emphasise the physical transformation entailed in the process of language learning.
After a while through whispers and croaks
new words emerged
in the borrowed tongue of a borrowed land.
This first poem gives an authentic sense of a new-language user’s building confidence, from the symbol-changes, to the child-like simplicity of Edward Lear’s nonsense alphabet lines, to the “single, stuttering, borrowed syllables”, to the final graceful torrent implicit in “and the new words began to flow”. The new words, like a new set of clothes, have transformed the speaker, made her new again as she has escaped the painful history contained in her own language.
Chris Edgoose, Bearing the Beauty of Music

The Bidoon literati did not think of themselves as constituting a distinct group within a literary community of foreigners in a country whose cultural sector had collapsed in the wake of the Gulf War. They simply considered themselves individuals on the margin, so there were no attempts to present Bidoon writing as necessary or urgent. Most of them found a comfortable space for themselves in poetry—where it was comparatively less dangerous to write about identity and belonging and pillaging. Some critics traced the Bidoon preference for poetry over prose narration back to their Bedouin culture, which would be a reasonable enough interpretation if it wasn’t for its narrow horizons. The funny thing is that poetry was not actually ever safe as far as the Bidoon were concerned: all of us have always heard about visits by state security to poets’ homes, or decisions to fire Bidoon from the Kuwaiti press. Fahd Aafat is perhaps the most famous example of this, given that he disappeared into the prison system for a while on account of a poem that was interpreted as satirizing the Kuwaiti Emir, before later reappearing as a migrant in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. […]
In exile, I have met other Gulf peoples. Their origins on paper are India, or Iran, or Egypt, or the Philippines, and some of them write in English, but they were born and raised in the Gulf and then ended up in exile for one reason or another. They define themselves as “a writer from Abu Dhabi” or “a poet from Dubai” even though some of them don’t speak Arabic. Through reading their textural conjuring of a whole other Gulf I came to understand that my imagination had fallen victim to definitions of national literature. How have state institutions in the entire Arab world pulled off corroborating the notion of national literature as literature written by citizens, and necessarily in Arabic? Literature linked to state identity and state narratives, rather than to geography, which is in reality the natural vessel for any creative act. The state formation system across the Arab world—or even across the Third World as a whole—has been downloaded like a revelation received on the same template everywhere: in order to create your state, you must manufacture a folkloric culture, a literature, some arts and a traditional local dress, and then the lie is bound to become truth. Gamal Abdel Nasser dispatched his specialist committees to every corner of the Gulf, to organize cultural operations and trajectories that have come to be repeated ever since by successive generations of citizens who guard over them, their chests swelling with pride. And within these violent operations, no one leaves any space for the migrant or the Bidoon—or any other passerby stranded along with them—to join in and contribute with their own cultural production.
Mona Kareem, Bidoon: A Cause and Its Literature Are Born

we know so little about the journey :: when canyon smells of moon and mind
Grant Hackett [no title]

We slip back into the current
            of ourselves as if there hadn’t been
a break; as if the year didn’t add
           long intervals of silence that branched
across the four dimensions of space.
           We’re eager to throw back
the shutters and put away
           the books of the dead—
Do they miss how near we came; how
           the wilderness between us at times
seemed as close as a wick to flame?
Luisa A. Igloria, We slip back into the current

I have finally decided on what my new poetry manuscript is—or, I’ve almost decided.
Poems about my childhood on a farm, about the farm and about the trees on the farm, about the people and animals there, and (especially) about my parents up to and including their deaths. It’s been an exhausting though rewarding journey, choosing which 60 poems would stand in for all the other poems I’ve written on these subjects.
My tentative title is The Dryad, which appears to be incomprehensible (to date) to about 1/20th of people I’ve shared it with. (My friend Karen says, “Keep it. They can look it up.”)
Subjects not in the book: waitressing, most of the 1,000,000 poems about my daughters (if the poem was set on a visit to the farm, it was fair game), poems explicitly about my marriage, poems about teaching, poems about recent politics, COVID-19, and so forth. Just farm poems and mom/dad poems (since our parents sort of are our geography, it all makes sense. I hope).
One part of my process has been reading many many poetry books by other people, with a steely eye looking out for book structure. Even though my mss. Is almost there, I’m still reading other poets’ books, and this week I am reading two books by Barbara Crooker.
A poet who writes about cows (and she does) never has any trouble winning my heart.
Bethany Reid, What Poetry Books Are Made of

I’m reading poems again for a literary magazine and I found myself leaving a cranky comment on the submission site about how poems about food bore me. I try not to leave cranky comments even though they are only seen by the editorial staff, but I could not stay silent any longer. There is no food experience I have ever had, no matter how toothsome or novel, that has inspired me to write a poem about it. I don’t care a whit about pomegranates or orange pulp or dates or fragrant stews or fresh-baked bread. Those thing are all fine and good, but my philosophy has always been, it’s just food. Eat and move on already. What’s with the fascination? It makes me wonder if I am somehow missing out on something. Like maybe I have a dulled sense of taste or that something fundamental to the human experience of food consumption is missing within me. I do often find myself annoyed that I have to eat and at odds with my stomach’s insistence that it’s hungry, so maybe there is something wonky in that part of my brain. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a food experience amazing enough to inspire poetry, but I am solidly middle-aged and it hasn’t happened yet. (All this reminds me that I ate turtle stew once. It was okay.)
Kristen McHenry, Mild Hypochondria, Food Anhedonia, Emotional Growth

I hope there are poems about sandwiches. There are Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, but I hope there are poets writing sandwich poems right now. Or at least their own lunch poems.
I hope someone makes you a sandwich for your journey. I hope someone wraps you up a sandwich for your busy work day so you don’t have to run out of the office and stand in a too long line-up. I hope someone knows what your favourite sandwich is. I hope you smile when you open it up. I hope you also get chips or a pickle to go with. I hope your sandwich is a deep comfort to you. I hope your sandwich brings up a good memory. I hope your sandwich isn’t too soggy or too dry. If you made it yourself, I hope your sandwich reminds you that you’re worth all the sandwiches. I hope you have something good to read with your sandwich, and just the right drink — a Diet Coke, or an orangina, or a glass of cold white wine, or maybe a coffee. I hope your sandwich is satisfying and I hope your sandwich tides you over.
Shawna Lemay, The Emotional Life with Respect to Sandwiches

Sometimes when I wash the dishes, I am seized by the notion that I can attain some kind of transcendent absolute, will have brushed my scrubby against a joyful, radiant beauty if I can just clean every speck, every burnt skirmish from the surface of the pots and pans. It’s a lovely idea really, but perhaps I’d be better off cleaning the dishes reasonably well, learning to appreciate the imperfections and burned-on rice fragments, and then leaving the kitchen and playing saxophone or organizing poetry readings which have a stubby, spattered, ill-attended beauty all of their own. Poetry is great at asking questions, at destabilizing and making us look things (language, life, baboons, dishes, abstractions) in a different or renewed way, asking where is the poem coming from –who and why are behind or in the poem—and what is the occasion that it was made for or presented. And how do we read things, including ourselves? What is stuff: language, the world, ideas, values, communication, looking, reading, hearing, speaking, listening, witnessing, making, power, bodies, hierarchies, values, life, poetry, thinking. And how are things connected to other things. What’s going on and what isn’t. Creative rioting, writhing, riting. Rising.
Gary Barwin, Washing the Dishes: Ars Poetica

Recently, I’ve been trying to thin out my book pile, and I’ve got rid of a few poetry books that, for whatever reason, I don’t think I’ll go back to. I’ve even managed to sell three on eBay for a small profit! Of course, the chances are that whatever space I’ve created on the book shelf will soon be swallowed up. However, one thing I’ve decided to do more of is make use of libraries. I ordered Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Dharma Bums’ last week, and this week got an email saying it was ready to collect. No charge as it was in the area. I’m impressed by the speed of that. No doubt for collections of haiku I’ll have to make a request outside my local area, so the wait will be longer. After all, haiku is a niche area to say the least.
Another great resource is The Haiku Foundation’s digital library. After a presentation at the Spring Gathering, I wanted to read ‘Drifting’ by Marco Fraticelli. Luckily, there it was, in the archive. Not that I’m a big fan of reading on the screen, but the instant availability won me over. Drifting is a collection of diary extracts by a woman called Celesta Taylor (written between 1905 and 1916) compiled by, and coupled with, haiku by Marco Fraticelli. As such, the collection is a haibun narrative, a poignant examination of love and loss set against a backdrop of financial hardship, domestic drudgery and ill health. This might sound too downbeat, but the writing is beautifully pitched and there’s a sense of lightness in the haiku that functions as a counterpoint to the bleak reality of Celeste’s lot. The extract below gives a flavour of the book, and I hope it whets your appetite enough to follow the link and read it for yourselves – Drifting.
Julie Mellor, Drifting

Throughout wifthing, McCarthy blends contemporary perspectives with Medieval experiences in the terrain of women through mothering, daughtering and the dreaded, dissolute “thing-ness” of how female work, thought, action and birth have been devalued generally and very specifically, cited as little more than the property of men. She writes a dialogue of previously unspoken, unrecorded and unheralded women and their experiences, writing to recover the absences and dismissals of history. “you get what you get & you don’t get upset,” she writes, in an early “margerykempething,” “margery kempe gives birth in a hairshirt / queen victoria in a shift nightdress / gives birth nine times & then her daughterthing / gives birth in same a braid with & against / the wisp patience is not her pigeon [.]” Or, as the poem that immediately follows opens: “there were two types of daughterthings the ones / who purposely stepped on ginkgo ovules / & the ones who picked their ways around them [.]” She writes on female agency, from childhood to marriage; she writes on female desire, sexuality, motherhood and the complications that can arise postpartum. Engaged with deep and ongoing research, McCarthy explores the lives of Medieval women, writing the two sides of the long view: “you are the shape of my midlife crisis / margery kempe where is your body / the cairn to mark you,” she writes, early on in the collection. As she cited in the chapbook edition, “margerykempething” took its title from the Book of Margery Kempe, the manuscript of which that sits in the British Library. It is an edition that sits as a single copy, giving Margery Kempe the title of “first English autobiographer.”
rob mclennan, Pattie McCarthy, wifthing

On weekends, my Youtube viewing schedule is largely plus-size fashion or thrifting hauls, a smattering of van and cabin life programming (aspirationally), some weird paranormal and urban legend stuff, and artist studio vlogs. All of it happens while I am working on other things–cleaning, folding books, etc, so my concentration is rarely focused, but Sunday I was watching a painter do a study of a flower, kneeling carefully on the ground in her yard and it occurred to me how I very rarely attempt to render what is there in the physical world. She would begin with a sketch, then moved closer to do more detail work. While ultimately her pieces were a bit abstract and not true-to-life, it was definitely a different approach to creating that abstract object. While I have painted many flowers and trees and landscapes, they usually come not from something observed in the real world, but much more, the imagined. Or the developmental, what appears and can be finessed from whatever happens on the page when I start raking the brush across it. Much is experimental and more about process–drips and smudges and color variations. So much more about color and mood and a hint of realness, but no real efforts toward verisimilitude.
It occurred to me that my approach to writing is very similar, and poetry, by its nature may be as well. So much is color and shade and music, maybe a hint of story pulling it along like an engine. I’ve often thought about how my work is definitely split along the demarcation line–circa 2004, when I began my first attempts at visual work. The poems before were like trying to paint that flower but always feeling like I came up short. I knew exactly what I was trying to do, what I was trying to say, but like that perfectly rendered flower, I failed. I was never happy with the work. The writing process, while I liked to have done it, was tolerable, but scarcely enjoyable. More like kneeling in the sun on my heels uncomfortably for hours, only to get back inside and find I’d done the bloom no justice whatsoever. And so it was like this poem after poem–all the way through my first book manuscript. I’m not sure I would have stayed in the game had it always been like this book after book, poem after poem.
In 2004 and 2005, something shifted. The process of writing became much more like an assemblage. Of words, of images, of feelings and fragments. I did a lot of collage-style writing and incorporating found texts then. Would keep a notebook close to me to catch the stray line or images for later. I would pluck a few and stick them down on the page and move them around to see what developed. Some of it was word-salad, but some of it took shape into solid things. The best part was never knowing what I was going to get, so I was always delighted when I got anything at all. It didn’t have to look like a real flower or say the thing I most desperately wanted to say, mostly because it would create even more beautiful flowers, say things that i would never, with my intentions, think to say. Sometimes, the most interesting narratives and themes came from the subconscious or the happenstance. There was a certain flow that made writing, if not always easier, highly enjoyable. Without expectations, everything was a success, no matter how small.
Kristy Bowen, the painter and the poem

I’m embracing the dialectic aspect of being a grown-up. The circling back. My students are my teachers in so many ways. Instead of a deeper education, I am getting a broader education in all that it is to be human. I have let go of the stupid notion that I’ve “seen it all” (at any age) and realize that if I believe that – that I have seen it before – I’m not looking closely enough at the details. What knowledge I have from before might offer itself as a key to unlocking something, but it isn’t the solution itself. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Until this year I struggled with the division of my efforts: nurturing other people’s talents, and making room for my own creative work/practices. I thought that the former sucked energy from the latter. But I am beginning to see how it doesn’t work like that. There is no either-or. That’s an excuse.
The occupation of teaching is the continuing education that is necessary for my vocation as an artist. For my growth. It connects me to a world beyond my own narrow perspective, and it keeps me soft and strong and capable of kneading the big emotions.
Ren Powell, Circling Back

Regardless of the challenge I was facing, from academic or artistic endeavors, to finding my way at a big university, to starting a business, my father always encouraged me to persevere, to be fair in all my dealings, concentrate on doing my own work tot he best of my ability rather than worrying about the competition, and to learn from my mistakes. If I had agreed to do something, or take a course, or learn something new, the rule was that I couldn’t stop in the middle, but had to see it through for the agreed-upon duration. His other mantra was “a thing worth doing at all is worth doing well.” I took that to heart as well. In combination with the influence of the strong women of my family, he also gave me the confidence to believe I could do whatever I wanted as a woman. I got my outgoing nature and love of humor from him, too. And in our nuclear family we had a rule: never let the sun go down on your anger.
My dad and I don’t agree about everything, of course, but we’ve kept to that rule, we’ve always been close, and there’s an unshakable bond of love and loyalty between us. It’s been hard not to see each other in person during these months of the pandemic and a closed border, but we’ve kept in touch by frequent phone calls and the occasional zoom. Today, at last, I received my second vaccination, and hope to be able to go down to see him in the fairly near future, so that’s something to celebrate in addition to Father’s Day. Dad, je t’embrasse!
Beth Adams, Happy Father’s Day

At school we had to pray they’d be forgiven,
those trespassers, who rambled viking fells,
ghylls and cloughs, sour gritstone moors
and green lanes cropped by mourning sheep.
They knew the land they walked should not be owned,
wished it was theirs; coveted the cottages
of the small stone villages, their tidy gardens.
Those men like my father, the woollen spinner,
namer of birds; presser of wild flowers.
John Foggin, Fathers Day

One of the wonderful things about Port Townsend is the ocean and the wildlife – so different from the woods and gardens of our home. We saw at least ten seals, several eagles, and tons of deer, including two little fawns. It was odd to go back and find some things changed – an old boat dock at Fort Warden that otters used to love to run across with their pups was torn down, to our dismay, and a roundabout in the road that was never there, plus some ugly development where there used to only be old growth forest. And an old-growth rose bower at Chetzemoka Park had been cut back almost to the root. We’ve only been absent a year or two, and yet…all these changes.
Another wonderful thing about Port Townsend is that besides offering beautiful views, fascinating flora and fauna, is that several of my friends (and soon, my little brother) live nearby. So I got to have a spontaneous afternoon coffee visit with poet friend Kelli Russell Agodon. We got to catch up on poetry news, then we hiked around a bit, birdwatched, and got rained on multiple times.
We talked about her latest book from Copper Canyon Press, we talked about my projects-in-progress, and generally I was reminded about the positive way that writer friends can help support our dreams and goals. After a year and a half of mostly staying in touch through phone calls, it is especially nice to be seeing people in person. It made me feel grateful.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Port Townsend Visit, Happy Solstice, and Appreciating Things While the Sun Stands Still

an ocean in a field
leading down to the sea
waving on an onshore
prevailing to be
a meadow in mist
the breath of a cow
morning thoughts
a series of how
can it be
this season of me
when all of the spaces
between spaces
lead down to the sea
Jim Young, to the sea

I am forcing myself to write despite my sense that the flow, such as it is, has narrowed. I’m keenly aware that there’s a lot of material beyond the blockage and opening the floodgates may be as unmanageable as the “dry period” is unrewarding. Funny thing about balance. Keeping the seesaw level–no easy task. And as my peers and I progress toward aging, the constriction metaphor applies all too well. Many people I know now walk around with plastic or metal tubes inserted in their interiors to keep vital organs ‘flowing.’ My mother’s brain operates through constricted blood vessels, and now she can barely produce an understandable sentence. My lower back’s accumulating calcium deposits that have narrowed the path my spinal cord takes as it does its daily, necessary work.
Sometimes the flow of anything gets constricted. In our bodies. In the earth’s rivers. In our cities and houses: clogging and backups, plumbing and traffic. We implant stents, dig culverts, widen highways, remove the blockage–once we have determined where it is. There’s the challenge. Where is the rub that keeps us from our dreams? (Hamlet couldn’t figure it out, either).
Ann E. Michael, Constricted

These are not your
Sandhills to write
about, the wind
tells the poet.
The poet doesn’t
listen to the wind,
but to the stars.
Tom Montag, NEBRASKA SANDHILLS (10)

My poems often engage with strangeness, but the first poem in this new book was haunted in new ways. This poem describes the night a family comes apart. It’s a moment I’d been trying to write for over twenty years. I’d almost given up when, drafting one morning, I let a bit of the strangeness of my recent fairy-tale poems cross over into this piece. That is to say, while I was drafting, ghost wolves showed up in the poem’s backyard. It’s actually a little less surprising than it sounds; these wolves had been a part of my dreams since childhood.
When I made room for them in this poem, though, something happened—not only to this draft, but to the next, and the next. Those wolves stuck around. They began taking up space, inviting their wildness and magic into the mix, and redefining what danger, safety, and even story meant in, and to, those memories.
From what places can you pull strangeness into your writing? If inviting it into your work feels challenging at first, try starting a dream journal. Keep a small notebook by your bed (or your phone), and when you wake—during the night, or first thing in the morning—take down odd images that linger from your dreams. Don’t worry about accuracy: allow whatever dream imagery, shapes and colors you recall—animals, weather, odd phrases—to lead you to words and images by association. Follow the flow; fill in the dream’s blanks. When you sit down to draft, open that journal back up, and copy out the more resonant bits. Let them seep into the work you’re doing, even if they don’t seem connected at first. Build bridges to the strange.
Tools for Re-Membering: Re-Framing Experience in Your Poems – guest post by Sally Rosen Kindred (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

Here, finally, the skybowl of night.
Milky Way within reach, our fingers can skate it; here Andromeda, Dipper, Orion, Sirius—lightning at the edges because night storm is the thing here, passionate and wild for fresh-washed days entirely skinless with gold and green—
And here, shooting stars above while below, spread over the grass as we are, a bowl of lightning bugs.
Discrete light, miraculous, above and below: we are of it, in it, entered.
Who is the ‘we’ now? The answer is yes.
To be human in this world has always seemed an error to me, for me, but in this one place, it is no deficit: here, for those who can listen, there is an invitation, a door to walk through, a way to be entirely inside and of the largest pattern, even so terribly small and badly constructed; spoken to by all of it and able to articulate back. There are no distinctions between this world and the spirit, between spirits, between animals, being.
Integrity, in every embodied breath.
Everything that could be, has been, sundered: here made whole.
JJS, Cleave

June 6, 2021June 6, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 22

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week, many bloggers took an existential turn. Others aired grievances and critiques. Sometimes they converged. Enjoy.

Fox barking to my right, to my left: what does it mean to be open? Risk, and patience. One bark after another, on and on they call and respond. Once home, once lost, once dead and blue at the bottom of the stair, stepped over: dream. Just a dream. The calls of foxes sound like screaming coughs, lungs gone closed and blued: I remember my dreams, even the ones I’d forget. What does it mean, “a wild patience has taken me this far,” if risk, if death? They bark and bark, echoing against June midnight, mountain. Crickets. Frogs. A whiffle of horse, a sussurus of sleep. I miss her, also gone. The new ones make sure to say my name.
JJS, Almost-ghazal, vulpine

and the rain
fell in one
long story
we sidestepped
between trees
i tripped my length
into fallen water
and you chased
a hare
into a rainbow
Dick Jones, dog sutras

You asked me once to tell about the whales
still in the deep places, untroubled. So I did.
I had a voice that persuaded then: I was young
and believed in victory. Far out to sea and far below,
I said, they are moving, huge and slow, older than us,
older than time, waiting us out. They know places still
that we do not. At last you fell asleep,
exhausted by fear and wretchedness: but I lay awake
and all night the stars picked their way across the sky.
Dale Favier, The Doubts

There are even organisms
that rarely die simply because they get old. Take the immortal jellyfish, for instance: faced
     with danger or threat, its clear, pulsing tent dandelion-ringed with 90 stingers might hitch a ride
     on the bottom of a cargo ship; or better yet, press the reset button to change itself back into a polyp.
Luisa A. Igloria, The Immortal Jellyfish Says No to Your Ageist Crap

The 27 year old finds a picture of your house, a picture of your writing room. She imagines long mornings writing in dappled sunlight, drinking strong coffee. She does not consider the long hours you have to work in your non-writing job to pay for the writing room where you never get to stay long enough.
The 27 year old thinks about her own life trajectory, so much of it yet to come. She thinks about your trajectory, both your writing arc and the other elements of your life’s narrative. She cannot realize how fast it all goes, how one minute you are just starting out, full of resolve, ready to change the world with your words, and then the next minutes, decades have disappeared, while you still feel like your younger self.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writer Me: Younger Me, Older Me

between the soul and its autumn :: all of time can be found
Grant Hackett [no title]

I was, I wasn’t, I am, I’m not, I will be, I won’t be
I shot twenty-four arrows this afternoon
one hit the small pink target on the hay bale
the rest disappeared into the mist
I have a post office box & a driver’s license
am I real now?
Jason Crane, POEM: vespers

How many of you remember The Interlude on television, when there was only one (b/w) channel and a 17” screen was regarded as excessive, and potentially damaging to eyesight unless you lived in a huge house? Programme sequences were interrupted intermittently by the interlude. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because the programmers had all grown up with the notion that visual entertainment like the theatre and the cinema traditionally had interval breaks when you could in one case go to the bar, and in another, buy an ice cream from a lady with a tray. Or maybe they thought that television posed too great a challenge to the concentration and/or eyesight, and that viewers needed a break for reasons of health and safety.
Whatever the reason, there would be a break that might feature a gently turning windmill or the hands of a person you never saw working at a potter’s wheel. It’s only just now struck me that they both involved turning wheels. Why? Are wheels soothing? If you use Google, you’ll find there was also one with a lady working a spinning wheel, but every now and then, a kitten playing with a ball of wool, and one of teams of horse drawn ploughs.
So I thought that if it was good enough for the BBC in its pomp, it was good enough for me. One reason why I write poems, and about poems, is that some years ago I used to go to folk clubs which were essentially sing-/play-arounds. The organiser would point to me and say “are you performing” and I’d say no and that would be it, until one night the organiser said ‘can’t you do a poem or something’. That’s how it started.
John Foggin, Stocking fillers

What struck me about the movie [I Used to Go Here], which was enjoyable enough, was a scene with the writer and a student in a cafe, where she begins to suggest edits and is cut off by the young writer’s reluctance to change her work in the interest of making it “publishable.” Set aside that most fiction writers have no idea about the experience of poets, and vice-versa, and the fact that it was weird they were having the conversation in the first place. There was something familiar and aggravating about the scene. Especially given the main character’s queasy dissatisfaction with her publishing experience–no control on the edits, the cover, a general dislike of the book she just put into the world. The younger writer, who seems unliked by her fellow students for whatever reason, is self-possessed enough to hold her ground in a way I’m not sure I would have been, even at 30. She mentions that she likes her title and has no desire to change things for publishability. Is, in fact, planning on starting a press to publish work she wants to. You watch as the main character is both flabbergasted and deeply uncomfortable by the conversation, even mocking when she learns of the press and dismissive of the work she is shown.
It’s familiar because it happens to many of us. Maybe all of us. When I was in my MFA program, I’d already started an online journal and was on the verge of starting the press, and yet people I met seemed one of two things–shocked or surprised, and largely put-off. Instead of support, it was like a dirty little secret. I once had a conversation with a male student I didn’t know all that well, and in the hallway outside class, he told me he “didn’t believe the things people said about” me and I was really confused. I always felt like an outsider anyway–being slightly older, working for the college, being further along in publishing my work, and also, writing at a different stage in my development. I had a full-time job, creative distractions and limited time, so I wasn’t as much part of the socializing so many people talk about in programs. In the first few weeks of the very first workshop people seemed to at first, love my work, then slowly begin to hate it. The comments went from nice, to really mean, and I don’t think the work changed all that much. Later, I went out for a beer with two classmates and they said people didn’t like me because I didn’t seem to give a fuck about all of it, and maybe I didn’t. It got better, I was part-time, so actually took classes over a four year span, and better and more self-directed poets joined on later and did things like start journals and presses and do the work of poeting. The first year left a taste in my mouth, though, that never fully went away.
Sometimes, I page back through this blog from those years, where I was very honest about my experience and my struggles. I would fault myself not as not caring, but maybe caring too much about the wrong things. Or the things that weren’t for me. Unlike the younger writer in the film, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to question things like that publicly–that push to fit things into neat publishable boxes and to do things the way they’d been done only because someone said that was where they were done. I might do so secretly under cover of the internet, but not in person. I saw so much bad advice in those years. For me and my classmates. I’m always shocked at the stats on MFA-ers who never write another word, but I get it. I totally do.
Kristy Bowen, film notes | the mfa on screen

Sitting on my mother’s couch in Rohnert Park, watching the blue and red flashing lights on the television screen, I realized what must have happened. Of all the times for this to occur, my first and so far only reading at Moe’s happened to coincide with an event that included the possibility of violence. Not even the most die-hard poetry fans would risk bodily injury to hear me read, nor should they. The five people who’d come must not have realized what was going on just a few blocks from the bookstore. I felt bad for them.
In What Could Possibly Go Wrong, which starts with an illuminating quote from Harry Crews: “The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure,” the issue of scheduling comes up often. Lola Haskins’ university reading was empty due to the simultaneous audience-sucks of a very important test plus another famous speaker; Jo McDougall was pre-empted by Monica Lewinsky’s TV interview; Marilyn Stablein was upstaged by a “faculty event.” Bar noise, changes in personnel, and lack of promotion added to the woes of reading in front of an audience.
On the back cover, after the price, a short phrase sums up the book’s classifications: Bad Luck / Fate / Literature. Sounds like the plot of a Russian novel.
Or the life of a poet.
Erica Goss, My Worst Poetry Reading

I came across an article the other day that reminded me that instead of hopelessly dreading my likely failure to make the most of a good opportunity, I could consider planning ways to manage stress. Self-help is not my preferred genre, and I have successfully avoided lots of pieces about social reentry post-Covid, but I was click-baited this time by a title about “using sobriety strategies,” about which I know little. Plus I’m desperate. The Washington Post article by Erin Shaw Street is here, although I don’t know if the link will work for everyone.
In short, the advice is to “start with acceptance”–this reentry thing will probably take a while, and that’s okay. “Have a plan, but stay flexible”: well, I always have a plan. My idea was to turn the week into a writer’s retreat at home, so my spouse is visiting family. Next week I’ll order out, let the dust pile up, and refuse to answer email. Write write write, I thought, and get back on the submission train, too. Maybe even use the empty house to lay out all my recent poems and see if they’re beginning to form a new collection! My revised plan: sure, try all that stuff, but if it doesn’t work, just do my workshop, make the best of my two 15-minute meetings with fancy editors, forgive myself if some of it falls flat, and otherwise chill. That’s the “pay attention to your feelings” part, which lately have made themselves very clear. “Practice gratitude and mindfulness”: well, all right, I know breathing exercises and I’ve actually worked on mindfulness lately, in my distracted way. What I’m proudest of, by the way of emotional planning, is in the “having a group of trusted friends to call on” category. I have actually scheduled a phone chat with Jeannine Hall Gailey right before the conference, because she is the best literary cheerleader I know. How about that! Me, planning a social interaction for my own sake, because it will make me feel connected and maybe even slightly more confident!! Miracles can happen. I also wrote the principles on a post-it note and stuck it on my office window frame, hoping I’ll stick with the program.
Lesley Wheeler, Conference anxiety times a million

And in my writing life, it’s been a season of rejection, rejection, rejection. Yes, I try to comfort myself that I’ve been lucky enough to have five poetry books published, or that I’ve gotten into some of my dream journals, or that I have wonderful supportive poet friends to help celebrate the wins and mourn the losses. But sometimes I wonder if the rewards are worth the effort. So, if one day I just stopped writing or sending out poetry, it’s not like anyone would demand it or clamor for my next book. To be honest, I also wonder about the effort of keeping this blog up as well – it does take time and energy, and I’m not sure that many people even read it (thanks, those that read and comment though, of course!)
I don’t want you to think it’s all gloom and doom in my head; it’s not. And I certainly recognize that many people, including some of my friends and family, have had it much worse than me lately. Every poet probably struggles with rejection, and we do tend to be prone to melancholy; it’s been a hard year for everyone; I recognize that catastrophic feelings don’t help anything. I think it would be nice if I could feel like I was able to do something useful again in the world, get paid for my work, or at least feel like I was helping others. I’m writing an essay for an anthology on speculative work and I’ll be offering an online class on speculative poetry soon (of course I’ll post details when it’s closer.) So those projects are good. And I really am thinking about moving forward on acquiring a place to use as a writer’s retreat – La Conner, WA or Port Townsend, WA maybe? So I’m trying to see the good things coming. I promise.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Butterflies, Sunny Days and Speculative Poetry Picks, Broken Teeth and Meditations on Melancholy

I have a pamphlet of poems without a publisher – that is, I haven’t found a publisher who wants the poems – that is, I’ve sent the pamphlet to two pamphlet competitions without luck. So, you could say I haven’t tried that hard to find a publisher, perhaps because I have doubts about the pamphlet as a whole, but earlier this year I made a decision to put these poems to one side, for now, which has been liberating and released some new writing energy. I’m now working on new poems, approaching them in a completely different way to usual, and gradually accumulating poems that might be a book, eventually. Individual poems from my unpublished pamphlet – I think of it as a ghost pamphlet – have been published in magazines and perhaps I will be able to salvage some of those poems and include them in my newer manuscript. Not an unhappy state to be in, just not a state brimming with success.
Josephine Corcoran, End of month blog and some wildflower poems

1. Compile a rough draft of a draft of a draft manuscript.
2. Slash and burn – round 1/n. Doubt spelling, suspect grammar, hate most lines.
3. Cold acceptance that this is crap but maybe it is marginally better than other crap. No? Probably not.
4. Idea! Write new poems. Abandon idea.
5. Existential question: To book or not to book?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, 10 steps to a new poetry book

I say if a lit mag can’t get to your submission in 6 months, they have to publish it whether they want to or not. I mean, by that point hope has been sparked in the little writer’s otherwise dark and bitter heart. And a year with no reply? That spark has lit the kindling. “Surely that they kept it this long means it’s in the line-up,” the writer begins to allow herself to think, warming her hands on the fire. Come on, lit mags, are you really going to send your hard, cold rain down now, douse the small flame?
Yes. Apparently, yes. Back in 2018 I submitted to a magazine I had been published in before. A year and eight months later I got a rejection. Standard reject, no “thanks for your patience,” no “sorry it took us a while.” (That’s the last they’ll hear of ME. THAT’ll learn ’em.) Not to mention the no-simultaneous-submissions mag that’s now had three poems for six months.
Talk about being nibbled to death by ducks. My goodness po is a terrible biz.
Marilyn McCabe, Bird on a wire; or, On Seeking Publication

Nell also mentions an interesting and often-since-asserted observation by Billy Collins, made two decades ago, that, in Britain, ‘the number of poets is equal to the number of readers of poetry’. Nell, rightly I think, says that there may well be more poets than there are readers of poetry. Stop me if I’ve told you this before, but 10 or 15 years ago, when I was directly employed by a certain south-west London local authority, there was an article in the staff newspaper about a member of staff who had self-published a pamphlet of his poems and who was quoted as saying words-to-the-effect that he didn’t read contemporary poets because he considered none of them to be worthy of his attention. It hadn’t seemed to occur to him that potential readers of his pamphlet might agree with him and therefore decide that his output was equally unworthy of their attention. I have no idea whether he sold any copies. I hope not. The sheer arrogance of someone wanting to write and air poems without first reading widely and absorbing the lessons of their reading into their own poetry-writing goes beyond (predominantly male) entitlement to the point of being downright peculiar. He’s probably since progressed to become one of those people who go along to open mic sessions to read their poem, invariably exceeding their time-slot, then leave at the interval so that there’s no possibility that they might feel obliged to hear too many of anyone else’s poems or to look at, let alone buy, any of the books on sale. (I realise, though, that not everyone has the financial wherewithal to buy books.)
Nell also says that ‘a good and loyal reader is harder to find than a poet’. If every person who knows the value of contemporary poetry were to buy books for those who haven’t read any poems since school and tell them, with as much vehemence as necessary, that they really will enjoy the experience, then the poetry readership can grow. Despite the un-self-aware idiots like the one I’ve described above, there are still many fine poets to be discovered; more, probably, than one could ever hope to read whilst living a full-ish life. Why shouldn’t a book or two of poems on the beach be as common a sight as crime novels, thrillers or bonkbusters?
Matthew Paul, On HappenStance Press, the reader and the poet

I once heard Sonny Rollins play in Toronto. It was a perfect summer day in the 80s when I was studying music at York University, and a bunch of us went to the Molson Amphitheatre on Toronto’s waterfront. We lay on the grass just outside the cover of the roof watching Sonny, the blue of Lake Ontario in our vision. I remember one extended solo by Rollins, where the band dropped out and it was just him. Such a delightful squonking. Low register honks. Motifs broken up and tossed around. Time made into a salad. And all of it connected with Rollins’ characteristically playful intelligence. As Wallace Stevens says, “the poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice.”
Ok, so gravitas didn’t seem to be explicitly there and the Coltrane-like bursting the seams, burning through the gates to another world. But there was meaning. Significance. And humility. And the sense of deeply being oneself. How? For Rollins his playing is often all about “the mind in the act of finding.” And what will suffice? Intelligence. Resilience. Creativity. Joy. A celebration of being. Of communication.
And the other thing I’ve come to understand in Rollins’ approach is ethics. Living through action and making choices. In a recent interview, Rollins says, “I’m just progressing through life, able to evolve now and to realize that to really live in a spiritual way I have to be an ethical person.” In his music I hear this decision to live ethically. To be in the world. To choose one note after the other as an ethical act. To embrace life. To choose positivity, communication, joy. The life-force. To keep playing, performing. To be an old man and to St-Thomas-the-hell out of life.
It’s an astounding thing.
Gary Barwin, Ethical Squonking: On the Coltrane-Rollins Continuum

It began with pain right where my heart is — a pain I initially discounted as probably a bad case of heartburn. It wasn’t such a big pain you’d right away think, heart attack. But after I lay down and it went away, I got up and went around doing things and it came back. Again, I went into denial. This is really bad heartburn — could my ulcer have reopened? Never, heart attack. I just turned 72 this month. Although my father and brother both had heart disease, my mantra was, I’ll take after my mother.
Called my doc’s private number. He picked right up, listened, said “Go to the ER and tell them you’re having chest pain. You’ll go to the head of the line.”
It wasn’t a comfortable procedure or hospital stay. But everyone who cared for me was wonderful. It was comforting to feel I’d survive and live well after this, as my cardiologist told me. […]
And the first thing I wanted to write when I could, was a poem. This one is for everyone I met and everyone who sent love.
The Heart
The heart is a muscle.
I feel its clench
protesting the lack
of blood, its nourishment,
and I go down, prone, bowing
to a central throne it inhabits in my body,
thrown to my back
and then to hospital,
where relinquishing clothes
and goods, I’m surrounded
by those familiar with a distressed heart’s ways.

Hours later, I am profoundly
embraced by science and love
that inexplicably flows
from these people whose powerful hearts
and muscles show up here every day.
And prayers that like a cavalcade of butterflies
shore me up in this new and sweeter life.
Rachel Dacus, A new heart, a new path forward

“We’ve been lucky. There was the nursing home outbreak,” she says, her voice lowering. The nursing home in town is a scant quarter-mile from the office where I’m getting my blood drawn. “And the soldiers’ home in Holyoke. But other than that, it’s been pretty good here.”
“May it stay that way,” I agree.
“All done!” She smiles, pressing a wad of gauze where the needle was just withdrawn. Now I look over, and I see the test-tubes full of dark red blood. The color always surprises me. It’s so vivid, so deep.
I’m not sure what they’re looking for this time, but we can’t schedule the next procedure until they run whatever tests they need to run on these gleaming garnet vials.
I wonder how many mini-conversations like this she has over the course of a day. How many lives she briefly touches with her blue-gloved hands.
When I exit the building, I inhale lilacs under the clouded sky.
Rachel Barenblat, Garnet

This weekend I spent some time reading poetry—some for a literary magazine I judge submissions for, and some from books that have been lying around that I haven’t cracked open for a while, namely by Wallace Stevens, who is my favorite poet, and Kahil Gibran. I needed to read both of those poets because somewhere in all of the chaos and heaviness of working at a hospital during the pandemic, I have lost my sense of passion and wonder. I feel ground-down and machine-like. I’ve been in survival mode for a long time, devoid of a sense of beauty and boundlessness, afraid to take any time to notice the natural world around me, afraid to slow down, afraid to allow for any sense of space and openness in my life. I shut everything out except the work that is front of me day-to-day, and I’ve been driven by dread—dread of the massive responsibility that has been handed to me at my place of work and at the same time, dread of being laid off, dread of loss both real and anticipated, and dread of what may come in the future for our country and for the world. I needed to read about love and astonishment and the miracle of pineapples and the cat forgotten in the moon and how the trees are there for me. I needed good language, the language of noticing, the language of elevation of the spirit and the essential divinity of human life:
“The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges.”
–Wallace Stevens, A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts
We’re coming out of it now, and I’m ready. Ready to breathe without a mask muffling my nose and mouth, ready for traffic and shopping malls and movies and night parties, ready for patients to flow into our facilities again, ready for the world to open its petals like a rose and for humanity to return to human-ing. For better or for worse, I don’t have a particular religion to hang my spiritual beliefs on, but I believe that we are children of God, and we need to remember our origins.
Kristen McHenry, Swimming Nostalgia, The Language of Divinity, Opening Day

“Remember we must die” need not be a call to religious fervor or to pessimistic existentialism. It is merely a fact that we ignore at our peril; for if we remember death is ahead, we can attune ourselves more closely to the lives we do have–and those others with whom we are in relationships. For whether you know it or not, your body has a relationship to Earth and all of its beings. Even, perhaps, the carrion beetle, not to mention billions of microbes and your best friend’s mother.
When I write about death (and I do), I find the tone of the poem depends a great deal on which words or images I use: the clear flow, or the leavings in the sieve. Different purposes, of course. Sometimes the poem wanders in sorrow, sometimes there’s clarity or a lifting of grief. It depends on the perspective (sometimes the speaker of the poem isn’t me), and on where the poem itself decides to go, particularly as I revise. Many readers believe that poems only ever arise from the writer’s experience, but poems are works of the imagination. And they are sometimes informed, or re-formed, by experience or insight that comes later in the writing process.
My own grief? That’s private. I may not decide ever to communicate how that feels. However, having sensed sorrow in my bones and gut and in the empty places in my community of loved ones, I can write about being in the moment of bereavement and the many moments afterwards when the losses make us ache. I like to imagine that memento mori keeps me alert to life. Even when I feel sad.
Ann E. Michael, Memento mori

It is a raw dawn on the morning of the poor.
“Be thankful,” they are told, “Here is your daily crust.”
The feathers of the wealthy have been groomed for the ball.
The day passes quickly for those who are pleasured.
Evening is a pistol and a whip; all the knives have been sharpened.
There will be fresh meat. “Where did the day go?”
Even as the poor ones scurry off, the music begins to play,
And the sound of laughter escapes the ballroom
The way a balloon escapes a child’s hand.
James Lee Jobe, Fresh meat.

cut the wild flowers were livid
~
living the wild flowers were vivid
~
in the hedgerows of my never mind
~
the limp excuses fall dry
~
in the hushed vase
~
the petals fall
~
lonely is the room
~
now
~
Jim Young, them cut

Otherworldly beauty, otherworldly creatures, otherworldly powers.
History lessons that keep writing and rewriting themselves.
Fake moon landings, alleged alien abductions, labyrinthine underground bunkers running through our blood.
It’s all part of how we’re hot-wired to allow our imaginations to roam wild, how we reverse engineer out-of-this-world technologies to better understand ourselves.
Close encounters of the lovebird kind, unknown lifeforms roaming darker minds.
From conspiracy theories to rational inquiry, from matters of the heart to unidentified aerial phenomena—
there’s a little Area 51 in all of us.
Rich Ferguson, You and Me Ufology

No, today’s post takes as its point of departure the fact that many younger generations always write poetry via a keyboard and a screen. Their typing is far more rapid than my two-fingered efforts, and a fair chunk of them don’t even own a printer. This last point means that they read through their drafts on a monitor rather than on a piece of paper, of course.
The key issue is whether the above-mentioned shift in writing habits is affecting the way their poetry is functioning. There seem to be two major questions. The first is whether speed of writing encourages lines to be longer, freer, less tense. The pen weighs up every letter before committing it to the notebook, but the keyboard rushes onwards.
The second matter for debate, meanwhile, is whether trends in line endings are also altering. The argument might be that moving a line ending with a pen involves writing the poem or at least the stanza out again (and again). It entails meditated probing as to whether an experiment functions. However, on a screen, the return key encourages the poet to play around with line endings at will, changing and then changing back in a few seconds flat, spotting immediately how semantics and synax might interact with expected and unexpected line endings.
In other words, my suggestion is that if there’s a generalised evolution towards longer lines and more unexpected line endings among younger poets, it might not just be because of their aesthetic tastes but because the actual means by which they write are also different. And this is before even starting to consider poems that might have been drafted on phones…!
Matthew Stewart, Line length and line endings in the digital age

low battery —
trying to silence
the wrong smoke alarm
Bill Waters, Haiku about sounds or silences

I feel such a kinship with library systems, especially those in small towns. Often a hub, they have the ability to bring together, and in many cases, create community. When Bruce and I traveled Canada for many summers, our first stop was often the local library. It wasn’t just to borrow Wi-Fi to contact home, but also check out local happenings, what types of resources were offered, what folks were reading in their neck of the woods. In fact, I collected a good 7-10 library cards from small town libraries across Canada, from British Columbia to Newfoundland. I may never return to these destinations, but I like to think that my card-carrying membership added to their collective reader base, somehow.
Last fall, I sent some poetry to Mason Street, the Newark Library Literary Journal. The Newark Library is located in Newark, New York, and of course my curiosity about such an offering through a library system got the best of me and I had to learn more about this particular library. Like so many libraries I’ve had the joy of experiencing, the Newark Library is really no different. Community within community.
Mason Street’s Editor and Founder, Celeste Schantz selected my poem “Troubadour” for the winter issue and “Faithful” for the spring. Both poems are in good company, and I was especially delighted, no, fangirl delighted, to see that poet Marge Piercy headlines the spring issue with “My Library Memories.” Swoon! If you haven’t read her work, you should. The first collection of hers that I savored is titled The Moon Is Always Female, a must-read. This is her 7th collection of writing. Organized into two sections, the first is categorized as “amusingly elegiac to the erotic, the classical to the funny (Amazon).” The second section is lunar in nature. It consists of a series of 15 poems for “a calendar based on lunar rather than solar divisions” (Amazon).
I’m really thankful that both “Troubadour” and “Faithful” found a home in the pages of a literary journal of a thriving library far away from home. Should you get the chance, read both issues. Visit the archives. But most importantly, keep writing and sharing our work with the world.
Kersten Christianson, Mason Street, Newark Library Literary Journal

I think TFP (not 100% sure about The Frip yet, but it will sink in and become shorthand soon enough, I’m sure) will be with us for a long time to come. I’m looking forward to seeing the new poems arriving week by week, perhaps I may even manage to get one in there; although the famous adage of Meet us half way and submit one first applies at the moment.
I must confess that I was a bit worried when Hilary first approached me and asked me to review Rendang. I can’t put my finger on it, but it felt like the biggest review I’ve been asked to write so far, the most complex book yet, and I wondered if I was up to the task if I could find something interesting to say (and to be fair that’s the same with every review I write, and every poem, and every post here…and every sentence I say out loud, etc).
If I’m honest I was worried about engaging with the “contradictions of identity and cultural memory” mentioned in the blurb. Not because I didn’t want to or don’t feel I need to. I absolutely do, it was more a feeling of do I have anything valid to say on the matter without falling into the lazy tropes that Alyca Pirmohamed refers to here in her excellent essay at Wild Court, those adjectives like ‘urgent’, ‘important’, etc?
I think I avoided that, but I don’t think I can be the judge as to whether I had anything interesting to say. However, I found it fascinating and educational for a variety of reasons to engage with the collection as a whole by examining how the poems developed between pamphlet and collection, as well as the newer work, and how that benefits from the space and time afforded by a collection (literally and metaphorically).
Mat Riches, That Friday (poem) Feeling

So much for my New Year’s resolution to avoid buying new books. Somehow, my April blog push led me hither and yon over the entire poetry landscape, and I ended up buying a truckload of books. Among them, Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things (Milkweed, 2015). Looks like The Carrying is next (winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry).
I have a major poetry-crush on this poet. Not only does she write about horses and honky-tonks (subjects dear to my heart), but dogs, owls, sex, and death. She’s got it all. And language! Oh, my!
Bethany Reid, The amazing ADA LIMÓN

First up is the almost obligatory cat poem, simply called “cat” which didn’t come with trigger warning but introduces the idea of suicide and ends,
“we are all decomposing slowly
so that is of some comfort
we are all a million dying stars
so that is of some comfort “
The ability of the narrator to be comforted by the idea life will end anyway and it ends for everything around us is enough for him to accept natural causes is a better way to go. It also shows how something unexpected, encountering a cat, can knock someone out of a rut, a pattern of rumination and look beyond themselves. Instead of feeling like a burden the world would be better off without, the narrator has seen he can have a place in this world and the current pattern of things will stop, not with a sudden jerk, but a series of small changes.
Emma Lee, “Blue the Green Sky” Stuart M Buck (The Broken Spine) – book review

Theirs is a fascinating kind of call-and-response through the poems in Hearing, each short single-stanza lyric burst including author initials, so one doesn’t lose track of who composed which, from two poets deeply engaged with language, listening and experimentation. The crediting of each individual author is something I find interesting, suggesting the collection less a collaboration-per-se than a conversation in poetic form. This is a lyric through which each poet is responding to the other, akin to what Canadian poets and married couple Kim Maltman and Roo Borson did in their own conversation through lyric, the poetry title The Transparence of November / Snow (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1985). In Hearing, there is something lovely about a collection that exists as such a conversation, especially between two highly accomplished poets who happen to also be close friends, as though we are being allowed to listen in on, or even overhear, a conversation that might otherwise have been privately spoken.
rob mclennan, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino, Hearing

[A] teacher friend has gotten me into the Poetry Unbound podcast and this has set me off on a new tangent. I’m also not into audio stuff much. I have struggled to focus on online lectures, audio books, music, podcasts, becoming distracted, flipping away if it’s on a screen. I listened to one PU podcast because my friend was raving about the title of the poem being a sign of a great poem, so I though I’d listen to the poem at least.
The poem read on the podcast was Hanif Abdurraqib’s ‘When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left The Needle Down On A Journey Record Before Leaving The House One Morning And Never Coming Back’ and my friend was right. The title is killer, the poem even more so. The presenter Pádraig Ó Tuama has an amazing voice for reading poetry and he brings his own gentle enthusiasm for the poems he shares. So I listened on. And again on the way home from school that afternoon. I continued to pick another episode and another and another, in the mornings before work and often on the way home.
One day after a partially tough morning with the child I support at school, I brought my lunch up to the classroom, rather than sit amongst the noise of fourth graders in the cafeteria. I needed to calm down before the next class started, so I stuck on a random episode called ‘A Poem for What You Learn Alone’ which seemed to suit my mood. The poem was Brad Aaron’s Modlin’s poem ‘What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade’. It is nothing about fourth grade and exactly what I needed. I think I’ve heard all three seasons now, but keep going back to favourites or finding one that I that I’ve forgotten.
Gerry Stewart, A Poetic Daunder – Stepping Away from the Familiar

There are days when I fantasize about not having to teach. Not to get away from the work exactly, but to spread myself out thinly over the days. To breathe easily. While the pandemic has been difficult in so many ways, it has also given me the opportunity to slow down. Listen. Can I listen to the birds with the same sustained interest that I listen to a student presentation? This is a kind of work, too. What do I earn from this?
My childhood was a cramped succession of dramas, of noise and movement. A montage of cigarettes and speed, cocaine and black eyes. Drama became a kind of addiction that I struggled with through my 20s. I walked that jagged edge of violence where you never know which side someone will fall on: wounded or… disappeared. And as soon as I write this down I think: no, I’m not being fair to everyone. And still, I censor myself. After censoring myself in the first place. I make excuses for other people.
Maybe no one should ever tell the whole truth? At least not for the sake of entertainment or to makes one’s self interesting like a spectacle at Coney Island. Though people do buy tickets.
When I was in high school I went to the county fair alone and bought a ticket to see one of the “freaks”, assuming it would be a mirror trick of some sort. A kind of theatrical presentation. It wasn’t. The “freak” was a person. I turned around immediately and threw up outside the tent.
No. That would make a good story. I didn’t throw up. I just wanted to. I felt a sense of shame that was too familiar. But weirdly, I felt a shared sense of shame. With the person in the tent. I couldn’t explain it then, and I can’t explain it now except to say I understand why the whales that are kept in tiny pools and mistreated at theme parks will give kisses to their trainers on cue.
I don’t want to choose revenge or forgiveness. I want a middle path here, too. It seems even my personal life isn’t really free of ethical concerns.
And my writing never will be.
So for now, I write about mundane things like lapwings and chaffinches. The vibrating silence of the Hardanger plateau where the snow still lies in July. How cold has a smell where the North Sea is untouched by the Gulf Stream, and the harbour in Stavanger can smell like watermelon.
Ren Powell, A Story of Going Feral

May 30, 2021May 30, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 21

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week, I found a lot of posts about learning or re-learning from the familiar, the close-at-hand, the wilderness in one’s own backyard — something I suppose I’ve become perceptually vigilant for, since daily walks around my own small part of the world have become so crucial to preserving my sanity, not to mention unlocking new levels of perception and (maybe, hopefully) expression. As Ren Powell puts it, “Why do I feel a need to go away from home to pay close attention?” One’s own home ground may in fact be the best vantage point from which to hear what Shawna Lemay, quoting Li-Young Lee, calls “the hum of the universe.” And poets can translate that hum even into something as homey as prose...

It’s late 90s Baghdad: with a trembling heart and weak joints, Ra’ad Abdulqadir, the editor of Aqlam literary magazine, would return from his office to his home in the western outskirts of the capital every day. He would change into his pajamas, lay down on the couch, and begin to write a poem for what would become his most notable work, Falcon with Sun Overhead. He would then doze off with the notebook resting on his belly. Like much of the rest of Iraq, Ra’ad spent the 90s suffering from health issues, and the hospital visits became part of his routine. He hated doctors and hospitals and chronicled their dreadful presence in his poems. “The poet used to be an angel,” he told novelist Warid Badir al-Salim in what’s considered his last interview in 1999. “Now he is a coal miner.”
And what does that mean for you, Mr. Ra’ad? “Well, I like to think of myself as the angel in the coalfield.”
And so he is—the angel in the coalfield, the cemetery, the empty classrooms, the white hospitals, the dark streets. For years, he was the kind of poet loved and envied by both his contemporaries and the generations that followed for his magical ability to keep the angel’s garb free of ash. Now, though, he has been underrated and forgotten.
Mona Kareem, How Ra’ad Abdulqadir Changed the Iraqi Prose Poem Forever

Portland, Oregon poet and fiction writer Zachary Schomburg’s latest poetry title is Fjords vol. II (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2021), described as the “second volume of Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords series of evocative prose poetry,” following the prior volume, Fjords vol. I (Black Ocean, 2012). I’m curious at the extension of his prose poetry project and how far it might continue, and if it sits within or alongside the trajectory of his other published poetry collections, all of which have appeared with Black Ocean: The Man Suit(2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), The Book of Joshua (2014) and Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018 (2019) [see my review of such here]. The pieces in Fjords vol. II are each short bursts of individually titled, single-paragraph prose poems collected together as a book-length suite. The narratives of Schomburg’s poems are fond of establishing a simultaneous light and dark tone, and writing poems with odd turns, and endings that sit, not as endings, but as a place for the mind to pause. In many ways, Schomburg’s poems haven’t beginnings or endings, but points at which the narratives start, with another point where the narrative stops. The effect is occasionally jarring, often turning bits of the logic of each piece back in on itself, as though it is for the reader to discern each poem’s actual shape: far bigger on the inside, perhaps. These are poems that reveal themselves in layers, and reward repeated readings.
rob mclennan, Zachary Schomburg, Fjords vol. II

Periodically I watch some free videos offered by artist Nicholas Wilton, who has a program called Art2Life. He’s unflaggingly enthusiastic and filled with wonder at discovering or uncovering processes by which he, and theoretically we, can bring our creative impulses to fruition on the canvas.
In a recent short one, he talked about how he’s trying to stay present with and focused on not what he is putting on the canvas but how he is feeling while doing it. And the feeling he is trying to maintain is, basically one of openness and a sense of possibility. And deliberately NOT a sense of assessment, judgment, predetermination of what should be happening on the canvas. He talks about having a “free outlook” and the “sense of wildness and freedom” with which he often starts a new painting — all that blank space, how it frames the first few marks beautifully — and maintaining that outlook and free sense throughout the process.
By focusing on the space out of which he is creating, rather than what is being created, he’s able to allow all kinds of things to happen. He says he can see both his own training at work in this more intuitive way of making, as well as a new “wild”-ness that is exciting.
Yes, I say. And thank you for the reminder. I’m talking as a writer now, and agree that the key to when I’m writing well and interestingly, and maybe the key to revision as well, is the center — i.e., me — out of which I am creating. And I love that feeling of openness and possibility. It’s a kind of ebullience, a word that means boiling up, bubbling up.
Marilyn McCabe, Warped by the rain; or, On Letting Go Control

Throughout the pandemic, in warm and cold weather, I often sit on my front porch. We’ve set up a table and chairs, curtains and heaters. I can be outside and work on my writing despite the weather. Or in celebration of it.
It’s very pleasant—fresh air, bird song, many trees.
Across the street, I frequently hear my neighbour, the artist John Miecznikowski, practising cornet. I understand that his son was an accomplished trumpeter and he gave the instrument to his father to learn. (They also share a love of motorcycles, and John has told me some great stories about his riding exploits in the 60s and 70s.)
Because John is “learning,” he often plays what sounds like hymns, or at least, simple tunes, but on cornet they have a English brass band sound to them.
Recently as I was working on a new novel, I listened to the sound of the trumpet entangled with the sound of the wind and the birds. I had been working on a cello piece for my old high school friend George. I decided instead to write something for John, something that evoked that entwining of trumpet and bird song.
Gary Barwin, My neighbour John plays trumpet and I hear him while birds sing.

Being at sea suits me sometimes. I like learning. It’s why I’m always trying unfamiliar forms and genres. I just published a short essay, “Hand of Smoke,” in Speculative Nonfiction, that’s about being a student and also demonstrates me in a state of experiment–what am I willing to say about myself in the plainer mode of prose, and is this a risk I can succeed at? Enjoying being at sea can shipwreck into stress pretty quickly. […]
The other side-effect of my mother’s death, though, is a changed perspective on what’s urgent. Apparently I CAN put everything aside for big swaths of time to take care of others and myself. I’d lost that muscle memory since my kids became independent. It’s a lucky thing to like your work, but work doesn’t always like you back. When it’s too much, it really is fine to say screw it. Literature is watertight and unsinkable.
Lesley Wheeler, I don’t know what I’m doing again

Roche sits snugly below the limestone promontory from which its name derives, and straddles Maltby Dike which provided water for washing and beer, presumably upstream of its use as a depository from the latrine. It’s a beautiful setting, as ruined abbeys almost always are. No wonder that Turner, Constable, Piper, Sutherland and others were drawn to paint them so often. On a day like today, when the sun has finally arrived to announce the start of summer, the scene at Roche looked very beautiful indeed. It reminded me very much of Waverley Abbey, near Farnham in Surrey, the Cistercians’ first abbey in England. There, I wrote this haiku, published in Presence no. 54 and undoubtedly echoing [Peter] Levi subconsciously:

ruined abbey:
the dark mullein’s yellows
light the transept

I wrote some more haiku this morning. It would have been rude not to, since they’re such inspiring places.
Matthew Paul, On ruined abbeys

I have to admit I went into Katherine May’s new book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times with specific expectations which is unusual for me with non-fiction books. Expectations about what wintering meant and what I was looking for from the book. I can’t remember where I came across the recommendation for the book, but idea that caught my eye amounted to learning to cope with the winters of our life and a connection to Finland. […]
The book contains many of my favourite wintery things which is saying a lot because to be honest I am not a fan of the season of winter at all. But I do love the darkness and magic of Samhain, the Cailleach, standing stones, hibernation during the cold dark months, wolves. She also looks at a few I don’t like as much like saunas and winter swimming. Both these latter things are very much part of the Finnish psyche, though Finland really doesn’t feature much in the book outside of this. May turns to these various things to try and work through her wintering periods.
Oddly, it felt like she was full of energy to go off and try all these various techniques, on her own and with other people, something I think many people who need to ‘winter’ would struggle with, to be social, try new adventures. I realise that the events and adventures she wrote about were maybe separated by years at different periods of wintering, but I would have liked more examination of how to face the dark stillness of winter when there aren’t friends around or even strangers to go stand at Stonehenge on midsummer. This would have made the book even more helpful in the last year when we couldn’t go out much when we have been forced to winter and many of us found it incredibly difficult.
Gerry Stewart, Book Review – Wintering by Katherine May

as if life ripens on our limbs, sweetening
with every step, every right step —
I watch your uneven breath, the awkward
shape of your sleep, so much of the night
is just a defence against another morning.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, As if death is so discerning

Notice how the rain
falls down,
the old monk said.
Think like that, like
the falling rain.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (17)

A squirrel stopped halfway up the tree trunk to stare at us. Perfectly silhouetted against the blue sky, so that the silly fur-forks standing up from the tips of his ears were visible. I still have no idea if the tussle we witnessed a few weeks back was a fight for territory or some kind of mating activity. Maybe there is a second squirrel tucked away in the tree with babies.
It almost makes me sad to be so ignorant of something so close. I think maybe this summer – when school lets out in two weeks – I could pack a lunch and settle under the trees there. Bring binoculars and spy a little. Why not?
It’s odd. I actually have plans to do something similar next month. We are flying and boating all the way up to an island above the arctic circle to stay in a cabin with friends, without running water. I hope to spend a few days on the beach waiting and watching for porpoises and otters. Scanning the sky for birds of prey and trying to identify them.
Why do I feel a need to go away from home to pay close attention? It’s almost as if it is “allowed” then. It’s not indulgent, or eccentric, or peculiar. It’s a vacation.
Ren Powell, In My Own Front Yard

scrolling slowly
through a wet temple garden
on my time line
Jim Young [no title]

The range children are allowed to travel on their own is what psychologist Roger Hart has termed the “geography of children.” This range, for an eight-year-old, has shrunk from 6 or so city blocks a few decades ago to barely beyond the front door today. In the 1970’s, Dr. Hart spent two years conducting informal walking interviews with every child between the ages of four and 12 in one Vermont town to discover where and how they played. Kids particularly enjoyed the type of play that manipulated the physical world, making forts or using sticks and dirt to create (as one child did) a miniature airport. Dr. Hart observed that four and five-year-old children were allowed to play in the neighborhood without direct supervision, and children had the run of the town by the age of 10.
He went back to that town three decades later to see how childhood might have changed. No surprise, parents were much more involved in the moment-to-moment details of their children’s lives, resulting in much less freedom for children (and adults, presumably). As he did in interviews back in the 1970’s, he asked children to talk about secret places they liked to play. One child called out to his mother to ask if he had such a place. Dr. Hart wrote, “That would have been inconceivable 30 years ago. Then, most children I interviewed had places they went to that their parents had never been to.” Thirty years later, Dr. Hart found no children who played with sticks. This impeded freedom to play away from adult gaze has only gotten worse since.
Laura Grace Weldon, Neighborhood Kids & Authentic Freedom

When I was a kid the tree was impossibly enormous. It was like the giant Christmas tree that rose out of the stage, dwarfing everyone, in the local ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker. But mine wasn’t a Christmas tree. My tree had a big smooth trunk and thick, sturdy branches. One branch protruded over the jasmine, and there was another one a bit higher and to one side. The lower one was perfect for sitting on, letting my legs dangle. The higher one was perfect for leaning on with a book. I always had a book, Laura Ingalls Wilder or EB White eventually giving way to Robert Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Eventually I got brave enough to climb higher, onto the roof of the playhouse with its asphalt shingles. Sometimes I would read up there, instead. Once I carved my initials into the bark with my red pocket knife, alongside the initials of the kid I had a crush on. The magnolia’s leaves were big and oval-shaped and glossy and they cast pockets of cool shade that kept the playhouse roof from overheating. The best time to climb my tree was late May — right around my mother’s birthday — when the magnolia would open her great creamy blooms. Her flowers were as big as my head. The petals bruised easily. Later, when they dried up and fell off, they were like scraps of tan leather. I used to try to stitch them together with monkeygrass to make doll clothes. By then, they only had a shadow of their former fragrance, but they were still sweet. I can almost remember that fragrance, forty years later and two thousand miles away.
Rachel Barenblat, Grandiflora

I finished a fiction book this week and I’m still reading Poets at Work, which is wonderful and strangely … well, comforting, for lack of a better word. I’ll be sad and bereft when I finish it. The Lowell interview is my favorite thus far, although I also just began the Walcott review — and I love reading it because it reminds me of being in his classes, and also the few precious times I had conversations with him outside of class.
But it also might end up be my favorite because of what he says in the interview, and how it resonates alongside other things I’ve been engaging with, like the Airea D. Matthew’s episode of the Commonplaces podcast.
For instance, this morning, I copied down this from the Walcott interview:
“What we can do as poets in terms of our honesty is simply to write within the immediate perimeter of not more than twenty miles, really.”
This made me think about my own art in this context, and about how I write, and my subject matter — which is often very much centered around my own experiences, not necessarily things that would seem universal — and I can’t escape that this is determined by my gender, my sexuality, my race, my socio-economic class, my career, where I live, etc. And then I was wondering if that’s worth anything. But I don’t think we can ever really know, or worry, about whether or not our work is worth anything to anyone else, unless we just want to make canned, color-by-number nonsense. We have to be honest, with ourselves and others, and perhaps in the way that Walcott suggests.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, How to Ease Away from a Particularly Traumatic Semester: Reading, Listening, Thinking, Walking

I think Adam Zagajewski’s poems were easy to love, which is no bad thing. When I think of his poems, words such as the following come to mind: humane, gentle, affectionate, clarifying. After 9/11, his poem ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ became very famous in its English-speaking translation by Clare Cavanagh when it appeared in The New Yorker. Not one of my personal favourites of his poems, I still appreciate it and its immense value in the wake of a huge, world-changing tragedy. It distills what I think Zagajewski did best – the acknowledgement that dark, horrendous things happen but the equal observation that life continues and that the value of light, beauty and faith remains unchanged. […]

It’s so hard to choose a favourite poem by Zagajewski. When I reread them now, years after first readings, they remind me of emotions and moments in my life, and they take me to places which I’ve visited or which I hope to visit some day. ‘Star’ has been a talisman for me for many years. ‘Vita Contemplativa’ occupies a central place of importance in my pantheon of poems, and lines from it often surface in my mind. ‘Poetry Searches for Radiance’ is a powerful mission statement for poetry. Whether one of his collections, a selected poems or something randomly found online, his works will reward both casual reading and prolonged engagement. What is much harder than finding the right poem by Zagajewski is accepting that he’s not here any more.
Clarissa Aykroyd, Remembering Adam Zagajewski, 1945-2021

This project, the best kind, emerged from the whim of writer and artist, Matthew Wolfe. When the pandemic began, he started assembling and sharing on Facebook a daily photograph of possessions, many with notes. Each photo carried a shadowbox appeal, a frozen moment in time. Enter Sheila-Na-Gig editor, Hayley Mitchell Haugen, who suggested moving this work to a book format, and to open a call for writers to share their writing in response to Matthew’s photos.
And so the birth of Pandemic Evolution!
It is a hefty volume, beautifully crafted. The book contains Matthew’s writing, a record of the early days of the pandemic, his photographs with notes, and the writings of 46 poets from the U.S., Canada, India, and Wales, who responded in kind, ekphrastically, to Matthew’s work.
I am grateful to have three poems included in this collection: “Day 79: Something Cohen Said,” “Outside Terrace, B.C.,” and “Day 100: Road Trip Is Life.”
This project is truly an act of a collaboration in both the project and more global sense. It is one that I’ll look back on in gratitude having had this chance to document those early days the world entered into a period of social distancing, questioning, uncertainty, and survival.
Kersten Christianson, Pandemic Evolution

Last Saturday, 22nd May, was Artists’ Book Club Dove’s first in-person meeting since September last year. We have had ark-building weather recently, but by great good fortune this was a warm sunny afternoon with very little wind. We carried our chairs and picnics through knee-high buttercups in Dove Meadow to a clearing beside the Tree House (visible top right in the photo below, taken by Bron) and passed books and ideas around. What it treat it was to be together. […]
I’m only half-way through India
I’d rather do the washing up
if I were a reptile
in between the showers
a bit of deckle-grooming
cuckoos bitterns warblers marsh harriers
hot chocolate with a dash of brandy
hedgehog highways and rabbit lintels
Ama Bolton, ABCD late May 2021

This book has just been published by Suffolk Poetry Society as a response to the diminishing state of nature. It forms part of a collaboration between the Society and The Lettering Arts Trust (Snape), where an exhibition of the same name opens in July. I am delighted to have two poems and a micro-poem about IUCN red-listed species included.
The topic resonates closely with Robert Macfarlane’s work (supported by Jackie Morris and her artwork) in response to an increasing concern over the fact that ‘nature words’ (the ‘lost words’: see here) were being removed from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Apparently space was needed for words deemed more valuable in a digital and technical age. You can read my post here about a previous exhibition at The Lettering Arts Trust on this subject.
Caroline Gill, ‘On a Knife Edge’, a new anthology from Suffolk Poetry Society

It was shocking, and not a little dreamlike, to experience going from a very small social circle that included my nuclear family, my sisters and niece, and a few very good, close friends and suddenly finding myself in Memorial Day travel at the Atlanta airport.
We were traveling to Oak Park, Ill to see my mother-in-law, more than likely for the last time, or maybe not. She is quite old, infirm, and suffering from dementia. She remains tied to her body by a silken thread, and so we plunged into the stream to be with her. […]
The Pandemic has made me much more conscious of my mortality. At 60, I’ve retired from public school teaching with a small pension, and I try to spend evenings on the back porch watching the sun set through the poplars and pines.
I’m so grateful to be alive, to have survived thus far, for breath, community, and connection. I want to dwell in these moments. My body and mind bask in the peace I feel under the trees in the evening air.
Christine Swint, Airport, Pandemic, and Gratitude

The littlest doll is also the one that doesn’t come apart, the one who stands complete. A inner strength that comes through in the poems that touch on the poet’s father’s death when she was aged 15. In “Matryoshka”, after the funeral, some dolls are taken apart some are “some shut tight, permanently locked in grief,” which leaves,
“The littlest doll found herself rattling around
in the wrong size body,
suddenly bulky with responsibilities
and listening to echoes.
To all eyes an adult, within, a child.”
The implication is that in the transition from child to adult, we don’t shed layers, we gain them. The intact baby doll is wrapped in experience and expectation. The external appearance is of an adult but the speaker still feels her inner child, hesitant and lacking confidence.
Emma Lee, “Russian Doll” Teika Marija Smits (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

According to recent assessments from the eager
to travel again, have drinks with friends, shed
the year’s wardrobe of almost sackcloth
and ashes—we’ve come through to the other
side. But what is the other side if not a reverse-
engineered vision of this one; a looking glass
in which (we pray) each full-blown tragedy of
the past year shrinks back to what it wasn’t
before the unfathomable struck?
Luisa A. Igloria, A Tunnel has Openings on Both Ends

I had thought I would write about cicadas and husks and post-menopausal Noah’s wife feeling like she, too, is a husk. This morning, I’m thinking about cicadas and Noah’s wife wondering why they got a space in the ark if they’re only going to emerge into life every 17 years.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Cliche with Full Moon and Sunrise

beneath my house of memory :: a wind of unknown depth
Grant Hackett [no title]

Can you tell me how In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered came into being?
I laid all the poems out on the floor to see how they spoke to each other. As I was going through them my biggest surprise was that the bulk of the collection was written using a very different voice to the one that I am most familiar with. I am a lyric poet by default. I tend towards the experimental, cross genre, free verse. I also approach subjects by going in slant. But this writing was radically different, it was narrative, direct, it employed characters and had a plot. Through the characters not only was I able to re-enact the past, but also to understand what happened and speak about it – although in these poems the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred!
Crystal was one of the first characters on the scene and she was fierce and feisty! She had her own voice and demanded she be featured in her own book. The title In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered is taken from the title of the penultimate poem in the publication, where Crystal sets out her own manifesto for an ideal world – full of contradiction and ambiguity:
Crystal knew what she wanted and that was somewhere quiet, but not so quiet I get
murdered.
Other characters trauma-wounds are experienced and displayed through the body, but are also expressions of fragmented memory, such as:
Ash held off the stab wound
through her laugh.
Abegail Morley, In Conversation with Chaucer Cameron

By the time I landed back in the city, internet journals were blossoming all over, and my first publication there (a site called Poetry Midwest) was just as exciting as the one in print. I was all in for sending out work at the rewards of publication, especially in those pre-social media days. Somehow, the community felt more connected then, or at least, the online journal community did. Journal publications would be met with fanfare and sometimes fan letters from other poets. Some of the people I met in those years are still my online friends now, decades later and across several states. Some of the journals are still publishing, some faded into internet obscurity and 404 errors. (Stirring and Pedestal Mag, for example, are still going strong.) At first, some poets scoffed at the online word, poets who now embrace it pretty regularly. I learned quickly that print journals were nice, but online was where things were more likely to get read (esp. by non-poets.)
The poetry world was, and still is, a constellation of communities. I moved in several for awhile and at different points. The online poets, the blogger poets. The open-mic poets I did readings with in local bars and coffeehouses. The MFA poets I was meeting at Columbia. Each community had their bibles. The most exclusive online journals were the ones I couldn’t get into, but I kept trying and eventually did, though sometimes it took years. (A couple others I am still trying to get into..lol..) The open-mic crowd had their own local pubs and presses. The academics had a ranking of “high tier” and “lower tier” that I will never quite be at home with or understand. Community journals, academic housed journals. Journals run by one person and some html skills (wicked alice was very much this.) As such, I moved through journals in all these communities and met many different people in them. Even more awesome, was often invited to submit by editors who liked my work that landed in places I might not otherwise even thought about sending to.
Ultimately, I have always kind of sucked at the submission game. I was better a decade ago. More often than not, even when i am writing a lot, I will go months without sending out a thing, then fire off a round to some familiar favorites and some pie-in-the sky places I’d like to see word. Maybe some new discoveries I think are cool (Twitter has been awesome for this.). I stopped trying to get into places it didn’t really seem like my work was a fir for or whose work or values I didn’t esp appreciate.. At some point, I stopped trying to build a resume or appear in the sorts of places that got a certain kind of attention and more just wanted to see if I could reach new or existing audiences with them. I began to think of poems as breadcrumbs you leave out in the world that lead back to a larger body of work, either just in general or to specific projects. This has made all the difference.
Kristy Bowen, breadcrumbs

Further to my post last week about certain poetry readings in London, I thought it was only fair to focus today on regular events that are held all over the country (having mentioned them in passing as a point of comparison and/or contrast with London).
I myself have been a guest poet at regular events in Leicester, Nottingham, Cheltenham, Manchester, Huddersfield, Edinburgh, Chichester, Portsmouth, Cambridge, Coventry, Oxford, Shrewsbury, Bradford on Avon, Reading, Lewes and Birmingham, so I’m speaking from personal experience when I state that these events are all idiosyncratic and play an important role in many people’s lives, reaching far beyond the stereotypes of open mics, etc.
First off, there’s invariably a dedicated individual or team who volunteer to run things, often without any funding whatsoever (the irony, of course, is that this is where poetry really flourishes and makes a contribution to society). Secondly, there are the regular attendees, some of whom even arrive from outlying towns and villages, coming together for the reading in question. And that’s before considering their personal circumstances: on several occasions, a member of the audience has told me that poetry events provided their main (or even only) source of social interaction.
In other words, this post is a celebration of regular poetry events all over the country, though it’s also a lament, as their temporary shift online provides yet another example of the huge damage that the pandemic has inflicted on many people who already suffered great loneliness. And then, finally, it’s an expression of hope, that poetry can still form communities, even maintain them via the internet, and emerge into a post-pandemic era where we’ll be able to gather above a pub or in a village hall, and listen to each other’s poems once more.
Matthew Stewart, The communities created by regular poetry events

And so the job I’m applying for is one who praises. From, again, Li-Young Lee:
“Praise is the state of excess, ecstasy. We counted up all the deaths; we counted up all the dying: we counted up all the terrible things in life, and guess what? There’s still Van Gogh painting sunflowers, there’s still morning glories. There’s an excess in the universe, a much-ness, a too-much-ness.”
So I’m turning to Van Gogh, to the sunflowers, and to the morning glories. I’m going to change the station, flip the dial, change the channel in my brain, and devote myself to the hum of the universe. The mess is going to continue, I know that, and it totally sucks. I’m so beyond exhausted by heading into the fray (both physically with the day job and mentally). So I’m just setting it aside. I’m going to be a fool and turn back to the beautiful, I’m going to fix my broken hearing. I’ll end with another passage of Li-Young Lee speaking about the hum:
“I think it’s bad when poets say, “I don’t believe in the beautiful anymore. Look at the world.” Well, I say, “You’re looking the wrong way. You’re looking at the past. Poets should traffic in the ideal. You don’t traffic only in the past.” For me, as far back as I can remember, I was trying to hear a kind of hum, trying to feel it, and if I could hear or feel that hum, then the words just came and perched on that hum. If I don’t hear the hum, then I have to make the poem out of words. But if I’m hearing the hum and I hear it very clearly, the perfect words like birds will come and perch on that line. They will be the perfect words. but if my hearing is off — if it’s a little broken — and I’m faking it, then I’m putting the words in there, making the illusion there is something underneath. No. I’m interested in the frequency under those words.”
Shawna Lemay, The Hum of the Universe

After three cloudy, seasonable days–with no rain (we are in a drought)–the temperatures here got up to around 80° F and the cicadas emerged. I took a long walk around campus to observe the hatch.
Judging by the divots in the mulch around the trees, skunks, squirrels, raccoons, and other omnivores had a feast last night. But enough fourth-instar nymphs made it up the trees that I quickly lost count of how many exoskeletons clung abandoned to the bark of pines, maples, rowans, and assorted campus-landscape trees. There were also pale, newly-emergent cicadas–not yet imagoes–most of which were drying out their wings and bodies in the breeze. A few were still in the haemolymph stage (teneral adult stage), which is fascinating. Their wings are still furled, as they haven’t yet inflated with whatever fluid circulates through their systems, and the insects look particularly weird.
Brood X hatches mostly south of us, though this county is right on the border. Definitely seeing more of them this year than I have for many years past.
Magicicada are justly famous for their loudness. There were not many full-fledged adult bugs on campus at noon today; but when I return (on Friday or, perhaps, Tuesday), I expect the place will be buzzing. The students are not here to make the place buzz–I’ll be happy to hear the cicadas.
Ann E. Michael, Hatching day

Every day, more and more faces are stepping out from behind their masks,
lips making their debut on reality’s stage after having been in hiding for well over a year.
Thin lips, full lips, heart-shaped lips, turned-down lips.
Throughout L.A., all these rediscovered lips are like the new Norma Desmond, emerging from their Sunset Boulevard seclusion,
telling the ghost of Mr. DeMille they’re ready for their close-up.
Rich Ferguson, The Itness of Lips

So, last week I talked about discouragement from the whole rejection-cycle of being a poet. This week I’m going to talk about poetry dreams. The sort you’ve thought about for a while and think – now may be the time to take steps towards making them a reality. You know, I’ve been sending out resumes for jobs in the literary world (this is a big secret) but it got me thinking about what kind of work I could start on my own. I’ve thought a long time about opening up my own press, and lately I’ve gotten to start thinking about Virginia Woolf – the way she cultivated her own circle of talented artists, writers, and critics, and invited them to her home because her health didn’t do well when she was away. I thought about maybe investing in a little writer’s retreat cabin in a resort area that I could use, but could also rent out to friends (writers and artists), and maybe even running a little writer’s retreat of my own. I think that would be within the range of things I could do without endangering my health, especially if I had an accessible place to host from. What do you guys think?
The main thing keeping me from starting a press in the knowledge that while I have some gifts that are good for running a press – enthusiasm for getting underrepresented voices out into the world, a great reader (and pretty good editor, if I do say so myself), PR and marketing know-how, a pretty good idea of how to run a business – my worry is that I recognize I don’t really have a great mind for detail (even worse since the MS). I wonder if I could get a partner in the press who was great at detail-work. I know that the caveat of a one-or-two person press is that if, for instance, one person’s health fails (which has happened at two of my own publishers) then the press is gone. Thus my hesitance to “go for it.” (Well, that and paperwork – one of my least favorite things in life.)
So the kinds of jobs I’ve been applying for would be doing marketing and PR for presses – or even acquisition editor, a job I’ve had before in my previous life at Microsoft. While it would be fun to be part of a team in that case, would it be more fun if I had more ownership?
So, even if I don’t have the money, partners, or plans completely available right now, there’s no harm in putting these things out into the universe, is there? Please chime in in the comments if you have any thoughts, encouragements, or ideas about what I’ve posted here….
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Almost Summer – Memorial Day Weekend, Supermoons, and Dreaming Some Poetry Dreams

Collective dreaming, tons of it, was being reported early in the pandemic. It was a phenomenon of nocturnal spaces around the world. I was thinking about that this morning around 4am, looking out from the second story window at a sea-green garden, an octopus’ garden, to use the Beatles’ words, with the blue-green flesh of hydrangea calling out, the pompom leaves of trees being shaken in a hynotic motion; thinking of the way we tapped into soft, amorphous time and space world during the pandemic.
I was thinking of this after we had our first dinner party; as people return to social space, they rush towards individuation only to find they fit awkwardly in their bodies.
What was all that dreaming about? The unconscious was ordering things in a way of deeper reality, and people not previously accustomed were becoming awake to it. When we needed it, a curative, creative depths became available beyond the frontal barking of social media, beyond the dominating mind.
What can we now collectively gather? Is it too much to think of reforming a collective mythology, desires and fears of our shared humanity behind the lids? What if we made a bank of dreams — the way we bank money, and bank blood, now bank sperm and eggs and genetic material. Thinking on the model of cloud banks, dream banks will mark undivided and shifting spaces where psyches run into each other, billow and split and dissolve. I’ll start. I dreamed C.D. Wright gave me a haircut, very slanted across my neck as we talked about her waiting to receive a certificate to teach swimming; I dreamed about my mother’s belly, my bodily home, in different ages and stages. Of course, I dreamed of bounding outside of lockdown, climbing over roofs and living in endless reconfiguration of rooms. The possibilities are endless.
Jill Pearlman, Dream Bank for the Post-Covid World

Rain against the window. The sound of my wife laughing in another room. A sadness for the mounting grief in the world. Things that tell me I am still alive.
James Lee Jobe, The universe. My wife laughing.

May 23, 2021May 24, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 20

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week found me in an odd mood, a bit disoriented by the sudden onset of summer here, and so in compiling this edition I found myself drawn to the odd sentence, the strange story, the unexpected efflorescence of the unsayable.

So this is all to say that in the absence of Things to Look Forward To just landing in my lap, I’m trying to create Things to Look Forward To all on my own, and when I write Things to Look Forward To, I mostly mean Things That Will Distract Me from Thinking About the Things I Don’t Want to Think About Anymore.
And if you’re a writer and reading this, you’ll know that’s a laughable goal, because if I write anything I’ll probably be Writing About Something I Think is Completely Unrelated to Things I Don’t Want to Think About Anymore But is Actually a Loose Metaphor or Allegory for Things I Don’t Want to Think About Anymore.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Once More Into the Fray: I Revive the Blog and Once Again Accost the Internet with Nonsense I Can’t Just Keep in My Damn Fool Head

Good morning from the West where we are but blood under the earth’s talons
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

Cold enough still to sharpen the lungs to hitch and hurry, to be glad of the fullsuit even with lats and shoulders complaining of restriction; above, that cloudscape reflected, below, that cloudscape reflected; her skin in the palms of my hands patting her wave-greeting, a braille of lake-language, of where ya been babe, hi!, and a pouring of bliss immersed in her copper taste, her silky texture, the smell of her unique among all the lakes, as every beloved is unique; freshening wind enough to make real push at times, coasting in still sky others, fast, slow, hit by arctic blasts of springs from below, sun baking neoprene from above; breathing into cold joy; cruising slowly, going strong, coasting again to better listen to the dialogue, the poetry, the lovesong being sung by us both; power returning to my body and brought home to home ground, so many hundreds upon hundreds of miles in this water; alive–
JJS, Open!

I’m really pleased to be writing about Mike Farren’s Smithereens for all sorts of reasons that will become clear as we go along. But I have to say that the first one was its title, which is, I think, only the second use of the word in a poem since Tony Harrison’s Bookends in the 70s. The poet and his father are sitting in a morose silence, either side of the gas fire, sitting out the night of the day Harrison’s mother dropped dead. It’s one of many poems that explores the business of articulacy, of education, the way they separate families that should be close, make them inarticulate and awkward in each other’s company. Like Dylan says we never did too much talking anyway, but as he didn’t say, it’s not all right. Not at all.
A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!
.
Your life’s all shattered into smithereens
.
Back in our silences and sullen looks
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books
.
It’s not just the title ‘Smithereens’ that resonates but the obduracy.. the stupidity, if you like.. of the men and their silence. As Harrison says in the poem, his mother’s not there to break it.
John Foggin, Catching up: Mike Farren’s “Smithereens”

The word flower thrives in every language, says Kate Farrell, and Julia Fiedorczuk tells her poem, “bloom, bear fruit / come to life.” Galway Kinnell reminds us that “everything flowers, / from within, of self-blessing; / though sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness.”
Shawna Lemay, 10 Poems about Flowers

Like the protagonist of Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Circular Ruins,” who seeks to dream into existence a man “with minute integrity,” Goodby dreams these poems onto the page only to reveal that we are all part of the dream, reader and poet alike. As he writes in “The Ars” (the title poem), at first “he cannot imagine yet / ripped space”; finally, however, “his dream inscrutably feeds / on itself wrings pain bodies dry.” The body “dry,” the table-soccer player of The Ars’s cover photo (taken by the author himself), a simulacrum, the seam of the mold visible from the crown of the head on down. As the concluding poem, “Llu” (meaning “power” in Welsh), reminds, “To happen is finished and about to.” That is, it is “finished” by fashioning hands, or in the case of the figure in the photo, not so finished; indeed, these poems are always about to be, but never quite, and in this manner, are.
Mike Begnal, John Goodby’s The Ars

listen to the illusive will o’ the wisp lisp
of voices beyond choices
extra-cranial in their introspection
the prolapse of a mind in depth defined
and all thought proscribed by thought
Jim Young, noise

Again last night I thought about something I wanted to explore this morning on the page. Well: screen. And I thought to make a note on my phone, but then figured it was so obvious that I would remember.
Obviously, I did not remember. I bet it was profound, though. And would have lead to a book auction for the small creature taking form from my navel-gazing and ethical brooding. There went that opportunity.
Instead, I sit here on a flat Thursday thinking my glasses really need cleaning. Glancing over at Leonard and feeling guilty again because he is more overweight than I am. Then wondering if he wants some peanut butter. Because I do.
Ren Powell, RL and The News

As many evenings as possible, I get out my work bag full of scraps of text from the librarian’s packet, and I begin to search for poems.
Christine Swint, Erasure Poems and the Pandemic

Even in my dreams
coyote sings.
Tom Montag, EVEN

Things that shouldn’t exist
in the same world: the scent
of lilacs in bloom and the stench
of the “skunk water” I read about
on Facebook this morning.
I sit on my mirpesset, surrounded
by green: trees in leaf, willows
trailing graceful fringes, pots
of oregano, rosemary, mint.
So tranquil I could forget
global pandemic still rages,
India’s cremation sites burning
around the clock. I could forget
bombs, rockets, mortar shells,
bereaved parents and orphaned children.
Rachel Barenblat, Bereaved

in love’s one tear
filling the whole flesh
hear me
Grant Hackett [no title]

I could imagine reversing this looking back. The new moon in all its newness with a long tail, the tail of all its memories and associations reaching behind it into the future. My future now. I live forwards but remember backwards. O ) ) ) ) ) )) A crenelating ripple through time, a wrinkling of the brain.
Gary Barwin, On Garage Doors: Do I feel like I am 16 now that I am 57?

I’m trying to avoid getting too carried away with what/how the poet is saying things as I found myself having to “have a word with myself” a couple of weeks ago in relation to a review that’s due out soon as part of a new thing. I can’t talk about the “new thing” yet, but it is exciting to be in “on the ground floor”. However, in writing a review I was really pleased with myself for seeing that the poet in question had changed a word in a poem when moving it from their pamphlet to their full collection.
The change was subtle, one letter, but it was a shift that made me wax lyrical about the poet’s intentions for a few sentences, exploring the reasons behind the change and what it might be saying about a poet’s voice becoming stronger with experience, etc. However, that was quickly deflated when the editor for “new thing” said (and I hope they don’t mind me quoting) that it was more the “proofreaders that preferred the more modern version (carcass) so I don’t think we can read anything much into that“.

A potent reminder that sometimes a change is just a change is just a change.
Mat Riches, The Flattened Calf and a (anti-)Matador

It’s late May, which means the garden is changing. My own roses aren’t blooming (dang deer ate the tops of every rose, even the ones in “deer proof” cages) but the peonies are about to go, the pink clematis, rhododendrons, and azaleas are blooming, and the birds are singing loudly every morning. I find myself sitting outside on the deck more and more each day, especially the cloudy days, and the birds are getting more comfortable with me.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Reintegration – Family Visits, Haircuts, and Roses – and Rejections

Clearly
the world is always changing, not even mildly
inclined to take your sensibility into account.
Before you know it, it’s high summer again
and the trees are filled with the high humming
of cicadas. They’ve awakened from a long
pause, an interlude. Should their bodies become
spore-infested so parts fall away, they won’t even
notice.
Luisa A. Igloria, Extravagance

I don’t know if this was inspired by Planet Zoo or not, but I had a terrifying nightmare a few days ago in which I was being eaten alive by a giant cobra. He had his jaws solidly around my leg and was making rapid progress on swallowing his meal whole. One of my hospital volunteers was attempting to rescue me and he kept telling me to be very, very still. I listened closely to his instructions, all of the time convinced I was going to die and devastated because I didn’t want to shed my mortal coil in the jaws of a giant cobra. In the end I was saved, but I woke up in a cold sweat and awash in adrenaline. I made the mistake of Googling “eaten by snake dream symbolic meaning of” and none of it’s good. I find it very unfair that a cobra was aggressively trying to eat me. I have always been very snake-positive and have stood up for snakes in the midst of wide-spread cultural fear and loathing of them. And this how they thank me. Sheesh.
Kristen McHenry, Grid-Blindness, Slow Creativity, When Cobras Attack

you chased the hare
a golden zigzag
covering the roots
and hollows
as if born amongst
bracken and moss
we waited
locked in time
i whistled and called
and you came
spinning in from
the wrong direction
hope intact
joy undiminished
Dick Jones, Dog Sutras §47

The odd thing is, mostly we did not talk about cancer. I told her my particular story, of course: the unusual way I presented; my misdiagnosis of relapse; my prolonged treatment ‘just to make sure.’ But that wasn’t what we talked about. We talked about my family, about language, about what she called ‘spiralling’, that sudden swirl of thoughts, like a gust of wind round the corner of a building, that can knock you off your feet from nowhere. Mostly we talked about that. And about relapse prevention. Not cancer relapse (there is no safety net there), but spiral-relapse.
Which, years later, is what I am still learning now. Or re-learning, with some new words and ideas thrown in. It’s good. I like learning languages, the names for things. I’m not good at them, but I have always liked the process. This is a chair. I sit in the chair. This is the door. I come through the door. I am happy to sit in the chair. I sit in the chair and we talk. We talk.
Anthony Wilson, On Being Chipper

It’s been strange to be on campus in the mornings and not be taking temperatures of everyone who arrives. I had gotten used to it as a way to greet people. I know that I can still greet them, of course. I also laugh at myself, because I remember a weeping moment in the late summer of 2020 when I said, “I’m just so tired of taking temperatures.”
And now, it’s strange to retire that equipment.
On Thursday our internet went out, and I called the new IT people who asked me to go to the server room to tell them if I saw any lights blinking that shouldn’t be blinking. When I told them that no one on this campus was ever allowed to have the code, I could tell they were just dumbfounded. Within a few hours, the campus had internet restored, and I had the code to the server room (those 2 events are not causally related). I made this Facebook post: “Because we have a new IT director, I have been given the code to the server room, a code which previously, no one but the few IT folks were allowed to have (much to the fire inspector’s puzzlement). I have used the code to go into the server room. I expected to find a great treasure. I found old equipment, including an ancient fax machine.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Retired Equipment

For some time, I mistook intuition for a door-to-door salesperson peddling snake-oil pleasures rather than recognizing those moments of elusive clarity as an otherworldly awareness far keener than rationality.
Still, there are times when logic learns to muzzle itself, and perception is allowed to freely surf the electromagnetic spectrum of consciousness,
follow psychological and physiological footprints until discovering that mysterious inner creature roaming around like Bigfoot
singing the well-tuned song of self.
Rich Ferguson, Gut Feelings and Bigfoot

This lurching is exhausting. But at the same time, we are also recording sensitive changes to our emotional body. Major concepts that are supposed to have held us are weak. Our relations in every encounter, human and nonhuman, create worlds. What is true in the morning might be overwritten by what is true in the evening. Come to it gently.
Jill Pearlman, Shock of the (Post-Covid) New

You know how I’m a bit of a sucker for interesting poetry formats? Well, I’ve often wondered what The A3 Review was all about – a paean to the London to Portsmouth road, perhaps? Or a massive mag that won’t go through your letterbox? I bought a copy of issue #13 to find it’s neither of those. As the website says, it’s ‘a magazine that behaves like a map’ – it comes folded into A6 size, but opens out to reveal its contents.
In it I found poems by a number of international writers who I wasn’t familiar with, plus a pocket-sized Q & A with Roger Robinson (top tip: ‘read & write more, publish less’) and some quirky graphics. It was really interesting to see the poems spread out, so you get a visual sense of how they sit together as well as how they ‘talk’ to each other.
Robin Houghton, On poetry magazines: The A3 Review

As a reader, I’m especially keen on poets who show a knack for trapping and then heightening the natural ebbs and flows of language. Of course, many don’t even want to. However, their forced and artificial turns of phrase tend to leave me cold despite their popularity with certain editors and judges. I seek an apparent simplicity in a poem, accompanied by an almost imperceptible tightening of its cadences and layering of its potential ramifications. This is difficult to achieve and notoriously undervalued, but it moves me far more than linguistic fireworks that don’t earn their corn.
In the above context, I was especially drawn to Ruth Beddow’s two poems on Wild Court last week (you can read them yourself via this link). Their connection to experience is clear, while their capacity to reach way beyond mere anecdote is also startling. In other words, I thoroughly recommend them and I’ll be keeping an eye out for more work from this excellent poet whose name is new to me. Yet another example of the role of a fine editorial eye at a poetry journal: spotting talent and bringing it to readers…
Matthew Stewart, The natural flow of language, Ruth Beddow’s poems on Wild Court

The poems of Late Human explore, in unusual twists of perspective and thinking, the questions between the unanswerable, and around certain questions that have long been answered. “Having sopped up the mess,” [Jean] Day writes, to end the eighth section of the ten-part sequence “WHERE THE BOYS ARE,” “Or stopped a door with a thud from closing / So the Children of Corn may sow their seed / absolutely certain / That the longer a person remains unsexed / The older he or she will live // To apostrophize [.]” These poems are quite remarkable for not only what they achive, but what they achieve so quietly, and with such ease. Day’s poems play off sound, meaning and rhythm, offering sequences of thoughts pulled apart and strewn together in a delightful and almost deadpan linearity that makes sense even as one knows it possibly shouldn’t.
rob mclennan, Jean Day, Late Human

Raymond Carver’s story continues. The poet gets a ladder, climbs up to the first floor. Then, finds himself face to face with his own room, with his desk:
This is not like downstairs, I thought.
This is something else.
Why? I think it’s because this is where he normally writes: that inner life – room – he’s built for himself. (He repeats ‘desk’ a number of times: showing this is the pivotal spot.)
There is an intensity to this strange, and touching perspective, as well as something overwhelming: ‘I don’t even think I can talk about it.’
I’m reminded of the Winnicottian idea of finding room inside yourself, somewhere robust you can work and play.
Charlotte Gann, ROOM IN MY HOUSE

I’ve been reading Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets, which has got me thinking about cracker sandwiches. She mentions them a couple of times in the poems. I have never had a cracker sandwich, but the idea really sent me into a deep recollection of peanut butter crackers. Saltines, of course. The way the peanut butter eases up through the holes like little brown worms.
I’m pretty sure it was my sister who showed me you could put jelly on there too. Jelly! The purple not easing but full-on squooching up through the holes. Plooping out the sides if you weren’t careful.
It was best to stuff the whole thing in the mouth at once. The dry cracker on the tongue, its salt, how it melted quickly on the tongue to merge with the peanut butter but for the edges that caught on the teeth, still brittle and crunchy to the bite down. The jelly, grape, sweet, soft, cool on the roof of the mouth.
Marilyn McCabe, Blue dress blue dress; or, Writing the Lived Experience

On the project front, this week I hope to finish the website edits I started last week and get a finalized draft for dark country. I also need to create my Patreon postcards for May, and I’m obsessed with watercolors and trees, so that’s what I’m thinking. I’m getting the last batch of dgp 2020 titles production ready, so look for a whole batch of them to drop soon as I get their pages up. A couple 2021 titles have also been hitting the site. It’s also the end of May, which means next week, we’ll be opening for submissions for next year, and this seems wholly impossible. I think I blinked and entire year went by, but also it dragged heavy, especially through November and beyond. I am still getting used to not being afraid as much moving about in the world, and it opens up so many doors in my mind that have been shut for so long.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/23/2021

Tree branches flailing in the wind.
Crows claiming territory.
The river when it’s in a hurry.
The sky thundering about a coming storm.
The earth when she shakes.
Leather shoes dancing over a hardwood floor.
The automobile horn under an angry hand.
The chattering squirrel.
The orca lowing in the deep.
Things and beings speak.
Ssh.
Listen.
James Lee Jobe, Crows, leather shoes, inner strength.

May 16, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 19

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week I’m a little under the weather following my second Covid jab—light fever, general brain fog—so if the arrangement seems especially random, that’s my excuse. I found so many interesting posts, I had to be a bit picky and exclude a few things that might’ve otherwise made the cut—if that’s you, my apologies.

If my mother were alive, she’d be asking me why I haven’t written anything this week about Israel and Gaza and the West Bank. (Well, in fairness: she’d be asking why I haven’t written about Israel. She didn’t care about Gaza or the West Bank.) We had this conversation often, when she was alive and was well enough to get cranky with me about what I did or didn’t write.
I’m struggling to find words this week. Would my words actually make things better for anyone? Would they bring light, or only more heat? Would they open anyone’s heart, or just deepen entrenchment? What purpose would my words serve? Instead I’ve been seeking out the voices of Israelis and Palestinians. Their words matter right now in a way that mine does not.
I read words from Leah Solomon about her heartbreak and desperation. I read words from Ismail (a young man writing under a pseudonym to protect himself) about feeling trapped between a quick death and a slow one. I read words from Lama M. Abarqoub about bereaved parents. I read words from Sarah Tuttle-Singer about blockades and parenthood and children.
My heart breaks for all who have worked there toward justice and peace and coexistence. The actions (and inactions) of governments and extremists are pushing justice and peace and coexistence further and further out of the realm of possibility. And I know the same emboldening of rightwing supremacists that scares me in the States is happening there too.
So I pray this prayer by Rabbi Jordan Braunig, and this prayer of mothers for life and peace by R. Tamar Elad-Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Maḥameed (transl. by R. Amichai Lau-Lavie), and The smoke has not cleared by Hila Ratzabi. I pray poems by Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, Rachel Tzvia Back and Carolina Ebeid. I pray, and their words become my own.
Rachel Barenblat, Wordless

Some days we can lose ourselves in the labyrinth of dark news headlines.
Blindfolded by grief, we wander from one tragedy to another, tattooed with wounds feeling so un-akin to our natural skin.
We’re taught, yet again, how a bullet spelled backwards might not sound the same way but it still leaves a gun at the same speed.
Or how awful words can build upon one another, calcify, create the spine of hate.
Some days are so dark you can taste the fear of becoming a relic, an artifact, an extinct thing in the museum of breathing.
Gentle heart, return to us from the wild. Bell our weariness to a many-petalled joy.
Rich Ferguson, When the Bullet Meets the Bone

This past year I have not been able to write much, or rather, I haven’t been able to write much new poetry. I’ve written here from time to time. (Thank goodness for this blog, and the book that’s come from it – so much pleasure there, and the kind reading and sharing of it). And I’ve written thousands of emails, texts, even posted the odd tweet …I’ve written for my job as a university lecturer: thousands and thousands and thousands of words about, well, about how and why we can and must care for and empower each other, about how we try to learn when we cannot be together. That work has been utterly exhausting, though I regret none of it.
As for the music of poetry? The place from which that comes feels numbed, weary, tuneless.
I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning …
I woke this morning and after a bit of Sunday morning laying around, talked with myself about first things – about how I came to write poetry in the beginning, how I scribbled lines, hid them and tore them up, then eventually had the courage to join a writing group in my 40s. It was through reading poetry, not writing, that I found what I needed to know. After the reading, the writing – the impetus to express my own longings. I knew, I reminded myself decades later, that it was reading The Wasteland in my 1980s London bedroom that convinced me that I was not alone.
Sharon Olds, in her poem I Cannot Say I Did Not addresses the question of unbidden existence more clearly than anything I’ve heard or read in any other context: church, family, school, social work text books, The School of Life website … This existential conundrum haunted my youth – none of us asked to be born. Olds takes it head on in this poem, even daring to end on a preposition. It’s brilliant, and reading it again this morning (from the Bloodaxe Staying Human anthology) it confirmed to me that if I turn back to reading the poetry that moves me most, poetry which is about this existence of ours – the one that we’ve been hanging onto for dear life – if I turn back to the well-worn pages of Olds, Rich, Hopkins, Eliot, Collins, McMillan, Clarke, Sprackland, Duffy, Oliver … in time, and with gentleness, and quietly, I will, in time, find my voice again.
… I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with.
Sharon Olds – I Cannot Say I Did Not
Liz Lefroy, I Struggle With Words

Strangely, in the last few weeks, I have taken some of the incredibly negative writing I’ve been churning out for months and months, and am turning it into something more positive. There is still an underlying sadness and fear but it also has hope. I had previously tried to find, in my vast pile of writing, some poems that were positive. I didn’t find many. I submitted those to a competition and was shortlisted. That was a positive in itself. And it is clear that people want hope right now – well, always, obviously. So I thought I’d try it on myself. If I can write it, maybe I can believe it. Some days it works. I’ll keep fighting.
Sue Ibrahim, Fighting

And the boat will light the night sky
enough for a sudden, uproarious rush
to the sea, in old clothes, good clothes,
underclothes or no clothes at all.
A wrecked boat with stories to be told
but nobody interested enough to hear.
Somebody will make a good fire of it
and it’ll be gone. Charcoal, ash, good to
spread on an allotment, or for the wind
to pick up and blow far out to sea.
Bob Mee, ON MADNESS STREET

I discovered the cure to writer’s block. Decide finally your rattly old car needs to be replaced so you can stop worrying about it. Do some dreadful car shopping, including endless reading of articles in Car and Driver or other magazines you would not otherwise frequent. While you’re in the middle of a reaction from your second Covid shot, buy a car you can live with for a price that gives you only partial dyspepsia. Sell the old car for far less than you had thought you could get. Boom: Start writing again.
Or was it springtime.
Or finally boredom.
Well. I guess I’m not sure. Anyway, I have several pages of scrawl, so that’s good. But I’ve also got a pile of really good reads (hm…could that have been what got me going…?), so I thought I’d share some.
Marilyn McCabe, But you gotta have something; or, On Writer’s Block and Reading

I’m not a silver linings kind of gal. Not a “look on the bright side” person. Not because I insist on wallowing, but that I believe I need to allow myself to accept what is hard, or unpleasant or destructive, for what it is – honestly. I need to see this “thing” for what it is and acknowledge the real consequences.
It seems to me that looking for bright sides is gaslighting oneself. A kind of emotional sleight of hand. That said, life is full of “things”. Dark things and bright things. And sometimes it does help to keep the nourishing things in view while dealing with the things that can kill us.
I remember seeing a drawing a few years ago of a dark tangle of lines inside a small circle. It represented grief. The image was followed by a larger circle with the same size dark tangle of lines inside. The idea being that grief doesn’t get smaller, but that life goes on and becomes fuller, and the grief takes up less space in our lives.
I am no expert on grief, but this makes sense to me. And I see no reason why it wouldn’t help to look around and make my life larger in the present. To make my circle of awareness larger.
Ren Powell, “All the Things”

As I read through Frances of the Wider Field, I think of my own grandmothers, one who died suddenly 30 years ago, and one who died 17 years ago from Parkinson’s. I often feel that I never really got to know them, and that is its own kind of grief. I see your poems as a way to stay in conversation with people you cannot converse with anymore, at least not in the way you once did. Do you feel there is something special about poetry as a genre that allows for these conversations to happen?
I hadn’t really thought about it like this before, but yes. Poetry allows for all kinds of unexpected turns as opposed to, say, a mode that has some expectation of linearity. It seems to me that poems are not only a way to stay in conversation with people we can no longer access, but that writing into the unknown allows us to converse with mysteries. The Frances poems originated with that energy, of being open to conversations with people I never met, with places that existed before me, with lineage, with ghosts, with concepts of god. The energy was at first an impulse to write toward a very specific absence, but the poems turned into presence–Frances began permeating the landscape, the dailiness of past, present and maybe even future. I’m interested in the continuum of time and memory and how we move long through different planes of experience, sometimes all at once.
Allyson Whipple, Poetry Interview with Laura Van Prooyen

When I visit, now, he makes sure that I know that he wants me to have his onyx bookends. It’s hard to know if he knows that he’s said that before: he’s always had the good teacher’s capacity for clear repetition. He knows it’s not enough to say something once. One of the reasons I’ve always been a poor teacher is that I’m not able to repeat myself. If I even suspect that I repeating myself, I stop short; I’m mortified; I can’t proceed. Not that it actually stops me from repeating myself: I’m often startled, if I look back at my older posts, to see how often, how tiresomely, I say the same thing. I’ve said all this before, too.
The bookends are massive, Mexican onyx, from some foray into Juárez. And I do indeed like them.
—
The mallet just kisses the huge metal disk: it rings, or rather throbs: a low tone on the edge of hearing, but a sweet call. If the huge slow earth were a cat chirruping with pleasure at the sight of a friend, it would make this sound. More things, more things in heaven and earth. A la deriva, but at least in motion. The sky is a pure wordless blue. This year’s wildfires haven’t started up yet. And we don’t actually know that they will. There’s lots we don’t know.
Dale Favier, Bells that still Ring

You must forget what came before,
how really there was no cloud
of mosquitos that night, only a stinging
flurry of words, how everything happened
too fast once she arrived, and how
you were the only one left to bury her.
Afterwards, you ate and cried as you ate,
the toast black like the black soil
you kept turning inside your mind,
covering and uncovering a grave.
Where there’s fire, there’s smoke, so you
sat there, waiting, eating the burned
toast, raising your hands in surrender
to imaginary knocks on the door.
The makeshift table wobbled, half-chewed
by termites. The TV flickered on mute.
You made your own news, platefuls
of it, the gift of an alternate reality,
where the world was still the same, but
was played back in reverse, and last night
with its soft-pink center was yet to come,
led by the peace of a dreamless sleep.
Romana Iorga, Nothing Left to Do

I do not own a powerful telephoto lens for my old digital camera, so I rarely take successful pictures of birds. My noticing tends toward the small and not-fast-moving: flowers, mosses, flora, lichen, fungi, landscapes. I have learned to look mostly at my feet, and occasionally at the clouds. It seems that the limits of my camera and of my vision (terribly, terribly nearsighted) have led to a particular perspective that affects my photos, my botanical interests, and my poetry.
Which is, sometimes, all to the good–but not uniformly. Perspective should be varied; we humans need to imagine that other humans (and non-humans) may witness life from other points of view. This concept is fundamental to psychological understanding and to the much-vaunted and controversial “theory of mind.” It also gives us the pathetic fallacy and anthropomorphism, which expand human ideas about consciousness and offer plangent and resonant metaphors that writers can employ.
All of this came to top of mind today when a student brought in a Philosophy paper concerning Nietzsche’s perspectivism.
Nietzsche opposes philosophers who ignore the fact that individuals have limitations on their theorizing. What makes his idea so thorny is that at the same time he suggests–goes so far as to claim–that perspective (even limited, ideological perspective) is imaginative, is one of our human freedoms.
Ann E. Michael, Perspective(s)

Poetry is difficult to define. It’s a nebulous creature. Even if one were to point to particular tropes or concepts as being hallmarks of poetry, the definition shifts along with its multitude of forms, styles, and expectations.
The first episode of this Writing Excuses master class attempts to answer this question. However, instead of simply presenting her own definition of poetry, El-Mohtar wisely turns the tables, asking the question, “What is prose?”
Prose is so ubiquitous — being present in novels, short stories, and non-fiction works all around us — that we tend to take it for granted. By asking “What is prose?” Amal shakes up our understanding of what we read and write.
Since Kowal, Wells, and Taylor are all seasoned professionals, their answers to this question are thoughtful and enlightening. The discussion leads to the conclusion that poetry and prose are not opposites (as is often perceived), rather they use the same tools and elements to engage with language in order to create specific effects.
As a person who has recently published Twelve, a book that blurs the line between poetry and prose, I found this conversation particularly resonant. Each of the poems within my book are narrative-heavy prose poems, in which poetic language is broken into blocks of text similar to paragraphs. As such, it’s been interesting reading some of the reviews and commentary about the book, as some readers feel that labeling these pieces poems is an inaccurate description, calling them instead vignettes.
Personally, I don’t blame readers for feeling bewilderment. When I started writing this collection, my intention was to write poetry with a heavy narrative focus. However, as my writing process continued, each piece grew into a hybrid creature I wasn’t quite able to define. Ultimately, I decided that since my intention was to write poetry — and these pieces feel like poetry to me — that’s what I call them.
Andrea Blythe, What is Poetry? A Writing Excuses Master Class

Tomorrow is #DylanDay (see here), so I wanted to post some photographs linked to the poet whose hometown of Swansea was also my home for two decades. […]
Italian poet and Dylan Thomas aficionado, Lidia Chiarelli, charter member and co-ordinator of the Immagine e Poesia movement, has been busy assembling and curating a website of international writing and visual art to mark the day. I am delighted to have my poem, ‘The Gothic Arch’, posted on this webpage (the easiest way to find it is to scroll to the bottom here and then move the cursor up the page a little). The poem, as you will see, was written in response to a few words from one of Dylan’s poems.
The site also contains articles, such as one by Peter Thabit Jones on ‘Dylan Thomas and Greenwich Village, New York’, in which he ponders some of the fascinating ‘what ifs’ in relation to Dylan’s short but extraordinary literary life.
Caroline Gill, Marking #DylanDay 2021 … Immagine e Poesia

as was youth
beer-bloated and curled
a smile – winsome
isn’t that what they say
to the wide-eyed
but to the writers of poems
it is the meagre wages
of time squandered
in the good company
of laughter un-worded
worldly but unworldly
is this tragedy to behold
Jim Young, older dylan dying

Most of the time, I feel much more at home among zine culture practitioners than I ever did poets, and it may just be that my DIY ethos has never fit well in a system where such things are frowned upon. Where I have sat on panels arguing about self-publishing that are the exact opposite of zine panels. Fellow zinesters are welcoming and excited about indie publishing, where many poets are just looking for the “acceptable” routes of work dissemination–academic journals, fancy presses, the things poets have been fighting over since the early 20th century and maybe before which have more to do with “legitimacy” and less with actually cultivating an audience. Zinesters have to take the means of production into their own hands by definition, so the results are much more varied and diverse.
And perhaps it is that seizing I try to convey to the classes the most. The idea of authorship and creating media in spaces and from voices that don’t always get heard. I am excited to see what comes of this year’s programming once we are back in the physical spaces..so stay tuned.
Kristy Bowen, for the love of zines

Q: How did Queen Street Quarterly get started?
[Suzanne Zelazo]: I had been volunteering as the photography editor (which was the only position open) at my college literary mag (The Trinity Review). The journal was as formally traditional as the campus. Although I found that limiting, I got to see a little of what went into such an enterprise. Most importantly, I got to see how and where it was printed, which was around the corner at Coach House Press. The singularity of that press with its commitment to the book as an art object was absolutely crucial to how I conceived of the QSQ. What they do as printers made it very clear to me that I wanted to produce a periodical that would showcase the materiality of the text, specifically by including sound and visual poetry. But, as a lover of much lyric work as well, I wanted a venue that would integrate the traditional and the avant garde. I believed and still do in the power of reciprocal exchange between different genres. One way I saw of enabling that was by according the ephemerality that characterizes much experimental work the weighted presence of a proper bound text and to have it appear on zephyr laid paper that would do much to fix the fleeting in place for the benefit of extended engagement. Additionally, I believed the less experimental material in this configuration would take on a different charge featured alongside seemingly incongruous work.
Looking back, part of the impetus to start the QSQ was no doubt youthful arrogance—I did not see any magazines at that time to which I wanted to submit work, or more precisely, which reflected the kind of work I was writing and interested in, so I figured I’d make one.
Q: What were your models when starting out? Were you basing the journal on anything specific, or working more intuitively?
SZ: I wasn’t basing it on anything specific but discovering older copies of Between C and D: Neo-Expressionist Lower East Side Fiction Magazine, edited by Joel Rose and Catherine Texier (1983-1990) made a huge impact on me. I read every one I could get my hands on. Printed and “bound” as it was, or rather, computer-printed accordion-style and packaged in zipped plastic bags, cultivated my understanding of the periodical as art object. The entire print run is stunning and the magazine’s commitment to the avant garde scene was so inspiring to me. Tish was the same for me in terms of prioritizing generic experimentation.
rob mclennan, Queen Street Quarterly (1997-2005): bibliography, and an interview with Suzanne Zelazo

I can barely lead this morning’s writing class. A sudden migraine hit only a few minutes before students began to show up on Zoom. It’s a bad one — pain and nausea plus vivid wavy lines distorting my vision. I take some restorative slow breaths, drink a glass of water, then welcome everyone to the class.
I love teaching. I’m particularly mesmerized by the way community writing classes effortlessly build connections between strangers. Over weeks of reading and discussing their writing, people can’t help but get to know one another. Ordinary conversations, even between close friends, tend to fritter time away on surface topics. But in writing class we skip weather and family updates, going directly to deeper topics. It’s entirely natural to bond after sharing universal experiences like fear, regret, grief, embarrassment, triumph, and joy. I suspect we carry one another’s poems and stories with us long after the class is over. I certainly do. Many friendships built in writing class persist and several former classes of mine continue to meet independently as writing groups. Writing together has a magic all its own.
But this morning I am in trouble. I can’t easily focus on the screen and can barely see my notes. Worst of all, I have trouble explaining concepts due to migraine-imposed brain fog, In this session I introduce persona poems. I explain, falteringly, how persona poems free us to write from the perspective of a soup bowl, a tree, an astronomer, a virus. I point out persona poems can help to stretch us. After all, if we’re writing in the voice of a dolphin or the voice of Donald Trump, we are writing our way toward understanding those lives more completely. I note that some people insist all poems are persona poems because the “I” in the poem is still a persona the poet choose to present. I’m not sure how much I get across because I feel like a balloon floating over the class.
Laura Grace Weldon, Healing Power Of Writing Via Zoom

After trying checklists and flowcharts and a variety of other revision tools, all of which felt too prescriptive, I finally landed on the poetry revision bingo card. I figured making revision an actual game might encourage a greater degree of playfulness. I tell my students that the goal is to get a bingo, not to get a perfect poem. This frees them up to be experimental and take chances they might not otherwise take. While they also have the option of jumping around the board at random, getting a bingo forces them to try things that might be unfamiliar to them, instead of just going for low hanging fruit. I sell it as an opportunity to be surprised, to find out what secrets the poem is keeping, as well as what it has to teach about craft. And of course, sometimes what the experiment teaches is that you had it right the first time, which isn’t a failure of the revision process, but a validation of your instincts.
Poetry Revision Bingo – guest post by Suzanne Langlois (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

A thousand pages flutter open in the wind.
Translation: The days are gods
who haven’t shown their faces yet.
It’s when they appear as nothingness
that we think of them as powerful.
How can you supplicate
what isn’t there?
Luisa A. Igloria, (Continuing) Improvisations

spring daylight lingers
longer through the evening
we talk video games
coasting down hills
our bike lights blinking
James Brush, 05.10.21

A roar of Harleys,
a long rumble of them
coming through town–
spring.
Tom Montag, A ROAR OF HARLEYS

Walking home the other day, I noticed a cop car pulled up in front of a coffee shop on the main drag of my neighborhood. When I rubbernecked to see what was going on, I was a bit shocked to see a 100% buck-naked lady standing out in front of the entrance in full view of God and everyone. I would have expected this from an elderly person with dementia, but this was a young, attractive woman who appeared completely normal in every other way. She was perfectly calm and reposeful, not all at combative, just…naked. At one point she settled into one the chairs in the outdoor seating section, drew her knees up, and just sat there. It was quite strange. The cop on site was in observation mode, being very hands-off and obviously trying to shield her body as much as possible. I hope the naked lady is okay and that she got connected with some good mental health resources and that no one took pictures of her and posted them on the internet (I was watching the other pedestrians closely to make sure they didn’t have their phones out). The whole thing made me wonder about my own capacity to crack to the point that one day I just decide take all my clothes off in public and stand around nonchalantly. Somehow I don’t think this will ever happen. I am innately as modest as a nun and have a horror of being seen in anything less than full-length pants and skirts, so hopefully, even if I do have a complete mental breakdown one day, it won’t involve me stripping in public.
Mr. Typist and I took a long walk yesterday in celebration of the outdoor mask mandate being lifted, and I was surprised at how joyous it made me to see people’s faces again. It was a sunny, almost-warm day, there were a lot of people out, and practically no one had a mask on. Every time we passed people without masks, I was filled with a little zing of happiness at being able to see their full faces. I don’t know any of these people; they are just strangers out in public, but somehow seeing their whole faces brought me a sense of jubilance. This brings up all kinds of questions about what sort of long-term psychological affects that masking has had on us, and how it has affected our sense of our own humanity, and what it means from a biological and evolutionary standpoint to be visually cut off from the view of our fellow human’s faces for prolonged periods of time.
Kristen McHenry, In Defense of Hufflepuff, Buck-Naked Lady, The Joy of Seeing Faces

Finally, one from Rembrandt — I love this because it’s deliberately left unfinished, and we can see his fast, scribbling line. Look at that barely-indicated tree, over on the left! Picasso loved Rembrandt and you can see why. His facility is unnerving, and just makes me smile with delight when I see the way he “builds” the trees with just that line before starting to add any shading or detail, and then starts to go in: “yes, let’s work on the side of that trunk to show its gnarliness, let’s show the little leaves on the ground and the way the bank is uneven, these branches I’ll leave white against the dark foliage, but those others need to be dark against the light shining through”… I could feel him thinking some of the same thoughts and making some of the same decisions I did in my own drawing, and all those years and the distance between anonymity and fame collapse, and we’re just two artists concentrated on our work, looking intently at trees.
Beth Adams, On Drawing Trees

Can light redeem every/anything? Since I have lost my faith in so many things of late, maybe irredeemably, it occurs to me that my latest photo excursion was in part about testing that idea. Can light still change us? Can beauty? Can a seagull perched on top of a TacoTime cactus after rummaging through the trash show me something that I need to know? Can all of this, this attempt, be a synonym for happiness, even if it is couched in despair and a loss of faith?
Shawna Lemay, Synonyms of Happiness

The photographer wonders how to say in deer language: “I come in peace; be not afraid.”
The deer wonders how to say in human language: “Breakfast is ready and there’s enough for you. Come and eat.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Deer and the Photographer

This morning I thought with a start: does “console” mean with-alone? It doesn’t, it turns out. According to the OED, it comes from the Latin con- (with) + sōlārī (to solace, soothe). We used to say “consolate” until Dryden, Pope, and others shortened it. But I like my pretend etymology, too. There’s inwardness to mourning, but it’s also touching how many people reach out kindly.
Last spring I found it deeply strange that the world was coming to life so beautifully as a virus ravaged populations all over the world. This spring, as the human social world stirs in harmony with the natural one, I’m thinking about how my mother would have appreciated the warm weather, the annual sequence of blooms, and the lift of mask mandates (I worry about the latter, but I bet she would have flung hers away triumphantly and gone to brunch with her friends, to her children’s exasperation). It’s strange not to text and call her. Guilt and shame sometimes flood in about the times I wasn’t kind to her. I woke up in the middle of the night mad at a relative who wouldn’t talk to her during the last year (although he’s also elderly, I thought in the morning, and deserving of compassion, so I will NOT be extending the grudge). I wish my mother had one more summer.
On the “with” side of lonely brooding, I’m thinking about traveling and connecting with friends, in person. I rebooked last June’s cancelled trip to Iceland as well as an August week at a NC beach house with my kids–and I’ll come to the latter straight from the Sewanee Writers Conference, which I’m looking forward to with excitement now. This Thursday Chris and I are driving up to NJ to spend three nights at my sister’s beach house before attending a small memorial for my mother in my sister’s backyard, with a few friends and relatives I haven’t seen in ages. I’ve picked out a poem from Heterotopia to read, and I’ll share a letter from my mother’s best friend while growing up in England, but other than that, this writer has no idea what to say. There’s so much, and a lot of it feels private.
Lesley Wheeler, Celebration & consolation

sad at the passing
of a friend
we few now
the sun sets
but still
you drive
the dark paths
as if they had
no end
Dick Jones, Dog Sutra §22

So I spent some time this week reading Joan Didion’s new collection of as-yet uncollected essays from the 1960’s – 2000s, What I Mean – a great book to dip in and out of on the weekends. Standout essays include “Why I Write” and “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” as well as some of her asides about her early days working as a copywriter at Vogue. […]
I also finished Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, about the friendship and relationships between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. There were two fun chapters – on how they met in a workshop with Robert Lowell, their meetups, and on their writing habits – and about four excruciating chapters on how both women suffered in their marriages, their poor treatment at the hands of psychiatrists, Anne’s abuse of her daughter, and their eventual suicides. I know it’s hard to get around those subjects in any kind of biography about either poet but it just – oof – made for tough going. It’s well-researched and the author makes useful notes and asides for context, but I was glad to have Joan Didion to go back to – she seemed so solidly upbeat in comparison!
I was also interested to find out for which book and when Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize – click the link for more detailed info from a Poetry Foundation blog post – and how she negotiated for equal pay for readings, appearances, and publications. When reading about successful female authors of the past for inspiration, I often wonder how they would fare now. How much more equitable is our current system – health system, and the poetry system? How can we make it even better? How can we find successful women writers who had more stable, less abusive relationships, better help and more success in life who can be role models? There’s always Margaret Atwood, who remains bracingly cheerful in the face of a long, happy marriage and a lot of late-in-life success, I guess…Suggestions welcome in the comments!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Poem on Verse Daily – I Can’t Stop, Birds and Blooms, and Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion

Poetry has been a balm for many over the past difficult year, for others it has been an outlet to express the whirlwind of emotions. Chris Campbell’s White Eye of the Needle, currently available from The Choir Press, is the first published collection I’ve read that mentions the current epidemic, though its presence has been felt through poems in journals and online since this all began.
Covid’s stamp on the current poetry scene can’t be ignored as I’m sure it will continue to weigh down many poetic collections in the near future, but former journalist Campbell doesn’t dwell on the epidemic. The poetry collection themes range from travel to relationships. They are well-matched by Sandra Evans’ sweet, detailed line drawings, gems in themselves.
Campbell’s writing is delightful, focusing on those simple moments that in retrospect carry so much importance now, especially as many ordinary habits of our life, visiting a café, going to an open air market have been denied us in the last year. His poems remind us to savour the things we once enjoyed freely.
Gerry Stewart, Book Review – White Eye of the Needle – Chris Campbell – Blog Tour

A second review of Strangers is in! This one meant so much to me because it was written by Chris Banks, a poet whose writing and blogging have meant a lot to me (as you can see if you check out my ten Chris Banks “quotes” here on this site, which reach back over the last twelve years!). As Chris mentions in the review, Strangers features a quote from Chris’ second book, The Cold Panes of Surfaces.

The quote accompanies the book’s dedication to my father and two brothers: “For we are who we are, and more, all that is ridden within us / in the same way our fathers are not our fathers but someone / else’s inconsolable sons” (“LaHave River, Cable Ferry”).

So I suppose Chris wasn’t a fully unbiased reader, nor am I a fully unbiased recipient. Chris’ attention being given to my book was an absolute joy. His observation that the book focuses on “grief for a larger world that is constantly passing forever into the past” echoes one of my favourite conversations, between Stephanie Bolster and Don Coles, on the”presentiment of loss” in Coles’ poetry. I hadn’t realized – slow as one is to see their own work – that I was in part drawn to that conversation because I think and write in similar ways.
Rob Taylor, New Strangers Review

I’ve been blown away by some of the haiku in paul m.’s ‘witness tree’, and reading Wally Swist’s ‘The Windbreak Pine’ has made me appreciate the longer line (many of his poems are 17 syllables, although not necessarily 5-7-5). Both books are from Snapshot Press. I’d like to say more about these collections, but work has been hectic (plugging gaps due to an outbreak of Covid that seems to be rumbling on despite many other areas having lowers cases). Time hasn’t been on my side – is it ever? What I would say though, is that I have never been disappointed by any books I’ve bought from Snapshot Press. And I have a few more still on my wish list!

This sort of brings me round to another thing that I’m starting to do, which is sell some of my poetry books. From time to time, I give books away, either to fellow writers, or to the local Oxfam bookshop in nearby Holmfirth. I don’t do this lightly, but space is always a premium and sometimes I realise I’m unlikely to keep returning to a particular book. Most of the books I own aren’t worth that much, but one or two might be considered collectible. So, I’m dipping my toe in the waters of e-bay, in the hope that some of these books will find the right home, so to speak. My mother has a saying that goes something along the lines of: ‘She knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. I’ve had a careful think about what I value, and currently, it’s haiku. Any money I raise will go towards the purchase of haiku books. And I’ve taken the plunge and joined The British Haiku Society too (not sure why it’s taken me so long, something about a formal organisation that I find slightly off-putting, but we’ll see). Anyway, that’s where I’m up to on this rather rain-soaked Saturday afternoon. I hope that wherever you are, you are reading, and writing, and loving what you do!
Julie Mellor, rain-washed gritstone

The burrowing owls stand and watch closely as I walk by; have I come to threaten them? No? This is the anxiety of death that we all know. The burrowing owls, small, colored like the earth, like the cold ground, relax a little as I pass. I can see this. O cold night, let them know peace and comfort, these little beings who look at me and think of danger.
James Lee Jobe, Flesh, time, fate, and some rather small owls.

May 9, 2021May 10, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 18

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week’s topics include (but are by no means limited to) graveyards, grieving, making art, flowers, gardening, literary community and the po biz, ghosts, podcasts, promoting new books, and ecopoetry. Enjoy.

This morning, I thought about writing a poem about Noah’s wife and cicadas who emerge after 17 years to mate for a month or two (or the whole season of summer). I’m thinking of Noah’s wife and menopause and sweeping away the dried husks.

And my other inspiration: one of my Create in Me female pastor friends made this Facebook post about visiting a congregation to talk about South Carolina retreat centers: “How wonderful to eat ice cream in a cemetery on a sunny day surrounded by all the saints.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Violence of Collision: Interstellar Space, Flannery O’Connor and Other Inspirations

I read Lucy Rose Cunningham’s recently published sequence sitting on a bench in a country graveyard this afternoon, with memorial stones in the foreground, and the Shropshire hills in the long view. I had a flask of Earl Grey and a bun to keep me company. My bicycle was propped next to me against the wall of the church. I was glad I’d set the context to become acquainted with this beautifully produced pamphlet from Broken Sleep Books. All credit to the publishers for its austere elegance.
I’ve learnt to look after my body as I’ve aged – in Cunningham’s Acknowledgements words – to know what this body really deserves. It’s an important rite of passage, and one to which Mary, Marie and Maria all have something to contribute. Others have illuminated this aspect of Cunningham’s work, so I won’t repeat what they’ve written (I refer you, for example, to the Cardiff Review https://www.cardiffreview.com/review/a-rich-stirring-debut-for-mary-marie-maria/)
For my part, I chose this setting for reading because I wanted to listen hard to Cunningham’s voice – not to understand every line (I didn’t) but to loosen up, pay close attention to what I heard and felt. I found much to enjoy, and much to grieve, in doing so.
Liz Lefroy, I Review A Pamphlet – Lucy Rose Cunningham’s ‘For Mary, Marie, Maria’

This week since her death has flit by strangely. I spent time with my kids, both based in Philadelphia, before driving home. I’ve written a little: a poem my hairdresser dictated the title for (he’s both a literary person and wise about grieving, and the title is “First in Line for Takeoff”); some notes of my memories of her last days; her obituary; responses to condolence notes and gifts; this blog post and the last. I’m thinking about other writing-related work: submitting mss for the virtual Breadloaf Environmental conference in June and the live Sewanee workshop in May; the Mother’s Day promotion I was going to do for Unbecoming; a short article on Eliot due at the end of May; whether it would be consoling or ridiculous to try working on my creative mss-in-progress again. The book of essays I will deliver to Tinderbox Editions before too long–Poetry’s Possible Worlds is scheduled for November publication–currently ends with my mother’s recovery from her first bout with lymphoma in 2015. Does my coda need a coda? I can hardly bear to think about it. And, of course, I’m spending a lot of time doing nothing. There’s so much to think about and avoid thinking about. I’m most comfortable perched at an intellectual distance from big feelings, noticing how the people around me process it, for instance, and my own preference for matter-of-fact conversations about her death. That’s part of what makes me a writer–metaphor itself involves displacement as well as insight–but it can also be maladaptive.
Lesley Wheeler, Grief metaphors flying

Well into Spring,
my jasmine is in bloom and soon
there will be the first of the peach blossoms.
A sliver of moon tonight, waning crescent,
and only a slight breeze.
1,487 nights since my son left this world.
James Lee Jobe, Are you ready to pass through?

And then he said something that I think is still changing me. He began to speak of a mutual friend, one we had lost some months previously, of how he was missing him: ‘Even with all that going on -and you know what this is like, having gone through it yourself- and with all the crap that is still going on, I still need to remind myself daily that a bad day at work is a day he won’t have.’
And that stopped me in my tracks. I began to find something pricking behind my eyes, the slightest increase of pressure in my temples, as though pushed by the gentlest of vices. My woes did not leave me, but I had the strong impression of seeing them from far away, as through a telescope from the wrong end. Mixed into this sensation was the pleasure, as well as the pain, of knowing that while the woes were in a different place, and that they were not going to vanish, I now had a choice about how to see them differently.
A day he won’t have. Like my friend, I need to say this to myself daily (sometimes hourly) when I sense the world and my feelings about its woes threatening to overwhelm me. Which is often. A day he won’t have.
Anthony Wilson, A day he won’t have

Yesterday an old woman almost died,
it took thirty-seven people
it took two hundred and fourteen messages
to get her to a hospital bed.
But she will be home in a week.
It will start with her.
We know.
We’ve won before.
It always starts with one person.
It always starts with one battle.
It always starts with one victory.
It always starts when the first person says no.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, It is war

Kept indoors over a year,
the Buddha’s hand: its leaves
whiten, unused to direct sun.
Luisa A. Igloria, Three Sketches

And I have been slowly working on another quilt about Park Wood in winter. Trees in cross-section, the space between them criscrossed with mycelial strands. Cotton cloth and silk thread, all dyed in a variety of botanical brews, some modified with iron-water. The circular patches are where I tied found beer-caps in. Some had rusted at the edge, giving a nice dark line. The bigger dark patches are where I tied in lumps of rusty iron from a bicycle half-buried in the wood.
[…]
what I’ve been missing is
stepping out
smelling human beings
everything has to be planned
Kate from two angles
diluted some ink and wrote it small
it will be something else
stitched on velvet
dropped into a window
Ama Bolton, ABCD May 2021

April also marked my first experience coordinating an event for the O, Miami Poetry Festival. The challenge in proposing a project for 2021: to what extent would people be interacting? How could we create something fun, but also safe? I reached out to Neil de la Flor last fall (great poet, lives in Miami, always has interesting ideas), and something came up organically in conversation–that his family had a multi-generational business in floral deliveries. One thing led to another, and we partnered with SWWIM to curate a selection of poems inspired by flowers, which then went out in bouquets delivered by Dolly’s Florist.

My contribution, other than a general habit for task-mastering, was to conceive delivering the poems in origami form–something that could sit decoratively in a bouquet and invite unfolding as a tactile interaction. Since I turned out to be the only origami enthusiast on the team, this also meant the literal hunkered-down time of folding 150 pinwheels. Felt good to do something hands-on, since I couldn’t actually set foot in Miami.

I’ve loved origami since I was a kid, taking classes on how to make cranes at the McLean Community Center. One thing I thought about as I worked in the (once again, very) early morning hours is how I used to try and rush through the preparatory folds; the moments in process when the paper has to be creased, then uncreased, to ease a later move. Younger Me thought that was a waste of time, that surely I could finesse the move without it. Older Me understands the necessity. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I’d like to think that the challenges of 2020 were, in a sense, preparatory folds for some great move ahead. […]

Perhaps this is a trite thing to say, but I do appreciate you coming by this blog. I don’t update it as often as I could, or should, or want to. But it’s a good, sturdy little tether that binds me to remembering the question of whether I would ever publish a book at all, and therefore how quintessentially lucky this life has been. I’m happy you’re here.
Sandra Beasley, Poetry in Bloom

Spring has come to Montreal very slowly this year, which I like — it gives us time to adjust from our Canadian deep freeze, and to really enjoy the incremental changes each day brings. While friends further south were posting pictures of cherry blossoms and daffodils, we were still looking at snow…so it was lovely to have a florist call us and say there was a delivery. A friend had sent us flowers in honor of his OWN birthday — what an unexpected and beautiful gesture! This was the second of three bouquets we’ve enjoyed this spring, and it’s the one that I managed to sit down and draw, and then paint.
The drawing started out as pure line, but I felt that the shapes were just too complicated to read that way, so I added some shading while trying to keep it all fairly lively.
How different it feels in color! I like the drawing more, but I think most people would probably prefer the watercolor.
In any case, I appreciated the hours I spent looking at these flowers – a challenge for the artist, and a respite from the sadness of the world as so many people continue to suffer from the virus and the inequalities of access to care, medication, and vaccines. Please give a donation if you can: what would you have gladly paid for your own vaccination?
Beth Adams, Bouquets

I can’t say
what what I say

is worth,
the old monk said.

I just want
a bowl of soup.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (13)

Another Machado poem, “Tal vez la mano, en sueños…”:
in dreams maybe the hand
of the sower of stars
sounds the forgotten music
a note on an immense lyre
and that humble wave comes to our lips
in a few truthful words
___
The climbing yellow roses make their serpentine, parasitic way through the laurel, and dangle from the eaves. They’re not really roses and the laurel is not really a laurel, I’m told; they both have odd polysyllabic names in clumsily grafted classical tongues. But I’ll call them roses and laurel. It’s my damn hedge. The roses are gorgeous this year: apparently this ominously dry April suited them.
Dale Favier, Machado, Roses, Back Pain, and Covid

I dedicate a dandelion to Anna Jarvis who, having founded Mother’s Day, spent an entire lifetime trying to undo it. Her success in 1914 quickly became overscented, oversweet, oversentimentalized by the profiteers of capitalism, and within years, she was desperate to put the cat back in the bag. Keep it simple! she railed. Boycott florists, squash the candy makers and card hawkers! Stop the commercialism! She exhausted her fortune to take back a name she couldn’t quite claim – Mother’s Day?
Jarvis wanted to honor and respect a much more complex motherhood. Rather than a delicately petalled flower, I see dandelion as Jarvis’ idea of mother. Its burst of sun-like flower is charming, and the unsung tenacity of its weed with its jagged, tooth-shaped leaf and its deeply sourced taproot where its spiritual power lies. The grit and vision of la durée, the everyday beauty of continuity, is packed into its whole. It is “toothy” — dandelion is a corruption of the French “dents du lion.” The feminine becomes gritty, determined, a fighter, what some might see as masculine energy while the masculine is often fragile. Such are the truths in paradox.
Of course, we can spy beauty in our mothers and sidewalk flowers often — like seeing dandelion when the afternoon sun comes glancing over rooftops and catches it in its jewel light. I see wildness in its simplicity. I see an outflow, a pouring of generosity. I am never one to scorn excess! All the flowers I got this year have amazed me. So many beauties! In the spirit of both/and, I gather the whole thing and offer it in thanks.
Jill Pearlman, The Rise and Fall of Mother’s Day

The other book I’ve been reading that made me think about poetic foremothers and influences is Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, all about the friendship/frenemyship of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. It provides a lot of background and context for their relationship. Besides making me jealous that I haven’t been meeting anyone at the Ritz for martinis, it made me think about the poets we read and pay attention to in our own lives, who we are secretly competing with (even if subconsciously,) who we read and let influence our own thoughts about poetry and poetics. I realize I am very lucky to be friends with so many wonderful poets, but I don’t really have a nemesis, per se. But maybe that’s okay. Do we need someone to compete with to reach our own potential? I think this is a very interesting question, because, especially as women are pressured NOT to be too competitive, at least in my generation.
But it does make me think about how writers need to encourage and push each other out of their comfort zones, and one way to make sure that happens is to make friends with diverse friends, some who are editors and publishers, who are full-time writers, who run their English departments, who have many different ways of writing and publishing, and many different voices. It reaffirms that we can all grow and learn and build our own unique paths. We don’t have to sound alike, or go to the same conferences, residencies, MFA programs, etc. There’s space for all of us.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Mother’s Day, A Week of Birds, and Thinking About Our Poetic Mothers and Influences (and Who Will Parent Our Books?)

Last night I sat upstairs in the studio and tried to read. But the refrigerator E.’s daughter used when she used the upstairs space as an apartment was humming. I’m not sure humming is the right word. At first I thought someone was playing music downstairs. Or outside. I would have sworn I could almost catch the lyrics. Ghost-like and insubstantial, but definitely present. […]
My best friend took me up a 14-pointer in Colorado a few years ago. After about an hour we were quiet. It was meditative. I paid attention to my breathing. To the calm thoughts that passed through my mind. To my physical body, checking for altitude sickness.
Above the tree line, above the snow. Stones and wind, and a little bit of vertigo. It was exhilarating. Coming down I told her I felt like I’d had a glass of wine. Or two. Her teenage son was with us and he was giggling: “Me, too.”
I really would like to climb a mountain now. A really high mountain.
But I think about the refrigerator and its ghost music, and I wonder if what I need is to sit upstairs in the studio and listen. To breathe. To pay attention to my body, check for any sickness caused by a sudden shift in circumstances. To make out the lyrics. To write them down.
Ren Powell, The Songs of Ghosts

bullet train
we are far from home
little fly
Jim Young [no title]

What replenishes you?
The term “self-care” has come to feel almost meaningless: it’s so ubiquitous, and so often misused. (A quick google search for the term yields returns like “How To Make Shopping A Healthy Self-Care Practice.” Hello, capitalism.) But we all need to replenish our inner reserves. That’s true even when there isn’t a global pandemic.
Taking Shabbat off from working — and from the to-do lists, the news headlines, workday consciousness — replenishes me. My son and I were watching Adam Ruins Everything recently, and in the episode about work, Adam proposes that we have “labor unions and the Jewish people” to thank for the fact of Saturdays off. Indeed we do.
As the weather warms, signs of spring replenish me. The chives in the window-box on my mirpesset winter over each year, and they are one of the first things to green up when spring arrives. I just added a little sage plant and a little rosemary plant to that box. Their scent grounds and delights me, and they’re delicious, too.
Rachel Barenblat, Refill

I had a post all planned out two, or is it three weeks ago, but tiredness and life got in the way. The gist of the post was me attempting to connect the work I was doing in the garden that weekend to the construction of a poem.

I was building, and staining two planters and some trellis (NB Trellis was bought, but I made the planters) as you’ll see below.
I forget how exactly how I was going to make the connection, but it probably involved the idea of some sort of planning followed by making it up as you go along. (Yes, like these posts…)..or something about taking raw materials and shaping them into a finished product over time…Yeah, it was probably something as pretentious or as tenuous as that.

However, while I was putting the stain on I was listening to 2 of the excellent Alice Oswald lectures (the Interview with Water and Art of Erosion ones), an Episode of The Verb (on punctuation) and the Toast podcast with Fiona Benson being interviewed by the excellent Laura Barton (I recommend her writing and radio stuff, and her novel, Twenty-One Locks).

The Benson interview was fascinating, and among all of it one point really stood out where she mentioned that the idea of calling yourself a poet should be no less of an issue than being a plumber…And I think she’s bang on. I’m not doing her justice here, but that idea that being a poet is somehow a higher calling is one that I totally concur with.

It really hit home today as well as I was attempting to swap some taps over in my kitchen. I’ve got better at saying I write poetry/calling myself a poet, but there is never going to be a time when I can say I know anything about plumbing, let along call myself such a wondrous thing. Dear god, we’ve got it the wrong way round…These people need to be the ones on plinths…
Mat Riches, A plinth and a punch, the first in (almost) a month

The sun is shining and I’m going to be gardening this afternoon. The weather is becoming less glacial and I may even be able to plant out the tomatoes. Hurray! I feel my mood lifting. The diary for May and June promises much, it looks like Nick will be working again after 15 months of enforced layoff, and musical events are on the calendar again. Not before time. I was starting to find it hard to get out of bed and not succumb to dark thoughts. But at least the pool has reopened!
In fact, the last week or two have brought some brilliant moments – not least of which was Wednesday’s launch of Antony Mair‘s new Live Canon collection A Suitcase Filled with Hope. I was proud to be able to say a few words about Antony, in front of his friends and family and many, many fine poets in the audience. He is a very modest person, but with a big talent and a huge heart. I think this is his best book yet. Highly recommended.
Last week I met up with my Planet Poetry co-producer Peter Kenny and poet friend Charlotte Gann for a few beers in Lewes. A bit of rain didn’t put us off! This is the first time Peter and I have been able to meet properly since last November, and although we thought we might do some recording for the show, we ended up just socialising.
We’re really proud of Planet Poetry; we’ve learned as we’ve gone along, made mistakes and haven’t quite reached BBC standard yet but hey! This week I attended some sessions of a Podfest Masterclass, and although the things I heard about how to take a podcast ‘up a notch’, promote it to a wider audience, make it easier to subscribe to etc wasn’t anything I didn’t know, it was a fantastic kick up the backside. As a result Peter and I now have a domain name, plans for a website and lots of ideas for the future. We’re currently working on Episode 14, due out next week and it’s all about poetry publishing. Looking at the list of previous episodes I’m reminded how much wonderful new poetry we’ve encountered, and how many fascinating poets and editors we’ve spoken with – most recently the eminent American poet LeAnne Howe.
Robin Houghton, Faith, hope and podcasting

Strangers is officially out there in the world and making things happen! […]
I’ve been able to do two interviews for the book, too – one audio and one in print. The spoken one was for Andrew French’s Page Fright podcast. Andrew has been good to me in the past, interviewing me last year (just pre-pandemic) about Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and What the Poets Are Doing. This time we talked about the new book, and all sorts of other stuff: creating community during a pandemic, how I like to read a poetry book, my superhero origin story, etc.
You can listen to/download/subscribe to the podcast here.
My second interview was with Michael Edwards, who runs the Red Alder Review. Michael has also been good to me in the past, publishing a haiku of mine just this January. We talked about both Strangers and haiku a good deal in the interview, among other topics. Most pleasing for me, Michael’s questions reached back over all four of my books, allowing me to take a bit of a long-view on my writing, and how its led me to this current book.
You can give that interview a read here.
I’ve also been delighted to have Strangers appear in both CBC Books and 49th Shelf‘s Spring poetry roundups, and to see photos of the book appearing here and there on social media, the highest of these honours being Vicki “BookGaga” Ziegler handwriting a poem of mine in her journal (weighed down by the famous tiny pink dumbbell!) – a long held dream for any Canadian poet on Twitter.
Rob Taylor, Strangers in the wild!

This month I have been dazzled and overjoyed with the love and support from so many about my book, though at times, I have felt like that hand in the life ring on the cover of my book–drowning not waving. Or maybe I’m just looking for a high-five.

I haven’t been this busy since pre-pandemic and in the busyness was neglectful of sharing that I have some wonderful readings coming up!
Kelli Russell Agodon, Reading Calendar For Dialogues with Rising Tides / Kelli Russell Agodon

Those who follow my blogs, and perhaps particularly this one, will know that (in normal times) I enjoy watching Puffins as they move about on and off our coastal cliffs. I am thrilled to have one of my Puffin photographs on the cover of Neil Leadbeater‘s new poetry collection, published by Mervyn Linford of Littoral Press. David and I met Neil back in 2011 as fellow participants at Swansea’s First International Festival of Poetry, organised by Peter Thabit Jones of The Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) with Stanley H. Barkan of Cross-Cultural Communications (New York).
This fine collection includes poems rooted in a variety of rural (e.g. Tarr Steps), coastal (e.g. Aldeburgh) and urban (e.g. Port of Tyne) landscapes. A compelling sense of musicality pervades much of Neil’s work, aided and abetted by a sprinkling of alliterations and allusions. I have been particularly enjoying the poem sequences … and the Puffin poem, of course!
Caroline Gill, My Puffin Photograph on the Cover of ‘Reading Between The Lines’ by Neil Leadbeater

Toward the end of last week, I was feeling the not all too unfamiliar feeling (doubt? restlessness? ennui?) about my work (more specifically writing more than visual work). It comes and goes, that feeling that feels like spending your whole life shouting into a canyon that comes back with only your own echo, but I was feeling it by Friday and questioning everything. I don’t think it necessarily has to do with po-biz, and more maybe with a certain writerly loneliness in the world. I don’t need fancy pubs and awards and attention, but I do like to feel that my words are hitting some sort of mark out there in the universe. (Maybe not the mark I intended, but something at least.)
That canyon is so big, and so filled with other writers also shouting. And also, there is this huge rushing whir that may be the wind, but may also be terrible very-real world things like raging pandemic attention spans and a world that barely reads at all. I sometimes go back to a blog entry I wrote in 2010 about feeling completely and utterly creatively happy and fulfilled, which is especially funny considering my non-creative personal life was a shit show and my work life tolerable but undynamic. I also was barely writing, and it occurred to me, this may have been why I felt so happy. I was anxious about it–the NOT writing, sure. But while others were shouting, I was hiding in the bushes. Being ignored was okay because, really, I had nothing much to offer.
In those years post MFA, I was devoting much more time to the etsy shop and visual things, and these felt like something people actually wanted, you know. Not just things I was throwing out into the silence. These things took up time/energies later better spent on my own projects and the chapbook arm of the operations and eventually I scaled the retail end back in favor of these endeavors. These are a harder sell than paper goods, vintage, and jewelry–all things in high demand in those days when etsy was still small enough to forge a following. The output/reward system was more direct and involved less effort. So it could be that–the satisfaction in making things for which there is a demand in the world outside of poetry, which is so small but also large but sometimes highly capricious.
Kristy Bowen, on writing and not writing

Hans Christian Andersen’s What One Can Invent merits a read. It’s part fable, part satire.
– There was once a young man who studied to become a poet. He wanted to be a poet by next Easter, so that he could marry and earn his living from poetry, which he knew was just a matter of making things up. But he had no imagination. He firmly believed he had been born too late. Every subject had been used up before he had a chance at it, and there was nothing in the world left to write about.
– He visits an old lady, who lived in a tiny gate-house i. She says “Just try on my spectacles, listen through my ear-trumpet, say your prayers, and please, for once in your life, stop thinking about yourself.” That last request was asking almost too much of him. It was more than any woman, however wise and wonderful, should demand of a poet.
– She shows him a potato, a blackthorn, a bee hive, then gets him to watch the people on the road. He has many ideas. But when he returns her ear-trumpet and spectacles, the ideas go. So she suggests “Write about those who write. To criticise their writing is to criticise them, but don’t let that trouble you. The more critically you write, the more you’ll earn, and you and your wife will eat cake every day.”
Tim Love, What One Can Invent

stacks of notebooks
like cordwood
fending
off the cold
paltry fire
barely big enough
to keep my fingers warm
so i can write
and count the pages
as they flutter
into the fire.
Jared A. Conti, Kindled

An amazing thing happened.
Last fall I sent a pile of newer poems to Middle Creek Press, hoping I might salvage something out of what little I wrote during our ongoing pandemic misery. Turns out that collection, titled Portals, won the 2020 Halcyon Poetry Prize. Wild, right?
What an honor to have Middle Creek publisher David Anthony Martin select my manuscript. This collection is packed with poems about sycamore leaves, gut bacteria, quicksand, protests, yeast, talking peonies, insects, inflation, and consequential strangers. […]
People seem to think a writer writes in isolation, pulled only by some invisible drive to assemble words into form. For years I felt that isolation acutely. Heck, I didn’t even admit I was writing and publishing poems until my first collection, Tending, was accepted by a small poetry press. All that time the work of other poets pulled me onward. Their poems nourished me and helped me recognize poetry is in us all.
When the publisher of my first collection told me to solicit blurbs by reaching out to poets I admired, the task seemed unimaginable. Approach a busy stranger, someone I’d deeply respected from a distance, then ask for a favor? A distinctly time-consuming favor? I was appalled. Maybe my book could be published with a blank back cover. Maybe I could pretend the blankness was some kind of artistic choice. Turns out that wasn’t necessary. Every poet I contacted was gracious, even the poets who turned me down. Their kindness introduced me to the kindness of the writing community. (There are unkind pockets too, but I’m too small potatoes to be affected.)
My next collection, Blackbird, continued to teach me just how beautiful the writing community can be. Writers go out of their way to amplify the work of other writers. They mentor, they share, they podcast, they teach. Many dedicate their time to make literary journals, literary organizations, and literary events possible.
I am the recipient of these kindnesses and more.
Laura Grace Weldon, Portals: My Newest Book!

I’ve noticed a quotation making the rounds again by May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude — a book which in part inspired my own Calm Things back in the day). She says, “Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
Keep busy with survival, says Sarton, and we try, even though survival really is just imitating trees. How did she know?
And while you are doing this, it’s good to also be seeking out and making beautiful things. On beauty, Peter Schjeldahl said, “Beauty is, or ought to be, no big deal, though the lack of it is. Without regular events of beauty, we live estranged from existence, including our own.”
Beauty, in my opinion, right now, is actually a really big deal. And that’s because we are a little estranged from existence, at least I feel as thought I am.
Still, everything else goes on, and if you don’t follow my posts on Instagram, you might not know all that has been going on for me and my famjam this week. And it’s all great, wonderful, kind of amazing stuff really. Which at this time seems a bit exhausting? Ha. We’re loving it all, but it seems weird to be celebrating in the middle of a pandemic and all that. As we all are doing, and have done, amid everything else. The lows and the highs are intermingling in all new and surprising ways, aren’t they?
And so with all that, I still have my book on the horizon to look forward to, which is actually truly heart-bursting — to think that this can happen amid everything else these past two years. I have my incredible publisher Palimpsest Press to thank for just persisting and being so enthusiastic and kind and also really professional and efficient, which is something I really appreciate. Because it’s easy to forget how hard it is just to operate in normal ways in these intense times and that everyone has a life outside of their work that has become tricky in immeasurable ways. And so if you can keep work things fun and light in all this, well that is a balm and a boon.
Shawna Lemay, If Two People

My video Colony Collapse has been selected for an international on-line exhibition, Agency, hosted by Broto Art-Climate-Science in Boston. It’s associated with their conference on 15-16 May entitled Greetings, Earthing: How does global citizenship affect our climate response? As part of the conference, I’m also taking part in a discussion on Agency: Arts as Civics Teacher.
Curated by Margaret LeJeune, the show asks “What exists at the intersection of empowerment, the climate crisis, and radical empathy? What does agency look like in a post-human world? And, can it be ascribed to non-human species, rivers and/or ecosystems?”
Ian Gibbins, Colony Collapse at Broto Art-Climate-Science: Agency

Amherst, Massachusetts poet and editor Dennis James Sweeney’s full-length poetry debut is In The Antarctic Circle (Pittsburgh PA: Autumn House Press, 2021), a book of absences and solitudes reminiscent of the geographic lyrics of Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), with both titles writing out alternate takes on specific geographic locales across a contained stretch. “Scan the snow for objects of love and wonder.” Sweeney writes, to open “74°0’S 108°30’W,” “Boil seal meat, stirring / with both arms.” For Reid, the boundaries of his specific map were the province of Alberta, and for Sweeney, he writes the Antarctic circle, but one as a space of shadows, legends and imprecisions. He writes an open space upon which the emptiness allows him to mark and remark as he wishes, putting on his own particular imprint, writing love, heart, hearth and environmental crisis. How does one love during a crisis? How does one allow a benefit of doubt? Even the shadows, one might say, betray. As “76°20’S 124°38’W” writes: “You will learn: Negative sixty degrees is not absolute zero. // You will learn: In a whiteout you cannot see shadows, but that does / not mean the edges are not there.”
rob mclennan, Dennis James Sweeney, In The Antarctic Circle

I wonder if we ever become allergic to ghosts or just the dirt that surrounds their graves.
When death arrives at our doorstep, I don’t imagine it bearing a beautiful bouquet as the living are generally the ones who lay fresh flowers upon graves.
The number of those who’ve passed away must surely outnumber my remaining brain cells. Eventually, those, too, will become dirt and dust. But not before I remember those who’ve left us.
Sometimes this world can break our hearts like a dog-whimper song.
Other times, our love ruckus is enough to remind the ghosts they need not be allergic to us.
Rich Ferguson, People Who’ve Died

the dog naps with a belly full of chicken
the cat naps with a belly full of mystery
one of the Marley kids is singing
through the Bluetooth speaker
I’m writing a poem, trying to freeze
a moment already lost to swift time
Jason Crane, POEM: movement

May 2, 2021May 3, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 17

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: hearts, mothers, birthdays, uniquely poetic dilemmas and much more as another Poetry Month came to an end… but the pandemic, sadly, proved to be far from over.

Certain variations of alone have served us well.
But in other situations, if you spell that word backwards, it becomes the first name of the aircraft to drop an atom bomb during times of war.
In other words, you can love the rain but not to the point you become it, where you flood the streets, spill into gutters, and are swept out to sea.
If there was something I said you don’t fully understand, hold these words up to a mirror.
Perhaps they’ll make better sense.
Rich Ferguson, Enola / Alone

It’s been a catastrophic April in India, with Covid-19 ravaging the country and causing bottomless suffering. I’ve tried to write micro-poetry through it all (on instagram – @tp_poetry), only to realize that there are not enough words for pain and grief. This was the last poem for April. Where do we go from here? What will May bring?
countless broken hearts:
each fragment a universe
in which stars are dying.
there is a reason we should not see
stars imploding —
the sky is part-dream, part-faith, wholly alabaster,
the ceiling that keeps out the endless deluge,
the monsoon is our one unspoken compromise.
but now silver turns to dust in wet eyes.
grief that needs to be intensely personal,
grief that belongs inside the occasional soul,
that grief is now plural.
we hold that polished stone inside our chests,
abandoned, naked,
naked in this city of wailing mirrors.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Countless broken hearts

The heart is a shoe: it grows tattered over time, worn down by its footfall that keeps trudging forward into each night.
The heart is a phone: it cannot speak but words come and go from it, not things it says but others, a conversation around the heart clutched and answered, only the side of someone else’s face for intimacy.
You touch my arm, and the set of toy teeth inside me I call a heart is set off chattering. All my life I’ve never heard this shudder and jolt. My heart’s all motion and gnash now, all kick and snap—a toy, but all bite.
José Angel Araguz, heartlines

After reading the first poem in Karen Dennison’s most recent book Of Hearts, (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), I discovered that Point Nemo is the spot on the earth furthest from any land and also the place where “retired spacecraft are sent”
Karen takes this strange fact and imagines a life over time from the invincibility of a young woman in love, to her sudden descent into waves: “… knocked off course by junk and debris. For decades I lay on the seabed with other wrecks and remnants of life”. Will the speaker resurface after loss and grief? That’s the question.
Many of the poems show us love-lost and grief, but they also give us a cosmic viewpoint blended with the human scale. The grandness of the Universe offers the gift of imagination, awe and perhaps comfort. For example, in “After you’re gone”, the speaker’s “heart’s a pulsar/ sweeping the night,/ warm breath on cold glass/ condensing to gas clouds,/ constellations … ”
Karen is really good at this sort of melding of imagery, scale and emotions, and in “Moon song” she gives the moon a heart: “She knows the destitute, the homeless, feels / Their dust-cold shivers in her empty seas, drips/ her thought-tears on midnight …”
E.E. Nobbs, Of Hearts by Karen Dennison

I met John [Higgs], Robin [Ince] and Kae [Tempest] at the British Library and we had the extraordinary pleasure of viewing Blake’s only surviving notebook. It was so well preserved, beautiful, filled with Blake’s sketches and first drafts. In this photo I am reading the early drafts of the poem London.

It was such a wonderful experience. We recorded some of Blake’s poetry for this event alongside my great friend the poet Kae Tempest. Even though we wore masks, I could see our eyes all smiling. Kae is the president of The Blake Society and it was so lovely to spend some time in the library with Kae and John and Robin and William Blake. What a glorious way to gently ease myself out of lockdown and out of my cocoon! Like so many I haven’t been out-out for a long time and have not seen my friends and peers, so this was an extra special day for me.

After the recording was done, the light was good, the golden hour, so I took a walk and saw my city again. I felt like I was coming back from war, returning home from a great battle. I ached and I felt older walking through London yesterday. How London was vibrating with youth and life, all London, all coming out of her cocoon. Kae said of butterflies, how it is good it is hard to break out of a cocoon, it makes the butterfly build muscle so they can fly, Kae said, if there was no fight and it was easy to leave a cocoon the butterfly wings would be too weak to fly. I thought about this a lot as I walked. I thought about butterflies and cocoons and wing muscles and how we are all building up our muscles to fly again – the collective noun for butterflies is a kaleidoscope of butterflies and I really like that. I want us to be a beautiful, powerful kaleidoscope of butterflies in flight.
Selena Godden, Tyger Tyger!

They arrive at the door. Late. They carry me out, upright, stiff, one man on each elbow, taking good care not to bump me against the door frames. They swing me horizontal to put me into the truck, stand me in a corner like a grandfather clock, strap me to the wall. In an easy chair, a woman in a Fair Isle cardigan and tweed skirt smokes a pipe. Are they moving both of us at the same time? I ask. She raises one eyebrow as if I should know. She picks up a battered copy of Slaughterhouse Angel, the underground magazine, from the dusty floor, begins to read the classified ads aloud.
Bob Mee, GROOVY REMOVALS (HOMAGE TO 1971)

We gathered our moments
gratefully — bits of starlight,
deep woods quiet, wild violets
and jonquils in Spring. We held them
close, like talismans for the future.
We held on until we didn’t have to.
*
[…]
So I missed the last two days of NaPoWriMo. I’m sad but it couldn’t be helped. I had my last COVID-19 vaccination on Wednesday and was rather sick for 48 hours after. All I wanted was to sleep or try to sleep. But I’m all better now and when I saw the bonus prompt I decided to jump in. My poem is on the sad side but we write what rises to the top, no? I hope everyone is having a great weekend. Mine is definitely on the upswing!
Charlotte Hamrick, NaPoWriMo Day 31: Bonus

My enormously generous and gifted friend Georgia Writer [my name for her on this blog], invited me to an actual community poetry workshop and open mic, in person!
This declaration warrants an exclamation point considering I read two new poems as well as an erasure poem that Georgia Writer guided us to write. I got so emotionally charged during the outdoor reading that I grew flustered and tripped over the mic cord on my way back to the seating area.
Of course, I warned everyone that I had retired from teaching this year and have been pretty much in lock down since Thanksgiving. I’ve barely seen my own family members, including my 81-year old mother, who, I’m grateful to say, is very healthy because of an active lifestyle, good fortune, and lots of time outdoors in the garden and on trails.
Georgia Writer is a longtime university librarian, poet, and natural historian, a true polymath. Several years ago, when I visited her university office, it was like entering a cabinet of curiosities: sculptures, drawings, birds’ nests, wasp nests, animal skeletons, plants and plants and plants under lights and in terrariums. Of course, there were towers of books everywhere, and yes, she really does read them all.
Christine Swint, April Erasure Poem

Have you ever done something as you planned and prepared for it, received well-intentioned compliments, and only felt terrible afterward? Well, it’s over: Thursday’s Zoom reading in which I read new material next to some amazing poets that shattered me temporarily (Raising Our Voices poetry reading hosted by Carlow University’s MFA program). I couldn’t figure out why I felt disappointed and very, very sad. Sure, it was almost 3 a.m. in my time zone (the Zoom was hosted in EDT) when it ended so I was tired. I stayed awake for another hour trying to sort out my feelings: was I embarrassed to hear my poems next to the other fantastic ones; was I doing that thing where I compare my work and want to give up writing forever; was I expecting something more from the audience; was I expecting more people? The honest answer to these questions was a certain, “no,” but still I felt let-down, an anti-climax of sorts.
I reached out to my cousin, a musical performer who I grew up admiring because his voice resonates (I can hear him as Joseph in Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat all these 30-some years later). He relates. He said that sharing our work is, “vulnerable so … it’s natural to have those types of feelings afterwards. We can be our own worst critic, which … goes hand in hand with wanting to do well.” He has developed compassion for himself and an ability to laugh and to keep things in a broad perspective. I wish I were so mature (turning fifty this year).
I reached out to poet-friends who agreed that, especially during this Zoom-era, readings can leave us feeling sad. There is no immediate response from the audience (on “mute”), no head nods, no affirmative “mmm-mmm’s,” no questions afterword or congratulations. It can make us feel isolated when we are left with the chat, which I only discovered in its entirety the next day. I didn’t know until the morning after that so many of my friends scattered all over the world (from Norway to Singapore) would be listening. The emails were very generous. My poet-mentor even wrote to ask if one of the new poems was published yet. I got lots of virtual big hugs and congratulations. The words beautiful, and great and vivid and moving were scattered about. It was very nice but, did I feel better?
What is this self-doubt all about? Is it a mechanism to improve our work? How could it be if I’m not revising all of my poems? I like them the way they are. There. I said it. I was reacting like a Kindergartner, who throws tantrums. I certainly had not reached the maturity level of my cousin. It was not a conscious decision to feel badly, it was a disappointment I am not used to and it has to do with the Zoom-room. I usually love the excitement of reading to a room, however small the party. I miss the warmth of the crowd. It has been a year of isolation and no wonder, I miss people.
Cathy Wittmeyer, Managing Expectations within The Honesty of the Room

I haven’t made an update here since February, but there hasn’t been much to say. And that’s not a bad thing.
Work continues on compiling and sequencing the new & selected volume, I’ve got a few poems out at literary magazines, and I’ve significantly pulled back on posting on all of my social media accounts (it’s been a breath of fresh air). I also decided to opt out of accepting any invitations for readings during the almost over National Poetry Month.
My head and iPhone notes app are filled with lines in search of a poem to plug them into, so that’s always a gift from the inspiration goddess. But, honestly, I feel like the “poetry hiatus” I wrote about at the end of last year has already begun.
Collin Kelley, I’m still here

Despite pandemic restrictions, or perhaps because of them, I have been blessed with poetry the past few weeks. I have attended workshops and readings remotely/virtually, and I’ve participated in a few of those as well as giving one in-real-life poetry reading. I signed up to get the Dodge Poetry Festival’s poetry packet & prompts, and those appear daily in my email. Best of all, poems have been showing up in my mind–I started quite a few drafts in April.
Up to my ears in potential manuscripts (I have at least two books I am trying to organize), I’m also waiting rather anxiously to see whether my collection The Red Queen Hypothesis will indeed be published this year as planned. The virus and resulting lockdowns have interfered with so much. The publication of another of my books matters to me, but it remains a small thing in a global perspective, so I try to be patient.
Meanwhile, I thank poet Carol Dorf of Berkeley CA, who has been kind enough to read through one of my manuscripts and offer suggestions. It’s such a necessary step, getting a reader. I recently enjoyed this essay by Alan Shapiro in TriQuarterly, in which the author reflects on his many years of poetry-exchanges (he calls it dialogues) with C.K. Williams. His words reminded me of my friend-in-poetry David Dunn, who was, for close to 20 years, my poetry sounding board, epistolary critic, and nonjudgmental pal who often recognized what I was going for in a poem better than I did. Shapiro says he feels Williams looking over his shoulder as he writes, even after Williams’ death (in 2015). In a section of the essay Shapiro has an imagined (possibly?) conversation with a post-death Williams, conjuring the remarks his friend might have made in life, or after. I have had such dialogues with David, but not recently. It may be time to try again. Or, as Williams told Shapiro before he died, “Find a younger reader.”
Ann E. Michael, Imagined discourse, new skills

“For her graphic imagination and her instinct for matching feeling to image, I chose Erica Goss’s poems. It is far easier to describe in language the push-pull and shove of emotional attraction than it is to locate and pinpoint the meaning of feeling in time and space. Put another way, this poet has a gift for putting into vivid word-pictures her passion for life as well as her grasp of its unfolding complexity.”
So wrote Al Young when he chose my poems for the inaugural Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry in 2007. Those three sentences changed my life. As a woman re-inventing herself in her late forties, I simply could not believe my good fortune in winning that contest, but Al’s words about my poems mattered much more than winning. Clearly, he had read my poems, understood them, and, with his phrase “the push-pull and shove of emotional attraction,” aptly described the time of life I was in: pulled in a million directions, between family, school, and work, with the burning need to write.
When I won the contest, I didn’t know much about Al. As I got to know him better, I realized that I was just one of many people who’d received Al’s kindness. He was generous in that way. His optimism was infectious. He made students want to get up and do things, write poems, connect with others. He had an amazing voice, deep and resonant, that made his ordinary speech sound like poetry.
Erica Goss, A Tribute to Al Young

I’ve long appreciated the slow lyric across which Canadian poet (residing in St. John’s, Newfoundland) Don McKay contemplates, something I’m reminded of through his recent All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2020). Over the years, and across multiple books of poetry, essays and thinking, McKay has developed a meditative way of approaching and considering the physical world, which for him includes the written word, specifically poetry, as physical to his considerations as pebbles along a shore, the development of the Laurentian Plateau or an outcrop of trees. As he writes in the opening piece, “The Path Between Bewilderment & Wonder: Contemplating Lichens,” “Another way to put this: lichens are naturally occurring koans, puzzles placed in our path to shift our paradigms of thinking and help us into fresh spaces in the contemplation of life forms, natural systems, language, and ultimately the organ we are contemplating them with.”
Across six essay sections, two of which are broken up, further, into pairs, McKay contemplates the works of Joanne Page and Margaret Avison, linguistic study, the grotesque, geological time, confronting grief and the clarity of the lyric. What I appreciate about this collection is that, occasionally, McKay responds via a poem over the exposition of prose, and occasionally poems are included here to illustrate his thinking. Through both forms (and what are “stretchers,” exactly?), his meditations and lyric concerns remain, moving from birds to geology to geologic time, but through what prose might offer, as though his best thinking form has expanded from the seemingly almost-exclusive realm of the lyric poem and further into prose.
rob mclennan, Don McKay, All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems

Mountains
hollowed for silver and gold, for copper
vein. The opening in the land a skylight
for all the dark bodies dropped into it,
made to extract their most sacred
elements. In time, the land publishes
every incursion— Open any rock face to read
the overlapping tables. Make a pin map
of every place where matter was atomized
for some kind of conquest or consumption.
Luisa A. Igloria, Histories of Conquest

I can’t keep up. Here’s a book published in 2019, and I’m only just getting round to it. In the poetry world that churns out collections and pamphlets and chapbooks by the thousand, 2019 might as well be the remote past. It’s like when I used to subscribe to Q magazine, and attempted to keep up with reviews of hundreds of new albums a month, all of which were the next Big Thing. And then they weren’t. It was pointless. I stopped trying.
With poetry I more and more rely on word of mouth, which sort of dries up when there are no readings to go to, no courses where people say, “have you read…?”. Everyone loses out.
And what if you’ve just published something. Imagine, you struggle, and work, and rework, and submit, and go to open mics, and one day someone offers to publish your first pamphlet/chapbook/whatever. There’s no feeling quite like it. But it happens in the middle of a pandemic, so you can’t go to readings and open mics and get the chance to sell your book (most of my sales have been on the back of readings), and you can’t charge your batteries on that energy, and gradually you see the wave’s subsided under you, and you’re floating in dead water. And you have books you can’t shift.
Now, imagine that poetry is your business, your profession. You rely on readings, on running courses, on tutoring…and on the back of that you go on writing, and hopefully selling your work. That’s how it is. Your job. Lockdown leaves you in dead water just as surely as if being published was a hobby. A nice one. But a sideline. Meanwhile, The Anatomical Venus should be flying off the shelves and hoovering up the accolades and starring at festivals. If you’ve bought it already you’ll need no telling. And if you haven’t, I hope the next few minutes will persuade you your life is incomplete till you do.
Sometimes a poem, a book, a voice speaks to you, makes you sit up. The Anatomical Venus does that for me, to me, no question. It’s full of what Clive James calls ‘the moments that draw you in’, when you recognise a poem as a poem, when it says that this is what it is. Something that memorises itself as you speak it, something that hooks you and reels you in. Sometimes it’s the sheer zestfulness of the thing, the unabashed love of language, its quirks and textures that are the stuff of en-chantment and incantation. So, yes, that. But also precision, the accurate control of the medium, a sure ear and eye, all that, and passion too. I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that Helen Ivory has all of that.
When I first read The Anatomical Venus I’d taken it with me to hospital . A session of chemotherapy is, counterintuitively, a good place to read poetry in. Quiet and peaceful as a Quaker meeting. It does mean you can’t read aloud, but this collection has a voice you can hear in your head.
John Foggin, Catching up: Helen Ivory’s “The Anatomical Venus”

The past few days have been a blur of real-life things like vaccinating and library things like our Urban Legends trivia (plus I worked from home Thursday in case I got sick from my vax, and didn’t really, so Friday was a catch-up). As such I have stalled out a bit on my napowrimo-ing and the bird artist pieces I have hope for, but not only things getting in the way, but also me getting in the way. I know where I want it to go, but am having a hard time connecting the dots. So I stall.
One of the things I appreciate most about writing is play, how it feels sometimes like I have no idea where I’m going until I get there. Which work for awhile, but at some point, the trip is over and you have to get yourself home somehow and finish the damn thing. I’ve written myself down a lovely road and now need to get back and so I lay in the grass a while and dally. This happens every time, though usually it doesn’t matter unless I’m purposefully trying to finish something in an allotted time I am all about cutting myself some slack. It will happen eventually. Last year, due to the pandemic crazy, I actually didn’t finish the series I started until well into July, and am determined it turned out the better for it. As such, I will keep sharing them here, April being over be damned. But it might be a minute before the next installment.
I have some other ideas in the hopper, both written and visual, I am hoping May yields. If I were responsible in tending to my projects, I would return to the things that forever languish uncompleted (&nbsp, the blue swallow project) but just as likely I’ll dive into something new that I also may never finish. Though the odds are about 50/50 at this point. Writing is also a little like crossing a high perilous bridge and doing fine until you actually look down. I reach a point with every project…sometimes I’m closer to the other side, sometimes it seems very far.
Kristy Bowen, the road out…

I’m first-round-reading again for a poetry contest, and it’s usually very informative (I’ve written several blog post about lessons learned). But this time feels different. I think it’s because I myself am doing no writing, and have received a rejection every day for a week from work I’ve sent out. So as I encounter manuscripts I think are weaker than others, they seem to become a mirror of my own fears about my own work. Which is working me into paroxysms.
All the manuscripts are competent. All have merit. But my job is to choose only up to 5— out of 25+ manuscripts — to move on to the next readers. So that’s a lot of manuscripts to say no to, and I have to, in my own mind, identify why I’m moving them into my No pile. I have to have good reason. But I can’t always articulate it, and that’s got me agonizing over my assessment prowess. And then as I articulate it I begin to question not only my own assessment but also my own work. Aargh.
For example, one manuscript: again, perfectly fine poems, but the thought occurred to me that too many of the poems seemed, and this is the word that popped into my head: “solipsistic.” But wait, I said. What the hell do I mean by that? That’s a terrible word.
As I’ve already talked about in the past in this space, I use a lot of “I” in my poems. Is that solipsistic?

But wait, here’s another manuscript that I’ve shuffled into my Good Maybe pile. And look: a ton of “I” poems. So what is this other manuscript doing?
It seems like the Maybe manuscript is using the “I” to look through the speaker self at the world, but the No manuscript poems seem to stop at the speaker self and never really get beyond.
So which kind of “I” poems am I writing? Oy.
Marilyn McCabe, No, no, no; or, Why Do I Keep Agreeing to Be a First-Round Reader; or, More on Doubt

Anyway, my birthday weekend visit with vaccinated doctor/poet Natasha Moni – only my second post-vaccine in person visit with anyone – was wonderful. We realized we hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half! So we celebrated my birthday (yesterday) and hers (in January). It is so weird to see people in person, to sit around a table eating and drinking just like it was the good old pre-covid day. And Glenn made a terrific spread – chocolate cake, a wonderful cheese tray, crudités with avocado dip, goat-cheese stuffed baby peppers – he even sat down with us – briefly, if you know Glenn – for some poetry and grad school talk.
We talked about favorite poets, jobs, medicine, talked about how medical improvements made during covid might apply to other diseases after the covid pandemic has died down – like MS, cancer, lupus, and other conditions that have taken far too long to get good, effective treatments for. We talked about the benefits and downsides of Zoom doctor visits and Zoom poetry readings. We talked about Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami, Sylvia Plath, and Siri Hustvedt. Anyway, if you don’t have Natasha Moni’s poetry book from Two Sylvias Press, The Cardiologist’s Daughter, do yourself a favor and check it out. […]
Speaking of books and birthdays, besides being my birthday, this was also the week of the book launch (otherwise known as book birthday) of Kelli Russell Agodon’s new book, Dialogues with Rising Tides (see left, with Sylvia, who gives the book two paws up) from Copper Canyon Press. Happy to have my own copy and I’m sending one to my mom for Mother’s Day!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Celebrations with Spring Flowers and Friends, Kelli’s Book Birthday, Book Giveaway Winner Results, and More Re-Integration into Society

Yesterday I called to make an appointment for my first manicure since the pandemic started almost fifteen months ago. A few moments later I reached for my phone in my pocket. It was playing a number-out-of-service message, with your picture icon in the corner. Did I accidentally dial you after calling the Clip Shop? Or was that you, trying to call me? Well, here’s the news: I have a pulmonologist and a nebulizer and a manicure appointment. I am your daughter in every measurable way.
There’s a dazzling yellow goldfinch in the tree outside my window. It matches the dazzling yellow tulips behind the rock. There are tulips on my dining table, too, striated in yellow and red. You would like those. Like the ones we used to see on Fifth Avenue. I wish we could walk arm in arm down the city sidewalk. When I was a kid it seemed to me that those sidewalks sparkled, as though shot through with mica flakes, something that glinted and shone if you looked at it just right.
Rachel Barenblat, My mother’s daughter

My mother taught me to understand my life as a series of tales in which I was the adventurous heroine. She also gave me books. Each Christmas, the best present was a heavy shirt box filled with paperbacks, with the implication that at nine or ten, I was plenty old enough to enjoy them. They included most of the Alcott and Brontë novels plus works by Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Homer, Chaucer, and much more. I remember walking down stairs carpeted in cream shag to ask her the difference between “impudent” and “imprudent.” When I was having trouble making sense of Wuthering Heights, she reread it and explained the story to me. Her taste wasn’t all high-flown, though. I also devoured her Reader’s Digests and Harlequin romances. It’s largely due to her that I always had my nose in a novel or play or epic poem, depending on them for escape and education. I told her how much I owed her for this a week ago, when she lay semi-conscious in a hospital bed, and it won me a rare smile.
She was also the parent who read all my poems and stories and, eventually, my published books, cheering me on. I owe certain teachers, too, for encouraging me to write poetry particularly, but I wrote Unbecoming because my mother taught me to love character-driven genre fiction (though she would never have used those words!). There’s a maybe-supernatural character in my novel because she loaded me up with tales about fairies and brownies and ghosts. I can’t believe that’s all in the past now, but my mother will survive as the stories we tell about her.
Lesley Wheeler, Mother of stories

My mother got a far away look in her eyes,
remembering breaking the bones of chicken legs
and sucking out the marrow. So good it was,
so good. Blood isn’t kosher, but is marrow?
The rabbi didn’t know, but the kitchen lady
does. My mother’s face looked satisfied and hungry,
both. I eat marrow to remember her hunger
and her satisfaction. All those children she had!
Making their bodies took something out of her own,
slowly sucked the bone itself out of her body
leaving the marrow surrounded by cobwebs.
The doctors said her bones looked like feathers. One fall,
that’s all it would take, and she’d snap into pieces,
but she didn’t. She fell over and over and
never broke a thing, going out of this life with
with all the bits and parts that survived her childhood.
PF Anderson, Breaking

We, the humans, move through the week like shapeshifters.
Monday is a dog with three legs, it barks at any noise,
And if it had a fourth leg and more motivation
It might just walk away and leave you.
Tuesday is your mother, as she was before your birth,
Lighter of heart, and far quicker to laugh,
Not as she became, a bag of bones, worn down by life.
James Lee Jobe, We are the crows, a happy child.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m going to have E. make some paleo hot chocolate and take me to the beach after work. I’m hoping the oystercatchers are back. The curlews. I’m hoping the wind is still but the sea is wild, white, and loud.
It’s been several weeks since we went to the beach. And then I was busy writing poems on stones, and thinking too much.
My new personal goal is to separate my day job from my personal work, and fold that work into the quiet, like shuffling a deck of cards.
Isn’t this the image people have in their heads of what poets do? Take things easily? Move through the world aware and in the moment, and then effortlessly shape the impressions into a written missive to convey the human experience? A recognizable experience. An idealized experience?
I don’t know. Does the general reader seek the familiar? Even Sexton and Path’s pain is idealized too often. I realize I could be wrong: my teenage preconceptions of what it is to be a writer are still lodged somewhere beneath my solar plexus, gnawing at me sometimes. I’m not living up to my own fantasy. Being the poet people say puts words to their own feelings for them. The successful poets with thousands of followers on Instagram, who self-publish and make enough money to retire at 30.

But the truth is I don’t want to do that. Not that I could either.
When I was 16 I sent some submissions to Hallmark Greeting Cards and was ignored. They were inauthentic. I was trying to “write pretty”. I am too intense for the general public. Too angular for comfort. I once told a colleague that I had a nice relationship with my step-daughter, and they asked me if she got my sense of humor. Apparently, I am an acquired taste.
This is real human experience, too, though. Even the being an acquired taste part.
I never imagined myself as the kind of person who would sit on the beach in wool socks and gloves. Who would walk through the sumps on purpose for no other reason than to inhale the smells of mud and broken branches of heather. Sheep shit.
I never aspired to be a poet who wrote about sheep shit.
Every year I try to explain to my students the differences between Romanticism, Bucolics, and Kitsch. Most of them don’t care. Maybe I do it to remind myself. I may be coming back to that separation of day job and personal work again.
I can feel my shoulders release now. I can let in the space of the ocean air – even here in my little room, fingers on the keys. Imagination is a wonderful thing when used right. Imagination stopped in its tracks just before it hardens everything into the familiar.
I am easing into a new ars poetica. That’s kind of exciting.
It will probably be an acquired taste.
Ren Powell, Against Idealization

For our last book of my National Poetry Month jamboree, I reread Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic (MoonPath Press, 2020) and was once again astonished by its interplay of light and language, science and art, artists and song. If you don’t already have this book on your shelf, you should find a copy immediately. It’s a tutorial in how to live …and write. And though suffused with color and light, it isn’t afraid of the dark: death marches through these poems with its equal-opportunity scythe (Trayvon Martin, Matisse, Otis Redding, the poet’s sister, old friends, old loves, even a young T. Rex). Comprising seven sections and 56 poems, Holy Magic is … well, magic. I loved spending time in this book again, and delighted especially in soundplay that bumps and grinds and burns its way through every page:
Fire is cookery, crockery,
Celtic cauldrons worked
in iron or gold—smoke
of sacrificial fat.
(from “Ode to Fire”)
Holy Magic is arranged by the color wheel, and so artists are invited in, not just their art—as it strikes me this morning, but their bodies—as in lines from this short poem dedicated to Meret Oppenheimer:
Kisses rot under logs.
Lost purple thrills
perfume purloined shadows
(from “What Can Happen”)
Bethany Reid, Priscilla Long: HOLY MAGIC

Deborah Bacharach’s Shake and Tremor is about relations between men and women, the complications and deceits involved. She combines Biblical stories of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, Lot and his wife, and Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, with contemporary examples. She mixes past and present so that the reader may not know where she is as she moves from poem to poem and also within poems. […]
The shifting of both topics and attitudes keeps the reader off balance. But Bacharach is having a wonderful time with the mixture. It’s worth the trouble to go with the flow.
The key poem for access to the mind of the poet, for me, is “I Am Writing About Fucking,” which gives a sequence of reasons: “because I am human, . . .because sorrow was taken . . .” ending with:
because it’s not polite and I am always very
please and thank you
because there are already
enough words for snow
because of shame, that fishbone in the throat
because we are made of stars.
If this word play pleases you, you should enjoy the book. And perhaps be a bit jealous of Bacharach’s skill and her leaps of imagination.
Ellen Roberts Young, Recommendation: Shake and Tremor by Deborah Bacharach

so many poems
will my mind ever empty
midnight moon
Jim Young [no title]