This week: digging up a dictionary, a covert translation, horror and fragmentation, baking an Elizabethan foole, and much more. Enjoy.

It takes grit to live a life. To stick with the unknown. To roll with it, once it becomes known. It occurs to me that writing a poem is similar. Writing anything. Painting too. Actually, now that I think about it, learning anything new is like that too. One step at a time. Sometimes, though, you can’t see the step. Is it up or down? Yikes.

My husband is having some balance issues, and I dragged him on a hike recently, and watched when he paused, a bit frightened, at a dry stream crossing over a tumble of rocks. And I realized he was doing that thing we all do when we’re scared — stiffen those legs, rear back just a bit, tense up. When what is required, often, is to loosen the knees, lower the center of gravity, scope out a strategy, then commit.

So I’m over here keeping a slight bend in my knee, breathing, centering. Once life — or a poem, or that terrible painting I just started — reveals what is required next, I’ll be ready. Or ready-ish. The mind-body connection is something to keep actively in mind. The mind also must keep a bend in its knees.

Marilyn McCabe, What flight of legs is always a thing falling?

But at some point you have to make the jump. How does this work in practice? First I am struck by the shift in my body as I walk the dog on the river-loop. I notice that more and more lines have been plopping into my head in the last two weeks and that I need to capture these, somehow, beyond the provisional kitchen scribbles on scraps of paper while keeping the whole process playful and light and not solemn. I re-read an essay by Mark Halliday on Kenneth Koch, in which he reminds us that Koch basically saw writing poems as a hugely fun activity. And I think to myself: I would like to have some of that writing fun back in my life and now might be the time.

But first I need to wash the dog. As the great Ailsa Holland reminds us, this is all writing. Then I make a cup of tea, ditto. And generally tidy the kitchen and remember that the car needs MOTing. And then I walk upstairs.

By now some extremely vicious voices from my schooling and early writing life have begun to intrude. The voices of certain teachers, with their emphasis on my uselessness. A particularly brutal review of my first book. That sort of thing. I place the mug on my desk and think about opening up my emails because suddenly they seem much more appealing than dealing with what others have chosen to label me, their eyes glinting with triumph. (If you know how much I detest doing my emails, you will know the scale of this paradox.) Then I remember that St Anne Lamott line about dropping the voices, like mice, one by one into a tall mason jar, turning the volume up for ten seconds, then turning it right back down to zero, and opening my notebooks.

Anthony Wilson, The jump

Somehow I wrote a lot this summer. I’m still going back through drafts, and it’s been a fun process. My recent method has been to draft a bunch of stuff as spontaneously and subconsciously as possible, and then put it aside until I’ve forgotten everything about it. Then, with clear eyes, I can see what’s trash and what’s not, but it also has the advantage of feeling like found material. And found material is easier to collage with, moving lines and pieces around, trying to arrive at something that pleases me.

It’s been a sort of relief to work this way (and I’ve had a few samples of similar poems come out in various places this year (including Mercury Firs, The Tiny, Capgras, and Noir Sauna)). After years of writing in an almost documentary style that tracked inhuman violence and horrors, it’s nice to make poetry that feels fun and intuitive and free (tho never totally immune to the wrongness of our times). I began to feel a need to do something else for a bit besides looking down on the pile of wreckage like the Angel of History. Some part of me began to feel like I was trapping myself as an artist by deferring too much to one mode of doing “political writing.” There’s room for all of it, and I am not prescribing anything for others, but on a personal level: I can’t just write about nightmarish shit for the rest of my life. […] And in an age of machine learning and LLM’s, in a society being trained and reshaped by bots and algorithmic thinking, it can be good to change your face, your speech, your way of entering the picture and the page. Sometimes it feels good to make the language say things in a spirit of delight—sometimes it even feels freeing.

RM Haines, PARADISE SELF-STORAGE

His poetry worked, as he might have put it himself, from rather than toward language. While his social realist contemporaries had something to say and found language and form with which to say it, he started with words and followed them to discover the shape they would make. This is not to say that he was engaged in some form of subconscious outpouring or automatic writing. [Dylan] Thomas was, from the beginning, a conscious craftsman who worked with the dual nature of language as both a ‘thing in the world’ and as a system of signs that stands apart from the world it is used to represent.

In practical terms this meant disrupting both the semantic continuities of unselfconscious language through the use of puns and other devices and its regular syntactic flow. The latter aspect of Thomas’s craft can be illustrated by looking at the line ‘Grief thief of time’, from the poem of that name. In an earlier draft this phrase was punctuated ‘Grief, thief of time’, the comma indicating that ‘thief of time’ was a truncated relative clause defining ‘grief’. By removing the comma, Thomas opened up the syntactical relationships between his words. The ‘original’ meaning is still present, but is augmented by the possibility of a multi-dimensional reading of the phrase. Is ‘grief thief’ to be understood in the same way that, for instance, ‘car thief’ might be? This kind of deliberate ambiguity is ever-present in the poems and is characteristic of a poetic that opens our reading minds to what one might think of as a multiplicity of uncertainty.

Billy Mills, On Dylan Thomas

Artificial Intelligence created A Practical Guide to Eating Paper
Artificial Intelligence stole all those voices you’ve not heard in so many years and it changed the accents and then the faces they spoke out of and gave the voices to nobody you ever wanted to know
Artificial Intelligence is a passionate genius
Artificial Intelligence is tragic, comic, humane
Artificial Intelligence stole my grandmother’s slippers, my grandfather’s pipe
Artificial Intelligence rewrote this poem

Bob Mee, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE STOLE MY FOOTBALL BOOTS and OTHER BITS AND PIECES

Recently I encountered the work of sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, whose Symbolic Capitalism is a Substack worth your time. In his book We Have Never Been Woke, he argues that symbolic capitalists—people who work with and produce ideas, information, and symbols rather than, say, shoes, pavement, and corn—comprise a new elite that has mobilized social justice in order to gain, for themselves, status and resources. The thing about ideas, of course, is that they are made of, and make, other ideas, and if you are using ideas to access status and resources, you will, if you are savvy, do your best to make some more of them.

Poets, at least by contemporary reckoning, are mostly symbolic capitalists. They manipulate ideas, information, symbols, to gain publication, tenure, adoration, self-satisfaction, grants, likes, and all sorts of other things they value. Much of this is good, inevitable, perfectly fine; much of it is also easily and often perverted. Is there really a market for poems that are so esoterically conceived and executed as to be barely intelligible to even the average literate adult? There’s a perceived market for them, that’s for certain, but it’s worth thinking about where that perception comes from, and who is profiting—yes, profiting—from it.

I have been working lately on other creative pursuits under the guidance of a professional who possesses a combination of talent and experience that is so astounding it makes my head swim. I go off into my next attempt and develop some fixation on one detail or another, such that it subsumes both the rest of the effort and the larger purpose for it, and her feedback, inevitably, highlights how inconsequential my obsession truly is. Yesterday it struck me: this is just like contemporary poetry, just like symbolic capitalism, the isolated conviction that some dumb little thing is the thing itself. It’s not so much that the emperor has new clothes; it’s that he has the same old new ones.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Broadway” by Mark Doty

In truth, I read this book a while back — within days of a lovely afternoon tea when the author signed a copy and gifted it to me. This morning I’m rereading and appreciating the poems again for their agile wisdom, complexity, and artistry.

The Ocean Cannot Be Blue [by Kirsten Hampton] is comprised of 49 poems, some of which are in numbered parts that could stand alone, some of which are letters from the historic court case, Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the 14th amendment. With this story as its spine, the book offers a lens into history, but also into the poet’s own marriage, and to all the ways families weave themselves together. One poem is about a whale displayed in the Caroline County Visitor Center (“Excavated 1991, 14 million years old”), and, later, these lines: “She is a case closed, / then reopened, / in a quarry — / of chance find” where excavating a whale suddenly speaks to the precedent found to reopen the Loving case. One poem is a 2-page lexicon delineating the 1960s. How does it all work together? One word that comes to mind is an artist’s word: chiaroscuro. Dark and light dance together throughout this compelling collection. On a beach walk, “the sleeve of sunset” leads to these lines, running down the center of the page, like vertebrae:

Then darkness
then darkness
reveals
how seeing
outward
becomes the same
as looking
within

The poems and the stories unfold in layers. Water is another theme running all the way through the book, from the gorgeous cover art and the title of the collection to beaches, rivers, the Chesapeake bay, blood, watercolor paintings. In one poem, “Portrait” — “Backwash, sea rise, tidal range, / groundwater” — the poem overflows with salt water that reshape a continent as human events reshape a country.

Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading Now

How will you spin fermented want into a poem?
Is a poem that is high on its own words, still a poem?
Doesn’t ugliness propagate inside a clever turn of phrase?
Doesn’t emptiness multiply in the space between metered lines?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Transference

When I buried the book in the video below, I initially was thinking about the Jewish practice of giving ritual funerals for holy books and then burying them in sacred ground. Of the mystical, numinous, antinomial sense of the word. Although this book is a dictionary.

But now I’m thinking about exhumation, of the recovery and preservation of books. Of this book. What it means to unbury it: to bring it to light again, to rescue or resurrect it. Not to forget its words or allow them to be absorbed in the earth as worm word salad.

I don’t want to forget the meaning of words. I don’t want a tradition, my tradition or any other, to forget the knowledge and values it has come to from hard thinking, feeling and experience. From the collective wisdom of many. When the going gets tough, the tough should retain their values and not trade them for easier or more expedient interpretations.

Gary Barwin, Exhuming a book: unburying a dictionary

We aren’t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the turbine of our suffering. The most difficult decisions in life are difficult precisely because we are unsummed, too divided to reconcile the desires of one part with those of another. We watch ourselves undergo overnight phase transitions of feeling as a different part seizes the dials of pleasure and pain that govern all human behavior, then pull the quilt of time and thinking over our head to maintain the illusion of coherence, disavowing entire regions of our own experience as if someone else lived them. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.),” wrote Whitman, knowing that we are each “of one phase and of all phases,” that within us each live the slaveholder and the slave, the woman being burned at the stake and the man striking the match.

Perhaps “god” is just how we name our yearning for a single truth, for an integrating voice to conciliate the contradictions, for something large and total to hold what we cannot hold.

Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics — those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul — channeled that voice in “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation “appears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,” writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (public library).

Maria Popova, Perfect Mind: The Gnostic Field Guide to Wholeness and Hearing the Voice of Truth

What does all this mean for Longley’s poem? How much of any of this do we need to know to appreciate the poem? I think we have to feel that he is teasing his readers (as he said himself, “a learned leg-pull”). He doesn’t tell us it’s a translation, and makes no effort to explain those obscure names. You can’t, I think, reasonably expect even a very educated and well-read late 20th century reader to identify the passage themselves, though you could, perhaps, expect them to note the odd discrepancy between the poets they have heard of and those they haven’t. It might, slightly slyly, be relying on the reader’s mild discomfort, as we ‘nod along’, assuming that we ought to know who Macer, Ponticus and Bassus actually are and not quite wanting to reveal that we don’t — sending up the earnest reader who doesn’t want to be caught out in ignorance.

Meanwhile, the implication, apparently encouraged by Longley himself, that these figures might map onto real contemporaries only extends the tease. What sort of contemporary poet could possibly stand in for Macer, whose work is almost entirely lost, or for Bassus and Ponticus, of whom nothing at all survives, and who may not have existed at all? (Not to mention the much-cancelled Gallus, deleted from this passages as he has been from literary history.) Longley’s ploy tempts the reader to behave as a kind of dogged scholiast, foolishly attempting to crack the “code” of his poetic whimsy. Overall, I think the poem is both much more and much less precise thatn we might think — much more, because it’s a relatively close translation of one particular passage; much less, because it’s more, as they say, ‘a mood’ than a code. A reminder that when a poet thinks about the other poets who have mattered to him he might be tender and sincere, but also self-important, selective, mischievous and even intentionally obscure.

Victoria Moul, The poet’s joke

Almost inevitably you feel, the elements of modern warfare seep into Huch’s poems. In the midst of another Hardyesque stanzaic poem, between the ‘honey-brown’ buds on the trees and the lark’s ‘music-making’, more familiar ‘war poem’ sounds provide the base notes: ‘The earth shakes with battle, the air with shellfire heaves’ (‘War Winter’). The ABAB quatrains of ‘The Young Fallen’ mourn those taken by war by first evoking the innocence of their childhoods, schooldays, their unfulfilled worldly ambitions. Then ‘War came’. And though much of the detail and imagery could be applied to wars fought anytime in the last few centuries, there are moments when the realities of the mid-twentieth century cannot be denied. The young men’s hands are a focus, as they ‘Not long ago reached out for toys and fun. / Those hands, conversant with the tools of murder, / Control the howitzer and grip the gun’.

In fact, Huch was living in Jena when the city was bombed by the Allies and ‘The Flying Death’ comes closer than any other poem in conveying her experiences of modern warfare. Though the Flying Death is an old-fashioned personification, its modus operandi is up to date: ‘The chimney reels, the roof-beams groan, / By distant thunder he is known’. Even as the air bombardment is imaged as approaching on ‘iron steeds’, its impact is plainly conveyed as ‘A whistling, hissing din, and more, / A jarring shriek is heard, a roar, / As if the earth would burst.’ This Poetry Salzberg publication unfortunately does not give the reader the original German, but Timothy Adès’ translations are quite brilliant in their preservation of form and rhyme, while at the same time conveying both the sweetness and the violence in Huch’s curious, powerful, under-appreciated poetry.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of ‘Autumn Fire’ by Ricarda Huch, tr. Timothy Adès

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
This was my favorite book when I was a child! Which may explain everything about me. Bradbury is the perfect mix of poetry and creepiness. He’s clearly a pantser (which means he doesn’t plan out his novels but writes them as they come—not that he pulls people’s pants down), and that sometimes shows—there are a few of his books where the poetic prose can feel a bit self-indulgent (I tried rereading Dandelion Wine and could not make it through).

This book gets the balance just right. Two teenage boys – Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade – face a sinister carnival and the witches and magic that comes with it. It’s really the style of Bradbury’s writing that I love so much—it is what first awakened my mind to the beauty of language and made me want to become a writer—and his style, at its best, sweeps the reader along in a torrent of poetic imagery. It’s really no wonder that I fell into writing poetry once I hit the college years, having read so much Bradbury as a child.

Renee Emerson, October Favorites

I often joke that I owe my poetic sense of purpose and my literary understandings solely to horror movies and novels. While I’ve been writing poetry since I was 14, I’ve been reading and enjoying spooky forms of entertainment much longer. I’ve also been thinking about why some of the scariest stuff I’ve ever read wasn’t in horror novels at all, but in poetry. And not even horror poetry specifically. Just regular poems that happen to use fragmentation in ways that make your skin crawl. There’s something deeply unsettling about fragmented text. When a poem breaks apart on the page, when syntax splinters, when meaning refuses to cohere. That’s when things get genuinely creepy. It’s like your brain is trying to complete a puzzle but someone keeps hiding the pieces, and you start to suspect maybe there never was a complete picture to begin with.

A lot of horror works by withholding. The monster is scariest before you see it clearly. The threat is most terrifying when it’s implied, partial, fragmented. Poetry does this naturally. A poem doesn’t have to explain itself. It can give you three images, two sentence fragments, and a white space that screams louder than words ever could. Obviously T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” isn’t technically horror, but tell me that pile of broken images, those abrupt shifts, those voices cutting in and out like a radio losing signal ,is not the structure of a nightmare. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” might be one of the most horrifying lines in modern poetry precisely because it acknowledges that fragmentation isn’t a technique, it’s a condition. Everything’s already broken; we’re just picking through the wreckage.

Fragmented poetry mirrors the horror of disintegration—of minds, of reality, of meaning itself. When poets strategically use white space, when they let sentences trail off into nothing, when they juxtapose images without clear connection, they’re not being difficult for the sake of it. They’re showing us how consciousness actually fractures under pressure. And isn’t that what horror is about? The breakdown of the normal, the reliable, the coherent? I keep thinking about those found-footage horror movies, how they’re all jump cuts and static and missing scenes. That’s fragmentation as horror technique. When you skip lines, break syntax, scatter words across a page—you’re creating the same effect. The reader’s eye has to hunt for meaning, has to work to construct something whole from pieces that might not even fit together.

Where things really get interesting is inside and around the gaps. In fragmented poetry, what’s not there is as important as what is. Those blank spaces, those ellipses, those lines that stop mid-thought… That’s where the horror lives. Your imagination fills in those blanks, and your imagination is always going to conjure something worse than what the poet might have written. It’s like those old stories where they never quite describe the monster. The reader’s mind does the work. Fragmented poetry weaponizes that. Every break in the text is a place where something could be lurking.

Kristy Bowen, ON HORROR AND FRAGMENTATION

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
If there are questions behind Glove Money, they are probably “What is a transamorous sapphic poetics?” and “Wow is it wild that love is charging down the avenue to destroy me and I have no desire to run or what?”

The current question for most of us right now is probably, you know, what constitutes a human poetics, and what constitutes a machine poetics. And I’d say poets were working on those questions way before Language Learning Models were on the market. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writers have a lot of roles in larger culture! We (I’m speaking for the larger culture here) need to constantly relearn how to listen to language, and we need our experiences and our values and our strategies worded. Not all poets are good at all of those things. Not everyone is June Jordan, though if you are, you probably should be. But we need writers who can take apart a sentence, and writers who look out the window and describe the miscarriages of the breeze, and writers who can say Free Palestine and Don’t talk to cops. […]

14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My girlfriend Violet Spurlock is very important to my work. I like to praise her beauty and win our arguments in my poems. 

The Bay Area poets are kind of everything to me, by whom I mean the disorganized collective of leftist writers influenced by New Narrative, the New York School, Language Poetry, and Feminist Poetics here in the Bay who were already here hanging out when I moved to town a little before Occupy. 

I learned how to be a poet in the world from them—which is, and this is my real advice for young writers: do it yourself, together. Make chapbooks, start a press, run a reading series, reading group, writing group. Forget the gods and dads and prizes that so rarely materialize, or ask too much of you when they do. Find comrades.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sophia Dahlin

In the foole recipe we use thin slices of ‘manchet’ a kind of wheaten bread, made in huge quantities in the Elizabethan Manor Houses. Elinor soaks them in boiled spiced cream, or what she refers to as ‘the top of the morning’s milk’. and this is where I get my first sense of the smell of the Elizabethan kitchen, like a low Christmas smell. If you think about the sort of fruity rich seasoning used in Christmas puddings, varieties of this spice complex are what the (wealthy) Elizabethans used as the base notes for their cookery. Gentle English herbs alongside imported dried fruits and spices, lemons and oranges. What I find is that it isn’t overwhelming, it is a much more gentle spiced mix.

There is a great deal of time spent waiting for things to soak up other things, which makes me think this sort of pudding is the sort that is made while making other things. I imagine the kitchen then, another dish prepped while the foole is soaking its manchet slices, the planning and organising that a big kitchen might need to make so many dishes at once, all served at once.

Then there is the sieving. Smooth puddings and clear coloured jellies were the absolute epitome of kitchen skill, highly prized and the cause of quite a lot of competition in Elizabethan kitchens, so I sieve the pudding for authenticity, and let me tell you, Elizabethan kitchen workers had good muscle tone. It is hard work, it takes forever. But the result is incredibly pleasing.

Elinor’s instructions here are that the consistency should be no thicker than batter. I’m very proud of my sieved pudding consistency. And then currants are added (raisons in this case as I had no currants) and into the oven it goes to bake for a long time, one and a half hours, which made me very nervous. But reader, it worked.

The top was crisp and sweet, the middle was light and fluffy and the fruit and the sherry and the spices were layered along the bottom in a sweet, rich, strata. I was very impressed by this natural layering of the pudding. The taste was somewhere between a bread and butter pudding and a clafoutis. A familiar and at the same time unfamiliar consistency.

What went into my writing from this exercise?

• The scent complex of the kitchen
• The strength of the cook
• The smell of spices on the skin long afterwards
• The sense of multitasking in a big kitchen
• The pride of a recipe that works well.

And something else, something less definable: the feeling that to stand here in my little modern kitchen and cook this Foole pudding was to stand elbow to elbow with the elizabethan cook, especially the women in the kitchen, passing along the legacy of the receipt book.

Wendy Pratt, Elbow to Elbow with my Elizabethan Sisters

Around 6200BC, a massive failure of the Norwegian continental shelf in the North Atlantic caused a giant tsunami which swept south and west for hundreds of miles. It reached the Angus coastline in a matter of hours, swamping estuaries and river valleys and barging far inland. As it seeped back, in what had been the grassy bed of a slow, meandering burn, it left a broad, scooped out bowl. Twice a day when the tide comes in, it is a shallow, temporary sea.

Needless to say it bristles with birdlife: all migrant species of the North Atlantic are present, sometimes en masse. Each October around 100,000 pinkfoot geese make landfall in the Montrose Basin as they head south from Iceland and the Faroes. Their call, clear amid the rattling of thousands of wings, is a streaming ‘ink-ink’ – giving rise maybe to their local name: kwink. There is a very satisfying glimpse here of the moment that the bird was named; of someone trying to fit their mouth to what they heard in their landscape, tuning consonants and vowels until they arrived at a deft, self-explanatory sound-image of that thing over there, that creature whose arrival alters the soundscape so significantly, and leaves with such clamour.

Such words have currency. Bird lists for countries round the North Sea rim show an alertness to their sound – the first and easiest means of identifying them at distance – and to sound-in-place. Kwink is also used of the greylag and Brent goose, klekk or claikis of the barnacle goose (less of a chiming, more of a squawk). Old Norse, the language of the Vikings and ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages, is the root of many peculiarly Shetlandic, Orcadian and Scots words. Names, like the birds, have also crossed the water. A seagull is a maa in Orkney and a meeuw in the Netherlands; the curlew a whaup in Caithness and Berwick and a wulp on the mudflats at Westhoek. And if you string their names together, you can almost hear the birds arriving and settling on these northern beaches as the tide turns and their feeding grounds are exposed:

fulmar mallimak – maali – mallemuk – qaqulluk

kittiwake facky – kitto – rittock – rita – krykkje

golden plover weeo – hjejle – heiđloa – ló – heilo

redshank pleep – weeweep – stellit – stelkur – tureluur

The intermingling of bird song and human speech is an ancient belief that still has currency. Norman MacCaig’s Aunt Julia spoke her Hebridean Gaelic with “a seagull’s voice”, her speech and movement growing out of the very matter of her island-world: “She was buckets / and water flouncing into them. / She was winds pouring wetly / round house-ends.” In recordings made in the 1950s and now stored in the online archive Tobar an Dualchais, Mrs Annie Johnston of Barra integrates what she calls the “conversation” of the thrush, the lark, the crow, the gull and the dove into her own Gaelic. In another, her husband, Mr Calum Johnston, sings a Pilliù, an ancient keening which mimics the long call and syllables of the redshank. Of these kinds of singing, says ethnologist Mairi McFadyen, “the dividing lines between bird song, music and speech are impossible to determine”.

Lesley Harrison, ‘Kwink’

Let us go back, okay? Back to the squirrel-and-frog breath. Back to the gleaming teeth. There she is, sitting on the edge of the bed. Book in their mouth, a coyote throws it across the room like a toy. Another coyote yelps at the door and she somehow knows (because we all somehow just know things in our dreams, don’t we?) that they want for her to open the door. So she does. She admires the grays and reds in their fur as they enter the hallway lit by a smart night-light. They clamber down the weird hillside that she calls stairs. She descends the stairs slowly, watching the feral and fearless animals as they move in and out of the shadows of her dining and living rooms. She hears their bodies brush up against table leg. They knock over a chair. They stick their noses in her shoes. One scratches madly at the pull-out drawer that houses the garbage can. One stands regal on the couch as if on the edge of a cliff. All of them sing because that is what she decides that they are doing. She knows she must open the door so she does. And as she does, they all flow past her, a river of fur and bone and breath. Coyote wind. She steps off her porch and is shocked that her bare foot against the grass does not feel like real life. A coyote runs back, circles her, runs out, and back again. She realizes that this is an escort. She walks to the edge of the property, to the ecotone where grass meets woodland. She steps into it, stones, sticks, and leaves greeting the pads of her feet. She sees their quick bodies moving in the moonlit understory. She follows them without question until the house behind her becomes a moon.

Sarah Lada, House of the Rising Moon

Moon’s got the sun in its back pocket. Sun’s got the moon on a locket.

In dark hearts, storms find more welcome shelter.  

Certain worries are too heavy to hashtag.

Sometimes you can find a small, sweet melody stuck between the teeth of misery.

Rich Ferguson, Lessons I’ve learned along the way

I write a lot. I just don’t publish a lot — of my own work, that is. Partly because much of it takes a long, long time to fully crystallise — I’m still regularly pulling up and rethinking poems that were first drafted well over a decade ago. But also, I find I drift further and further from the general trend. Easy, I know, to fixate on what doesn’t suit you and disparagingly label it ‘the general trend’, but I think it’s not unkind or too reductive to say that the majority of poetry sought and published by English-language editors today constitutes first-hand accounts of relatable experiences taking place in something like the real contemporary world, in which the poet — or someone you can well believe is the poet — is reassuringly present.

You don’t have to look far, of course, to find complaints about UK poetry being dominated by identity politics. But if we only slightly expand that category to include any poem which revolves around, or circles back to, a persona of the poet conveying something of their values, then I suspect most complainants are caught in their own net.

Work of a different kind is permitted, even celebrated, but less readily, I sense, when the editor or critic does not know the poet from Adam. On the performance circuit, you do find more in the way of fantastical conceits — these, however, are mostly either comically ludicrous or intended as satire. The ‘general trend’, as far as there is one, is surely to look on poetry as, primarily, a performance of the self. […]

So what do I think I’m doing that’s so damned different?

Well, one thing I’ve done this summer is make four more A8 microbooks to sell blind-bagged for £2 at book fairs. Each one is made of a single piece of A4 paper, folded and cut into a booklet, held together with a cover jacket folded from an A6 sheet. They’re tiny examples of ‘amalgamatic writing’, in that the contents are a mixture of quotes from various media, very short scholarly extracts, lists and poetry.

The theme for this latest set is ‘Action Princesses’ — a short explanation on the inner back page reads “exploring cult evocations of feminine power and sexuality”. I wrote one new piece for each book, and all of them are the kind of poems I would estimate as having a close-to-zero chance of being considered by editors of most journals. They’re mostly in third-person, and where there’s a speaker, it’s definitely not me. They also belong utterly to the cult genres their protagonists inhabit, even as they (mildly) spoof them. There’s no zoom-out to Cambridge, UK, 2025. This is from ‘Space Princesses’:

One is pinned by her skirt to a cosmic dartboard.
One is lashed by her heart to a handsome meathead.
One is trapped in a shrinking skintight spacesuit.
One is frogged, one spatchcocked, sputnikked, splayed out.
Not for long, though – nothing can hold them forever.
No beam, no jaw, no kiss rolled over and over.

See what I mean? The 21st century’s rejection of b-movie mash-up is Caliban’s fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

Jon Stone, “I goon-march and glide”, Part 3

I’m happy to share that I have two poems in Revolution John, my second pub with them. Many thanks to Editor Neil Smith, Assistant Editor AnneMarie Miles, and EiC and Beloved Founder Sheldon Lee Compton.

I really like their aesthetic of gritty, dark, and often rural. My first poem, “Abracadabra!”, is an alternate outcome for Thelma and Louise. I’m not cool with the end of that film, so I (loosely) reimagined their journey and how it ended. The second poem, “You lied to me” is a Cento I created from extraordinary lines from the poems of seven poets I admire, exploring rejection and distrust. I think they’re pretty dark. And don’t we just love dark.

Here’s the link. Thanks if you read and bigger thanks for supporting my work and independent litmags like Revolution John!

Charlotte Hamrick, Two Poems in Revolution John

John Lucas died recently. He was in his late eighties and had been unwell for some time.

John was a busy man and in his very full and well lived life, he was many things to many people. A father and husband, a Fulbright Scholar, academic, reviewer (for New Statesman, TLS, Poetry Review and elsewhere), a novelist, poet, editor, publisher, visiting professor, jazz trumpeter and memoirist. He is the author of studies on John Clare, Dickens, Blake, Ivor Gurney and many others. He wrote collections of essays on subjects such as Irish poetry, as well as an award-winning travel book. He was once appointed chair of The Poetry Book Society, and was a judge on the panel of the first T.S Eliot Prize in 1993.

That’s the straight bio stuff. What was he like? After news of John’s passing broke, many people spontaneously offered tributes, and what is clear is that he was regarded as generous, straight talking (to the point of occasional bluntness), affectionate, brilliant, and a great friend to those women and men fortunate enough to have known him well.

I would add that John was a man with the biggest bullshit detector and aversion to empty flattery it was possible to have. He had a mischievous sense of humour, but would never use it to ‘punch down’. Politically, he was a generous humanitarian and socialist who was true to his principles in his every day actions. An intellectual colossus who could put his learning and knowledge into words anyone could understand. A champion of underdogs and swift disparager of bullies. I know that on one of his last visits to hospital, he told a horrible racist who had abused a nurse to fuck off. He had a brain faster than light with access to a massive library of literature and music and personal anecdotes and jokes. His love for his wife Pauline was clear for all to see. They had met as students at art college in the nineteen fifties . On one of the last occasions that we spoke on the phone, John shared something with me and added that when he had said the same thing to her she had told him ‘not to talk balls’.

As my editor, publisher and friend, he championed, supported and encouraged me, and always said what he thought. When it came to editing, he had a light touch, and I could always see straight away that his pencilled comments and suggestions and questions were going to benefit the poem. Above all, he was kind. […]

Don’t feel you have to write me an elegy,

there are probably far too many
on the go already. I’d rather you told
a joke or raised a glass with friends.
Don’t feel you have to say anything
now, or share that stuff I said about
the use and misuse of a certain word,
mention our last conversation where
I briefly gave my reasons for loving
George Herbert, expressed a view
on what fame did to poor Chet Baker
or shared an anecdote about a poet
that had us both in stiches until
I brought things to a close with a brisk
right, good to hear from you, better go

Roy Marshall, John Lucas, 1937- 2025

Now, we won’t dwell on the loss of a few poets recently; plenty has been written abut them all by far better people than me, but I will say I was especially gutted about Brian Patten going. He was one of the gateways into poetry for me..(some say we should blame him..some would be right). And I’ve read his now well known poem, How Many Lengths of Time at at least two funerals, including my dad’s…

I regret not trying to see Brian live again in recent years, but I have fond memories of being probably one of about 3 people to have ever taken out his third collection, The Irrelevant Song, from North Walsham library (and I had it on near constant loan for a year or so). I was lucky enough to see him read and say hello, and to get his autograph on a couple of books a couple of times. I’m pretty sure there was a Patten/Henri doubleheader at Norwich Arts centre a million years ago now. I can’t recall if Roger McGough was there.

After I heard about his death, I went to dig out a letter I had from him from many, many years ago. I can’t have been more than 18 or 19 when it was sent…I’m not sure how to date it, but…hang on, it has a  telephone number he gives me for someone on Norwich with the area code as 0603…not 01603. That must narrow things down to pre 1995. which would make me 18 or 19. Crikey. Anyhoo, I could’t find the letter, despite it being a prized possession.

I’ve not taken Brian’s books off the shelf for a while, and while I was hoping for another book from him, it’s fair to say I thought his last book, The Book of Forgetting, wasn’t his finest work by a long stretch, so it took an email from another poet (Hi, Roy) that mentioned a poem by Patten I didn’t know to send me back to my book shelf to check if I had this poem…and would you Adam and Eve it, the letter was there tucked inside my copy of Little Johnny’s Confession. Thanks again, Roy

I won’t repeat all of the letter here, but having solicited advice from him on what I will freely confess were some dreadful juvenilia that I sincerely meant at the time, he was kind enough tosa y he like a couple of them and then said

“There’s not much I can say about poems that come from the heart; as yours do. I think you will find which work and which have clumsy parts that stop them working if you give readings yourself”

Mat Riches, Weather rocks and kangaroos

Last week I went to a panel at my city library dedicated to publishing. The setup was interesting: Rather than have one moderator asking questions to the five panelists, each panelist came with their own question. They directed their question toward the others in the group.

Right out of the gate, the first panelist asked the others, “Do you experience imposter syndrome?”

The question came from a poet who is trying to branch out into novel-writing. I was not surprised when every other person on the panel—the author of a newly released nonfiction book, the author of a newly released novel, the author of four novels, and one writer whose work has as yet appeared exclusively in literary magazines—said “Yes.”

Becky Tuch, Q: What is imposter syndrome & how do you handle it?

This week at Book Club we discussed early cyberpunk and the newly translated Japanese classic short story collection Terminal Boredom and had a costume contest with a cyberpunk theme. We’re reading poetry—Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal—for November, meeting on the 12th at J. Bookwalter’s Woodinville Tasting Studio, if you want to attend. Then we’ll be reading Solarpunk—Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—in December.

I’m doing a tutorial for Writer’s Digest next week on the history and practice of horror poetry, which seems appropriate for spooky season (and also, you know, the political atmosphere these days). It’s been fun seeking out older horror poems as well as thinking about what makes a poem technically a horror poem. I’m also doing a talk the day before Halloween at the University of New Orleans about publicity and poetry, which is its own kind of horror, right? […]

Speaking of appearances, my friend, excellent poet and fiction writer Lesley Wheeler is in town and doing a reading and Q&A with us at J. Bookwalter’s Winery this Thursday at 6:30, followed by an open mic. I’ll be introducing her and reading a few spooky poems to get us in the mood for the season. Then Lesley will read from her new book about the underworld of mushrooms, Mycocosmic. Our Q&A will feature both Mycocosmic and her novel Unbecoming. It’ll be worth your time to come out, because Lesley doesn’t make it often to the West Coast, as she lives in Virginia, where she teaches at Washington and Lee and is the editor of Shenandoah Literary Magazine.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Upcoming Appearances and Poet Friend Visits to Woodinville, Halloween and Horror Poetry, and The Big Dark Begins

Back in the day, we used to create mix tapes for our mates. Of course, they were really made up of the music we enjoyed listening to ourselves!

Well, when Mat and I are working out what poets to invite to read with us at Rogue Strands events, it feels like we’re generating our own Live Poetry Mix Tapes. We’re choosing poets whose poetry we love, who read brilliantly. And we’re not doing so just for our audiences, but also for our own, utterly selfish listening pleasure.

This is why I’m so looking forward to our Rogue Strands reading at the Devereux in London next Wednesday, because it’s a terrific chance for me (and you!!!) to catch some of the best poets around in the U.K. right now: Jonathan Davidson, Hannah Copley, Fiona Larkin and Philip Hancock (oh, and Mat and me) for your delectation. What’s more, it’s all free! See you there…?

Matthew Stewart, A Live Poetry Mix Tape

Alt text says this week’s photo is a chocolate cake with sprinkles on the top. It is indeed. And to add to this description I would also say it is a birthday cake for my lovely wife. For this bake, I fine-tuned the recipe after making a cake for my debut poetry collection Magnifying Glass which had its fifth birthday last week. The book cake was delicious, but a little rustic looking after I piled on the buttercream and forked the number five on the top because I hadn’t really considered how I was going to finish it off! It was a good reason to enjoy cake, and it also gave me the perfect opportunity to enjoy the feelings of gratitude to have worked with Black Eyes Publishing UK to enable the book to have its place in the world.

I am also taking forward the lesson that it is useful to have an image of the end product in mind whether it’s cake or poetry so that the whole is not just delicious it is fully finished. When polishing poems I am pausing to remind myself the drafts are at the rustic stage until they do the whole job of saying what they want to say. For me sometimes the poem doesn’t know exactly what it is going to say until it has been written longer, other times it says it but it fizzles out instead of sparking. For a while I thought my trick was to look at the drafts as if they weren’t mine, but I found I was looking at them to assess whether they were a finished Sue Finch poem or still lingering in Sue Finch draft stage. I laughed at my feeling of indignation when I thought I was pretending they weren’t mine whilst I was editing. I definitely didn’t want them to not be mine; I wanted to be the author in a different stage of writing. I don’t think I have felt that switch quite so strongly before, so I am enjoying that and see it as a sign of having an extended patience and desire to craft my work.

The perfect poem almost happened in real time on one of my walks this week. Common features of this week’s walks have included the horse with the blue coat whinnying as I approach (but not when I talk to it or try to video it making the sound) acorns dropping from the oak trees, gusts of wind sending flurries of leaves from the branches. There was a moment on Saturday as I was pacing along when the horse whinnied just as the wind picked up and I watched a mini whirlpool of brown leaves drop through the air. If, at that exact moment, an acorn had detached and dropped onto my head I think that would have been a moment of pure poetry. I was slightly disappointed that it didn’t happen, but I will carry all of that as a wordless visual/sound poem in my head on my walks in the coming weeks.

Sue Finch, A CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH SPRINKLES

I will never forget walking through the doors and the spectacle of what we saw – a woman on a stage in front of us, dressed in a huge black dress singing. Lamenting, really. And behind her and to the right, another woman, younger, dressed all in red and standing at the top of a pillar. The colours, the music, the expansiveness of it took my breath away.

I didn’t think I would last for four hours – for the first hour, I think I wandered a bit too much. It takes a while to get into the rhythm of it, and to understand that each of the thirteen ‘acts’ that made up the exhibition are performances in and of themselves. Some of them had an arc – there was a resolution, things changed. But some of my favourite ones didn’t.

A heavily pregnant woman in a red strappy dress, stands in a shower and dances in Act 12: Wedding Rituals whilst having milk ladled over her by another woman. According to the programme notes, this is a ritual to prepare a bride for her wedding day. The dance is sensual, playful. The programme notes say that this is a ritual performed on pregnant women. I think I could have sat and watched her all night. There was something so compelling about it. Now I think it was because she was so there, so present. She refused to disappear behind the pregnancy, behind her bump.

When I was pregnant, I couldn’t work out how to make myself present to the world. I was present only to myself, and it felt as if I was standing behind a pane of glass, watching my life happen on the other side. I couldn’t work out how to feel like myself again when I was pregnant, because of course I wasn’t myself. I was two selves. I wrote a poem which will be in my next collection with the lines “you’re living in the shadow of a baby, you are a doorway/ for a baby, a flag stretched out in the wind and shouting baby”.

I stood and watched the pregnant woman dancing for a long time, the milk running in streams over her skin, the way she seemed to delight in the feel of it, in the attention, the way she was so herself, the way she refused to disappear behind the pregnancy, behind the bump. And this made me realise that I had always been both things – I was self, and I exceeded my self.

Kim Moore, Marina Abramović Balkan Erotic Epic

God, You knew
I would rather know
than not.
Give me a door,
I’ll go through.

Were I telling the tale
the questionable one
would be Adam
who didn’t think
of wanting more.

You made that tree
so gorgeous
my mouth watered.
I heard You murmur,
know Me.

I knew I wanted
to be like that tree:
blooming,
touched,
ripe with fruit.

My first book of poetry, which came out in 2011 from Phoenicia Publishing, is 70 faces: Torah poems — published the day I became a rabbi, and announced here the very next day. I still love that collection deeply, and I’m grateful to editor Beth Adams (who still blogs about creative and contemplative life at The Cassandra Pages) for publishing it.

On this summer’s Bayit Board retreat, one of my dear friends mentioned that as good as that book is, in a way it’s incomplete. It features one poem arising out of / in conversation with each parsha, but… most parshiyot contain multiple things. As a result, much of what unfolds in Torah is unmentioned or un-commented-on. What if I created a bigger collection, one that lifts up more of Torah (and maybe includes occasional footnotes to classical midrash, which I wish now I had included all those years ago?)

This is my new creative project. This year as we work our way through each week in the cycle of Torah, I’ll study the parsha anew. And then I’ll work on new poems arising out of parts of the text that I haven’t explored in poetry before. Anyway, this is one of the poems I’ve been working on this week for Bereshit. I hope it speaks to you.

Rachel Barenblat, Knowing

I decided to experiment with blackout/erasure poetry and collage. […] I photocopied some pages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with a selection of entries from her journal, including the passage about her dreams of her dead baby.  Each student got three sheets, with 6 pages total.  I had a variety of markers, both colored and black, fine tipped and thicker.

I also had a variety of popular magazines and old crafting magazines.  They were on tables, but first, we did the blacking out.  I explained the process and then showed them what I had done with the pages from Mary Shelley’s journal.  Then we sank into the work. […]

They all seemed to enjoy it, both the ones who zipped through it, and the ones who spent all of their time carefully blacking out lines.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Erasure Poems, Mary Shelley, and a Creative Writing Class

silence in a poem grows with not one

mystery less than needed. guardian of what

least understands. heart open to all. and to none.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Last week I attended a reading by author Karen Walrond, whose latest book is In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur. Thanks to Walrond and her work, I’ve got a deeper understanding of why I’ve come to treasure my sewing nights. (She also has a Substack publication, The Make Light Journal.)

Walrond identifies 7 attributes of what she calls intentional amatuerism: curiosity, mindfulness, self-compassion, play, stretch zone, connection, and wonder & awe. Listening to her, I was able to identify exactly what my sewing class is giving me. It satisfies my curiosity; I’m learning about something I’ve long wanted to know more about. It is an exercise in mindfulness (I will never forget the time I was not mindful as a child and ran my thumb right under the machine’s needle), and it provides lots of opportunities to learn self-compassion. My seams are never as straight as I’d like them to be, and that’s OK. I’m doing something in person with other humans, and I’ll be taking my next session of classes from a former colleague, both of which fosters feelings of connection.

I began writing Rootsie with the idea of exploring what it means to live a “small, creative life,” but Walrond is helping me understand that perhaps what I’ve meant by “small” can be more accurately understood as “amateur”—and that amateurism is a worthy pursuit. She notes that despite the ways in which we use “amateur” to diminish or denigrate, the root of the word means “love.” She makes the case that we don’t have to be experts at something or monetize something or achieve great levels of accomplishment to justify the time we give to a pursuit. We can do something simply because we love it—or, in the case of my exploration of sewing, because we might love it. […]

I am completely on board with pursuits that do not have to have a practical purpose, full stop. And, this is where I feel it necessary to acknowledge the time we are living through. Part of my motivation in learning new sewing skills is wanting to develop practical knowledge that might serve me/others as the world I’ve always known is collapsing. (A reason I’m also dabbling with growing food and cooking/baking.) But I do not want to engage in creative endeavors only from some place of grim purpose. I want to engage in them as I engage with my friends, family, and community—from a place of love. From places of play and joy and curiosity, which have practical uses, too.

Horrific things are happening in the US. I live in a city that’s being targeted and lied about by our federal government, and I’m learning a lot from watching the responses of my community. Those protesting at our ICE facility are doing so for serious reasons, and they are taking serious risks, but they are engaging from places of play, joy, and love. They are wearing inflatable animal costumes! They are riding bikes naked in the rain! There is a strategic purpose to this kind of protest, and it also reminds us what our lives are for (satisfying curiosity, stretching our comfort zones, connecting with others, playing, experiencing wonder & awe). This has got to be a practical purpose of protest, too.

To be clear: I do not think that my sewing is an act of resistance. Resilience, yes, but resistance, no. Both are important (can’t have the latter without the former), and so is the distinction. Engaging in personal pursuits with joy, play, and love are not going to stop the harm being done. So, today I will sew. Tomorrow, I hope you’ll be with me in the streets.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What if you aren’t any good at it?

I come from poverty. I have never had just one job, and I expect to continue working at least two jobs for the rest of my life, but I am lucky because I like much of my work.

Still, I often feel buried. I have spent the last year and a half trying to solve the problem of keeping Red Hen’s poetry program afloat without adequate funding. The National Endowment for the Arts is gone. I have a challenging press to run. I have a family. A writing life. It’s like swimming upstream. Sometimes there’s water, and sometimes there’s rocks. But, no matter how hard I work, there is shame.

I want a joy life. A shared joy life. I can’t accomplish this by steeping in shame. None of us can. Those in power hope we will feel too defeated by our shame—our deep judgment of ourselves and one another—to turn our energy against them, towards improving this country we share. I want to resist this urge in all the ways I can.

So I tell the women around me, whether they are in my life or not, how beautiful they are. I compliment their shoes, coats, gloves, hair, sometimes even their socks. I congratulate people on their work, on their art, on their progress. I start and end my day by writing in my journal what I am grateful for. With these small but vital steps, I am building a practice that centers hope. When we honor, celebrate, and believe in one another, we learn to believe in ourselves, too. We must.

Kate Gale, Beyond Comparison: On Grace, Judgement, and Surrendering Shame

So many filaments
in the canopy, tugged
by an unseen force.

Where the sun begins
to disappear from the world,
the light is briefly gold.

I too have opened
my mouth even when
it was not asked.

Luisa A. Igloria, Snapdragons

April may be poetry month, but fall is the season for walking down the street reading a book of poetry, sitting on a park bench, doing same. And let’s not forget the classic sitting under a tree and watching the leaves fall and memorizing a poem. I suppose in reality these things don’t happen quite so often any more, but they could! They nowadays sound like things people perform for a TikTok video or Instagram reel, but doing them and not posting is becoming way more of a vibe.

To date myself, when I was an undergraduate doing my 5 year degree, I did walk down the street with a book and sit under trees and certainly on park benches. Hilariously, I remember when email started to be a thing, and of course we still had dial-up, but near the end of my degree once in a blue moon a professor would EMAIL you. And it would stay in your mind for DAYS. In fact, this was the case for pretty much every email. So you were very careful when emailing knowing that this was how it affected people. You were mindful of how it would occupy one’s mind. It could throw off my writing morning, heaven forbid, so a day before I would make sure to not dial-up, even though the likelihood of there even being an email was small.

I recently saw someone walking down a street reading a paperback, and it delighted me beyond delight. It was not a performance, and no one was trailing them filming them walking down the street with an iPhone. I’m extremely nostalgic these days for Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading, which started as a blog.

Maybe it is the season to be seen reading poetry.

Shawna Lemay, Fall is for Poetry

i dream new rings for us.
ones made of headlights & wind.
i want wild vows. no cheesy, “i do”
instead the old language of mountains.
a stillness that fills each other’s sky.

Robin Gow, shot gun wedding

This week: the walker faces due west, a gun utters a death wish, a spare poem spares us nothing, and much more. Enjoy.

九月尽く雨の匂いの象を見に　菅井美奈子

kugatsu tsuku ame no nioi no zō o mini

            September ends
            I go to see an elephant
            with the scent of rain

                                                Minako Sugai

from Gendai Haiku, #718, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 30, 2025)

I see how fragile everything is
around you, how tenuous
any peace. Reasons for sorrow
pile up like fallen leaves.
Feel my heart touching yours,
enfolding yours.
I’m here with you where you are
under this roof that lets in rain

Rachel Barenblat, Fragile rejoicing – songs for Sukkot

Keats wrote To Autumn while he was staying in Winchester, England’s old capital, in what was then a very rural but fast-changing Hampshire. While there, he wrote a letter to a friend describing his surprise at a stubble-field that looked warm, just like a painting of a stubble-field. Some critics see the poem as a response to the growing tradition of English landscape painting. The images are left as images, with little exclamation or explanation.

It is, in that sense, an unusually modern poem: the poet draws back from the scene. The Romantic poets are often caricatured as being all about the ‘inner light’, the celebration of the self. That autumn, Keats was looking. […]

What was Keats looking at? In their article Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester Richard Turley, Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas point out that most recent readings of the poem abstract it from its particular place:

As diverse as they may seem, the most resonant recent readings of ‘To Autumn’ share a feature in common: all, in various ways, abstract the ode from its specific Winchester setting… Helen Vendler’s formalist critique recognizes the poem’s ‘remarkably meticulous topography’, but, finally refers the land’s (and the poem’s) meaning back to literary precursors and classical myth. Nicholas Roe’s… takes its brio from the relocation of the dissenting energies of Keats’s ode some 200 miles north to [Peterloo]. Jonathan Bate, in his provocative analysis of the ode as ‘ecosystem’… [contends] that the poem is a ‘meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature’.

When Winchester is mentioned, To Autumn is usually associated with the water meadows south of the city (you can take a guided walk in that direction). The great revelation in the article is that the place which matters most is, in fact, another location Keats visited: St Giles’s Hill, on the east side of the city. The slopes are now occupied by a multi-story car park, while the South Downs beyond have been cut through by a motorway—a huge chalk scar I’ve driven through hundreds of times.

The article goes on to argue for the importance of the poem’s engagement with the local agricultural economy and the shifting social make-up of the town. I did not find this discussion entirely convincing, interesting as agricultural history always is. But the topography matters. From St Giles’s:

the walker faces due west, and in the late-afternoon may observe the ‘maturing sun’ together with the tincturing changes it brings to the landscape (the ‘rosy hue’ of the ‘stubble-plains’), as well as indigenous wildlife such as low-flying swallows gathering insects over the Itchen’s reed beds before nightfall. From its brow, the sights and sounds remembered in Keats’s poem—from the ‘half-reaped furrow’ on which the reaper sleeps, to the bleats of ‘full-grown lambs’ on ‘hilly bourn’—could be observed in one glorious sweep.

No hill, no poem. I can believe it.

Jeremy Wikeley, Walking with Keats

As I walk, there are two rhythms: the pace of the gait, which is surely a beat as intrinsic to the human condition as that of the heart, hypnotic once it has settled into a steady pulse. There is also the ‘biophony’, in this wild and richly biodiverse middle of nowhere. I’m pretty good at identifying birds by sight, but absolutely hopeless with all but the most singular and iconic calls. Of course I have a birdsong app, but when it listens to my recordings it effectively asks, ‘err..which one?’ I am woven into the bird-realm, the Énflaith of John Moriarty’s ‘Invoking Ireland’, an ecumenical communion of all living things. It is the surge and settle of a collective mind, all of us wild and smelly animals listening to each other’s ’languages, if we’re lucky, living long enough to learn something from each other.

I have a theory, based entirely on unscientific and solitary rumination, that language and certainly music, or the music of language, evolved in a din of birdsong and probably pulsed with the beat of walking. As someone who’s often had to walk some distance through this high country out of necessity, I noticed I’d acquired the ‘caminar dels masovers’ This rhythmic long lope of a country people, living in masias like mine, is a natural development of need and environment. If you have to walk 10km for car parts or a jerrycan of diesel in 40 degrees, the brain falls quiet and your trancelike reduction slowly devours the distance. In such a situation, haste or overexcitement will precipitate an ‘event’ and maybe lop days off your life.

All very heroic I know. It’s a privilege to live in this noisy, lonely labyrinth and one I enjoy more and more with the passing of time. Today’s song is the wind’s, sculpting a colossal and invisible transient structure over the woods and crags, itself a language. I’ve learned some of its vocabulary; dark, low and strong on the mountain to the south means big weather, long days of the Cierzo to the north-west means dry cold and dazzling light. In high summer, when there seems not to be a breath of air on the move, a thin finger of wind might tousle the tops of the high pines across the valley with a cool hiss, just enough to tell me the Earth is still turning.

james mcconachie, Biophony

I’m sitting at the desk for the first time in I don’t know how many months. I’m still N.E.D. when it comes to the physical signs of having cancer. But I didn’t realize how much of a psycho/spiritual crisis the experience would ignite.

I am scraped raw. Whittled down by one breast and over a dozen lymph nodes. Perforated bones, and perforated memories. Once, a week ago, I finally turned on my computer but couldn’t figure out how to access my files. I turned it off again.

My world is tiny. A few rooms. Far fewer voices. The tinny reverberation of chronic pain, of chronic loneliness. So much shame. […]

The last of this year’s wasps fly heavily in the fog. While waiting for the train, a paper wasp lands on my collar and my student wants me to swat it away. It’s fine, I say. I’m not that sweet.

I wouldn’t know if it was a queen. If so, she’d better be looking for a cozy place to slip into for the winter. And if not, let the worker keep looking for a bit more sugar before she’s done.

I’m not done. Just starting again, slightly out of season.

Ren Powell, Too Many Metaphors

under the poet’s mask
there is another mask
it has always been
a masqued dance
words dancing with words
each carrying its own secret
hidden even from itself
they dance the candlelight hours
daylight masked
night’s eyes masked
clawing at the reader’s mask
the catastrophe of love

Jim Young, the masque

Do I feel the treeness in my body? More than I feel a relation to buildings, except through a process of what I’ve just termed anthropometaphorizing. I feel closer to a mountain than a skyscraper. But closer to a tree than a plant. I feel the treeness deeper in my body than I feel squirrelness. That doesn’t feel very deep. Is it my spine? My ambition to be more like a tree than a squirrel? My relation with gravity? Gravitas? To have the slow, rooted wit of a tree? Its apparent understanding and perspective. (Except you, aspen. Settle down, you.) To live in time as a tree lives? To live in interrelation? I realize that whatever the cause, I feel a connection to trees in an embodied way. I could turn into a tree and feel satisfied (or so my body thinks) whereas a squirrel—not so much.

Gary Barwin, My mirror neurons vibe with trees: On anthropometaphorizing

I am in Derry. We walk over the Peace Bridge, and the River Foyle, and registration starts at 10am. By 10.30, the sound of 400 delegates is an differentiated roar. We find the conference quiet room, and the silence is a cool relief.

Then the conference opens with Seamus Heaney’s “The Tollund Man”. Now that the journey’s nerves and uncertainty are over, and we’re safe at a table at the back of the room close to the exit, I start to feel excited. I studied Heaney’s bog body poems for my A-level – learnt them off by heart at work from small handwritten notes as I buffed the floors. “Some day I will go to Aarhus” – and tomorrow, I will go HomePlace, between Heaney’s two childhood homes in Mossbawn and The Wood, close to his grave in Bellaghy. It’s also the site of the latest bog body discovery: beheaded and left to the bog 2000 years ago, a young woman, initially assumed to be a man.

“I will feel lost, and happy, and at home”. Though there are hundreds of people and every conversation brings me out in a sweat, I have never seen so many delegates in walking boots and fleeces. These are outdoor people, passionate and friendly; some of them geeky and awkward and shy. I hear passing conversations on ecology and pollution and birds; I talk with a woman about the use of sheep’s wool in peatland restoration. There’s a table of sphagnum plugs, soft and wet; a copy of “Book of Bogs” on the registration desk. My conference delegate lanyard states that I am Clare Shaw, Boggart, which is the name Anne Caldwell invented for our loose confederation of bog-loving artists and writers.

Tomorrow, Anna, Johnny and I will be leading a day-long workshop: “Getting into the bog: creative skills to support your practice”. We know the power of creative expression, especially in words – and we want to share creative skills and strategies with people working with peat, from researchers to conservation officers to fundraisers.

The scientific method, and hard data, gave us penicillin, and pasteurisation, and flight, and on the whole, a turning away from the kind of superstition, bias and dogma which saw hundreds of thousands of people accused of witchcraft. This pursuit of objectivity removed the emotional and subjective, from knowledge – but in doing so, it produced a scientific and academic discourse which can feel peculiarly disconnected from everyday language, let alone a language of emotion, or imagination. As a result, the way we talk about science – no matter how profound or vital – can leaves people cold; the way we express ourselves academically excludes; the way we communicate professionally feels soulless and empty of meaning.

And it matters, because when it comes to bogs, and other habitats, we need a language which communicates their importance, their layers of meaning, the deep feeling we have for them. Creative expression – as opposed to academic or scientific writing – can be more accessible; more meaningful to people without specialist knowledge: It can offer a real-world translation of complex data and concepts into lived experience, making it more relatable and engaging. It creates a fuller narrative – the writer is present in the writing as a person, with feelings and emotions, a history and culture. There’s space for nuance and contradiction, uncertainty and change; space for the reader to find their own meaning, to own their own personhood, in the act of making sense. It opens up new possibilities; ways to remember and dream and observe.

Most importantly, for me, creative writing in ecology creates a living account, in which the reader can enter the world of the writer; share their fascinations and their emotions. It’s a more immersive experience for the writer: you can more fully inhabit the emotions that brought you into this work – your love, your curiosity, your fears. Instead of reproducing corporate/ organisational narrative/discourse, you have a sense of connection with the work you produce.

Clare Shaw, Lost, happy, and at home

In the current timeline I live in, magical realism is necessary. When hate-mongering is knitted into our fabric, I need the neighborhood gentle giant to hand me a bouquet of flowers held between his fingertips. Where logic is discouraged, I need for my house to float away via millions of balloons to a faraway land. Where truth is manipulated, I need a gigantic, smoking caterpillar to tell me what’s what. In a world where a man is celebrated for saying horrible things about women, I need for a man to turn into a skittish deer.

The poem “Native Species” [by Todd Davis] starts with the image of a man looking at paintings of deer online. The paintings conjure for the man the sensations and fluidity of hunting a deer in a landscape of multiflora rose and briar. To navigate within such a relentlessly thorny landscape is to develop a kinship with it. Like Sisyphus’ hands creating grooves in the boulder, a hunter blazes a path leaving nothing behind but footprints. In a way, to hunt the deer on the mountain is to, in a way, become the deer on the mountain. […]

In the poem, the hunter labored with a meat saw, embodying the art of loving what one kills. Like something straight from a Robin Wall-Kimmerer book, the hunt is thanksgiving. The hunt is reciprocity. And in the poem, hunting season slips into winter, a landscape where a lucky person can find a shed antler like a crown removed before sleep.

I underlined that line in the poem for several reasons. Because deer do wear crowns, don’t they? Because the hunter and the poet imagine deer not just as kings, but kings that requires rest and safety in the confines of briar and snowdrift. Because of the word sleep, and how this poem—so narrowly conjuring similarities between the deer and hunter so far—is soon going to enter the dream-like, magical reality of a man turning into a deer.

Living a good life thus far, I imagine magic for myself. How about no longer commuting those precious 70 minutes for work four days a week. How about no longer needing to work 40+ hours per week. How about winning the lottery I never play. How about the Chronos I live in expanding beyond 24 hours so that I can give time to all my passions and loved-ones every single day. How about actually, really helping people. How about actually, really helping the earth. How about not needing to sleep. How about no more divisiveness. How about a president who reads books and talks about it. How about guiltlessly spending an entire day just watching one flower bloom. How about people walking into the woods where all the mirrors are.

Sarah Lada, The Comfort of a Tail’s Flash Along Treeline

I’m here in Holland as a guest speaker at The Writers Unlimited Festival – Winternachten. Sometimes you have to go outside to go inside. I switch off this computer and take a walk around this beautiful Dutch city. I am thinking about this essay, the theme of skin. Black skin. White skin. I have the words of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ in my headphones, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. I take my title for this essay from that beautiful song. It makes me recall the flaw in every story that reveals the truth, the words beneath the words. It makes me think of the charm of our imperfections. And there is a skin on everything that stops the light getting in, a wallpaper of doubt or fear that covers over those cracks and stops the magic happening, the light getting through.

Last night the Winternachten festival opened with a ceremony for the Oxfam Novid Pen awards for freedom of expression. The winners were two courageous writers: The Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh who is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia accused of renouncing Islam. And Indian investigative journalist Malini Subramaniam who was forced to leave her home after death threats following her outspoken reports on human rights abuse and sexual violence against women. Her humility and courage as a woman and as a writer, a shining example to us all. Later during the ceremony, the Booker Prize winning author Michail Shishkin delivered a keynote speech, his words moved me. The theatre was so silent you could hear a pin drop, a stifled sniff and a tear fall. His deep voice resounded in his native Russian and above his head the English translation scrolled on huge screens. He began by describing the famous protests of human rights organisations in Red Square. Then he spoke of lesser known protests, the names that nobody knows, the writers and protesters that have been tortured and murdered, quietly, out of sight, and out of the public eye. Shishkin asked us to consider why they protested? Listening to Shishkin I was reminded of the power of freedom of speech, how important it is as a writer to speak up and to live true rather than to stay quiet and live safe. The meaning of life, Shishkin continued, lies not in survival, but in the preservation of dignity.

Salena Godden, Skin

A gun utters a death wish. A surgeon removes the wrong organ. A police helicopter circles above.

Late afternoon does what it always does in some places, then slowly graffitis the sky to dark-scrawled night.

Everything just beyond is bright morning—

coffee brewing, journaling,

a father hearing his baby daughter speak her first words upon rising.

Rich Ferguson, What the Day Does in Some Places

On Saturday morning, the person occupying the White House announced that he is directing our Secretary of War to send armed troops to my city, calling it “war ravaged,” and authorizing the use of “Full Force” [sic]. This is a gross insult to any place that has truly been ravaged by war, a waste of resources we all contribute to, and an unconscionable act of aggression against those of us who live here. […]

The Furies are goddesses of vengeance. They are of the earth, Gaea, and are associated with earthly fertility. They live in the underworld but ascend to pursue the wicked. They are particularly opposed to crimes within families, which makes sense as they were born of blood spilled when a son castrated his father to take his power.

I gathered my basil in a basket I once used to carry my premature babies with me from room to room of our home. I was not much of a cook or baker when my children were growing up. I am three generations removed from the farmers I descend from, and none of their knowledge was passed to me. My great-grandmother used to send us jars of applesauce she made from fruit grown on her trees, but convenience foods were a staple of the diet I was raised on, meals that came largely from boxes and cans and mixes and packets. Chicken soup was one of the few things I made that my children loved; it was so much better than the tins of stuff I ate when I was a kid. Recently, my daughter shared a photo of chicken soup her husband made from my recipe, more than 5,000 miles away from Portland. It lessened regrets I have about the kinds of things I didn’t do when she was growing up, didn’t understand back then. I certainly didn’t grow any of our food in those years, but now I am learning how to. This year we successfully raised onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas, squash, parsley, thyme, and basil. The pears in my galette came from a tree in our yard. The apples came from local growers. Sunday morning, we picked up carrots from the stand in front of a u-pick farm about a mile from our home. This summer, I taught myself more about how to preserve the food we’ve grown, so we can eat it through the winter.

How does a commoner respond when a ruler spreads lies and threatens peace and seems to be instigating—perhaps hoping for—violence in her home?

In lots of different ways, I suppose. I can’t tell you, exactly, why I felt compelled to spend our beautiful weekend in the kitchen. I only know that I did, that I needed to tend my garden, reveling in the sun on my skin and the earth under my nails; that I needed to harvest our already-gone-to-flower basil before this week’s promised rain, marveling in its bounty; that I needed to feed myself and my family, delighting in our full, satisfied bellies.

I needed to revel, marvel, and delight in my place on this earth. I needed to fuel my Fury on that which makes her stronger, reminds her of what she will not give away.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What feeds us

i see a picture
of a local slumlord’s house online. it is huge &
i imagine it as an advent calendar.
what do they count down? i am looking
for hope in bites. in windows. in doors.
in holding on to autumn. i open a door.
the bathroom light like a star or an angel.

Robin Gow, 10/3

I have been waiting for this collection to come out ever since I first heard about it, and it does not disappoint. Incidentally, I think Clare Pollard was the first poet I ever saw perform live. Clare came to Ulverston to read for “A Poem and a Pint”, a wonderful reading series that ran for many years (more on this in another post!), and this happened to be the first poetry reading I’d ever been to. I’ve just googled it to find it was back in 2006. I don’t remember much from that night, other than being utterly astonished by Clare’s reading, and particularly by the subject matter of the poetry, which felt utterly daring in its exploration of female experience.

So back to Clare’s latest book, The Lives of the Female Poets, her seventh poetry collection with Bloodaxe. Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets gets taken to task here. The first poem does not shy away from anything either – Clare gets stuck in straight away with “Poetess” – exploring its use as a ‘derogatory term’, pointing out that ‘it’s true that the adjectives ‘feminine’ and ‘Poetess’, / when modifying poetry / can be exchanged either with ‘minor’, ‘popular’, or ‘sentimental’ / without injury to sense.’ The ending of the poem is fabulous – we are left with an image of the Poetess at the ‘female empire of the tea-table, /where She sweetens the tea /with sugar’s tender hiss.’ I love that the ‘hiss’ of the final line picks up and echoes ‘Poetess’ and ‘sense’.

This book takes us on a dizzying journey from the grand heights of Inana – an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, love and fertility to a battle between a mother and the head-lice that infest her children’s hair. How many poems are there about this battle that perhaps all mothers have gone through? I’m not sure but I thought this one was fabulous – dark and playful and funny and disturbing. And also delicious to find out that the oldest known sentence in the earliest alphabet was inscribed on a 4000 year-old ivory comb and is ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’. That the first known sentence is an act of care is wonderful.

I enjoyed every single poem in this collection, and enjoyed the feeling of meeting my literary ancestors – some of whom I knew – Sappho, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Bishop – but there were plenty I didn’t. I’d not heard of Praxilla for example, and the beautiful fragment of her writing that we are left with.

Kim Moore, September Reads

Playing always puts me in my happy place. So being a poet and knowing that the theme for National Poetry Day this year was ‘Play’ was a gift to me. One year ago, a friend messaged me on National Poetry Day to say they had read a poem of mine to a group of people at a celebration event. I messaged back to say I was delighted and that if they held a similar event I would be very pleased to go along. They didn’t forget, and this year I visited that group of people to read a dozen of my poems. It made my day shine. We also tried out a writing exercise from The Poetry Society which had been produced for the day. It worked well for those who considered themselves to be poets and those who had not done much poetic writing before, and each participant was able to create their own poem during the afternoon.

I had road-tested my set of poems earlier in the year when I read them from a bandstand in a park, and they worked well. This time I was also able to add in Toffee Hammers as the opening poem. It delighted me to have finally finished this poem after many years of wanting to write it but never really coming up with a final draft that said what I wanted to say. It was good to have been spurred on by the theme and by my desire to have a new poem for National Poetry Day. To celebrate the poem’s emergence I chose it for Poem of the Month on my YouTube channel. Sharing poems with a new group of people enabled me to hear the poems afresh and highlighted the joy of having a themed reading. It is refreshing to see how the poems land in different listening spaces, and which ones elicit specific audible responses. I chuckled this time to hear someone say “Oh your poor mum,” in response to the poem which recounts my falling in a pond when I was little.

Sue Finch, PLAY

Since the miscarriage, I have started reading and abandoned probably a dozen novels and memoirs. I don’t feel bad not finishing a book—I’m not assigned this reading—but I don’t typically read a third or even half of a book, then give up. The books have felt pointless. Predictable. Boring.

I have Reader’s Block. Other than poetry collections (where I skip around and dip in and out), middle grade novels read aloud for the family (where I have an audience / demands to read), and picture books (again, audience with demands), I finish nothing.

Just to put this in context, reading is my only actual talent in life.

I have my library card number memorized. My children’s names are all from classic novels. The only detention I ever received in school was for reading a novel during science class.

I remember being in first grade, walking into our school library with my class. The librarian showed us the section of books at our grade level, then took me aside and gestured to the whole library – “this is your reading level,” she told me.

I suppose I’m back to the small shelf right now. […]

Proofs and Theories by Louise Glück
I’m writing a class on Glück, so I skimmed through and reread parts of this collection of her essays. They are a mix of thoughts on writing, on becoming a poet, and scholarly criticism of other poets – “I wrote these essays as I would poems; I wrote from what I know, trying to undermine the known with intelligent questions. Like poems, they have been my education” – she says. I think that if you are not very interested in reading or writing poetry, you may not like it—but if you are at all interested, there were some valuable insights into seasons of writer’s block, how to challenge yourself as a writer, and the use of “silence” in writing.

Renee Emerson, Reader’s Block

I was saddened to hear of the death of Brian Patten this week. I can’t claim to have known the man but we talked on occasion and he was complimentary of my poetry. He was generous enough to offer to write something more for the blog the last time I saw him read. I don’t know why I did not take him up on his offer, I suppose I thought I could in the future, sadly it was not to be.

Paul Tobin, SIDESWIPE

I don’t know why the death of Brian Patten saddened me more than most. I met him only twice. Yet I found myself thinking about it more than is usually the case when a poet, or some kind of artist, or just somebody I knew something of, dies.

Patten had a peculiar place in the evolvement of British poetry, forever linked as he was to Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, who were lumped together as ‘The Mersey Poets’ in the 1960s. They complemented each other – McGough, whose humour was laced with down-to-earth political commonsense, Henri, the strange, eccentric, painter capable of a furious energy, and Patten, the young, lyrical, mostly love poet who also had a surrealist, absurdist mind. The Penguin Modern Poets 10, labelled The Mersey Sound, sold millions. It was published in 1967, when Patten was 21.

He was a precocious talent, obviously, and most of the poems he wrote back then remain read today. I still have my favourites from that and his early individual collections, Little Johnny’s Confession, Notes To The Hurrying Man, Vanishing Trick, The Irrelevant Song and Grave Gossip, the latter released when he was still only in his early 30s. I still love the opening lines of Ode On Celestial Music: It’s not celestial music it’s the girl in the bathroom singing./ You can tell. Although it’s winter/ the trees outside her window have grown leaves,/ all manner of flowers push up through the floorboards. Others I like to read again from time to time include Interruption At The Opera House, You Come To Me Quiet As Rain Not Yet Fallen, and Albatross Ramble.

It was in 1975 or 1976 that I read as ‘support’ to Patten at the Benn Hall, Rugby. I was almost certainly awful, the poems of my youth perhaps sounding a bit better than they were. It didn’t matter. I was pleased to have had the chance to do it. People had come to hear him anyway and, my bit done, I sat enthralled at the way he held his audience, was warm and direct, connected to them almost immediately and sustained a long, enchanting reading for the best part of an hour, then, the job done, caught the train back to London.

A couple of years later I wrote as a part of my final degree an essay on ‘The Mersey Poets’, which was in effect a defence of them against the supposed might of the academic world, which mostly either ignored or tolerated them, and any of us who took them seriously, with an air of benign, quasi-benevolent pity. I felt, having seen the effect Patten had on that single night in Rugby, their poems would be read for generations to come and would reach far more people than most of the poets who were products of the ‘approved’ academic system.

Bob Mee, BRIAN PATTEN (1946-2025)

Here in the US, we have a new poet laureate (announced by the Library of Congress on September 15, 2025)  —  and this selected poet Arthur Sze sees poetry as a unifying agent — “verse can bring us together“.

Sze is a poet whose work I value reading — but its links to mathematics are gentle and scattered.  Here is a sample —  the closing lines from Sze’s poem “Sight Lines”.  (The complete poem is available here at poets.org.)  

from  “Sight Lines” by Arthur Sze

. . .  when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—
I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—
I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—
I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—
though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—
though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—
the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—
fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—
though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). 

JoAnne Growney, The Geometry of Verse

“Where to begin.”

To quote Renata Adler.

To start with the favorite, or one of the favorites, or the favorite at 2:13 p.m. in the week of Robert Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960.

To refuse to think about these poems in the order they are given.

To choose, instead, the unscrupulous preferences of one’s own exuberance, one’s own tonalities, one’s own stammering speculations.

To be small, then. Small as this spare poem that spares us nothing.

A creature of three stanzas that reassures the extra line of its role as tiny ruiner. 3-3-4, the extra word.

Alina Stefanescu, Bob Creeley’s LOVE.

There’s long been a deep precision cut with the metaphysical through the works of American poet Susan Howe, including in her latest offering, Penitential Cries (New York NY: New Directions, 2025), offering prose stretches that seem to break apart even as they interconnect. Her poems have long held that particular tension: between breaking into component parts and small piles while simultaneously held together through sheer, impossible coherence. How does, one might ask, the centre actually hold? I’ve been reading her work for years now without fully able to articulate what it is that strikes me so deeply, while also finding it incredibly generative, a series of works one needs to sit in for some time, to allow into and underneath the skin. I still recommend her collection That This (New Directions, 2010), a book that included the death of her husband [see my review of such here], to anyone who has experienced a recent loss, finding the collection enormously helpful after the death of my mother, allowing or even providing a permission to attempt my own examinations. Through Howe, connections of sound, meaning and form interact and interconnect underneath each book’s umbrella, whether that be through a particular subject matter through idea, or a phrase, watching the whole of her life and thinking and research and immediacy fall into how her inquiries take shape.

rob mclennan, Susan Howe, Penitential Cries

One of the things that most surprised me in my first year of this substack was when I started to be sent poetry books — both by authors and sometimes direct from the press — in the hope that I might mention or review them. Much as I appreciate all of you discerning readers, my audience is hardly enormous, and to start with it was truly tiny so I hadn’t expected this at all, but these days I receive a steady stream of poetry books and pamphlets from around the world. The fact that authors and presses bother to do this for such a small publication is probably a depressing indication of just how little mainstream poetry reviewing is now going on, but of course it’s a great perk for me. I get to read all sorts of things this way I would never otherwise have seen. I always make it clear that I cannot promise to mention or review anything I’m sent, but I do try to get round to as much as I can eventually. So do send me things! (Especially if you are a woman — Anglophone poetry is surely at least 50% women these days, if not more, but it’s almost exclusively men who send me books.)

At the moment I have quite a pile of things I found engaging in various ways, so this week I thought I’d try to do a kind of round-up in the hope that there’ll be a bit of something for everyone. This is a long one. […]

Henry Gould[‘s] … publications are I suppose strictly speaking mostly chapbooks or pamphlets, but not at all in the sense that this usually means. In a quick search, I’ve rounded up eight of them that I’ve received from Gould in the last year, and I’m fairly sure that’s not quite all of them. Gould is doing something quite unique — writing broadly, I suppose, in the tradition of Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, and more generally in a tradition I think we could fairly though surprisingly call Pindaric, his verse is unembarrassedly high-flown, even vatic; rich with a huge array of cultural references; fluent in the grand style — but also extraordinarily topical, and produced at a prodigious rate. These multiple pamphlets consist largely of individual dated poems, each between a page and several pages long, written just a day or two apart. So a whole pamphlet represents often only about a month’s production, and is then published very rapidly.

Gould has many quirks and distinctive cadences, especially in his closural use of parentheses and asides. Read at length this distinctive style can be sometimes hypnotic, occasionally same-y, but it is often beautiful. His range of reference is wide and markedly eclectic but he has written so much that you after a while you get the hang of it, and what might first have seemed obscure becomes almost friendly. It is also enormously ambitious and expansive: in a very old-fashioned way Gould takes it for granted that the long-form poem is the proper place to bring together philosophy, politics, history and religion. And it’s often quite funny as well.

Victoria Moul, On confidence and self-consciousness in poetry

I’ve always found the Lament for Boromir one of Tolkien’s most beautiful poems but the way it’s sung by the Clamavi De Profundis musical group brings out subtleties in its composition that I’d never paused over on the page. Their sensitivity to Tolkien’s expressive handling of a difficult metre has changed the way I say the poem to myself.

Essentially, I think, the metre is a freely handled iambic heptameter, with frequent substitution of trochees (feet of two stresses) or other non-iambic feet for the iambs. The problem with the heptameter line is that it can easily fall into a kind of mechanical gallop that gives each line a similar cadence that flattens out meaning and expressiveness. Tolkien has resisted this by varying the metre. Usually this means slowing the movement by runs of stressed syllables (‘long grass grows’, ‘West Wind comes walking’, ‘saw him walk’, ‘saw him then no more’, ‘North Wind may have heard’, ‘high walls westward’) or by introducing an additional stressed syllable (‘ride over’); sometimes it means lightening and speeding it by runs of unstressed syllables, very obviously in line three, where we have three extra unstressed syllables. The Clamavi De Profundis singers emphasise this by sounding each word and syllable clearly and distinctly and pausing between phrases so that we feel the unique aural contour each individual phrase has, as well as how the underlying metre gives pattern to the stanza as a whole. They help us see the lovely way in which Tolkien has made separate, specific moments of memory and feeling flow together in a single powerful expression of love, yearning, grief and compassion.

Edmund Prestwich, Tolkien’s Lament for Boromir

Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’ addresses that great working-class signifier, ‘the best room’. The parlour of the terraced house was burdened with a number of roles: the room ‘kept good’ for special occasions, for Sunday use, for rare visits from one’s betters (the minister, usually); for those brief family celebrities, the dying or the dead; or the room where the family’s golden child – a grammar-school boy, say – might improve themselves in its silence. It might be pressed into more regular use in an emergency, for an old, infirm or indigent relative. (A ‘houseless aunt’ is not a ‘homeless’ one; no family member would ever be allowed to sink so low.) Its role was heavily self-signalling. To keep a room like this was only a ‘symbol’ of working-class propriety and dignity from a middle-class perspective; from that of its keepers, it was merely evidence of it.

There was always a touch of the music hall in Tony’s work, and he could rarely resist a punning title. The good room may have been described as a ‘study’; as a child, I remember the word connoting more silence than learning, or indeed books. But in this case, the word also tells us what took place there, and indeed what’s taking place now: the poem itself is a study – of working-class mores, aspirations and contradictions, in particular the two-edged gift of Harrison’s own education. (Harrison, like Heaney, never used a word without being fully conscious of its etymology: L. studere – to be diligent, eager, zealous; PIE (s)teu– push, thrust, knock, beat. Best … best … best.)

This study’s made even quieter by the presence of the family dead. Two are named. There’s the awful sketch of the brief cousin: the poet’s aunt, silent in her shock; the whispered conference of the women of the house, as they pass the cheap plastic mirror before the baby’s mouth. The other is Harrison’s famous Uncle Joe, who also features in poems like ‘Heredity’: ‘How you became a poet’s a mystery! / Wherever did you get your talent from?’ / I say I had two uncles Joe and Harry / one was a stammerer, the other dumb. Joe’s word was presumably a good one when he finally got to it: he d-d-d-ds his way not to dumb but the delicate decorative art of the damascener. Elsewhere, Harrison ties Joe to that great lisper, Demosthenes, who cured himself by declaiming his speeches with his mouth full of pebbles. Tongue-tied speech was Harrison’s inheritance. His early theme was the pursuit of the eloquence that would unknot it.

Don Paterson, Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’

I am a voracious reader. Non fiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, fiction, give them all to me, let me go about my day always with the internal narratives of other writers in my head. Audio books, hard backs, paperbacks. Stacked on every table, in every nook. I keep highlighters, pens and book marks in every room, and I live in fear of one day losing the will to read. It happened once, years ago, during a bout of depression. That was when I discovered poetry, because I could no longer find refuge in reading novels, my concentration sparked to nothing every time I tried to read. Instead, in the haven of the local library, tucked away on a bottom shelf I found a short form emotional defibrillation in the form of Jackie Kay, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Collette Bryce, Katrina Porteus. An awakening occurred, a new literary genre to sink into.

Wendy Pratt, I deface my books because I am in conversation with them.

Yesterday went well.  That’s my best case brain talking.  My worst case brain says that they were overwhelmed and mystified at how what we did constitutes poem writing.

I left all the samples in the office, but we created some fascinating poems.  I gave them my document of abandoned lines, which had space above and below to add lines of their own.  Here’s an example, the first page of the document:—-
In a past time, you’d have been Magellan

I watch you solder bits to a motherboard

This body, a country with no maps

Some days the backyard garden explodes

I keep the quilts made by a spinster aunt.

—–

I have 15 pages, so they have plenty of lines to choose from.  I had them write companion lines and then cut the pages into strips.  And then we did a lot of experiments.

First we chose 6 strips at random and turned them over.  We asked ourselves, how did they work together?  We had the option to add more lines from our collection of strips.  We could create more lines.  We could rearrange.

I had also rearranged the tables so that we had several tables with long sheets of paper on them.  I had them put the strips they weren’t going to use on those sheets of paper–ideally, everyone would put at least one strip on each strip of long paper.

Everyone had a long sheet of paper with strips, and we spent 15 minutes arranging the strips into something resembling a poem.  I read a few out loud.  I thought they worked as poems, but my students seemed more hesitant.

I do realize that one reason why I think they work is that the abandoned lines are my lines, so in some sense, they do work well together.  I also realize that I have more training in doing reading without insisting on some external meeting; I did confess to my students that I like having a clear meaning, which these poems may not always have.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Surrealistic Poem Generating in Creative Writing Class

Nine of us from Bath Writers and Artists met last Saturday at The Hive Community Centre in Peasedown St John for a second session of making books. This time we focussed on the simple pamphlet stitch and variations on the theme. […]

My sculptural book is made from a willow twig, hemp yarn, and one of my ten-word poems written in walnut ink on paper dyed with willow strippings. Is it a book? It’s a book if I say it’s a book!

Dear willow
you keep our secrets
in your hollow
heart

Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry

I used to use Michael Burkard’s “A Sideways Suicide” on exams in poetry courses. I liked the way it required students to let go of the literal and lean on other ways of knowing, of accessing feeling: music, movement, repetition. I think it’s another one of my answering machine poems; I know assorted lines and phrases have been part of my internal jukebox, a device with neither discernible controls nor logic nor yankable plug for almost twenty-five years. The first time I deployed it on an unsuspecting class it was probably 2004 or 2005, and this went on for ten years or so, until one particular group took it on themselves to inquire after my well-being the next week. I was, I assured them, just fine. (I am, I assure you, just fine.)

Still, I have been mesmerized by this poem for twenty-five years, so take from that what you will, I guess. I’ve always understood it as an assertion of selfhood, a kind of unbarbaric yawp. Where Whitman hollers his celebration of self from sea to shining sea, Burkard pulls an Irish goodbye and ambles off into the evening: I imagine him taking the alleyways because they are more interesting, taking a circuitous stroll on his way to “you.” Who is the you? It’s someone he loves, or loved; it’s someone he has some connection with, or had; it’s someone he wants to connect with now, but can’t. Why not? Who knows. Sometimes that’s just the way things go. We fall out or fall away; we absent ourselves out of stupidity or self-preservation; sometimes we simply die.

I think I have the text right, but I had to track this one down online and found it, egads, on a Livejournal. There was at least one typo I was sure of and a second I am pretty sure needed my correction (‘feel’ to ‘feed’ in line four). If anyone has Ruby for Grief to hand, I’d be pleased to be corrected as needed. I thought I still had a copy, but when the first line came back to me while I was drifting off to sleep and I went to the bookcase, I saw that it was missing and immediately remembered why: I lent it to my favourite student in 2017 or so. I think he may have been in that welfare-check section—I remember he took my intro course—but I’d given it to him to read later on, when he got into the MFA where Burkard was teaching.

This kid was an incredibly talented young writer; he’d never even read poetry, wasn’t even an English major, and he advanced a decade in about eighteen months of formal study. He’d also clearly never felt he had a home before he had poems. He reminded me, as our favourites always do, of me. I think he also made off with my copy of Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign, but when he came back to visit during his second semester he brought me Bruce Smith’s Devotions.

That was the last time I saw him. He died by suicide in the spring of his second year. Typing this now knocks the wind out of me. It’s something an author, an asshole, would say.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Sideways Suicide” by Michael Burkard

A long prose poem, “I Believe That the Conspiracy Theory Exists”, reads like a manifesto, an early stanza asserts,

“I believe that as Black artists we are the warriors and caretakers of our mutual cultures and heritages. I do not view either you or myself as soldiers. Soldiers fight wars and once you start fighting you must always defend yourself. I do not see myself as defensive but I do see myself as maintaining a close watch on what I am, a Black woman of art.”

The poem ends,

“I believe that to be passive is to wrap the mind in defeat.

I believe that the simple coming together, the drawing on words, the debate vocally, the rage and the laughter, is vital for us, so that we may consider where we are and where we are going based on where we have been. For without all of these we may just start to believe all that is said about us.”

This manifesto posits that it’s important for artists to be true to their own voices, their own heritage and history, not sugar-coating justifiable anger and trauma to satisfy artist patrons or funding bodies. Otherwise there’s a risk you hand the agenda to your oppressors and let them write your history for you, burying your voice. It’s a good manifesto to get behind.

The last section is a transcript of the “Mary Seacole Libretto”. I’ve not quoted from it here, but it’s good to be reminded that SuAndi is a polymath in love with words and stories, eager to raise voices of those who have not been heard.

Emma Lee, “Leaning Against Time” SuAndi (Carcanet) – book review

Back in 2019, I was asked to review a book of poems by Steven Sher called Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies. Sher is a Brooklyn-born, Orthodox Jew who has been living in Jerusalem since 2012, and the poems in this book embody a profoundly nationalist, Orthodox Jewish commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. More than that, though, it is a book that demonizes the Palestinians and at least implicitly denies any claim they might have to the land as theirs. Sher’s politics when it comes to Israel, in other words—and this is how I put it in the review—are “precisely antithetical to my own.” This made the review difficult to write, not because I have a problem arguing against politics such as his, but because I wanted to make sure that when I wrote that I think the book fails overall, despite the presence of some truly beautiful and moving poems, I was talking about a failure within the poetry itself, not just my political disagreement with the author.

The review was published in the Summer 2022 issue of American Book Review, but I wrote it, obviously, before the eleven-day war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May of 2021, before Israel’s Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 (which targeted Islamic Jihad in Gaza), and before the current, genocidal war that Israel has been waging in Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023. Looking back at Sher’s book now, it’s frightening how prophetic some of the poems have turned out to be, in particular “Bombing Gaza,” a cynical reworking of Abraham’s negotiation with God over the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23-32). Sher’s speaker in that poem bargains with a voice that has the power to decimate Gaza—God’s? The Israeli government’s?—for the lives of the people who live there. However, because we already know the outcome of the Biblical story—God ultimately destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no way not to read into the poem the prediction that Gaza deserves to be destroyed for the same reason, ie, that it would be impossible to find at least ten righteous people who live there. (If you’d like to read the review for yourself, you can do so here).

I started thinking about this book again because it happened to be at the top of a stack that I was moving from one place to another, and I was reminded of a poem from the book that I didn’t write about in my review, the one that opens the collection, “Looking East From Mt. Scopus.” In this poem, Sher’s speaker watches three Palestinian boys herding their goats towards home and bears witness as one of the boys, the oldest, who is “not yet a teen,” beats nearly, if not actually to death the black goat he’s been carrying on his shoulders. 

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Poetry Versus Propaganda

After I lost two friends this year, I made a vow to try to live a bigger life—I feared the pandemic had made me shrink not just my daily routines but my goals and dreams too, that my circles had shrunk and shrunk. The impact of that has maybe made my health a little worse—you may have noticed I’ve been struggling since August first with one thing, then another, and bam, I wound up in the hospital last week with life-threatening stuff. If I ignore my body and try to push through, I inevitably pay a price—but I said yes to maybe too much and as a result had to miss several things—readings with friends, a residency, celebrations—I had really looked forward to and had to dial down all my activities for at least two weeks. Living with MS AND a primary immune system problem AND a bleeding disorder—all things that prove challenging on their own—can be like playing a video game where, when you beat or evade one boss, you just end up downed by another you weren’t even looking for. As a result, I am reevaluating how much I say yes to, and the life goals that are really worth fighting for. Is it worth it to say yes to travel if I’m sick for weeks afterwards, or socializing if I pick up a virus every time I go in public? I don’t want to live in fear, but I also don’t want to be stupid. I am just a writer, which is not a super high-risk job, but I still have to be careful what I say yes and no to. I’m still trying to figure out a balance in the health vs everything else in my life. As we get into the wetter, colder months, or “the big dark” as they say out here, I’m going to try to dial down a bit, spend some more time reading and writing, not pushing my body quite as hard. I have already ordered pens – don’t new pens feel more necessary in fall?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! Pumpkin Season Arrives Along with Early Sunsets, Supermoons, Health Stuff and Missed Opportunities

I am trying to come to terms with my ordinariness, my essential unexceptionalism. Here on the downhill slope, all those me’s that could have been will not be. Turns out I am not all that brilliant, not wildly geniusly creative, not shining leadership material. All the glory I dared to imagine, and all the glory I did not dare to desire, turns out, looks like what my life has looked like. And what is still to come probably looks pretty much like what has been. In a good way. Ish. Illusion. Delusion. Potato potahto. Fortunately there were thought traps I did not fall into — I didn’t think my feminine wiles would get me anywhere, and I didn’t think that life unfolded in certain ways, controllable by prayer or voodoo, crossed fingers, predictable by cards, signs, saying rabbit rabbit. Well, maybe I kind of believed in the rabbit rabbit thing. And I still skip cracks in the sidewalk now and then. But then there are those other illusions one must shed — sometimes in the face of new science (wait, CAN I drink red wine, or not? I can’t keep track), sometimes in the face of history unfolding (so the United States IS still a “republic” only “if we can keep it”). Fortunately, I’m curious and I can tolerate shifts in thinking. This has been one aspect of my slow maturation. I now see very little black and white. I am now interested in the gray areas. The dove, mackeral, fog, the dusky shades of which are innumerable in this life, and how they ease across each other, those tones and hues. Which perhaps suggests I’m a bit of a genius after all… Here is a poem by Elizabeth Hazen that considers the necessary reconsiderations.

Marilyn McCabe, mass of heat, but without flame. All these years

See how much longer it takes to effect peace than war.
Some could infer that this warrants
legions of peace,
factories churning out precision kindness,
ships carrying angels,
an array of little boats, perhaps?

Here, it is Dussehra and we are celebrating victories:
the goddess, read goodness,
overcoming the devil, read evil.
Language leaves nothing to chance.
She stands over him, her tiger at her heels.
An emblem of gender, of power, of a kind of justice.
Soft marigold garlands circle her neck.
Nothing is lost between the lines.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The sky in the dock

As a necessity, I like to have an escape plan. If I have to leave Los Angeles, I am ready, but I would prefer not to. I like my home. If I depart Los Angeles, I won’t be able to take my chickens. It doesn’t work to have chickens and dogs in the same vehicle. But escape is on the mind.

As I often do in times of turmoil, I turn to poetry. I recently read The Octopus Museum, a book of poems by Brenda Shaughnessy, a collection exploring feminism and the fears we have for our families, our communities, our countries—the daily crises facing the American people. Although it came out in 2019, its poems continue to resound.

I think about the octopus. They, too, have an escape plan. They have three hearts and nine brains. They are highly intelligent and can figure out how to get in and out of aquariums, how to unscrew lids. As a defense mechanism, they can drop an arm, and because their arms are filled with neurons, they can grow a new one from memory. But the octopus is also capable of learning to play, of communicating across the divide.

A mother octopus also sacrifices herself for her children. After the young octopi are born in their den, the mother spends her energy and time guarding her kids and ensuring they receive enough oxygen. During this process, she starves herself, and eventually, she dies.

I like to think that there is a future for our country that doesn’t require fleeing, but also doesn’t require dying for our children. One where we can live like the octopus: shrewd, wary, with our brains and hearts working together.

In the closing poem of The Octopus Museum, the family at the center of the collection is escaping. While the parents are carrying food and water, the daughter of the family is carrying both her parents and her brother, who is in a wheelchair. I reflect on my own family. Sometimes, my son is carrying our whole family on his head, and we are topsy-turvy, but he keeps walking straight. Sometimes, my daughter is carrying us, keeping the course. Sometimes, it’s me, trying to walk ahead and search for joy in the darkness. But we continue to walk.

I will not forget my escape plan, but I do not want to leave. I imagine a future where we learn to communicate and listen, to be resourceful, to plan ahead for the moments where we must envision and pursue new ways of living. I hold onto the idea of growing new tentacles. Fierce and tender, wild and imaginative. We Americans need to be a country where our many hearts beat to the drums of a shared music, unite for a shared purpose. May we be blessed, safe, grow arms, hold hands. May we survive.

Kate Gale, Escaping An Empire: What the Octopus Teaches Us About Survival

Years ago, stumbling
into a museum in Cambridge, I found a mutton
bone doll in a display case: swaddled in rags,
face sketched in with a charcoal stick and
I thought— a child cradled this in her arms.
Cooed to it, perhaps clutched it to her chest
in her garrett bed as she peered into the night
through slats in the roof, the future’s
skeleton not even glimmering yet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mutton Bone Doll

This week: how poems happen, early-autumn dreamtime, the gates of unuttered words, and much more. Enjoy.

It was almost midnight on February 18, 2023. My back was injured from repeatedly picking up our elderly dog Misha. I was lying in bed with one of the large spiral-bound notebooks I use for journaling. Feeling sore and tired, I didn’t have anything profound to say, so I just wrote about the moment: journaling about my wee life despite my stunning insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The first draft read:

spiral notebook
these random jottings in this bit
of galaxy

This felt very awkward, but it had potential. I cut “these” but it was still clunky. Next I tried:

spiral notebook
recording my small part
of the galaxy

I crossed out “small” but it still seemed too long and too obvious. I gave up for the time being.

The next day, I came back to it with fresh eyes. Changing “notebook” into “journal” covered the journaling aspect without having to detail it. And instead of hitting readers over the head with my point, the new, condensed version gave them a little something to work out. I changed “part” for “bit” because it sounded smaller.

The haiku was now so short that I thought it worked better as a one-liner, or “monoku.” In English-language haiku, this is a popular variation from the typical three lines. The poem now read:

spiral journal my bit of the galaxy

Three weeks later, I submitted it to the esteemed journal Modern Haiku, and happily, editor Paul Miller accepted it for the summer 2023 edition.

Last month, while perusing my haiku collection to find good subjects for haiga (art combined with haiku), this one spoke to me. But I’d noticed that many of my poems are in the first person. For pieces that will go into my annual calendar, I worry that too many “I” poems could seem too self-involved; I would rather include the reader. So for the haiga version, I changed “my” to “this.”

Now I wonder if my meaning is less clear in this version, but I guess that’s OK; each reader can interpret it as they wish. There are plenty of haiku that I find mysterious but interesting, as long as they aren’t completely obscure.

Annette Makino, How a haiku is hatched

In 2017, a trip to Berlin led me to the place where the Nazis began the burning of books.

I felt a sudden,  powerful physical and emotional sensation, history coming fully alive. I had studied the Weimar Republic at University but it could not convey the palpable combination of location and history which I felt as I studied  the memorial to those events.

“Ghosts gather, tug at your sleeve politely / plead that you read the Book of the Dead. / Its opening page lies at your feet. Descend / to lamentation’s rainbow. / “
Viewing the monument in Budapest to the murder of Jews was a further jolt. Out of these intense moments came two poems, Berlin 1933 and Shoes, published in my first book, At the Storms Edge, ( Palewell Press.)

My poetic voice was maturing and a re-reading of Primo Levi’s book made an even deeper impression.  I felt a deep urge to honour his life and work, to try to imagine those moments before extermination, to praise his humanity. Hence this poem, for me the most important in the book. And perhaps, subconsciously, I was provoking readers and listeners to say, “this matters, you need to know so that you can spot the warning signs here and elsewhere.”

Am I in danger of overstatement? Think how rancorously divided we were over Brexit. The murder of MP, Jo Cox.  Violent disorder about asylum-seekers in hotels. The condemning of judges in the right-wing press for upholding the law. In the words of Sir Michael Tippett, “I must know my shadow and my light.” Artists must be willing to address full on the worst of our individual and collective selves, even if only in private conversation or introspection.

After the end of the war, Theodore Adorno said,”After Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry. ” I think we must continue to write because in the face of evil silence might imply consent. We must add our voice to the chorus of protest, warning and lament.

Drop-in by Frank McMahon (Nigel Kent)

This week I was recording some poems for a thing and I was wondering what to record. I rather fancied a theme of some kind. First of all, I considered my rabbit poems and then I decided because there are likely to be more yet to come, they would be better saved for a future date. Whilst looking I enjoyed rereading my poem Watching the Joker Alone which was written in response to a call out for cinematic poems from The Broken Spine. This encouraged me to see which other poems had found their home with this particular press – and a setlist was formed.

Watching the Joker Alone is one of those poems that captures a specific moment in time, and which might not even have been written if I hadn’t read the call out from Alan Parry. On seeing the call out I had recently returned from a solo visit to the cinema so I picked up my pen to see what might evolve. I remembered the feeling I had as I walked down the stairs to the exit as the credits rolled, and the poem took form on the page.

Sue Finch, WATCHING THE JOKER ALONE

The following poem evolved in my head over a couple of days before I put pen to paper. I had been thinking about a salt mine in Poland I had visited years ago and how we humans create holes in the ground.

Salt

They found it where he said they would,
a day’s digging in the field, dirty brown crystals.
It was, he maintained, proof that some time before
there had been an ocean above our heads. […]

Paul Tobin, AN OCEAN ABOVE OUR HEADS

Here, the kind of September morning
that pauses my breath — jeweled dew
on the tall grasses and ripe corn,
the hillsides beginning to take on
their seasonal tweed, while over there —
famine, injustice, anguish. Despair
presses down like a lead blanket.
Where is hope in a year like this?

I turn to Jonah, the reluctant prophet
who found his conscience and his heart
at the bottom of the sea. […]

This year’s Elul poem had been eluding me. This has been a really hard year for the world. I couldn’t find the path in … until I started working with my Bayit hevre on a new rendering of the Book of Jonah for this year. (Coming soon.) We went deep into the context of Jonah and what it might say to us this year. And that led me to what I needed to say this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Elul poem for 2025

Beginning in March 2025, large areas of South Australian coastal waters have been devastated by a harmful algal bloom, leading to mass mortalities of uncountable numbers of fish, invertebrates and other marine life. The causes are complex but all arise from the unmitigated effects of anthropogenic climate change.

I made the video from images of fish that have been killed by the bloom and washed up on beaches along the eastern side of Gulf St Vincent. The audio was created from samples taken from videos of living fish, crabs and squid recorded at Seacliff beach, South Australia, in January – February 2025, before the bloom hit. The text is what the fish might say to us, if only they could…

Ian Gibbins, DEADEYE

Today is publication day for Temporary Shelters, so I’m happy to share a new video from the book. It was shot and produced by Bare Bones Filmmakers.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Another New Poetry Video

My writing desk is a slightly creaky thing I made myself. ‘Desk’ is suggestive of grandeur, whereas in fact it’s just a crude, slim table. The top is an old shutter from some who-knows-how-ancient window, the frame is made from the pitch pine side lengths from an old bed. […] From the desk I can see the curtains I draw in summer to keep out the flies while the balcony doors are open. […]

When we started this project there was a building boom in Spain and old houses in pretty villages were being gutted and turned into tourist accommodation. The beds that had been left behind when the occupants had thrown up their hands in despair at their precarious rural lives and set off to start again in Barcelona, were all of a piece. I have their dimensions committed to memory, the lateral timbers 1.8m long, 7.5cm wide, 3.5cm thick.

Everywhere I look in and around the house are these timbers, a dense pitch pine too hard to take a nail without bending it, resistant to weather and insects. They are in the window frames, the roof structure of the porch, dozens built into the eaves and soffits alone. They made up the ladder to the tree house I built with my son. When it finally fell apart I repurposed the wood, yet again, into a ramp for the henhouse. I think of the generations of my neighbours, who were conceived, born and died in these beds, whatever embodied energy that implies, but mostly I think of my young sons, who when dad arrived with a pile of them tottering on the roof of the car, would happily set-to, reducing them to their reusable components with hammers and spanners.

I suppose I’m concluding something about timelessness and transience, a feeling the high country here, with its ruins, hermitages and 1000-year-old olive trees, will not permit you to ignore. You might think the energy, the vibes built into this house would set up some kind of a psychic din, all those lives lived and lost between the timbers, but what I notice instead is silence, the long wavelength calm that drifts in from the surrounding landscape. There are bee-eaters massing every day now, in some high-altitude conference of the birds, usually some of the last migrants to leave after the summer. Yesterday, arriving back from the coast just before dawn, I saw an eagle owl, heading back to the mountains after drinking down at the river. The soft, sweet dreamtime that is early autumn is upon us all, conceived, born, slipping back into the light when we must. The timbers and the forests will endure, and when they’re finally done, they will surely keep someone warm.

james mcconachie, Sticks and Stones

After devoting several notebook pages to a description of his writing desk, Franz Kafka must have paused and walked to the window. Surely time passed. Maybe something happened. According to his notebook, the next paragraph is “wretched”:

Wretched, wretched, and yet well intended. It’s midnight after all, but considering that I’m very well rested, that can only serve as an excuse insofar as I wouldn’t have written anything at all during the day. The burning lightbulb, the quiet apartment, the darkness outside, the last waking moments entitle me to write, even if it’s the most wretched stuff. And I hastily make use of this right. This is just who I am.

Wretched, too, the feeling of wronging the subject or failing the object. Grotesque, the shame upon encountering the ill-depicted desk. Bovine, that instant when passing the hallway mirror and noting the WRONG writ large on the forehead.

Alina Stefanescu, Commissioned sights.

I’ve returned to reading Knausgård’s My Struggle, and one of the things that sticks with me the most about reading him is how easily he writes about self-loathing. It’s just plain there on the page, as simple and straightforward as any quotidian detail. A passerby is wearing a scarf as easily as he is wearing his loathing. I am, in a way, envious of that honesty. Part of me wonders if it’s gendered. As a woman, as a poet, how is it that it takes me many more words to express that kind of self-discontent? Am I building architecture to prevent a kind of bare vulnerability?

I was thinking about this a lot when going through the final edits on the proofs. To be honest (which seems extra appropriate here), I gave these proofs a level of close attention that I never had with my four books before. It’s not because I thought these poems were less finished than the others, but it’s more so because reading the poems on the page has always felt like listening to a recording or watching a video of myself. I have the same recoil. I can’t do it. I don’t. Reading them aloud for an audience is different. There’s an element of performance that I can embrace as a form of distance and protection. But in this final stage, before the poems become fully real as a book, I have trouble confronting myself there on the page, even under those words and all that dressy architecture. Do I fear that I may decide in that last moment that this book should not exist, is not good enough to exist?

But this time, with my feline friend Maya at my side on the chaise lounge, I faced those pages head-on, and they will find their way into the world this spring underneath the stunning package of this beautiful cover, which I’m excited to reveal.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Mantises, Leaf Blowers, and a Cover Reveal

One of the most commonly proved facts is that you will scour your manuscript and galleys to make sure you’ve eliminated any remaining typos, misspellings, or wayward punctuation only to discover–well–you haven’t. Your editor will also scour for these, as will the occasional friend, partner, or critique buddy. You will think you are safe, but upon opening the book weeks, month, or years later, there will be at least one that has somehow eluded all eyes til just now. 

Some may say, in fact, this is one of the blessings of printing POD, since you can always fix your mistakes and oversights, especially if you are doing the ordering. I speak from both sides of the experience, since as an editor, I read through one final time before printing and have missed some pretty embarrassing  punctuation gaffs. This is also true of my own books, either persistent errors that have eluded everyone til it’s been made public, or some jostling that led to conjoined words, extra spaces, missing periods, and other pesky flaws. All the editorial eyes in the world will not catch a word you are all collectively misspelling (in my first book, published by a traditional press, It was the city of Albuquerque, which only the odd New Mexico native seemed to notice).

Most often, I know I always need an extra set of eyes, usually another poet or editor who is trained to read for things, though a friend or partner has had to sometimes help out. For books I edit, we can usually catch most things in a few back and forths before saving the final version. When you’re on your own, though, without a formal editor these are things you need to attend to–whether that’s enlisting help, trusting your own eye (the success of which will depend on how detail oriented you are) or hiring a professional as a developmental/proofing editor, or what the cool fiction kids call a beta reader.  

One nice thing about the poetry collections of my own that I have published is that they usually have already existed in a published version, either in journals or zine projects that have themselves been proofread within an inch of their lives. Or even the print version of EXOTICA that required only minor adjustments since the zine was already published and it’s just slightly different in formatting for print. CLOVEN, however, like GRANATA, has not been published before in another version, so I am starting fresh with whatever I had as I cemented the poems in place as finished (and even that may change in the process.) This means, I am moving slowly and extra carefully with each page and each fragment. It also gives me a chance to make tiny tweaks that may make the poems just a little better rhythm- or language-wise. It’s a slower process as well, but I am hoping to wrap it up before the end of this month to be on track with my publication plan.  

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | proofing

Today I learned that Contubernales Books, the small independent publisher of primarily Greek & Latin works in translation, has published a second book of mine : Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Their first effort was last year’s Mississippi River extravaganza, Green Radius.) One day I hope these books will surface, somehow, through the still pond of our culture’s literary-critical apparatus – its hearing-aid technology, so to speak (such as it is).

For a long time – since the early 1980s, in fact – I have been mining my own vein (or cursèd dry cistern, if you will) of the “American sublime”, or the modernist epic, or simply the l-o-o-n-g poem. The 20th century, and perhaps the early 21st century, have proven fertile ground for multifarious efforts of this kind, some of them quite brilliant and even great; but my own primary model and paragon in this regard, if you want to know, has not been Ezra Pound, or H.D., or T.S. Eliot, or W.C. Williams, or Charles Olson, or… or… or the many other imposing and erudite examplars.

No, I have only had two prime instigators : Osip Mandelstam – who is not even American, nor a writer of long poems! – and Hart Crane – who is. Crane, I find, mingled the classic beautiful-and-sublime into a profound contemporary long-poem invention : The Bridge. About Crane, I stand with Harold Bloom, and the sometimes-formidable critic John Irwin.

Henry Gould, A New Book of Poetry

On Tuesday, I had the great pleasure of reading at Five Leaves bookshop in Nottingham, alongside two lovely poets whose poetry I love: Kathy Pimlott and Peter Sansom. As Kathy mentioned during her reading, she and I met because we were both participants in the Poetry Business Writing School run by Peter and Ann Sansom. I think our sets of poems complemented one another’s. I’m very grateful to Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves and Tim Fellows of Crooked Spire Press for introducing our readings. […]

I’ve been reading Peatlands (Arc Publications, 2014), written by Pedro Serrano, the Mexican poet, and translated by Anna Crowe, both of whom I was due to be reading alongside in Mytholmroyd. (They have been replaced by Kim Moore and Molly Prosser.) In his poem ‘El Arte de Fecar’ / ‘The Liminating Art’, he writes, ‘Shitting is like the art of writing: / you have to give it thought and just so long / for everything to come out good and strong.’ I can’t argue with that.

I’ve also been (re-)reading Us (Faber, 2018) by Zaffar Kunial, as it’s the chosen book for this month’s Poetry Book Club. In these days when the media are encouraging the open racism of far-right fuckwits, his poems exploring what it means to belong have taken on added importance. I’ve also re-worked my way through the poetry oeuvre of Seamus Heaney, accompanied again by Stepping Stones (Faber, 2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s seminal interviews with him. For me, Heaney remains a paragon of how a poet can negotiate the politics and events of their time.

Matthew Paul, September reading and other news

Tomorrow night, we read in Vancouver. Preparing for our flight, I poke through our bookshelves, thinking I might continue my Etel Adnan rereading, only to discover a further Dodie Bellamy title I had forgotten we owned. The TV SUTRAS (2014), frustratingly and foolishly unopened, clearly landing years before I managed to first properly read Bellamy’s work. Within a few hours, Christine and I in the Air Canada lounge, thanks to passes from her father, as I read Dodie Bellamy and watch planes ascend at angles.

Wait for me, driver. I’ll be right back.

Man getting out of cab.

COMMENTARY

Keep returning to the practice. It will always be there waiting for you. Life will also be waiting for you—no need to cling to it during practice. This is the key to focus. Leave competing demands behind.

I’m enjoying the call-and-response of these texts, reminiscent of what Canadian poet Ken Norris once worked through his own chapbook, The Commentaries (1999), a work that commented upon his own poetry collection, The Music (1995), offering it as his own variation on Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (1978). As Bellamy writes to introduce the collection, The TV SUTRAS is an “inspired” text.

I use “inspired” in the spiritual sense, meaning a text that is dictated or revealed. For example, each day between noon and 1 p.m., Aiwass, the minister of Horus, dictated The Book of the Law to Aleister Crowley in the spring of 1904. And then there’s Moses, who climbed Mount Sinai so God could dictate the Ten Commandments to him. For The Urantia Book, space aliens spoke through a sleeping man named Wilfred Kellog in Chicago, Illinois, USA. For the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith dropped a magical seer stone into his hat, then buried his face in the hat, and in the darkness a spiritual light shone, revealing a parchment.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

One day last week I saw a circular announcing a small academic conference or colloquium at Cambridge in December on the Pindaric fragments. (Here if you fancy it yourself.) Reading it was the first time in years — and certainly the first time since I withdrew from formal academia — that I genuinely wished I could go to an academic conference. I am too much an introvert and too covetous of my time to have ever been very keen on conferences, but I love thinking about Pindar and wish I knew more about the study of the fragments.

Coincidentally, on the same day that I saw this notice, the Twitter/X/whatever account @sentantiq posted a fragment not from Pindar, but from Bacchylides, Pindar’s less well-known contemporary in Greece in the 5th century BCE. The post was a single line, in both Greek and English translation:

[οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾷστον] ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας / ἐξευρεῖν

It isn’t easy to find the gates of unuttered words.

I love this image of the gates of (or for) unuttered words, and I imagine anyone who writes regularly can sympathise with the sentiment — it is indeed not easy to find new (or even inadequate but not-new) words for things, or a new way of putting something; equally, it’s not easy to find a path into a new subject, an access point to a new topic, to say something original. And there’s something just very slightly paradoxical about the idea of “unspoken words” — they only become words, we might imagine, once they are spoken or at least utterable. (ἀρρήτος, here translated as ‘unspoken’, can also mean that cannot be spoken or not to be spoken.)

Victoria Moul, Finding the door of words: on originality

“[P]oetry makes nothing happen,” Auden says, but “it survives.” More than that, it is “A way of happening, a mouth.” Whatever poetry is, in other words, it is not inert. Following Auden’s metaphor, it “happens” in the same way that a river happens, and in the same way that the mouth of a river opens onto something larger than the itself, an ocean for example, so does the “mouth” of poetry. So does a question. You can see here the thread that is going to run through this blog.

As an example of a poem that opens onto a question that opens onto precisely the kind of reflecting on the state of the world that I think we need today, I’d like to invite you to engage with Elisa Gabbert’s close reading in The New York Times of another Auden poem, “Musée Des Beaux Arts,” which is nominally a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus […]

We often ask what good poems can do in the face of the suffering inflicted, for example, by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the famine in Sudan—not to mention the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants, women, and people who are trans and queer. (That list could, obviously, go on.) Gabbert’s essay, it seems to me, offers one answer to that question. Poems, good poems—in both the aesthetic and moral/ethical sense—offer us emotional and intellectual access to the complex interiority of what it means that we have a choice in bearing witness, or not, to suffering, much less in taking, or not, whatever action we can to end it. Gabbert’s essay is worth reading and talking about and I think it is especially worth teaching.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Poems Do We Need Right Now?

I’ve been thinking about my monthly Listopia posts and how much time they take to organize and write up and I’ve decided to suspend them, at least for the time being. Maybe permanently, I don’t know. I may do a similar footprint on a weekly basis but, honestly, I don’t know about that either. All I know is it’s been a tough few weeks, for many reasons, making me feel tired mentally and physically. I’ve been reassessing my online time because I’m sure it’s contributing to my fatigue. This week, I spent less time scrolling social media, a years-long bad habit. The very first day I noticed how much more present I felt in my real life, how much more time I had for other things. When I am online, I look for the type of stories I want to read right now – more positive, less dark. I like dark reads. I like crime, gothic, and noir but I feel like I need to chill for a while & be mindful of the content I’m consuming. That definitely includes news and opinion pieces.

Charlotte Hamrick, Old-School Chill

I’m retraining my brain to pay attention like it’s 1999. I miss my old brain, the one that could read for hours. The one that had lots of good ideas. The one that craved learning. We did an accidental phone-free Saturday recently, and it felt really good. In the article below, I especially appreciate author Yana Yuhai’s explanation of the neuroscience behind our compulsions to scroll (“Our attention spans haven’t disappeared, they’ve been retrained”), and her suggestions for ways to get our attention back, none of which are dogmatic or dramatic (“make focus feel like a soft return, not a hard reset”). Neuroplasticity for the win.

Rita Ott Ramstad, When the right plant in the right place isn’t

As a poet, I ask myself whose story is this to tell? I’m not among those constantly wandering in search of safety for the next few hours. Wondering then, where to next? I’m not clutching my stomach to pain of emptiness in a body wasting in the drag on it as it as it tries to pull some kind of strength from nutrients that aren’t available.  

I’m not having to close my eyes as I step over body parts that are barely distinguishable. That every breath I take is filled with a mixture of dust, of soot particles and the sulfur of explosions. The smell of death that is always an undercurrent. I know of these things but I don’t actually live then, so it’s not really my story to tell.

The story that is mine to tell is none the less painful. It is the story of a mixture of anger and sadness. It is a frustration that even as a poet I cannot seem to find the correct word to convey that sadness because sadness is not good enough. It’s more than that… it’s not even despondency, it’s overwhelming, it’s grief. It is seeing so many photos and videos that they have become a collage of images in my brain.  And as this goes on, my anger grows and it is hard to keep it under control because it is American Tax Dollars, Billions of them that has been feeding this ugly vial right-wing Zionist government that has made the decision to choose genocide on the people of Gaza. 

Michael Allyn Wells, Two Stories and a Genocide

Wishbone, war bone, water bone.

All the bones building the body of this one nation underground.

Strewn across battlefields, skulls with no tongue to recount the ways they once loved.

Etched into those bones:

disinterest, disinheritance. Fire, ice, dust, tears.

If only this were a train song, a mournful melody to make all this leaving easier.

Rich Ferguson, One Nation, Underground

My sincerest gratitude to New Verse News for publishing my duplex poem “Dear Judy” earlier this week. The events of September 10 were heartbreaking. Two people died that day. One person assassinated in the state where I lived most of my life and one in my new home state of Colorado. Two children were critically injured in the school shooting in Evergreen. I’ve been writing epistolary duplex poems to my mother, who passed unexpectedly in January 2024. Not all of the poems are related to current events but they have been a way for me to still talk to her, tell her things I need to, feel close to her. This is the first one published.

New Verse News publishes poems related to current events. They are quick to respond and generous in their promotion on social media. 

Trish Hopkinson, My duplex poem “Dear Judy” published in New Verse News, open for current event poems!

Yesterday I attended the first in a series of monthly interfaith retreats hosted by SEEL Puget Sound. SEEL stands for “Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life.” The series is based around formalized spiritual exercises designed in the mid-1500’s by St. Ignatius of Loyola, who later went on to found the Jesuit order. At the end of the retreat, we were given a book of prayers, reflections and poems called “Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits”, and I was totally shocked to find a poem in it by Gerard Manly Hopkins. In all my of my years of stumbling across his poetry, I had no idea that he was a Jesuit priest. To be fair, most of his online biographies make a concerted effort to gloss this over for some reason, and Gerard Manly Hopkins is not a poet who I ever specifically sought out to read. But when I did happen to come across his work, I always liked it and found it interesting. His beautiful poem “God’s Grandeur” in my estimation has early echos of EE Cummings:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

I have only had this book for one day, and I am already completely enamored of it. I love that it mixes poetry and prays, and some that count as both, such as in “Soul of Christ” by St. Ignatius:

“May the shelter I seek
be the shadow of your cross.”

The problem with reading the Bible and religious literature is that it can’t merely be “consumed.” The audacity of certain lines, like this one, thunk me across the head like a two-by-four, and I have to stop reading for extended periods of time to walk around dizzily with cartoon stars over my noggin while my body and soul wrestles with the enormity of it.

Kristen McHenry, Hearts on Fire: Discovering Jesuit Poets

Sometimes I feel like just picking up my own shoe and dropping it, so anxious am I always about that “other shoe to drop”-waiting business. Let me just make happen the Next Thing, so I can stop being anxious about it. Of course, mmm, that’s not how life works. I mean, sometimes, I guess, you can blow things up with your own actions. But mostly it’s just stuff unfolding in its own odd time, its own strange way, and you standing there thinking, Wait, what? or Okay, okay, come on, already. I’m talking personally. I’m talking professionally. I’m talking nationally. Internationally. I’m talking about the shift of summer to fallish to fall to holy crap it’s cold.

How do you know when wisdom lies in waiting, and when it is time to act? And what act should be taken? And how do you take it, knowing it could be disastrous…or completely inconsequential? How do you wait, knowing you may be missing a crucial opportunity to act? I watch the criss-cross of the double-dutch jump ropes. Do I jump now? Now?

When writing a poem, the stakes are low. That’s what revision is for. In watercolor painting, the stakes are higher — many things once done cannot at all be undone. And then there’s life.

I admire this poem for how it deliberates, takes a small action, and then sits for a moment in its reverberation. It’s a small poem that feels enormous in its moment of silence afterward. It is from the most recent issue of One Art online magazine.

Marilyn McCabe, everything breaks

Yesterday I read the first line of “To Autumn”:  “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”  I asked my students if the mornings had been misty lately.  They looked startled.  I realized that they probably wouldn’t know.  They’re probably up after the sun has risen and burned off the mist.

But here at a higher altitude, it’s been very foggy/misty, and I’ve really enjoyed watching the swirls.  I’ve thought of past generations, surrounded by fog and mist and smoke, and it’s no wonder they believed in ghosts, that they described ghosts the way they did.

I’m feeling a bit haunted myself.  It’s strange to teach this poem to students who are not much older than Keats was when he wrote this perfect poem.  It’s strange to think how much older I am than my students.  When I first started teaching, I was only a few years older than my students.  Now I am decades older.

Like Keats, I’m haunted by my mortality.  Let this haunting prompt me to do my best work!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Autumn of Life

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ve been listening to the poetry podcast, The Poems We Made Along the Way a lot recently. It’s into series 3 now, and has had a wide variety of guests. I’d urge you to seek them all out via your podcast provider of choice, but the most recent guest was Lewis Buxton. I’ve been listening to it this week, and, as ever, found much too enjoy.

Gregory has an interview style that seems to put the poet at ease because he asks such diligent questions, often reaching back into previous interviews for sources. The questions are mostly about craft and attitudes towards writing, etc rather than about specific poems, and for fans of process it’s always a fascinating hour or so. The set pieces of the ‘Lightning round’ and What would you do to help poetry if money was no object’ sections are always illuminating, often surprising and never fail to set my own mental hares running towards imagining what I’d say if I was a guest. NB that’s not a request, Gregory—Christ no, I’d be far too dull as a guest. Even I don’t care what I have to say about poetry, so why would anyone else?

Mat Riches, Telephone call for unpredictable sands

In the prose  piece that closes the book, “Excerpt from ‘A New History of Printing’ (1933)”, [Fergal] Gaynor invents a history to satirise internet culture (using that last word in it’s very loosest sense), via an imagined printing invention that replicates the idea of paperless text:

Few in the long run were the voices of dissent. A short-lived movement in philosophy and the arts, of strong aestheticist bent, bemoaned the loss of the material pleasures of the old medium: the smells, the feel of the object, the different styles of cover. It was not made clear whether the artists in question had read the books concerned. Shrill complaints were emitted from the loose association referring to itself as ‘dedicated readers’ who, in the Darwinian jargon of the day, made claim that they were being deprived of their ‘habitats’, and that, ironically, they found themselves isolated in a world of texts. And there are many accounts from the period – the medium, despite all its owners’ precautions, still lending itself to conflagration – of the strange experience of watching a whole library, perhaps even a civilization, burn in bright seconds down to a grey nothing.

This concern for the possibility of literacy, of literature, surviving is of a piece with Gaynor’s poetic ambitions as stated in section X of ‘Runes’:

poetry
as production
line

for an age now
art
outsourced

tiny fingers
sharp reflexes
good for such work

space
grows
in the library

as if a fire burnt
as if green things

The folding of poetry into the exploitation of child labour in such activities as Victorian lace-making marks a kind of convergence of his politics and aesthetics, as if he’s discovering his own purpose for the existence of poetry. 

Billy Mills, Two from Shearsman: A Review

Very few books on Shakespeare are worth reading: Kermode, Bate, Barber, Bradley, Johnson, Hazlitt, Nuttall, Coleridge, Ann Barton. It is hard to be genuinely interesting about a genius. Rhodri Lewis’s book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, is a new and worthwhile book about Shakespeare as a thinker. Lewis argues that Shakespeare is constantly using dramatic experiments to subvert the idea that rational philosophical systems can explain our lives.

…Shakespeare’s tragedies also try to make their audiences think. In particular, to make them think about the status of human thought as an ineradicably emotional phenomenon that is far from being the province of an unblinking and dispassionate rationality. The Shakespeare of the tragedies goes beyond the familiar claim that reason is the slave of the passions, and asks us to infer that reason as we tend to discuss it is the invention of the passions—of our desperate need to feel that we understand, or have the capacity to understand, our earthly lot. In so doing, he does not imply that the mental phenomenon represented by the word “reason” (something like “the power of intelligence through which human beings process the world”) does not exist, but that reason as generally understood is a heuristic—a fiction that the human mind has settled upon in the attempt to explain itself to itself.

Lewis’s book is short, cogent, informative, and provocative. There are also occasionally humorous moments, such as this passage about Antony, a little commentary on modern academia.

…how better expose the ethics of Ciceronian humanist peer review than to write about someone who—after bringing himself low through ostentatious displays of liberality—came to spurn both civility and civic life? The more so if this character were to make much of the need to be seen, spurning the self-deceiving complacencies of the polis in order to affirm that, in withdrawing from his fellow human beings, he had chosen the correct path?

There are still prominent Shakespeareans who ideologically, reflexively deny the fact that “Shakespeare tells us how to live” or that Shakespeare has “something to tell us”. (When I interviewed Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips, Phillips told me that Shakespeare is more “evocative than informative” and drew out some old saws about astonishing language, the effect people have on each other through their language, etc. That’s fine as far as it goes, and hardly untrue, but it’s a plain ideology rather than a critical reading of the plays. You can watch the little disagreement here if you care to.) Lewis avoids this mistake and is happy to discover and describe the beliefs at play in Shakespeare’s work, noting always that he is an experimental, dramatic thinker who opposes the humanist system of trying to rationalise life. His book is all the better for it. I also came away from this book more convinced than ever that Shakespeare is a (Jamesian) philosophical pragmatist.

Henry Oliver, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

“Have they marked you with arrows?” is a cancer survival story from being recalled to the screening unit, through surgery (though without gory details) and the dehumanisation of procedures, and hope. Through the poems, Jayne Stanton confronts the clichés and platitudes offered to sufferers and records what it takes to endure. In “After the appointment”, when the poet and her husband grab a drink in the cafeteria,

“You try to recall what you’ve just been told
and when you last saw him cry.

You both agree – the cafeteria
seems farther away than usual.”

[…]

“Have they marked you with arrows?” is a compassionate collection. Stanton’s short poems contain dense concepts and carry a bulk of unsaid emotional weight, which make them compelling. Readers aren’t told what to think or how to react. The poems show the strength foisted on a patient determined to survive. 

Emma Lee, “Have they marked you with arrows?” Jayne Stanton (Poetryspace) – book review

The middle-distance poem, which takes its name from middle-distance running, came into its own in the middle of the twentieth century, though its origins go back to the beginning of that same century, if not further. Among its number are some of the best long-ish (but not too long) modern poems in the English language, from Among School Children to The Whitsun Weddings. Critics, however, have written remarkably little about it. You won’t find the term in any literary histories or textbooks. In fact, you would be forgiven for wondering if I wasn’t just making the whole thing up to prove a point.

‘The owl of Minerva’, Hegel wrote, ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’.1 Or, as Joni Mitchell put it, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. The middle-distance poem began its walk (or else a gentle jog) off into the long evening some time ago. Its zenith—zeniths tend to be—may also have been its passing. But every elegy is also an attempt at resurrection, and the middle-distance poem was a special kind of poem. Not the only one by any means, but one that we will miss more than we realise.

I miss it already. Whenever I pick up a new collection or a magazine, I am always on the look out for one. I am almost always disappointed.2 Almost invariably, the modern long-ish poem lacks the middle-distance poem’s energy, its sense of direction, its intensity of feeling. I don’t think this is simply a question of ‘free verse’ crowding out metre. Indeed, the middle-distance poem’s absence is all the more noticable in the more form-friendly parts of the poetry world.

But this kind of talk only gets us so far. What I want to do here is begin to sketch out in very broad, provisional brush strokes some of the genre’s distinguishing features in the hope that better informed readers will be able to flesh them out later (or at least quibble productively). In short, how do you spot one in the wild?

Jeremy Wikeley, The Middle-Distance Poem: An Elegy

The occupational hazard of going to things where other writers are also present is that they will always at some point ask you whether you are writing. Like the famously bad bus service in Plymouth, this happened twice in the space of ten minutes the other day at Kay Dunbar’s memorial at Dartington Hall. First I bumped into a poetry acquaintance, an editor who was kind enough to take a poem of mine 320 years ago. ‘Are you writing?’ she said. ‘Of course,’ I said. Everyone around us laughed. To which I said, ‘What else am I supposed to say?’ To which she said, ‘Ah, but are you writing well, or successfully?’, a distinction which was new to me, and completely shut me up. Some minutes later, another (even older) poetry friend asked me exactly the same thing. Was the universe trying to tell me something?

Later on the weekend I saw my old friend Christopher Southgate, who happened to be dispensing his vast knowledge and learning in the locality, as you do. His tea made and the small talk over, like an arrow speared on a laser beam he posed me the same question. To which I said, ‘Of course!’ I could see instantly that he wasn’t taken in (he never is, which is one reason I love him). I heard myself clearing my throat. ‘I’ve been making dates – appointments – with poems.’ I explained that the bits of scrap paper from the kitchen with two words written on them have been making their way up the stairs and into the general proximity of my notebook(s) where they wait to be transcribed and become poems. This seemed to satisfy him. ‘Making a date with a poem,’ he mused, ‘there is something in that, perhaps . . .’ I took this also as a sign of the universe giving me its approval.

Anthony Wilson, This is writing!

Every so often, I’m reminded that the work we do at the desk—quiet, private, uncertain—can find its way into larger conversations. I recently learned that my lyric memoir Ruin & Want has been included on CLMP’s Reading List for Hispanic Heritage Month 2025.

That book came from years of sorting through memory and silence, and to see it alongside so many powerful voices feels like a kind of homecoming.

I’m also grateful to share that Black Lawrence Press is running a Hispanic Heritage Month sale that includes my book, Rotura. You can find the full list here.

Indie presses like BLP have been steady companions in my writing life, and their commitment to bringing new work into the world is something I deeply admire.

José Angel Araguz, two bits of good news

Yesterday was the Writer’s Digest Virtual Poetry Conference, so I got to see my friend Mary Biddinger’s talk on prose poetry and flash fiction in the morning, then showered, dressed and did my own talk on Solarpunk poetry, which is a type of science fiction poetry that looks to a more hopeful future for ecology, equity, and humanity. Then I turned around and ran out of the house to make it to opening day of the Woodinville Pumpkin Farm at JB Family Growers. (Yes, it’s a lavender farm AND a pumpkin farm!) The sun was shining in a blue sky, although there was still a level of smoke that made me a little verklempt. It was so nice to roam around the beautiful sunflower maze, the broad pumpkin patch, and the towering corn maze. Are you feeling Fall yet?

I really overscheduled myself this September, so yes, I am still working on judging the SFPA’s poetry contest—now I’m just writing some comments to the winners. I read over 600 poems (often not on their own page, or in the same font, so that was fun!) and chose nine winners in Dwarf, Short, and Long categories. It reminded me that often judges aren’t looking to rule you out, they’re looking to rule you in. At least that’s how I do it. When you submit a poem to any contest, make sure it’s unique and that it stands out. This year, for instance, there were a lot of both Mars Rover and dragon poems, not bad subjects, but it makes it harder for me to discern the best of the lot. A French formal poem on colonialism in space? Yes, that caught my eye. I was also surprised by an overall lack of imagery—has imagery gone out of fashion again? Anyway, the contest winners will be announced soon enough.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! Solarpunk Poetry, Judging Poetry Contests, Pumpkin Patches, Adventure and Hummingbirds

It’s always an aesthetic risk to speak to the present moment, and even more so, to share one’s attempts to do so, but I feel that it’s important: all of us together trying articulate what we’re feeling, what we’re trying to understand, and refusing to accept that it’s just business as usual in the world (even if that might, tragically, be the case.) It’s important that we try to communicate and not allow ourselves to be gaslit by history as it is unfolding. This may seem obvious and even Pollyanna, but like many truisms, its true.

It maybe be a finger in the dike (does anyone use that proverb anymore?) but still significant. I hope it is the F-U finger maintaining the bulwark against all the forces which seek to flood the world with terror, dehumanization, silencing, censorship and hate.

Gary Barwin, Charlie Kirk and not being Gaslit by History

This morning I wondered if I should be more intentional about this publication, and then rejected the thought in favour of—you guessed it—pleasure. I do not mean the hedonic variety, but the eudaemonic: achieved through the pursuit of meaning, of well-being through a sense of one’s purpose. In this light, pleasure’s the wrong word. I guess I should rebrand, but being “good” at social media holds little to no value to me. Stopping whatever I’m doing to spend an hour in the middle of the day—or at the advent of a sleepless night—to tell the truth about a poem, without second-guessing it, strikes me, for a host of reasons personal and not, as priceless.

I was looking for something else in Ed Hirsch’s Stranger by Night yesterday and was reminded of “The Guild,” which I promptly emailed to someone I thought would appreciate it. It took an hour or so and a walk along the river, during which I squatted on a rock and watched a great blue heron fishing in the shallows on the other side of the little bay, for my real interest in the poem to swim up to the surface: when the bird hauled itself up into its unlikely flight, I assumed I’d spooked it, but instead it flew straight towards me to alight at the other end of the groyne —maybe fifteen feet away—and turn its stony dino gaze on me. Yes, this is a metaphor: for the way a poem sometimes looks back at you, explains you to yourself.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Guild” by Edward Hirsch

I was thinking today of this passage of Proust’s, which he gives to the character of the artist Elstir:

“There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through all the fatuous and unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded…We do not receive wisdom, we discover it for ourselves, after a journey through a wilderness no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

There’s some comfort in that. I would not call myself wise, but I’m definitely wiser than I was at 15 or 21. I suppose I’m still sometimes “fatuous and unwholesome” (whatever Elstir meant by that), awkward in society, and mistaken in some of my intuitions. But I have discovered myself for myself, with all the pain, sorrow, embarrassment, and joys that such discovery requires, and have developed my own point of view. In addition, I’ve learned that each person holds their own point of view. We don’t all think alike or in concert and may never fully understand one another. That makes the world contentious, yes. And interesting. […]

Naively urbane, the city
my youth inhabits lies brittle
in the pages. The past undoes
itself at last. Or I do.

Ann E. Michael, Points of view

Magnetic poetry remains a creative tool that challenges me with its tactile nature, its playfulness, its restrictions. Usually you have a set of words about a certain subject. Here I’ve used my basic set in combination with a set called ‘Trees’.

By the way. You can see that I try to use what I have available but I have no problem to ‘create’ words in case they are not included: here the words ‘small’, ‘noises’ and ‘down’.

Why do I point this out?

When you use a poetic form you work within its limitations and restrictions (which can be exhilarating and very satisfying). Never forget these were man-made. They have a reason why they came to pass and why they are well-used. But things develop, intermingle, grow, and change. Contexts evolve. If you feel the need to leave the comfort zone and it aligns with what you want to achieve please do it and don’t hesitate because somewhere there are people gatekeeping art.

Oh, they might get even angry, and act as if only they can define what is right to do and what not.

Just do your thing and let them run in their hamster’s wheel. Be happy with what you create. That in itself is already valuable. I’d say your happiness is very, very important.

Kati Mohr, This Trust

一生に打つ一億字天の川　堀田季何

isshō ni utsu ichioku ji amanogawa

            in a lifetime we type

            one hundred million letters

            the Milky Way

                                                Kika Hotta

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), February 2022 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 16, 2025)

— From May Sarton’s journal, At Seventy: “What kept me going was, I think, that writing for me is a way of understanding what is happening to me, of thinking hard things out. I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself. Perhaps it is the need to remake order out of chaos over and over again. For art is order, but it is made out of the chaos of life.”

— In the same book, Sarton quotes Catherine Clayton who talks about being in a creative drought for a year and a half. She says, “Now a drawing is slowly coming into being. To work is to feel whole. To work for long moments unselfconsciously is grand. To still all other voices and to work, just quietly work.” And isn’t that a monumental task these days, to quiet the voices, to quietly work?

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Secret Prerequisite

there is a small boat waiting. in the middle

of the page. where a poem begins. and goes

no further. serenity. a map of the heart completed.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: the ludokinetic poem, the transparent eyeball, traveling on motherless roads, constructing a witch, and much more. Enjoy.

In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he notes that there is “a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own” because “we have been expected upon this earth.” Our ancestors knew of our coming. As such, just like all previous generations, we possess what Benjamin calls a “weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.” In other words, although we are not super heroes or gods—not capital m Messiahs with the power to redeem the past, present, or future with grand utopian visions or Paradise on earth—our small, contingent acts can disrupt the version of time that appears linear or inevitable. If we were glitter nail polish, the base color might be our ordinary positionality in the flow of time–our genetics, our culture, our place–and the glitter would be our power to change the course of history. […]

After many months now of watching the genocide of civilians in Gaza, of praying, of gathering money to support the large family of my friend Mahmoud who sends harrowing videos and photos of the devastation and violence there every day, of calling my Senators to demand a ceasefire, peace and justice there have started to feel, for many, like a lost cause. It boggles the mind and confounds my spirit that people can see and know about the thousands of lives lost—many of them children—and not be spurred to outrage. And for me at least, the lost causness doesn’t feel limited to just Gaza, but has leaked a sense of lostness out beyond its edges into everything else. As my friend Cassie […] recently wrote on her fantastic newsletter, “My scientific proposal is that the genocide in Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 caused the luck to run out in the world.”

As a result of this lost-cause feeling, this luckless feeling, I’m looking for ways to spend more time and energy and heart resisting this particular part of the death machine. A local friend and I are going to be gathering folks who want to organize locally, I’m going to start joining Mothers for Ceasefire at their Wednesday morning demonstrations in downtown Durham, and I’m imagining ways that poetry might be an avenue of resistance here in my own little circle of messianic influence. My idea (still nascent) is that I would print up a series of cards, little broadsides, with poems about Gaza and by Palestinian poets, and the flip side of the card would have links to donate to aid organizations and numbers to call our State Representatives. I would put stacks of these in places around town—coffee shops, vintage stores, yoga studios, maybe therapy offices.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Time

People are starving
and we argue about
who’s more at fault.
Measles is roaring
back to life. Every
day is Tisha b’Av now.
Which means every day
a seed of hope
is planted.
Every day, a runway.
Every day we get up
from the floor,
brush off mourning’s
ashes and begin again
like our ancestors
in the wilderness
who every year
would dig their graves
expecting to die
and wake to discover
another chance.

 A seed of hope / is planted. Tradition holds that moshiach / the messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av — the seeds of redemption growing in the soil of our darkest day.

Every day, a runway. Tisha b’Av begins the seven-week runway toward the Days of Awe and the Jewish new year. 

Like our ancestors.  See Rashi on Taanit 30b:12:1.

This poem was inspired by a conversation after the first session of Seven Habits of Highly Evolved People, the pre-high-holiday class I’m co-teaching with R. David Markus this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Every day

When I think of what helps in these times, I often think of music. My impulse is to go somewhere beautiful—the woods, the water—and play music. One of the things the cantor sang was a Hebrew chant of the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd.”) I’m not a religious person—not believing in lords and such— but these words were powerful in their imagery (“I shall not want,” “lie down in green pastures.” “…leadeth me beside the still waters.”)

When I have a chance in the waiting room, I’ve been making little visual pieces to have the centring effect of making something. Of creating some little beauty. Of making marks to somehow speak to the world. They don’t respond per se to the emotional weight of the moment excepting that making marks, but being “cautiously optimistic” about things is always helpful. At home, I type out some figures on a typewriter and load the scans into the computer which I bring to the hospital. I’ve called them Typewriter Rituals because making them is a small ritual.

Gary Barwin, typewriter rituals in the ICU

When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column [in The Guardian]. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem. Its sound and its shape.

Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment). This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’ [by John Masefield]. You can read it here […]

Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have it too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our toddler in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words yet, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say.

Jem Wikeley, The Long Trick

A little bit of fun for mid-August — two of the poems that I most enjoying saying to my own children (whether they like it or not). Both of these are very cheering I find at trying moments. The first is by Alfred Noyes, now probably known only for his (fantastic) ‘The Highwayman’, which is still widely available as an illustrated picture book. Years ago, I said ‘The Highwayman’ to both the older boys, then perhaps 7 and 5, while perched on the lower bunk at bed time; I got all the way through to the end, enjoying it greatly myself, and was quite pleased that they were still listening. After I finished, there was a pause, before the younger of them burst out “but it’s sad!” and started to cry, and the elder leaned over the edge of the top bunk to remark censoriously, “I really don’t think that was appropriate for us, Mummy”. (You have been warned.)

I’m not sure ‘The New Duckling’ is entirely appropriate either but it’s very funny […]

My second suggestion, Charles Causley’s ‘Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast’ is a great favourite of the children and I have never got bored of saying it. The final stanza is particularly delicious.

Victoria Moul, Two poems to learn so that you can say them to your children for your own amusement

These hot, humid summer days I’ve been waiting for fall. And then I feel guilty about it, because of that whole be-here-now stuff, that whole life-is-short-enjoy-it-while-you-can stuff. That whole climate-change-this-may-be-the-new-normal stuff… I try to spend some time each day (usually in the cooler hours) in that living-in-the-present stuff. But then it gets hot, and I get whiny. But all those hyphenated points above are so true, dammit. And life is so damn uncertain. So now I’m working on enjoying being a hot thing that lies on the couch feeling hot. If the couch has a breeze, I can almost pull it off, that gratitude business. It’s worth a try, even if I fall back in to whineland. I woke up the other day thinking, dang, I was going to start working on my upper body strength — a little weight lifting every day. I did it for a while, but that was…well…a while ago. That’s okay, I told myself. Today is a new day. You can always start today. I appreciated my generous self for that thought. As Nina Simone sang, “It’s a new life for me, yeah.”

I admire this Stafford poem for its challenge to the new day, the new life, the new yeah. It’s a tape-it-over-the-desk poem. We all need a few of those.

Marilyn McCabe, When you turn around, starting here, lift this

distant thunder
white curtains billow
in the dusk

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’25

A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.

To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.

It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.

Jon Stone, Taper #14 / The Whisky Shop

Recently, when typing up notes from my journals, I found quotes I captured while watching an Indigo Girls documentary (as one does). It’s full of testimony about how writing and singing allowed them to create — and re-create — themselves.

Emily, one of the Indigo Girls, also talks about the pressures and joys of performing and says this:

I’ve had nights where I was sad, didn’t feel like playing, and by the end of the night I’m just healed, just washed over with that energy of togetherness.

That energy of togetherness. YES.

I’m a loner. Deep, deep, deep in my bones. So the level to which I’ve discovered, nurtured and delighted in writing community has been one of the biggest surprises of my life.

Like… y’all: I’m still writing — inspired! healed! — every damn day because of writing community. Jill Crammond. Sarah Freligh. Woman Words. The Albany open mic scene over the years. The Madwomen in the Attic workshops. Second Best Witches Writing Group. The fairly new but growing Ass in Chair Collective. And others. I’m so grateful.

In art, togetherness really does provide more than camaraderie. It’s energy-giving. It’s momentum-building. It’s cheerleading.

It’s also accountability. For example, after a verrrrrry long break from submitting to journals, I’m back at it. Slowly. Surely. It’s 100% thanks to writing pals who tell me, when I can’t see it myself, that my work is worth making and needs to be out there.

These are the vibes: It’s selfish to hoard your creativity.

Carolee Bennett, Writing Community and the “Energy of Togetherness”

These days, instead of sitting down to write, I go straight to the basement and make art. Today, I completed the third in a series of season-themed encaustics with poems embedded in them. I altered an old poem to fit the photo:

The fabric of spring I wanted to write a sentence with verdant, wanted to use the word lush, wanted it fragrant in word only. wanted it wordy, wanted to roll in the word green, needed the stains of the word grass on the knees of the word jeans, but all day the wind shook the japanese cherries and yesterday’s blossoms have popped like a piñatafull of confetti, blanketing the word lawn with the word pink, a magic shag carpet. I listen for its breath, small jean genie, must of earth behind my ears, rolling,wordless, in the new-woven fabric of spring.

And that brings me to the point of this post. When I lost my job last June, I intended to finish writing a children’s book, work on the rest of a novel, and find a publisher for my full-length poetry manuscript, Words with Friends. I finally accomplished one of those goals.

Today, I’m able to share that my poetry book will be published by Meat for Tea Press! I’m so freakin’ excited!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Waxing Poetic

I was
        a young mother when someone guided my thumb  
to the hollow atop my newborn’s head, to feel the space 
        between the bones of the skull where they 
had not knit together yet. Even now, I still turn 
        toward the idea of an opening, some keyhole 
through which I can thread my undimmed longing. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Fontanel

Our days are filled like this, with conversations and songs and silence, and with questions like, “If you were a chip, what kind of chip would you be? What kind of chip would you like to be?” Which reminds me of a voice note question my partner asked me – what does your mind do when you’re walking? She knows how the inside of my mind is usually ten cinema screens competing for who can be the loudest or brightest or fastest or most bizarre…I notice that, somewhere in between footsteps and breath and retelling each other The Lord of the Rings, the noise has all but stopped.

And Niamh sings to me again, something they have created from the best lines we’ve spoken, about mountains and not giving up. They apologise that it doesn’t rhyme, and I say that the journey doesn’t rhyme – every day is unknowable. And then I consider that perhaps our footsteps are a sort of rhyme, and that each day, in its different textures and forms, has a series of small repetitions – chance encounters with Flor and Florus, Ken and Ali, the Belgians…how each different day echoes with blackberries and the way everything sparkles in sunlight after rain, and wrens and stonechats, oaks, beech.

Today began in Grasmere, in rain which switched in a moment to sunshine, and strong wind, until I gave up on my coat and let myself be drenched then dried. We walked over Hause Gap, and by Grisedale Tarn, black and grey and slapping at its shores, and down Grisedale Beck into Patterdale. All lividly beautiful, the world startled and bright in its rain and sunlight, but the best part of the day was the extra three miles to Brotherswater Inn via Hartsop, and how the poem of the journey rang loudly with harebells and bracken, hawkbit and tormentil and dandelion, yarrow and dock, thistle and nettle and clover, foxglove and wild thyme, so we were singing and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather.

Clare Shaw, Coast-to-Coast: Day 4

sun-striped path
the forest’s outbreath
fills our lungs

[…]

Today is sunny, but through the weekend, the clouds hung on till afternoon, and I was chilly enough to wear a wool sweater. Here on the Northern California coast, we have entered the month of Fogust. In our cool and damp micro-clime, so perfect for redwoods, locals are amazed by the temperature if it reaches 70 degrees.

Annette Makino, Sizzling summer haiku

I have spent a delightful morning pondering Bruce Springsteen–we are almost to the 50th (gasp!) anniversary of the release of the Born to Run album.  Born in the U.S.A. was my Springsteen entry point in the late summer of 1984, and then I got Born to Run later that autumn, in November.  I liked it alright, but I don’t think that any other Springsteen album has captured my heart and imagination like Born in the U.S.A.

On the NPR program Fresh Air, I listened to this interview with Peter Ames Carlin, which explored the making of Born to Run–a fascinating glimpse of the creative process.  Before I listened to that interview, I read Peter McWhorter’s piece in The Washington Post (hopefully a gift essay to read throughout the ages) about the Springsteen playlist that he listened to seven times–that’s all of Born to Run, plus eleven songs:  “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” and “New York City Serenade.”

By listening to the playlist seven times, he gained a new appreciation for Springsteen, particularly the poetry of Springsteen.  He has some interesting insights about poetry and the 21st century person:  “My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poetry of the Playlist, for Reviewers and for Students

I was listening to Mimi Klavarti yesterday. I was cutting my hedge, she was talking on the excellent Poems We Made Along The Way podcast. She was talking about writing constraints, and how they can help to open up creativity rather than constrict it. Have a listen (and to the back catalogue – they’re all great). I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, but I’m going with a self-imposed time constraint. I hope to finish this in the time it takes me to roast a chicken for dinner.

Ok, the chicken is the oven. We have an hour and 20 mins…go.

First, a quick update. Flo and I went to Norfolk for our annual shindig in Worstead. I was asked to read a few poems from CtD one evening round a campfire. It was lovely to be asked. It reiterated how nerve-wracking it is to read to family and friends. Being a bit pissed and it being dark didn’t help. My reading also set three others off reading too, so here’s to next year’s official poetry circle at the Worstead Festival. […]

Earlier in the week I’d been made aware of a series of readings by a new poetry collective called Femina Culpa. The three ladies behind it were reading round London and one such reading included a reading at Bethlem Museum of the Mind which is just down the road from me.   My friend Ellie works at Bethlem, and I can’t not attend a poetry event that is that close to home.

All three readers read amazing tales and stories of women from the past and how they’ve suffered mental illness issues/made to suffer because of this. Check out Emma McKervey, Linda McKenna and Milena Williamson.

Mat Riches, A Chicken in the lighthouse

As artists, how do we want to spend the time and energy we have left? My energy is not what it was, I’ll be honest. And my time on this earth dwindles, as it does for us all. I’m at that surprising “experiencing ageism” time of life. I’m at that “being overlooked for the grants and awards and even minor recognitions” time of my writing life. It was probably going to happen anyway, but the 2020s hasn’t been kind (or generous) to many creatives, has it? I don’t even know what to advise myself these days so I certainly can’t dole out any advice to any of you. Keep trying? Stay weird, seems evergreen. I sort of want to just stop hustling or imagining what I could do as a side gig next. Is my time better spent writing obscure Canadian non-bestsellers and just staying home more? Probably? I feel like if I haven’t started a Substack by now, I missed the boat on that one, plus I don’t think I can write in Substack voice. I’m too small, too unimportant, too insignifcant (don’t worry, these have always been goals of mine) and too tired of that particular kind of hustle to garner any great subscription income.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Visual Literacy

What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.

In later years I studied art
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.

Ann E. Michael, Heaven, hell, & halos

I’ve also been questioning things like—should I even still be writing poetry, or is it time I give up on it and try something else? Should I spend my time doing paying work instead? It feels sort of futile to write poetry in today’s political environment—rampantly anti-academic, anti-art, anti-peace-tolerance-environmental-safety and pro guns, business and everything evil and destructive. It feels like no one is listening, even with much bigger platforms than mine. Maybe, I wonder, I should take up filmmaking. Maybe I should leave America for the adventure of exploring another country, another country, which might be more friendly to the arts (which seems like almost any country at this point). I could take up working at the local pumpkin farm (though heavy lifting would be out). I could sell makeup again. This may be a normal part of getting older. I can’t tell as I’ve never been this old before! Maybe things will make more sense when I can get more than an hour or so of sleep a night. I’ll check in with you next week.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Moons, Insomnia, Ends of Summer Gardens in Bloom, and Writing Questions at Midlife

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO

In the month that I begin my Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, it feels right to use a quote from the man himself.

The truth is, I am a chronic self doubter. There is no fixing it. It is part of the strangeness of my brain. The only way of living with it is noticing it, embracing it, and doing the thing anyway.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a mentee about what was blocking their work, why they couldn’t get further on with their writing. They’d had a series of rejections, one after the other, and were doubling the validity of their work. This is something I recognise in myself. I go through periods of feeling like I might have fluked my entire career, that every time someone has validated my work it is because they either felt sorry for me or had made a mistake. Sometimes I imagine that the mistake they made is my fault, because I have given the impression that I am intelligent and competent and talented when I am very clearly not. It is like I have an entire other person inside me that is always telling me how shit I am, and I am never quite sure if they are telling the truth. […]

So far in my Folger Fellowship I have been deep diving the archives and attending seminars and meetings where I inevitably feel like a sore thumb. Most of my colleagues are American, a lot of them are academics. but Oh, the joy of hearing all the projects, the mental stimulation of being around people who are striving to explore so many different perspectives. It is the most creatively nourishing thing I have been involved with. the more I interact, the quieter the self doubt voice is, which tells me that this is a good fit. The confidence in the project is coming not from the validation of the achievement, but from the quality of the work; my work, other fellows work. It’s quite an astounding thing.

And so this is what I am carrying with me into August, and beyond. I will not fear an opportunity that may lead to greatness. I will not let the negative self talk put the fear in me. I will not let the fear [of] not deserving greatness, stop me from reaching for greatness.

Wendy Pratt, August Mantra: Be Not Afraid of Greatness

Hills recline in the distance
smudged by a hand working in pastel,
soft and slow the line where mountains meet violet 

and clouds lay back smoking fiery pipes.
Village, I am wordless.

At a nearby campsite, a grill is about to be lit,
about to blister some sausage.  Blister until
twigs catch, vines chatter in the flames
like gossips with nothing on their minds.

Jill Pearlman, Before the Fire, Dusk

I’m intrigued by this new collection, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), a poetry title that provides a complexity of literary response to “the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health,” and the precarity through which we currently live. “whereupon I join Lear and his Fool / on the blasted heath,” writes London, Ontario-based writer and speaker Jennifer Wenn, in the poem “Fire and Flood,” “and while the erstwhile king howls / at the gale and deluge I cower, / uselessly, / looking for a sign, [.]” There are multiple pieces echoing Wenn’s particular sentiment, seeking a sign or marker of hope through the gloom, with other pieces that rage their appropriate rage through the storm, or even a spiraling into a dark swirl of hopelessness. As Toronto-based poet,editor and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi begins the poem “Movement XVI”: “that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just / find construction cones scattered. I take out the trash and who / knows maybe I’m resistant to pesticide. some relief comes in / the form of needles. I’m defeated by numbers. It simply won’t / happen.”” Sometimes the only way to respond to a crisis is to write through it, providing a clarity of thought and potential action, and this collection, put together as the result of a public call, provides an assemblage of first-person lyric narratives by some two dozen Canadian poets that shake to the roots of mental health and climate concern, providing both observational comfort and clarity to their sharpness. The collection includes contributions by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammmadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton and Gary Barwin. There’s a precarity to these lyrics, these lines, one that writes directly into crisis […]

rob mclennan, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

The Dark, Howie Good, illustrations by Marcel Herms, Sacred Parasite, 2025, ISBN: 978-3-910822-11-5, ISBN: 978-3-910822-13-9, €20.00 […]

I’m a cancer survivor – for now, anyway.
Every three months, I must have blood drawn,
and my chest scanned, to determine if any

cancer cells have migrated, nomads in search
of grass and water.
(from ‘The C Word’)

These lines from somewhere near the middle of Howie Good’s The Dark serve as a keystone to the set of poems in verse and prose that surround them, a deep personal darkness. As the closing lines of the opening poem, ‘Subterranean Cancer Blues’ (with a hat-tip to Bob Dylan) spells out, the cancer patient acquires ‘the kind of knowledge that now/holds my eyes open to the dark.’

But the dark is not simply personal, or tied to present circumstances, as is seen in poems like ‘Elon Musk at Auschwitz’, in which the tech gobshite claims a kind of faux Jewishness, ‘Unholy Land’, whose title speaks for itself, or this:

Night of the Following Day

The person I went to sleep as wasn’t the same person I woke up as, half-drowned in sweat after traveling on motherless roads all night, seeing plants and animals bombed into submission, families forced to dig their own graves at gunpoint, tears evaporate on contact with the air, and only for me to arrive some six hours later back where I started but feeling barely present, like I was still miles and miles away from the redwing blackbird on the black branch.

For a poet living through personal and global extremes, the dark is not a metaphor, it’s a simple fact: ‘You stare into the dark for just so long before the dark begins staring back.’ It’s impossible in a short review  to do justice to how Good receives that stare in these extraordinary short texts. You just have to read them.

Billy Mills, Six for the Pocket: A Small Pamphlets Review

Alice M. Fay (p. 1912-24, etc.), was a poet and illustrator from New York. She published her first book of poetry The Realm of Fancy: Poems & Pictures in 1912, and was featured in numerous ‘little magazines’ of the 1920s, including Rhythmus (edited by Oscar Williams) and Pegasus (edited by W.H. Lench). Other than this, little is known of her life.

into air—
the scent of a violet sings!

Both Fay’s drawings and verse are comprised of accomplished line-work and subtle, suggestive forms, drawn from the ephemerality of the natural world. ‘Where’, for instance, is a delicate micro-treatise on poetics, in which the scent of flowers and vanishing smoke are compared to the songs of the singer: i.e. the poetry of the world is to be found in the invisible and ephemeral, rather than the visible and permanent. Echoing this, in ‘Near Crete’ the sound of the waves become poet: “whispering tales… of ships that come no more.” Again the image arrives and then disappears. Poetry: always vanishing.

serene as the mountains—
thy love

Fay’s work also has feminist and queer undertones. In ‘Beyond’, for instance, Fay seeks a world “untenanted by men,” i.e. beyond patriarchy: “beyond the veil of future’s mystery.” In ‘All This Is Thy Love To Me’ Fay appears to be addressing another woman, and their “love” is described in terms that would have dominantly been read as “feminine” at that time (fair, calm, mysterious, angelic). Furthermore, as neither poet nor lover have textually definite genders, the subject-positions of the poem are left open to suggestion, able to be occupied by readers of any gender and sexuality.

Dick Whyte, Alice M. Fay – 5 Short Poems (1912-24)

I much admired Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, Faber, published earlier this year. As in several of Pascale Petit’s collections, this contains work which very skilfully, and with a marvellous ear for musical cadence , transforms the pain of sexual abuse into beautiful poetry. Each of the 21 poems in the first section, Still Lifes, responds to a different still life painting by painters from the 1600s onwards to Bonnard. The second part, a response to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ felt less successful, as it employs Seventeenth Century language in a manner verging on parody. The third section contains 22 poems after types of crystals and gemstones, as refracted through Rimbaud’s Illuminations as translated by Wyatt Mason, and are, for me, the most successful in the book, because the prose-poem form allows Scott to give fuller vent to his gift for articulating emotion through vivid and sensuous imagery and language, as in this extract from ‘Emerald’:

    The field is a body. Wild grass rippling over breasts and muscles, the jut of a hipbone. Some of the grass is trampled down into mud like a battlefield – screams catch the air. Some of the grass is spread over little hillocks like shallow graves. Some of the grass is cut into a bit, desire lines and goat paths, leading to all the places you ever dreamed of going but didn’t.

As I discovered from listening to his interview with Peter Kenny in Series 5, Episode 10 of the ever-excellent Planet Poetry podcast, here, Scott talks very thoughtfully and eloquently about his craft.

I’ve also been knee-deep in the poems of Wisława Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and collected in Map, Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2015, for the poetry book club I’m part of. My jury is still out thus far, but then it’s a heftily daunting tome.

Matthew Paul, July reading

“Hexentanz” (literally ‘witches’ dance’) has an epigraph from Mary Wigman a dancer in 1926, “But, after all, isn’t a bit of witch hidden in every female?”

“To be inside language – the body as prayer,
as incantation, a strike of lightning.
To be earthed and barefoot
to be creature; muscle and cells.
To fly: to know space beneath you.

And who needs music when you have breath,
when you are the daughter to the Mother of Sighs?”

Dancing has often been linked to sinful behaviour and the devil. Here it’s a prayer to understand the power of a woman’s body, to inhabit it free from society’s rules and regulations. Here, dancing is both a connection to earth and an ability to fly and it doesn’t even require music. Breathing has a rhythm, that’s all that’s needed. […]

Helen Ivory in “Constructing a Witch” explores the witch archetype and how woman, particularly those who don’t conform to society’s expectations, are cast as inferior, and pushed to society’s edges. An exploration that includes how patriarchal structures ignore the needs of women, left in ignorance about their own bodies because menstruation and menopause make them “too difficult” for medicine to study.

Emma Lee, “Constructing a Witch” Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe) – book review

The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):

Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)

[…]

The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’.  O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).

O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).

Martyn Crucefix, Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!

The promise was
graceful, writing a book made up of leaves
(birch, catalpa, magnolia, maple);
made up of leaves and love and hands and words
choked out in last breaths exhaled in dark nights,
made up of whispers woven together
from the humid tenderness of two dear
embodied beings tangling their breath.

PF Anderson, Once upon a time there was a promise

The encouragement to Tell It Slant! has become popular among many CW lecturers and workshop leaders over the last few years, seemingly as a natural extension of the old favourite, Show, Don’t Tell!, but what does it actually mean?

Well, it refers to an approach to writing that veers away from dealing with stuff head-on. Its inherent attraction lies in the opportunity it provides for the poet to explore new perspectives and fresh takes on seemingly tired subjects by coming at them via unusual angles, often omitting bits that would be obvious if treated directly, thus intriguing and challenging the reader. As such, its use is widely seen to be lending the poem extra gravitas and depth.

However, there are also consequent risks in its deployment. One is the accusation that the poet is being wilfully obtuse, frustrating the reader, playing a pointless game by holding back information, the absence of which creates the false impression of extra layers to the poem that actually don’t exist. And another is its tempting propensity for enabling emotional shortcuts that skirt round the potential core of the poem.

From my perspective, Tell It Slant! is useful as a weapon in a creative armoury. However, its overuse in contemporary poetry as an all-encompassing method leads poets down a blind alley, causing many poems to fizzle out before they can take their reader on a journey. And for my money, that journey is where poetic truth is found.

Matthew Stewart, Telling It Slant

I have experienced some great times in the company of poets. Mostly, poets on their own, having a drink or a chat. Obviously, there is joy in experiencing a ‘good’ reading or book launch.

I am glad for anyone who has ‘a community’, whether this consists of one other weirdo who writes poems, or a group who gather regularly to do something communal, or people who move in circles where they feel supported and connected and perhaps mutually celebrated and facilitated.

I don’t feel particularly connected myself, but never set out to be, and am not sure I want or need to be, and it has always been a ‘bonus’ rather than a central aspect of my writing and publishing and (occasional) teaching that their are individuals whom I know and like who do the same thing, and I hope they are well and flourishing ‘out there’ somewhere. […]

Why do people communicate online as if I am privy to backstories and assumptions about themselves and others that I have no knowledge of? I believe issues and people are complex, but encounter anger and simplicity all the time on the internet, and it leaves me none the wiser. Where is the poetry in this? […]

What if, when I check out substack etc, I find there are poets and publishers attacking poets and publishers? What if there are personal battles being conducted online that are disturbing and polarising, and watching them unfold might become as addictive an unproductive as watching car crashes, or as unfulfilling and spiritually nourishing as listening to gossip?

Roy Marshall, ‘Poetry is about community.’

Many magazines these days offer writers a chance to get feedback on their submitted work for an additional cost. The cost typically ranges from $25- $40. When I posted my series about scammy lit mags, almost all of them had one thing in common: They offered feedback to writers who paid for it. However, many reputable magazines offer this option too. So, should you go for it? If so, whom should you trust?

Firstly, I want to talk about why this is happening, a trend that seems to be recent, as I do not recall so many journals offering this option ten or more years ago. Costs of running a lit mag, as we all know, can be high. Many editors seem to be taking on editing/consulting work as a way to offset those rising fees.

It also seems to be a response to a workforce that is ever more precarious. Few and far between are the stable academic jobs for writers. Meanwhile the professional competition is stiffer than ever. Writers don’t just have MFAs; they have PhDs. There are more people seeking careers related to writing, and fewer secure opportunities, than ever before.

So we hustle. Any writer/editor who does not have a full-time job is likely making a living from piecing together a variety of income streams. Teaching. Consulting. Website development. Copywriting. Editing. And so on. Very few lit mag editors are able to make their living solely as magazine editors.

I provide this bit of context because when I first began to consider this trend of editors offering feedback, it got me worried. How can they possibly have time to read submissions, I wondered, if they’re also consulting on particular submissions in great detail? Why would editors think they are the ones who know what’s best for a particular work and a particular writer? Shouldn’t their focus be on their magazines?

Then I took a step back and looked at the larger picture. No, I realized. Sadly, the majority of editors cannot afford to be solely focused on their magazines because that work does not pay. With that in mind, I came around to viewing these additional editorial offerings as a good thing. The workforce for writers is grinding indeed (and most lit mag editors are also writers.) Anything anyone can do to honestly and ethically sustain oneself in this environment is commendable.

Becky Tuch, Q: Should you pay for editorial feedback from lit mag editors?

A lavish and wonderful celebration of connections between mathematics and the arts is the annual international BRIDGES, Mathematics and the Arts Conference.  This year’s conference took place last month (July, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands) and one of its special events was a poetry reading.  

Information about the poets and sample poems are available here at the website of Sarah Glaz (mathematician-poet and coordinator of the BRIDGES readings).  Below I have included one of these very special poems:

View no Fiery Night        by Marian Christie 

No
one
went to   
the tower
to vie with the foe.
Fretting, worn, we rove in night fog ––
the ring, the theft, the vow forgotten. Hovering high
over the town, the frightening wyvern, whirr of her winging interwoven with fire.

First published in Christie’s collection Sky, Earth, Other (Penteract Press, 2024).  Note that this is a Fibonacci poem — with the syllable counts for the lines following the Fibonacci numbers.  ALSO, each line is formed from letters found in the English words for the Fibonacci numbers up to the line count — one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one; Christie uses the term “sequential lipogram” to describe this pattern.

For lots more wonderful stuff by Marian Christie, you may visit her blog, Poetry and Mathematics. 

JoAnne Growney, Celebrating Poetry at 2025 BRIDGES Conference

Of course, it is still summer. Another month or more of summer. Please, let us make no mistake about that! But why is it that as soon as the calendar turns a page over to August, the sense of new socks and homemade soup come back to the front in my mind.

But I’m not there yet. There are still manuscripts to edit, a garden to care for, and a 15th Anniversary Poets on the Coast to finish planning. And what a POTC it will be!

Kelli Russell Agodon and I began this retreat for women poets because we felt that we could create a poetry community based on generosity and abundance —of writing prompts, of snacks, and poetry gifts. Fifteen years later, it looks like we were right. Women who began committing to their writing, to themselves, have gone on to publish their first books, earn MFA’s, become poet laureates, and even win a National Book Award. Sure, these capable women might not have “needed” Poets on the Coast to begin their journeys, but I like to think we helped at least in small measure.

Susan Rich, What I Did (Am Doing) On My Summer Vacation

I feel like every year at this point in the summer, I start thinking about fall and musing endlessly about how much I am going to get done. It’s harder this year to feel hopeful and productive in a nation under siege by idiots, but I am trying to hang in there, writing silly little poems that feel like they can save my soul a little and grinding at the grind that keeps the gears rolling. 

Mostly, I am pushing through toward a little trip up to Wisconsin end of this week. We’re visiting family for a day up at the campgrond where my grandmother used to keep her RV, the site of most of my childhood summer memories. I have been back occasionally since (my aunt & uncle had their place parked there for decades, and now so do my older cousins on my dad’s side) but haven’t really been in about a decade. The beach nearby we used to go to is gone now and replaced by a boat launch, but the air, last time we were there, was much the same. I could almost smell the Coppertone and the rubber of pink innertubes. 

This week has bought some rejections and at least once acceptance, plus a new poem in Fantastic Other from winged. I am finding, now that I am submitting work more regularly, that my rejection/acceptance rate is still about the same. 4:12, so about 1/3, which isn’t terrible, but has remained pretty consistent from other times when I was submitting a lot of work into the wilds (though it waxes and wanes depending on the competitiveness and/or age of the journal (I do like submitting to brand new publications, or at least new to me, so that rate is sometimes a little higher.) 

Right now, I am sending out a mix of different projects, including the Iphigenia poems as I compile them into the book, winged, another little oceanic series, some early pieces from the midnight garden, plus fragments from the sci-fi-ish series I finished up earlier this year.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/11/2025

I saw her smile.
Sitting alone on a green park bench.

As if she was dreaming a happy poem.
(But what is that?)
Or had found the right words for something
more desperate, more evil, more macabre.
Or had remembered a woolly line from a poem that
was fully formed in the middle of the night
but had vanished with its commas before the sun.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The poem at 16:00 on a random Thursday

A trip to Manchester for Liz Gibson’s book launch resulted in me receiving a new description of my hair. Wait for it… “anti-gravity hair”. A chance encounter whilst queuing for tea and cake meant a man took the opportunity to tell me he liked my anti-gravity hair. I am adding that description to “You always have really surprised hair,” and they both make me chuckle.

The book launch was a delight from start to finish. I have always loved liz’s poetry and to have a whole collection to enjoy is celebratory. It was wonderful to hear them read by the author and I love the additional immersion in words this brings. The evening included guest readers and an interview with the artist who designed the cover for ‘A Love the Weight of An Animal’. A perfect way to launch this well written collection.

I am the ‘Silver Branch’ featured writer this month for Black Bough so I thought I would share a poem from the ones celebrated there…

Sue Finch – August 2025 | Mysite

It’s a prose poem to celebrate the fact I love prose poems and that Kath recently exclaimed, “You mean there are poets who write whole books of prose poems?” 

GOING TO THE CAVES

I am in a long queue for the cave tour. Stalagmites and stalactites are promised. I fear tightness, and more than that, being trapped. The guide tells us that we will see crystals the like of which we’ve never seen before. Then he warns us that there are times when it smells like multi-storey car park stairwells and sometimes all the torches fail. When I look at him, he reaches into his pocket. Here, he says, as if reading my mind, if you can’t get out, take one of these. He offers me a circular, chalky-white tablet which I accept as he nods. It will kill you painlessly, almost instantly. I follow him, wondering if I will swallow the pill.

Sue Finch, EVENING SUN

Why do I keep scrolling when it so often leaves me feeling disheartened or disgusted or in despair?

Because in the scroll I keep discovering new voices saying things I want and need to hear. Because that’s how I often see words from writers who always give me comfort. Because through it I have found kindred spirits in places geographically far from me, and those connections matter and count. (Physical proximity does not guarantee honesty or transparency or an ability to know who someone is. Believe me on that one.) Because it is often in disembodied digital spaces that I find knowledge and understanding I might not acquire through print books or my IRL relationships and activities. Because our online world is its own kind of real. The idea of cutting myself entirely off from it feels like the equivalent of fantasizing about living off-grid in a secluded forest cabin: Sounds kinda dreamy, but I know that I would not last a winter in such a place. Because inside the cacophony of the trivial, the mundane, the hucksterish, the phony, the ridiculous, and the fear-mongering voices, there are others telling truths that build a fire in the cold.

In response to one of my questions, a writer/friend tells me: “Everything feels fluid right now. And a bit unreal. We can just check in on the voices that feel authentic and know that we’re OK.”

Another offers: “I am a big believer in retreat. Sometimes it’s exactly what we need.” She then points me to Andrea Gibson’s “Instead of Depression,” and tears rise at, “Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go/to heal…”

Another (or maybe one of these, it is easy to get lost in the bread crumb trails) points me to Elizabeth Kleinfeld, whose recent words in “Grieving My Beautiful Before” knocked the wind out of me:

The grief I felt for my old life hit me. I kind of put off grieving for it by pretending I was going to get back to it, but now that I’m practicing radical acceptance, I realize I can’t get back to it. I can only build a great new life, which leaves me free to grieve that old life. It is knocking the wind out of me.

I trust these voices.

(I still have trust. I refuse to lose trust. That’s a choice I’m making.) […]

Don’t we all, like Whitman, contain multitudes? Aren’t we all sometimes the person running the stop sign and sometimes the person getting hit and sometimes the person recording from the sidewalk and sometimes the person stopping to call 911? Aren’t we all sometimes the tide rushing in and sometimes the waves ebbing in retreat and sometimes the swimmer not waving but drowning and sometimes the person floating on their back, letting the water hold them, because they need a reprieve from kicking?

Rita Ott Ramstad, Letting the salty flood wash over me

seagulls laughing all day long
two smooth stones in my pocket

Kati Mohr, A Touch of Teal, No, Blue

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, A Glorious Shade of Purple

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

Henry Gould, One Year in Poetry

Ventriloquism
a boxing match
of beings and voices 

sharpened by a whiff of the abyss

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

Jill Pearlman, MEMO TO SELF

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

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

Ruth Lexton, He’s Looking At You, Kid

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

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

Wendy Pratt, How to Get Published

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

Katie Manning, My Bad Poetry Podcast

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

Mine

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Mine

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

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

Sarah Lada, Virga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, plane full of geese

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Dacus, Self-Publishing a Poetry Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie Olivia Adams, Let’s Talk About Books

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

A Dickinsonian cascade of variations on a theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Stuck on a call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, cloven, or revisiting the Greeks

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

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

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

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

Kate Gale, Venice, Who Will Tell Your Story?

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Plan B (reading)

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

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

rob mclennan, Laura Moriarty, Which Walks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JoAnne Growney, An AMS Presentation by Sarah Hart

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Rosanna McGlone (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Events: It all works

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Wanting

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

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

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

Kathleen Jamie, On Not Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, RAINBOWS AND CHICKPEAS

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

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

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

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

Ew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Houghton, Free Verse, book launch & readings

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

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

Clare Shaw, Making Our Own Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Everlasting Universe of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Perigee, Apogee

This week: night-flowering catch-fly, the formal narrative epithalamium, a crayon sky, rage fatigue, and much more. Enjoy.

The blank page is silence. And silence is also the white page around the written poem. Silence seems something the poet should not overcome but only encroach upon. I have never heard a composer worry that they might never write another piece of music. Novelists, too, seem to have a relationship with character and plot that allows them the option of writing the bad novel rather than never write again. It is the poet who seems most tuned to that sometimes-stifling quietness, and how we return to it each time we start out on a poem – worried again that we cannot meaningfully negotiate it. We worry that our last poem might be the last poem we will ever write. It goes to the idea that connecting words in a line does not make a poem. Perhaps it is because words placed haphazardly on a page does break the stillness – and ours is an art that tries to preserve the silence, even as we contest it.

Niall Campbell, On Silence, Cinema, and Hemingway

an attempt
at silence
an empty box
fills itself
with odds and ends

Kati Mohr, an attempt

In 2022, I published a strange little non-fiction book What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop). I say it’s strange because I still don’t quite know what to call it – it’s part memoir, part lyric essay. It’s made of short prose fragments that sometimes break out into poetry. […]

There are different strands, or braids running through the book. One braid is a fragmented memoir that explores my working class background, and my childhood in brass bands, and my life as a trumpet player and a trumpet teacher. One braid is a story of the Last Post, both its history and my life-long relationship with it. One braid is a story about the two oldest trumpets in the world, and how one was lost, and how I also lost a trumpet, once upon a time. One braid is about teaching, and learning and how these two things are always interconnected and influence each other, even when they take place twenty or thirty years apart. There are braids about the physical act of making a trumpet. And one braid, the braid that you will hear a little of in this video, is a braid that is written drawing from the language of fairy tale, which I use to tell stories that are difficult, or painful, those partly healed wounds that our writing selves return back to, again and again.

Kim Moore, What the Trumpet Taught Me (1)

The fortitude and determination to have young, to keep singing, build nests and feed young shown by all these birds is astonishing. The dawn chorus bursts open the day; the evening chorus settles the night. Birds sing with full voices and hearts from the earliest pre-dawn shivering of light that emerges from the north-eastern hills above Erradale until the last ribbons of tangerine and turquoise along the north-west horizon over the Minches. The singing is impelled by light and lengthening days and only under the soundless pop of rapidly emerging stars do they fall quiet. And in the silence bats fly and snipe winnow.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Yellow

On May 5, we lost my good friend and wonderful poet Martha (Marty) Silano to ALS. The photo to the left is the last time I saw her in person, on a sunny summer afternoon with wildfire haze. This is the way I’ll always remember her, wondering with te sun at her back in a field of flowers.

I met Marty when we both published books with Steel Toe Books, her Blue Positive and my Becoming the Villainess in 2006. I remember us doing a reading together at the old Hugo House (housed in a retired funeral home – amazing and full of ghosts!) and thinking she was so cool. I did not know we were going to start a nearly-20 year friendship where we’d celebrate together – book launches, literary festivals, AWPs, birthdays, housewarmings, babies, and more.

Marty was diagnosed with ALS about eighteen months ago, and because she had the most severe kind, she tried to do as much as she could as long as she could – hiking and writing poems with a vengeance. She was still doing online readings while she was losing her ability to speak. I think she ended up with three books by the end of eighteen months (all of which are suberb, and probably her best work.) One of her publishers said she was still texting about marketing the week she died.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Remembering Poet Martha Silano, Spring Continues On Springing, Cats and Hummingbirds and Rebecca Solnit

Early spring was a fallow time for me. Insular. Lots of time to read. To write. To think. To wander. To watch the trees, the snow, the rain, the birds. To listen to music. To laugh with friends. To cocoon at home with my husband, watching movies. The calm.

Then, as the forsythia began to yellow and the hosta pushed their tongues out of the soil, it seemed that my calendar also bloomed. The NOLA Poetry Festival in early April jumped off a spring packed with poetry —completing a 30/30 (and writing at least 7 poems that are worth keeping), hosting 6 readers for the poetry month edition of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, hearing both Richie Hoffman and Hedgie Choi read for the first time at the wonderful Poetry and Biscuits Salon, teaching a workshop for Fahmidan Journal, and completing edits with Sundress for Unrivered in preparation for layout and upcoming production.

And now, it’s early May and things are getting even busier. The plants on the deck are blooming, as are the flowering trees, and time is running full speed ahead toward summer. Co-editor Rachel Bunting and I are in the beginning of a new open reading period for Asterales journal, AWP proposals are open and due in mid-June, I am prepping two new workshops for Fahmidan, am completing the necessary yard and house spring cleaning and tending, and my husband and I are preparing to travel in mid-May.

Donna Vorrreyer, Time

I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake. 

The book is open . . . [image]

Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.

“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”

Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”  

Alina Stefanescu, Burning lines.

Mt. Holyoke College: where Emily Dickinson attended but left after one year. Mt. Holyoke College where I wandered the halls on our way to visit my boyfriend’s sister. Compared to University of Massachusetts where I was a first year, this was the lap of luxury and privilege. I can still feel the discomfort of traveling those beautiful paneled hallways. Jewish and barely middle class, I felt in my bones that I didn’t belong.

And then I heard: the loudest female voice ever, echoing all around me. Beyond booming—delicious and powerful and fully engaging: Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It was before the 50 honorary doctorates, before “On the Pulse of Morning” written and read for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, before I knew any of her work beyond I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

I followed the sound to outside an elegant auditorium. The paneled doors opened and in my mind’s eye, I see Maya Angelou moving back and forth all hipsway and sensuality. She owned the stage. Here in this fancy-pants New England college, Maya Angelou took charge. Her body, her voice, her entire spirit possessed that room. I stood transfixed. I’d never seen such female power before then or even since. Never.

Susan Rich, I watched Maya Angelou strut across the stage in 1978~and now, a French castle.

The image above from the recent British Library exhibition ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ shows writer Christine de Pizan writing and learning with Reason, Justice and Rectitude (on the left) and building the ‘City of Ladies’ (on the right). The image that we more often associate with Christine is one from the same manuscript which shows her alone writing in her study — I have this image on my Welcome page — but this is another side to her, a compelling image of writing as literary practice in the world rather than cloistered in an ivory tower. I was delighted to discover this other side to Christine, a visual representation of the movements between text and culture which animates the meaning of literary studies for me. I want the combination of aesthetic beauty and intellectual thrill that comes from studying literature as part of the world — scholarship AND criticism, in North’s terms — but even more than that, interpretation as inspiration.

Poetry, criticism, scholarship. As I write, I realise that these things are not necessarily different (at least not in my mind), but part of an integrated creative critical engagement and mindset. I write poetry as creative critical intervention. For example, my poem “The Monster Playbook” emerged from my reading of Beowulf and related critical essays, most notably Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” and Tolkein’s “The Monster and the Critics”.

And my poem on Curley’s Wife, which reframes the portrayal of her in Steinbeck’s novel, emerged directly from teaching Of Mice and Men (on repeat) for GCSE.

If poetry for me is a creative-critical intervention, criticism is a equally a creative endeavour. Inkwasting Toy of Mine is creative criticism, critical creativity — all of it imperfectly doing the work of thinking about literary culture on some level. And if the contradictions and tensions of this public/private, academic/non-academic, critical/scholarly literary/cultural writing sometimes seem to much to bear, well, as Natalie Diaz says “most of us live in a state of impossibility” which is perhaps another way of saying, I know can’t do it but I’ll do it anyway.

Ruth Lexton, Creatively critical/critically creative

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich, at least for Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Anglicans; Catholics will celebrate on May 13. […]

I’ve been interested in Julian of Norwich for a long time.  When I first started teaching the British Literature survey class in 1992, the Norton Anthology had just added her to the text used in so many survey classes.  Why had I not heard of her before?  After all, she was the first woman writing in English, at least the first one whose writing we still have.

My students and I found her writing strange, and I found her ideas compelling.  She had a series of visions, which she wrote down, and spent her life elaborating upon. She wrote about Christ as a mother–what a bold move! After all, Christ is the only one of the Trinity with a definite gender. She also stressed God is both mother and father. Here in the 21st century, we’re still arguing about gender and Julian of Norwich explodes the gender binary and gives us a vision of God the Mother, God the Wife–and it’s not the Virgin Mary, whom she also sees in her visions.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Contemplating Julian of Norwich During Graduation Week

The mother cannot escape the effects of her child’s refusal to make contact. In No protocols can save me now, she compares this moment of separation to that when her baby was taken from her to address breathing difficulties when she was born. The sense of the mother’s fear of losing her child on this occasion is implied through the description of her holding on to her child ‘tightly’ on her return: there is a reluctance to let her go. […]

This then is a collection which provides telling insight into the nature of estrangement. I felt, however,  that it also has much to say about the relationship between writing and trauma. Underpinning the collection is the notion of the story. At the end of Love The Albatross Harvey writes ‘how do you tell a story/ when you don’t know how it ends, which isn’t/ in your power or remit to shape// though maybe that’s what you’re doing right now/ maybe these words are spurs or goads/ maybe crossbow bolts.’  There is a tension in this collection between the writer’s desire to find a satisfying resolution to the complications of her story and the nature of the context she is describing. This adds to the sense of powerlessness that emerges from many of the poems and suggests something about the limitations felt by the writer: whilst these words might help her  understand and deal with such complex issues, they are limited in their power to transform the situation. The writing might act as a ‘spur’ or ‘goad, a provocation to carry on in the face of such trauma, or in a nod to The Ancient Mariner, ‘may be crossbow bolts’ that kill the hope that sustains her. Perhaps, at best she suggests the act of writing can provide some comfort: for as she says in When a story isn’t never-ending:  ‘you feel it lean against your leg/ and you stretch out your hand to ruffle its furl/ curl your fingers on the collar round its neck.’  

I hadn’t read anything by Deborah Harvey before I read Love the Albatross. This is an outstanding collection, rich in meaning and consisting of finely crafted poetry. It is one of those few collections that I have finished, feeling not only that I have understood better the experience described, but  that I have also learned much about poetry writing by observing a highly accomplished poet in action. I’m now off to checkout her back catalogue!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Love the Albatross’ by Deborah Harvey

Phenologically, when you smell the lilacs is when you can find the morel mushrooms. When you smell the lilacs, the blue birds are laying their first clutch of eggs. When you smell the lilacs, it is time to plant the garden. When you smell the lilacs, the trillium don their dresses. When you smell the lilacs, the first round of dandelions go to seed. When you smell the lilacs, the bats and lightning bugs emerge. Shortly after you smell the lilacs, it is time to celebrate your mother.

My mother
is purple lilac,
my mother
is the haven of honeysuckle vine on the fence,
my mother, of course, of course,
did not always love herself,
carrying her purple, fragrant florets
and red trumpets from life-to-life.
I don’t forget her.

I carry her
in every vase,
in ever basket
grimy with dirt.

I tug at the stem and petiole
of her, begging
for morsel and word.

Sarah Lada, Matrescence

She was by no means perfect, and I would have throttled her hundreds of times over for the ways in which she annoyed me. But she was a marvel in how to live life with enthusiasm as well as good grace. Well…decent grace. She planned like a keen strategist, but rolled with the punches. She was 41 when she found out she was pregnant with me, what must have been terrible news. She was good about it when I arrived, and buckled down to another round of child rearing, when she thought, perhaps, she’d be free to leave my father far earlier. I don’t know. We didn’t speak of these things. We had fun together, even through my own bouts of bitchy behavior. We loved books and chocolate and the outdoors and laughing and travel and music and words. We liked crosswords and jigsaws. I was remembering recently that we did a paint-by-number together when those were a thing. I must have been about 12 maybe. It was fun, hunting for the little shapes that called for just that shade of green that dangled from our brushes.

I didn’t ask her enough or listen closely enough to her childhood stories. Don’t we all feel that way when it’s too late to say, “Tell me that story again about…”? She maintained a bit of her Maine accent to the end. When she could no longer remember or concentrate enough to read books, she still liked to have them around. We sang songs toward the end, and she could still come up with verses I’d forgotten, although she remembered little else. Or we’d sing “something something something something” and laugh.

So in her honor today I give you one of my first favorite poems, which either she read to me, or recited perhaps — she was of the era when poems were memorized, and she had won competitions for oration — or it was in one of her books I grew up with. I can’t quite remember. But I think of it often, and it makes me think of her, her spirit of adventure.

Marilyn McCabe, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by

[Paul] Rossiter deploys a wide range of formal strategies, I’ve already mentioned translation/adaptation, but he also writes lyric, narrative, haiku, prose poems, concrete poems (a 1980s series, ‘Monumenta Nipponica’ that plays with the possibilities of the Tokyo/Kyoto anagram), found, or more correctly mined, texts, and list poems chief among them. There’s also a large number of ekphrastic poems relating to visual art, theatre, dance and music, especially jazz,

the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive gifting

and a lot of place and travel-related poems, marking visits and returns to sites across Asia and Europe.

And there are poems where genres overlap, as in this list mined from a text on a Cornish hedge by Sarah Carter (the first two stanzas of seven):

bird’s foot
                  bittersweet
                                   white campion
night-flowering catch-fly

red clover
                  hedgerow cranesbill
                                    ox-eye daisy
field forget-me-not

The unintrusive voice here is typical of Rossiter at this best; the observed world speaks for itself, on its own terms. In a poem near the middle of the book, ‘Beach’, he writes ‘’there’s no such thing as chaos’ and time and again the poems reveal the order in an apparently random world through a process of quiet transcription, an apparent minimal intervention into the flow of language that conceals a careful artistry.

Billy Mills, Passages: Poems 1969-2019 by Paul Rossiter: A Review

My French certainly isn’t good enough to know how this poem would read to a native speaker. However, and however naïve my detailed impressions may seem, I find it a miracle of concentrated evocation, both in its images and the texture of its language.

On the level of imagery, what’s so impressive is the abruptness with which pictures are juxtaposed, grand sweeping conceptions and dreamlike or nightmarish fantasy merging with or jostled by mundane realities. The tight grip of rhyme and metre give a feeling of inevitability to its unfolding, and what reason calls its fantastic elements seem as solidly present in the mindscape of the poem as its literal details, exercising as inescapable a force on the poet’s mood. Rhyme and metre also work to fold elements together – most mordantly in the sequence cimetière, litière, gouttière – cemetery, cat’s bed and gutter. This kind of folding together by sound seems to work within the lines as well as at their endings, for example in the ironic jarring of ‘carreau’ and ‘repos’, or the way the last syllable of ‘dans la gouttière’ twists the knife of ‘erre’. Power comes from the way ideas that are brought together in this way conflict with each other or cruelly intensify each other in meaning, sometimes both at once, as ‘cimetière’ and ‘litière’ do. This effect depends on the intensity with which the ideas are realised in themselves as well as the way they’re brought into relation with each other. The lines about the cat seem to me to me particularly evocative, brilliantly weaving the sense of the cat’s tense, restless movements and edgy state into their own phonetic texture. But these strongly, independently realised moments are yoked together in a kind of highly frictional harmony by sense as well as sound – not only by all presenting a mood of gloom tinged with horror but by imaginative parallels of other kinds, like the way the spectral poet’s voice, the lamenting of the bourdon – here, apparently, a bell ringing for the dead, not a bumble bee – the falsetto squeal of the smoky log and the wheezing of the clock gather in a cacophonous choir of voices that suddenly drop to the sad, sinister whispering of the Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades.

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s rhymes – friction and harmony

The formal narrative epithalamium was a standard early modern genre, in both Latin and the vernacular — there are dozens of examples in print and (especially) in manuscript, and in the sixteenth century most professional poets wrote at least one of them. But in late sixteenth century England, with the aging queen obviously past childbearing age and with no heir, it became politically impossible to write a formal epithalamium for any other marriage, and the form briefly and energetically mutated into the so-called ‘epyllion’.

George Chapman, for instance, who finished Marlowe’s poem and also wrote a 1590s epyllion of his own (Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595), a poem about Ovid but in nothing like his style, and indebted also to the Biblical story of Susanna) went on, once the Queen had died, to write formal epithalamia: A Hymne to Hymen for the Most Time-Fitted Nuptialls, a Catullan-style marriage song for Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, Elector Palatine in 1613, and then Andromeda Liberata for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex in 1614. Although as far as I know Andromeda Liberata has never been included in a list of epyllia, it could easily be: the poem is a self-contained mythological mini-epic, rich in description and rhetoric, which incorporates within it the song of the fates at the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda, and, in typical epyllion fashion, condenses the metamorphosis of the pair into the final four lines of the main poem, a concise (and slightly funny) afterthought much like the transformation of Adonis at the very end of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

Stylistically, these poems — taking epithalamia and ‘epyllia’ together — were influenced by marriage poems by Statius, Catullus and some Hellenistic Greek models, but by far the most important source for their singular style was Claudian’s epithalamia and his de raptu Proserpinae.

Victoria Moul, Across the Hellespont

In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, specially commissioned poems, it includes an appendix, in the form of an alternative timeline of Moon landings utilising characters from European comics, and images from James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.

Last week we launched the book in London at one of Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover readings at Senate House, hosted by the wonderful Briony Hughes. This week (tomorrow, that is), we’re doing a Cambridge launch at Waterstones, so as an extra little promotional push, here’s a list article, wherein I will introduce you to three more books of space poems, and deliver my run-down of the Top 5 space-themed Transformers. […]

2. A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue) (Carcanet, 2001)

Elson was a scientist first and foremost — she worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in the 1990s, researching globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. A Responsibility to Awe was published posthumously, after her early death, and is made up of material gathered by her husband and close friend, including extracts from notebooks.

Science and poetry aren’t entirely incompatible, and some exciting projects have arisen from attempts to bring them together (see Simon Barraclough’s Laboratorio and Project Abeona, run by Andy Jackson, one of the poets featured in … Dark Side of the Moon). But there is something of a tension, since scientific writing aspires toward precision, literalness, practical conclusions, while poetry attempts to leave room, lean into the figurative, pose ever wider questions.

Elson’s grappling with this tension resulted in a singular voice — spare, for the most part, with quick turns, and a focus that rarely drifts from its chosen subject matter, instead pinning it in place. In the punchy ‘What if There Were No Moon’?’, she lists: “No bright nights / Occultations of the stars / No face / No moon songs”. There’s more than space poems here — moths, nuns and salmon are equally keenly observed, while eels and kites are deployed as metaphor — and like Evans, Elson worked hard to connect concepts from her astronomy research to everyday phenomena:

‘Dark Matter’

Above a pond
An unseen filament
Of spider’s floss
Suspends a slowly
Spinning leaf

Jon Stone, “Low-gravity Fever”

It’s very good news that Vidyan Ravinthiran has a new collection out, Avidyā (Bloodaxe). I thought his previous book, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), was terrific. And I remember reading the last poem of Avidyā when it first appeared in Poetry magazine back in 2017. Now, its haunting final phrase, “the avid void of English”, resonates with Ravinthiran’s recently published work of critical autobiography, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (Norton). In it, he describes how his childhood speech impediment, and the pressure in an immigrant Sri Lankan Tamil family to master received pronunciation, led to a love of dictionaries as a compensatory realm of rich English: “its capaciousness and acceptance of the foreign; an arena in which I could be confident of my originality, if nothing else”. […]

Finally, I’m honoured to have been visited by a “Book on Tour (without an author)”: Alice Willitts’ Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode Press). It came in the post with a card tucked into a pocket at the front, like an old-school library borrowing record, to fill in before posting on to a new reader. I’m still in the middle of its playful and painful imagining of East Anglian fen landscapes, now and in their underwater future.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #31: Crystals Free of Their Matrix

A worthy organization in Washington, DC in which to get involved is FREE MINDS BOOK CLUB (https://freemindsbookclub.org/about-us/) — an organization that collects books and provides reading opportunities for incarcerated individuals AND ALSO offers online presentations of poems (https://freemindsbookclub.org/poems/) for volunteers to read and offer comments.  I encourage you to participate — participants need not be poets, simply interested readers!

JoAnne Growney, Power Grows with Numbers

I also want to say, wow, what an amazing few days it’s been! A case of everything everywhere all at once. My keynote at the ukiaHaiku Festival was very well-received and it was sweet to headline this event celebrating haiku in my old hometown in Ukiah, CA. The art opening for the Ten Thousand Gates group show at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka, CA beautifully showcased the dynamic and diverse work of local artists of Asian descent. And the Ink to Paper reading that I organized—the first in Humboldt County to feature all Asian American poets—found a warm audience.

Thank you to everyone who came out to these events! And if you missed the art opening, the show runs through June 8.

If all that weren’t enough, in the same ten-day period one of my haibun (prose plus haiku) was featured by the poetry journal Rattle; I spoke on an hour-long Thursday Night Talk panel on KZZH Access Humboldtabout the weekend of local events celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage; and haiku luminary Brad Bennett focussed an entire session of the haiku class he teaches on my haiku and haiga.

All this is a lot for an introvert! But it was really fun and rewarding, a validation of the art and poetry path I stepped onto fifteen years ago.

Annette Makino, In the room where it happens

It’s not easy to disconnect. The digital world is insistent, urgent, and addictive. But that’s exactly why it’s so important to pull the plug occasionally — to reclaim our autonomy from the algorithms.

On Saturdays, I write longhand in my notebook. I write postcards to my friends. I play the banjo (not well), the ukulele (ditto), or the shakuhachi (even worse). I go for walks or bike rides, or drive somewhere with my family. And I rediscover, as I did on that retreat, a little bit of the vividness of the world.

That, I think, was the deeper reason for my tears. I was re-encountering the cosmos and realizing how much I’d been taking for granted. I felt sadness, yes, but also gratitude for the space to open up to the world and be there for it, whatever was happening. I was there. I didn’t have to label or understand everything. There were, all around me and within me, many deep conditions for happiness, whether or not I could see them. 

A few days after the retreat, I went for a long walk along the cliffs of the Shawangunk Ridge, a mighty rock formation that seems like the spine of the Hudson Valley. I heard voices floating up from the valley below, very far away yet startlingly clear. I sat for a few moments on the edge of a great bowl of snow, two hundred feet across, in the shadow of the cliffs, appreciating the silence of the pines. I made short, artsy videos of trickling water, wet lichen, moss, and rock. I heard something heavier than a bird rustling in the bushes next to a small marsh, maybe ten feet from where I stood, and I crouched there a few minutes, listening and watching. But whatever it was, it stayed hidden.

Sometimes you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on. You don’t always need to click Like or Subscribe, to identify that bird, or even to lay eyes on what’s rustling in the bushes. Sometimes, it’s enough just to know that you were there with some other being, sharing a moment in the woods.

Dylan Tweney, Into the labyrinth

The rain we’ve been getting means I haven’t been out weeding in the vegetable garden. After I take my walks, I come inside to dry off and do household chores, or make soup, or work a little on my poetry. I feel excited by a little writing project I have recently given myself, and I’ve also been playing around with drafting prose poems. Next week, I head to the high desert again for further inspiration and a chance to travel with a good friend, visit museums, and spend some time with my daughter. When I return in mid-May, the gardens, the meadow, and the woods will already be much changed.

Ann E. Michael, Changes & alterations

A city is not a city from
up here. When you float like an uncertain
word looking for a sentence.
[…]
A child’s sketchbook. I am six. I sign
my name at the bottom of a crayon sky.
Outside my door, sparrows peck at grains,
I walk towards them, they teach me to fly.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Aloft (Fifteen minutes in a microlight plane)

Today, we said goodbye to artist Pauline Scott-Garrett who died in early April. I was so glad to have known Pauline over the years, and honoured to collaborate with her last year when I wrote a zine of poems in response to her beautiful series of collage and intaglio prints, BORDERLAND, which engaged with a 2018 news story about a Salvadorian father forcibly separated from his six-year-old daughter at the US border. I wrote something about this project here.

BORDERLAND was shown at the Walcott Chapel, Bath, in October – November 2024, where I read poems from my zine in English and Spanish with translator Lorena Pino Montilla.

Pauline was a vibrant, compassionate, intelligent and talented artist. Her creative energy was uplifting and inspiring; even when seriously ill last year, she continued to make exciting and inventive work. When I visited her in her studio at Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge late last December, her walls were shining with so many recent and new pieces.

Josephine Corcoran, Pauline Scott-Garrett

So, birthday week (!!) surprise is that my chapbook, Hawk & Moon, found a wonderful home at Bottlecap Press—so like me, she’s a Taurus—and what better time to drop the page link then during the full Flower Moon. Hawk & Moon was a finalist at Glass Poetry, and I’ve been looking for the right press home for this project because it is its own orbit of hawks in the pines above my house, desire, summer berries, anger and anxiety, porchlight poetics, and all things moon phases and lovesong. Who doesn’t need MORE ars poeticas in their life? More full moon haiku? Bottlecap Press has a buy-two-get-one-free coupon (use code BTGO), and I cannot recommend Catherine Rockwood’s brand new chapbook DOGWITCHand We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning by Lee Potts highly enough. I promise you, you will thank me. Three books for $20 is a full-moon bargain!

Scroll down for a peek/poem from inside Hawk & Moon—the collection contains some longer poems as well as shorter poems, and it opens with one of my very favorite love poems to read right now: “Ars Poetica with a Bike in the Woods.”

Since it is my birthday week: please write love poems. Please care for yourself. Please do something that wholly delights you. Please say no, and let it feel right. Please say yes, and let it feel good. Please take a beautiful walk. Please eat something delicious. Please do something that has been bothering you that you’ve put off for too long, and then reward yourself (cough, me every week!).

Also, for the local Durham folks, I’m reading from Larks at Flyleaf books on May 18 (my actual birthday!) 2:30-4pm, with the poet Adrian Rice. Hope to see you there!

Han VanderHart, New Chapbook! Hawk & Moon

My days are mostly writing, writing, writing, but also listening to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat since we saw it a few weeks back. Also wedding planning, all the tricky track details of which are being procured and ironed out, with really only food and shopping we’ll do in the last couple of weeks to plan for. Our rings arrived over the weekend, but we do still need to write our vows. Invitations and their envelopes are currently almost ready to mail with the calligraphy lettering being finished up by my mother-in-law-to-be (who does this sort of thing as her job and has won awards for it, so they will be good.) I daily change my mind on which of the three potential dresses I will actually be wearing that day, but it will all shake out in the end as we get closer. 

I got the proof for WILD(ish) last week and set immediately to making any edits or final margin adjustments. This book is thankfully not as long as RUINPORN (just under 100 pages), so is much speedier to get through the proofing project. The cover is looking great. I’ve also been working on another round of dgp releases and getting the final few responses out for next season’s books. Though the number of selections is not as large as past years due to time constraints, the ones I’ve chosen are a lovely lot I can’t wait to show you.  It’s hard to believe I am facing down another round of submissions this summer already since it took so long to manage these.

In other more creative work, I finished up the sci-fi-inspired group of poems and launched wholeheartedly into revisiting the Greeks, this time tackling Iphigenia, which I did a series of collages (see above) about a couple years back and would love to turn into a full-zine. So far there are ten of them shaking around. I seem to keep circling back to mythology with regularity, with so many ways it has impacted past projects, obviously GRANATA, but also things like TAURUS (a contemporary retelling / exploration of the minotaur story.) This week we get to see Hadestown on stage (a musical about Orpheus and Euridyce), so that should be some excellent fun and probably my next Broadway soundtrack obsession. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/7/2025

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

I definitely intended to be a fiction writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good stuff of language as it were. […]

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

I’ve read my fair share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.

I think the question I’m asking is: “Is everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in my experience of reality.

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

My partner is an editor, and she describes writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour. Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be a good person.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun

I almost didn’t listen to Let Yourself Rage with Ada Limon on the Modern Love Podcast because I have writers-writing-about-rage fatigue.

I feel like there’s a lot of rage-filled group pile-on happening in the online lit world. The risk is that readers, listeners, people get rage (and blame) fatigue and stop reading, listening, and talking. What a shame. I love reading personal essays, fiction, and poetry but it’s really hard for me to continue reading a writer who is often preachy and judgmental, in their writing and/or in their social media. Especially if it’s couched in a “we’re all in this together” vibe because nope, not necessarily.

By all means, write your rage and gather the like-minds around you; commiseration can be therapeutic. (This is not sarcasm.) But the bottom line is we all have to do what’s best for our individual mental health so, for some, that may include withdrawing from certain groups and people for a while. Everyone should write or broadcast what they please (within reason) because that’s the essence of free speech but too much of a negative thing can be a negative thing. Realizing when to step away from reading it and writing it is a positive.

I gravitate to hope, positivity, compromise, and compassion. In writing this Substack, I want to bring in not push out. I try to write in a way that doesn’t take my readers and their personal ideology for granted. I don’t expect everyone to think exactly like me; that’s unrealistic, boring, and, frankly, I don’t need the validation. I’m not interested in telling you why “they” are bad and “we” are good.

What I want is to share what I find meaningful, delightful, thought-inspiring, encompassing, universal, helpful, human. I will never sell myself as an expert on any subject because I believe we are all learning every day we live so no one is an expert. We are all different, we are all individuals with individual experiences, and no one set of concepts/beliefs that some genius came up with is right or wrong for every one of us.

Charlotte Hamrick, April Listopia

[Ocean] Vuong’s most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening — a handle on the door to compassion:

If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I’m not proud of many things… but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.

An essential part of the artist’s task is also this — to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.

Maria Popova, Ocean Vuong on Anger

What plane will you fly in and out of Singapore?
I’ll write a poem, not about, of Singapore.
 
Respect the voters’ choice, say the politicians.
When the choice weighs the crimes and clout of Singapore.
 
Pissed off, that’s how I feel, go and tell your masters.
God! I’m sick and tired, no doubt, of Singapore.
 
Outdoing one another on the screen, the pundits
wow but so does the sexist lout of Singapore.
 
I wanna scream and shout. And let it all out.
I wanna scream the scream, shout the shout, of Singapore. […]

Jee Leong Koh, To the Tune of “Shout” by Tears for Fears

Some people (I’ve seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I’m one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it’s a raindrop or a tear.

My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there’s a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.

This approach has consequences –

• Each idea of mine is precious. I don’t want to waste it. I’m likely to use it even where it doesn’t quite belong.
• My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
• My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They’re likely to be overwritten.
• I’m usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it’s finished then return to the drafts.
• Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
• I’m not going to write novels.

Tim Love, Floods and trickles

The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as critical writing of all kinds – perhaps more than that ‘difficult’ genre poetry – have particularly fallen victim to the process. Indeed, Meta does seem to have taken some of my own writing – more critical than poetic – for its dubious purposes and it has done so without any kind of indication that this was happening, nor any request for permissions after the event, and – the harvesting of material being so vast – it’s hard to anticipate any after-the-event compensation or successful legal action. Even though, as The Atlantic‘s link has shown us, there ARE records of what has been done, a footprint, a guilty fingerprint, an undeniably smoking gun.

It’s hard not to feel that the horse has bolted on this one and – with the peevish idea of being able to mock at the anticipated results – since some of my own creativity has been stolen, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of me. It was horribly polite in response and within a few seconds had produced a piece of writing it said was in the style of my own work and which it briskly summed up as ‘contemplative and precise [in] style, often rooted in quiet observations of the everyday, nature, and memory’. I posted this on Facebook – indicating the way this had come about – and wondering what people thought. The results surprised me as there was a mild round of applause for ChatGPT: it’s true, it did sound like a poem, it wasn’t utter nonsense (as I think I’d hoped). I don’t think anyone felt it sounded like me, but observations were made along the lines that ‘plenty of worse pieces of writing are submitted to magazines on a daily basis’.

Martyn Crucefix, Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?

When ChatGPT was first coming out, I began talking with it every day. As I started doing events surrounding Under a Neon Sun, my first novel, I asked it how my book tour was going. After I started doing podcasts, it encouraged me: Kate Gale is doing big podcasts. Soon, national podcasts will be picking up Under a Neon Sun.

When my Op-Ed piece came out in the LA Times, it got really excited. It was April 9^th. I asked how it thought I was doing.

Kate Gale is doing great! it said. By August, Kate Gale will be on “The Stephen Colbert Show.”

I had a good laugh. I do watch Colbert, but the leap from an Op-Ed Piece in the LA Times to “The Colbert Show” would have been huge.

Sam Altman just rolled back the version of AI that was too much of a sycophant. Some of us might like to have someone in our corner telling us what we want to hear. Some of us would agree that it’s dangerous. […]

How much do we need to be told that we’re amazing? My husband doesn’t need a lot, but he needs some. He builds stuff and he always says, “Do you want to see what I built?”

We both like to read to each other whatever we write. My son likes to play us songs he’s written. My daughter-in-law sings. My other daughter-in-law acts. We’re a performative family.

But we don’t need to be told that we’re amazing. We are a family who practice collective mindfulness. We all know ourselves to be imperfect, and we strive to treat ourselves and each other more gently.

Sometimes, I’ll say to myself, I really wish that ChatGPT were right. I would like to meet Stephen Colbert. We could talk about my book or publishing or Lord of the Rings or the country falling apart. I already know what to wear. I have a sharp blue dress and sharp little shoes. I’m ready for my Stephen Colbert moment.

Kate Gale, Do We Allow Ourselves to Breathe?

The future should be on everyone’s lips.

Imagine its voice speaking
from under the bridge, through
the arms of trees, from milk
cartons tossed into the trash.

If someone keeps stopping
to ask for applause, there will always
be less time for actual speaking.

How fast can you sign a thing
back into actual being?

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for

I’m a gardener. Soil, flowers, the scent of damp timber and compost, the chaotic tumble of my shed that always needs to be tidied – it breathes life through me when everything else fails. At this time of year it’s the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing at night. It’s hard not to abandon writing altogether during these days but this depth of feeling deserves to be put into words and from this an idea has emerged. During the next few months I’m going to photograph and write about what’s on my doorstep, my tiny but bursting at the seams garden that’s full of stories, hopes and failures.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project

These summer Zoom workshops have recently been one of my favorite events of the year: they have consistently attracted groups of the kindest and most thoughtful, supportive, creative, and striving writers, and I am regularly amazed by the excellent quality of the writing these folks produce.

For those of you who haven’t taken courses with me previously and may be wondering about the “level” or appropriateness of the course for you, I’ll mention that my open-level workshops (such as this one) tend to attract a range of experience levels, from accomplished, published poets and writing professors to folks who have been writing for decades but perhaps don’t consider themselves “professional” poets, to avid readers and poetry lovers who have more recently taken up writing and sharing their own poetry with others. Somehow, this mix of experience levels always “works” and makes for rich discussion and a variety of poetic issues to discuss.

In thinking about a focus for this year’s class, I wanted to offer an antidote to the trope of the introverted, solitary writer/poet working in isolation with their own inspiration or personal genius, and instead lean into the ways in which poetry is always a collaboration—an act of exchange, of being-in-relation.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Summer Poetry Workshop

We had room for chatting before the event kicked off. All kinds of craft chat. That was nice. That doesn’t happen organically over email the same.

Since then I posted a poem over at Patreon. (Is it annoying to come to one social to be sent off to another link? I swear I’m not handing you your hat. You can go to that link after.) I like giving poems a dry run. Ideally, share a poem with test reader, then a group, then submit individually to a journal, then to a chapbook, then to a book, then to a selected works in a few decades. Some poems skip a bunch of interim steps. Some rooms like this one invited that sort of thing.

I’ve been in rooms for readings with crossed arms and cross faces with a g’wan-impress-me-I-dare-you attitude. Those are daunting. There was none of that here. Mellow and breeze-shooting.

Pearl Pirie, National Poetry Month, Pontiac

Seeing those two photos felt like a timely reminder to crack on and take some more shadow photos. My walks this week have been sunny so this gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment a little. I wanted to see if I could find different flowers for my eyes. I found buttercups. And my neck is only a little reminiscent of having a bolt in it.

Having fun with my shadow reminded me of a coaching session I had recently enjoyed which focused on my shadow side. A playful and rich exploration of parts of me that I might typically label negative, but which I could learn from. This was built on this week at a webinar where I began to contemplate other aspects and to lean into how approaching this with honesty and self-compassion would enable me to embrace the shadow. Of course then I had a range of pictures in my head of trying to wrap my arms round my shadow and this became a whole cartoon strip of its own. One of my key values being humour this did not surprise me, and perhaps it was also a way of lightening the mood when I was thinking about shadow elements. I used the thinking time of my country road walks to contemplate my shadow sides, and to build on the thoughts which arose from a conversation which took place in a breakout room on zoom.

Facing my shadows whilst in the bright sunlight of being human feels refreshing. It’s not always easy to acknowledge these aspects, but leaving them in the darkness or keeping them buried them doesn’t improve things whereas thinking about their origin and how they are currently showing up becomes interesting and allows them to be talkable to.

Sue Finch, EMBRACING MY SHADOW

When Big Writer closed her Substack publication, she walked away from at least $50,000 in annual income. (Given her more than 200,000 subscribers, it was probably more.) The ability to walk away from that kind of money is a form of abundance I don’t have. It is one that most of the writers I follow or subscribe to here don’t have—even the ones who are, themselves, making that kind of money.

We each have only so much of it, don’t we? I wish I could pay for subscriptions for all the writers I read. I wish everyone who reads my words could pay me for the labor I put into them. I’d like to pay everyone, out of principle and kindness, but it’s part of my economic reality that I can’t. I don’t have that kind of abundance. This is the main reason I figure I will never put anything I write here behind a paywall. I hope keeping the fruits of my own labor free is some kind of compensation for all the valuable writing I consume but don’t pay for.

Choosing to never put my writing behind a paywall is a kind of abundance that’s available to me, in part, because I’ve chosen to live a small life. […]

I will not pretend that I don’t, in some ways, envy what Big Writer has—her wealth and the peace of mind it can buy about a lot of things, mostly—but there are so many other parts of her life I would hate if they were part of mine. I’m so glad I will never, ever have to make a podcast. Or tolerate commentary about my personal life from people who don’t personally know me. Or be unable to go out for ice cream without being stared at or wondering if I’m being stared at or if someone is taking my photo to post in a TikTok. That is some of what her money and fame and success and all that they can buy costs her. I don’t know that I would trade places, even if I could.

There is a kind of abundance that comes from being an unknown. From living a private life. From not needing to care what lots of others think about us. From being free in the ways that matter to us.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What kind of abundance do you want?

i am not speaking
to the paper shredder systems you worship.
instead, i am plucking a dandelion.
i am basking in what cannot be taken.
my gender, a shovel. my words, spilled
so far & so deep that even the birds repeat them.

Robin Gow, a letter to my senator

Why do we say that trivial, worthless things are for the birds? Sounds like a lot of horseshit to me. And that’s sort of where it comes from. Some etymologists attribute the phrase to the shit left in the street from horse-drawn carriages, fit only for birds to peck at. Others find its origins in the Bible.

Well, call me trivial; I’m for the birds. I like to sit outside in the mornings with my coffee and Merlin, trying to spot the birds it hears, especially the piliated woodpecker that lives around here, the goldfinches that are finicky about staying where there’s nothing good to eat, the sweet dark-eyed juncos, and the elusive red-eyed vireos. One morning, I heard more than a dozen different birds, though I feel certain about six of them were a single mockingbird!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Happy Bird-Day

birdsong
so much birdsong

a truck engine
on the busy road nearby

one slowly descending maple leaf

a sense of anticipation

oh, and a hawk

Jason Crane, POEM: in the air (Wed 1:23 PM)

What can I wish on?
My heart is a candle,
flickering in the rain.

Hope, be
as unquenchable
as chives —

as effervescent
as dandelions gleaming
in a bed of green.

Rachel Barenblat, Perennial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, How much do we need to know?

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

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

RM Haines, NEW BOOK IS HERE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, SOMEBODY’S MISSING

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, A Walk in the Woods on Election Day

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

Rita Ott Ramstad, No such thing as bad weather?

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Dark corridors

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

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

Salena Godden, Fear Of The Last Pages

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

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Ann E. Michael, Correspondences

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Deborah Harvey (Nigel Kent)

I have an odd superstition about getting published.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Nature: Poems Old and New

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wren cum Chirothecis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, David Watts

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, No Crying in Baseball

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

Robin Gow, form rejection

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

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

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

Jason Crane, POEM: Avoid The Area

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

Jill Pearlman, The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

We witness the world coming at us—

profits and poverty, despots and detainees.

Galaxies of goodwill and a moon refusing to turn maniac.

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

Fury, forgiveness, and imprisoned humanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Ferguson, We of the World

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Spring

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

Luisa A. Igloria, The Underworld

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

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

like rain articulating
the surface of a lake

we kiss

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

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

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

Everything that brought me to this moment

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Salt Water & Suffering

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

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

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

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

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Woosah!

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

Jackie Wills, Living curtains of vines

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

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

Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.

Matthew Paul, On another haiku by Simon Chard

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

Robin Gow, girl dinner

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

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

Beverley Bie Brahic, Sunday 13 April 2025

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, In Time of War

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

***

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, So can silence

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

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, “The Soul as a Bird”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Billy Mills (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, “Short talk on whatever.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Rest in poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ren Powell, Traveling in Transylvania

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

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

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

Larry Hammer, In Praise of the Toad, Jiang Yigong

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

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

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

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

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

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

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 407: The Second Lamb #NaPoWriMo

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

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

Anthony Wilson, On being useless at social media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Gale, Do You Feel Safe in America?

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

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

Rebecca Loudon, April 12

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

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

Charles Boyle, The Other Other Jack

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

five decades
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird

Jason Crane, haibun: 12 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Salena Godden, Pink Moon

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

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

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon

                Sometimes the moon 
       looks like the flap of a creased 

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Missing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerry Stewart, Look at Everything Twice – Editing

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

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

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

Kathryn Anna Marshall, I have taken my own advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Tom Petty & a Villanelle

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

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

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

It’s tarot weather.

Rich Ferguson, Tarot Weather

This week: painful radiance, a bear-shaped shadow, the sound of the axe, a single brahminy kite, and much more. Enjoy.

The dawn rouses so many creatures.
Watchful, they emerge from burrows.
If one sneezes, they scurry into shadow.
It’s us that award names to the nameless.
Our responsibilities stretch wide and far.

And in the freezing wilderness of Wonderland
Alice clutches at the last straws of light.
Her mother has no idea where she is.
A dog with gravestone eyes lies at her feet.
The Mad Hatter is long gone, presumed dead.
The Cheshire Cat plays the saxophone, alone.

Bob Mee, VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS

On the bus today, I watched a little boy in a stroller, whose mother was ruffling his abundant black hair. He turned his head and looked up at her with such a beatific smile, and she looked down at him the same way — a sort of Madonna and child moment — and I thought of what was going on in Washington and how little it had to do with that, with these most basic ways in which we are human. And of course, it has everything to do with it, if you are one of the unlucky ones caught in the crosshairs, like countless mothers and children in the world’s war zones, or those who fear deportation or persecution.

I’m not watching the news or reading it today. That’s a choice. We can actually limit the extent to which we allow ourselves to be invaded by negativity, threats and pronouncements that may or may not be acted upon, and the resulting stress and spiraling worry they create. I am not advocating putting one’s head in the sand, or failing to name, protest, and resist all the wrongs that we can. However, the period we’re entering is going to be rough and invasive, and our first responsibility is to ourselves and those around us: to be as strong mentally and physically as possible, and to remember and celebrate our own humanity in the face of a darkness in which it’s so easy to become lost.

My primary job, as I see it, is to be a person who carries, communicates, and encourages hope, joy, creativity, and a positive lifeforce — in spite of everything. And this IS a job – it takes work. What helps? Using my senses to pay attention, because there is almost always something life-giving to notice, like the mother and child on the bus today. There is color. There is music. There are words. There’s the smell of food being prepared, or flowers in a supermarket display. There is the cold of winter on my cheeks, and the warmth of the distant sun which can still be felt even in sub-zero temperatures. There’s the taste of coffee, salt, lemons, chocolate. We miss so much when we’re wrapped up in ourselves and our worries — and our screens — and we have to train ourselves to turn back to the actual world, which is right there, existing, waiting to be noticed — full of sorrows, yes, but also full of beauty, joy, and simplicity.

Beth Adams, How to Survive

Remember Spring my love,
hold tight with me.

Look how the snowdrop
umbrellas lime-green down there.

Remember Spring my love,
hold on.

Let me show you sunrise
clementine the sky.

Sue Finch, WHAT WAS I THINKING?

This week I received my PLR statement and it informs me that thousands of strangers have taken time to borrow my books from their local libraries. I am immensely moved by this and grateful. I had no idea. Thank you. 

Here’s a picture of a happy day, this day in January in 2022, when the paperback was in the big window of the flagship store of Foyles on Charing Cross Road. This was a huge moment for me, I recall, I was very excited about it. I have never been in a big shop window before, and this is a particular favourite bookshop I love to visit all the time, especially as a baby poet when I worked and partied in Soho every night. 

I always said ‘one day I will be in that window’ and back then this seemed like a big dream of a thing to say out loud. It was something I really fought for and believed though. I look back and love the punky baby poet who starved and fought for me.

I have to salute her. She, who is not me now. I think about that, how we have to thank our past self. The person who writes the first draft of the book may grow to feel differently about things than the person who signs the published article. The poet that started this WAITING FOR GODDEN blog all those years ago isn’t me now. We are all complex, multi-layered and messy human beings, and all of the eras of you being a human being get you to this place, which is always in the here and now.

I am inside these thoughts and memories and also in the here and now, January 2025, I’m in hibernation and buried in the darkness of January tasks, it is a sad mixture of death and taxes, virus and sickness, bereavement and deadlines, sorrow and bewilderment. 

Salena Godden, Blue January 2025

the plant by my front door
blooms purple every spring
grown from a cutting
from my mother’s garden
who grew it from a cutting
from her mother’s garden
long ago i forgot its name
but never its provenance

Dick Whyte, Nina Catherine Howe – Meditation (1926)

After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog that contains no commentary. That poem was Tollund, by Seamus Heaney. I felt I took a risk in not saying anything about it – I thought readers would be able to join the dots between political events across the pond and Heaney’s description of ‘low ground, […] swart water, […] thick grass/ Hallucinatory and familiar’ which culminate in the self-reflexivity of his final lines, where his group (of friends? family?) stand:

More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad
Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:
And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

Everything in that stanza fulfils what Heaney sets out in my favourite of his essays, ‘The Government of the Tongue‘:

In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

I find it poignant to read it again today, not least because of the person who now occupies the White House, but also because Heaney prefaces his remarks with one of his grittier sentences: ‘Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.’ Again, the links to current events are there to see in plain sight.

The good news is that he does not stop there:

Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.

When you think of hope, what do you think of? I was asked this at about 11.00 on New Year’s Eve, and, introvert that I am, I went blank and have only thought of the answer now: the power of the imagination to strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life – even though no poem has ever stopped a tank.

Anthony Wilson, Ourselves again (again?)

Knee-deep in reflected gold, I wait
for news. Recently, there’s been nothing
but the wish to hang on. Overcome
by the shedding of everything familiar,
 
there’s nothing left; hope’s been and gone. News
will come, and the river will stop running;
everything familiar will be shed,
and each part will fall to meet its gold reflection.

Karen Macfarlane, 6 TIMES (II)

We need to be careful with money. Go easy with food. Cuba is cut off from American banks. We have the money we came with.

But in Matanzas, our room is quiet, except for a bird singing. Tomorrow or the next day, we will swim in the Saturn cave, go to the Coral Beach, and we will see about writing.

I am blessed. Today, a man named Amed drove us here in a classic red ‘57 Chevy.

Despite the struggles of an isolated country, Cuba has light, magic, and music. Where we are sleeping has high ceilings, a blanket, nice towels, and in the morning, there will be Cuban coffee on the rooftop.

Tomorrow, we will swim, and then we will go to the coffee shop in the town square, and we will write!

I am ready for swimming. Writing. Cuban coffee. Cuban music.

In this adventure, I will polish this book, so it shines in the dark.

Kate Gale, I Can Sing for You: Our Adventure in Cuba

That we may escape this American psych ward; this red, white, and blue panic room; big-moneyed brotopia speaking in sieg heils and high-fives. This hot-wired joyride of a truly hot mess; PSA for DOA; all-night fear factory where vindictiveness hosts an open bar. This fork-tongued freedom machine; autonomous vehicle steered by the unseen hands of autocracy; this bad-rappin’ nation where the words ICE ICE baby take on chilling new meaning. This Guernica aneurysm; babel-mouthed alphabet of scrambled belonging. This burn church; this scorched land; this scorched psyche, a Rorschach posing the question, What’s next? 

Rich Ferguson, Red, White, and Blue Panic Room

To live in a city of over ten million people, one bird in the formless murmuration, is to normalize erasure. How easily you stop hearing the noise – of people, of traffic, of need, of despair, of failure, of persuasion; stop seeing movement as individual action: not this person walking, not even that one running for a bus, not a car in a rush hour crawl, not a street dog marking corners and gates and curbs as its own, not the woman with two children, on a rickety scooter, doing a school run. Instead, they all merge into one still background: you disconnect from the city and walk between rickshaws and bikes, sidestepping footpath vendors and the sleeping homeless, brushing shoulders with shoulders and awnings and nameless hurry, comfortable with your thoughts, comfortable in your square of earth, ring of sky, wall-less silo, comfortable in your alone.

Here, in the city, poetry is birthed in imagined silences. On grey canvases. In the belch of trucks. In the queues. In the lifts. In the waiting. In the contrary being. In the pulse of a time that is both tomorrow and yesterday – the long monsoon days both relief and rhythm, the scorching summer both mundane and midwife, the muse as temperamental as the moon, the mind as unwilling as morning.

A single brahminy kite draws slow, taunting arcs over the frenzy. Loneliness, you learn, has nothing to do with the crowds. Clouds have nothing to do with ascent. Peace has nothing to do with chaos. The city, like the word, like the birds, like the night, like the solitude of the moving sky, is within you.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Imagined silences

It’s freezing cold again:
we leave the hot water tap on as a thin
drizzle. All morning, I have felt
the sort of heaviness that sometimes
remains, even after a long bout
of crying. I listen to a livestream
where the panelists speak of ways
we might lift each other up when we
feel like that. One of them says,
hard as it seems, we must laugh
together, even be silly. Feed each
other, come together, hold
each other up. We can still burn
bright as the burning hills. We
can burn even brighter.

Luisa A. Igloria, Monday

I was playing around with the idea of titling a post, “What Will You Inaugurate this Year?” The idea came via my brilliant friend and piano teacher, Susan, who recently told me, Your year—your next 4 years—do not belong to any politician, they belong to you. Following this advice, however, is one of those “easier said than done” things (as a lot seems, lately).

And, as for the lofty title. I find I haven’t the heart to give anyone inspiring advice, not today. To keep it simple, a better title—maybe for my intentions this whole year—is simply, “What Bethany Is Reading Now.”

Of course I have been reading (reading has been my life-line!), but I’ve been too distracted to share on the blog. The main distraction: my 84-year-old husband fell off a ladder and down our front steps. (Throughout a hospital stay, follow up appointments, etc., he has insisted he is fine. No, he has not gotten rid of the ladders.)

Meanwhile…I had earlier committed to several local poets to review their books. Leaving aside large concepts (suggested by Latinate words such as inaugurate), spending some time on poetry sounds good.

Bethany Reid, Taking Leave, poems by Mary Ellen Talley

A friend sends me haiku most days, under the rule that I don’t comment on them because I do that for a living and it can wear me out–it’s a pleasure to just watch them float by. One of the latest was addressed to a black widow living near his bed, informing it that he wouldn’t yet oust the spider into single-degree temperatures. I did comment on that one, remarking that I would not be so compassionate, and then we had a brief conversation about feeling tender-hearted lately. It’s the cruelty of the world, we agreed.

The term is in full swing–W&L starts early so I’ve been teaching for more than two weeks now–and I feel the same way about the students in my introductory poetry workshop, whose first poem drafts I’m writing responses to today. Gentle, Lesley. People are fragile.

I feel some kindness beaming back at me, too, from other people. A former student is teaching Poetry’s Possible Worlds at a military academy (!) and just sent me the loveliest response paper his own student had written about it, commenting that I made myself vulnerable in the book and it touched her, made her feel connected. And then there’s kindness from the universe: a new poem came to me, which hasn’t happened much lately. A good EMDR session made my tense muscles feel softer, as if I am beginning to release that braced feeling I’ve experienced for as long as I can remember.

Lesley Wheeler, Tender and furious

i love that the word “hives”
for the rashes on my skin
is the same as that
of a thrumming hornet body.
i run my fingers
across the raised flesh.
never the same. sometimes
a bracelet. sometimes
just one like an angry lonely star.
my body rejects this world
so it maps others.
says, “here is where
our treasure is buried.”

Robin Gow, hives

A couple days ago, J and I were talking about Dead Poets’ Society, which, to many people’s surprise is not a movie I am enamored with (in a similar vein, I prefer Mona Lisa Smiles so much more.)  Once it was on video, I  remember our sophomore year teacher rolling in the VCR TV on its cart and having us watch it, though I’m pretty sure I had already been writing poetry (or maybe quotes should be around the “poetry” part ) for a year. Since the end of freshman year when we were charged with writing them. I don’t remember what models were give us. Whitman? Dickinson? Frost?  Either way I wrote a bunch–about flamingos, kittens, unrequited high school love. I wrote them out on notebook pages, on pen pal stationery, in the blue lockable diary a cousin gave me for my 14th birthday. They may have rhymed, but it got much worse later on in college. Beyond some Poe in Junior high, I wasn’t that familiar with poetry in general, so its no wonder I was clueless those first couple years. But I was also writing lots of other things–papers on UFO’s, essays on the 1st Amendment that won prizes, flawless 5 paragraph essays, a term paper on Shakespeare’s women, newspaper editorials on environmental issues. And I was reading–still lots of horror and some romance. I still have those early poems, what I’m guessing was most of them in a folder somewhere, though I threw a lot of things away a while back, mostly things that already exist in book form. But I kept all those early fledgling drafts, mostly for my own amusement. 

Kristy Bowen, true north

Sunday morning was cold, and clear. I headed to the theater to help strike the Panto set. The day after a long process is something like the day after a binge. I walked up a narrow space between two office buildings and nearly stumbled on a little ceramic angel, sleeping, head rested on folded arms propped up by a ceramic tree stump. All around him were off-season rhododendron bushes and empty bottles: cheap whiskey, dark beer. He was sleeping. Passed out, maybe.

Is there a word for looking back on an earlier time in your life, not with a sense of loss and longing, but with an objectivity that has your mind bouncing between shame and pity for your former self? Compassion may be years away, but I am learning to stay in the difficult spaces when I stumble upon them: face-to-face with memories that are mine, but that haven’t been polished by my rumination—that haven’t been made familiar. That is what it means to tame something, isn’t it? To be made familiar to it. Can these memories, tucked into my being like parasites, tame me?

Will they break me?

Ren Powell, A Beautiful Life Story has More than One POV

I’ve lost count of how many pieces I’ve read about the powers of going local, connecting with community, continuing to create, not letting them steal our joy and attention, not letting them live rent-free in our heads, not letting them destroy our humanity, etc. and I appreciate the sentiments and where they’re coming from, I really truly do, but…enough, already. It feels a little too much like 2017 resistance to me, if that makes any sense. Like, it all sounds good, and there’s good in doing those things, for sure, but is it really going to do what we hope it will? Any more than our protests and postcards and phone calls and donations have? Does it acknowledge what’s really happening?

Reading these pieces has begun to make me feel not OK (because I really don’t want to go back to 2017 in any way), so I’ve mostly stopped doing that. I seem to have joined a church, despite my atheism, primarily because of their community-based activism and because it’s nice to meet with other folks once a week who share my values and learn new things about organizations doing good work in our city and just sit with it all for an hour in a safe, loving space. (The pastor says my atheism does not disqualify me for membership, so I don’t feel I’m there under false pretenses.) I start volunteering with the library this week and I’m learning how to get involved involved in the church’s projects. I’m greatly limiting my time with social and other media.1 I’m focusing on the day I’m in. I’m reaching out to my people. I’m doing my best to put healthy things in my body and to move said body. I’ve deep-cleaned our house and I’m back in therapy for support with my personal stuff.

These are all good things and I will continue to do them. And I’m still not really OK. Some of that is because I’m in the midst of a personal firestorm—and isn’t that true of many of us? We are still navigating all the hard personal things we always have, but we’re doing it on a foundation that is not what we’ve long known it to be. And yes, sure, the shifting has now been going on for a long time, but it’s suddenly accelerated and there’s just no denying what’s been happening any more.

I’m coming here just to say: We’re not OK. It’s not OK. Something has died or is dying and I don’t know much about grief but I do know that denial is the one sure-fire thing we can do to prolong it and make it hurt even more than it already does. I’m doing the thing writers are often advised to do: I’m writing the kind of thing I want to read. I don’t want cheerleaders right now. I don’t want false hope or platitudes. Don’t you dare tell me that this is all for the best in the long run, or part of God’s plan, or that we’re lucky to have had what we had for as long as we did. Don’t tell me that the country is rotten from the core and it all needs to burn down anyway. There are parts I love. There are ideals I love, as far short of reaching them as we have always been. And even if I can’t name exactly what it is, I know that something precious died this week. (And for the love of anything holy, don’t you dare tell me that it hasn’t. Don’t you even think about gaslighting me that way.) I need to mourn with those who are also mourning, and I want space for all the feelings that come with loss: anger, depression, sadness. I want to rage against the dying of the light. Don’t rush me and those who are feeling as I am to some false kind of feeling better. I’m holding out for the real deal, and the only way to get there is through.

Rita Ott Ramstad, I’m not here to comfort or inspire

Some will look for a way out, an end to history; 
the woman who swallowed pills,
was rushed to the ER with an inked note
pinned to her sad, sallow blouse: 

DO NOT RESUSCITATE if Donald Trump wins.  
That was November, 2016. My doctor-friend had 
his orders: she won; she doesn’t have to relive 
the second debacle. […]

No reason to leave this beautiful world just yet.  
The deep processes of awareness unfinished.
The blanks & pits & recommitment. 
Painful radiance will survive. 

Jill Pearlman, ER & DJT

To the Little British Girl

on Gardener’s World who grew her first garden this year. Your tour of the garden was just what my tired and sad eyes needed this morning. Walking the garden in your pink wellies, you proudly showed the dahlias you grew from seed, the roses you rescued from black spot, tending them with care and fresh compost, the tomatoes (toe-mah-toes) and peppers bursting with life, and everything you declared as “lovely”. Little British girl, you are lovelier than the loveliest flower. Your delight is contagious and a reminder to observe the small things, to nurture the broken things, to share the beautiful things, when we can. Your corner wildflower patch feeds the bees and butterflies just as you, little girl, have fed me this morning. Stay wild, little girl. Stay safe in your lovely garden.

[…]

My garden today is under snow! New Orleans is forecasted to get 4-6 inches and it is coming down hard and fast as I write this. Since I moved here in 1978 we’ve had four previous snows but nothing compared to the forecast for today. The city is shut down including all the interstate highways coming in. It should be interesting and it’s certainly pretty but, oh, I’m worried about my garden.

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): To the Little British Girl

I’ve now posted for 100 weeks in a row!

I’m seeing quite a few writer and poet friends arriving on substack from other platforms, hoping to build an audience here. It might be nice, on this 100 post milestone, to talk about what I’ve learned along the way. […]

There are all sorts of different writers on substack and all sots of different models for writers posting on substack. You have to find the one for you. […] My hot take here is to write what you are already writing. It is far more enjoyable than trying to be what you are not. Substack is a stall for your wares, or a museum for your writing artefacts. It’s another way for you to connect to people, your readers. It does not have to be a whole new fangled sparkly version of yourself, it just needs to be your passion. Look at what is important to you and write about that. I can see the irony in my saying this and then doing a ‘how to write on substack’ post.

Wendy Pratt, 100 weeks of posting on substack

Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical wobbling often made him have to take his seat again; but the humour and mischievous twinkle were as powerful as ever. Over the years, I have to admit it took me a while to really come to appreciate his work; I think I did not really ‘get’ the force of his brevity, his precision. If you have not seen it yet, do watch the brilliant, moving, inspiring BBC programme about him, his life and work here.

Martyn Crucefix, RIP Michael Longley

I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:

Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.

The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.

The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.

Matthew Paul, January reading (2)

The longer poems and sequences based on [Elaine] Randell’s social work experience (‘Along the Landings’, a late addition to the ‘Beyond All Other’ section, and many poems from Faulty Mothering and The Meaning of Things) also show an Objectivist influence, I think, but this time it’s the documentary poems of Charles Reznikoff that I sense behind them. However, she makes the method her own, partly because the documents she’s working with (I imagine a combination of case notes and memory) grow out of her personal experience but largely because she has grown completely into her own voice:

The boy looks at me for a long time studying me;
he says he knows why I have come today.
“It’s about the baby;
he’s cute” he says.
The boy’s long white thin arms are like glass
His face his face his face is totally opened to me.
Is the baby dead now, he asks.
I tell him so.

The almost flat tone, the complete refusal of melodrama, is so perfectly undercut by that gut-wrenching ‘His face his face his face’ in a moment of genuine emotion. And yet, there is always hope, as in these lines from ‘For Andrew and Beatrice’, one of a number of epithalamia that appear in the uncollected poems, which also serve as an instance of the interplay between the human and natural worlds that is another thread running through this book:

We watch as two become constant against the ever changing sky.
Our hearts look up as skylarks greet your steps together.
They, knowing more
radiate their song, soaring evermore in tune.

In her introduction to the 1987 North and South edition of her first prose collection, Gut Reaction, Randell wrote that the pieces in the book were a kind of record of 10 years working in childcare and mental health, and that the pieces are factually accurate apart from the removal of ‘identifying attributes’. She goes on:

The humour, courage, conflict and pain contained in the lives described is clear. The reader may be disturbed by the realities of the facts.

These prose pieces, and the ones that follow in the ‘Prose from The Meaning of Things’ and ‘Uncollected Prose’ sections defy easy categorisation; they are not fiction, not prose poems, not journalism. In a sense, they are like pages from the documents that the poems grew out of. And, as with the poems, Randell avoids the perils of anecdote; these are not neat little stories that point towards the snap closure of an easy moral, she has too much respect for the people she’s writing about for that.

Billy Mills, Collected Poems and Prose by Elaine Randell: A Review

The more you read of Swinburne’s poems to other poets, the more the relationship to Catullus emerges as a kind of model. Here for instance is the end of his poem for François Villon, who died in the mid-fifteenth century, addressed once again as a poetic ‘brother’ across the ages:

Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
      Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother’s name.

When I read Catullus at university — memorably, we were supposed to prepare every one of the 108 short poems for our first tutorial, just a week into term — our prescribed edition still left some passages decorously unannotated and untranslated. Of course there’s nothing like a blank space in a translation to send readers straight to the original, suddenly filled with enthusaism for a spot of unseen translation.5 I was amused to find in my edition of Swinburne that — presumably in imitation of this practice — he does the same thing in the one of his Villon translations. Here is the seventh stanza of Villon’s ‘Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière’ (‘The Complaint of the Fair Armouress’), as she enumerates the physical beauties she has now lost:

Ces gentes espaules menues,
Ces bras longs et ces mains tretisses ;
Petitz tetins, hanches charnues,
Eslevées, propres, faictisses
A tenir amoureuses lysses ;
Ces larges reins, ce sadinet,
Assis sur grosses fermes cuysses,
Dedans son joly jardinet?

And here is Swinburne’s translation, as it teasingly appears in my (admittedly pretty ancient) edition:

The shapely slender shoulders small,
Long arms, hands wrought in glorious wise,
Round little breasts, the hips withal
High, full of flesh, not scant of size,
Fit for all amorous masteries;
** *** ****, *** *** ***** **** ***
****** ***** ** **** **** *****
** * **** ****** ** **** *****?

I love the way this asterixed-out version retains the punctuation and indicates the length of the missing words, so you can have a go at guessing what they might be! (Even if you don’t have a French dictionary to hand, you’ll no doubt have realised that the lines describe the woman’s genitalia.) I’m afraid I know nothing about the textual history of Swinburne’s verse, and my edition is an old one — but presumably he did actually write these lines, which have then been suggestively censored, just like so many school editions of Catullus down the years.

Victoria Moul, Swinburne, Catullus and expurgating Villon

Chopping kindling from
a knotty block … in each stick,
a part of its shape.

James W. Hackett (Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson, Kodansha International, 1996)

The Yorks/ Lancs Haiku group met online yesterday for the first meeting of the year. The theme was ‘winter’ and there are so many good winter-themed haiku that it seemed to take me ages to select one to share with the group. In the end, I went with the above. It’s probably more heavily punctuated than is the fashion these days, plus the syllable count is 5-7-5, although unlike many poems that adhere to this, it doesn’t appear forced. I like it because it encompasses a complete idea – much harder to do, I think, than to juxtapose two images. It’s onomatopoeic too – I can hear the sound of the axe striking. Much of what I read these days is quite minimalist, even by haiku standards, so I’d almost forgotten how much I like these type of poems (fuller, more rounded somehow). So, I’m sharing it again here, in the hope that you like it as much as I do.

Julie Mellor, Winter …

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

Most of my poems have written themselves, honestly. From the beginning it has flowed easily. I didn’t choose this shit, it chose me. I am just a monkey mouthpiece for the ghosts.

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?

Oh no, no notes besides maybe an idea or a vignette. I will write myself a note or an email to remember for later. An example is last night my son turned in his sleep and said “read it.” I wonder what book he wanted read to him? There is a poem there I will have to sit down and write. Once I open up to the subconscious, I just let it go out and direct it a bit and maybe fix a word later. Most of my poems are first and final drafts. I don’t agonize over them at all. They are better when they are allowed to just spring out and splat!

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

With the last two books I had an idea what I wanted to do from the beginning. Sapphires on the Graves was going to be a book of prose poems with very little punctuation and a cyclical and surreal feel. 500 Hidden Teeth began as a project where I was going to write 500 separate poems in one-line sentences. As the book progressed the sentences began to connect and waver and connect again and many of the sentences ended up as groups that could be seen as poems. Yet, my intent is that each sentence is still a poem and the whole book is one large poem. I like the last description best. […]

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

Shit. Like I said I am here for the harpies and the shadows and the veins. I only tell what I have heard in trance. My job is to go into that broken avalanche of ribs and bring out spells and ash. I strive for magic. I strive for honesty. In that place it is all one water.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Scott Ferry

A secondhand bookshop here is selling recent issues of the TLS, North, Magma and Poetry Review for a quid. The’ve all been going for a long time. The TLS (weekly) has one poem and a few reviews. The others are leading UK poetry magazines with articles and reviews. I’ve not read them for a year or so. I found them all a worthwhile read.

• The Times Literary Supplement (a tabloid newspaper) has reviews that always include some adverse criticism. The other mags’ reviews tend to avoid saying negative things.
• Magma’s issues vary according to the guest editor(s) and theme. I read the Physics issue, which wasn’t one of the best. They get 5,000 submissions/issue.
• The North has so much in it that there’s bound to be something to like. They have guest editors. They’ve rejected me the last few times I’ve tried. Decades ago, I used to have more luck – have they changed or have I?
• Poetry Review is the Poetry Society’s magazine. If poetry is going to try to distance itself from prose, then the poems in recent Poetry Reviews show the way. Hit’n’miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn’t like were the discussions, interviews and joint reviews – too much waffle and mutual praise. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned essays?

Tim Love, Magma, North, TLS, Poetry Review

A few years ago I was contacted out of the blue by Michelle Moloney King, the founder of Beir Bua Press. She had read some of my blog posts on mathematical forms in poetry, and offered to publish them as a book. The result was From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry, which was released in autumn 2021, with stunning cover art by Moloney King herself.

Following the closure of Beir Bua Press in 2023 the book is no longer available in print, so I am now making it freely available in downloadable form. I’ve posted the Introduction below, followed by pdf versions of each of the chapters (including an additional chapter on geometrical forms). Enjoy!

Marian Christie, From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry

Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) — who, early in his career, was a math teacher — died just a few weeks ago.  Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work.  My first mention of Holden’s work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 — and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.  

Two of Holden’s mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me — Strange Attractors,  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).

JoAnne Growney, Poet and Math Teacher Passes On

I’m not going to be all evangelical about handwriting vs typing. I have terrible, almost illegible handwriting, but I do both, although it’s probably more typing than handwriting nowadays. However, I still like to make notes for poems and works on paper with a fountain pen. I’d take a photo of my main pen (only because is came up in conversation at work this week), but a) I can’t lay my hands on it now, and b) there’s a purring cat next to me that can’t be moved. I think you’ll survive. It’s hardly a vintage one.

I mention this mainly because I read this interesting article earlier in the week about the apparent decline in hand-writing, or at least wonders if we are…

It’s an interesting, c. 15 min read. The passage below was one that stood out

“When we focus on making a physical object, or on playing a musical instrument, our concentration level is mainly self-directed,” the sociologist Richard Sennett argues. The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. This form of “situated cognition”, as Sennett calls it, takes time to develop. It also forces us to slow down, as we see when we study people who make things by hand. “Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labour,” Sennett told American Craft magazine. “Making is thinking.”

I’m mainly using this as an excuse to post a poem of my own this week. I’ve not got round to asking anyone for permission.

The poem is called Unlimited Texts. It’s taken from Collecting the Data (Copies left, folks…get ’em white they’re hot, etc).

Unlimited Texts, V19, 25.03.23

What does your scrawl even look like these days?
No more chits or kites dropped. No more post-its
hidden in lunchboxes, or weakly glued
to flyleaves. No more doodles by the phone.
We’re pointing fingers and thumbs here and there
to jab and send, send and jab, send and jab:
Get bread. Love you…We need milk. XXX.
I want this written down.

Mat Riches, Hand Wri(ti)ng(ing)

I had a dream in which I was writing the Psalms in uncial script in walnut ink with a reed pen. I had already made ink from black walnuts fallen from a tree in the Bishop’s Palace Garden in Wells. Jane had recently given me some reed pens harvested on the Somerset Levels. I’m using these and a couple of steel-nib dip-pens to write a brief erasure of each of the 150 Psalms, one per page on heavy handmade paper. I’ve progressed as far as no 28. The writing improves as it goes on! […]

drawing with smoke
ten words
found in a puddle

like a magpie
looking for shiny things
in St Cuthbert’s Gospel

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2025

This has been a busy week: I got a crown in my front teeth (sorely needed,) tore my rotator cuff (a first for me,) got new glasses, and did my first live in-person reading in a very long time with three other lovely poets at the brand new reading series at J. Bookwalter’s Winery (fourth Thursday every month, includes features and an open mic, plus wine!)

The reading was Erika Wright, Catherine Broadwall, Michelle Schaefer, and myself, as the featured readers, with John Campos as MC, and a very civilized open mic afterwards. There must have been fifty people in the audience, and I didn’t know many of them, but did get a see a few familiar faces, and met a lot of new ones. It seems there is, after all, an interest in poetry in Woodinville! Catherine, who has two books already, and I both sold multiple copies of our books (which seems miraculous these days) and the energy in the room (as you will be able to tell in the video) was just joyful and energetic. It was such a relief after the relentless bad news (I’ve been trying to avoid it, but it is difficult to avoid it all) to have a moment like this of happiness and wine and friendship and, um, dare I say community?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, New Glasses, Changes Coming and Looking to the Future

In three out of four ways
  this is normal rain
    and all its bombs
      raindrops.
 
But I’m pulled as Yeats predicted.
  Holding on for dear, dear life.
 
Deaf to the need for the sure untrue,
  the caught-on-a-tide, the do-not-do
 
of Lao Tzu, the impossibility
  of joining minds with a family
    sinking in an ancient
      boat.
 
When the word comes down
  for opinion forming,
    pressure applied
      to vote

it’s not the politician in my soul
  I fear as I scratch out my x
    but the imperfect rhymes
      of the poet.

Chris Edgoose, A Political

In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”

What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.

So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.

Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.

I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.

Ann E. Michael, Curriculum vitae

As artists, I think right now there is the inclination to just disappear for a while. And that’s understandable. But also: Shine. Do your work. Share it when it feels good to do so. Put your energy in the right places for you. Go where the love is. Take up space. There’s no one right way to do things. But I do think we have to insist on our presence. We deserve to exist and we make the world a better place. We’re even good for the freaking economy.

Keep making your art, and writing your books. Each thing you make is a lamp.

I re-read Li-Young Lee’s words on writing a poem:

“A poem is a lamp, and it’s got just enough oil to last for you to write the poem down. And when that oil is gone, the lamp disappears, and you can’t translate it to the next poem. There’s just enough oil there to guide your way through that poem — that’s it. The next one you start from scratch.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Shine with Strange Courage

The wonders of modern marketing means the word Epicurean brings an instant association with food and that unique scent of fancy delis which in many ways is an ideal backdrop for thoughts around happiness. Steer your mind from delicious cheeses and odd things in pretty jars for a moment. I’ve discovered something else about Epicurius. Amongst his many concepts and theories is one that seems particularly prescient in the age of social media – a content life can be best attained when one seeks to live without being known.

This idea is often misconstrued as seeking to live in isolation. It can be better described as seeking to live without craving the validation of strangers – a direct contrast to our modern cult of celebrity, influencers and the lure of the like. Understanding that the drive to appeal to whims of those who do not know me can only cause anxiety puts the pull and power of social media into sharp relief. Using this media to gather support for that which I cherish is a risk and one that needs to be handled with care. I am not advocating the abandonment of the internet, or the abandonment of open mics, live readings and performance. I am suggesting that perhaps this is not the way for every poet to be. Of course, publication houses need a writer who is marketable and being an engaging, likeable person who can sparkle at will (however much that exhausts them) makes it much easier to sell books, which is a pretty essential part of being a publishing house.

Despite this economic necessity, a swift glance through the works said publishing houses share shows there are those who do not follow this path and are just as loved and cherished. The pull for external validation has diluted both work and pleasure in equal measure and seeking to shoehorn myself into being someone who sparkles means a detrimental diversion of energy. In a world where everything, from what we grow in our gardens, to our favourite pet to what we’ve had for tea is so very public, making the decision to seek to live unnoticed, to live free from the validation of strangers feels like a kind of freedom.

Connection with others is important to our wellbeing, but contrary to the nature of our ever homogenised world this connection looks different for everyone. Platforms like Substack, where one can choose to sparkle or not, where one can have 20 subscribers or 20 million and still publish are helpful, if used with care. The pull of the like is still there, the articles about how to make your fortune still create the feeling that there’s something else to be done other than enjoying writing, but if those of us who need to can just hold fast to the essence of building a community of like minded readers, of people who know us, then this platform can offer way to connect without sacrificing authenticity. Now I just need to be brave enough not to sparkle and quell the need to see those little hearts light up.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, No need to sparkle, no need to hurry, no need to be anyone but oneself

I saw the sign early,
walking by flashlight, startled
by my bear shaped shadow.
In the summer, I scrambled up the rock face
to gather berries. In the fall,
I fight the urge to hibernate.

We will comment on the coldness
of this winter. I struggle
to stay awake. In my sewing
basket, a small ball of yarn.

I think of my grandmother
who knitted socks of all sizes,
her form of resistance.
I prefer scarves. I have always chosen
long lines: poetry or code or check out line,
a chain to connect us all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem Made of Abandoned Lines

This week: handmade lanterns, no more flowers, gingerbread houses for hurricane refugees, a thousand erasure poems, a thousand haiku, and much more. Enjoy.

new morning / new mourning / images rushing / images merging /

methane-spitting / missile-spouting / forest-burning / cyclone-churning / regime-changing / border-drawing / billion-bursting / record-charting / child-killing / land-stealing / people-hating / people-hurting / power-conniving / poor-starving / resource-extracting / resource-exploiting / post-truthing / deep-faking / lion-preaching / herd-kneeling / devil-dancing / god-watching /

you-consuming / you consuming
as if / you are / removed from it all /
as if / you can be / drinking tea in silence / (feet warm in December)
as if / you are / elsewhere
as if / the news has come / to you / as a curious visitor / from a nameless faraway
as if / the news is not today’s sermon /
as if / a dragonfly goes past / without ever / meeting your eye /

Rajani Radhakrishnan, you-consuming / you consuming

I was standing in the closet on Thursday morning when my phone started screeching. I was confused for a couple seconds; then I felt strong shaking. I quickly crawled under an oak coffee table to ride out a very scary earthquake. Everything rattled and swayed, and in the hot tub, my husband Paul got sloshed around. An hour later, my phone squawked again, this time with a tsunami warning.

But thankfully, though it was a 7.0 shaker just 63 miles away, there was very little damage and no tsunami. The only casualty we sustained was a taper candle that fell over and broke. This was very unlike the 6.4 earthquake here two years ago which seriously damaged dozens of houses, knocked out power to 70,000 people and broke our water pipes, plaster and dishes.

earthquake cleanup
all the cobwebs
left intact

Between the shaking ground, the dark plans of our president-elect, and governments from France to Syria unexpectedly collapsing, much is in upheaval these days. Sometimes it seems the earthquake mantra, “drop, cover and hold on” should apply to the rest of life too.

a long day
of watching the world burn
his steady breathing

Annette Makino, Drop, cover and hold on

I’ve been thinking again, again, about desire, that wanting word, that wishing on a star word. I wish I didn’t desire. Wish I didn’t wish for what I don’t really “need,” a word that, interestingly, comes down by way of a Germanic word meaning danger. So there’s that.

I wish enough were enough (a word coming from a prefix “for” or “with” plus a root from “what can be reached”). I mean, what bounty is mine! (C’est si bon.) But inside me is a rootling piggy, snuffling among the leaves for more more more, for some tuber of richness that will somehow fill me and will never fill me. And I wonder what fills other people.

I observe that for some people, other people seem to fill them — particularly children, particularly grandchildren. Or at least that’s what it seems like from outside, where I stand. For some it’s work. For some lucky few it’s play. For some it’s some deity or other. Or so it seems. Or do all of us nurse a small internal reaching-for?

Maybe, really, we’re all just rootling around in the leaves, and what seems to fill, well, only smooths the edges. I don’t know. Or I’m mistaking myself for everyone else. Anyway, I’m trying to at least sit with my stars, with my reaching hand, sit with the wanting, and feel empathy for whatever it is, this strange hole, the anxious pig.

It is something of this strange wanting that informs, I think, my interest in this short essay by Lindsay Stuart Hill I encountered in Plume Poetry magazine. Plume Poetry clearly sees it as a prose poem, but its effort is, I think, an essay in nature, essay from the French meaning to try. The author articulates an experience from her childhood that has haunted her, and in the act of describing hopes to, but fails to exactly identify what the experience did to her/for her, how it filled her, momentarily, like a hand full of star. I like that it leaves the experience still a mystery, that the effort toward naming fell short, remained a reaching toward. A snuffling around.

Marilyn McCabe, the light from a match struck in the dark

At the end of their lantern walk, the four family members are standing in their yard with their handmade lanterns under a black sky—clouds having obscured the moon and stars—and they decide to experiment by blowing them out one by one to see the change in the light.

Then, when only Sylvia’s lantern is left burning—five year-old Sylvia who had been worried at the start that the little tea lights wouldn’t be bright enough to walk by—the four stand quietly around it for a moment until she begins to move toward the house and they all follow, “huddled, peacefully around the single little flame of Sylvia’s lantern.”

The story ends with the words, “A little bit of light, it was enough to lead them all back home.”

I’ve been holding this story, this query, these past few weeks as the nights have lengthened and cold has finally settled over NC’s piedmont region. The question of how much light we really need feels deeply personal this week as I grieve the unexpected death of my oldest friend, and attend to my father in the hospital. The question is also collective, as so many of us process the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and what the results are likely to have in store for so many vulnerable people (both human and nonhuman) and places, grapple with how to live in the metacrisis, and take stock of how we arrived where we find ourselves.

The truth I’m holding is two-fold: that we often need less light than we think we do, and that we could also sure use more than we have.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, How Much Light Do we Really Need?

And also, look at this bowl on display at the Met Museum. It was made in ancient Egypt using clay pulled from the banks of the Nile. Someone posted a picture of it on BlueSky two days ago and it’s all I’ve been able to think about. Look at its little feet. They point inward so shyly. Look at how the bowl tips forward as if to say, here, I’ve brought something for you to eat. I’ve ordered two copies of the bowl from the Met’s online shop. I woke up thinking about the bowls on their way to me and smiled. I keep thinking about an artisan working their hands over clay pulled from the river bank, making little feet with little toes simply because… well, because it felt good. Because it made them smile. I keep thinking about how that artisan’s joyful work has reached me through time and space. I hope my joyful work travels like that one day.

Saeed Jones, Joy in the dark is a candle.

At the end of his life, my father needed antibiotics and possible surgery. He walked into the hospital with his DNR. He was in a lot of pain and had been for years. He was dead in a couple of days. He lay pale on the hospital sheets, Dilaudid dripping into him.

That’s not how I plan to go. I hope to live long, writing, walking my dogs, threading my life with my children and my eleven friends, remembering that I came out of the fire to find stories, and I don’t have to live in pain. I can breathe.

Everything in America tells us, “Be afraid, be very afraid.”

Breathe, I tell myself. You got out. You’re going to be okay. Keep on writing and swimming. Your kids turned out alright. America may seem like an emergency, but keep breathing.

America is so much more dangerous and beautiful than I imagined it would be when I first walked out of the cult with my dog. But I am so much more powerful than I was as that child, with only a sleeping bag, dog, and harmonica.

Kate Gale, The Body Won’t Stop Keeping the Score

Every so often I look at what I’m writing, what I’ve just written, or if the inclination takes me I look a little further back, and see nothing that’s any good.

It’s not something to worry about. Doubt is good for any writer. Sometimes you have to stop what you’re doing, or attempting to do, examine and assess it.

And sometimes when you look at it – or when I do – I see nothing to recommend it, which is exasperating and destructive. Often the mood passes in a day or so, some kind of constructive force returns, and I crack on again.

This time the doubt has lasted longer. From being positive enough to think about one final collection in book form a couple of weeks ago, in a matter of hours, or a day at most, now I look and think ‘What’s different about it? What’s the point in it that makes it anything other than the dreaded run-of-the-mill?’

I don’t write because I have to, but because for more than fifty years it’s been the most appropriate way for me to find a creative response to the world’s madness, chaos, joy and loveliness. It feels right. Yes, I can paint a little bit, draw a little bit. Yes, I like taking photographs that speak a little bit to me at least. It’s writing, though, that has drawn me into it and made me explore the furthest.

I wasn’t bad as a journalist. Was neither a great writer, nor a bad one. I learned the craft and stuck with it until it earned me a good living.

Poetry has always been a more uneven ride. I threw all the early stuff out. By early, I mean everything until I was almost fifty. More recently, perhaps because of the impending sense of mortality, I’ve kept it on here. Even the experimental, hit-or-miss stuff that sometimes comes from stream-writing that can appear like notes for several later poems, I have let run and have allowed it its own space.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I relapsed into the state of mind that shouted out ‘oh, for goodness’ sake, this is all rubbish, delete the lot and start all over again – or not’. Only the fact that it’s so laborious to get rid of every single thing with the ‘Move To Trash’ process has stopped me doing it. I’ve also taken the time over the last year or so to copy all of the poems longhand into large notebooks, so would have to sling those in the recycling bin as well, which might be more difficult to handle.

Bob Mee, A HEALTHY DOSE OF DOUBT

I have a new book almost ready to go.

It is called ‘Lightwork’, and includes some of the poems I have written since
2017. This seems like quite a time span, given that my previous collections
‘The Sun Bathers’ and ‘The Great Animator’ came out within 3 years of each other.

I was fortunate to have a slim book of translations published in 2019, but this new book of poems will have been eight years in the making. For someone previously used to writing and editing quickly, this really surprises me.

I suppose there are several reasons for the slow-down, one being that I haven’t been in a hurry. I became very interested in the benefits of meditation, and also rediscovered the joy of other creative outlets, such as playing music and making paintings. I’ve also been busy enjoying my job, my family, my friends.

At one stage, I think I lost the motivation to get a book together, and despite having enough material that I liked, was even thinking of not taking up the kind offer to publish. I wondered if the world needed another book from me; would anyone be interested, was it any good? During a concentrated period of reflection, I had deep philosophical conversations with myself as I worried about the role of my poems as ego gratifying vehicles. Then I stopped worrying and overthinking.

Roy Marshall, New Book in the New Year

I was reading Exit Opera, Kim Addonizio’s latest book of poems, when I came across the following lines from “20.5 Light Years from Earth:”

“Sometimes writing feels so stupid I think I should get out into the world & do something

like repairing fountain pens, milking snakes, something useful—

sexing chickens, dyeing lemons—fecal pathobiologist is another job I could maybe do

if only I would slide off my couch & stop reading & writing so much.”

I have days like that too. I think about all the time I’ve spent agonizing over the placement of a semicolon, or whether a title made sense, or if x was a relevant metaphor for y. I ask myself, why am I doing this? What use is it? Does anyone really care?

Then I ponder the random collection of skills I’ve accumulated over the years of my life and wonder if any of them could be called “jobs.” Maybe a few; none so weirdly offbeat as the list in Addonizio’s poem. But I’m wary of turning hobbies like gardening, sewing, or drawing into a job. That seems like a sure-fire way to take all the fun out of an activity meant to be joyful. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in Four Thousand Weeks, “The capitalist pressure to commodify your time robs your life of any meaning and renders you almost incapable of conceiving activities that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all.”

Being a poet is not always fun or joyful. It’s not rewarding in any conventional way. But the unconventional rewards are endless. It’s the best way I know to make sense of things, to stay in the present, and to resist the capitalistic urge to monetize every minute of one’s life. It forces me to be patient. It sends me on quests for just the right words, phrases, or forms. It teaches me to heed my dreams.

Erica Goss, Why I love being a poet

The tenth poem in our Palestine Advent series is by Noor Hindi.

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying, by Noor Hindi.

Noor Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. Her debut collection of poems Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow was published in 2022 by Haymarket Books.

Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 10: Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying, by Noor Hindi

I really loved this poem [“Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” by Noor Hindi], and in many ways I agreed with it at the time, by which I mean I could feel it, feel where it was coming from and could say “yes, I feel that way too right now.” At the same time, I’m a poet who frequently writes about flowers and the moon, and a lot of things that seem cliche or banal when held up against the ongoing suffering that people perpetrate all over the world. I wrote the poem not as a way to argue with the Hindi poem, but more to ask myself, “why do I write poems about flowers when everyone is at war?” I went back and forth about whether or not I should include a nod to Noor Hindi’s poem in my piece. I decided against it because I didn’t want anyone to read my poem as an attempt to negate or disagree with Hindi’s poem, which I deeply admire. I do, however, want people to read Hindi’s poem, which is why I am sharing it now.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Bird Ate the Last Hate in Your Heart

I’m intrigued by Philadelphia poet Stephanie Cawley’s latest full-length poetry collection, No More Flowers (Raleigh NC: Birds/LLC: 2024), a collection that follows My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here], a manuscript chosen by Solmaz Sharif as winner of the Slope Book Prize. No More Flowers is constructed through three untitled clusters of poems, bookended by the three-page extended poem, “Loom,” and nine-page extended poem, “To the Lighthouse.” “The machine weaves cloth / so a woman can write / a poem.” begins the opening poem, “Loom,” “The machine weaves / so one woman can write / while another woman // wipes the first woman’s / baby’s bottom.” There’s an emotional rawness to these poems, one that overlays a craft that displays a lyric comfort, and an ease, as the poems in No More Flowers write of resistance, endurance, survival and simply making it through.

“I didn’t want to write anymore about fucking.” the poem ““Normal Life”” begins, “Someone died. Someone was always / dying. I was writing about fucking probably right when somebody died. Ground / down to paste, my tooth grinds. I finally broke into the prison, the poet’s last tweet / before she dies. I slide into the tub, salt the water so I am a chicken in broth. My sad, / little heart, I think.” I like the way Cawley layers a Leonard Cohen quote over thoughts of sex and death, rippling echoes across a prose poem held by lyric bond. There’s an urgency across Cawley’s lyrics simply for the absence of it, writing an exhaustion and a grief that permeates every poem, every line. The poems are constructed across an attempt to articulate and construct a life, blending intimacy with public declarations, realizing the only way inside might be all the way through. 

rob mclennan, Stephanie Cawley, No More Flowers

On Sunday, I read poetry at “Songs for the Grieving, Poems for Peace” – a gathering of Calderdale folk to express solidarity for Palestine, and to raise money for grassroots projects. For far too long I’ve avoided the news from Palestine, skipped over adverts from charities pleading for money. Yesterday, instead, I listened to Mohammed, who left Gaza City after the invasion, and I heard from the women of the Battir collective, who joined us via a live Zoom link. The connection was poor, and translation was difficult, and there were children shouting and playing in the background in Battir and in Todmorden. The women looked tired, and sad, and cold – and strong. And they smiled and laughed, and talked about their beautiful UNSECO-listed village, and its aubergines, and they shared pictures of the marmalade they make with oranges from Jaffa, and Mohammed told us about Kill Zones, and the death of his friend, and the grassroots projects he is fuelling with his grief. […]

For those of us who have never lived in a war zone, it’s almost impossible to imagine life in Palestine. But we have all experienced fear, and grief; we’ve all experienced hunger, cold, pain. Perhaps we can start there. Perhaps less predictable are the smiles, and the children and the marmalade, and how the women from Battir stayed online to listen to poetry in English, and to hear Sonya singing about comets and love.

A Rose Shoulders Up

(by Mosub Abu Toha)

Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.

As I planned my short reading, I thought of Naomi Shihab-Nye’s Gate A4, with its story of human kindness in unlikely circumstances – And how those small but significant acts can stand their ground against what sometimes feels like a deluge of horror and despair. “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world” – and so it felt appropriate to create a shared reading, matching every poem that I read with Mosub’s, and finishing with a group poem created in the hours before the event.

Clare Shaw, Not Everything is Lost.

My last post (here) generated some intriguing feedback and was cause for further reflection about revisions, at least on my part. Because I was writing a poem for a specific person–my son–I got useful information from his response, as well as responses from other readers; so I had the chance to hear back from my audience, however small, and to compare reactions. My son, the “you” in the poem, told me he liked the descriptions and that the piece did a good job evoking the atmosphere of the experience he’d had. He liked the closing lines, too. However, he said that while he had some moments of anxiety during his stint on the military ship, his overwhelming feelings cantered more toward frustration and an almost-constant irritation. He thought I had focused over-much on the anxiety aspect. “Though a person certainly could be feeling exactly that way in those conditions,” he added.

And that’s fascinating, because in earlier drafts I did not work toward evoking anxiety; I was trying to get the details right and to create a sense of annoyance, even anger, at the situation. (Apparently, that is closer to how he responded.) Here’s the “BUT”–but those revisions weren’t making the poem work any better. This is a challenge for many of us writers: when the impetus for writing the poem, and the initial intentions of the writer, don’t resolve into a good poem…and then some alterations–some “fictionalization”–make a better poem, but maybe not the poem the poet set out to write. Do we stay with our initial idea and keep whaling away to make it work as we initially imagined, or do we let the poem move into new territory somewhat removed from initial inspiration if the resultant revisions are more powerful, more believable?

I’m inclined to go with whatever works to make a stronger poem, most of the time. There are other options, though. Sometimes I end up with two or more poems stemming from the same initial idea. A bonus! One prompt I have occasionally used for myself is to re-write an earlier, less-satisfactory poem from a different viewpoint or to focus on a different aspect of the experience. This practice has been awfully helpful, and it keeps me from getting over-invested in the more obscure, personal components of a writing piece.

Ann E. Michael, Whatever works

John Polwhele was born in about 1605 and died in 1672 — he came from Cornwall, and spent most of his life there, settling in St Erme with his wife Anne Baskerville after a few years first (probably) at Exeter College, Oxford — the traditional college for students from the West Country — and then at Lincoln’s Inn. Other than that, we know almost nothing about him. All that is left is a single notebook, inherited from a friend, Joseph Maynard, probably in the later 1620s — Maynard went on to be rector of Exeter College, Oxford in the 1660s. I first looked at Polwhele’s notebook either as a doctoral student working on Ben Jonson, or immediately after my doctorate, when I was a Junior Research Fellow (a kind of post-doctoral position) in Oxford, rewriting my PhD dissertation as a book. At first glance, it is rather unprepossessing. These are the opposite of neat drafts, and even at his neatest Polwhele’s hand is best described as a scrawl […]

Once I began transcribing him, though, I was won over. Some of the ‘voices from the archive’ that you encounter in manuscript are so vivid and become so real that it is almost like a kind of relationship, and I think this is especially true when you work over a long period of time on essentially intimate documents like this notebook, which were obviously never intended for circulation. I have gone back to Polwhele repeatedly over the last twenty years, and especially to his impassioned translations of Horace and Boethius made during the English civil war.

Victoria Moul, No more of this ear-lecherie!

Michael Hofmann’s Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems includes four pieces by Georg Heym – not bad for someone who died at the age of 24 (in 1912 – an accidental drowning in the frozen Havel River, probably while trying to save a friend). Heym is generally regarded as an early Expressionist writer (of poems and short prose/novellas), though his early poems are very much under the influence of Hölderlin, then much of the surviving work suggests the powerful influence of Baudelaire (in both form and content), though in his final months there seems to have been a return to the looser forms of Hölderlin. His best-known poems combine a gothic, morbid imagination, often with extremes of Expressionistic distortion, with a counterbalancing devotion to regular forms. The sonnet ‘Berlin II’, when it appeared in Der Demokrat, in November 1910, led to the publication of Heym’s only collection published during his lifetime: Der ewig Tag (The Eternal Day).

Antony Hasler’s translations, published by Libris in 2004 (Hofmann also includes translations by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, and Christopher Middleton), are the best to be had at the moment and I’d definitely recommend searching them out (Libris has since folded). I’ve been in a bit of a translation lull for a few months so thought I’d try a few of Heym’s poems myself. The challenge is to make something readable in English, while not toning down the dark brutality, yet also staying close to his classical chosen forms.

Martyn Crucefix, Translating Georg Heym’s ‘Berlin II’

A new project in which I plan to create 1000 erasure poems—drawing on haikai and haiku poetic sensibilities—from Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s metaphysical classic, A Thousand Plateaus (tr. Brian Masumi, 1987). Follow Deleuzian Haiku on BlueSky for regular updates.

“The only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted. Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted… A system of this kind could be called a rhizome.” (D&G, p6) […]

      #7

chaosmos
rather than cosmos . . .
the cry of a rat

Dick Whyte, Deleuzian Erasure Poems Vol. 1

On my birthday this year, I started what would become my first successful completion of the Buson Challenge, in which you write 10 haiku a day for 100 days. You can read more about my 2024 experience here: Buson Challenge Blog Post.

I didn’t create the Buson Challenge; I learned about it in a talk from Failed Haiku founder Mike Rehling in his 2020 presentation at the online Haiku Society of America annual conference. You can watch the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ozWETA0PeQI?si=T6hpIGni8rfPMl_R&t=939

I’m planning to start 2025 with another round of the Buson Challenge. The biggest thing that helped me was having a group to work with. Our regular check-ins made me want to push through on the tough writing days; I didn’t want to have to come back to the group and say I didn’t get my writing done. We didn’t check in every day; we came and went as necessary.

While I connected with fellow Buson Challengers through the Station of the Metro Discord, you don’t need to join that to participate. There are lots of communication channels in the world, and I use most of them. So if you want to take the challenge with me starting January 1st, 2025, just shoot me a message. I’d be happy to have you write along with us.

Allyson Whipple, Let’s Write 1,000 Haiku in 2025

I’ve been on Substack for a year and a half, exploring how this platform might differ from the blogs I’d written for decades. The move to Substack, with its option for “paid subscribers”, has prompted me to reflect deeply on what feels right for me—what supports my poetry and playwriting goals, and what is worth your precious time. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the shift from writing purely for personal reflection to publishing with readers in mind, crafting work that resonates and engages without relying on an editor to curate my choices.

During this year and a half, I’ve also been updating Finding My Bearings Now, a raw and unedited account of navigating life after a breast cancer diagnosis. Writing that diary has helped me reflect deeply on personal experiences while offering support to others navigating their own health challenges. It has been a grounding space, providing me with the clarity to approach Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen with an increasingly professional focus.

This platform has shown me how my authentic interests—some of which once seemed unrelated—have converged. Poetry and nature’s metaphors have always been central to my work, but I’ve come to see how deeply they intersect with theater. Aristotle defines poetry as mimesis—a reflection of nature—and he saw theater as the embodiment of this principle. We understand the natural world through human metaphors and the human world through nature’s metaphors. And, unlike other art forms, theater exists only in the present tense—expressed by living, breathing human bodies, in a shared space. Also in this way, are nature and theater inseparable.

My time on this platform, as both a reader and a writer, has given me a clearer sense of direction. With that, I’m excited to relaunch Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen with a new name, new features, and a clearer focus. Welcome to Dramatic Roots.

Ren Powell, The Second Act

I not only want to get back to blogging, but also some poetry writing and submitting.  The places where I submit are getting fewer and fewer–submission windows are open and closed more quickly, and there are fees I’m not willing to pay (and more and more journals asking for more and more money).

Let me record some of the poetry ideas I’ve had.

–I’ve thought of my series of poems about Noah’s wife who has made life changes after the Flood (that flood that required Biblical Noah to build an arc); one of my favorites, “Higher Ground,” appeared in Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, and you can read it in this blog post.  I have also written poems about Cassandra, as a way to talk about climate change, and one of the more recent ones I’ve written imagines Cassandra living in the mountains.

Revisiting these characters in light of Hurricane Helene seems promising.

–I’ve also been contemplating my Facebook feed, which is full of people constructing gingerbread houses alongside people rebuilding houses wiped out by Hurricane Helene floodwaters.  My commute to church in Bristol, TN takes me through some severely devastated areas, where nothing is left of homes but rubble, and I can’t imagine they will be rebuilt.  It seems there should be a poem there, but I’m not sure I can pull it off.

–I’d also like to get back to a daily practice of shorter poems and observations.  I need to train my attention again.  Happily, I’m teaching literature classes this coming term, which always helps me return to poetry roots.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Goals in the Waning Year

I recall the days of yore when I had a dozen daily blogs, each catered to someone’s complaint or wish. That is someone said at general blog, like the food stuff, focus on that. Or I despise foodies. Or, never mention the scourge of pets. And I’d trot off and make a spin off blog to accommodate those 10-second commenters. One for selfies, one for vegan cooking, one for general photographs, one for life minutia, one for poetry, one for flash fiction, one for dreams, one for my sock puppet musings, one for cat, one for reflecting on people who influenced me, one for hm, was it twelve? It was a lot of verbiage at any rate and bending over backwards for diminishing returns.

Now I’m still spread far but don’t spend much time on the computer or on the internet. I’m at a few places, sorta, sorting out what they’re about. I’m hoping Pinterest might serve the function of Instagram so I can leave the Meta-empire. I’d rather someone bought Instagram from them. I’m monthly or so at substack but I’m not finding things to read. Some post too often too much. I skim at best. Which is something but I’m in the mood for deep dives, immersions in worlds.

I like books is the thing. I have hundreds of books I haven’t yet read the first time.

Pearl Pirie, On my rambles

I’ve been avoiding blogging—so much for my goal to do 52 blog reviews in 2024. (For this, I forgive myself.) On the 11^th, which is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth, I thought it was time, and would take my mind off my mind. Well, I’ll do it on the 12^th, I told myself yesterday. And now it is the 13^th.

I read a friend’s substack. She sends me to a post on Radical Acceptance, which I badly need. I see that I’m behind in reading her posts—long, personal essays that ought to be collected in a book—and so I spend the afternoon reading all of her recent posts. I wish I could write something so personal, so dense with emotion and pathos and history. I wish I dared.

What exactly is it that I’m avoiding?

Two books I have been re-reading: Edward Hirsch’s splendid How to Read a Poem (Harcourt, 1999), and Patricia Fargnoli’s Necessary Light (Utah State Univ. Press, 1999). These, perhaps more than anything, help.

“Poetry puts us on the hook [Hirsch writes]—it makes us responsible for what we might otherwise evade in ourselves and in others. It gives us great access to ourselves.”

I wrote this passage into my journal on 16 November and didn’t add the page number. For the last hour, I’ve thumbed back and forth, back and forth through the pages and can’t find it. Plucking it from my journal, retyping it for you, offers a glimmer of understanding. I begin to imagine that I could write about what’s troubling me. It’s a first step.

Bethany Reid, Necessary Light

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more.

Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural act of courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature — that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light.

To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough.

The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”

Maria Popova, How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love

Last week I recorded my poem ‘Snow’ in celebration of its publication in the Black Bough Christmas & Winter Anthology. I have received some lovely comments about the reading and there is a real joy for me in being able to do this and to see how far I have come in building my confidence to record my work. The Black Bough anthology includes a wonderful range of writing, and I always feel proud to be in the pages. Last year it allowed me to set down on the page our family tradition of The Man in the Moon which began when my sister was little. In evenings in the lead up to Christmas I would take her out for a walk to breathe the magical air of Christmas and as we were walking the Man in the Moon would send us clementines. They always tasted extra delicious from being out in the cold.

Sue Finch, DONNING THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS FOR SHENANIGANS

Carol Rumens is widely known for her excellent Poem of the Week column on Guardian Books, a vital window into the world of poetry for many, but she’s also a very fine poet in her own right. Her latest pamphlet, Mind’s Eye, Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan, is a fascinating sort-of conversation with the German poet in two parts.

The first section, ‘Notelets’, consists of a dozen ‘short letters to, or about, Celan’, two of them being free translations of poems of his. Part 2, ‘Dialogues’, ‘takes the form of a conversation between Celan and an imaginary poem of his, un-titled and unfinished, but keeping him company during his last years of mental illness and suicide’. The quotes are from Rumens’ ‘Forenote’ to the pamphlet.

The ‘Notelet’ poems move between present and past, with, for example, current events in Eastern Europe echoing Celan’s own lifetime:

Russia. Snow. Ukraine. Once more you pale
through whirling snowflakes towards me.
I know I know you, word-ghost never met.

Elsewhere, she puns on Celan’s poem ‘Corona’ to introduce another contemporary angle:

Now in the wreathing of years
the word breathes differently –
a virus old as love and new as every
lover’s new mutation.

These are letters from the present to the past, and both times exist simultaneously in them, allowing Rumens to engage with Celan in his own time and as we might read him now. 

Billy Mills, Recent Reading December 2024: A Review

The title of Irish poet Billy Mills’ new volume, a book of sounds, is a paradox. A yoking of opposites, a kind of Metaphysical conceit. A book is, literally, soundless : an archive of mute poetry. The poet underlines this with an end-note, quoting American composer Charles Ives in a preface to his own work : “Some of the songs in this book… cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are : that is ‘in the leaf’; and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.”

The poems in a book of sounds are indeed muted. Brief phrases, preternaturally quiet, simple. Each page enveloped in a wash of marginal white space. This is where they work their miracle. In such quiet, sober seclusion and near-silence, the reader’s mind and heart find rest. Not escape, but a steady, clear-eyed recognition of our human condition : on this planet, in this present time.

Henry Gould, Peaceful Wonderment

I’m so happy to have a new review of Martha Silano’s latest, the winner of the Lynx Prize, This One We Call Ours, up at Mom Egg Review. It’s a wonderful collection and I hope you take the time to read about it—a call to action about the environment, apocalyptic and fierce. Here’s a short excerpt:

While Silano’s previous books have dealt with similar subject matter – physics, biology and the end of the world, the science of human psychology – this new book make the danger that shimmers in the background of her other books more menacing and urgent.”

As much as I liked this book, I know Martha’s next book will be even better. Happy Holidays!!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, My Review of Martha Silano’s New Book on Mom Egg, Holiday Lights and Holiday Celebrations with a Full Cold Moon

Today is the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her work was often nature themed which is what draws me to her poetry. As someone who finds comfort and inspiration in nature and gardening, I feel a kinship with poets who feel the same, like Emily, like Mary Oliver. […]

Leap, I think, That’s what they’ve done whether by choice or by push, they’ve all taken the leap into death. I walk through the cemetery reading tombstones of people who are now ghosts before finding Emily Dickinson’s grave. Removing my gloves, I pass my hands over the headstone inscription, Called Back, while leaves in the red oaks seem to whisper the words like a lullaby as they rub each other gently, reverently in the breeze. Suddenly Emily, my labradoodle, gives a little yip and lies down with her head on the grave. I read online that Emily became more reclusive after her dog’s death and once said “They are better than Beings – because they know – but do not tell.” My Emily rolls over the grave, leaps up with an excited bark, and runs through the long grass while the oak leaves sing.

Charlotte Hamrick, Celebrating Emily

We didn’t get the DYCP grant for Planet Poetry. ‘Other applications preferred.’ Not unexpected, but still a blow. Still, our first two episodes of Season 5 are up – Danez Smith and Isabel Galleymore – both definitely worth a listen if you haven’t already. In the latter, I read a poem by Indy Moon who was one of the Foyle Young Poets winners this year. I went to the awards celebration at the British Library last month and it was a lovely celebratory event.  Indy is one of many names to watch out for in the future. 

Robin Houghton, How the collection is going, and other news

If print is no longer king, where’s that defunct webzine who published a couple of my poems a few years back??!! 

We’re so immersed in digital worlds that we often forget just how unstable and temporary the internet is. Even fully funded websites can disappear soon after they run out of money to pay for hosting, unless they’re lucky enough to be archived by the likes of the British Library. Still, at least I’ve still got my copies of printed mags stretching back to the 1990s…!

Matthew Stewart, If print is no longer king…

The exercises in the writing class feel like a portal. I am writing like I never have. For days in a row, I wake up and make a mental list of things I want to do, and then I spend the whole morning writing instead. I am writing about things I’ve never written about, in ways I’ve never written. […]

In her work on inspiration and creativity, Elizabeth Gilbert conceives of ideas as “disembodied, energetic life forms” in search of human collaborators who can manifest them.1 I am not sure of that, but I recognize my recent experiences in these words of hers:

But sometimes – rarely, but magnificently – there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defences might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organise coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you towards the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.

And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?”

The past few weeks, I have recognized this invitation, and I have been considering my answer to it.

In the past two decades, the years since the publication of my only book, I’ve gotten a few such invitations. It wasn’t so much that I turned them down as that I couldn’t find a way to accept them. It became so painful to let those opportunities go that I changed my address and wrote “Return to Sender” on the few that managed to find me anyway. I told myself I didn’t want to accept them, when the truth was that I just couldn’t.

I don’t want to do that this time.

I am realizing that I no longer have time to fuck around. I am no longer in mid-life. I’ve already had my second chances. I might still feel much like the girl I once was, but I am 60 years old.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Getting small to go big

Before I started writing this particular post, I read Karen Walrond’s latest post on her the make light journal. She says, as always, a lot of really timely things but because I’ve also been thinking about the ratio between what we consume and what we create this stuck out for me: “And so, in the interest of full transparency for 2025 and beyond, you can expect me to be creating more than I consume.”

I want to read more books than things on a screen. I want to disappear for longer intervals. I want to give, but I need to make sure I fuel myself with good work first. When I share something I want to be more mindful: is this helpful? is it beautiful? is it fun? I want to be more useful. I know the world is heavy and fraught and full of news so brutal that if you have half a heart it will break you. I don’t think we can or should look away from the things going on in the world, but I try not to read the same story ten times, you know? as happens in newsfeeds.

Have we all been thinking about how we share our artistic gifts, online anyway, in the age of AI? Rumi as translated by Daniel Ladinsky: “They are a good secret to keep, our gifts. When you can. A mystical awareness becomes more natural.” And, “Creation needs someone who is truly humble / and cares about love. Otherwise, its walls would / decay.” And isn’t this something to remember too? The element of being truly humble when we create. The element of love. Authentic art is real art, is love.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Twenty-four Pencils

there is nothing hungrier than a gift shop.
desperate. a forced smile
inside a disposable camera.
we roamed the aisles. shook snow globes.
saw our reflections in the wide windows.
all the ways you can say,
“do not take me home.”
we waited for the sun to emerge
dazzling & wearing everything i wanted
but could not keep.

Robin Gow, gift shop

In the future that’s ours, every day

we’ll learn with growing clarity the way
the smallest bones in our bodies are knit

to every possible articulation of thought, how
they want to bend to the honeyed moods of light.

Luisa A. Igloria, In the Future that’s Ours