This week: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.

This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.

In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.

I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:

“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?

And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]

Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up

Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.

Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]

A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.

Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings

Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.

What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.

I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.

One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.

I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but

1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.

2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.

A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.

I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).

Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

It’s beginning to flood, my foot
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me. 

Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends. 

Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes. 

We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same. 

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

the buddha in the window well
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.

These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman

As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]

As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain

If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.

Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.

Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!

The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.

But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”

Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…

Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.

Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”

I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.

Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

[…]

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review

Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.

Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

looking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:

blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wall

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

ch-                         ch-
click                     of cows                     moving
up                         chalk                         downs
and me in the dip
gathering sun

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflection

This is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:

hear      the       chalk       rabbits
beneath       the          mountain
&    thru    the mountain    &    pray
&     ray     to     the     mountain

(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.

The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:

Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.

There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

i find myself craving primordial. to chart
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.

Robin Gow, 5/31

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.

On bark cliff faces,
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem.  Here are the opening stanzas of  ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022  issue.

Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.

He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)

I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.

One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:

I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski

I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.

I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.

I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.

With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.

When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.

When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]

Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

How to explain to someone else
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.

Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.

Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.

The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.

At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.

Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.

We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.

Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community

My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?

Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.

Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: notebooks full of angel drawings, a dream of burning, forced dactyls, a springboard to spring, and much more. Enjoy.

Do poets tend to have managers, or at least drivers? I think we should be issued with one for gigs and the like. It may stem from me not being the best driver in the world, but I drove back from a reading in Faversham last night and it absolutely horsed it down in stair rods all the way back. There was an hour and a bit I wouldn’t care to repeat in a hurry…

I am always grateful for the gigs, but that’s the second gig now in a couple of weeks that involves travelling an hour or more in each direction.

Two weeks ago it was a trip to Chipping Norton to read at a lovely gallery there called Art & Talking. […] It’s a 150-mile round trip to Chippy and back for me… However, I got to read for the first time in a beautiful venue, I got to read with the wonderful Laura Theis and Robin Vaughn-Williams again. Robin puts on a great night….The open mic readers were also excellent. My friend’s teenage daughter told me I wasn’t as boring as she thought I would be, so I’m calling that all worthwhile.

Mat Riches, The Great Song of Indifference (and Engines)

At my desk I drink my coffee, check my diary again and work out how many hours I need for the other non writerly stuff in the week. This week I have emails to answer, a small pitch to put together and a meeting about a future work project that I am trying to pull together. I also have a couple of requests for brain picking sessions from emerging writers who want advice because they are writing in similar fields. I do these when I can, but I can’t always do them because it sacrifices time from my own work. I always feel guilty turning down endorsements and blurbs for exactly the same reason, and invitations to read at events from tiny organisations who don’t have a budget. I do them when I can, but I can’t always do them.

Then to work. I have to put my phone in a drawer otherwise every time I get frustrated I will look at it for the quick dopamine hit of watching cats do stuff. I am addicted. I cannot stop at one cat video.

On my notice board I have this quote by Hilary Mantel – my notice board is a shrine to this god of writing whose wise words have gotten me through some awful blocks:

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”

In my case other people include cat videos.

Wendy Pratt, Day by Day: My Writing Week

Looking at my notebooks full of angel drawings and asemic mark making, I’m sure the average person would see a sort of madness. I prefer to concentrate on the meditative quality. But maybe the marks are a kind of refusal. (To be anything less than completely human). The more marks I make the more I realize that it is impossible to make the same mark twice. In fact, I’m generally trying for a unique mark/scribble. Some days the marks are responding to a piece of music I’m listening to but other times, I’m notating the silence, or the sounds in my skull. They are a ravelling and an unravelling, a joy, a calm, a human touch. Sometimes deliberate, sometimes wild, or thoughtless, beyond thought, a flying, a soaring, a darkness, a skating, a tangle.

Shawna Lemay, With No Illusions But With Some Joy – On Asemic Writing

It’s so hard to focus these days, and find a rhythm of living that is not disrupted by fear. I mean we all should be feeling fear, but also hope and joy and solidarity. I hope you are all staying as safe as you can be.

One thing that helped me recently was to do an event at Clio’s with the DSA and the Oakland Education Association Rapid Response Team, a group of Oakland educators organizing to protect families from ICE. They organize community patrols and raise funds to provide legal aid, click here if you want to donate. Just being in the room with with people who are taking action and being in solidarity felt good. Zeina Hashem Beck, Jason Bayani, and Sara Borjas gave amazing readings. I read some poems too.

Another thing that helps is to read a poem closely, and just sit with it. I’m getting ready to teach an on-line class on Tuesday on how to read a contemporary poem, which in some ways is an absolutely absurdly vast subject to even begin to approach. But I have some thoughts of ways to do it. Reading closely for me is always the way I get back to writing. For me, reading poetry is really about accepting and embracing and getting excited about what is challenging, unexpected, new, different. Reading poems has changed me. I feel like if everyone read poems there would be less evil in the world. I realize that’s naive, but I can’t help thinking it.

Matthew Zapruder, Reader, You Already Know

There is an intervention by poets to be made, into the fiction-led “should writers read” debate and the “should writers read for pleasure” sequel. It should have something particular, and not only concerning that poets don’t get paid very much. It should also consider Donald Davie’s dictum that there is a group pressure to remain at the level of the skilled amateur – because for them, and you can detect this in many blurbs that aren’t (soi-disant) political, everything is “reading for pleasure” if they read other poets at all. For the practitioner of the ancient art, there is definitely reading for fulfilment, for a guide to living, and living must include pleasure. I wonder too about suggesting a new category for the current debaters of “reading for morality”, which is what enables us to sift among people who make political speeches and also to act locally (which will affect the personal anecdotes in our own poems but also guide us in making narrative without it always having to be politically exemplary – whatever that is – line by line). Regardless of all of this, what of seeing the poet made to struggle by their poem – not with the poetry basics, but with a form they could handle easily if it were inert? An oeuvre entirely composed of good poems that are totally commonplace workmanlike in the idiom of a century or two up to the day is unlikely to survive. So is the struggle crucial, and how do poets do their reading of other poems to aid the struggle only of not writing badly (not, per se, every time the political struggle nor, as with fiction, “good writing”/the saleable)?

Ira Lightman, READING TO WRITE POEMS

On a news channel someone says the President
is planning a gigantic triumphal arch
and wants an airport named after him.
(Of course he does.)
Wind rattles the windows.
I think ‘OK, I need to get work done’,
open the laptop, remember once
a Buddhist monk told me
in a station waiting room
life requires no explanation.

Bob Mee, HARPOONING PRAWNS IN A WOK

Look at this picture from the gold medal winner for women’s figure skating, and her celebratory leap in the air. And if you haven’t done it yet, watch Alysa Liu’s gold-medal winning skate—I promise even if you don’t like skating, it will inspire joy. If they don’t cut it, you can see how afterwards she curses as she celebrates, as well as hugging the bronze medalist and swinging her around in a spontaneous hug. It reminded me of the poetry world, how we need to celebrate our wins with this much joy, and the wins of our friends and colleagues.

On that note, AWP. I’m not going to be there this year, as I am instead taking a trip home to Cincinnati to visit my father, who is ill, and family. Which is not to say, I will not miss seeing my friends. But AWP can be a lot even for completely healthy young people, much less people with disabilities and illnesses that tend to flare up under stress. And right now, I have to prioritize family, and if I only have so much strength, energy, and money for travel, I’m going to choose home over a conference. If you’re going, I hope you have a wonderful time, and post lots of pictures. […]

I […] had good news from my poet friend, Kelli Russell Agodon—she got her first poem in the March issue of Poetry, “Trying to Sext My Partner, Who Replies ‘I Can’t Get My Camera to Work.’” It’s not up on their web site yet, but I got my issue and so Charlotte the literary kitten and I had so much fun reading it.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Missing AWP? Me too. Celebrating Wins, New Glasses, and Quail

I stopped going to AWP when I had a baby and haven’t attended since. For many years, I blamed new motherhood for my lack of attendance. But I am no longer a new mother. And yet, I still have not attended the conference.

It is only now, in writing this, that I think I understand the true reason. In 2014, my last time at the conference, I was genuinely dismayed by how little attention was paid to the serious crises within academia. So much so that I was compelled to write an open letter to AWP: Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts.

Since then, the conference has improved somewhat in this regard. They have incorporated one or two panels on the subject of adjuncts. There is also now an AWP Writers Adjunct Caucus. Yet largely, the conference remains dedicated to pursuing one’s own personal career ambitions—publishing, getting an agent, improving craft, enriching one’s pedagogy.

Meanwhile, 70% of the academic workforce is now contingent labor. Many adjuncts are earning less than minimum wage. Since I published that article in 2014, conditions have only gotten worse. Adjuncts still report juggling several teaching jobs at once, working for poverty wages, and avoiding hospital visits for fear of financial ruin.

According to the Higher Education Inquirer,

Pay and Financial Security: Poverty Wages Become the Norm

In 2006, Hoeller reported that Washington community college adjuncts earned just 57 cents for every dollar paid to their full-time colleagues. The disparity persists—and in some ways, it has widened. Today, more than a quarter of adjuncts report earning under $26,500 a year, below the federal poverty line for a family of four.

According to a report on The Impacts of 2020 on Advancement of Non-Tenure Track and Adjunct Faculty,

The pandemic…increased career insecurity for non-tenure-track faculty in ways that are more subtle but equally important. For instance, when institutions extended tenure and promotion clocks, they often failed to think about the implications of moving online for instructional and research faculty.

All this and yet I’ve yet to see a single panel dedicated to the kind of structural changes that would improve the material conditions of grad students, adjuncts and non-tenured professors. These might include sessions on how to create a grad student union, how to obtain health insurance as adjuncts, how to organize a sit-in at your university for increased teaching stipends (as former Gulf Coast editors and students at University of Houston successfully did).

But no. Such panels do not exist at AWP. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of panels dedicated to political engagement. We can learn to “write resistively” or learn “Cartooning at the End of the World.” We can discuss “Editing for Community and Change” or “Strategies for Navigating Organizational Change.”

But, it seems, what we cannot, must not, should not ever discuss is the broken system staring us all right in the face. Perhaps it’s not very sexy to have a panel dedicated to collectively organizing for health insurance and a living wage. Or, maybe such panels might not be very welcome by those who actually sponsor the conference.

Becky Tuch, Q: Why does AWP barely touch the crises in academia?

Lately, I’m trying to find enough mojo to send out some poems. My thinking is that given current circumstances, having poems in (mostly) online journals offers more possibility that someone, anyone, will read them. Poetry like most arts is communicative, so poets need readers; I treasure my readers, but they are few. I love books, but my books do not sell well. That means the poems don’t reach an audience. This blog doesn’t have a host of regular readers, either, though there are some stalwart followers for whom I am immensely grateful. Then what are a poet’s options? Small-press publication (let’s hear it for those wonderful folks!) and self-publishing can get you the physical book, but for readers you have to do a ton of self-promotion. This is a skill I have never developed and that I do not, at my age, wish to learn. Besides, I am out of the job market now and have no need for a CV full of publication credits.

But I read literary journals. My colleagues in creative writing read literary journals. Some lit journals continue to produce paper issues, bless them, but more of them post poems on various social media platforms, where casual viewers might run across a poem and–who knows?–read it! Therefore, it seems to me that’s what I ought to be doing: getting my work in magazines, large and small, local and international, professional and amateur, one poem at a time as a kind and careful editor decides my poem suits the journal. I think that in 2026, more poems reach people online than in books. Am I wrong about that? I guess I could research that question if I really want to know.

Of course I love books and will never stop reading them, poetry books and other kinds. Of course I would be thrilled to have another book in print if the manuscripts I send out ever were to find homes. However, probably my focus this year will be on the more ephemeral but wider-reaching media forms. I want to remind myself that I write because what I want to say may be valuable to someone other than myself; might strike someone as beautiful, sad, or wise; might make someone think in a different way or learn something new. Poetry has always done that for me, after all.

Now if only I can generate the mojo…

Ann E. Michael, Midwinter mojo

I’ve lost my enthusiasm for all things writing, except the actual writing. I’ve barely tried to get published, picking publications and press that I have a connection with or that I really want to get into, mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness of getting rejections year after year. I’m determined that eventually I’ll find one they like. 

My poetry collection that was accepted in 2019, and delayed and delayed, will never be published, at least by that press as it is closing this year. The editor had long gone silent to my queries, so I stopped trying. I continue to occasionally send out that collection and my others to different editors, more out of habit than with any hope. 

Mostly now, I think of my collections as a record of my life and thoughts that will never really be shared until I’m gone, like my writing notebooks and my diaries, just a bit more thematically organised. And the thought of not publishing them doesn’t really bother me. […]

I wrote or finished 73 poems in 2025 which is higher than average for me, as most were written for a specific collection that will probably never be published. I’ve had an urge to write unusual love poems, so I’ve just gone with it. I think it’s complete, but as is my way, I will continue to tinker with it for a long while yet.

My new writing practice routines means I’m writing regularly, even if only just a few notes or scribbles. I try and draft out at least one poem a week, not necessarily a good one, but it’s a nice feeling on Sunday to have something typed into my drafts file. […] I’ve gone back to the process, what I love about writing, the slow accumulation of ideas, words on the page. 

Gerry Stewart, Sweeping Away the Last Clutter of 2025

Under my bangs
this smudged and gritty
cross a remembrance:
A dream of burning, my very
bones done in.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 1

Unbidden, I imagine
a womb

fashioned from
blue, purple, and crimson cloths

(knitting and weaving:
women’s work)

twisted yarn like blood vessels
intertwining, carrying blood

back and forth, looping in
the lungs of all creation, nourishing

us in this nest
where if we listen, really listen

we can hear the heartbeat
of Shekhinah.

*

Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of Terumah in the book of Exodus.

Rachel Barenblat, Mishkan

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with my writing – (as in Dr. Frankenstein but using a journal and pencil in place of electrodes and lightning) – and it’s opened doors and closed windows for me. I’ve discovered a great deal in the power of words, but I’ve also found new rivers in myself. And that’s felt good.

I’ve spent the last two years moving into hybrid work – fusing genres, blurring lines – or that’s what I’m telling myself. But, it seems to be working on several levels. There’ve been a few falls from cliffs, of course, but I keep moving.

I’m more open to ideas, less controlled. A statement by Stanley Kunitz – “A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of” – has been a map for me. I apply his notion of “secrets” to all the forms of writing I’ve been working in – poetry, essay, cnf, flash.

I also hear words by Flannery O’Connor in this – “I write to discover what I know”. My own writing does reveal layers of self – layers I didn’t know were there, but they were. They’ve always been there. Waiting.

So – we wait – for the writing to appear. And, we never know when that’s going to happen. Of course, I’m meaning the moments of writing that lead to discovery – not the day-to-day writing, in whatever genre … the time set aside or found to allow the drafting to move forward. Writing with no plan, no agenda. Putting words on the page – or screen.

Sam Rasnake, The Experiment: Finding the New

Like all endings, endings in poetry are often caught between two extremes. It is tempting to slam the door too hard, or to slink out so quietly nobody notices you’ve gone. They are all the more difficult, I think, when a poet is writing in so-called free verse, though ending a (so-called) formal poem isn’t exactly easy either.

Perhaps, like all the best endings, the best endings in poetry aren’t endings at all. Looking back at the poems I wrote about on this blog last year, one thing I notice is the way in which they each close with musical and metrical effects which ring out after the poem is over: Thomas’s misty counties, Brooks’s twinklings and twinges, Masefield’s long trick, even Larkin’s whispering trees. Here is the final stanza of ‘Why Brownlee Left’ by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, its abandoned horses staring out beyond the last line:

By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

The horses can’t quite move forward into the future they’re gazing at, but they keep moving all the same. They seem to be caught there forever, shifting their weight from foot to foot. And one way in which Muldoon achieves this effect is by setting that ambiguous image, the not-quite-ending, off against the ‘closing’ rhyme which, again, is only half a closure (foot to / future). A half-rhyme is all it takes to set the thing ringing. Muldoon makes it look easy. It isn’t.

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry of Departures

In the 1970s, I didn’t know poems could speak to my life as a young woman. I’d never heard a contemporary poet read in person. That changed in college when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. Later, hearing Gary Snyder read about wildness and Gwendolyn Brooks describe love “like honey” made me realize poetry could be a living, breathing force. I wanted my students to feel that too—and to find the power of their own voices.

I also wanted to bring in some of the magic of InsideOut, the Detroit poets-in-the-schools program founded by Terry Blackhawk. I invited local poets from the University of Michigan or visiting writers passing through town. We hosted all-school readings, performances, and a beloved event called “Shorts on the Ledge,” where students read brief pieces from a hallway ledge during National Poetry Month. We partnered with Jazz Band, Dance Body, and the annual Art Show. We read poems on the first day of school and at graduation. Whenever the school gathered, we offered a poetry prelude.

In 2011, a colleague and I opened our classroom once a week for Poetry Club. We advertised in the student bulletin, hung posters, and I brought homemade cookies or muffins. Our formula was simple: read a poem, talk about it, write, and share. Students came because they needed a place to write what they wanted to write in school.

Fifteen years later, the club is thriving. In the early days, we begged for five or six students; now a dozen come regularly.

Creating a High School Poetry Club: Why and How – guest post by Ellen Stone (Trish Hopkinson)

When I was at school, the English department ran a (voluntary) verse speaking competition, in which we, well, spoke verse, competitively. It was immensely absorbing. One year, I did ‘Death, be not proud’ (alas, when I tried it just now, I only remember the first quatrain). Another year, I did a passage of Paradise Lost, (ending ‘Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms’) now lost to me. I knew other sections of Milton at university. I performed in several Shakespeare plays, and remember a fraction of them now, though I know my way around Hamlet reasonably well. In those days, though it was never a formal requirement, I took memorisation seriously. I once knew the whole of Ode to a Nightingale…

It didn’t all vanish, thankfully. And the poetry I learned subsequently has largely stayed with me, and I slowly add to my stocks, meagre though they are. (One thing I can recite in full on demand is Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, of all things.) I decided several years ago to start memorising more, (including several poems by Robert Frost, which I used to say by heart to my children when they were little), and though I am, and always have been, an insufficient pupil, bad at schedules and consistency, I am not entirely failing at that endeavour even now, though I do far too little.

Last year, I memorised ‘Daffodils’ by Herrick. I am currently learning ‘My true love hath my heart.’ Alan Lascelles, Private Secretary to King George VI (and also to the Abdicator—hiss) knew Gray’s Elegy by heart, as, once, did so many English school boys. Lascelles was appalled to learn that the king hadn’t even heard of it. Perhaps I shall learn that one next. I am resolved to take memorisation as seriously again as I used to at school. (Join me!—though you should expect me to fail!)

Henry Oliver, George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.

The students look at me as if I’m the lab
animal in the crate, and they’re the scientists

circling the room with clipboards and pens.
I dearly want to know: what will it take

to kindle a fire, get them to care
about stories and poems, warm up

to metaphor and meaning? Toward the end
of the session, they shut their tablets

and zip backpacks close, heave out of their
seats and walk out of the room— expressions

mostly unchanged as I erase the board, return
the matchstick to its box marked “strike anywhere.”

Luisa A. Igloria, Strike Anywhere Match

This scene was outside King’s College Cambridge yesterday [photo]. Typewriter at the ready, the poet offers the public a “Poem on the Spot”. No AI.

Today I went to Huntingdon, about 30km from Cambridge. They have an alley of murals I didn’t know about, featuring T.S. Eliot, William Cowper, Lucy Maria Boston, Henry of Huntingdon, George Herbert and Samuel Pepys.

Tim Love, Street Poetry

I am currently on hiatus from daily poems in favor of hammering away slowly [at] plays as I try to increase my skills there, but will be making an e-zine in March of the Bluebeard poems (and a special print book object edition for Patreon subscribers, so keep an eye out for that.) You can still get in on the action there before the end of this month and land a signed copy of CLOVEN and my little 2026 desk calendar featuring collage work. This was a small print run, but I hope next year to make both a spiral-bound calendar and a desk standing version.  

Tuesday, we are headed to Steppenwolf to see another Strindberg play, Dance of Death, which looks to be about a contentious marriage, which fits well as I am finishing up a first draft of the Chopin adaptation.  This week, we also have new bookshelves arriving to deal with the living room situation, in which they are basically collapsing under the weight of way too many books[.]

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 2/22/2026

How easy it is to build a house from the pieces at hand. A mini table here, a houseplant and storage boxes there. With glue, scissors, pencil, cardboard, wood. But who says it couldn’t look completely different? Each little house remains one model among many.

marks
on the new floorboards
years ago

How many variations could be created? Imagine them in a single line. The judges enter. Point with their fingers. Take notes. Look concerned. Smile. Move back and forth.

How easy it is to read the room but forget the house.

Kati Mohr, Compass Needlework

I’m fascinated by the potentially infinite array of how literary influence shapes writing. How could American short story writer Lydia Davis, one of the most striking prose stylists of the past few decades (as well as one of my personal favourite writers), profess that the late Connecticut prose poet Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the most important writer on the development of her style? Whatever overlap between their work might exist, one of these things is not like the other.

One of the first of my contemporaries I encountered with a personal library as large as mine was the late Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), and there was something both striking and wonderfully exciting upon realizing our libraries had little to no overlap. From what I could see, only P.K. Page’s Hologram (1994) was the exception, although I’m sure there were others. Based on her library alone, one might gather that Uppal’s was a literature fueled by a narrative lyric with a more European base, offering a heft of titles by Guernica Editions and Exile Editions, which sat as a counterpoint to my own, rooted in 1960s Canadian postmodernism: west coast TISH poetics, Talonbooks and Coach House Press, into the prairies and south, towards Black Mountain, Richard Brautigan and the San Francisco Renaissance. I remember thinking how glorious it was to see a collection so wildly different but equal in scale, and the two in counterpoint suggested to me the mark of a healthy, vibrant literature: knowing these alternate perspectives were both held in high regard. If you want a quick overview of how any writer is shaped, head straight for their library.

Of course, influence is rarely a straight line. A collage, perhaps, or a constellation. I remember a conversation with Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961-2022) and Ottawa poet David O’Meara, back when O’Meara had that apartment in Ottawa’s Lowertown; how they both swore by John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” as collected through his 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). I remain baffled by their attachment to the work. I’ve also never understood how anyone could enjoy the poetry of Don Coles, another poet I know admired by Heighton and O’Meara. What am I missing? The years I’ve attempted to return to the work of Robert Duncan, unable to grasp the appeal, despite admiring the work of multiple writers who swear by him; despite my holding Duncan’s contemporary and compatriot Jack Spicer as such an important poet across my own trajectory, as well as Robin Blaser, the third in their triumvirate of American poetry and poetics. The San Francisco Renaissance: Spicer, Duncan and Blaser. What am I missing?

In some ways, I find Davis citing Edson reminiscent of longtime and former Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler who once offered that he could see how the works of Vancouver poet George Bowering or Montreal poet Artie Gold influenced my work, but couldn’t understand my attachment to the work of the late prairie poet Andrew Suknaski. I mean, I thought it might have been obvious, but I suppose not: I came to Suknaski through the work of Dennis Cooley (and other prairie writers, I’m sure), latching onto Suknaski’s self-described “loping, coyote lines,” and quickly realized an affinity to how he returned to writing on the histories and complications of his geography-of-origin, a geographic and cultural space that had not yet been articulated through poetry. This is where I might point to the crowd, and bellow: I say “Glengarry,” you say “Wood Mountain.” A chant begins.

rob mclennan, Lecture for an Empty Room

For former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, it took nearly 50 years of listening to the deepest, locked-away part of himself to address the profound abuse to which his Catholic parish priest subjected him when Krapf was a child. During the period of that abuse, the priest took the photograph that became part of the cover art for Krapf’s 2014 autobiographical collection Catholic Boy Blues (Greystone Publishing), and gave it to Krapf’s parents. That haunting photograph, an evocative visualization of the painful words comprising Krapf’s poems, contains both dark secret and starker truth. Krapf wrestles with both over the course of his four-part collection by assuming four dramatically different yet intertwined voices: the boy who suffers sexual abuse, the man who sets upon the “healing journey” that requires reconciling the boy he was to the adult he became, the priest whom Krapf allows to engage in dialogue with the boy, who finds in himself the extraordinary courage to speak back once and for all, and a wise figure Krapf calls “Mr. Blues.” The latter speaks in four voices, too — friend, advice-giver, counselor, mentor — that if they could be sounded as one, might best be described as “savior,” for Mr. Blues ultimately helps the boy Krapf was and the man Krapf is today to “break free” of “the language of pain” to sing as “one with the spirit inside me” where hope and forgiveness, even love, reside. Mr. Blues teaches boy and man to see that

there’s always a hopeful boy inside the man. Deep down lives a hopeful boy inside the man won’t quit fighting till he comes out best he can.

In that final “Love Song for Mr. Blues” from which the above lines are quoted, we find all the reasons Krapf is able to survive his harrowing journey.

*

Catholic Boy Blues, the twenty-sixth of Krapf’s more than 30 books, is dedicated to “my sisters and brothers of any age in all lands abused by priests or other authority figures.” As anyone knows who pays even slight attention to the news, especially over the last two decades, an enormous group of Catholics and former Catholics — Krapf now known to be among the thousands of primarily male adolescents abused — suffered a profound silencing, because of the presence of priest-pedophiles in the Church. Krapf movingly describes that silencing:

Not even the great
visionary wordsmiths
Isaiah and Jeremiah

had to find words
to tell their people
how it feels

for a boy
to be so defiled
by a priest

that for fifty years
he keeps his mouth shut
even to those he loves.

~ “Not Even Isaiah and Jeremiah”

In his acknowledgment in the Preface that his “responsibility and mission as a poet” oblige him to share the “dirty little secret” with the public, Krapf, born in 1943, bears startling witness to art’s power to save when, as the persona Mr. Blues says in “Mr. Blues Wakes Up,” we can “sing it straight.”

Maureen Doallas, Norbert Krapfs ‘Cathlic Boy Blues’

Part of the reason why Isobar is a vital press is because [Paul] Rossiter has a clear purpose in mind for it, a purpose with three parts or strands. The first of these is to bring into English the work of key 20th century Japanese poets who have been generally neglected, poets like Yoshioka, Kiwao Nomura, Rin Ishigaki and Sanki Saitō (to name just ones that I’ve reviewed). Many of these poets engaged with western poetry; Yoshioka translated Rene Char, who was a key figure for Nomura, and Ishigaki was also clearly influenced by surrealism. Equally, the VOU poets were clearly in conversation with western concrete/visual work.

The second strand is the publication of English-language poets who live and work in Japan, and who engage, to one degree or another with Japanese literature and culture. The result is that Isobar books are a venue for cross-cultural fertilisation in very real terms.

Glasgow–Tokyo Line by James McGonigal and John Pazdziora, subtitles An East-West Hyakuin, fits perfectly into this strand. A hyakuin, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a 100-poem renga, or linked verse, written collaboratively by two or more poets turn-taking. There are rules or conventions to the form that McGonigal and Pazdziora follow, with one key exception; their collaboration was not in person and limited to a single block of time, but extended and conducted through email.

Another interesting aspect of the book is the blend of languages, with most of the text being in standard English, with a healthy leavening of Scots, and the odd hint of Japanese included. This has the effect of making it seem like there are more than two voices at play at points.

The linked verses hover around the passage of time, the seasons, mortality, impermanence and, ultimately, cyclical renewal.

Can fresh leaves foretell
the snick-snap of garden shears
on October days?

There’s a sense of the human integrated with the Buddha nature of the world:

Stretching for plums, my fingers
greet a snail. Good day, neighbour.

Billy Mills, Several Isobars: A Review

I love this love poem, the “philia” kind, dear old pal. Nostalgia in its “algia,” an ache, but funny and odd, in the way that old friendships and memories can be. There is a helplessness to it, how the speaker is awash in his own foibles, ones that he knows he can admit to this old friend, who likely knew them all too well, and maybe had a few more. It cracks me up. It makes me sad-laugh, laugh-cry, this apostrophe, which is a strange word for speech or a poem addressed to a person, as its etymology lies in words meaning “turning away from,” but is also used to describe an indicator of possession, as well as an indicator of something missing. Which also makes me sad in a isn’t-that-funny way.

Marilyn McCabe, the fate of the cruel & unusual

How should I be? is the question I’ve been asking myself these last two months. If my lifespan is now counting down in years or months or maybe even weeks rather than the decades I expect we mostly luxuriate in imagining, what is it I should do with a day, an hour, a breath, a synapse? What should be my mindset, and the means by which my time—imaginary god—is made? Thus far I have tried: pious, melancholic, pragmatic, defeated, paralyzed, depressed, and, simply, numb: unfeeling, unthinking, if-I-don’t-move-nothing-else-can-go-wrong. Those of you who know me in real life can probably guess that none of these has fit particularly well.

One must have a mind of winter I thought to myself yesterday, getting dressed for a run, and as I ambled along in safe-heartrate-zone I found myself transfixed by the verbs: to regard, to behold. Stevens was an insurance executive, and legend has it that he’d send a page down the street to the library to copy out definitions and etymologies of words he was turning over in his mind whilst writing policies and other boring business things, a fact I take to mean: there is nothing accidental about any word that turns up in one of his poems. It’s not simply that one must accept one’s circumstances in order to understand them so much as that one must accept them—develop a mind for their reality—in order to see them clearly and thus to hold them in esteem, to see what is remarkable, what can be held dear, no matter the odds.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

In addition to showing us that grief is both a complex shared and unique emotion, Webb suggests that there are many forms of loss, just as complex and difficult to resolve. in She called her Melanie we meet the unresolvable loss of a mother who gave her child up for adoption; in New and to him who came from my body we find the loss of a way of life experienced by a mother on the birth of her first child and the loss when that child gains independence; and in  If only you didn’t have to shove your living in my face we find the loss and ultimate recovery of self-respect during and after an abusive relationship.

There will be many potential readers who have experienced grief in their lifetimes: it is an inevitable consequence of having loved.  There will be much to connect with for such readers in this collection. However, like all literature worth reading, Webb offers us fresh perspectives and insights, deepening our understanding in emotionally intelligent poems of great skill.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Grey Time’ by Julia Webb

Among the poems one really doesn’t expect, there’s this: a poem about Christ’s forty days in the wilderness by Robert Graves (1895–1985). Graves was young when he published the poem in his second collection, the 1918 Fairies and Fusiliers. He’d been through the war, become friends with the poets Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), and published his own war verses. (In 1985, a memorial was placed in Westminster Abbey for the poets of the First World War. The long-lived Graves was the only one left to attend.)

He had yet to write his memoir of the war, Good-Bye to All That (1929) or his strange book about poetry’s beginning in worship of a divine mother figure, The White Goddess (1948). His best-selling historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, wouldn’t appear till 1934 and 1935.

In 1918, for that matter, Graves had yet to make a public point of his loss of faith. By 1948, following James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Graves would insist in The White Goddess that “Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.” In Today’s Poem, “In the Wilderness,” however, Graves emphasized not the personality but exactly those mythopoeic elements of Jesus. (He would later call it his “last Christian-minded poem.”)

His fantastical account of that mythopoesis is aided enormously — turned nearly into an incantation prayer — by the rhymed two-stress lines of the poem and its forced dactyls. The meter quickly turns artificial, standing outside the natural words to become the kind of musical chant we know from nursery rhymes and counting games.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In the Wilderness

[Geoffrey] Heptonstall explores the nature of storytelling and how a narrator can try to influence a reader to draw a desired conclusion. However, a narrator can’t control a reader, especially a reader with an enquiring mind, who reads and sits with what they’ve read to bring their own lived experience to the text and question it. Ultimately, Heptonstall also questions what truth might be. A narrator doesn’t tell the same story twice, placing emphasis on certain details can tailor the story to a different audience, who, for cultural or personal reasons, might need different arguments or persuasion to see the narrator’s viewpoint. “The Truth on the Tongue” is a quiet, thought-provoking collection that aims to recreate the sense of timelessness that is an audience listening or reading a tale.

Emma Lee, “The Truth on the Tongue” Geoffrey Heptonstall (Cyberwit) – book review

Last week I was struck by the wording of a Latin memorial composed in the 1660s by Payne Fisher — once Cromwell’s poet, though glossing over that phase for obvious reasons by 1665 — for one Jane Robinson, wife of Thomas Robinson, protonotary of the Common Pleas and prominent member of the Inner Temple. Jane died in November 1665, aged 49, of metastatic breast cancer. Most unusually, the memorial specifies the disease and even how it was treated:

Septendecim Annos
Cum Marito suo suavissimè feriata est,
Et ab Ipsius sinu demùm malevolè divulsa est
Per MORBUM CANCRALEM.
Cujus infandos Cruciatus postquàm diù victrix pertulisset,
Et Laevè Mammae detruncationem
Intrepidè passa fit:
Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo,
Et vitalia validiùs invadente,
Fato concessit:

This means:

For seventeen years
she rejoiced most sweetly in the company of her husband,
and was at last cruelly torn from his embrace
by CANCEROUS DISEASE
after she had long victoriously endured its unspeakable torments,
and had intrepidly suffered the amputation
of her left breast:
when the old disease returned (after an interval of six months)
and invaded her vital organs more powerfully,
she yielded to fate.

This describes a mastectomy — surely a very horrible business indeed in the 1660s, without any anaesthesia — that Jane surprisingly survived, followed by a recurrence of the disease, which spread into her vitalia, i.e. her interior organs. This seems to describe metastasized cancer, recognised as such. Although general statements about the courageous endurance of suffering are quite common in elegies and memorials, this sort of detail is unusual and must have been requested specifically, presumably by her husband.

Fisher’s inscription is prose, not poetry, though it is densely rhetorical in a way that we might associate more with verse. The pronounced alliteration for emphasis — as at Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo, / Et vitalia validiùs invadente, is typical of Fisher’s style. In any case, the distinction between Latin prose and verse in this kind of text was fuzzier than you might think: the mid- to late seventeenth century saw a particular vogue for a kind of free verse in Latin that was related to the fashion for the ‘literary inscription’. (I’ve written about Latin free verse and related forms before here.) Fisher, who had a sharp ear for a new trend, was rather a pioneer in this form. Back in 1651 he composed an elegy for Henry Ireton the Latin of which is a very early British example of this kind of free verse. The parallel English version uses rhymes, and indeed it is parallel-text examples like this help to demonstrate that this sort of Latin was understood as verse, rather than prose.

Victoria Moul, Dying is a difficult enterprise

“The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

At one point in March 2024, I copied these words into a yellow notebook. It was the spring of Larry Levis; azaleas aching to bud, stammering possible colors in the margins of former journals. I remember thinking spring would destroy me, as it does annually, gutting me with its flushes and fevers, distracting me from the needs of surrounding mammals. Each day lengthening by inches of light. Moths moving like nocturnes near the doors. And Levis’ poems garlanding the floor of the porch with their gentleness…

WOUND

I’ve loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight

on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.

Like the ravish of spring, Levis seasons his stanzas with unremitting tenderness for life, the sap-work of being. I return often to his “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” for the momentum it accrues as it winds down the page, working the space between the biography and the apologia:

I also had laughter, the affliction of angels & children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then
You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free
In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
Either because no one else could hear them, or because
No one else wanted to. And, mostly, because they know.

… and for the inflammatory, unforgettable scherzo:

One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,

… and for how Levis circles the figure of Billie Holiday, a talismanic figure that animated his jazz pantheon, jazz being the musical form that Levis deployed and studied for its repetitions and returns and metaphysical resonances.

“My Story in a Late Style of Fire” is a self-portrait that leaps from the canvas like the face in Caravaggio’s convex shield, occupying the continuous present of poetic address. Yet its speaker takes leave of the reader with an embrace, a likening as bright as it is critical:

I know this isn’t much. But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass,
The flames reaching through the second story of a house
Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who
Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

Brief, it is. Brief as the blooming set to a season. And what literary form turns this brevity to face vastness? Poetry.

Alina Stefanescu, Larry Levis: For love of immanence.

In the interests of research I’ve been doing some investigating. Just how easy would it be to pass off an AI-generated poem as one’s own work?

So on Chat GPT I offered the prompt: “Can you write a 14 line poem with a science fiction theme in the style of Caroline Bird?” In a few seconds this is what it produced:

The British Secret Service issues me a sensible coat
and a name that tastes like static.
I learn to listen through walls politely,
to sip tea while history clears its throat.
My handler says don’t fall in love—
everything leaks eventually.
The dead drop is a park bench feeding pigeons secrets.
I memorise faces the way others memorise prayers.
At night, the truth sleeps beside me, fully clothed.
London keeps blinking like it knows.
I file my feelings under miscellaneous,
and burn the rest with the kettle on.

Once I’d tried the same exercise with four or five other poets a few commonalities started to leap out, such as heavy use of simile, often one ‘quirky’ idea per line, little or no through-references, sonic echoes or layered meanings. The poems kind of looked like poems but there wasn’t much below the surface, Which ties in with the fact that AI is only privy to what’s already been written. Or as Rachel Piercey, editor of Tyger Tyger said to me: “Each new poem works on its own terms – a highly individual, poem-by-poem house style that AI could never comprehend, because it has never been done before and AI can only look back.”

The twist in the tail is that I then ran these AI-generated poems by Originality.ai, an AI engine trained to spot AI in texts. It’s not fool-proof as is has been trained primarily on non-fiction texts, but the result was pretty conclusive. […] Busted!

Robin Houghton, Can AI engines write poetry?

This my the 52nd free newsletter / essay / manifesto / article and it marks one year of writing weekly dispatches on this platform. It is also the tenth and final chapter in a series I’ve been writing about the poet John Keats and his last days in Rome.

February is an important month in the Keats calendar. It was in February of 1820 that the poet suffered his first lung haemorrhage, coughing blood and understanding the seriousness of his condition. He would die the following February in Rome, cared for by his friend, the artist Joseph Severn.

Over these last weeks I’ve described events leading up to his death and it doesn’t make for easy reading. We know how this story plays out and who really would want to follow it toward its inevitable, uncomfortable, painful end? This wasn’t exactly the reason the poet who wrote to me gave when she left but I think it had something to do with it. She’d spent long periods of last year in hospital, in pain and witness to the pain of others. Weekly instalments describing another poet’s demise isn’t exactly the most comforting material to receive. I myself find a fatigue has set in as the story of Keats approaches its sad conclusion. I mean, what do you say? I mean, what can you say? […]

I thought I’d shift focus, not in order to avoid describing how a light went out, not to ignore the Bright Star of this story but to consider its supporting actor, Joseph Severn.

Severn had been with Keats on his journey from London in September of 1820 when the Maria Crowther set sail on an arduous voyage to Naples. He was there for the poet’s 25th birthday in October spent in quarantine on their ship in the Italian port. There are stories that he threw Keats’ opium overboard into the Bay of Naples believing, with their arrival, the promise of fairer weather would restore the poet’s health.

Severn felt Keats no longer required the drug he’d used to treat the pain of his condition and the sore throats he suffered brought on by coughing fits. Severn later removed (another) bottle of laudanum from Keats’ possession in Rome when he feared the poet may try to take his own life. Severn was a man of faith. A believer in God. Keats was not. While Keats didn’t possess the same fierce atheism that earned Shelley the epitaph of ‘the infidel poet’ he was a free thinker, his devotion was to poetry. That he may have been tempted in his last days by the ‘ungodly’ act of suicide was something abhorrent to Severn. Although it goes too far to say he’d rather see his friend suffer in acute pain than provide him with oportunity to end it forever we do know how tormented Severn was in his duty of care, how he wrestled with decisions such as this.

Nicholas Roe, chair of the Keats Foundation and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, states in his 2012 biography that he believed that Keats was in fact an opium addict and Severn, among several of his friends, was aware of this. It is a claim, of course, and there’s no real evidence beyond the jealous mood swings Keats displays in letters to his fiancee Fanny Brawne and veiled references to the use of opiates (in Ode to a Nightingale for example) to support it. He certainly didn’t have the same appetites as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was a bonafide junkie and the first poet to enter rehab. But that’s another story.

Jan Noble, Nº52 Loving the pain away

Whitman’s words in the preface to the original edition are at least as radiant and rousing as the verses themselves — words that continue to enliven heart, mind, and spirit a century and a half later. He writes:

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.

And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

I have been looking at rough drafts, as I’ve been doing when I don’t have a new poem bubbling up.  I am surprised by how many poems came from the bushel of apples I bought in October.  In the future, when I deliberate the wisdom of buying apples in bulk, let me remember how many ways those apples fed me.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tuesday Scraps: Texting Mix-ups and Passings and Other Goblins

After last weekend’s yarn show I set myself a catching up kind of a week. The kind where sparkly conversations with good friends featured amongst time to tackle admin type things and time to see if the poems that wait patiently in the draft folder are ready for polishing. The kind of week without a particular routine which allowed for resting and for seizing the moment when there was a gap in the rain to take a daily stroll.

It was good to get out for daily walks again after having recently had to wait for my cough to diminish. I felt my body easing its way back in to striding out and being glad for being out in the fresh air. I also realised how much I had missed listening to music for that dedicated segment of the day. My soul shines more fully when the right sounds are in the day. The country road route is currently muddy and wet, but I like its familiarity as I get back into the swing of things. The fact that walking this route takes as long as listening to the album Personal History by Mary Chapin Carpenter is also rather splendid.

It was good to have a free and easy week, it felt rather like having a springboard to jump from on the journey towards spring. Spring is my favourite season, and I love the feeling of entering it with a sense of renewal and to revelling in the newness it offers. So many reminders of growth as the rhubarb stretches out new stems and the snowdrops flourish in the borders. Mixing these wonderful visuals in with the joy of lengthened days makes so much seem possible. It even had me venturing into the garden with a pair of secateurs to begin the big tidy up.

Sue Finch, I SEE BLUE SKY

It’s an all-white affair, the blizzard sweeps
in with style, its blinding white tux,
bow tie and stiff starched shirt,
its grandeur, its threats and proclamations,
its show of power. In a flick of its
handsome wrist, it shows us who’s who.

How blankly we stare at its parts,
its top hat and white entrails,
wanting, not wanting its magic entourage
to disappear.

Jill Pearlman, Mr. Universe

春泥に厚き硝子の破片かな　松本てふこ

shundei ni atsuki garasu no hahen kana

            spring mud
            a thick piece of glass
            in it…
                                    Chōko Matsumoto

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), August 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 17, 2026)

This week: a hell hole, relearning the world, wormy things from the sea bed, a single blue tree, and much more. Enjoy.

Three bullets fired. A poet shot in the face.

I read her lines. I read them again. How her poem begins with I want and ends with dies there. In one lilting tower, there is ovum, sperm, and wonder. I wanted, also. More of her lines. But I couldn’t find them, so I took a walk to Hell.

Hell, where like her body, it is cold. People huddle together now for warmth. Some tempt fate, balancing themselves on the frozen surface of the watering hole. Everything is putrid, being eaten, digested, spewed. A flute up the ass here. A pig guised as a nun there. I hide in the eye of a donkey skull and look about. A man’s body is skewered in the strings of a harp. Dark birds fly out of a man’s ass as he’s being eaten by a bird-man who shits out people into a hell hole. Into the hell hole, a man vomits his wine and another man shits out wafers.

Smoke wafts in from the faraway fires in the background. Nothing is good here. Not even the birds. Not the skin or earth or sounds. God is panels away and out of control of his creation. A shell of a man is bright in this hellscape. Poised on his tree trunk arms, he looks back at a ladder that leads up into his eggshell torso where people gamble in the darkness. He watches his own ruin, the calmest look on his face.

I slide down the nose of the donkey skull and land where the ladder is. Do I climb? Do I steal a brass instrument from a demon and make my own music?

Sarah Lada, In the Garden of Earthly Horrors

The poem knows that paradise has been lost – that’s a clear-eyed assessment.  It gathers evidence and clues without putting together answers or a coherent narrative.  Is it environmental destruction?  Malfeasance?  Incompetence?  But on the loss of paradise, it isn’t giving up. 

If anything, paradise is lost, then regained through poetry.  The poem’s title, “U-topias,” refers to the original meaning of utopia, no-place.  That could be a name for poetry itself.  Poetry is the place, and it is involved in restoring lost value in the world.  Restoration through humble things. The humblest of things.  The world of love and things of the earth.  Rebirth of paradise in the heart.

Jill Pearlman, U-topias

We are now out at the very, very edge of the textual record, and maybe the beginning of our cultural memory, when language and writing began to give us a notion of ourselves. The writing becomes the weather; whatever the runes are saying, their presence is as much a matter of this place as the weather or this lump of slate or anything else.

‘Sleep is the other half of us … It is us, in our absence’. (Marie Darrieussecq, Sleeplessness). These poems explore paths we’re not quite aware we are following; and the tracks we trace, half-consciously, into the future.

Lesley Harrison, Presencing

throw away the key. i will eat
with my eyes. pay an application fee
to look at the moon. they say it is withering
with each poet’s glance. that we must conserve it.
soon we will run out of metaphors
& we will have to start screaming.

Robin Gow, 1/15

There are very specific memories around the traumatic events of the day he died, which I intend to write about more someday (one poem I wrote in the thick of deep grief describes it, I still cannot read it aloud), but the day he died, he was very quiet. It was the quietness that was the most striking but probably, in hindsight, not the most surprising. His voice was near silent. He slept quite a bit. He looked at me with worry yet strangely far away.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Intuition. Connection. Voices.

There are two ideas that have stuck in my mind from my professors back when, which I still find unescapable. The first was my Milton professor, who claimed that Milton was the last man to know everything at a time when it was possible to know everything. I knew even then that the professor was very wrong (how much did Milton know of the ideas of the East, for instance?), but still, I envied the idea that such a thing could be possible. The second comes from a lecture by Mary Reufle in graduate school, where she was reading from the letters of Emily Dickinson, noting how there was no distinction between Dickinson’s poems and the letters—she had one mind, one voice, and it filtered all the world as poetry.

Of course, I want that to be me.

But I don’t speak in poems. And my work-a-day emails don’t bear a trace of lyricism. Does that make me less of a poet? Or, was Emily Dickinson just very lucky to not have a day job (and a 21st-century one at that)?

Carrie Olivia Adams, Opening & Closing Lines for Your January

In January 2021, during the second lockdown, I hosted an online discussion of the books on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist that year. A poll at the end showed the audience favourite was the outsider choice: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry). The judges agreed. Kapil’s sequence of vivid, compact free-verse poems about the violence of colonialism (figured as a house stay) is, to my mind, one of the best books to win the prize. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance (The 87 Press), presents extracts from all her work woven into scripts made with the multidisciplinary artist, Blue Pieta. […]

Kapil fans will want to know that she has a new prose poem in Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber), the first anthology of nature writing by African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora poets in the UK, edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Another new poem in here that I enjoyed was Moniza Alvi’s “At Walberswick”, which considers the fact that some locals in the Suffolk coastal village claim to have seen two circus elephants ferried across the River Blyth, and yet no evidence for this newsworthy event survives.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #39: The Patter of Thaw

A few weeks ago, the Best American Poetry blog ended. And when it disappeared, hundreds of interviews and reviews and insightful posts by and about famous poets and writers vanished with it. I am still grieving its loss. But it’s not all bad. A new blog will soon begin—this one from Etruscan Press. There will be new posts on poetry and all things literary weekly as well as old posts from Best American and other places. I will keep you posted . . .

But before that happens, I wanted to post a review by Dante DeStafano that appeared on BAP, and of course, is now gone.

I admit that posting this review makes me feel a little queasy. It is so kind. So before posting it, I thought I’d post a picture from the book of me as a child. What I don’t say in the book is that I think I am holding a manure ball. I’m not sure, but it looks like it . . .  

Nin Andrews, Review of Son of a Bird by Dante Distefano

For the last few months I’ve been reading and re-reading the work of Souleymane Diamanka, whose work I mentioned briefly at the end of a reading round-up in the autumn. Diamanka is a French poet who was born in Senegal, before coming to France as a toddler. He started out in slam / hip-hop and his earlier printed collections are also available as recordings (this is not, I think, the case for this most recent book, 50 Sonnets pour mes 50 Printemps).

Shortly before Christmas I went to see him live in Paris. Diamanka recites all his poems from memory, many to a kind of musical backing. He also performed a couple of pieces in a duo with his friend John Banzaï. At the end of the show, he invited the audience to provide ten words and promised to improvise a poem on the spot using all ten of them as rhyme-words. The first person to call out suggested rhizome: he asked politely for a definition and noted it down. Some of the subsequent suggestions were more traditional ‘poetic’ words like amour (love), âme (soul) and chocolat, and someone asked for habibi (an endearment borrowed from the Arabic for ‘my love’). My favourite request was curcumasse, which at the time I took to be an obscure variant of curcuma (turmeric) but I think was actually the imperfect subjunctive of a verb I didn’t know existed, curcumer, ‘to add some turmeric’.

The poem he produced after perhaps 30 seconds of reflection had a narrative structure – it started with him arriving for the performance and meeting this audience and ended with him saying goodbye. So far I’ve only seen him perform once so I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that he often or always uses a similar structure when improvising a poem with words provided by the audience.

The improvised poem was funny and charming and the audience responded with whoops and applause after each rhyme-word duly appeared. This reminded me of Agha Shahid Ali’s description of how ghazals work in performance (he is writing here about the Urdu tradition):

The audience (the ghazal is recited a lot) waits to see what the poet will do with the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] when the poet recites the first line of a couplet, the audience recites it back to him, and then the poet repeats it, and the audience again follows suit. This back and forth creates an immensely seductive tension because everyone is waiting to see how the suspense will be resolved in terms of the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] I should mention that a ghazal is often sung.

Ali also describes the audience reciting elements back to the poet. Diamanka’s performance has aspects of this too: in several poems he encouraged the audience to join in with, and then finally to provide, a refrain.

Although he incorporates a little improvisation at the end of his performance, and expresses his admiration for le freestyle — a kind of rap competition which relies entirely on improvisation — Diamanka is not mainly a poet of improvisation himself: his poems are composed and then memorised. He is, however, emphatic about the centrality of orality and performance to his work.

Victoria Moul, On improvisation and the poetic occasion

–In my English 102 classes, I’ve been using Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel.”  I often use it as a way of talking about whether a piece is a poem, a journal entry, a very short story, or something else.  I did that this week.  But I also talked about Forche’s time as a human rights adviser for the U.N., and the situation in El Salvador when she was there in the late ’70’s.  I have concluded by making connections to Venezuela.

–It is strange how events have changed since I taught this poem in the fall.  Now we have invaded Venezuela.  In some ways, it’s not a surprise.  After all, the U.S. has inserted itself in many a country, especially in Latin America.  But this time, the surprise is that the U.S. has been very covert in the past.  Not this time.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fragments–So Fragmented that I’m Posting Late

Among the new collections I’ve enjoyed and admired of late are Lady by Laurie Bolger (Nine Arches), In the Lily Room by Erica Hesketh (also Nine Arches), Lives of the Female Poets by Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe), and, at the moment, I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon). The latter consists of single-paragraph prose-poems. In their quirkiness, they remind me of the epigrammatical mini-essays by Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), which were really proto-prose-poems, I think. […]

In a letter dated 21 May 1919 to Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf described Pearsall Smith thus: ‘I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in him.’ As a young man, he was a friend of Whitman’s in the latter’s old age, and they used to take (horse-drawn) cabs round Central Park following ones in which lovers were passengers to see how far they got, as it were. That incident apparently sparked Robert Lowell’s line ‘I watched for love-cars’ in his great ‘Skunk Hour’, available here, the last poem in Life Studies. Who knew? Well, I didn’t until I read the notes in the very heavy paperback I have of Lowell’s Collected. I’ve been reading Lowell off and on since I first read his poems at school, in the first year of sixth form, way back in 1983, and many of them remain among my all-time favourite poems.

Matthew Paul, New Year resolutions

I’ve been re-reading my Denise Levertov. She’s always meant a lot to me but her work hits differently these days. Which is likely always the case for a body of poetry, and/or reading anything over and over through time, measuring yourself and the surprising people (never just one really) you have become. Her longer poem in letters, “Relearning the Alphabet,” for example. “Relearn the alphabet, / relearn the world, the world /understood anew only in doing.” And doesn’t it seem like we’re relearning the world over again every day in these times?

Shawna Lemay, Flowers in the Dark

When the disembodied voice of Philip Levine comes to you in a desperate hour, Gerald Stern can’t be far behind. During my recent hospitalization I discovered my personal essential-texts test might be: Would I want this with me in the hospital? John Irving’s latest novel? I brought it to the ER, knowing I’d have a long wait to be admitted, and promptly regretted it; it remained unreadable even after I was discharged. This Time, Gerald Stern’s 1998 new and selected, which I bought at the Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2000? Twenty-five years later I asked for this book to be brought to me, on day seven of nineteen, as I underwent urgent radiotherapy for what pathology would eventually determine to be a rare recurrence of the rare cancer, a type of sarcoma, I was first treated for in 2011.

That day I was feeling, oddly, lucky, amid the whirlwind that had begun with a clinic visit on a Saturday morning for the seemingly innocuous sluggishness and what I took to be sinus issues that had lingered on after Covid and flu vaccinations and abruptly became suspected recurrence. I first had it in my leg, and was treated with radiotherapy and surgical resection that left a long scar down my left hip and took a healthy margin from several muscles: lateral hamstring, quad, glute medias. I went on to race bicycles and hike arduous distances and hit a one-rep deadlift max of 245 pounds. Too, to train for and run my first half marathon, just this past October, and so it remains difficult to get my head around the idea that I have two large tumours in my lungs, and that one is involved with my heart and my superior vena cava.

I don’t particularly want this to become a cancer newsletter. I’ve never written about my health despite various concerns thereabout being a continuous presence I mostly manage to forget about; I suppose I have found it uninteresting to anyone but me, and often uninteresting even to me, its captive audience. But I do believe that we keep poetry alive—and perhaps it keeps us alive—when we are reading and responding to it with our whole selves. When we are open to, and about, the truth of our lives, we are able to receive the truth of poems. So there’s no real way to tell you why “Lucky Life” came back to me, what it means to me now, without the context: I was in the hospital, adrift on a sea of uncertainty, and thinking of what was certain, of that which I have rarely, if ever doubted: my friends, the cavalry of happy warriors I reached out to with the news and who reached out to me with their best and most hilarious idiocy and cat pictures and funny books and treats and sticky-limbed ninjas that, when flung against a wall, climb down with a herky-jerky unpredictably, much to the delight of both humans and felines.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern

In 1934, Tristan Tzara released a major collection of prose and poetry, including both linear argument and surrealist fugues, called Grains et issues. It was a very dense work of combined poetry, poetic theory, and Marxist thinking, and as far as I am aware, it has never been translated in full—or even much in part. While I can’t promise anything close to a full version (it is close to 200 pages), I have started chipping away at one section called de Fond en comble la clarté, which can be rendered as “From Head to Toe Clarity,” “Clarity from Head to Toe” (alternately, “Top to Bottom,” or similar idiom). Here, I’m calling it “Clarity Through and Through.” The whole chapter begins in dream-like prose, shifts into free verse lines, and then turns back into prose for several paragraphs. Here, I’m offering only the free verse passage, as it stands alone quite well and shows an good example of Tzara in his surrealist era.

As always in Tzara, you cannot always tell what modifies what, or where one thought or sequence begins and ends. Despite title, nothing here is clear. He collides fragments and complete sentences with no concern for clarity or transition, and disorientation is a primary effect he’s after. (Or, more precisely, he’s less interested in “creating an effect” than on direct transcription of his imagination in its uncontrolled flight through language.) […]

bitter eye undivided
the fresh water longs to assemble
if only for a moment an image dissolved
on the path of survivors
cross-sections of membranes with the look of life
air melted to the root

R.M. Haines, BY THE SALAMANDER WALL

E. G. Cunningham is the author of several books of poetry, most recently the text-image collection Field Notes (River River Books, 2025).  Her work has appeared in The Abandoned Playground, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fugue, The Nation, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications. She received the LUMINA Nonfiction Award for her lyric essay “The Exedra,” and the Judith Siegel Pearson Award for her collection of lyric vignettes, Women & Children. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Edmonds College in Western Washington. […]

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 try to be as aware as I can about the questions that the work is asking. Equally as interesting to me are the unconscious pulls and drivers that inform the writing itself. Only after the fact am I often aware of the questions being asked. As an example: when I began writing Field Notes, I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between the field as an historical site of oppression and the field as a kind of idyllic mythos; I was surprised, however, by how forcefully other inquiries, related to family history, memory, and the making of art itself, arose.

My theoretical concerns have to do with the nature of time and memory, the role of desire in both, the relationship between place and (personal, social, familial, political) identity, the loss of and role of nature, death, endings, the invisible and the unknown. These of course are questions that artists have always confronted; the difference now, as I see it, has to do with a shared awareness of a foreshortened future in a truly ongoing, accelerating, and global sense. All of the metaphysical questions, the epistemological and existential questions, are entirely rearranged by the exponential facts of climate catastrophe (which I’m using here as shorthand for myriad ills, including biodiversity loss, species collapse, soil depletion, extreme weather, etc., etc.).

For the painfully aware, even something as seemingly simple and beautiful as a walk on the beach conflicts sharply with the paradigms of decades prior. Once one knows, for example, that ocean spray releases more microplastics than nearly any other natural phenomenon, well, that quite changes one’s view of and relationship to and available means of expression for such phenomena.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with E.G. Cunningham

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. […]

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Ann E. Michael, Unsettling

Today, as I worked on chapbook cover designs and poems in the swine daughter series that I am realizing more and more reflect the heaviness of my mood, J was in the other room, playing a video game over Discord with his friends (the same couple we play real-time D&D occasionally). It got me pondering how, while I was invited to play provided we get another controller, I really feel like all my free time (“free” meaning not writing for money or peddling away on press/shop things) I should be writing or making art. That those slivers of time can sometimes be the most productive. While I was once quite good at Nintendo games when I was a teenager, once I started writing in earnest, my free time was for poems–both from a vocation and a hobby standpoint. I enjoy gaming as a social endeavor–board games and RPGs

This doesn’t mean I didn’t have other hobbies. Though I make money from it now, my visual art endeavors were once a hobby, less a profession. I have always had a maddening/productive way of turning hobbies and interests into side hustles, which at various times have included collecting vintage, jewelry making, soap making, and other crafty things.  My other interests, like horror films and theater are more passive (though my dip into writing things for the stage may change that slightly.) 

I used to talk to a friend about the difference between consumption and creation. How, as artists or writers, you are focused predominantly on making things. On expression and creating worlds. While her hierarchy placed the consumers of culture lower than the creatives, I don’t think it’s that simple.  One, after all, needs to other to exist. While the audience for things doesn’t always rival the people making any given thing (especially poetry–where poets often bemoan the sadness of writing only for other poets) they still need to exist for either side of it to work. There is a lot of talk about the dangers of AI, how it takes away the creative and panders to the consumer but really doesn’t create anything new. Basically, every one becomes consumers but there is really nothing real to consume. 

But I also think creating can come in many forms […]. While my parents were not really artists, I think often about the ways they laid the groundwork for not one, but two children with artistic leanings. I’ve spoken before of the years my mother spent painting plaster figurines. Or about the surprising revelation that my dad, as a kid wrote horror stories when he was supposed to be paying attention in class. My mother also, like me, shared a love of decorating and setting the tone of a space. How my dad turned his love of betting on horses into a science and a little extra money. These were in addition to things like gardening and fishing and cooking that littered their time. 

Kristy Bowen, creation vs. consumption

I like the ability of the internet to connect people of like minds or experiences and far distance. I like the critical thinking skills of people who make rather than only consume.

I like the free exchange of ideas and people who are curious to learn. People who declare they “don’t want to be influenced” worry me for that alone and for the mindset of proprietary insular ideas instead of community and growing together in an interdependent way. Aren’t we each isolated enough without deliberately avoiding listening to one another? It’s never made sense to me.

Pearl Pirie, So glitchy

I have clear memories of 1956, the year my mother became ill.
A room in lamplight, curtains closed, yellow wallpaper faded to brown.
The computer offers me a drone tour of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The computer tells me it’s freezing in Downham Market.
The president condemns a protester for shouting Shame, Shame, Shame.
His stormtroopers cover their faces, arrest a clown for dancing in the street.

Bob Mee, A LAYING BARE OF THE BRAIN, THE RHYTHMS OF HOPE AND OTHER BUDGERIGARS OF THE HEART

My husband reads physics books all the time, and most of his own novels are based on entanglement and quantum physics. He is fond of explaining the double slit experiment to new Red Hen staff people. If you aren’t familiar, light changes when observed, almost as if it’s aware of being watched.

We change when we are observed. Our lives change. Some of us are more anxious, some less, some fatter, some thinner. If I were single, I would live on air. I would always have sake and champagne in my fridge for emergencies; other than that, I would live on fruit, tuna, and arugula. Like light particles, I change through observation. I’m more civilized, less savage.

When I grew up at the Farm, I spent much of my life with no people watching me. I was always told, God is watching you, so I talked to God. “God,” I said, “Are you watching me right now? I’m going to do something dangerous. Watch this.”

Yet we do get married to live an observed life. We have families to observe what we have done, who we have been, to be known and remembered. This weekend, we are hosting a family dinner, one of thousands we’ve had at my kitchen table.

We live, now, in a society where we are watched all the time. In Washington, D.C., there are 44 cameras per 1,000 people; in New York, 10; and in Los Angeles, 12. Atlanta has 124 per 1,000 residents, a product of Operation Shield, a massive police surveillance system known to unfairly target Atlanta’s Black residents.

In Beverly Hills, there are 62 cameras for every 1000 residents. It’s a small town with a population of only about 30,000 people, but with an average home price of five million, that small town is carefully watched. The park where I hike does not have CCTV, and I go there to get away from electronics and breathe.

But the observed life we live with our spouse and our family is not surveillance. It’s a story, a long narrative. Alone, we are looking to achieve great things, yet we are in the dance together. Sometimes it feels more like we are lurching around the dance floor, but in our best moments, we twirl.

I am living in the gift of an observed life with the people who truly see me. This includes the family I have chosen.

Kate Gale, The Marvel of an Observed Life

first light
the frost on the hillside
is turning pink

Jim Young [no title]

The Little Review (“a new pocket-sized magazine for anyone interested in poetry”) has quickly become one of my favourite (little) magazines, not least because it really is designed to be carried about in your pocket and I do a good 50% of my reading on the tube. But also because they are committed to the art of the review, and know that poetry isn’t always the most interesting thing about poetry. You can subscribe to their newseltter, which includes gems like CG’s piece on Sylvia Plath’s prose, here on Substack.

They throw good parties, too. The review below, of Matthew Buckley Smith’s second collection, Midlife, was first published in Issue 2 last November. One cold, rainy Saturday, I went along to read at the launch party on a cosy old boat in Canary Wharf (a distinctly un-cosy area: the contrast was surreal).

How do you perform a review? We agreed I’d simply read something from the book, without any discussion, so I read ‘Object Permenance’, of which more below. I am glad to say several people came up to me afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed it and asking to see a copy of the book itself (which was quite possibly the only copy in the UK at that point), promising to get hold of one. It was a strange, and strangely gratifying, experience. Though it has its pleasures, at the end of the day reviewing is always a strange and solitary task. I often find myself mentally distancing myself from a book, and the review itself, once I’m done. Suddenly, I was the book’s ambassador, enthusiastic about the poems all over again and basking in their borrowed glory. Perhaps all critics should be given the opportunity to impersonate their victims.

Jeremy Wikeley, The things you’ve said and done

wormy things from the sea bed
making ink from sediment
they are snapping at our heels

that one’s got money in it
an unsympathetic material
frozen in body and brain

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2026

Eve Luckring’s Signal to Noise grows out of her own experience of progressive hearing disability to become a study in incomprehension, or failed comprehension, or random misapprehension, which is to say it concerns language.

The book is constructed in two complementary numbered sections, with the longer second part also bearing the title ‘A Lexicon’. The first part consists of a set of texts bound together by some formal, or semi-formal repetitions. One of these is a thread of five-line pieces that read like, and may well be, transcripts from a single-word speech audiometry test, though some of the vocabulary seems unlikely:

“Say the word ’Haint’…”
“Say the word ‘Strop’…”
“Say the word ‘Rift’…”
“Say the word ‘Lure’…”
“Say the word ‘Whom’…”

The refrain-like anaphora is picked up, with variations, in a second thread of four-liners (in two couplets) on the following pattern:

I hear a voice calling my name
I can’t tell from which direction or how close it might be.

I can’t tell if it wants to harm me or tell me something
important; I know it wants attention.

As we cycle through the iterations, the owner of the voice and the person addressed change, as does the uncertainty of the remaining lines. These uncertainties reflect the limitations imposed by hearing impairment, which are a kind of subset of the limitations imposed by language. Who amongst us ever really hears things clearly? Which is not, let me be clear, to diminish the impact of hearing loss, but to set it in a broader spectrum of human experience.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading January 2026: A Review

I think I need a bigger “leap” for the last image. I read about a hoax where an 17th or 18th c. woman pretended to give birth to rabbits (15 of them!) in order to gain money to feed her actual children.

not a sleepwalker’s hands
or the space between
but a rabbit in the womb
instead of capitalism

Nah! Interesting but not yet. So what happens if I change the opening two lines. There’s no reason to keep them, or for that matter the form — the four lines — though I’ve imagined the poem to be this Knott-like short text.

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon
where do they walk?
east then west
north then south

I like the question here, but the ending sounds good but doesn’t deliver an imagistic “zing.”

Maybe the whole thing would be better with just those first two lines, those are the ones that are working the best.:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon

I kind of miss “the space between the sleepwalker’s hands” which is what occasioned the poem in the first place. Something mysterious and interesting about that space:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon

not the sleepwalker’s hands
but the space between

Hmm. That has potential. I’m going to leave it for now, since I still have to prepare for the reading! If you have any suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Gary Barwin, Revising the Sleepwalker

Again (again?) thinking about that treacherous “about”-ness of poems, or of my attempts toward a poem. How seeking to write “about” some Important Thing makes my work flat and explainy and earnest in the way of a Hallmark card. Nevertheless, I persevere. I have been trying to figure out how to write a poem that informs, as I want to talk about Important Subjects in a way that Opens the Eyes, but I want to do it with grace, ease, play, subtlety.

But do I, as a reader, want to be informed? Is that what I want from a poem? No. Something else. I want the something elseness of poetry. The subtext and subtle unsaid and loud silences and momentary confusions that ease into — what? — a moment of wisdom, maybe, or of connection to an Other, or of perspective, insight, or something more visceral — the ah ha, the oh, the yes.

What I admire about this poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney is that she is committed to communicating information but also to the playful use of sound and language to carry that information out of the sometimes-tedious realm of explication. And also how the denseness and movement of it enact the subject matter. How it dams and flows, hurriedly gathers and lets loose.

I sometimes ponder the arcane information I have learned from fiction — I know to keep my heels down if I go off a ski jump (thanks, Nancy Drew), and how starfish regrow arms (thanks, Madeleine L’Engle), that the province of Quebec is a hotbed of organized crime (thanks, Louise Penny). But I have not considered all that I’ve learned from poems, mostly because what I learn is less arcane information and more like life. But hey, if a poem wants to slip me some info, well, bring it.

Marilyn McCabe, and stops the smock and linger of pond racket

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was born in Saki, near Osaka, and as a teenager began submitting shin’taishi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) to Myōjō magazine, founded by Tekkan Yosano. Later, Akiko married Tekkan, and her poetry would go on to be a significant influence on both the shin’taishi and the shin’tanka movements, alongside her husband, and poets like Masaoka Shiki, Yanagiwara Akiko, and Kujō Takeko.

Akiko’s first solo shin’tanka collection みだれ髪 (Midare’gami; ‘Tangled Hair’) was widely read and especially popular among radicals and “free” thinkers of the time, particularly with regards to feminist discourses in Japan. This frightened the tanka establishment, who publicly attacked the book. Tanka poet and critic Nobutsuna Sasaki, for instance, claimed Akiko was “corrupting public morals” and “mouthing obscenities fit for a whore” because she composed tanka on the topic (dai) of breasts. Despite this—and equally because of it—Akiko’s work remained popular among radical poets and the general public alike, and she would go on to publish 20 tanka collections, becoming one of the most famous poets of the shintai’shi and shin’tanka schools.

Dick Whyte, Akiko Yosano – 8 Tanka (1901-1928)

My daughters play that the mud is soup,
the treehouse a boxcar. They tell me how
they came to be here, little women
growing wild as if sprung up from the dust,
or taken, gently, from a bone.

Renee Emerson, Dorothy Sayers, Mystery Writer

“Familiar Phantoms” are the gentle ghosts that act as reminders of people and things no longer in our lives that we don’t want to let go of yet. The familiarity comes from the repetition of memory, not necessarily the person or object themselves. While no one who witnessed it may have forgotten the karaoke performance from the curate, no one in the audience is likely to have been close to her. Sometimes the familiar is in something apparently trivial, a repurposed needle or a biscuit barrel, that has no financial value but an intrinsic one because of what it represents. Sue Forrester has created a subtle, multi-layered collection.

Emma Lee, “Familiar Phantoms” Sue Forrester (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

Why I Wear My Past to Work (Parlyaree Press, 2025) was written over three years and during that time, a friend of mine who I’d known since we were two-years-old, passed away. I’d moved from the village Simon and I grew up in when I was 14, but we were at the same school for a couple more years and later would meet up if I was travelling through the area.

We had many adventures, often in the Meadow at the end of our road. It was an old school playing field and fired our imaginations as explorers, often wanting to jump the fence into the farmer’s field beyond. I’m fond of Warwickshire and like many kids, we would spend what we could of weekends knocking on each other’s doors, playing street hockey, or cycling up to the Meadow, trying to find enough of us to have a proper game.

I began ‘The Meadow, Dugdale Avenue, 1993’ shortly after Simon’s funeral as a way to process his loss and the memories we shared. The collection explores the past and male and family relationships, and I admire Lewis Buxton and Luke Wright’s work on these themes. For me, great moments involved lying in the Meadow, exhausted from football, and looking up at the moving sky – clouds disappearing like days do now, more than 30 years later.

It’s not just long, sunny days I remember as a child, but looking out of my bedroom window before bed to count how many others still had their lights on. Simon and I joked it’d be great to have a walkie talkie at night, so we could discuss plans for the next day – which sport to play or trees to climb. I moved to the Cotswolds after that, and while I wouldn’t trade its landscape and stillness (which wasn’t always appreciated as a teenager), I always missed my friendships in Bidford-on-Avon.

The poem starts with a Meadow flashback. I remember Simon’s early support for Manchester United and opinion that strikers ought to be selfish to score goals. I felt quatrains worked best as the poem highlights loss and boyhood, and that provides space for different memories – the stages you go through when you lose someone close. It felt right to begin in the Meadow and the proceeding stanzas feel like the meet ups we had in the years after school.

Drop-in by Chris Campbell (Nigel Kent)

Last night I was reading at the Needlewriters in Lewes, which always feels like a second home. Despite the foul weather there was a good turnout. A warm and receptive audience including lots of friends, and a wonderful reading by Maria Jastrzębska from her forthcoming memoir. I’ve no more readings in the diary now until June. But who knows.

An exciting project that I’m currently working on is the long-awaited (by me, anyway) update to A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines. This was a wee guide that I produced firstly in 2018, then updated in 2020, and both editions sold out quite quickly. I’ve thought a few times about updating it and then a few months ago someone asked if it was still available. After explaining it was out of print, I got out my copy to review it. I was actually quite shocked how much of it needed updating, for example many of the featured magazines have folded. Not only that, but if you consider how the poetry landscape has changed there were a number of things conspicuous by their absence. As a result, I decided the new year was a good time to bring this baby back in to the present day. Once again, I’ve asked magazine editors for their thoughts and ideas. I’ve also asked a number of seasoned ‘submitters’ about their own learnings. I’m also going to include some information about competitions and pamphlet publishing. The end result, I hope, will be an informative and motivational guide for anyone who is aspirational about their poetry and either new to submitting to magazines or just needing a regular nudge to keep going and take it further. More on this soon!

Robin Houghton, New Year, new projects

The other morning I woke up singing – Try A Little Tenderness – remembering the first person switch, singing it as woman, as she, as I, just as Little Miss Cornshucks and later Aretha Franklin chose to, a bit like this…

I may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But while I’m weary
Try a little tenderness

I may be waiting
Just anticipating
Things I may never possess
Oh, but while I’m waiting
Try a little tenderness

I make coffee and think about this one song and all it means to me. I watch a light snow fall outside my window, and then listen to it, again, the Aretha version and then an early take of an Otis version. I think about the meaning of this song to us, to me, and the lyrics. I ponder on what ‘tenderness’ could mean in that crazy violent world and what it means now in this crazy violent world.

The dictionary meaning: Tenderness, the quality of being gentle, loving, kind.

I sit with all the feelings this melody conjures, and notice how the song changes shape and power when sung in first person. the things I may never possess. Then I remember the lost Cornshucks version and recall what a tough and tumultuous life she was living when she sang and recorded her rendition of this.

So next thing I know, I find myself rummaging through my archives, boxes of discs and files and old computers to find this one documentary we made one snowy January in Chicago back in the day. Was it 2013? 2014? Of course, all of this is a great procrastination from doing my tax return. I know, I know … but I am glad to find this recording and now share it here as I think some of you might dig hearing this and the sounds of old Chicago too.

Listening back to this show we made maybe twelve-odd years ago, my mind floods with images and fond memories of that trip to America. I remember the thrill of travelling with my producer, the brilliant Rebecca Maxted, I remember the heavy snow in Chicago and seeking the jazz ghosts of Cornshucks. I can recall us sharing Chicago deep-filled and thick crust pizzas and beers, and then exploring incredible lively jazz and blues clubs. I remember with great fondness all the beautiful people we met and talked to. The wonderful Lester Goodman, then aged 98, sharing his stories with so much kindness and sass and soul. The gorgeous and generous family of Cornshucks who welcomed us with open arms and fed us stories and delicious food. It is with gratitude I remember them all here. As I listen to this programme it already feels as though it is a recording of a different me in another life in the old times far away from the here and now.

But the music is forever, the song is timeless, the story never changes.

Salena Godden, Try A Little Tenderness

a blue lake sleeps at the foot of a blue mountain. where my 

life is an island adrift. poems sail into a mirrorless day.

each end of the sky moored to a single blue tree.

Grant Hackett [no title]

In this sonnet-length pentameter stanza, many lines begin with the hammer-stroke of a trochee, as though to echo a burst of wind or the lashings of the rain. The rhyme scheme, ababbcdcdefefd, initially suggests a Shakespearean sonnet but begins to deviate from that expected pattern by line 5. This deviation reinforces the poem’s sense that although the Christian might expect to find comfort in that promise following the great deluge in Genesis, even in the light of that promise, reality and our perceptions of it do not proceed in any straightforward or predictable way.

The strangest moment occurs at line ten — where, in the chaos of the storm, and in possibly the closest thing to a volta in this poem, the language itself turns strange. The poem shifts its gaze from the scene outside to the interior of the cottage, from whose doorway the cotter has been peering out. Though “glabber” is a Scots word for liquefied mud, we seem to be, now, huddled around a fire, with “flaze” apparently signifying gazing at the fire — the people talking until a frightened woman hushes them to listen to the storm’s ferocity. Only when the wind has blown itself out, and the end of the world hasn’t happened, can anyone go to bed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Nightwind

There are
things whose passing you’ll grieve,
sharp as a shard of laughter

floating in a hallway long
after the one who lofted it into
the air has left. Once, the shape

of the future was a mere speck
in a wilderness of tomorrows, but
now the light has shifted.

Luisa A. Igloria, Stay

Ah, January 2026—so far, not a month many of us will look back on fondly. This past week I did everything I could to get myself back into a better headspace. I changed my hair (back to auburn—the color I was born with!) I visited the Seattle Art Museum to fill my head with beauty instead of the awful state of things on the news, to wake up my inspiration. […] An installation of happy little clouds in the entryway ceiling made for a cheerful entrance on a gray January day.  Then, a new acquisition is right at the ticket takers—a Takashi Murakami 3-D piece called Flower Globe.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Change in Mindset: A Visit to Seattle Art Museum, A Friend from Out of Town, New Year’s New Hair

sanctuary woods
a scatter of feathers
under the pine

sanctuary by tom clausen

This week: a magic baby, the local megaliths, over two million lights, the way a poet blinks, and much more. Enjoy! See you in 2026.

The color of the year is charcoal, and these
are the ashes with which we paint over this
sparkling holiday, dimming the fairy lights
into a gentle distance, glow to glimmer.

PF Anderson, Sonnet

The poems are curious pinpoints set as a kind of sequence. They are minimalist, although less imagistic than narrative, offering narrative moments, albeit sans context but for themselves, and perhaps the suggesting of grouping, although more as a way to understand how to approach them, perhaps, as opposed to any kind of particular interconnection or narrative line. The pieces pinpoint, individual dots on an expansive grid, which can’t help but begin to form shapes, if even unconsciously, as any reader might go through. […] Davies’ poems are, each, individually complete in their incompleteness, fragmentary in nature, and less an exploration in density than a way of looking at narrative through a keyhole, perhaps.

rob mclennan, James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall

Gabriel, if you like, be not afraid, to follow that shimmering orb

until you find a hurried and poetically humble stall, there a magic baby

waits to fisher stitch an empire’s myths. What if things were not

as we thought them? What if we were wrong, lost, lost in all of this?

james mcconachie, Yet Nothing You Dismay

I love these quieter days after Christmas. Today is the first day I’ve had entirely to myself since term ended, and I’m spending it by:

– finding new shelves for old bottles

– reading poetry by Morag Anderson and Maggie Milner, and choosing poems for January Writing Hours

– plotting with Kim by text and arranging our live events for paying subscribers for January, February and March

– arranging broken bits of pottery into categories which are obvious only to me

– making whisky liqueur so that the house is full of the smell I remember from Christmas Eve

– looking for the local megaliths I’ve been ignoring for years – until I discovered The Megalith Portal in Fiona Robertson’s “Stone Lands”. Then my partner bought me “The Old Stones” for Christmas, and now all of the big stones on the moors are transformed, and a new obsession is born!

I’m wishing you light, and I hope that however dark or busy your day, there’s time, however snatched, to do the things that make you happy, or comfortable, or warm.

Clare Shaw, If You Need More Light …

At the heart of Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour (Seren), there is a sequence of twenty-four sonnets which flip for the first time into the first person – following the third person of the early section, ‘The Hotel’, and preceding the (mostly) third person of the later section, ‘The Garden’. And at the heart of this first-person sequence, there is a poem, Sonnet xii, in which the poet addresses her thoughts to her deceased husband, the memory of whom is anchoring her sense of self to her weakened and virus-riddled body. And at the heart of this sonnet, like all of them neatly bisected into seven-line stanzas, this clause straddles the whiteness of the central break:  

…and me

like a kite flown from the beach as you look up to hold me…

(Sonnet xii)

At the very heart of Hôtel Amour, then, is a ‘me’, and then a blank space, and then a metaphor, and then a ‘you’. And my reading of this collection is that it is an attempt – and a brilliant one – to fill in, or at least to give some definition to, that blank space that sits between the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and which is therefore at the very centre, the unknowable centre, of the self. More specifically, this is the blank space between Rees-Jones and her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009; but in taking on the project (started in 2019’s Erato – and earlier in the elegiac poems of Burying the Wren in 2012) of exploring her grief, she moves far beyond elegy, and builds a serious and profound meditation on what it means to be a human subject.

[…]

Towards the end of the period that I was reading and writing about Rees-Jones’ work, my mother-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer. Watching and speaking to her in her final days as her body failed and witnessing the awesome spectacle of my wife taking on the full responsibility for the care of her mother at home, gave many of Rees-Jones’ words a new significance, especially those relating directly to her husband’s premature death. I returned to my essay on her work and found that I no longer thought some of the things I had thought before my mother-in-law died. New thoughts came to me, based in a fresh awareness of the bodiliness and the gravity – I might almost say the sanctity – of a human life ending. What had always seemed like a very good collection, had morphed into a profoundly serious and important one. This essay, then, is a substantially revised version of the one I originally wrote, and even now I am aware that my present reflections are also probably provisional, perhaps fleeting, but certainly contingent.

To return to the ‘me’, the blank space and the ‘you’, and the failed attempt to define the space between them through metaphor which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay; it seems to me that the world of meaning-making where this attempt takes place is the world that exists somewhere between the writer and the reader, fully belonging to neither but for which each bears responsibility, albeit of a different type.

I think about the revisions and reworkings in Rees-Jones’ work, I think about her celebration of the necessary failures in art and life, and I think about her speaker’s fragmentary voice speaking brokenly into a whiteness of blank paper. Then I think about my own revisions, my own failures.

I think about the still point of the turning world, where the dance is.

And without my fully understanding why, the people around me – both in my memory and as physical presences in my life now – suddenly seem more important.

Chris Edgoose, Revised reflections on Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones

My friend and collaborator Arnold McBay is an artist and musician. He frequently makes intriguing short films exploring very elemental objects such as clouds and branches. These often move slowly, change slowly, emerge to be only more themselves. He is always finding the surprising and mysterious quiddity of things with perfectly simple means.

Last night he sent me a short film (1 minute long) of branches moving as if they were the hands of a clock. This is exactly my kind of thing and I couldn’t resist and so asked if I could write some text and make the audio for it. So I did. I wrote a short poems and made an audio track from the sounds of breaking sticks and a typewriter (since the poem refers to the trees “writing” and the repeated sounds of the sticks breaking sounded like a typewriter.)

I was intrigued by the idea of a tree “writing” in time by growing. How a tree is a kind of writing in time. Of time.

I wrote the poem and it was ok, but line to line, a bit flat. So then I had the idea of mixing up the lines in order to create more energy between lines. I remembered how a student had showed me how she randomized lines using Excel and a sorting procedure. (You create random numbers using the RAND function in a second column and then sort the numbers from high to low, bringing the lines you’ve inserted in the first column with them and thus into random order.)

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that random was more interesting than my original order. Thank you, Mr. Cage. But part of the reason is that it breaks apart the logical chain between lines that is initially created. Sometimes I run a poem backwards for the same reason, though it maintains another kind of order. But the leaps between lines are larger and therefore have more energy. The mind leaps like a squirrel between branches in order to form the poem. Always more exciting to get the reader more involved and/or thinking like a squirrel.

Gary Barwin, Set the Alarm for Spring: why random is better

Last week Peter and I sent a new episode of Planet Poetry out into the world, featuring our interview with Niall Campbell about his excellent Bloodaxe book The Island in the Sound, plus various festive shenanigans. Yippee! We’re still going strong, even though fewer new episodes this season. We’re both enjoying the reduced pressure, to be honest!

I had a fabulous time reading at the Poets Cafe in Reading a couple of weeks ago. Hosts Vic and Katie were so welcoming, and the audience was warm and very switched-on. There was an impressive open mic. I sold a few books, both The Mayday Diaries and Yo-Yo, now well into its second edition.

I’m not writing a great deal at the moment, but I’ve been making an effort to send a few poems out. Gratitude to The Frogmore Papers which will publish a new poem of mine in the Spring. And I’m thrilled to have The Mayday Diaries as the current featured publication at Atrium. Huge thanks to editors Holly and Claire.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on new ideas for my quarterly spreadsheet which seems to have a life of its own these days. I’m frequently surprised and touched by the messages of support I get for producing it. It seems the poetry magazine landscape is a sprawling and confusing space and people are thankful for a tool that helps with both navigation and motivation to keep going.

Robin Houghton, Seasons Greetings

I wasn’t going to do a chart for the end of the year…all a bit of a busman’s holiday and the like, but the arrival this week of the wonderful new issue of Finished Creatures containing a new poem by me made me reconsider…Thanks to Jan for taking a new new poem from me…A poem written and finished in 2025 as well which is good work; looking back at my notes I can see the first scribbled notes/draft was 30th January and the final draft was sorted on 4th August. […]

The collected data would suggest that 2025 has seen an overall increase in the number of poems sent out, and certainly an increase on recent years. I’ve crunched the numbers and the number of unique submissions has gone up YoY again – which is good, I think.

But it comes down to the success rate (or does it?)

Maybe it’s working (maybe it’s Maybelline, etc), but we’ve seen a 100% increase on 2024 in successes. It looks a little different if we present this as counts, but either way the numbers are up. And I thought this had been a crap year (for many reasons).

Mat Riches, What a count…

Bless the Christmas Number One.

Thank you for the nightmare in which they
deny using white phosphorus,
deny they shot a man who was emptying a bin,
deny they shot a woman who was mending a carpet,
deny they bulldozed a tent filled with the chronically sick,
deny mass graves.

Bless the turkey and all its trimmings.

Bless the Boxing Day breakfast of buttered toast, eggs, bacon and beans.

Bless the football match we’re going to later.

Bless both teams.

Bless the abyss of the human mind.

Bob Mee, A CHRISTMAS POEM FROM TWO YEARS AGO…

From across the boulevard, crowds stream
toward the entrance to the battleship whose nine

16-inch guns, three triple-gun turrets, twenty
5-inch dual purpose guns and forty-nine 8-inch

Oerlikon auto cannons are decked out in over two
million lights. To get to the main deck, the lines

(single file) must navigate two bridges, but only
after walking through the museum converted into

a white wilderness. In one hall, an animated
tree. In another, strung on wires from

the ceiling, a polar bear treads air.

Luisa A. Igloria, Light Show

To visit (or live) in a country that is not yours by birth is an enlivening and sometimes, bewildering experience. A student came up to me at the festival and told me I had an excellent personality (!) and someone else told me I was the best poet that they’d ever heard read — it was a time out of time experience.

Now, typing this post in the quiet of my Seattle home, the cold wind beating the trees and electrical wires outside, it all seems unreal. A world where poets and poetry take center stage. A place where poets from all over the world come together? Yes, dear reader, this exists.

After the festival finished, I visited my friend, the fabulous poet and educator, Anil Oomen, who was on sabbatical, conducting research in Southern India. Anil is from Kerala, a state in the south of India with the highest literacy rate in the world. It is also famous as a home for writers, painters, filmmakers, and fabulous fish.

How did we meet? Nearly 29 years ago, Anil took a poetry class with me in Eugene, Oregon. I was a newly minted MFA graduate and he was a stay at home dad who needed to get out of the house. In that little class of seven, held after hours in Black Sun Books, Anil brought in a poem (a palindrome) about his first language, Malayalam. The language of Kerala where he was born and lived his first five years. All of a sudden, he was teaching me about this incredible language and culture. From that poem (later published in the South African journal, Carapace, that I was guest editing at the time) the idea came to me that someday Anil and I would travel together in Kerala. 29 years later, we have.

I think bringing poets together to generate new work in beautiful places might be my dream for retirement.

Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop Travels to India for the Kolkata International Poetry Festival

Today’s Christmas poem is by R. S. Thomas, not generally known as the most celebratory of poets and offering an appropriately chilly version of festive spirit here. One for anyone who’s feeling a bit Christmas-ed out by this point!

Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.

Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.

Victoria Moul, A Christmas poem, no. 2

I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:

“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”

Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.

Ann E. Michael, Play’s the thing

It’s a shame we can’t embed playable text into Substack, isn’t it?

Also a shame that I didn’t have time to make a new version of Ice Dive, as I’d been planning to. This version is a little buggy, the mechanics are unbalanced and many of the lines need further shaping and shuffling.

But I wanted to end the advent calendar on a ludokinetic poem and this is the only ice-themed one I have — even counting the many pieces sitting around in various states of completion in the workshop. It was originally devised so as to be playable over a Zoom call — the player merely has to shout “Stop!” when they want to come up for air, whereupon I (the person in control of the game) click once to bring them back to the surface.

For what it’s worth, it is possible to finish the game, collecting all seven pieces of the ‘something’ it is you’re collecting. I’ve only managed it once, though.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #10: Ice Dive

Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with. 

I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains.  I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree. 

Grant Clauser, The Weight of Poetry

I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.

When the wise ones
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Border Lands

This was the year that finally convinced me that humanity is devolving as a species and that we are past due for an extinction-level event, so Earth can hit the reset button. Nihilistic, perhaps, but if you’ve been watching world events – especially the U.S. descent into authoritarianism and isolation – then you know exactly what I mean. 

The deaths of David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, and Rob Reiner hit me especially hard, since I remain an unrepentant film buff and those [four] were among my favorites. Every year, more and more of my icons pass away, which also brings my own mortality into focus. 

Maybe that’s why much of this year was dedicated to what Kate Bush refers to as “archive work.” I’ve got another box of materials almost ready for the Georgia State University Library Archive, which is the repository for my papers, manuscripts, and ephemera related to my writing life. While this will be an ongoing process until I kick the bucket (and beyond), I’m nearing the end of culling through 40 years of writing. 

During the most recent dig, I uncovered a small grouping of poems – some dating back to the 1980s – that I’m currently sorting through to see if anything is worth revising or will just go to the archive. I also found handwritten pages of another story that belongs with my long-simmering collection of tales in the fictional town of Cottonwood, GA (the first four of them are in Kiss Shot, which was published as an ebook back in 2012). Of course, this has me eager to get back to work on this collection, but at the expense of the fourth Venus novel.

Collin Kelley, A look back at 2025

Still a couple days left to read but I’m adding to best of list now,

The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson, illustrated by April White (Brick Books, 2025) which gave so many aha moments on chronic illness and concussion, and consumer culture, and pure amazement at her rendering poems from trash container text.

and from backlist titles,

But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2023) which impels me to buy her book too. What a crisp, alert alive mind!

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025, Addendum

[…] He knew they were important, even if
he couldn’t quite recall which one was which,
or how he’d landed in this unknown bed
this perfectly nice place that wasn’t home.
*
Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of parashat Vayechi, in which Jacob — now in Egypt — blesses his grandsons and his sons.

When I imagined Yakov nearing the end of his life, I remembered visits with my father in his last months and weeks. I remember what he had forgotten and what stayed with him. I remember trying to steer away from my mother’s absence. (No reason to make him grieve her loss again.)

After my siblings and I had moved him into assisted living (with his approval; he understood, at least in flashes, that he couldn’t live alone any more) he lost track of things more quickly. That’s normal, I know.

I remember a visit when he said, “I’m not sure where this is? It’s not home, it’s just — the place where I stay now.” I can imagine Jacob, away from his familiar surroundings, maybe feeling the same way.

Rachel Barenblat, Not home

Ben Lerner describes one of his dreams involving Keith Waldrop. In this dream, Ben is an undergrad “trying to impress Keith by saying something about Olson’s ‘Projective Verse.’ When I finish my little speech Keith is quiet for a moment and then says: “It’s always seemed to me that lines of poetry are broken less by the way a poet breathes than by the way a poet blinks his eyes.”

Alina Stefanescu, Guston and allegory.

I’ve been tossing my phone aside a lot, which, in essence, is a surreal way of tossing aside an entire universe. Because I read books, I am often faced with a deluge of reels where highly-curated humans talk about the same 15-30 books. Because I write in journals, ads show up in my feed of highly-curated humans who look and act out the part of an observant human pontificating their surroundings, pen in hand. Because I go on walks, reels and reels of highly-curated humans talk at me about living an “analogue life”, off the phone. Journals, books, puzzles, watercolors, and all the things that I see when I look up from my phone are romantically and aesthetically displayed on my screen. Because I do not engage in or click anything, the algorithm has only a vague nebula to work with. I do not know how many pages of a book a person could read in the time that it takes to curate, create, and edit a reel about annotating a book. The cogs and wheels of the manufactured lifestyles and hot-takes continue. When I toss my phone aside, so do I.

Sarah Lada, American Idiot

My father would have none of it
“China elephants as holiday gifts?
Oh no, they always bring bad luck.”
And who would openly court misfortune?

When a child there were moments
I sensed elephants in the living room
the drum taut tension of things unsaid
We tiptoed around their slumbering forms.

Paul Tobin, WE TIPTOED AROUND

One of my favorite books, in spite of its flaws, is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. One of my love languages is giving gifts. I love the exchange of gifts, especially when you find something you’re certain the other person will love.

In his book, Hyde says:

1. A true gift loses its power if it is hoarded or sold. Gifts should be like a river. You should always feel like you can pass them on when you don’t need them. (I like to think that he’s a big fan of white elephant parties.)
2. Art, he says, is a spiritual act. It creates a sense that we are alive and belong to the world. I like to think that the work I do is part of that circle of creation, not just a bounce of profit; that we are in the sacred fire.
3. Market economies thrive on strangers, on isolation. Gift-giving builds communities with stories and myths, and when they are shared, they create a kind of magic. Red Hen’s supporters feel like that to me. You enter a circle, and when you contribute to our growth, you become a part of our family.
4. The cultural commons—the shared arts, literature, dance, gardens, museums, public spaces, and all else created by those of us in the creative spaces—become more and more integrated into our being the more we participate in them.
5. The more we give and expect gifts, the more we create a world where gift-giving is the norm, and we build trust that we can rely on others for support.
6. Artists are stewards of the creative spirit; we sit in the well of the collective unconscious and drink.

Hyde’s examples of artists who participated in this lifelong sharing include Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. If I were to suggest a rewrite of The Gift, which I wouldn’t, I would suggest replacing Pound with Toni Morrison. Pound, despite being a celebrated poet, went to prison for treason, hated the Jewish people, and had an utter contempt for women and people of color, neither of which he would support in publishing.

I am a fan of literary citizens. Toni Morrison is one. She built community by taking time from her own wildly important writing to mentor, teach, and sit with young writers, discussing their creative lives. Her students loved her. They said she was spellbinding in the classroom and an amazing mentor. This kind of literary citizenship is what Red Hen Press is built on—the idea that the arts can only exist and thrive in community.

Kate Gale, In Which I Step Away from My Cliff and Ride a Horse

alone in the waiting room
checking the plant
for reality

waiting by tom clausen

I know you’re supposed to size up the previous year and set goals for the next, but I feel like 2025 was somehow rougher than it could have been—the bathroom renovation was a too-long-and-too-expensive nightmare (I’m glad to have the disability-friendly bathroom, but it took a LOT of time and money and took a toll on both my health and Glenn’s)—rejection on the writing front, an increase in MS symptoms for the last six months (hence the brain MRI), and the political nightmare that is America right now—I want to be grateful and count my blessings, but for now, I just feel like shutting the door on the last few years and hoping for some more normalcy—for myself and my country—in 2026. Just wishing doesn’t make it so, of course. I know a lot of people who had a difficult holiday season—health emergencies, layoffs, losing parents and loved ones, divorces, or learning to care for parents who are getting older. I am sending good thoughts to all who are struggling right now.

If I have some positive hopes for the new year, it’s maybe a trip to Europe and a residency in spring on San Juan Island, maybe to find a good publisher for my seventh book, maybe a part-time regular job I could count on instead of scrambling for freelance stuff all the time, better health for me and my family? Less drama, more fun. Less spending, more appreciating the things I have. More time for friendship, adventure, inspiration? At my age and with so many things out of my control, I don’t do “goal setting” per se like I used to for each new year, but I do try to envision something positive—small joys, the chance to reset, a chance to embrace something new.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Stressful Christmas, Thinking about 2025, and the Year Ahead

The snow makes it all quiet. Away from the windows, away from the dinner, there is a blanket over the earth, the air is scrubbed clean, and nothing is moving. I wish it would snow for a year, and the telly breaks. Then the radio goes off, and we forget to talk, and we get a year of this crispy breathing quiet.

John Siddique, A Christmas Poem

日記買ふ白く輝く日々を買ふ　内村恭子

nikki kau shiroku kagayaku hibi o kau

            I buy a diary…
            I buy days
           shining white

                                                Kyoko Uchimura     

from Tashin (Gods), a haiku collection of Kyoko Uchimura, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo, 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 26, 2025)

This week: glitter on our fingers, the heaven of the moon, Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday, the buzz of numbness, and much more. Enjoy.

Chatting about beachcombing with a poet/accomplice the other week, she mentioned finding Aristotle’s lantern on an Orkney beach. I’d never heard of it – the boney, five-sided mouthpiece of a sea urchin with its fearsome, self-sharpening teeth, designed to eat through stone, which in his History of Animals Aristotle described as ‘… like a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out.’ A mouth that carries light? Light that can gnaw through stone – how would that work? […]

At age 6 our entire class had our silhouettes drawn as some sort of weird gift for our parents. It was definitely me, that black-paper other half, but a two-dimensional outline, cut from shadow and therefore expressionless and blind. This is what is left of us after consciousness has been removed, turning aside in shame. I tried to write a poem about it years later, but it had already moved beyond poetry, into significance.

John Glenday, Aristotle’s Lantern – Twenty-Four Digressions on Light

Yesterday I went to the secret woods which Nick owns/ is the custodian of, and which he shares with me and Alice Wolfe and the other people who work to protect and restore this small, injured section of land. A former tip built on ancient woodland, the site is characterised by rubble, glass, and poor, loose soils; scarred by the pits and trenches of illegal bottle diggers who show no respect to the land and have even felled its trees. We’re slowly clearing and healing it, removing rubble and glass, heavy metals and plastic, filling trenches, planting saplings. […]

And the shards. Some are so startling, or so meaningful, I bring them home. A picture of Santa! Where the pottery breaks, trees and birds, flowers, faces – even words – are taken from their usual context, liberated, perfectly framed. Most shards I place in a big bag for Alice, who transforms them into exquisite mosaics representing the wildlife who have survived, or who are now returning, to the woods. We sit together on the bench and watch the birdfeeders – crowds of coal tits feeding, a nuthatch, a tiny wren. Alice is especially pleased with the gold shards, the green, the mosaic of cracks on old white pots which she sees as the feathers of a barn owl.

But we both agree that there’s not a single shard we don’t love: how even the ubiquitous, common-as-muck Blue Willow gives itself up in infinite variations when it is broken. A manic gang of long tailed tits pay us a visit, a lone squirrel unhurriedly gathers nuts. Let that be my story for today. I am a broken thing, and I am beautiful. I am a white feather in the night, I am a leaf. I am a broken woman stroking a dog, a girl with no face, an animal, a broken King. I am a tree, a series of flowers, I’m a river.

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

Scratching her cursive
into the soil,
she scribes a language
of talon and hunger.
Upturning stanzas,
syllables of soil
fall apart and scatter.
Our yard is raw and quiet with her.

Sarah Lada, Donna

The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That’s not some advanced meditative state: it’s the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it’s true, but it’s also normal, ordinary, regular. I don’t have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.

Dale Favier, Fetch

Dick Higgins calls this form ‘leonine verse’ in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, but I can’t find reference to it anywhere else. In fact, Wikipedia has an entry for ‘leonine verse’ that describes a totally different form. Whatever you care to call this, it looks more complicated than it is — each stanza is really a couplet, but the second and fourth (or, alternately, the first, third and fifth) metrical feet of each line in each couplet are identical, these are placed in a third line that sits between them. Effectively, the lines are woven together.

Also, if you read it across diagonally from just inside the top left corner, it goes snow, snow, snow, snow.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #6: Another Labyrinth

The third poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Batool Abu Akleen.

This is how I cook my grief, by Batool Abu Akleen, translated by Yasmin Zaher.

Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others.

She is the author of 48Kg. (Tenement Press, 2025), translated from the Arabic by the poet, with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher. 48Kg. is a Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Book of the Week’ / A Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Bookshelf’ choice; A New Statesman ‘Book of the Year’ 2025 / ℅ Jacqueline Rose; and was awarded the The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellowship / ℅ the Akademie Schloss Solitude.

You can read an interview between Batool Abu Akleen and Claire Armistead on the Guardian website.

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 3: This is how I cook my grief by Batool Abu Akleen

When I was little I loved an annual. To me it was a book of delightful snippets collected together to be enjoyed in a period of time that involved a break from routine. I can picture myself reading in my pyjamas, the seemingly bottomless sweet tin, and the advent calendar that left its glitter on our fingers with all its doors open telling me that it was indeed Christmas Day. This week’s photo is like the cover of my 2025 annual.

This blog has been my way of building a good relationship with Mondays, and the fact there have been 114 episodes since September 2023 tells me that I have definitely adopted this as a habit. Singing as the Darkness Lifts (this blog’s title) comes from my love of three things:  the sound of birds welcoming the dawn, the feeling of darkness lifting, the moments of joy that make my heart sing. And writing each entry is a grounding in the changing of seasons when I take time to sniff the air each Monday morning and note its scent. In some ways it is also a setting down before moving on with the new week. It is a simple place to reflect, and it is a place to find joy as the darkness lifts.

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

Most of my slightly mad ideas (16 days of activism last year which included 16 poetry events, January Writing Hours) have at their heart this belief that (cheesy as it sounds) community and being together, and creating space for conversations and poetry and inspiration is important. They are my acts of self-care and self preservation.

This year we decided to make all of our written content available for free, which I hope is another act of community. We are running monthly events for our paid subscribers – another much smaller type of community. And of course there is January Writing Hours, which is approaching fast.

Kim Moore, Day 16: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

i do not want to fight myself & call it football.
put my brain in a helmet & run
at the sun. instead, i want to be
something else. it is exciting that i am not sure
what else i can be. the football tv will,
like any hole, shrink from lack of use.
maybe one day be smooth & soft.
the last little man digging at the earth
in search of himself. what if that is me?

Robin Gow, football tv

When I was seventeen, I discovered that a close friend had just broken up with another girl. Their parents had discovered they were sleeping together and, horrified, had decided to put a stop to it. My friend was devastated, and sometimes sat outside the other girl’s house in her car, crying. Amongst the many details which impressed me was that fact that they had sent each other poems. My friend told me that one of them, ‘The Good-Morrow’ by John Donne, was the most passionate love poem ever written. A while later, she gave me a copy of ‘The Good-Morrow’ along with some of Donne’s other poems. She had fallen in love with me. I was in love with a lanky indie boy pining for his previous girlfriend, and could not reciprocate. One day in the sixth-form common room I, too, passed him a copy of Donne’s poem to read.

John Donne, then, is for me intrinsically linked with all the dramas and intensities of my teenage years. As we were discovering our sexuality, my friend was pointing out the double-meaning of Donne’s ‘country pleasures’. As I gazed on my crush in tiny, grubby clubs, I was thinking: ‘For love all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere.’

Of the seven poems published in John Donne’s lifetime, only two were authorized by him, and they were instead written to be circulated in manuscript form amongst a coterie of his admirers. It seems fit that in Turton High Sixth Form in 1996 they were also circulating in handwritten form or as dog-eared photocopies; passed from lover to love-object.

Clare Pollard, Reading John Donne’s ‘The Flea’

Bridge over the Aire is a singular achievement in the same way that Briggflatts is; a poem unlike anything that Tebb’s fellow Children of Albion have, or could have, produced. As with most long poems, there are some flat moments, but overall it is a poem of great accomplishment as well as being a remarkable document of a world that has melted away before our very eyes. There is much to admire in this Collected Poems, but this poem makes it a book to treasure, a book to return to. Tebb is, above all else, a survivor of a gone world, a world of hope based on a firm sense of community and of social democracy in all its messy glory. Read it.

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

Last week I wrote about the pioneering doctor and scientist William Harvey, and since then I’ve been reading his wonderful second work, De generatione animalium (1653). Unpicking in crisp and patient Latin the precise mechanics of reproduction — including a great deal about how human reproduction, described in comparison with that of deer — I have found it a strangely moving read. […]

Harvey was not a poet himself, but his friend and successor, Martin Lluelyn (sometimes Llewellin, 1612-1682) was. Lluelyn, who became the doctor to King Charles II after the Restoration, wrote a prefatory poem for the English edition of De generatione, and he was probably also its unacknowledged translator. Here is his description of Harvey’s achievement in matters of the heart:

There [in the dissected animals] thy Observing Eye first found the Art
Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart:
The mystick causes of its Dark Estate,
What Pullies Close its Cells, and what Dilate.
What secret Engines tune the Pulse, whose din
By Chimes without, Strike how things fare within.
There didst thou trace the Blood, and first behold
What Dreames mistaken Sages coin’d of old.
For till thy Pegasus the fountain brake,
The crimson Blood, was but a crimson Lake.
Which first from Thee did Tyde and Motion gaine,
And Veins became its Channel, not its Chaine.
With Drake and Candish hence thy Bays is curld,
Fam’d Circulator of the Lesser World.

There is a moment in the mid-late seventeenth century when the passion, complexity and rhetorical extravagance of the baroque (or ‘metaphysical’) met the precision and optimism of the new science. We see glimpses of this in late Cowley, and you could take his remarkable (and remarkably conflicted) ode to Harvey as a kind of analysis of the two elements. In Cowley, though, they never quite combine — or, perhaps rather, the combination never feels entirely natural.

Other poets, though, did see how to put it together, and Lluelyn is one of them.

Victoria Moul, The running of the deer: celebrating Christmas in 1644

The latest from Vancouver-based writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt, a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, is the poetry collection The Idea of An Entire Life (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025). “How we exist in the world / depends on how we describe it.” begins the opening poem in the collection, “AUTOFICTION.” The poems in this collection are quietly gestural, earth-shaking, precise and performative, offering a layering of direct statements, narrative storytelling and subtle truths. “Picture the women waiting at the forest’s centre,” Belcourt writes, as part of the poem “20TH-CENTURY CREE HISTORY,” “their hands / folded into little coffins. // Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.”

I seem to be a few books behind on Belcourt, having missed A Minor Chorus: A Novel (Toronto ON: Hamish Hamilton, 2022) and Coexistence: Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), the two most recent of his growing list of titles that includes the full-length poetry debut, This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), a book that made him the youngest winner-to-date of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], as well as his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020) [see my review of such here]. There is a way that Belcourt has of stitching together the present moment with threads of memory and history, writing declarative details of and around Queer identity, family history and survival, utilizing factual details as building blocks into something larger, deeper. As any poem might require, in that particular moment. “I want to call attention to the dead,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CRUISING UTOPIA SONNETS,” “to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world.” There is a dream-like quality to elements of these poems, blended with concrete realities, each side complementing the other in quite striking ways, hitting all the right notes of lovely, of devastating, of loss and heartbreak and wonder. These are poems of witness, of memory; of documentation; a book of the whole world, the whole body, an approach that seems to be how he approaches the books of his I’ve seen to date, including elements of his entire world in that particular moment into the work. This is, arguably, what the best work is supposed to, each poem and line offering a different facet, a different fragment, of something far larger and more expansive as a unified whole. A book of an entire life, indeed. 

rob mclennan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Idea of An Entire Life

I was spelunking some digital archives recently and came across Bob Hicok’s “A Primer,” which I loved to bring into classes at assorted Michigan universities. Apart from Frost, excepted for his titular role in this publication, I’ve been trying to not repeat poets, but in the days that followed my rediscovery I couldn’t stop laughing whenever I thought “I live now / in Virginia, which has no backup plan,” and so it occurred to me that perhaps my dumb little rules are less important than, well, enjoying life.

What’s to love? The ability of a poem to have an entire room of twenty-something-year-olds in stitches is a ringing endorsement in my book, though my book is titled Make Poetry for People Again and yours may well have a smarter title, like Something Nice I Saw Today. With Michigan in literal eyesight just a five-minute stroll from the desk where I am writing, I find the seasonal hyperboles are pleasingly apt. As much as I dislike small talk—try asking me some time “What’s new?” and enjoy the cold sweat it engenders—I consider weather a topic of extreme importance, an enthusiasm partially born of the perpetual endurance sports–based need to know when it might next be kind of warm outside, but mostly of the simple fact that what comes from above comes for each of us in kind. It’s always our weather.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

In the heaven of the moon, Dante meets the humblest of the blest. When Dante asks one of them – Piccarda Donati – if souls like her desire a ‘higher place / to see more and to be yet more beloved’,

…She and the other shades first smiled a little –
and then she answered me with so much joy
she seemed ablaze with the first fire of love:

She explains that it is impossible for them or any of the saved to desire more than they have because that would be discordant with the will of God:

 ….And in his will is found our peace: it is
that sea to which all beings move that are
by it created or by nature made.

This last tercet is often quoted, whether in Dante’s Italian or in different translations. What quiet power there is in the simple phrases, both in terms of their psychological and metaphysical meanings. What I find most stunning, though, is the imaginative reach that unites these vast ideas to the delicate humanity of ‘She and the other shades first smiled a little’. Love in the most absolute sense, the creative love of God, is brought together with the simple human joys of shared knowledge, shared feeling, and the ability to communicate these things, so that we feel how such emotions in this world offer glimpses of the divine. […]

I’m no Dante scholar and can’t judge [D. M.] Black’s version on purely scholarly grounds but I have enjoyed the Paradiso in several different translations, and wrestled with it in Italian. Black’s version is the one that’s given me the most intense imaginative experience and sheer reading pleasure. This is because he writes as a poet translating a poem into poetry for a wide readership, less concerned with word for word accuracy than an academic Dantist needs to be.

Edmund Prestwich, Dante’s Paradiso, translated by D. M. Black

From the first word of the comprehensive new Poems of Seamus Heaney, Heaney writes in a familiar voice.

Hushed
And lulled
Lay the field, under a high-sky sun.

Hushed and lulled could have been the title of this volume. Heaney’s voice often is hushed and lulled, both his writing and his reading voice. There is much “hushed and lulled” imagery in Death of a Naturalist: “The squat pen rests, snug as a gun”, “Hunched over the railing”, “Snug on our bellies”, “Drifted through the dark of banks and hatches”. This hushed hunching is found in the earliest uncollected poems, but also in some of Heaney’s later work, such as Seeing Things: “Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb”, “that sniffed-at, bleated-into grassy space”, “Firelit, shuttered, slated, and stone-walled”, “claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof/Effect”, “all hutch and hatch”.

This hutch-hatch snug-nested manner is the heart of Heaney’s forms as well as his tones. Like the poet who had the greatest-but-least-acknowledged influence on his work, Robert Frost, Heaney enjoys tightness—not the neat tightness of form in which Frost specialized, but the sort of tightness we associate with being hushed, slated, lulled, or stone-walled: his poems are packed, slotted, with meanings couching, crouching, bunching.

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

The poem’s speaker moves from victim to survivor. The sequence “Surviving” uses animals as metaphor, in part iii, “Isolation: Giant squid”,

“I shared my body with the swelling sea,
flowing in freedom, salty and edgeless.
We cephalopods have been shapeshifting
in these depths for five hundred million years,
to the rhythm of our three hearts pulsing.”

Letting go of the abuse and shifting into a shape that feels like home, enabled the speaker to adapt to life free from that abuse. It’s also a place from which the speaker is able to consider the abuser, in “Faceless”, “He was a needle, not sewing to join anything together/ but because he enjoyed the holes that were left behind”. The journey continues, an abecedarian in “A-Z gratitude list”, has some seemingly random items, “G is for gusting wind”, “River’s brown windows”, “S is for shingle”, until “Zips. Keeping a child warm/ by closing metal teeth with my fumbling fingers.”

Emma Lee, “Full Body Reclaim” Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.

This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.

I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.

Matthew Paul, Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other

My pamphlet Cry (Valley Press, 2025) is all at once a delving into the ego, a rumination on the difficulties of accepting one’s suddenly-changed identity as a creative mother, and a heartfelt expression of love for one’s child. The subjective viewpoint is that of a woman who tries to carve out time to maintain her ‘writer self’ alongside the newly acquired ‘mother self’, and she wends her way between the mundanity of chores and the space needed in order to write. The poems veer from warm love for her child to frustration to exhaustion to annoyance at a husband who doesn’t consider the mundane aspects of parenting to be part of his role. Freedom and space are craved.

The poem ‘Floating’ appears almost half-way through the collection, just before the central crux, and I have chosen to offer it here for all its metaphor, psychology and symbolism. As a poet, I find it hard to escape the metaphor; indeed some things are better said through it. It lends an “otherness” which can encourage a freer voice, more immediate language, and something concrete on which to base an idea or feeling. For otherness, think of the patient’s chair facing away from the antiquated psychoanalyst to garner honesty and openness, or likening a person or feeling to a piece of fruit to detach them from yourself and describe them better: hard skin, pith, juice… One can really have fun. In ‘Floating’ I give you water.

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

Ann E. Michael, Systems

We watch other writers making best seller lists, winning awards and feel like we could have had that if only we’d set up an instagram account and promoted our books, or made lots and lots of contacts that we could pull in for favours when we needed them, if we’d set the alarm for five am and pushed out 2000 words fuelled by caffeine before shuffling the kids to school and keeping house, not forgetting making time for health and happiness, reconnecting with nature and reading fifty two books a year. We have this pushed at us from every corner of the internet. The dream writer life can be achieved if you do more than other writers. If you fight harder you will achieve more. If you push harder you will be the one that makes it. Added to this, we crave the validation of our peers, naturally, and as a species we are drawn to the idea of a hierarchy, that there must be a way to attain the top tier if not the top position. If we knew what the key to it all was, we could make it. If we took the right course, the right workshop, if we made the right friends we would, finally reach the golden summit of being successful. There are many people making money selling writers a key to success that doesn’t really exist. If you can’t physically fight, will you drown? If you can’t keep up, will you disappear? This is one of the fears that comes up the most when I am mentoring. I have that fear in me too. But our perceptions of what the writer life looks like, and about success are skewed by that fear.

Wendy Pratt, I don’t recognize the writing road anymore, or even the creative landscape my mind is waking up to.

What a lovely event it was at The Brunswick in Hove on Sunday, at the awards event for the Brighton & Hove Arts Council Poetry Competition. Jeremy Page had kindly invited me to read alongside him (he was the adjudicator) and the audience was very receptive, especially given that they were no doubt there to hear the results of the comp! One of the poems I read was ‘She offers her defence’ from The Mayday Diaries, not one I’ve ever included in a reading because it’s written in two voices and without having the poem in front of you it’s possibly a bit hard to follow. Then I had the idea of asking poet friend Jill Fricker to read it with me. I knew she would be there as she had been shortlisted for the prize. And I think our team reading went well!

Come the second half, when the results were announced we found out Jill won first prize for her poem ‘NW3’ – very exciting, and a massive co-incidence that she’d already appeared on stage in the first half. Huge congratulations to Jill. She’s actually a pretty successful poetry comper. I must ask her what the secret is.

This week I was contacted by Rebecca Leek, whose podcast The Ditty Bag is a lovely thing: she records a new episode every week, featuring five or six poems that she has chosen, sometimes on a theme. This week there’s a fair bit of water, and Rebecca included my poem ‘Before the Splicing’ which was originally published in Prole magazine. She liked the poem because of its rope-making and boat-ish references, and actually explained what ‘splicing’ is. Very helpful! The poem is a sonnet spoken by a woman having doubts (or not) ostensibly about whether the rope she’s working on will hold tight, but also whether her impending marriage will work (the sense of ‘getting spliced’). I was delighted to hear Rebecca read it.

Robin Houghton, Readings, and a poem on ‘The Ditty Bag’ podcast

I live in a world of books, in the over-passionate, underfunded world of the arts. It’s messy and uncomfortable. But art is. The billionaires are in tech in the Bay Area. While thriving financially in the artistic sphere may be near impossible, reading enriches my life in every other area: it allows me to expand my mind, travel the world, imagine myself anew, be everywhere all at once.

As a publisher, I always think about who will read the books we publish. As a reader, I read all over the place, tumbling through genres, styles, poems, stories. I like to envision that we will all keep engaging with literature, whether we read books physically, listen to audiobooks, or consume bite-sized essays and poems throughout the day.

Kate Gale, Read to Me, America: For The Love of the Arts

Many poets seem to leave their book behind as soon as it’s published, but at that point I feel I’m only just getting to know it.

First of all, the reviews it receives (if the poet’s lucky!), provide an excellent sounding board. Which poems do reviewers highlight? What elements are cast into doubt? And secondly, what about the readers who buy the collection? These days, they often select a favourite poem or two from the book and post them on social media. Which ones are chosen? And thirdly, the poems that the poet might also decide to share. Which generate most traction? Which are most popular? Which garner most sales of the book? And then there are in-person readings. As mentioned previously on here, those events enable the poet to explore their collection again, to test which poems go down best in person, and which appear to disappoint.

And finally, the poet often benefits from time to weigh up all this feedback, to gauge it, to avoid dramatic, knee-jerk reactions to it, to compare and contrast it, to consider how it might (or might not!) contribute to the writing of their next collection. Of course, none of this process is possible if they turn their back on the book and immediately embark on another creative project as soon as a copy reaches their hands. The seemingly fallow period that follows publication is, in my view, a necessary pause, a pause that may be filled by the satisfaction of engaging with readers.

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

My poetry book now lives in over 120 homes, across 28 states and 5 countries. I want to say these numbers are far beyond what I expected, but I don’t think I really let myself “expect” anything. Regardless, every time I try to picture it—these little blue books sitting on nightstands, tucked into bags, resting on coffee tables—my whole body hums. […]

I’ve learned that marketing is much less fun than writing, and I’m not really the type who can do both at once. So for now, I’m letting myself lean into sharing this book and finding my readers.

Originally, I planned to spend a few quiet months focused on online sales before moving toward in-person stores. I wanted room to breathe after the marathon of finalizing the book. But my ADHD brain saw shiny opportunities and sprinted straight to them. I ended up pitching shops almost immediately.

From everything I’d read, I expected a long string of no’s before even one yes. Instead, I got two early yes’s (woohoo!), followed by two no’s, and two that I have not heard back from yet. Of the six places I pitched, half were boutiques and half were indie bookstores. And incredibly, A History of Holding is now available at Golden Hour Goods in Ventura and The Bookworm in Camarillo.

I’ve already sold a few copies at Golden Hour Goods (in fact, the first copy sold before I’d even left the shop)! The idea that a stranger could wander in, pick up my book, and decide to bring it home? That still feels unreal. […]

Another surprise was just how time-consuming and expensive it was to sign and ship orders. Each packaged book included a custom sticker, bookmark, plastic envelope to protect the book, gold wax seal, bubble polymailer, and shipping labels. By the time all was said and done, I spent about $7 on materials and postage per book. Still totally worth it, in my opinion. There are cheaper options, of course (ahem, Amazon), but I loved sending out the highest-quality book, infused with special touches directly from me. I wanted opening my book to be the highlight of someone’s day.

Allison Mei-Li, My First Month as a Published Author

The early half of this week has been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on CLOVEN, whose release is pending just after the beginning of the year. The initial proof copy was lost in the mail or swiped from the package room (or has somehow vanished into a dimensional divide along with a bottle of nail polish and some air fresheners) so I had to order another. Given shipping times, I assumed [that] would set me back a few weeks on the release, but I there wasn’t much that needed adjusting besides some margin/gutter issues, so I was able to make those changes in the master file, get it approved by the printer, and place an order for my first stack, which given it’s the 10th, may guarantee me copies before Christmas.  It feels like a more wintry book than GRANATA, which was all spring/summer, the first book in the series, so this mid-winter debut seems perfect. […]

I was thinking the other day, when I had to order another stack of an older self-issued volume, DARK COUNTRY, how much releasing my own work has changed my view of what’s possible for so much the better. On one hand, the benefits are immediate, like control over timelines and the book’s launch into the world. It also feels good and more sure-footed to not be waiting on submissions and schedules and just feeling like there are blocks and bottlenecks that are ultimately a zero sum game, at least for me and my needs/wants. If I could go back a couple decades, as enjoyable as its been to work with other publishers, I’d switch to self-publishing much faster than I did (for zines and chaps, I’ve been doing it all along through the years, but I’ve only had the design/layout skills in the past half-decade or so. )

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

I am excited to say that I have just received advance copies of Polar Corona, my prize-winning ‘crown-of-sonnets’ poetry pamphlet, published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press.  

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

“In Polar Corona, Caroline Gill offers a vivid and precise depiction of Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife, especially the seasonal rhythms of penguins’ lives, interwoven with a poignant exploration of human fortitude in this most testing of environments. Her marvellous ear for the music of a poem is evident throughout and the intricate pattern of mostly half rhymes cleverly accentuates the pervading sense of risk and unpredictability.” 

 – Susan Richardson, Author of Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022) and Words the Turtle Taught Me (Cinnamon Press, 2018), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 

Caroline Gill, ‘Polar Corona’, my prize-winning poetry pamphlet on Antarctica

Are you surprised to see me so soon?—me too! I’m usually more of your every-so-often friend who arrives with poems and snacks, but I just got the word I could officially share this with you (and I wanted to share here FIRST before you saw it on social media, etc.—Accidental Devotions has its FINAL cover—and I’m trying (um, failing) to act casual about it.

But the day is perfect to share as today would have been Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday and Emily D. is braided all through this next book (her and Darling Sue and even pressed jasmine)! So maybe this is not just a cover reveal, but also a little birthday offering to Emily’s altar of em dashes and devotion. (Side note: I recently read that AI is using dashes now, and I wanted to shout—Grrrrl, I got here first! I know there are a lot of dash-happy poets out there—maybe we need to start an Em Dash Society or at least wear t-shirts: The Em Dash: Because Periods Are Too Final).

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

My Creative Retirement Institute class on Emily Dickinson’s fascicles wrapped up yesterday. The beauty (and the weirdness) of it was that focusing on the fascicles made it impossible for me to turn the class into “all of Bethany’s favorite E. D. poems.” In each class I asked, “What caught your eye? What do you want to bring to our attention?” As a result, we put a microscope to poems I’ve barely given a glance in the past. And everything we picked up gave us so much to talk about. It was ideal.

Today I’m having my writing group here, at my house. I’ll bake Emily’s Coconut Cake, and we’ll drink sparkling water, and read poems to one another. What could be better?

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.

It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.

I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.

Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I’m going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

Perhaps it is my southern hemisphere background, but I find it hard not to feel gloomy in the cold, dark, dreary months of northern winter.

This December has been particularly depressing. In the part of southeast England where I live, issues with mains water quality led to a disruption in supply; ironically, given the fact that it has been raining for weeks. The lines from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner acquired a new context:

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

There have also been reports of an alarming surge in flu cases, including advice to wear face masks in public settings. On a global scale, events seem to be increasingly turbulent, the background noise more dissonant, the outlook ever more chaotic and uncertain. In some ways it feels reminiscent of the pandemic: that sense, in early 2020, of flailing around, panic-stricken and directionless. Then there was the alien state of being in lockdown; schools, businesses, leisure facilities all closed, no physical contact with wider family or friends, daily announcements of grim statistics and ever more stringent protocols….

That was nearly five years ago, and it feels like another lifetime. We don’t talk much about that period of lockdown any more,  yet the repercussions continue to reverberate in deep and subtle ways. It features, directly or indirectly, in a number of my poems: ‘Post Lockdown’, for example, which was written in 2021, or, more recently, ‘Discontinuity’.

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

the world is sky, lake, three men and a killing. it is winter.

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I must admit, these short, dark days are hard to take. Being more of a night owl, I miss part of the limited daylight we get in the mornings, then feel shocked and cheated when twilight approaches before 5 p.m. So unfair! 

How to cope? I try to appreciate merino wool sweaters, flannel sheets, and our wood-burning stove. And ignore the fact that spring is still months away—in fact, it’s not even officially winter yet! Still, it’s cold, dark and damp, and I struggle.

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

But it turns out that the worst is already behind us: yesterday saw the earliest sunset of the year here, at 4:48 p.m. From today on, the days will feel longer even though the winter solstice is not until December 21. So hurray for the return of the light!

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

It’s cold in these darkest days of winter, the land having turned its face away from the sun. But you are warm here, sleeping heavily under your down quilt, your worries scattered lifelessly about the rug where your mind dropped them. In your dream, you are following a white fox who trots through the frozen forest, leading you further and further away from the safety of your cabin. Where is he taking you? The way he darts between the trees, his thick fur lit only by the moon, makes him disappear for whole minutes. Many times you think you’ve lost him and begin to panic, only to glimpse the soft plume of his tail leading always just ahead. And now, what is that singing in the distance?

A sound dissolves one dream into another as candlelight fills your bedroom. It’s the children who are singing so beautifully. Do you know them? Yes, they are the same ones who, during the day, bicker over toys and leave clumps of porridge on the table, but are now revealed as children of light. Leading them is a woman wearing a crown of fire and carrying a tray of coffee and yellow buns. The smell of saffron is the smell of the sun. She invites you to taste it.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

I am sheltered on the second floor,
the house, when lit, is a fishbowl. 
Helicopters never quit whirling over Providence.
They clip the air, giant locust wings, clip
and clip and clip, over gardens, greens, 
sewers; when they quit, the silence of grief. 

In and out of the buzz of numbness. 
We live it viscerally but our experience, 
not yet cold, is already cliché. 

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

I wrote to my community this morning about the horrific shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island yesterday, and the horrific shooting at the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney today. Over the last several years I suspect every rabbi I know has gotten better at finding words to say after unthinkable tragedy. A skill none of us wanted. […]

When life feels dark and overwhelming, Jewish tradition teaches us to come together and to let our light shine. Over the course of the coming week our literal flames will go from one tiny candle to the blazing brilliance of a chanukiyah full of light. When we come together, the lights of our souls become more than the sum of their parts. The best response I know to anti-Jewish hatred, or any hatred, is to bravely let our light shine.

That’s the best wisdom I have to share today. For those who about to be celebrating (or are already celebrating — hi antipodeans!), may this Festival of Lights be a time of joy even amidst this sorrow.

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

We have names for our dark forces.
We have names for things close to us.
Different names when they become distant.
We have names for our separations.
And names for the shadows that grow
when the moon rejects us.

I hold this evening up
against that incomprehensible design.
A cold front has crept down from the north.
Clouds obscure everything, even reason.
Even the light from Cassiopeia
that has been stubbornly travelling in my direction
for thousands of years.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

It seems like a good time of year to remember the goal of Christianity used to be “peace on earth, good will towards humanity” and “love thy neighbor” and you know, welcoming the stranger and the immigrant because after all, Jesus was born in a foreign land and no one gave his family shelter—all that stuff that seems to have fallen out of fashion among too many who call themselves Christian. Whew! All right, maybe this post got heavy. I also lost another poet friend, the great Connie Walle, who was a fixture in the Tacoma poetry scene and a great poet besides. It made me sad I had not expressed my admiration to her more while she was still here—a theme of this year for me, as I cross the names of old friends off the holiday card list because they are no longer with us. We really do a bad job of this remembering to express thanks, love, and appreciation for those friends and family, writers and artists, who have made our lives better, our memories short, our ability to remind ourselves that even our lives are not “forever,” and even small things cannot be taken for granted. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dangerous Floods All Around, Trying to Holiday Despite

Brown eyes peer through a back seat window, gazing at the sparkling white powder on the city sidewalks. A small mittened hand swipes a red runny nose then dips quickly back into the pocket of the threadbare rumpled jacket from which it emerged. Festive shoppers with bulging bags walk gaily down the street as brown eyes watch in wonder. The family in the old red Chevy sits in the background of busy streets and merry anticipation, waiting at a red light as the sputtering heater blows hot then cold and the children sniffle and cough the carol of the hungry and homeless. Down the snowy street it chugs, straining on its last fumes to reach the red door of the shelter where warmth and food and one cold night off the streets awaits if the line isn’t too long or the shelter too full. Belief is a word pregnant with hope.

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

Some leave, some arrive.
Flaggers waving lit-up wands
before the train station.

*

For a few moments,
the silhouettes of trees pressed
against the sky’s burning throat.

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

Welcome to the Some Flowers Soon Christmas Poetry Quiz! Questions this week, answers next Monday. Then I’ll be away for a fortnight and back in the New Year.

All the answers, except the last one, are the names of modern poets. The usual rules apply: strictly no Googling, but you may consult poems learned by heart. Previous editions of Some Flowers Soon may also, in some cases, be helpful. […]

Which Swiss-Bolivian poet, who died this year, wrote a poem (in English) which begins:

snow is english
snow is international
snow is secret
snow is small
snow is literary
snow is translatable

[…]

Which poet wrote a “Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan” which ends:

Christmas is the time of cold air
and loud parties and big expense,
but in our hearts flames flicker
answeringly, as on old-fashioned
trees. I would rather the house
burn down than our flames go out.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Some Flowers Soon Christmas Quiz 2025

Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation…

… for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia … and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC! 

It’s the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened my birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply to my day: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday to me in that moment. I’d planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. “But I please to know what my presents are now!” I thought, so I damn well opened my presents over breakfast, and I’m so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.

I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing.

Liz Lefroy, I “Do What [I] Damn Well Please”

All that I am
is the question of
a crow against the sky
on a cold morning
when it is too bright
to see,
too blue and white
to believe.
The tree against
the landscape. One thing
depending on the other.

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

This week: an imagined history of the Green Man, anti-capitalist work poetry, the dactylic hexameter line, and much more. Enjoy.

If only I could sculpt the words to shape the lump in my throat every time I see the smiling faces and the flickering flags of the Global Sumud Flotilla as it heads east, picking up more boats, more people, a milquetoast military escort, as it goes.

They’re good at social media, across many organisational and personal Instagram accounts, and my window onto the digital collective mind is full of it. The soundtrack knocks the nail home. I cried when I watched a crew member playing ‘Bella Ciao’ on the violin, or another reel, with a beautiful Mediterranean sunset and Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’.

‘Love, love is a verb, love is a doing word.’

And we know they’re doing what we didn’t, or can’t, or won’t, wringing our hands at the unfolding massacre. I am as guilty of inaction as any shame-faced nation-state, hiding behind bleak poetry of witness, for what it’s worth, which might not be nothing. I wrote something about poetry sending ripples and ripples becoming waves, and know that it must be cold out there at night, under way over the ancient sea.

They thread between cities and the remnants of fallen civilizations, many the foundations of the West’s antiquity and its origin stories. Barcelona, Genoa, Catania, Tunis, Syros, then on to the ‘Holy Land’. Like lacing together a fishing net, they draw in more boats from across the sea, the Maghreb, and other oceans beyond. I was reading about the 1190 massacre of the Jews of York, then later, about the burning of the library of the Madrasa of Granada, a bitter, vengeful conflagration of knowledge and scholarly endeavour. A thousand years of burning books and the people who wrote them. It is a modern human triumph that the flotilla has members of all three ‘peoples of the book’; Christians, Muslims, Jews.

james mcconachie, Flickering Flags

I put my fist slightly off centre on my chest
draw round it, with red marker pen,
make a Valentine’s heart.
It needs to be bolder.
I outline it again
with black.
I recall the pages of my old Gray’s Anatomy;
add in a fat aorta,
ventricles, atria
forget where the vena cava goes.
I leave it out
press lightly to feather in the valves
laugh when they look like ghosts.

Sue Finch, MANDALAS AND THE JOY OF THINKING

Just to stay sane,
with warplanes
wounding the ancient sky,
I write
one more tanka.

[…]

I’m aligning myself with what I stand for, what I long for. I want to recognise my own shortcomings, and continue to face them so that I never stop learning.

On love:
pick no flowers
from open meadows,
from no one,
not any.

Kati Mohr, Makoto

The monarchs I see in my garden may, if they are lucky enough to survive the trip, live up to 9 months, which is well past the life span of spring and early summer generations.

They are not even returning to a place they know or have ever been. Human science has never yet determined how monarch butterflies of the last summer generation find their way to Mexico. They just go adventuring, floating on air currents, supping on flowers as they travel.

I’m about to go adventuring, as well, traveling further east than I’ve ever been, in the company of one of my favorite persons in the world–my daughter. She and I had long talked about taking a mother-daughter trip together once I retired, and sooner is better than later! She found an environmentally-conscious adventure tour business that offers some really intriguing historical/archeological/environmental hike-and-bus options. We’ll find out whether the company is worth recommending & I’ll report back here, meanwhile keeping our destination unrevealed for now. A little mystery is fun.

While I am taking this trip for reasons beyond writing inspiration, I can’t help hoping it will act as a prompt and opportunity for drafting new poems. I’ve been working on new drafts, and revising older ones; but I have to admit that for awhile my creative mojo has been a bit off. Yes, this happens to any so-called “creative” occasionally, but it never feels terrific. One prefers the juicy, challenging urgency of creative flow. Wish me luck (and traveling mercies).

Ann E. Michael, Adventuring

I’ve been pondering why I’m so lacking in any impetus to write at the moment. After all, if the sun-drenched historic gorgeousness and energy of Sicily doesn’t inspire me, what the heck will? Actually, those fabulous mosaics at Villa Romana Casale of female bikini-clad athletes are pretty inspirational. But sometimes (usually, for me) it’s a small thing that pops out unexpectedly. Among the pile of publications and catalogues waiting for me to read when I got back was a copy of the new-look Times Literary Supplement, bigger and thicker than before and every two weeks rather than weekly. I had barely got into it when today the latest issue dropped though the letter box. A quick skim for poetry content revealed a poem by Jemma Borg called ‘Before & after the night’. (Apologies if this link takes you to a paywall.) As I read it, I felt little lights going off in my brain accompanied by the kind of ‘wish I’d written that’ feeling that can be inspirational but also saddening. Like Salieri in Amadeus, melting in the face of Mozart’s brilliance and at recognising that he himself will never be more than a reasonably good musician. Thankfully, Jemma’s poem had more of a positive than negative effect on me! So I’ve just ordered a copy of her collection Wilder and a already noodling through a few ideas.

Robin Houghton, Readings, writing, reviews & general catchup

Being of a certain age, I worry that the time will come when I stop writing poems. I’m constantly jotting down wee scraps of notes, on the flyleaf of whatever collection I happen to be reading at the time, or in a notebook, or on my phone, in the hope they’ll eventually spark something. Folk are always talking about where the next poem will come from or fretting that there are no more poems left in them, but I find it far more helpful to talk about the poem as being up ahead somewhere, and everything I’m doing now is to bring me closer to it.

There’s a fair amount of trust involved – moving from something tedious and dreadful towards something that intrigues. When I think of it, that’s probably my main criterion – does it interest me or bore me? When I already know where I’m heading, when I’m confident I understand what I want to say, I’m almost always disappointed with the outcome.

What can help me on the path to the next poem? Many years ago a young Louise Glück said there were four things she would teach aspiring poets: how to become better readers; knowledge of craft; an attitude of dedication and habits of scrutiny. In other words, read poetry, learn how a poem is put together, work bloody hard at it and don’t just look at the world, engage with it.

John Glenday, North Sea Line Caught #1

The lover and the writing exist in tension for the poet. Nothing will relieve or alter these intersections in his life— the duress of intimacy and its attendant conflicts. “Vulnerable and exposed” . . . like a man battered by winds on the cliffs near the Duino Castle, where his elegies would be finished. […]

Among my three copies of Stephen Mitchell’s Selected Rilke translations, there is one filled with color-markings, the text that peeks out from the rainbow of my Rilke readings. Yellow markings made in my 20’s. Green arrived my late 30’s during the nursing-while-returning-to-Rilke days. Rilke’s “Elegy” for Marina Tvsetaeva is a forever favorite in its form as well as its direction. His preemptive elegy to a friend would be matched by her own New Year’s elegy to Rilke, following the shock of his death.

It hurts to write. It hurts to not-write. This, too, is an unassailable rhythm that rocks the raft of a life.

Alina Stefanescu, Rilke’s testament.

I suppose it’s what all poets search for – the perfect poem.

It’s the quest that keeps writers writing. And for most of us, it’s an impossible dream that sometimes seems achievable, sometimes seems very far away.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve written something, leaned back and thought ‘That’s it, that’s the one, I can’t say it any better than that’ only to look again, in an hour, a day, a week, even a year and, with a sinking feeling in the throat, think ‘Oh’. […]

You can’t set out to write something perfect, of course. Or I can’t. I just feel I might be on to something, a line, a thought, a link of words, an image, and run with it. What understanding I have of what a piece of writing is becoming as I write is often instinctive. I trust in my ability to get it down, to find the better lines, to hold the theme or tone, or change the theme and tone, and finish it at the right place.

I think that sense of trust has evolved over time, has taken over from the arrogance of youth where I wrote something and wanted to tell the world about it because I believed it to be so very good. Now, life itself is in a more reflective place, but I also think my brain seems to operate in a different way to when I was young. While I still hold pretty much the same view of the humanity’s moral and physical crimes and persistent absurdities, the connections between words and images are not so clear. I don’t hear or feel the same rhythms. Poems arrive in different, less systematic, less easily controlled ways. I have a more relaxed attitude to whether or not something will be successful, am content to let the process take care of itself and hope those who read it find something thought-provoking, useful or entertaining in it – assuming I think it of any interest at all. If I don’t, then I scrap it and start again at another place, another line, thought, image.

Bob Mee, THE PERFECT POEM?

“Meditation at Lagunitas” [by Robert Hass] is, I will argue near to the death, a perfect poem. Despite its 1979 publication in Praise—it is as old as I am—it remains as fresh and surprising for me as it was the first time I read it, an encounter I feel fortunate to remember; it’s not often you confidently recall, for instance, the moment a favourite person entered your ken. Nor is it necessarily typical to remember an exam question twenty-five years after you closed the blue book, but such was my undergraduate poetry education: singular and enduring. The essay prompt entailed a comparison-contrast between the Hass poem and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Blackberries” (the audio is the man himself; give it a click). I don’t remember what argument I made—only the feeling of Hass’s meditation opening, the longer I looked, like a lotus.

All I knew of Helen Vendler at that time was her book On Extended Wings, on Wallace Stevens’s longer poems, with which I’d grappled in pursuit of an unwieldy high school essay on “Sunday Morning,” but what captivated me in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” I realize now, is embodied by her notion of the speech act as a means of accessing a poem. By recognizing the function of each utterance and observing the shifts from sentence to sentence, one gains a deeper understanding of a poem’s tones—its emotional attitudes. In part it’s simple rhetorical analysis. It’s also just being a good listener, attentive to the speaker in front of you, how his effort unfurls with ease or snags, catches or exhales, sets out an assertion or walks it back, tests an idea or insinuates it, waits for your response.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass

I wrote a tribute to my long-time poet friend, Martha Silano, that went up on the Poetry Foundation web site (and was in the newsletter) and I was very happy and hope this helps people remember her and her writing. Marty passed away of ALS in May of this year. Her last book, Terminal Surreal, just came out from Acre Books. I hope you will look up her work as it is very worth reading.

Here’s a link to the article: An Oracular Voice: Remembering Martha Silano | The Poetry Foundation

Here is a taste of the article:

“The last time I saw Marty—Martha Silano—in person, it was fall during a week of wildfire smoke and we decided to visit a local sunflower farm in my neighborhood of Woodinville, Washington. We got lucky—the haze lifted for a few hours, the air quality wasn’t too terrible, and the temperatures had dropped enough for us to be comfortable outside. We met at my house for a quick catch-up chat, snacks, and wine, and I noticed that she hadn’t eaten or drunk very much. I think the beginnings of her swallowing problems—her first ALS symptom—were already happening, though she didn’t complain about a thing that day. I have a picture of us smiling among red and yellow sunflowers, the sky blue but slightly hazy above us. She told me how glad she was to be able to get out into nature again, without the pervasive wildfire smoke. Soon afterward, she was diagnosed with ALS and such outings would become impossible. I am so glad to have the memory of that day, now.”

I wish you all a healthy and happy week, and be sure to find a way to tell your friends how much they mean to you.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Tribute to Martha Silano Up at the Poetry Foundation

With the sad news of the passing of Tony Harrison, who as a working class poet had a great impact on me during my formative years of writing in the 1980s, I went back to a piece I was commissioned to write for an OUP collection of essays on his writing – both poetic and dramatic – in 1997. […]

Harrison’s first full collection, entitled The Loiners after the inhabitants of his native Leeds, was published in 1970 and contained this limerick:

There was a young man from Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
A pure white rose grew out of his nose
And his arse was covered in weeds.

Without losing sight of the essential comedy of this snatch, it can be seen as suggestive of aspects of Harrison’s career. For example, the comic inappropriateness of the Leeds boy swallowing seeds becomes the poet’s own ironic image of his classical grammar school education. As a result of this, in a deliberately grotesque image, arises the growth of the white rose of poetry – from the boy’s nose, of course, since Harrison in the same volume gave credence to the idea that the true poet is born without a mouth. The bizarrely contrasting weed-covered arse owes less to the intake of seeds (rose seeds wherever transplanted will never yield weeds) than to the harsh conditions Harrison premises in the Loiner’s life, as indicated in an early introduction to his work, where he defines the term as referring to “citizens of Leeds, citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, ‘loners’”.

Harrison’s now-legendary seed-master on the staff of Leeds Grammar School was the one who humiliated him for reciting Keats in a Yorkshire accent, who felt it more appropriate if the boy played the garrulous, drunken Porter in Macbeth.(3) The truth is that the master’s attitudes determined the kind of poetic rose that grew, in particular its technical facility which Harrison worked at to show his ‘betters’ that Loiners could do it as well as (better than?) they could. Yet this was no sterile technical exercise and Harrison’s success lies in the integrity with which he has remained true to those regions “covered with weeds” and in the fact that his work has always struggled to find ways to unite the weed and the rose. Perhaps the most important of these, as the limerick’s anatomical geography already predicted in 1970, is via the rhythms of his own body.

Martyn Crucefix, RIP Tony Harrison – a piece on metre and voice in his poetry

• My actual birthday arrives and I attend a reading by two visiting poets, Julia Kolchinsky and Jaswinder Bolina. The reading is fire. At dinner after, Shenandoah editor Beth Staples urges me to get dessert and I sheepishly order a fruit cup. It arrives with a lit candle shoved into a slice of banana and the waiters serenade me.
• Fifty bazillion people wish me happy birthday on FB, which is so kind although I feel guilty again because I have NOT been keeping up with distant friends’ special days. I navigate to the site to finish reading the messages. I learn through the many shocked posts on my timeline that Jennifer Martelli has died.
• I think of Frank O’Hara’s elegy for Billie Holiday’s voice: “Everyone and I stopped breathing”
• I last saw Jenn in late spring, twice. First was at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival where she spoke memorably on a panel about shame. My notes don’t quote her but I think she said something about not giving shame the time of day, being done with it after a childhood steeped in it. I was admiringly gobsmacked.
• A poet who was supposed to do a reading/ interview with me in Cambridge MA shortly after the festival suddenly canceled (long story). I panicked hard. Then I thought of Jenn’s generous social media posts about my book, the kind that showed she’d really engaged with it. She lived not so far from there. I wrote and asked her if she’d be game to step in. She swiftly said yes with only a week to prepare (a week that also involved, for her, two festival presentations).
• As I wrote about that Porter Square Books event in a diary-style blog shortly after returning home: “The amazing Jennifer Martelli (who’d spoken so powerfully on the shame panel) reads with me then runs a staged conversation about Mycocosmic, having prepared spectacularly with insightful and high-stakes questions.”
• I had no idea she’d been coping with pancreatic cancer for months. In her honor, I am resisting feeling ashamed about having asked her. She seemed unburdened and 110% alive.
• I watched her post joyous pictures on social media from a trip to Iceland, and when she’d returned home I sent her a few little gifts from a local lavender farm with a thank-you note. I received a lovely message back claiming that I had accidentally discovered her obsession with tea towels.
• I was far from Jenn’s inner circle so I don’t have any right to say this, but sometimes I feel a spirit-connection with a poet when I spend time with their books. I do in her case. She wrote inventively and autobiographically about addiction, violence, and being a woman in a profoundly misogynist world–often with witchiness and references to Tarot. (Her work suggests that she was both an atheist and kinda psychic, although I’ve never confirmed either.) The poems are spare, the language tight, but they simultaneously convey a mind in the process of probing experience with self-interrogating honesty. What’s not to love?
• My Tarantella is near my desk–it was the only Martelli book for sale at Porter Square that I didn’t already own–so Friday morning, I put aside the recommendation letters and read it. In life, she had a strong and distinctive voice that tended to delight people–you knew where she was from! It’s good to hear it in my head, to know she survives this way. I often tell students that the poems that move us most say what seems scary, self-exposing, dangerous. My Tarantella probes the poet’s obsession with the life and death of Kitty Genovese. It’s powerfully riveting because it brims with risk and revelation.

Lesley Wheeler, Voices in my head

On Tuesday night, I travelled to the London launch of “The Wildest Dream: an imagined history of the Green Man” by the much-missed David Gee (Ember Press 2025). It was strange to be at a launch when the author was absent; strange to celebrate when grief was such a strong presence in the room. But the beauty of the book still shone, and listening to it, I remembered- for the first time in these tumultuous weeks – something of the calm I found on the Coast to Coast, something about how words can lead the way into brighter, wider places. “Green without, green within”, said David, finding wildness not just in mountains and rivers, but also in tap water, weather, small acts of love and care. Fitting then that his final book – finished just weeks before his far-too-soon-death – should be an act of community, crowdfunded and published by people who loved him and his work, with half of all proceeds donated to Asylum Welcome.

Clare Shaw, Celebrating New Books

The wide canvases of Shadow Reader and The Strongbox embrace many lives, some sharply realised as individuals, others sketchily included in panoramic views. In this way, both books offer many of the satisfactions of fiction in a concentrated and distilled form. Michelene Wandor’s chapbook Ergo represents a very different poetic. My general sense is that moving from Dugdale’s and Dharker’s books to hers is like turning from oil paintings – crowded, impasto canvases in The Strongbox, more thinly layered ones in Shadow Reader – to an album of delicate, almost transparent, semi-abstract watercolours. Most of her poems are very short and all use minimalist imagistic techniques to hint at emotions, narratives and situations in a way that’s often almost ethereally bare of human presence. […]

The distinctive beauty of these poems seems to me to depend on two things; the harmonious flow and sensitive patterning of their sounds and the combination of vividness and elusiveness in the imagery. More than pointing out to the surrounding world, they induce a dreamlike state focused on the movement of the mind between the impressions forming and reforming themselves within it.

Edmund Prestwich, Michelene Wandor, Ergo – review

One of the pleasures of living where I do is its proximity to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, home of a vibrant poetry festival. One of its star turns last year was Cirencester poet, Frank McMahon. I have heard him read his poetry on several occasions. More recently he has been performing poems from his fourth collection, The Canticles of Spring, (Tim Saunders Publications, 2025). I couldn’t wait to review it.

The first thing that strikes you about McMahon’s poems in this collection is the polymathic knowledge that underpins them. There is a familiarity with ancient history that informs the poems in the Museum section, such as Market Opportunities and Neolithic Axe-Head. There is the knowledge of myths that is most notably deployed in Ancient Music, a retelling of the Orpheus-Eurydice story, which imagines her relentless pursuit of a reunion with him through the ages and culminating in the present. There is the understanding of classical music and jazz that is so movingly deployed in the war poem, Pastoral, after Symphony no 3 by Ralph Vaughan Williams and in other poems specifically on the subject, such as Jazz Variations. Three Voices. There’s the rich botanical knowledge that makes for vivid descriptions in nature poems, such as Where I walked. And, of course there are the intertextual references in poems such as The Periodic Table (In Memoriam Primo Levi) and in Du Fu Comes to our Home, the latter a work which imagines a conversation with the 8^th Century, Chinese poet, Du Fu.

This impressive, broad frame of reference supports poems that seek to make sense of human experience. The range of themes explored is equally diverse. At a time when the fashion is for collections and pamphlets on a specific theme, I found this a refreshing change. All poetry’s universal concerns are here.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Canticles of Spring’ by Frank McMahon

The latest from Philadelphia poet Gina Myers [see my review of her prior collection here] is the book-length suite, Works & Days (Philadelphia PA: Radiator Press, 2025), a collection that plays off the dailyness and immediate title of Works and Days (New York NY: New Directions, 2016) by the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022). Instead of articulating the dailyness of being, Myers works through, as Marie Buck offers in their back cover blurb, “[…] all the hours we’ve lost to working; it also registers the continuous urge to want more from life than just sustaining oneself with a paycheck.” “Once I commit to writing a long poem about work,” Myers writes, near the end of the collection, “I decide to read a number of books about work / And this too becomes work, thankless and unpaid / And it begins to make me feel worse / And I begin to dread the work of reading about work [.]”

There has been an interesting anti-capitalist work poetry emerging from Philadelphia for some time, centred, as my awareness provides, around the work of Myers and Ryan Eckes [see my review of his latest here], offering a kind of continuation of the 1970s “work poetry” ethos worked through by Canadian poets Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Erín Moure and Phil Hall, and furthered by poets including the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing (Wayman being one of the founders), to more recent examples, whether Vancouver poet Michael Turner (think Company Town, for example), Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell or Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here]. Whereas those early Vancouver days of “work poetry” championed the idea that labour was worth articulating as literary subject matter, an idea that evolved through poets such as language-specific interrogations and pro-labour criticisms of capitalist culture—leaning into the work of poets such as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Clint Burnham, Colin Smith, ryan fitzpatrick and others—Myers employs numerous of those same threads with the added flavour of general frustrations, one that I know she shares with numerous other writers (few who ever discuss such in their writing): the mere fact that requiring employment takes time away from actually writing. […]

Not everyone holds the same physical requirements, the same mental load, for employment, which can allow for a very different level of post or pre-work energy. We all know about Frank O’Hara working poems during his lunch break, Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching upon prescription pads, or Toronto poet bpNichol, who used to compose his thoughts directly into a tape machine, during his long commutes from downtown Toronto to his lay-work at Therafields. Vancouver poet George Stanley composed a long poem while commuting around on BC Transit. Minneapolis poet Mary Austin Speaker composed The Bridge (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], her accumulation of untitled, stand-alone poems as she made her daily commute across New York’s Manhattan Bridge. I also know of writers too exhausted to even think about writing, once they leave the physical threshold of work.

In a cohesive collection of accumulated, first-person lyric interrogations, Myers writes on writing and work. She writes on writing and not writing, and offering her best energies and time to what she cares less about than other elements of her life, and of wanting to keep her writing life and writing time separate from ideas of “product,” a notion she feels enough pressure, put upon through capitalism, to resist.

rob mclennan, Gina Myers, Works & Days

“Home is a Place that Visits Me” does end on a note of hope: that trauma has been acknowledged and is being worked through. Hannah Hull has achieved an empathetic, compassionate long poem that captures a child’s view of abuse without graphic detail. Effectively a house readers journey through with space for them to imagine how they might have lived there and what the previous occupants experienced. It also asks questions about what makes a home. It’s not the building but how we occupy and use the building, the people we invite in and the people we keep out. Ultimately, it’s about agency and bodily autonomy: the house may be real or metaphoric. How we treat the most vulnerable who don’t have the capacity to bodily autonomy is a measure of humanity.

Emma Lee, “Home is a Place that Visits Me” Hannah Hull (Arachne Press) – book review

Last week Jeremy Wikeley (Jem) wrote an excellent, thought-provoking piece on the near-disappearance of what he calls the ‘middle-distance poem’ — the sort of thing exemplified by Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ and Yeats’ ‘Among School Children’. These are fairly long poems — often of around 100 lines — which, according to Jeremy’s piece, have a consistent, often stanzaic form, are strongly felt and “go on a journey”. […]

Jeremy’s piece hit my inbox at a busy moment, so I read it very quickly, and immediately had three thoughts but no chance to comment properly. The first thought was that, actually, I have noticed at least one long poem of roughly the kind of shape and ambition that he describes in most of the collections I’ve admired recently, and in several cases these were among the poems I liked best in the book — I’m thinking of pieces like the impressive ‘What the Buddha saw’ poems at the end of Carola Luther’s Walking the Animals; the title poems of Alex Wylie’s Secular Games and Joshua Mehigan’s Accepting the Disaster; Peter Davidson’s ‘The Mourning Virtuoso’ from Arctic Elegies, and A. E. Stalling’s long poem ‘Lost and Found’ (from Like). (Most of these poems are not available online: in those cases, the links in the previous sentence take you to pieces where I have quoted from them.)

I don’t think this invalidates Jeremy’s point at all, because you certainly don’t see poems like this in magazines very often and I think he’s right that they occupy a much less prominent place in the wider poetry “scene” than they once did. (Perhaps contemporary poets who want to write in this sort of way are now more likely to turn to the prose poem or lyric essay rather than verse?) I certainly can’t offhand think of a contemporary poet who is really “known” for writing poems of this general type, in the way that Larkin is and was.

My second thought was that these are, in classical terms, ‘hexameter’ rather than lyric poems. In classical Latin and Greek, the dactylic hexameter (six-foot) line was widely used not only for epic, which is perhaps what we tend to associate it with today, but also for medium length ‘conversational’ poems, such as satires and epistles. The satires and epistles of Horace, for example, are all in hexameter and range between 13 and over 300 lines long, but are mostly around 100. (Classical “satire” in this generic sense can be, but is not necessarily, “satiric” in the modern sense: the Latin term for both verse satires and epistles was sermones, ‘conversations’.) These are poems that are characterised by their ‘speaking voice’, even in cases where they do not have a specific addressee. Though they have moments of great intensity or beauty, they are typically pitched at a lower key than we associate with lyric, and they are (broadly speaking) closer to ordinary speech and more outward looking.

Poets raised on a classical literary framework, whatever their native language, have always tended to reproduce this distinction — in the sixteenth-century you find it very clearly in both Wyatt and (in French) Marot, for example, as well as in all the Latin poets of the period; and Jonson and Donne both wrote dozens of satires, epistles and other sorts of medium-length ‘conversational’ poems alongside lyric. (This perhaps goes a small way to answering one of Jeremy’s very interesting ‘Questions to follow up’, “What, if anything, have the metaphysical poets got to do with it [i.e., the middle-distance poem]?”). And even among 20th century poets, there is a clear sense of the difference between lyric and ‘hexameter’/sermo in the poetry of, for example, Thom Gunn and Anthony Hecht, as well as in Larkin. (Who, as has often been pointed out, had a kind of genius for concealing, or perhaps just fully digesting, the more high-flown elements and sources of his deeply-rooted style.)

Victoria Moul, Middle-distance death

— I’ve spent some time this week, as one does, comparing two translations of the same line from Tomas Tranströmer.

This is by Patty Crane, from the book Bright Scythe:

“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.”

This one by Robin Fulton in The Great Enigma:

“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from wounds we don’t know about.”

— They resonate in different ways, and I’m grateful for them both. I like the word fatally, in the second, but I like the finality of the sounds in words bleed, death, wounds, together. And I’m sure each translator mulled over these possibilities. Meanwhile, we look almost happy out in the sun. Worth a life’s work to have written something so true.

— Teju Cole on Tranströmer upon his Nobel win: “Reading him, one is also reminded of American poets like Charles Simic (for his surrealism) and Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder, and W. S. Merwin (for their plain speech and koan-like wisdom). But Tranströmer casts a spell all his own, and in fact the strongest associations he brings to my mind are the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Overwintering

–You wake up tomorrow morning, and you discover that you are a tree, outside there, on the quad of the campus.  Describe how you feel and what you see.

–The next morning, you wake up, and you are a single leaf on the tree.  Describe life from the viewpoint of that leaf.

–The next morning, you are soil, the dirt beneath the tree.

–The next morning, you are a bird.

–The next morning, you are the bird’s nest.

–The next morning, you are this door, made of wood that was once a tree.

–The next morning, you are the blade of the saw mill that transformed the tree into wood for boards to make doors and furniture and lumber.

–The next morning, you are a saw mill.  Are you abandoned?  Transformed into something else?  Or are you still transforming trees into boards?

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, You Are the Tree, You Are the Board, You Are the Sawmill Blade

When I was in middle school, my family took a trip to Western Ireland. It was my first time in Europe, and the first time I walked around inside structures more than—at most—150 years old. Being in the presence of these timeworn stone castles, Celtic earthworks and burial mounds, churches built a 1,000 years ago or more, I felt a sense of vertigo as time expanded and deepened around me, an uncanny feeling of the now—of my own thirteen year old self—suddenly touching history, being inside of it. Rather than learning about the past as some outside observer, I realized that I too was riding the same winding river as the other real people from long ago who had walked the same land, stood among the same rooms.

I was already a budding poet then, and I wrote a poem during that trip trying to capture this new sense of time I was experiencing. Like most middle-school poems, it reads as cringey to me in retrospect, but it still puts me back into that place of vertigo when I remember the lines “I placed a rock on the old stone wall/ to put myself in history.” Thirty years on, I can feel that mossy stone in my hand as I lifted it from the moss, feel the electric surge in my spine as I nestled it onto the crumbling wall that had veined that particular green hill in Connemara for God knows how many years. In that act, I felt my hands joining the other hands that had built the wall. I wondered how long my stone would stay where I placed it.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Deep Time

i lose my head & live a tiny green life.
in my house-sitting days every place
had orchids. they liked to speak in parables.
once, i sat down & a white & blush orchid
told me, “there was a girl
without any parents. she emerged
from the earth.” i thought the flower
was talking about me so i ran away
& did not get to hear the end of the story.
what happened to her? is that why
there’s always dirt under my fingernails?
i think politics are awful & i would rather
just sit with the orchids & try to not die.

Robin Gow, orchid keeper

ChatGPT will respond by predicting what words are most likely to follow in a helpful, coherent way. Utilizing semantics and context, possible responses will be considered. If I had been talking about a stressful day, ChatGPT may consider responding with “That sounds like a restorative plan—long walks are great for grounding” or “That sounds nourishing. Do you usually find walks help you reset?”

When I say “I need to go for a long walk. Respond as if you are May Sarton”, ChatGPT responds as if it were the poet/writer May Sarton:

“Ah—yes. Go. The long walk is not a luxury but a necessity, a way to restore the soul’s fragile balance. Out there, in the hush of the natural world, the mind loosens its tight grip, and the body remembers its rhythm. Each step is a kind of prayer, each breath an opening. Do not hurry; let the walk take you as much as you take it. In the quiet, you may find the threads of yourself weaving back together.

“Would you like me to shape this into something closer to her journal style, almost like an entry from Journal of a Solitude?”

A fluffy response, followed by what feels like an advertisement. More, more, more.

Sarah Lada, (Really, I 3 You) (Do you wish to believe I 3 you)

To dream.
To have the sky on speed dial:
please more stars, less rain;
please more wildfowl in a skein,
less death please, less disarray.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, To have the sky on speed dial

In Chicago, I walked around the hushed library of the Poetry Foundation. In an ongoing period of artistic suppression, The Poetry Foundation has helped us maintain a literary community. As a young person, I dove into poetry and decided that was my way of life. When I was in college, I only wanted to read either queer women or African American poets. I could not bear reading white men. I was convinced their poetry sprang from privileged lives safe from my guttered existence, completely outside of my experience of the world.

When I think of the extremes of poetry, the poems you can’t really read because the words are stomping over each other on the page, or the poems you have to read many times to understand their kind of music, I recognize how humans like extremes in our universe, in our communities. Maybe because America is moving toward such a dark place, I’m giving thought to all the ways a person—a country—can die and be buried. […]

Living is difficult work. In Chicago, I didn’t eat. I worked. I drank water and coffee and, when I could, I saw art. At my next stop, Nashville, I caught my breath. Carrying an independent publishing press through a country on fire—a country that will not prioritize the survival of the arts—feels like a wild task. Some days, I wonder if I am too old for this. Or too young. Or not impressive enough. Or too female. One of my advisors says a man could do it better.

And so? God is a woman, I say. My God, at any rate. Women get things done. Just wait. Right now, I am in D.C., heading to Baltimore to plan for AWP, to New York to fundraise, then to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Red Hen Press is women-led, queer leaning. We women carry water. We sustain our communities.

In the immediate moment, when I’ve caught my breath, I am off to do wild, great things, as we must in times of great peril. I am not disappearing. Some days, I feel that I am. But I am here, ready to do the great work that art requires of me. I believe in the survival of America. We will unbury this country. We will find our way to the sky.

Kate Gale, Visibility and Vanishing: Unburying the Dream of America

Somewhere, the click of high heels becomes rosary beads, sending well-worn prayers up to a starry heaven dazzled by mercy and moonlight.

All around, the onyx-eyed gaze of darkened apartment windows.

Alleyways looking for nothing pretty, just enough shadows to cloak them in mystery.

Hotels, rooming houses, bungalows, and mansions whisper secrets of the lucky and lowdown, the famished and famous.

Above it all, lovers are parked along Mulholland.

Their fingers upon the heated pulse of a promise yet to be kept.

Rich Ferguson, Along the Boulevard

But sunsets still stun with their overflow of spun
candied gold; dust pooled in clouds, at last.

Thieves walk the streets in statement suits—
brazenly believing this is their time at last.

Who’ll remember when and where and what
survived, when the trials end at last.

On our very last day, before our departure,
will there be a break in the rain at last?

Luisa A. Igloria, Eventually

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

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

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

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

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

OK, I thought. Not Whitman then.

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, READING POETRY TO PIGS

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

Clare Shaw, Walk with Me.

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

PF Anderson, Honeybees

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I Explore by Swimming

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

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

Saudamini Deo, Rue du chat qui pêche

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

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

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

Gerry Stewart, A Summer Ending

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

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

Kim Moore, July Reading

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

Rebecca Loudon, Chicago

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

by spring a small antenna sprouted in that place

somewhere under the earth
wispy clouds and the wingbeats of birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Houghton, Summer, busy, change, decisions…

審判のゐないテニスよ夏の雲　遠藤容代

shinpan no inai tenisu yo natsu no kumo

            tennis match

            without a judge…

            summer clouds        

                                                Hiroyo Endo

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Poetic feet [sprained]

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Exhibit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this:

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, On revising poems

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

Kristy Bowen, summering with the greeks

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

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

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

Sue Finch, YELLOW STRETCHY MAN

Despite
everything, there is still this life. And in

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

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

in your mind and explain themselves to
you.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Despite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hug on the street
the bagpipe’s notes
mellifluous

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

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

Billy Mills, Recent Reading July 2025: A Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copiously in her mouth.

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Three books from a box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, What is spite?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where the wild roses grow

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

Robin Gow, tunnel breath

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

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

Who are we when we lose our essential selves?

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

I remember.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Gale, I Hear the Black Swan Coming

Everything has been falling apart for so long.

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

Help us to believe
that better is possible.

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

Rachel Barenblat, Fifteen glimpses of Tisha b’Av

This week: industrious bees, birds made of text, the rhizodont, International Pineapple Day, and much more. Enjoy.

Despite being long removed from my teenage years, I still think of summer as a time of transition or growth. You return to school in the fall to find out who got taller, weirder, or cooler; what new experiences people had, or friends they made or lost. This summer, I’ve decided instead of discovering something new, I would reclaim something lost. And so, after 28 years, since I first left home for college, I have picked up my flute again.

Through high school, despite knowing that I had no long-term musical ambitions, I was quite serious about it and performed with the local college flute choir until I graduated. (I even have a flute performance to thank for connecting me with my now husband.) I am not sure exactly why I stopped playing, other than my singular focus and obsession with becoming a writer. But, as I remember it, I put my flute away after my senior year ended, and it sat in its case, moving with me from city to city and home to home for decades. Ocassionally, my parents or in-laws would ask if I ever planned to play again, and I have always thought that I would, perhaps in some old lady orchestra. Yet still, my flute sat on the bottom shelf in the basement.

And then, earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to see contemporary dance legend Twyla Tharp’s newest work, which is set to music from Philip Glass that features the flute extensively. I left the performance wondering—what did my middle-aged brain remember, and could I be nearing a tipping point where, if I don’t start to reclaim what it remembers, I might lose it completely?

And so, a few weeks later, on a night when I had the house completely to myself and thus could embarrass myself privately, I went down to the basement and dug out my flute and all the sheet music I could find. Nervously, I assembled my flute and brought it to my lips, which to my great surprise instinctively formed an embouchure. I then gathered my yoga breath and put my fingers where I thought they might go to play a D. And what do you know? It made the sound I remembered, vibrato and all.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Who will you be at the end of the summer?

I’m trying out my boundaries and saying yes to more opportunities. Who knows, maybe I’ll even teach again? I don’t want to live my life in fear anymore, especially when the world is so uncertain around us. I can’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, but I can stop letting fear make my decisions.

So, I am starting a new class on essay writing, and I may try to put together a manuscript of essays. I may even try my hand at YA fiction after many years of avoiding it.

It starts inside us. If we are afraid of everything, we will not act in the way that’s probably the best for our lives. And our lives are so short! If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been talking about the deaths of two friends in the last year. It made me realize that no matter how safe, how good, how many right things you do, you really can’t protect yourself, and in that case, why not: write the authentic truth about your life? Venture further out into areas that might not be exactly the best for your disability or food allergies but might be an excellent way to connect with a new community of writers? Why not try walking a little further every day in the lavender farm (or your local trail,) because maybe right now is the best my body will ever be? Why not stand up to bullies in politics, or befriend someone who is a little different form you, or read whatever books you like no matter who says they’re okay/appropriate? If I am a poet, why can’t I also write essays or fiction? Lots of my writer friends do this already. This made me think about the cages we put ourselves into, the prisons that are our routines or relationships that hurt us or a country that doesn’t value us, or people that don’t treat us with respect. Why not reach farther, try a little bit harder, face more risk?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New poems in Flare, Upcoming Appearances: Nature Writing Conference, Not Being Fearful, More Lavender and Hummingbirds

i tell my doctor that i don’t want him
recording any more information about me
being trans. i think of a running bible of
my body. what kinds of notes has he taken
over the years? did he note
when i first grew a full beard? did he record
the times i came in a dress & the times
i did not. i look up diy hormones.
one website has a list of rituals.
go out to the forest & perform one & feel
nothing has changed. what level of belief
do you need for a gender ritual to take?

Robin Gow, 6/29

Michigan “writer, editor, educator, dancer, and, more importantly, learner” Leigh Sugar’s full-length poetry debut is Freeland (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), a collection that opens with the information that “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.” Framed as “an impossible love story,” Freeland “examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.” As the press release continues: “Drawing critical connections between personal and family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the racial imaginary of whiteness, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.”

I’m intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay, writing on loss, love, grief and language, wrapping in threads of family story, poetics and how best one might articulate across such potentially vast distances. As she writes as part of the extended sequence “FREELAND: AN ERASURE”: “Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon oof the punitive form. // In profile, I separate from this justice. // Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter. // Dear anyone.” Freeland exists as an interesting counterpoint to other contemporary literary titles that have explored the prison system, whether Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng writing her father through the poetry collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2017), or the collaborative study between photographer Deborah Luster and the late American poet C.D. Wright, One Big Self: an investigation (Lost Roads, 2003; Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007) [see my review of such here]. Sugar centres her specifics around the abstract of human space and interaction, connection and disconnection, composing a lyric of deeply-crafted lines that braid lived experience, whether by the narrator or her “beloved,” across a poetics around human connection, even and especially amid such punitive disruption. “A smile,” she writes, to open the poem “REPRESSION,” “when the officer commands I stop // touching you. The space between shame // and pleasure shorter than the scythe- // shaped stretch of shoulder // revealed when my shirtsleeve slips off // the me whose swift hands leave your neck to right the slip // then return to my own lap. I sag, // guilty, still, still under the camera.”

rob mclennan, Leigh Sugar, Freeland

I can’t think of two busy places that are more different. Even in the crowded, electric areas of Tokyo, even in Shibuya with its famous scramble, there was a sort of order, a vibe that was polite and even hushed in the train stations and on the streets. Nashville, on the other hand, was a cacophony. Neon signs announcing celebrity bars flanked both sides of Broadway. Each one had a band playing and, although I’m sure the bands could be distinctly heard inside the bars, outside on the sidewalk, it was an assault of drums and chords. Every inch of real estate around the Country Hall of Fame and the Ryman was filled with restaurants and retail stores, and there were apartment complexes with more retail spaces under construction everywhere we turned.

It made me consider how some words embody different meanings. Both of these places are tourist destinations and therefore are busy. Synonyms for busy fall into both negative and positive connotations. Negative? Strenuous, hectic, tiring, swarming, teeming. More positive? Energetic, active, lively, bustling, vibrant, buzzy. A few that could be either?Astir, thronging, eventful, crowded. (I just re-read what I wrote up above, and —order, vibe and hushed versus cacophony and assault — it’s pretty clear which experience of busy I preferred.) But even the most accurate words sometimes aren’t enough.

This is part of the difficulty of writing about a place that you do not claim as your own. Your biases come through in language, even when you are trying to simply convey, perhaps, a narrative or a description that struck you in your travels. I have traveled a lot, and well-meaning people always say, “It must give you so much to write about!” Not really. I find that I struggle to write in a meaningful way about travel much of the time. I started three pieces of writing while in Japan and decided to do what I do at home—let something in my surroundings serve as an entry point to a bigger idea or theme rather than to write directly about the experience of traveling. We’ll see how it works.

Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part 2

A couple of weeks ago I did a reading with Peter Kenny at at Arundel Arts Junction, a lovely eclectic event which also included a comic improv act, jazz for keyboard and sax, a photography presentation and more – it’s all happening in Arundel, people!

Peter and I are doing another joint reading at In-Words this coming Tuesday 24th June from 7.30 at West Greenwich Library, together with fellow Telltale Poet Sarah Barnsley. As well as reading our poems we’ll also be chatting & taking questions about Telltale Press. It’s free, and there are refreshments – come if you can!

Yesterday I was reading in the home of a very good friend. She basically asked me to come and talk about the book, and read a few poems, for a group of her friends. Susan’s enthusiasm and unwavering support for my work are both astonishing. So there I was with a small group of women, telling them a bit about the book, reading some of the poems and answering questions. It was a lovely intimate event. And I sold ten books! Much gratitude to Susan.

Robin Houghton, Book promo: readings, reviews, articles… plus other stuff

Bradford Literature Festival is my favourite festival. It’s immense – massive enough to have its own road signs – but at the same time it makes Bradford into a friendly literature village, where everyone knows everyone, including some of the biggest brightest stars in literature. Plus they have the best Green Room with the best buffet, and a free-to-passholders restaurant with the greatest curry and jugs of lassi.

The first time I worked at the festival, I sat in that restaurant filling my face and chatting to a lovely friendly woman. Eventually, I asked her name, and what she was doing at the festival – to my mortification she turned out to be the festival founder and director, Syima Aslam. Hundreds of events across the city, and an education and outreach programme running throughout the year – but she still has the time and grace to chat.

All of which is to say, that when they invite me to run discussion panels, I always agree.

Clare Shaw, Did The Great Gatsby change your life?

Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing. […]

On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures.

Matthew Paul, May and June reading

Sarah Imrisek and I exhibited an interactive video work (BIRD FICTION) at the recent Hamilton Arts Week. I wrote music and poems and Sarah worked her visual and programming wizardry and made a very cool and beautiful projection that responded to the audience’s hand movements.

Our installation also included the video that I’m sharing here. It takes a text about Hamilton, Ontario that I’ve posted below and turns it into the flight of flying birds—the birds are made of text. If you don’t want to watch the entire thing, you can watch a bit and then skip forward to past halfway where the way the birds are made of text changes.

Gary Barwin, THE SKY ABOVE HAMILTON, ONTARIO WAS EMPTY

Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.

I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.

It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.

Beverley Bie Brahic, California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025

All lines of the poem arrive, perfect in itself
except that it needs to be written. The gestalt
in a swift and complete vision. Start. Where.
So many words crowd the mouth. Also tongue-tied.

Jill Pearlman, USHA

All poets/writers periodically hit a moment where things stall: you finish something, a poem, a novel, a piece of writing that’s taken as much energy as you can give it, and you sit back and it feels as if there’s no more to be done, nothing else to be dragged out of the mind and body and put into words.

When it happens to me, as it just has, I tend to read, explore the work of others more than usual, or just get on with life – the stuff without which I couldn’t write anything useful anyway. […]

The meadow is full of wild flowers, so I’ve kept the mowing to a minimum, just a strip by the blackberry hedge bordering the woods where the family can put their tents when they want to camp there. We also have a young male deer who has taken to using the cover as a suitable place to rest. Unfortunately, his self-preservation instincts mean if he spots us he jumps up and tears off in, it seems, any old direction, bounding through the pens where the bees and hens live. Still, he’s welcome for as long as he chooses to stay. As usual, there are always a host of jobs to do in the woods now the bluebells and orchids are over. The hide/ tree house needs to be repaired after some stray miscreants had fun trying to wreck it but I need one of my son-in-laws’ help with that. So much to do!

Apart from that, oh yes, poetry. I read a couple of dull books by what the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski called, in his poem Potato Thief, ‘cardboard cut-out poets’. Saarikoski interests me because he made enough noise to be famous young, was both a radical, political participant and a chameleon-like figure who played both the hero and anti-hero as he drank and partied his way through four marriages, and perhaps inevitably, died young. I suppose I admire poets who are confident enough socially to try to make a difference. I can only attempt to make a small difference, through the writing of poetry, given that I struggle more and more these days to speak when faced by groups of people (football excepted, but the vocal stuff I indulge in then is more often than not confined to howls of blue-and-white-striped dismay at the latest crazy, wrong, anti-Albion decision by an official…)

I also enjoyed a short poem called Temptation by the Romanian poet Nina Cassian in my ‘anthology of the moment’ from 2010, The Ecco Anthology Of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders. It’s fulfilling to explore its 500-plus pages and follow up on the poets I like. I have an anthology of Romanian poetry but Cassian isn’t in there, so I shall go off in search of more of her work.

Writing poems will come again, but not yet.

Bob Mee, OK, SO WHAT NOW?

I’ve had a mighty struggle this past few weeks to do even a minimum of writing (determined to catch up this week…we will see, and, after that, to begin blogging again). Reading obsessively about dementia, getting lost in political news…these things do not seem especially helpful to me.

On the other hand, reading poetry, and reading and listening to poets and creatives about their work is one of my go-to solaces. So here are two things. The first was shared by my good friend Francine, and I’m amazed at the prescience of this 2011 interview with Bill Moyers, who died last week at age 91. Though the news is dire, it’s good to know that such people have been walking this trail before us. It gives me hope.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/27/rip_bill_moyers

I’m also reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön — given to me by my friend Therese — and I highly recommend it.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. (p. 7)

By “concretize,” I think the author means, don’t grasp, don’t turn it into thoughts or anything you can hold on to. Let it be as amorphous as it is. Just be with all of it.

The third source is the incomparable PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA from Poetry Unbound. Clicking on his name should take you straight to his most recent substack. Here are a few lines toward the end of Dunya Mikhail’s poem, which Padraig shares in full:

I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm…

I don’t know why either, but when I’m outside, walking, at 6 a.m., I listen for them just the same.

Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading

This morning, I was walking and texting a friend who has been mostly homebound recovering from hip replacement surgery.  We talked about 19th century writers who wrote in bed and wondered how they could do that.  We talked about 19th century approaches to dental care.

But most important, we talked about the best ways to remain human in an age of AI and how to create projects for students that keep them embodied–and to create assignments that are more cheating resistant.  I talked about Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and got the idea of having students compare them to Thoreau’s Walden Pond journal.  I want them also to keep a journal to see what it’s like and then write about it all.

It was a good text exchange.  Of course, we’re looking forward to a time when we can meet face to face, but that’s not this summer.  I think it’s funny that we were texting about 19th century writers who kept painstaking journals.  There might be a seed of a poem there.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sunrise Walks and Texts and Teaching Ideas

The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. […]

The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).

Martyn Crucefix, Katrina Porteous’ most recent Bloodaxe collection, ‘Rhizodont’, reviewed.

I think sometimes about how every “period” we perceive in history was a bunch of people’s present. How this period we are in will be parsed by some future historians who will be able to see a larger trajectory of time and circumstance that we cannot see, we here, inside this moving vessel of the present-that-will-be-history. Already people are positing just how we ended up here, in these situations we find ourselves in. But we cannot see what happens next, so can only understand the story up until now. Some of us will die without seeing how the next bit transpires — whenever it is, that next bit. We may not even understand it’s happening until afterward. When we look around and think wow, that was a wild ride. But we’ll, of course, also be caught up in the present of that present, unable to see how that unfolds. Here in this present, it scares me to read about other period in history and how long it takes them to shift to something else. Or I suppose it depends on the nature of the “something else.” Things could get worse. Things could get better. Only that bastard, time, will tell.

The thing is: we’re all in this together, we present-dwellers. I have a photo of my mother in Africa. The tour bus has gotten mired in mud or something, and she and the guides and some of the other old ladies on the trip are all muscling the bus, trying to rock it from its spot. It cracks me up, this photo. But it’s spot on. One minute we’re sitting all faced forward, stewing in our juices, and the next we’ve tumbled out to shove, we strangers and friends and enemies and fellow travelers. I wish we were all shoving in the same direction, though. That’s what I wish.

I found this wonderful poem on the recent issue of 2 Rivers. I love its quirky perspective, how the poem plays with the situation it describes, and enlarges it to encompass the whole world of life.

Marilyn McCabe, into a bottomless future, a cold ocean of absolute unknowing.

The opening anaphora — “Always” — commits the poem to a time beyond time, a claim of futurity. In the second stanza, the “But” seems to undo this commitment by suggesting we can never really speak to anyone except ourselves. Words, as Bachmann sees them, are useless communicative vessels. Or else: they are things which taste doubly, as sound itself does a thing to the mind.

Reading this poem for sound rather than meaning, I thought of the Greek word diaspon, which is short for diapason chordon (“through all the strings”). Diaspon refers to harmony, or a harmonious combination of notes, and it draws meaning from the Pythagorean system, which holds that the world is a piece of harmony in which man is the full chord.

John Dryden used this word in the first stanza of “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”:

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

After providing his song with seven stanzas, Dryden concludes it with a “Grand Chorus” that binds heaven and earth, or the visible and invisible, through chorale. The poem dresses up as religiosity but I think what it does is closer to the spiritual, or that metaphysical plane Dryden occupied. The “Grand Chorus” allows sounds to interpenetrate one another, diluting the sensed distance between one and “an other” in that “last and dreadful hour,” when time itself (that “hour”) “shall devour” “this crumbling pageant”:

The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

Italic mine. How are we “tuned” towards making music that separates the seen from the felt? How is a poem “tuned”, so to speak, in order to articulate particular images or structure its desires through the deployment of rhetoric?

Alina Stefanescu, “It tastes of both.”

In Odes 4.2, Horace contrasts his small-scale, precise literary style with the grandeur of Pindar — one version of many similar statements in Latin literature of this period (also in Virgil and Propertius, for instance) about the choice between the grand style of epic and panegyric and the smaller or narrower style of elegy, lyric and epigram, associated particularly with Callimachus.

In the middle of Odes 4.2, Horace describes himself as a ‘Matine bee’:

Multa Dircaeum levat aura cycnum,
tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
nubium tractus; ego apis Matinae
more modoque

grata carpentis thyma per laborem
plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
carmina fingo.
(25-32)

A great gale lifts up the Dircean swan,
O Antonius, whenever he makes for the lofty
tracts of clouds: but I, after the custom and manner
of the Matine bee,

gathering the welcome thyme by constant
labour about the grove and the banks
of the watery Tiber, though small, I craft
highly-wrought songs.

Horace’s meticulous bee is contrasted with the ‘full-flood’ style of Pindar — and of Iulus Antonius, the younger poet he’s addressing. (Although because the poem opens with a famously impressive imitation of the grand Pindaric style, Horace’s supposed disavowal is really an example of having your cake and eating it too: showing that he could do Pindaric style if he wanted to.)

Odes 4.2 was one of the single best-known Horatian odes in the seventeenth century, printed in every edition of Pindar as well as of Horace, and it is cited in pretty much every discussion, no matter how basic, of literary style. Marvell’s Garden and Hortus date probably from the mid-1650s, just exactly the time at which Cowley was writing his Pindariques and Pindaric form in both English and Latin was the height of fashion. Indeed, Cowley’s Pindaric Odes contains a partial translation of Odes 4.2. Here is Cowley’s version of the relevant passage of Odes 4.2, which he — like Marvell — makes the end of his poem (though in Horace it comes in the middle):

How th’obsequious Wind, and swelling Ayr
The Theban Swan [i.e. Pindar] does upwards bear
Into the walks of Clouds, where he does play,
And with extended Wings opens his liquid way.
Whilst, alas, my tim’erous Muse
Unambitious tracts pursues;
Does with weak unballast wings,
About the mossy Brooks and Springs;
About the Trees new-blossom’ed Heads,
About the Gardens painted Beds,
About the Fields and flowery Meads,
And all inferior beauteous theings
Like the laborious Bee,
For little drops of Honey flee,
And there with Humble Sweets contents her Industrie.

This is such a famous passage that any poem ending with the ‘industrious bee’, as Marvell’s does — a phrase in fact very close to Cowley’s ‘laborious’ — immediately recalls Horace’s poem. This matters I think for two reasons that are often underplayed in discussions of Marvell’s poem. First, because the bee stands for the poet, and a poet adopting one particular style over another; and secondly, because Horace’s poem is specifically and explicitly about how to choose a style for political praise.

Victoria Moul, Who planted Marvell’s garden?

Last week I attended a candelight memorial for slain legislative leader, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, at the Minnesota State Capitol, in St. Paul. The next day I started working on an elegy in her honor, and began thinking about the etymologies of her first and last names : “honeybee” and “gardener”. Which reminded me of one of Osip Mandelstam’s most famous poems, written in 1920… and so my elegy grew into a kind of widderruf of Mandelstam echoes.

Henry Gould, Melissa Hortman : in Memoriam

The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve 
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
        thickets sweat poisons
        as well as fruits.

Ann E. Michael, Blackberries

Sometimes the world seems like a dark circle within a dark circle within a dark circle forever and ever, amen. I think I have a story hunger. Stories that will make sense of the things I know.

Saturday I ran on the beach. Every beach run is a memento mori. I don’t know how to explain why it makes me feel calm. The beating of the waves. The screaming birds. The dead jellyfish, birds, crabs, fish.

And the absurdity! Saturday, a pineapple was left by the tide.

Funny that being that close to all the death, brings me back to life.

Ren Powell, Story Hunger

I had no idea it was International Pineapple Day until Kate mentioned it in her LinkedIn post and I loved the serendipity of the fact there was a poem on my desk with pineapples in it. I took this along to share, and I must say that being described as “The Perfect Guest”, was a wonderful comment to tuck safely in my confidence pocket. If I hadn’t had a poem I would have taken a tin of pineapple from the cupboard and celebrated that, but the poem was just the thing for a poet coach to take along. Kate and I had a wonderful chat about poetry and coaching and it put an extra sparkle into my Friday.

The poem was on my desk because Louise Longson had invited me to be one of her guests for her poetry event ‘Last Saturday’. This invite also widened my knowledge of celebration/commemoration days and I chose to follow up on the following themes that Louise mentioned when writing to me: World Sand Dune Day, Insect Week, Armed Forces Celebration Day and Pride. It felt good to put together poems to match the different themes and try them out together in a zoom room.

Sue Finch, A GREEN CARNATION

The main activity of the day was a game of Musical Inks. We had brought our brushes from last month, various inks and large sheets of paper. We splotched and doodled (and danced) until the music stopped. We passed our sheet to the person on our left, and began again. A wonderful exercise in spontaneity and non-attachment. I love making rhythmical marks to music. When twelve large sheets had been passed around the table we had a break for lunch, which was sumptuous and exotic as usual. […]

Then the inks and brushes were packed away and we went to work with white emulsion, blanking out parts of our own and other people’s sheets. Lastly we added to our own sheets a few more marks made with sticks, grass, feathers and so on. We’ll bring books made from these sheets to our next meeting, on July 19th.

On the way home, Jane and I stopped at the Somerset Rural Life Museum to see the current exhibition, entitled Tractored by Beetles: six artists display works inspired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Fugitives’ dedicated to the National Landscapes of the UK. It’s on until Sept 14th; do see it if you can. I love Fiona Hingston‘s work Petiole, a response to a particular woodland close to her home. I’d seen this work before, in her studio during Art Weeks. The way it was displayed in the SRLM, the archive boxes covering a table isolated in the middle of the room, gave the work the space it needed.

Ama Bolton, ABCD June 2025

What are we trying to capture in our writing? A snapshot of the moment or something of the feeling connected to an event? I ask because on finishing the piece on peat-gathering I remembered an early comment from the poet Robert Minhinnick. ‘Even in your bad poems, there’s still the grit in the wash.’ It was kind, forgiving criticism to three underwhelming poems that I proffered to him on a writing retreat in the north of Scotland. A poem potentially having grit in the wash seems a lovely idea. The expression comes from the time of handwashing clothes, when you added grit to the water and lather so that its abrasiveness would help the removal of mud or stubborn grime. The phrase taps into something else a poet might capture or preserve: not the snapshot or the view or the observable but, instead, the texture of the moment. Writing, in this gesture, becomes an attempt to make some past world touchable again.

Niall Campbell, On Writing for the Hands

Many journals, even those that charge submission fees, have fee-free (and even deadline-free) options for reviews. Quite a few will send you a selection from their list of books they’d like to have reviewed. Once you’ve proven yourself to a journal, you might become one of their regular review-writers, a position that definitely improves your visibility. In my experience, journals will respond sooner to a review submission, since they want to secure a review of a new book ahead of others. Some journals even pay for reviews.

Believe it or not, writing reviews is – yes – fun. Or, it should be. To keep it fun for me, I choose books that I enjoy. I want my review to convey that enjoyment to the reader, not turn them off from reading the book. I look at reviewing as a way to open the book for people who might enjoy it, not turn them off. I avoid the negative review whenever possible. […]

The type of review I usually write is one I call “the exploratory review.” As I wrote in “Erica Goss’s Guide to Writing Poetry Book Reviews,” this type of review “combines elements of narrative, description, and exposition. In the exploratory review, the book leads the way instead of the reviewer.” (You can get the guide free with a subscription to Sticks & Stones, which is also free.)

As critic David Ulin puts it, “In the best reviews, the book is just a starting point, which is not an argument for self-indulgence but for its opposite: the deep dive, the conversation on which all literature (and yes, book reviews are a form of literature, or should be) depends.” 

For more on these topics, see my blog post, How I Review a Poetry Collection.

I also wrote an article for the 2/3/24 issue of Funds for Writers: Expand Your Writing Practice With Book Reviews.

Happy reviewing!

Erica Goss, How to Become a Poetry Book Reviewer

I come to you on the other side of frantic and chaotic wedding planning. On the other side of a few weeks of daily poem writing feverishly to deal with the stresses of that, on a micro level, and the world around us on a macro level. While both the poems and the wedding celebration worked out well (even despite the extreme heat that forced us, very last minute, inside a bar/banquet hall for our woodland whimsigoth vibe picnic) this week has been about resetting, cleaning a chaotic apartment, and trying to get my ducks forever in a row on projects and layouts, as well as charting a path forward through the rest of the summer in terms of timelines.

And since it’s summer officially now, that only means that spooky season, the high holy months of September-November, are right around the corner. which I have many delights planned in the form of New Orleans vampire brides and dystopian robot women. But there is still some spooky left for summer in the form of cursed coastal towns and sideshow horrors in some upcoming e-zine action, so watch for those…

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I’m hoping to get a load of new drafts out of this break – it does seem to be a time when I get lots done, so fingers-crossed the notes, and scraps turn into something. I’d like 10 -15 new ideas drafted, but let’s see. Writing has to sit alongside just relaxing, reading, consuming Efes, swimming, snoozing, eating, consuming Efes, etc.

I saw Robin Houghton, Sarah Barnsley and Peter Kenny read at West Greenwich Library on Tuesday. All were excellent. it was lovely to see Robin again, and to put bodies to the voices and emails of Peter and Sarah (Thanks again to Sarah for her kind words about CtD in The Frogmore Papers).

I have to say a massive thank you to Kevin Scully and the crowd at Cowden Pound for having me three to read on Thursday just gone. It was a joy to read in such a lovely pub, with such a lovely crowd. The open mic part of the ending was exceptionally strong, and Kevin is a wonderful host. Note to self, if you want to sell books please remember to tell the audience you’ve brought some with you before the end of the reading…**Slaps forehead**

Mat Riches, I could do with an OOO (out of office)

I’m happy to (tentatively) report that my writing mojo has (shakily) returned. Maybe I needed the fallow time during the week I was bed-bound with my back to think, just think, without writing it all down. In the past week I’ve started reading and writing from Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy and started participating in Kathy Fish’s Flash Extravaganza workshop. So far, I’ve done one or the other every day.

June has been a month of changes and challenges for me, not all on the positive side, either. Reading, music, and, yes, TV have pushed me through it.

Charlotte Hamrick, June Listopia 2025

I realise I’ve not been posting many haiku recently, although I’m just about to submit some of mine to the British Haiku Society’s journal, Blithe Spirit. Contributors have also been asked to select a summer poem from the journal’s archive and I’ve chosen this one by by Matthew Paul:

BHS vol 63, Aug 1996

almost anonymous
yellow ladybird
in sun-dried grass

I love the quiet simplicity of this poem, especially the word ‘anonymous’, which seems to suggest, both ‘unnamed’ and ‘overlooked’ – as insects often are, unless we come into direct contact with them.

Around five years ago, reading Matthew Paul’s collection, The Lammas Lands (Snapshot Press, 2015) inspired me to keep having a go at haiku (they were a diversion from writing more mainstream poetry at the time). Then Presence published a haiku of mine and I was bitten by the bug. Haiku took over, or rather my way of living altered slightly, and haiku became a big part of that.

My way of living has recently altered again. After Easter I took what seemed to be the momentous decision to retire. I handed in my notice – one month was the requirement – and suddenly, freedom. More time for dog walks, banjo practice, reading, writing, drawing, gardening, yoga etc. These are all things I was doing while I was working, so really there’s not much change, but I have more time now, and can do stuff in greater depth. That’s what’s been so satisfying, being able to take my time and do things properly. We’ve even fitted a couple of camping weekends in.

Julie Mellor, Summer poems

What does a “metabolically literate” poetics look like in this time of deforestation, of plastic islands, of melting ice caps and wayward storms? How can we, as writers, readers, breathers, enlist the help of the four winds, which seem, at times, to have turned against us with their tornados and hurricanes, raging at our immaturity, our hubris, our willful illiteracy? This is a question I want to conspire around with you, with other poets, with the trees themselves. A question to breathe with rather than to answer. But from my explorations, I suspect this poetry is a poetry tuned into the breath, a poetry that moves like a steady wave, that doesn’t rush to declare itself, but that listens, and speaks, and then listens again. It is a poetry that may happen further from the click of the keyboard and the glow of the screen, and closer to the lungs, the trees, our shared body. A brave and humble poetics that–like the young heroes who find themselves at the house of the North Wind—is willing to offer itself in order to receive.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tree Conspiracy

i will know it
    outside the dream
when it comes
    behind the calm
because it breathes

Grant Hackett [no title]

When my dad was entering what we now know, but didn’t then, were the last months of his life, we spent much time travelling between Scarborough and Hull for chemo appointments. I’d drive, my dad would talk. The further down the cancer route we got, the more his memories returned to the family farm, the route to the town, stories of what it was to live on the land and off the land and with the land. Stories from his own childhood. He himself, though he had run a small holding of his own, had not farmed since his mid teens when he’d left the family farm to become a Rington’s tea van driver. The narrative was so strong though, the stories like tethers that brought him back; the pull to place like the magnetic forces that bring geese back to their home grounds.

When the operation that he had ran into complications, and he was intubated and unconscious and we talked to him in the hope of calling him back, it was to the land and the work that still needed to be done – the apples ripening, the chicken houses in need of fixing, the sun pooling on the stone bench next to his fish pond awaiting his return there for his morning coffee. But we couldn’t bring him back.

When I wrote about it, later, in my poetry collection, I wrote of him being called back to a childhood in which he had to bring the cows in. I created a version of him that was too busy with farm chores to leave off and return to us. My mum, when she talked of him in the beginning of that most long and dark road through grief, talked of him as the tawny owl in the field that called and called and received no answer.

I wonder if he heard us, through the fog of induced coma, if he knew we were there, holding his hands, when the life support was switched off and he drifted away from us to wherever it was. When I think of those moments now, it is as an observer. As if I was taking notes on my own life experience, ready to create this new narrative, this continuation of a family narrative so attached to place. In fact, here I am, creating the narrative of this time, shaping and re-shaping and feeling the pull of something like home, but a home that has never really been.

When we came back from Thirsk and I dropped my mum off to their small holding and my dad’s grave in the field; the grave that he had specifically asked for, and which had been a nightmare of logistics, the last crazy dad request of his life, the last risk taken, the last fuck you to any sense of normalcy, I returned with a sense of peace and with a sense of gratitude for the stories, the history I get to travel on with.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: My Dad’s Last Days Spent Dreaming of the Family Farm

“The people of Israel, Gaza, and Iran are human beings. No one deserves to live under constant rocket, missile, and drone fire.” These are words from Standing Together / עומדים ביחד / نقف معًا that landed deeply in my heart. “This is not a football game. This is real life, and entire worlds are being shattered day after day.” How much more can our hearts take? And what can we do?

Standing Together is raising funds to bring bomb shelters to underserved Bedouin communities in the south of Israel. NATAL provides trauma support in Israel. The PCRF feeds and supports children in Gaza, and the Sameer Project provides food, shelter, and medical aid. And United4Iran has a fund for survivors of the Iran-Israel war, and their work is well-respected.

Giving tzedakah is meaningful, and in Jewish tradition all are commanded to give tzedakah, even we who receive tzedakah ourselves. But I know what I can afford to donate barely touches the ocean of need. Primarily what I feel able to do is internal. I pray for peace. I extend support to the human beings I know, and I try to extend compassion to the ones I don’t know. […]

I keep coming back to the Amichai poem about turning the swords not only into plowshares but into musical instruments, which I have on a poster on the wall in my office. As difficult as it might be to hammer an instrument of war into an instrument of music, I think it might be more difficult to hammer and reshape the human heart into one that truly beats for justice and for peace. 

Rachel Barenblat, The Best We Can Be: Korah 5785 / 2025

On the eve of his execution in 1896,
he wrote a long poem which his sisters smuggled
out of his cell in a cocinilla: fourteen stanzas,
each with five lines. He called it his last
farewell— Mi último adiós. We had to memorize
at least half of it. It was so hot, and we
were tired of memorizing, so we thought
of going to the corner store to buy more
snacks. With a dramatic flourish, I called out, “Mi
último adiós!”— which made my mother and aunt,
making dinner in the kitchen, drop whatever they
were holding and shriek— Take that back,
take it back, don’t you ever say that again!

Luisa A. Igloria, Very Superstitious

my favourite dream
blossoms falling and falling 
on our riverboat 

Jim Young [no title]

This week: the grey scale, a rain of earth, a detailed intimacy, a Tennysonian absence, and much more. Enjoy.

A walk in Parc Angrignon yesterday felt like a respite from the extremely difficult time in which we’re living. The world is screaming and yet so many are silenced, afraid of what will happen if they voice the truth or even simply say what they feel, as human beings. It’s a time when truth itself is under attack, as well as the institutions that teach people how to think critically, how to discern the truth for themselves, and express it in a coherent and rational way. A time when we are witnesses every single day to horrific violence perpetrated on the most innocent of victims, when sheer cruelty, corruption, utter disregard for the most vulnerable, and endless lies are becoming normalized. A time when being a journalist, a doctor, an aid worker, or a foreign student has never been more dangerous. A time when our own options for living with integrity seem smaller and smaller, and, as another Substack author writes, one longs for retreat from the madness:

Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing.

Not dying.

Just logging off.

Getting a job no one cares about.

Growing tomatoes.

Writing poems in the margins of a notebook no one reads.

Not as a failure.

But as a kind of freedom.

—Huy Nguyen

For those of us who do write, it becomes harder and harder to know what to say.

Beth Adams, A Letter from Canada, at the end of May

You said if we kept on, worked hard enough,
we’d feel warmth from the centre of the earth,
that we’d know by laying our hands flat
on the bottom of our freshly dug hole.
You told me Australia was right beneath us.
It all seemed so worth digging for.
I pictured us emerging in a different country,
staying there until teatime,
coming back to tell Mum.

Each time you pressed your palm to feel for heat
you looked hopeful
silently inviting me to copy.
But I only ever felt the cold damp
of earthworms.

Sue Finch, Turning the Calendars Over

My daughter asked to read some of my love poems recently. I tried to find some that were understandable and appropriate for an eleven-year-old. Not surprising that this was difficult, but what did surprise me was that they didn’t feel like love poems when I read them, though when I wrote them they felt so overly emotional. 

I struggled to find one that felt a good example of how I write love poems, but I guess they all are. I don’t gush or really even praise the other as there is no particular person in mind. I focus on the moment and the whirlwind of emotions I’m feeling. There is often a sense of sadness on the edges, that the flush will fade, that reality will set in. So they don’t always feel like the giddy heights of love poems, but maybe the more realistic confusion of love. 

I read a few of my poems out to my daughter and while she didn’t get most of them, they’re maybe a bit thick linguistically and not aimed at pre-teens so she was ok with that, but it did open a nice conversation for how love is such a big emotion that it’s confusing and often leaves us feeling very overwhelmed. How it’s important to express how we feel even if it doesn’t always make sense to others. It’s part of understanding how we fit into the world. If she walked away with that sense of it’s ok to express being overwhelmed however and whenever we need to, then I feel pretty good about my poems. 

Gerry Stewart, Expressing Big Emotions

I just found this piece and thought I’d share it today. It is a recording from a live performance at Spoken Beat Night, Bimhuis, Amsterdam, June 2016. The evening was totally improvised and LIVE, a beautiful combination of spoken word and poetry, art and drawings, and jazz performances with the always incredible Shabaka Hutchings and the Spoken Beat band.

This piece feels like a calm voice from another time to me. I love Amsterdam and love to go there, to visit friends and perform. Every time I go I feel rather nostalgic for the summers in 1990s inter-railing around Europe. This poem really captures that moment when you stop and feel it, time shifting, changes occurring, the moment passing and a new moment beginning. I feel it now, the tide turning, I feel a shift, this poem reminds me of that and a young and fearless hope.

This poem was published in my first collection ‘Fishing in The Aftermath’ by Burning Eye Books in 2014. I reckon the poem was written almost 20 years ago and I can picture the bar where I wrote it, it’s a glorious gay bar, overlooking the water, oh you know the one … ah how the years are flying by…

Salena Godden, All We Can Do Is Hope

Another memoir I’ve enjoyed very much recently is Authentic Embellishments, by poet Joshua Davis. Since I work as a book designer, I get the opportunity to read a lot of terribly good small press titles well before the general public, and this one hit my desk at just the right time, I feel, as I struggle with several kinds of interconnected grief—that I may lose my mother sooner rather than later, that our shared genetic condition could mean a similar journey for me or my sisters, and the regret and loss I feel over these pockets of time where I can’t live the way I wish to because I’m needed more urgently elsewhere. Some of this grief is current, and some of it is oddly anticipatory? And yet “grief” does feel like the best word.

I’ve wondered whether my attraction to found materials, both visuals and sound, has to do with these feelings of loss. I can say that collecting the sound effects I used in the collages was directly related to the experience of missing them in the world, so maybe?

Josh beautifully traces the paths of loss, absence, and abandonment in his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, husband, and child. “A life saved by poetry,” the subtitle promises, and the moments where Lucille Clifton or Ruth Stone appear (or are found? he was definitely seeking!) in his life to guide him emphasize to me, again, how keen a tool art can be for comfort and survival. Yes. 

Shanna Compton, INKY 2: Room Tone in June + On Loss & Found Materials

My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories leaving and arriving as unpredictably as fish to the surface of a pond. If she goes out of her house for a walk, she can’t always find her way back. If she wakes up after a nap, she might think a new day has started and begin making breakfast. She knows there’s a number you call in an emergency, but usually can’t recall what that number is. She has forgotten much of our family and most of her friends. She has only once forgotten me, her only child, and then only briefly—but it’s a sign of what’s to come.

I should be precise: my mother’s conscious mind is disappearing, not her body or her unconscious mind—the mind of dreams and reflexes; the mind our conscious mind tries futilely to claim dominion over. For now her body is very much present, and for her age, thriving. When I take walks with her, I hardly have to slow my pace. When she accompanies my two year old daughter to story time at the local library, she sits on the library carpet with the kids and young parents, then pulls herself up to standing at the end, to the amazement of all present. This is not how I have come to understand death’s arrival, especially here in our death-averse society, where we whisk away bodies and scrub rooms clean, buffeting ourselves from the reality of what’s happened with expressions like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.”  My father died of cancer when I was eleven, his mind sharp up until the final weeks. The day he died, surrounded by family in our living room, I stood by his body and held his hand, still not quite cold. Soon after, the paramedics took him away and I never saw my father’s body again. My mother has been dying for years but her body is, for now, undiminished.

And my body, too, persists, though my conscious mind doesn’t understand quite how. While it worries over prescriptions and home healthcare workers and nursing homes, my subconscious is drumming up lines of poems, or the sentences that I’ve cobbled into this essay. I sometimes find myself with a pen in my hand, with no memory of picking it up. And my conscious mind asks the obvious questions: Why? And why now? Why persist with poems and stories and all this fancy language in the face of unavoidable loss? They’re questions I’ve asked myself often over the years, with no final answer arriving beyond the knowledge that not once in my life has my devotion to writing been a conscious choice. All I did was read, innocently at first, oblivious to what I was getting myself into.

Rob Taylor, “Why? And Why Now?”: On Poetry and Companionship

Storyteller Poetry Review has just published 5 of my poems about my wonderful mother-in-law. Some have been published before; some are first-timers. My thanks to editor Sharon Knutson for this opportunity to share an extraordinary life.

Sarah Russell, My Mother-in-Law Boby Clariana

I had been revising som old poems of late, and after some feedback on one it dawned on me that I am pissing about, and that I need to focus on newer stuff. So I am. A new draft emerged this week, and two very recent things are shaping up nicely. I need to go back to the piles of notes I have and perhaps, just perhaps a collection might have started to take shape by the end of the year. A long way to go yet, so no getting ahead of myself, but there feels like light at the end of the torch I intend to take into the tunnel for the first time in a while.

Mat Riches, A jumping off point

How do you build a poetry community? Is it a bit like gardening, in that you have to work at it slowly over time and then all of the sudden, blooms everywhere, and hummingbirds? One thing I want to do is to prioritize time with poets online and in-person, catching up over coffee or the phone, or having people over. Sometimes, it takes a lot of energy, but I think it’s worth it. Even this blog, or social media, can be part of building community. I think we writers work better when we have community. We need to support each other and recognize each other and shout “good job” when someone gets good news and “so sorry” when they get bad news.

Despite setbacks, I did write a poem this week, and I started submitting again. I’m editing my book for sending out again. But there has been a tick-tock in my ear lately (and not just because of the ear infection). It’s how fast time passes these days, and losses that come with getting older, and the feeling that my time is limited.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Ups and Downs, Birds and Blooms, and Building Poetry Community

Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I always have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain. The facts! The worlds. The perspectives from people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet or places I will never go. Thoughts, philosophies. Lives lived. Lives! Life!

I love holding books. I love re-reading the books I love. I love taking photographs of books! Books, I love you. I love watching a movie based on a book I love and then going back to the book and loving it all over again in new ways. I love talking about a book with someone and they saw something I didn’t. I love taking a single sentence from a book and typing it out and saying it and sharing it. I love being regularly astonished by how words spark one against the other and how sentences somehow contain a style that you have never until then come across. I love how a sentence by one author will resound and then take you to another author and you will learn to hear echoes and rhythms.

I love words. I love sentences.

In an epigraph to a chapter titled “What is a Sentence” in Jan Mieszkowski’s book Crises of the Sentence, John Banville says, “The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.”

The greatest invention is still the sentence. The book, another great invention. Best technology. Poems, another great invention.

Fernando Pessoa:

“I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.”

Pessoa, my soul to your soul.

Shawna Lemay, The Greatest Invention

This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves

— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks#32: Try a Poem Staple Gun

As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.

I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.

As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.

Matthew Paul, On The Last Corinthians

Thanks to being published by a small press with an open attitude, I persuaded them to use a photo I’d created myself.

I took this photo in my living room (the colour on the wall is French Grey from Farrow and Ball, in case you’re interested!) My idea was to assemble a ‘still life’ in the Dutch tradition of ‘vanitas’ paintings. ‘Vanitas’ being the genre of still life that is supposed to suggest the brevity of one’s time on this planet, and the futility of everything we strive for, since it has to end in death.

This isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, trust me! What I gathered together were pieces of memorabilia, items referenced in the poems, signifiiers… all arranged in such a way that I hope engenders a feeling of a life lived, in all its messiness, chaos, mistakes, serendipity, quirkiness and yes, beauty.

If you look closely you’ll see a Korean Coca-Cola bottle (I used to collect Coca-Cola cans and bottles from all the countries I visited through work!), burnt-out candles and a half-drunk glass of wine (I’ll leave you to decide on the significance of these), rotting fruit (=decay) and a fox’s skull (mostly in pieces). Skulls, and timepieces, are very common ‘vanitas’ tropes. There’s no clock or watch here, but I have included pages from work diaries, a (laminated) production timeline (we had a new product range every quarter), my old Filofax from the 1990s, even some pages from one of my teenage diaries. There are also photos of me as a Brownie and later as a jaded employee posing for yet another visa application. And let’s not gloss over the blister pack of paracetamol. Pills, childhood terrors, stupid work schedules and endless long-haul trips are well represented in the poems. As well as the internet, computers, magnolia flowers (artificial in this case) and ‘burning the candle at both ends’.

Robin Houghton, The Mayday Diaries cover art: what’s it all about?

Many thanks to Arts ATL for selecting Wonder & Wreckage as one of its 13 must-read poetry collections for National Poetry Month. I was in fine company with Beth Gylys, Andred Jurjevic, and Elly Bookman. See the list here.

And also many thanks to friend and fine poet Steven Reigns, who recommended Wonder & Wreckage in his selections for National Poetry Month that appeared on The Poetry Foundation website. See the list here.

Wonder & Wreckage is also a nominee for the annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards, which will be announced in June. I’m among a very crowded field, so not hopeful about my chances, especially since the great Alice Friman is in the running. 

Collin Kelley, Wrapping up May

On the very first day of June five years ago, this little book dropped into the world in the form of a box of copies left downstairs. Chicago was literally on fire from protests (which I still think were outside agitators, rather than the Chicagoans who had been protesting Friday and most of Saturday without incidence.) What would follow was curfews that lasted a couple of weeks and increased policing on Michigan Ave for a couple more years. In the thick of Covid lockdowns, that morning, I sat in a zoom meeting, in which a bunch of librarians fretted over return protocols coming a month later despite not a single one of them actually returning to the office during the remaining year and a half I still worked there after. I wound up texting my boss to say I was taking the day off and depression napping, but later I went to fetch the cat litter downstairs and found my newest book. It was a moment that should have been one of celebration, but I wasn’t feeling it. In the coming months I did my best to market the book, making my first video poems and web content, but it was hard to get traction. In retrospect, it was [the] last traditionally published book I published before moving on to issuing titles myself a year later (after what I like to call now the “Poetry Mid-Life Crises of 2020” ).

This bones of SEX & VIOLENCE started in early 2015 with the blond joke poems, and through 2016 with the Plath centos gleaned from lines in ARIEL. It continued through slasher movie fragments and what was initially J’s Valentine’s love poem series from 2017, but which broadened over the next few months and took on a life of its own. Right after I lost my mom, I sat down to send it in time for the end of the month deadline BLP had for new submissions. When the acceptance came during the early spring, I sat and cried at my desk over not being able to tell her first thing. 

The time since that first spring without her and lockdowns/riots to now, five years later, always feels like it is collapsing in on itself.

Kristy Bowen, book birthday | sex & violence

“Fierce” and “fearsome” offer the perfect segue to the Taylor Swift component of how I’m channeling my rage this spring. Ever since hearing “Look What You Made Me Do” in the opening scene of the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale series, I’ve had it on repeat. I’ve been loud about it. Very loud. (Sorry not sorry!)

I’ve declared it my twisted summer anthem of 2025. Or my anthem of twisted summer. Or the summer of twisted me. Let it be a season of retribution. A season of reclamation. Let it be a season of taking back our power. A season of kingdoms crumbling and artists rising. […]

I’m happy to say I’ve also reached the defiance stage in what has been a season (or seasons) of rejection for my poetry manuscript. Over the last three years or so, my Gertie manuscript has been rejected dozens of times, while also receiving a handful of finalist nods.

The most recent rejection — which came with a lovely note from the editor about making the final round of consideration — arrived in early May, a couple days after I returned from a writing retreat at Mass MoCA. The press that had it was not only one of my dream presses. It was also the last one to respond from a big submission push I did last spring and summer. And since I had paused submitting and revising after that, it meant that Gertie was no longer a contender for any reading period or contest anywhere.

It also meant that if Gertie was to get published, I’d need to jump back into the whole process, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I spent some time entertaining the fear that the last and latest rejection signaled that book publishing wasn’t ever going to be for me.

I indulged the idea that there simply wasn’t a place in the world for my work, but I took lots of deep breaths, gave myself a good talking to, and consulted my writing community. And … wait for it…

I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time …

Defiance has always been one of my strengths, and I plan to keep fighting for Gertie. It’s partly because I believe in the book. It’s also because, despite constantly wasting energy entertaining negative self talk, somewhere deep down I believe in myself.

Carolee Bennett, Artmaking as Pleasure: “Uncontainable, Unmanageable”

I had a student who is now a Very
Famous and Important Poet; I don’t
think she remembers me much
anymore, if at all. I had a teacher
who said, It’s really about who you know.
But I still believe in the poems I want
to write, believe in the air I breathe,
the tiny electric pulse which begins
as a prickle somewhere in the brain
or sensorium, informing me I need
to sink into the shag carpet of that
moment and stop asking only the logical
questions; because then a trapdoor
might open and who knows what bright,
surprising universe I might fall into?

Luisa A. Igloria, Partial Self-portrait as Poet, with Novelty Cakes

My husband and I recently visited David Austin Roses in Shropshire. It set me thinking about why I love roses: the scent, the sweet-shop colours and the silkiness of the petals. But they also have thorns and are beloved by insects such as earwigs. This links to my latest poetry collection, Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024), where the main theme is ‘beautiful things have inner horrors’.

We do have a small Tudor style rose garden within our back garden, with box hedges and some David Austen roses, and others that need a little work, pruning etc. We also have a few which were standard roses but have reverted to wild roses, and are far too large for this miniature parterre. So our visit was partly scoping out replacements. I liked the Olivia rose, and hope to order bare rooted in the correct season. I can’t see a rose without sniffing it for its scent, and will only buy scented ones. Everywhere I go I see roses and apply my nose to them, and have done since I was a small child. They are indeed ‘olfactory delights’ (quoting one of my own lines there). […]

Your parents’ tangled minds
are clogged with memories, resurfacing
as they approach their nineties.
We have assumed control.

Safe in their new apartment, they cling
to routine, repeat old stories, laugh,
are mostly thankful for our care: roses
late flowering against the dark of winter.

Angela Topping, David Austin Roses

[E]astern Pennsylvania finally moderated its weather enough that I got the weeds and the seeds and transplants more or less under control this past week–“control” being a general term subject to, well, Nature. The peonies bloomed gorgeously on schedule, as did the nefarious multiflora roses and Russian olives that plague the hedgerow. The catbirds and Eastern kingbirds are back; the robins’ first brood has hatched; the orioles are insistent in the walnut trees and brilliant in the garden, chasing the barn swallows. I’m not doing much writing, though I drafted one or two beginnings of poems. Outdoors takes precedence–not that I can’t write out of doors, I often do so. But poems can wait in a way the garden cannot.

And, speaking of poems (and Pennsylvania), I returned from my trip to find this Keystone Poetry anthology awaiting: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09990-3.html–the followup to 2005’s Common Wealth anthology, also edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple.

The new anthology, 20 years after the initial one, has poems by about 180 poets–yes, I am one of them–covering the corners and the center of the Keystone State. I like it even better than the first collection, and it is clear the editors learned much from the experience of curating poems and creating a cohesive “experience” of the regions. Granted, since I know both of the editors personally and appreciate their poetry and their visions, I may be biased. But that’s okay. Objectively, I truly get how huge an undertaking this was and how well it has turned out. For educators, there is a section at the close of the anthology full of suggestions for reading, writing critically, and writing creatively based on this anthology, and even in comparison with the previous one. As both editors are college professors who teach creative writing and critical writing, these appendices are well-thought out and worthwhile.

I miss the aridity of New Mexico, which seems to benefit my overall health. And I miss my daughter immensely. But springtime in eastern PA has many compensations, not the least of which are blooming even as I write.

Ann E. Michael, Back in PA

I think Palgrave’s decision to exclude contemporary work – he would not ‘anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries’ – was an excellent one. Absolutely no one can ever assess its merit, because it hasn’t had time to accrue any yet. Not that this stops us doing it. Young poets are always certain they live in a golden age; if it were left to them, they would include few poets beyond their brilliantly relevant coevals. But what they imagine the intrinsic value of their poetry is often just its extrinsic attitude, which is half the point of young poets in the first place: to take a stand, and demand a corrective to the inequities and distortions of the establishment. Today, ‘identity’ is still the main game in town, just as ‘class’ and gay visibility were in my day; in my mentors’ day, it was feminist corrective, and in their mentors’, anti-metropolitanism and fighting for the representation of the regions and the Celtic fringe. While one’s day passes quickly enough – the identity-obsession will eventually find its level, like everything before it – it always leaves the year ahead looking different in prospect. In time, I believe things tend to be changed for the better and the fairer.

Old poets, on the other hand, know that poetry has never been in worse shape, and would exclude everybody, bar themselves and their one remaining friend. I’m not even too sure about him, to be honest. But for those reasons, the young and the old can make poor anthologists. The young are too short-sighted and the old too long. Those who enjoy the brief, bifocal wisdom of the mid-river perspective (a mixed metaphor which seems to have conjured a specky fly fisher in waders; my apologies) know that the truth always lies in balance. You want a book which looks both forwards and backwards, because those are the books truest to their own time.

Tennyson, Palgrave’s great friend and advisor, wisely insisted that his own poetry be left out of the Treasury – a stroke of genius, because he knew would put the kibosh on Palgrave using any other contemporary work. Had he done so, it would have done nothing but draw attention to Tennyson’s absence. In vetoing his own inclusion, Tennyson underwrote the Treasury’s own longevity and success. […]

My favourite version of the do-I-put-me-in dilemma is actually a Tennysonian absence: The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry was edited by my favourite living poet, Paul Muldoon, a choice Faber must have instantly regretted. In it, Paul more or less explored the set theory complexities of self-absence. He had already made the most insanely Palgravian choice – a mere ten poets were included in the book; but Muldoon then doubled down on his honourable self-omission by not just leaving himself out, but annihilating his own existence altogether. Instead of an introduction, there was an excerpt from an interview with Louis MacNeice. Given that even back then Muldoon was, by common consent, one of the most important living Irish poets, the book was now rendered self-evidently and gratingly incomplete. The cleverness of this almost situationist piece of publishing is so Muldoonian I could spend an essay unpacking it. But it remains a brilliant anthology, in the true sense, I think – provided you read it with a copy of Muldoon’s Selected in the other hand.

Don Paterson, ‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of Francis Palgrave and the Golden Treasury – Part II

If you enjoy reading poetry and are, at least in principle, interested in reading contemporary poetry and responses to it in “real time” — following poets as they publish new material, getting a sense of new directions and experiments as they evolve — then the obvious thing to do is to subscribe to a handful of poetry magazines. There are several splendid online poetry magazines now, but I still much prefer to read both poetry and criticism in print. This is partly because I just don’t remember poems I read on a screen in the same way. I don’t believe you have really read a poem at all if you’ve only read it once — and certainly, from a poet’s perspective, you haven’t really “succeeded” unless your reader comes back to your poem time and again. Online venues are quick and convenient ways of getting a taste of many writers, but it’s hard to revisit things. You can’t annotate or turn down pages as you can with a physical book or magazine, even saved links often go dead, and the lack of manual interaction I think also impedes memory.

So for me, at least, printed poetry magazines still matter. But if you’re new to reading poetry magazines, or even if you’re quite experienced at it but fancy a change, it can be hard to know where to start. Most print magazines, unsurprisingly, only offer a very small amount of their content for free online, and very few libraries and bookshops now carry them so the opportunities for browsing are limited. (At least in the UK; I see them more often in France.) And it’s hard to find “reviews” of magazines that aren’t aimed primarily at people thinking of submitting, rather than those who are potential readers.

I’ve written reviews of three of the magazines I receive regularly before (Poetry Review, Interpret and the French rbl), and I’ve put the links to those pieces at the end of this post. But today I thought I’d take a look at three very good magazines, all of which I value and read loyally, and all of which print a good deal of prose as well as poetry, with an eye for their differences — what might attract you to one of these over the others if you are a potential new subscriber. These are the spring (i.e. most recent) issues of the long-running PN Review; Poetry London (also well established, but with a recent change of poetry editor); and the quite new, and still evolving, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. All three print poetry, literary essays and reviews (of poetry) in broadly similar proportions.

Victoria Moul, Poetry magazines: three spring issues

I’m always on the look out for books that deepen my understanding of creating poetry and am eternally grateful to writers such as Ted Kooser (The Poetry Repair Manual) and Steve Kowit (In the Palm of Your Hand), who supported my early attempts at writing myself. Last year I was moved to congratulate Isabelle Kenyon of Fly on the Wall Press for the publication of a truly inspirational book (The Process of Poetry) in which British poets of the stature of Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Liz Lochhead and Gillian Clarke reflected on the development of one of their poems through discussion with editor Rosanna McGlone. I was, therefore, particularly excited by the news that McGlone was working on a sequel, an Australian version, called The Making of a Poem (5 Islands Press, 2025) and wanted to review it. […]

Whilst there is some commonality in the different poets’ approaches, such as in their shared view of the importance of reading others’ work and in their willingness to experiment, there is diversity  too and, at times, contradictions. John Kinsella, for example, does not believe in giving up on poems, even if they are not working.

‘I’ve never abandoned a poem. If a poem doesn’t work, it gets rewritten and reworked. If I’m doubtful about what I’ve said, the piece then becomes a questioning and an investigation of that doubt.’

Whereas Sarah Holland-Batt, admits to giving up on poems that she feels aren’t progressing

‘All the time I have poems that I feel won’t work and I just let them go.’

Such contradictions are inevitable in a book that seeks to provide insights into the highly individualistic practice of writing poetry. As The Making of a Poem is not a simplistic handbook on the dos and don’ts of poetry writing, the reader must use the poet’s different accounts to reflect critically upon their own practice. Some insights will confirm and some will challenge their approaches and through that challenge produce the potential for its development.

Three of the insights that have led me to reflect on my own practice are: Jaya Savige’s statement that: ‘If I feel I’m getting too confessional, I try to rebalance things by banning myself from the first-person pronoun for the next few poems;’ Mark Tredinnick’s advice  to his students that  ‘ the poem you’re writing isn’t about yourself; it’s about ourselves;’ and Bella Li encouragement to ’trust in your particularity: the subjects you’re interested in, the forms that you want to use…don’t try to change what you’re doing to suit some sense of an audience.’  I have no doubt the lessons other readers will take away  from engaging with such poets will be different. That is the beauty of this book: there will be something for everyone!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Making of a Poem’ edited by Rosanna McGlone

The latest from Birmingham, Alabama-based poet, fiction writer and editor Alina Stefanescu, and the first collection I’ve properly gone through of hers, is the remarkable My Heresies (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2025), a lyric exploration of being and becoming, of family histories and geographic shifts. “The first word wasn’t love, was it?” she writes, within the first poem of the two-part “Cosmologies,” “It was this once that sat upon a time we can’t locate / in physics. It was the science of bread / being broken and eaten. // I am still terrible at division.” My Heresies is a collection of big, complicated emotions, cultural collision and a fierce intelligence, composed with such a delicate and careful ease of the line. “I, too, would appreciate / being courted at the leveling / of the sacred.” she writes, as part of the short poem “Little Things: A Ring,” “If I can’t partake of the trifecta, / I will settle for that flaming / thing in the angel’s right hand.” The poems are expansive and intimate, containing the whole world and the author’s entire life in the smallest moment, the most contained set of sentences. […]

With opening poem and five carved, numbered sections, there is an element of My Heresies of being constructed as a long sentence, a book-length suite of poems seamlessly stitched into a single, ongoing conversational thread. The poems are propelled by hush and halt, a tempo of thoughtful measure, articulation, excavation and archaeological play, but one that loops and reels and revels in repetition, managing to find new elements across familiar stories, familiar lines and phrases. “Failure to absorb the verb / and modify the actor accordingly.” begins the poem “Indictment for Failure to Conjugate,” “To sit and / play dumb.” There is also an interesting thread contained within this collection of the moments and lyrics of the late German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a poet with whom Stefanescu feels both cultural and poetic affinity. “Paul Celan begins with an act of self-naming.” begins the poem “Sonnet at the Ghost Commune,” “The poem claims the invention of self / on a Bucharest windowsill. Poets put // the moon in its place / at the horn of the table / on the shoe of the satyr folding laundry into bohemian ballet.”

There is such a detailed intimacy to this collection, and a sharp and open intelligence at play, one that invites the reader in as an equal, unafraid of what these lines might reveal.

rob mclennan, Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies

The second section of Thomas Meyer’s Fisher King, ‘Adages Agenda’ begins with these words:

Have I said more than I meant. Or mean to? I mean have I said too much, shy of either revelation or burden. Not so much said as wrote. Letter. Poem.

It’s a significant question for a writer who’s launching into a book a significant part of which consists of the relation of memories of personal relationships from teen romances through his 40-year-long partnership with Jonathan Williams to his current marriage to Michael Watt. It also bears on the idea that people as written have their own reality as compared to their ‘real’ one, as in this poem, poem ‘x’ from the short first section, which shares the book’s title:

I am Merlin.
I only exist in books.

An empty place.

For us, as readers, Meyer’s cast of characters also exist in the empty space of the book but are none the less as real as Merlin; ‘memoirs are inventions, fictions autobiography’. […]

Much earlier in the book, thinking of Bunting and Pound’s ‘Dichten = Condensare’, Meyer writes:

Could it be that an aesthetic invented at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to the nineteenth might lack application at the beginning of the twenty-first? We don’t need to compress, we need to expand. Slow poetry? Take time, make time?

It strikes me that in these closing pages, Meyer achieves a kind of slow poetry, a poetry with time and room to think, without succumbing to prolixity:

Something about a peony.
Full blown on the table in a jar.
The whole room filled

with that pink light
coming from

it having us in mind.

Fisher King is a book to inhabit, to move around in, slowly. Inevitably in a review of this nature, I’ve only skated over a few of its surfaces. As a reader, I’ll be back for more.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading May 2025: A Review

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone’s future involves some form of disability. As we age, our bodies show the results of living, i.e., aches, stretch marks, and memory lapses, to name just a few. Poets, it appears, intuit this reality more readily than others, even embrace it. As Loveday puts it, poets, “though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us.” As I read those lines, I thought of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which includes these familiar lines:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poised between kindness and sorrow, poetry beckons us towards what Loveday calls “connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.” How often have you read a poem and felt a deep gratitude, something far beyond the words on the page? This is poetry’s gift. It delves into our shared humanity, reminding us that the world of poems includes all of us. “What poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible.”

The article goes on to connect poetry and disability: “Contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability…Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time.” You could say that poetry takes a stand against ableism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “prejudice and discrimination aimed at disabled people, often with a patronizing desire to ‘cure’ their disability and make them ‘normal.’” 

But is, as the title asserts, poetry disabled? Or is it “differently-abled,” a term sometimes used as a kinder-sounding alternative? I don’t have the answers to those questions. What I do know is that this article made me think hard about my assumptions regarding both poetry and disability.

Eric Goss, “Is poetry disabled?”

“Put it down
on the page” – a writing
teacher says,
“…metaphorically speaking”

Meaning the page pales,
letters on paper have been eaten
and digested (as metaphors do), 
transmuted into light and hovering figures

On a backlit screen, the page
a wink in language, a vestige 
holding its head aloft in a 
restless, churning language. 

Jill Pearlman, The Page, the Page!

Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.

I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.

I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.

Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.

I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heat

writing a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s mother

And in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highway

Ren Powell, A Score of Sorrows

In early spring a book arrived that I had been eagerly anticipating. Atomic Masquerade by Clara Etherin did not disappoint. Witty, exuberant, layered and innovative, this visual poetry collection is full of delights, from brooding palimpsest portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein to the vivid pair of asemic sonnets “Heaven & Hell” – written in collaboration with AI – with which the book concludes.

Each piece has a distinctive energy, generating an impression of rising out of the page into some intangible third dimension. […]

I have read and reread Atomic Masquerade with great enjoyment; but the enjoyment has been bittersweet, for the book represents the final publication from Penteract Press.

Founded by Anthony Etherin in 2016, Penteract Press has been a leading independent publisher of innovative constrained and visual poetry for almost a decade. The press has given a platform not only to established avant-garde and experimental writers but also to new, previously unknown voices (my own among them). You can read my interview with Anthony about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close here.

Penteract Press books are unique: often sumptuous, always elegant, and characterised by verbal and visual delights and surprises. Moreover, like all good books their intrinsic value to the reader extends beyond the simple pleasure of reading. Diving into a Penteract book is an adventure, an exploration into the art and craft of poetry, an opportunity to investigate the possibilities of language and the space in which letter, word and image coexist.

I have learnt so much from Penteract poets. Luke Bradford’s lyrical Zoolalia, for example, has taught me the beauty of lipograms and how we can tune in to their potential for music and rhythm and energy. The magic of palindromes is revealed through Merlina Acevedo’s Mirrors. Visualising the formal structures in Shakespeare’s sonnets with BardCode by Gregory Betts has suggested new and interesting ways in which I might use rhyme and metrical patterns in my own work.

Marian Christie, A Paean to Penteract Press

I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World.

Han VanderHart, Finding Shape in the Dark (on writing difficult narratives) – Two Online, Generative Writing Workshops, July 5 & 19

One of the things I’m looking forward to exploring in my upcoming workshop Rumination as Route is a practice I call ruminative reading: a way of engaging with texts that invites lingering, layering, and the kind of close attention that reveals deeper textures over time.

I’ll be sharing how I approach reading as a writer, and how I tease out unexpected meaning through methods that mirror the digressive and associative structures I write in. This kind of reading isn’t about decoding a text once and for all, it’s about returning to it, turning it over, letting it shift in your hands and your memory.

My ideas around ruminative reading were shaped by my time writing creative reviews for The Bind, a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Though currently on hiatus, The Bind remains a rich and inspiring archive, a space where reviews take many forms: lesson plans, maps, quizzes, writing prompts. It honors writing at important intersections, and I encourage you to spend time on the site if you haven’t already.

José Angel Araguz, on ruminative reading

Daily I am perplexed by, well, the day, what is transpiring, what has happened in the world since I last checked, what the day will bring and how I’m supposed to respond, what I want and what I have and how to reconcile the differences and align the two, who I am, who I was, what I’ll be, how I’ll manage, what it all means, when I know meaning is a made thing. There are other questions. How do birds fly in the rain? Don’t they feel the pelt of drops like bullets on their backs? The rabbits in the backyard are racing around and leaping over each other in play. Does everything play? Are bacteria on my skin doing their own version of Miss Mary Mack with their flagella? There is so much we don’t know.

I used to be a strict believer in the black-and-whiteness of things. With age I’ve settled into a certain comfort with the gray scale. Nevertheless I’m often an impatient reader of poetry that does not show itself to me right away. I won’t name names at the moment. Too much gray and I’m just wandering in the fog, and really, I’d rather not. This little poem, however, has pleased me over some weeks as I’ve turned it over and over in my mind’s hands like a pretty rock.

Marilyn McCabe, a moment

i ask my friends,
“how have you been keeping yourself
together?” i do not actually want
advice but i want to hear if/how
we are surviving. i look up designs
for a plague doctor uniform.
needle in my teeth, i get to work.
sew together old jackets.
i stop sleeping. sleep is for a different time
with less fire & less windows.

Robin Gow, plague doctor

I struggle for language in a murky space. Must I write an ode to this insistent despair? Be thankful for its amorphous presence, its angled ambiguity, its sightless eyes that berate me in silence? The music obfuscates the light. Separates word from meaning. What is the edge of gratitude? What birds listen in the trees beyond it?

talk to me
broken moon:
dark side to dark side

There is the crescendo. Then the quiet. Then the flapping of wings. Then the jacarandas straightening. Then the echo. Then the hum. The tune running in my head.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Purple song

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