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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugly Spring

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

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

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

Kati Mohr, Writing—because.

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

Do you hate me? she wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, NaPoWrimo-ing along…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magda Kapa, Der Laden

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

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

Ali Thurm, Saying goodbye

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

Lori Witzel, The abrasions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Thousand Wings

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, What news there is

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

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

Happy National Poetry Month!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we reveal when we ask? 

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

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

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, David Lloyd and Cassandra Moss: A Review

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Good Spring Returns

surviving
the collapsed house
an old baby carriage

Tom Clausen, carriage

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

Topology by Jeffrey Branzburg

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

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

JoAnne Growney, Scientific American Shares Rhymes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Ode to a (former) office,

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

PF Anderson, X (#NaPoWriMo 4)

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

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

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

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

bursting
to tell someone
magnolia

—Susan Constable

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

Pearl Pirie, Openings and Closing Calls

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, Contemporary hauntings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, Sam Renda

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

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

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

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

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, How to memorise poetry

Bot, thank you for joining me in this conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The prompt was, Make something from nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

What is the editorial process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, Scientists, Wizards, and Poets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathleen Jamie, Before Hatred

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Announcing Recover, from Bayit

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Does it help to be religious?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Metamorfosen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 4 April 26

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

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

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

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

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

Salena Godden, Our Anarchy

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

*

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Air So Still

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

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

Shawna Lemay, On Seeing a Different Picture

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Notes on Translation

Last week, I flew to Portland for poetry.

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

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

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

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

Allison Mei-Li, I flew to Portland for poetry

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

Robin Gow, 4/3

一人降り春風乗りし過疎のバス　稲井夏炉

hitori ori harukaze norishi kaso no basu

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

                                                            Natsuro Inai

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

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

This week: death stuck in traffic, puritans vs. mermaids, an inflamed labyrinth, rain falling on asphalt, and much more. Enjoy.

Today I prayed upon waking
in weak morning light, on this
ordinary day, unkempt
in flannel and cotton.
Peace descended
like a still, insensible animal
laid on my lap, a strange
species I don’t know how to take care of.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 3

To quote T. Swift:

“ All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.”

But things are happening amidst a world in utter chaos and absurdity, a place where I and I imagine other creatives are holding on white-knuckled to artmaking and routines and fighting the urge to run away into the woods forever. I saw someone quoted the other day that it was important to go on making art and devoting time to creativity, that besides the things like protesting, making calls, writing letters, could be one of the most important things you do. Also a documentation for prosperity.

Kristy Bowen, February Paper Boat

I’ve also been wedging my foot in the door poetically while thinking, like Plath, that there are so damn many of us trying to push up through the earth. The poets are using Canva to design posts summarizing their busy AWP schedules: me too. The poets are announcing their publishing milestones via social media and MailChimp: me too. Mycocosmic was published a year ago this week and the “book birthday” post/ newsletter has become a standard publicity genre. That’s fine, poets deserve any little morsel they can scrape out of the attention economy, but it’s hard to do the work lightly. First and foremost: the US is in the middle of an illegal war because a reckless pedophile president needs to distract people. Even without apocalypse (are we ever?), it would be a tonal balancing act: here’s me putting a very slight twist on a “content” cliché. Now here I am asking you to pay attention to my book in a way that needs to be a little wry and humble, because no one likes a pushy writer. Then there’s the tech: good lord, I’ve spent hours trying to format a simple email, is MailChimp going to make me upgrade to paid now?! Curses.

Lesley Wheeler, So many of us!

I have been home in Hastings, looking after my mum and my kid sister. It’s been a tough winter. I’ve been making soup and feeling time plays tricks, how fast it all catches up with all of us. My lovely mum will be ok, but she gave us a scare. My lovely sister is more than ok, she has got all the sticky toffees and caramel promises out of me she can in mum’s absence. I’m now back at my desk madly trying to catch up with books and admin and stuff. It’s a juggle navigating this time of life, this big scary world, this terrible age of distraction, and all this patriarchal fuckery.

Take a deep breath. Here’s a walk along the beach and something from the archives. A love letter to Hastings and those 1980s teenage years. The poem ‘Under The Pier’ was originally written for a walking tour of Hastings, where you would have poetry playing in headphones at different historical and tourists spots in the Hastings area. ‘Under The Pier’ was also the title poem of a pamphlet published by Nasty Little press in 2011. Then later in 2016 this poem featured on the LIVEwire album, a solo performance poetry album, released with Nymphs & Thugs and Matt Abbott – The video was shot on location in Hastings, East Sussex in 2016, the video was filmed, directed, and edited by Jordon Scott Kennedy of Idle Work Factory, and it accompanies audio of a live performance of the poem recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre.

Time is such a trickster, somehow this all feels like last week, and also so long ago now. Ten years have passed, so much water has passed under the pier. I’m gonna see my friends soon, excited to do a show with Matt Abbott and Toria Garbutt next week, so, if you are up in Yorkshire and local, I’m at Barnsley Book Festival on March 2nd, please come, details below, it will be lovely to see everyone again.

Salena Godden, Under The Pier

Acrobat, by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated from the Bengali by Nandana Dev Sen:

Poetry flies away as well,
if you let go of the thread—
it flutters in space like a lost kite.
The poet floats in an infinite void, desolate,
like a spacecraft disconnected from earth,
with no destination.

I’ve chosen these six lines from a poem called “And Yet, Life,” which appears towards the end of this volume—a collection spanning a sixty year career—because their subtext, the idea that poetry is that which connects the poet to the world, is the thread around which my experience as a reader cohered. Read carefully, each poem in the book reveals itself as something that needed to be written, not because the world required it, but because the poet’s consciousness and conscience did. “This Child,” for example, which opens with the line “One day this child too will die,” confronts a question with which children by their very presence ask of their parents: Why did you bring me into this world. Dev Sen’s speaker, “Choking with fear, with ignorance,” tells us this question will make her “run away/to a dark cave, numb and empty” because she has no satisfactory answer to give. In “Growing-up Lesson,” she addresses a boy who fears the requirements of manhood—the most interesting line in the poem, to me, is “Are you terrified of plucking virginity?”—and then offers, as (a perhaps ironic) alternative, the kind of strength and maturity and analogous manhood that can be found in the use of words. In some ways those different but related spheres of concern—that of a parent responsible for a child’s life and that of a woman turning a critical eye on patriarchal gender roles—are the poles between which all the poems in the volume move. In her moving introduction to the volume, Nandana Dev Sen, the poet’s daughter and translator, offers a quote from her mother that I think speaks to what makes this book worth reading as more than just an interesting volume of poetry in translation: “I speak of poetry as being central to woman’s freedom. Yes, I am partial, I cannot be and do not wish to be objective…”

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #52

And then the siren gets closer. There’s nowhere for
the ambulance to go. Cars inch to one side as if the
road is stretchable. As if the vehicle is marshmallow.
Someone jumps off a Suzuki and waves his hands about,
directing the melee. The paramedic shakes his head.
The lane clears. Like a break in the clouds. The
ambulance rushes ahead to the next signal. Death
stuck in traffic. Life wanting a better place to die.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Monday traps

I recently spoke with David J. Bauman on the In Three Poems Podcast about Jehanne Dubrow’s book The Wounded Line, how having a “container” (in poetry, a form, like the sonnet) can be helpful when approaching the difficult subject, though it may not stay in that form in the end. And it’s not just the difficult subject that benefits from limits. Other constraints can push language in previously unmapped directions.

Here are a few constraints to try:

• syllabic limitation (for the poem or the line)
• sound limitation (i.e., an alliterative or anagrammic word bank)
• nonce forms (creating your own rules you must follow)
• grammatical patterns (check this post for an explanation)

When I put constraints on myself, I often discover something: a pleasing color palette or a surreal feeling in a collage. A juxtaposition of words or a rhythm of language that are not in my usual wheelhouse. And allowing those limits to sing in their own way opens up so many possibilities, much more so than a prompt that might ask me to write “however I want” or “explore” a topic. In this way, constraint leads to an expansiveness of thought.

In this way, the limit becomes the sky.

Donna Vorreyer, The Limit is the Sky

Again, I was surprised and encouraged. I’d never seen anyone else write like this. I decided to keep going. I wrote pieces where each word started with the next letter of the alphabet, where specific letters could be lined up to make other stanzas, poem codes where each nth word of a poem could be combined to make a new poem, and poetry using music notation letters that could be played on a piano. Some of these are forms that, as of now, AI writing tools can’t even replicate.

I wrote hundreds of symmetrical poems and kept discovering new forms all because of that first day that I tried something impossible and didn’t give up on it until it was finished. These new “impossible” forms opened up new publishing opportunities for me. Dozens of the poems have been published in various magazines, and I won an award and was interviewed for one of them.

Not only that, but my writing style overall has improved. Writing anything else seems easy in comparison to these “impossible” forms.

I heard recently that in some professions, even more important than consistency, is persistency. A refusal to accept ‘no’ as an answer. If you believe in your work, don’t give up on it, even if—especially if—people think it’s crazy or impossible. Sometimes, as the Wright Brothers found out, stubbornness pays off.

Joshua Kepfer, Try Impossible Things

She sits on the cliff watching the water.
He is a rounded head buoyant in the centre.

Something on the air tumbled by the wind
interrupts him;
eyes and nostrils flick open
revealing stone-black depths.

Sue Finch, SEAL AT ANGEL BAY

It’s a chemo week, so when I say I’m tired: I’m really tired. In the spirit of “letting myself be tired,” as those zany docs like to suggest, this week I’m sharing a poem that first appeared in The Missouri Review. Its companions are paywalled, but you academic types can get to them via JSTOR if you’re interested. (If you’re an editor, you can get to the whole looking-for-a-home manuscript through me.)

I don’t remember much about the writing of this poem and have never felt compelled to keep anything resembling archives, but my email oracle reveals that I foisted it on my favourite first reader in June of 2018, which sounds about right. I was thinking about power, about who constructs the narrative, about who is left out and why and what a piss-off it is. I’d wager I’d recently read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey: Scheria is where the shipwrecked Odysseus is discovered by the youthful princess Nausicaa, who helps the wanderer on his way.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Scheria”

Dear ***** , Arrived last night, on the anniversary of the funeral, when (and do stop me if I’ve told you this story before) in 1821, a small cortège made its way through these very streets at dawn from Piazza di Spagna to the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome where the mortal remains of ‘the young English poet’ John Keats were interred. Yesterday the sun shone, “for the first time in months,” according to a local. I’m quite sure he was exaggerating but his friends seemed to agree, draining their espressos, adjusting their shades in expectation of better weather ahead.

Today it’s cloudy, overcast, just as it was when Johnny K first arrived. I thought I might be overdressed, coat, jumper, hat, still wrapped for a long London winter. I’m told it’s warmer there now I’ve left. I’ve brought the colder weather with me it seems. The sun comes out when I leave, goes in when I arrive. I pull my collars up, think of John, on these steps, out here, on one of his better days, wondering if he’d make it through, last until the better weather came. He brought the clouds with him too. I wonder if he ever considered if it had all been worth it, if he should have stayed home, done the decent thing, got a proper job, been a doctor, married Fanny, raised some kids, slipped quietly into obscurity.

The Piazza is full of tourists. They are all out filming each other, all trying to manoeuvre to a spot where they’ll just get a shot of themselves on the steps and no one else in the frame. None of them are successful, they are all in each other’s photos while posing for their own. Later they’ll all star on each other’s social media feeds. Some pictures will get one hundred ‘likes’, one may go viral, others will get no reaction at all but they will all look the same, more or less, just people standing around in a crowd, being bland and simultaneously incomprehensibly unique.

I begin to move around the steps just to see how many pictures I can appear in, how many videos I can star in. I don’t do anything daft, I’m not photo bombing, I’m doing background work, just filling in, milling around, trying to be as natural as I can. I take it seriously. It’s like writing, it’s like finding that line, trying it out a dozen times until it feels authentic, until it floats unnoticeably just above the ordinary. That’s what I’m doing here. This is what I decide I’ve spent a lifetime doing: floating unnoticeably just above the ordinary.

Jan Noble, Nº53 In a region of mists…

Last night, I wrote this Facebook post:  “In my younger days, I wanted to be a reporter. In my older days, I am so grateful to have a job where I don’t need to stay up for the State of the Union address, although when I teach “Antigone” tomorrow, I may wish that I could make more specific references to the speech. Nah, it’s probably better to keep that class conversation more general: what do we do when our moral/religious beliefs are in conflict with what our earthly rulers want us to do?”

I didn’t need to make a conscious choice.  By 9 p.m., when the pageant started, I was already asleep.  Instead of watching the State of the Union address, we watched A Fish Called Wanda. […]

This morning, my brain returned to the State of the Union address and my Facebook post.  I also thought about my department chair asking me if I had ever taught a journalism class.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  “Before she assigned me the Journalism class, my department chair reached out to me by way of e-mail to see if I’d be open to teaching it. Here’s what I wrote back: ‘I am open to that, although I haven’t taught it. But long ago, in my Newberry College undergrad days, I was an essential part of the student newspaper. We went looking for hot stories, a la Woodward and Bernstein. We never found them, but we had fun just the same.'”

This morning, I’ve been trying to write a poem that combines threads of my Facebook post and threads from my blog post.  I still need a third stanza, so I’ll let my subconscious brain keep working on it while I get ready for my working-for-pay day, the teaching of “Antigone.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, What We Watched When We Didn’t Watch the State of the Union Address

I didn’t set out to write this. I began this piece with the rainless days of 2025 so that I could tell you how they brought a hedgehog to my door, skinny and dehydrated; how I took him to a local sanctuary who nursed him back to health. I intended to tell you how the “Full of Joy Animal Sanctuary” runs on entirely on donations, how I decided to help by running a fundraising poetry workshop to celebrate the more-than-human lives which surround us. On Sunday, 36 participants showed up, raising half of the cost of an incubator for hedgehogs and other small animals – so I decided then to run another online workshop on March 28^th, from 10-12.30: click here. In the meantime, “Full of Joy” told me that Lizzie Holden who attended the workshop, had contacted them to pay the rest of the cost. This means that whatever we raise in this second workshop will go towards a second incubator, where owls and hawks and rabbits and other sick creatures can be nursed. I hope some of you can join us.

Instead of the piece I’d planned, on hot days and hedgehogs – and the saving power of poetry, which gives us the means to save small animals, to express ourselves, to understand the world around and inside us, to imagine a different relationship with nature, to bring us together – I wrote this piece on walking through tough weather, and depression, and my regular return to despair. Sometimes the words lead you where you most need to go, and you have to follow them.

I find my meaning in landscape. Every day I walk, and it’s very hard, and rainy, and dark. I am so tired. Some days I simply don’t want to take another step. I want the path to stop. But then there is lichen, that incredible symbiosis of fungus and algae, through which life first crept on its belly onto the land. Then there is scarlet elfcup, and the drowned Ophelia of sphagnum cuspidatum, and the blackbird resuming its song – and yesterday, the first curlew. And there is always my Niamh, my first light, bright star, my green.

Clare Shaw, Rain, rain, snow

Dear god, I renamed one of my current 9 books at editing phase. Continued editing it, then started editing the old version so they diverge. An overlap of poems but changed edits, deletions and additions. I can convert to text files (more versions, goodie) then run through File Merge app to see where changes are.

Is it still a headache if there’s a solution?

Pearl Pirie, I am Forked

I am nervous about writing this post because I also think there is a lot of stigma around ADHD. In fact, when I rang the doctors to have an initial conversation, he actually said to me ‘Well, you’ve done very well for someone with ADHD if you have a doctorate and you are working at a university’. I was so taken aback by this that I said nothing, but of course people who are neurodivergent can ‘do well’ (whatever that means) especially if we are lucky enough to have a job which allows us to hyperfocus on something we love.

I am starting to understand that my ADHD brain has allowed me to achieve so much even whilst it makes things it is not interested in (chores, housework, paying bills, booking doctors appointments, losing things etc) very difficult. My brain, which cannot rest is the reason (I now understand) why so many of the ideas I come up with (16 Days of Activism, January Writing Hours) have this endurance element to them. It’s painful for me to sit still, so I come up with projects that mean I never stop. My brain also means I can hyperfocus all day and forget to eat – a useful trick when you are trying to complete a book manuscript for a deadline.

I wish I could have explained to that doctor that I achieved my doctorate because I found a methodology that was perfect for my particular type of neurodiversity, that I found a structure for the PhD that embraced the quirkiness of the way I think and allowed me to connect everything in a non-linear fashion. I should have told him that people with ADHD are brilliant and creative and resourceful and resilient – but at the time, I didn’t feel like any of those things. I felt like I was drowning and he’d just put his foot on my head!

Despite all this, I think getting the diagnosis has been a largely positive one. I have moved past that numbness and sadness and am starting to process and make sense not just of the past, but also my lived daily experience now.

Kim Moore, What is an overshare anyway?

Early March, below zero, but blue at least, and the long winter loosing in drips and a rouging of the forsythia. Difficult days of promise and betrayal, of hope and despair, large and small. I cannot get out of my own way, nor see around the muddle in my head. My brain is noisy and clanging. But the sun is leaking through the trees, and small birds move in the thicket. I know what I don’t know, but that does not make me brave. I try to stay present but spin out into what-ifs. Time is water in my hands, but the skin on the back of my hands is dry. I think of the word slake. An edgy word, knife-ish, as if the end of thirst is painful. But there seems no end to thirst.

Here is a poem by Lawrence Wray full of sound, and something achey, like thirst but not quite, like promise but with the possibility of its opposite inside.

Marilyn McCabe, I listen for fraught accords between soil and stalks

Today’s Poem is an eighteenth-century curiosity by the now-obscure English poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756). Classified as a “natural” or untutored genius, Duck, son of a poor and obscure Wiltshire family, had left his charity school at thirteen to begin a life of field labor. A self-directed reader and self-taught poet, he came to the notice and patronage first of a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, then of Queen Caroline (1683–1737), wife of George II, who employed Duck as librarian for Merlin’s Cave, her folly at Richmond Park. Both Pope and Swift knew Stephen Duck, liked him personally for his sincere piety, and — when he was rumored to be in the running as the next poet laureate — savaged him in print for his rhymes. […]

Taking holy orders after the death of his royal patron, Duck accepted a series of clerical positions, burying the second of his wives and marrying a third. He continued to write poems. Everywhere he went, as always, he was popular. In 1756 he died by drowning, an apparent suicide, the man whose name had been whispered as a possible poet laureate, only because everybody liked him.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On Mites (To a Lady)

Like the Romantic poets before me, I believe in the primacy of the Imagination to poetry. You won’t find many everyday or slice of life poems in my debut collection New Famous Phrases. Instead, I deal primarily in myth, in fable, in fairytale, folklore, foretelling, and the fantastic, which for me is where poetry is at its most powerful. This poem, ‘Death by Earth’, is part of the wider aquatic and siren mythology that runs throughout the collection, in poems like ‘The Pact of Water’, an origin myth for humanity’s relationship with nature, ‘The Crying of the Gulls’, a revenge tale of the natural world upon the human, ‘Cryptid (The Myster of Water)’, a poem about mystery, curiosity, and what we do when we find an answer, via the Loch Ness Monster, and ‘Lady of the Rock’, ‘The Sea Chain’, ‘Siren’s Throat’, and ‘Scraps to Daub a Siren’s Lips’, which portray the varying fortunes of their speakers in their goddess quests towards the isle of the sirens, and the reasons for their failures to reach this apotheosis.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about an aspect of the goddess quest in Ted Hughes’s work. It is this goddess quest that forms a framework for my poetics, and it is something you’re going to see me return to throughout my poetry, as I navigate how to reach this storied isle. ‘Death by Earth’ draws on the ideas of Robert Graves and Ted Hughes about the transition from a matriarchal goddess to a patriarchal god, hence the epigraph ‘the stages of his age and youth’, plucked from T. S. Eliot’s poem, which I use to evoke the history of mankind (and I use this gendered term deliberately here, given the events of the poem). Or, as I like to more succinctly introduce this poem during readings: puritans vs. mermaids.

Drop-in by Daniel Hinds (Nigel Kent)

“With My Back To The World” was sparked by an ekphrastic prompt that sent Victoria Chang to explore Agnes Martin’s art and write about them. Martin once told an interviewer, “…when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.” Her art, pencil drawings and paintings, are of grids and stripes often in muted colours. That might suggest regulation, rather than freedom, an imposition of straight lines on a naturally curved world. However, in Chang’s poems, those grids become a way of drawing focus, turning a spotlight onto one small part of a bigger whole. […]

An artist or poet may try to guide a viewer/reader, but ultimately have no control about how a piece is perceived. One person may briefly glance and see a grid, another reads suffering into that grid, someone feeling isolated may only see parallel lines that never meet. Chang is inviting readers to participate in her exploration, to see not the paint or the words but the beauty of the structure and what it might represent.

Emma Lee, “With My Back To The World” Victoria Chang (Corsair Poetry) – book review

Clarity and Light by Jesse Baker
I’ve been reading this book of devotional poetry in the mornings – a smooth transition between bible study and poetry writing. “Devotional” poetry sounds flowery, but these poems are earnest and relatable. Jesse is a pastor whose poems arise out of his biblical study and sermon writing process (which you can read about fully in this Rabbit Room article by the author – but an excerpt I cannot resist including:

Poetry has helped my sermon writing; but, it has also helped me to experience the whole of the spiritual life as a patient, attentive, and prayerful experience of God and his Scriptures. With that poetic foundation, when I preach, I hope sermons have the same effect on listeners that a poem has on readers, that it is seen as an open door inviting people into an exploration of both the text and the God revealed in the text. I also hope the whole of our worship becomes, not simply a chance to learn, but an opportunity for the church to embody their spiritual lives prayerfully and poetically, that they in turn become living poems through which the world encounters the Maker of all things. – Jesse Baker

The collection is organized chronologically, so you could keep it alongside your bible readings and tuck in to the aligning poems (though most poems include a scripture excerpt as an epigraph, so you could read it on its own and understand the context just fine). 

Renee Emerson, Listening so hard to an audiobook I almost ran out of gas but Thankfully Did Not

The world has its unacknowledged legislators – now more than ever – but poetry is the wrong place to look. ‘Unacknowledged’ is still on the money, though. When an AI researcher recently quit his high-powered Silicon Valley job, the BBC reported that he’d decided to ‘look to pursue writing and studying poetry, and move back to the UK to “become invisible”.’ The poetry WhatsApps lit up with the predictably self-castigating glee of the nichist: Poetry? in Britain? That should do the job, aye.

We might imagine the quitter chose poetry as the instinctive inverse of AI. Silicon Valley is everything Parnassus Foothill isn’t: modish, cutting-edge, drowning in capital. When people imagine the meeting of the two, they picture some Bay Area tech bro realising there’s a gap in the market to sweep away all the lazy, complacent poets. That is, what people mostly expect the poetry x AI crossover to involve – getting ChatGPT to write poems about how we’re all numb inside now because of capital, woke and melamine – is in fact the least interesting possible avenue of exploration.

But there are lots of ways the analogical interchange between poetry and AI can be rich, fruitful. Here’s one: the unprecedented tidal wave of investment genAI is receiving is strongly incentivising a whole bunch of maths nerds to think about natural language for the first time, and in so doing presenting strange and novel perspectives which, it seems to me, the poets are currently sleeping on. Why not make use of these odd new materials suddenly washing up on our shorelines? Poetry’s slinking, adaptive omnivorousness has long been one of the reasons it’s never needed to be cutting edge, never needed to drown in capital. It possesses a kind of pre-emptive and instinctual access to the new modes of thinking and feeling which any change in linguistic convention necessarily entails.

And linguistic change is coming. For around 200,000 years, if you came across a sentence, then you knew it had been produced by a human. That changed around 2019. Some believe that the discursive tipping point – at which AI began to produce more new commentary than humans do – came in late 2025. Ways of differentiating machine from human text are becoming paramount.

Joey Connolly, Metrics: Machine-Tooling a New Human Poetry

Birds can learn to fly without studying physics, but poets, it seems, cannot write iambic pentameter on instinct alone. This conventional wisdom accounts for the experts offering to teach the rules of meter, in their many books, The Ode Less Traveled, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and so on, with helpful examples, and exercises whose solutions are not (alas) always in the back of the book. The puzzle is that the rules in those books are wrong—not entirely wrong, nor entirely useless, but wrong in many details, and wrong in the abstract, wrong in the theoretical framework they employ—yet still the poets who study them often end up writing good verse that scans. What’s going on?

The linguists, who have made the study of language, and of poetic meter, into a science, have an answer. While some people learn to scan verse using “rules” they read in a book, others are able to tell—and more reliably—whether a line is metrical without such training. These others are no elite priests; even children learn to sing nursery rhymes. The training for this ability is the experience of metric verse, that is, reading a lot of it, and grokking, inarticulately, what separates it from prose, and (God forbid) non-metric “free” verse. Then one may use the true rules of meter to sort those categories, but here the rules are not available to us in consciousness; we do go by feel. We know the rules the way native but naive and untutored speakers of a language know that language’s rules of grammar.

Are the linguists right about this? Who are they to tell the poets and literary theorists that they misunderstand a core subject of their own discipline? One answer is that they have, or claim to have,

uncovered subtle properties of meter which are so detailed as to be unlikely to be accidental, and also so obscure as to be unlikely to be conscious.

If there are indeed generalizations about iambic pentameter that Shakespeare never violated, but which no one wrote down before 1977, or even had the vocabulary to write down before the 1960s, then yes those generalizations are rules of the meter, and Shakespeare was following them, but he was not doing so consciously. Ask him about them (oh, to ask him a question!), and he won’t recognize them.

Brad Skow, Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing

Here goes a backasswards way of trying to get poetry published, pitching it out on Substack. To my lovely fellow poets thinking ‘What the..?, Submit like everyone else, there’s a queue, you fuck..’ I get it.

But hear me out. One problem I have is that what I’ve written here is a heroic crown of sonnets, or sonnet redoublé, which is too short for all but the most left-field and blue moon random pamphlet subs. Even with a title page and epigraphs it’s 17/18 pages thereabouts. I could wait for the next one in-a-million pamphlet call outs that’ll consider something so short, or I could do what I’m doing here.

Faint heart never won fair maiden. Gah, the dreadfully important nonsense that is poetry, that it should come to this.

The other problem might be the subject matter, stained by stigma, and riddled with ridicule, that is, until fairly recently. You may be forgiven for not noticing that UFOs and ‘aliens’ are having a bit of a moment, sufficient to permit their institutional rebranding as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and NHIs (Non-Human Intelligence). Arch-bozo Donald Trump has even waded into it with promises of revelations, no doubt to divert attention from the Epstein files.

What snagged my interest, and left me wondering why it was met with a cultural shrug, was the dread word uttered by senior intelligence whistle blower David Grusch in the US congress, when asked, “If we have recovered craft, do we have the bodies of the pilots?” To which he responded that yes, non-human biologics had been recovered. There have been three congressional hearings and multiple attempts at transparency legislation since the 2017 NYT article that set this current kerfuffle in motion.

I would urge anyone to avoid the rabbit hole that I threw myself into. At best it’s a bewildering hall of mirrors, with bad actors, a desperate counter intelligence operation losing its grip, a weird coterie of wannabe messiahs, grifters and charlatans. On the other hand, we could be on the brink of the most ontologically significant moment in all of human history. Steven Spielberg certainly seems to think so, his upcoming summer blockbuster, ‘Disclosure Day’ looks set to make our collective skin crawl with gnawing unease. Surely poetry could layer the confusion and ambiguity inherent in what’s referred to as the topic’s ‘high strangeness’ in ways no other form might be able to attempt. That was my brief.

James McConachie, A Straight-up Poetry Pitch.

Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning? 

This might be unusual, but the titles often come first. I love titles. I love the act of naming something. It’s like a generative exercise. A perfect example of this is my poem “Antediluvian,” which is the last poem in Citronella. I was curious about the period of time in the Bible between the fall of man and the Great Flood — what I came to know as being called “antediluvian” (or “pre-flood”). I began asking myself, what happens in a moment of banishment? How does one feel looking back at a place called home while simultaneously seeing some strange land on the horizon? It was the first poem I wrote for Citronella, but in doing so, I knew I’d already written its ending. I wrote towards that closing with the other poems; led the speaker all the way to the edge of that cliff.

I don’t think I’ve yet figured out how books “happen.” But I can say this: the more I write, the more I understand how my poems interconnect. It was clear to me when I had enough poems for my chapbooks, and it was clear to me when I had enough for my full-length collection. […]

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

This is a big question, and one that could be answered in no less than a hundred different ways. I see my own role as a writer as being a sort of truthteller. In Shakespeare’s plays, the truthtellers often operate on the margins and in the fens. Think of the Fool in King Lear or the witches in Macbeth. These are queer, weird (wyrd) characters. I feel similarly as a queer writer. I write to reveal uncomfortable truths. I write frankly, and shy from writing fiction, because there is so much happening in the real world. Fiction is an interesting genre. I read a lot of it, and I value the way it can offer escape or confront me with difficult truths. But in my experience, contemporary poetry doesn’t allow for distraction — it cuts straight to the bone.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Loch Baillie

meditation
i remember i left
the lights on

Tom Clausen, footstep

My son is still small enough that, when I put him to bed, I can hear, briefly as I hug him, his heartbeat. It is a beautiful but also a baleful moment. Frank Kermode said, in The Sense of an Ending, that although the clock goes tick, tick, we hear tick, tock; bounded, as we are, in this little life, by a birth and a death, we hear the inevitable everywhere, giving to all things a beginning and an ending. And so the haunting tick, tock echoes in our lives, as it does in my son’s heartbeat.

It echoes through literature, too. It is the ageing Captain Hook, not the ever youthful Peter Pan, who is rendered insensible with fear at the approaching sound of the crocodile’s clock. Barrie’s finest stroke of genius was to have Peter himself make the ticking noise, unconsciously imitating the crocodile, as children do, which sends Hook crawling along the deck, only to plead to be hidden from Fate. ““Hide me!” he cried hoarsely.” And all the while, insouciant, loveable, innocent Peter keeps on ticking.

In a sublime moment, Barrie mentions that Peter “had seen the crocodile pass by without noticing anything peculiar about it, but by and by he remembered that it had not been ticking. At first he thought this eerie, but soon concluded rightly that the clock had run down.” It is terribly funny to read this after Hook has been crawling helplessly along the deck of the Jolly Roger, but it also makes that scene, for the reading parent, far more poignant. It means nothing to Peter that the clock has run down; it is all in the joke; but to the reading parent, faced with their own children and the tick, tick of their little heartbeats, it means all too much.

To the poets, time and death are as commonplace as toast and tea. “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker”, wrote T.S. Eliot, four years after Peter Pan, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In that poem, we hear echoes of Marvell, who wrote one of the most famous lines of English poetry about the swift passage of time—“for always at my back I hear/time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. A few years later Noel Coward had hints of Shakespearean “golden lads and girls” in the lyrics to ‘The Party’s Over Now’: “The candles gutter,/ the starlight leaves the sky;/ It’s time for little girls and boys to hurry home to bed,/ For there’s a new day waiting just ahead.”

Those lyrics are from 1932. Perhaps I am fanciful in hearing an echo of T.S.E. in them.

Henry Oliver, The night cometh

Intense vertigo of the spinning variety, hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ear), nausea, vomiting, and imbalance.

These are the symptoms of a condition caused by an ear infection or a virus attacking a particular part of the ear known as the bony LABYRINTH, a delicate complex located inside the inner ear that includes three specialized structures: the vestibule, the semicircular canal, and the cochlea.

The labyrinth converts mechanical signals transmitted by the middle ear into electrical signals, which are then relayed on to the auditory pathway in the brain.

The labyrinth also detects motion and position in order to maintain balance.

An inflamed labyrinth.

A hidden snail snell with oval handles.

A series of letters in which Samuel Beckett mentions his ear issues, and how motion is displaced by vertigo.

Alina Stefanescu, The thigh of the mind; or a few words that delight me.

In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:

P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].

I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”

What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:

How can any system
observe itself?

And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.

Maria Popova, A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

And if you are
tender to yourself, you’ll hear and
maybe even smell the rain falling on
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled
map of this life which shows you there
are still wildnesses left unexplored.

Luisa A. Igloria, Little Essay on Disorder

I have a few friends bringing out books soon, and they have told me how they struggle to continue to write, to even dare to post about their new books, or do readings, or any normal things.

I feel this pressure and anxiety as well—how do you write through the most stressful times I’ve ever experienced in my life? How relevant does poetry (or AWP, or a new book) feel in the face of women losing their rights to their bodies, facing a new war, facing threats to our voting rights? Can women in particular be expected to just go about business as usual? How can we deal with personal crises on top of political stress?

I try to spend time noticing nature, spending time reading, trying to deal with each crisis as it comes and just do the best I can. Friends are also a huge support. And can poetry save a country, save women’s rights to vote or use birth control, help us heal our own bodies or those of our loved one? Writers are storytellers, and storytellers have an important role to help people remember moments in lives, in history. If the American mythology seems to be teetering on the edge of insanity right now, how can we set that right? Can writing our own versions of mythology sound a note of hope, of justice, or reason? I hope so. I certainly don’t think it helps the world for artists to silence themselves in the face of so much uncertainty. Reading books about apocalypses helped me process the anxiety of the nuclear war threat of the eighties as a kid—perhaps something you’re writing right now will do the same for some other person? Speaking your truth—whatever that is—seems more important in a world where false information spreads like wildfire and hate tries to suppress everything kind, joyful, empowering. Is what you and I have to say about our daily lives, our work, our love lives, our disappointments and hopes important right now? I would argue, perhaps even more important than we know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring on the Way, Writing Through Hard Times

— It’s perhaps an evergreen statement these days — I know the news of the world is harrowing today.

— Because the news of the world is harrowing and because the world is full of sorrows, we hold a place here for joy, for when you can get to it, for when it is needed. We lay down some hope and some beauty when we can. Sorrow is not the whole story. […]

— I’ve been reading Fernando Pessoa’s poems, enjoying all his pseudonyms. So many of his poems contain lines that will get in your head and stay. “The astonishing reality of things / Is my discovery every day. / Each thing is what it is, / And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me, / And how much this suffices me.” He says, “All it takes to be complete is to exist.”

— An oft quoted poem by Pessoa:

To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.

— His book A little Larger than the Entire Universe seems to know things about the universe all the way into the future.

Shawna Lemay, The Entire Universe

Once, when I went to see my mother, we climbed a mountain above the tree line. It was Mount Monadnock, a massive peak in New Hampshire. Partway up, a thunderstorm began, bringing rain and lightning. My mother, already haggard-looking in the eerie lightning, said, “Once you have begun a thing, it is fatal not to finish it.” We climbed to the top and started coming down in the rain to the crack-crack of lightning hitting the rocks. She was slow.

“Leave me up here,” she said.

I, too, believed in finishing a thing. I took my mother off that mountain.

This sense of hiking through the storm is my approach to the press, too, but getting a conversation going about a book is harder than ever, considering the other noise in our culture. Even those authors who have hit the ground running—like Luke Goebel or Rebecca Chace—still have to fight for review space. Poetry is even harder to get into people’s hands. We have a book in Spanish and English coming out from William Archila, an El Salvadoran poet, who walks through the world quietly; I don’t know how many people will have the exquisite experience of his gentle footfalls across their kitchen floor. […]

When I was growing up in the cult, we learned a lot about the building of the Christian churches, and I was interested in the construction of cathedrals. Germany’s grand Cologne Cathedral required the participation of the whole city, and in my classes, they made a big point about everyone participating. We all had to carry wood and take care of the animals in the afternoon, so maybe their lesson was a hint to us that we needed to be ready to participate in work.

But the part we didn’t learn was that the Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to build. That’s many generations of laborers, of dreamers. I like to think that by the time Red Hen is a second-generation press, it will have grown into a stronger, sturdier organization. We are taking firm steps, like building a new website, but I’m also working hard to build a stronger support network. I like to imagine that right around the corner, there are thought partners—those with expertise in marketing, finance, and law—ready to join our board and help us get to the next stage. I feel sure that this spring, we will find these helpers.

Kate Gale, A Cathedral of the Mind: Sustaining the Arts Through Community

When I heard about the attack on Iran
I thought, look how far they’ll go
to keep the depredations of powerful men
off the front page. How can I just
shower, make breakfast tacos, listen
to Bach while the world is on fire?
The world is always on fire.
It’s not a new war. What can I do
but clean out the ashes
and kindle my little light?

Rachel Barenblat, Many things

What will the weather be like on March 7th? I’m planning to attend the book fair day at AWP in Baltimore that day, but always “weather permitting.” Last year in Los Angeles, I liked having the option of just attending one day of the event–sans panels and such, which overload my introvert personality. But Baltimore is a 3-hour drive from here, so weather must permit! The past five years, March 6-8 has been mild and reasonably fair; so says my garden journal, so maybe I will get there. If so, I’ll return bearing poetry collections…

Ann E. Michael, Comparisons

Down at the shore I thought again about the sparrowhawk and adaptation. About how wildlife finds ways of coping, even thriving in nature depleted places. In front of me, amidst all the bustling of oystercatchers, ringed plovers and rock pipits, wrens were flitting back and forth. They slipped in and out of view amongst the boulders. Like the birds of coast and shore, they were finding food in the seaweed piles. I wondered where they shelter on this wild windy coast, where they nest. There are short stretches of tumbled walls but no hedges or bushes or clumps of bramble.

How might we have to adapt and make do as our familiar places change and weather patterns shift? Could I be as adaptable as a sparrowhawk or a wren? As resilient? Unlikely; me, with my stiff bones and slow gait, bad habits and old ways.

News of bombs falling in Iran, retaliatory strikes and mayhem found me at the sea-log-seat as I watched plovers whirl about the sands.  But just as my spirit quailed, the most joyful sound rose up from the dunes and crofts. Skylarks! Heralding spring.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, February flight, flood, light

This week: cobra mating season, the hand of a Medieval scribe, a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal, and much more. Enjoy.

It has been awhile friends and a lot has been going on in the world since I last posted here. These days I am trying to balance my life as best I can. Somedays I do that better than others. I am sure many of you feel the same way.

Writing and reading poetry helps. It focuses my attention to the long arc of history, gives solace, expresses what so many of us are feeling or thinking these days. I read poems written during times of upheaval and remember that humans have a long history of bad behavior and yet, and yet, the pink camellia in my backyard is bringing forth her blooms, the birds are still arguing who gets the best spot at the suet cube, and my husband once again has the coffee ready for me after my long night of sleep.

Recently my husband and I took the train from Portland to Seattle. We stayed two nights in the hotel where we had our wedding reception 37 years ago, walked the city, and took the monorail to the Opera. We met family for dinner, and even took in an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. Seattle is not the city it was when I lived in the area 8 years ago. My favorite stores were gone, entire blocks are boarded up waiting for new tenants, there is still homelessness, and drug use on some streets. In general, it looked worn out, much like I feel these days. And yet, and yet, the Seahawks fans were out by the thousands, the Olympics in the West were as beautiful as they have ever been, and the coffee at Storyville was just as good as I remembered it.

I recently took a class with the poet Danusha Lameris, who shared that we often write to our “irritants”. Those things that get under our skin and keep rubbing at us. Today, I had a poem published in the online journal RADAR POETRY titled SEEN. It is a narrative poem about a young boy who lived in the same small coastal town I lived in as a kid. This is the second poem I have written about him, and I have wondered why I keep doing so. Why the memory of him is like a burr in my sock. I think in the end, I have a need for him to be seen like the image above, beyond the dark winter trees. I think somehow in these heavy days of heartbreak, I finally acknowledged his pain.

Carey Taylor, SEEN

Enlightened men are more likely to pump iron and own bitcoin stocks. Positivists and tech-bros are more likely to support the genocide of Palestinians. The possibility of greening the desert commits itself to banishing all nostalgia for the actual land as shepherded by its inhabitants for centuries. “We obviously don’t think nostalgia can cause a person to commit murder anymore, or advertising firms wouldn’t encourage companies to use nostalgia in their marketing,” writes Grafton Tanner. “The truth is, there actually isn’t much of a difference between the words of the positivists and Fabrik Brands. In fact, they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing: the eradication of longing.” […]

In the interest of poetry, I need to detach my brain from the exhausting emptiness of the commercialized present. Longing is what poetry does. Longing finds a loose solace in the “frequency of images of the moon,” that source of nostalgia that humans still cannot quite fix in their discourse. I love whatever it is about the moon that continues to escape us.

Alina Stefanescu, Notes on nostalgia

butter in the pan:
it sings its song
of browning

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’26

I also know there are so many poets who have died homeless in San Francisco, and that is not what I aspire to do, feeding pigeons in the dark. Near the end of Wanda Coleman’s life, we were giving her money to live and collecting more to support her. I called one friend, a poet, to ask him if he would be comfortable giving something. I felt kind of weird, thinking maybe he would say that she shouldn’t need help when she’d lived a grand poet’s life, but he said, “Kate, if you’re asking me if I understand that as poets, we don’t manage our money, and we might be someplace else in our heads, I know that.” And I thought, I got you. We might be building castles in the air, we might be writing the blues or drinking the stars, but we don’t spend our lives making, counting, or spending money.

For all of us writers and creatives, the wandering and the wooing of the muse is the substantial part of life, the nourishment of ideas. If you have kids, which I do, it gets tricky. You have to feed them. But when you aren’t young anymore, you have to think about the trajectory of the rest of your life. No one will be able to fully take care of you. In the end, I wish Wanda had been cared for better.

In writing, there are two ways to approach a story: plotting and pantsing (figuring it out as you go). I am not a plotter. I am a pantser. My husband and I are both writers, so we live in a plotless world. At times, it’s indecently plotless. But I am leaning into plotting and planning: write big books, build up the press, swim more, find another way to make a living so the hubby can work less. In April, for our birthdays, we’ve planned to visit my sister-in-law in Murrieta and go to sushi together. I plan for love, for family, the dream of a life of tranquil Sundays.

Kate Gale, A Dream of Tranquil Sundays: How We Value Our Lives

The cats sigh and briefly stretch, spreading
their toes apart, twitching their ears
as a gust kicks loose snow into a swirl—

a kind of dust devil on the lawn,
a devil made of icy crystals. Apparently,
winter is not as tired as we are.

Ann E. Michael, Tired

It’s not a sun, or moon, but has something of their capacity to shine. It’s the colours and how they fell into place, randomly. This was a mat I made for my daughter, a rather wonderful photographer living in the Netherlands. [image]

This year my seventh collection of poems comes out with Salt Publishing. My first collection, Powder Tower, was published in 1994, the year she was born. In glorious ignorance when it was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot prize I had no idea of how lucky I was. Well, two small children, freelance working – daily life was distracting. 

But this collection’s title, Making the Wedding Dress, marks a lifetime of change from gunpowder to silk…and the wedding dress was real, for my daughter. My son played piano as she walked into the hall with her dad. The sequence about sewing that gave the book its title does feel like it’s summing up a lifetime making clothes, covers, mats, bags, costumes, you name it – whatever scraps and a machine can come up with. Zero waste, repurposing, there are new terms but I feel sewing’s about respect as well as meditation. And the rest of the book – there are strange poems about modern living, the tensions we exist among, about money, sadness about lost species that were part of my childhood and I thought would always be around, like snowy winters, watching age catch up and wring out memory. How lucky, though, to have a cover image from my fabulous friend Jane Fordham, whose work is continually surprising, revealing, unique.

Jackie Wills, Not a sun or moon

Across the lobby, in the bar and restaurant behind us, they are setting up for Valentine’s day. It’s all ruby balloons and red rose petals. It’s the kind of scene that Philip Larkin, the slippers and gin and pipe smoke poet of Hull would add a good doleful drone to as he watched the couples come in, as he watched the blokes slouch out. Only he’d probably do it tomorrow. He’d do it when the balloons were sagging, the roses wilting. It is Keats who’d be turning the volume up, adding pulse and throb to the occasion, Keats who’d be accused of making a fuss, of going over the top. And I’m not sure which team I support today, which game I want to see played. Is it flare and fancy footwork or composure and a solid work rate I’m after? There were 4000 Chelsea fans in Hull last singing in the snow and I thought about Keats saying, “Love is my religion – I could die for that.”

Jan Noble, N°51 Love is my religion

Love is a lot
like physics:
It takes study

to understand
how masses —
yours, his —

attract, how his body
heat conducts
and your heart rate

accelerates before
either has had time
to evaluate impact.

You think you get
principles of velocity […]

Radio station KPBX in Spokane, Washington, invited students of St. Andrews-Sewanee School, Sewanee, Tennessee, to select and read on the air (SAS owns and operates its own radio station, SASradio) poems with a science focus. In searching online for such poems, the students and their faculty sponsor came across my “Love Is a Lot Like Physics” and wrote to ask permission to read it on air. The poem was broadcast and recorded on “Poetry Moment” on Spokane Public Radio on October 5, 2023. It was read by student Kendall Elder.

Maureen Doallas, Love Is a Lot Like Physics

There is a difference […] between an editor stating that their journals are labors of love in order to make writers aware of the conditions under which their magazines are created, and editors stating their journals are labors of love in order to extract sympathy from writers and, as [Anandi] Mishra writes, “exploit earnest writers for cheap labor.”

Case in point:

Angel Food Mag: “This is a labor of love and unfortunately, we cannot pay writers.”

The Garlic Press: “Unfortunately, this magazine is a labor of love, and we cannot offer payment for publication at this time.”

“Whale Road Review is a labor of love and can’t offer monetary payment at this time, but we include a ‘tip the author’ feature so readers can send money directly to our writers.”

Obviously, most writers expect these conditions at literary magazines. Payment is unfortunately not the norm. But framing the inability to pay writers—which is the basic professional standard in every other market besides literary magazines—is like a tug on the heartstrings while getting robbed. It’s bad enough that most writers don’t get paid at literary magazines. Do we need to use love as a means to justify the practice?

Becky Tuch, Q: What’s with all the luvvy duv “labor of love” malarkey?

I didn’t have the highest hopes for Valentine’s Day, but we took the arduous trip downtown and back to attend the Spectacle du Petite show at Roq La Rue, which features a ton of wonderful artists including my current art crush, Dewi Plass, whose works Glenn photographed me with. Below are some of the pieces, including the fennec fox piece, for you to enjoy. However, I recommend a visit to the show! Glenn also took me to a downtown bookstore, so I could peruse lit mags and magazines not available to me on the East side. The whole thing wore me out, but I was happy I went. Glenn made duck and strawberry cupcakes, and we had dinner at home, which was lovely. (I also received two rejections—one book, one lit mag—on Valentine’s Day, which seems like a slap in the face. Not cool, places that reject on V-Day. It’s a hard day for a lot of people! Geeze!)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Valentine’s Day and Artist Dates, Birds in the Cold, Melancholy, AI and Voting Rights

Even now, in my sixties, I keep falling
in love with things. The crumpled
texture and weave of linen, the sharp
clean edge of a cotton collar, the soft
slouchy hems of bright socks.

Luisa A. Igloria, Self Portrait, with Once-Lonely Sheep

In addition to eating way too many raspberry and lemon paczki for one person this week and the rest of February, my other treat was getting a new tattoo, a pair of fancy and decorative scissors. Lately I do more digital work than analogue (something I am vowing to change this year) but when I did work more with physical materials, I always preferred scissors over X-actos, which sometimes meant my cuts were unweildy, but I was just more used to them (though it depends on the scissors.)  They are the first tattoo on my left arm, which I don’t plan to create a sleeve, so it stands alone on my forearm and is actually about the size of an actual pair. 

And speaking of collage, the Februllage endeavors have been going well. Since we’ve been coming and going a lot, I’ve been doubling up and working ahead to make sure I can post daily, if not create daily (this is much easier with collages than NaPoWriMo poems.)

Kristy Bowen, notes & things: valentine’s edition | 2/14/2026

A stray barks: sharp, staccato, afraid.
Like she is shouting in a different language.

She must have spotted another cobra.
They are everywhere now.
It is, after all, mating season.

The other street dogs don’t come near.
They are picking their battles.
Or the afternoon is too warm, too languorous,
too burdensome, to die.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Trying to make sense of the world – attempt #1

“The Quiet Ear” is subtitled “An Investigation of Missing Sound”. Raymond Antrobus was diagnosed deaf at the age of six when it was discovered that he was missing sounds at certain frequencies, e.g. birdsong, and unable to hear certain letter combinations, particularly “is”, hearing “talisman” as “tal man” or “tally man”. Typically the teachers who’d written him off as slow didn’t apologise. […]

The book’s title comes from a chapter, which also is the title of a poetry anthology that contains a poem by Ted Hughes called “Deaf School”. Hughes had been commissioned by the National Theatre to research “how people live without language”; a bizarre commission given that the Deaf are not without language, but hearing. Hughes visited a Deaf school in London and the result was a problematic poem. The poem, in Antrobus’s words, “positions the speaker of the poem as a wise observer; there’s a tone of certainty that pathologises the deaf children, seeing them as passive amusements… The biggest irony is that Hughes is lazily describing something highly sophisticated, the language of sign… Seeing Hughes use his poetic gift to frame deaf children as animalistic simpletons was a double assault to me, disappointing and hurtful. What is the use of a poet who uses their talents to enforce harmful stereotypes on marginalised people and their language?”

Antrobus’s reaction was to write a poem that mirrored the language back at Hughes. To get it published, he needed permission from the Hughes’ estate which was denied. Antrobus then redacted the lines in the poem so you only see the title and then a series of black blocks. Showing it to some school children, one suggests that if you rotate the poem by ninety degrees, you can see the poem as bars on an audiologist’s chart.

Emma Lee, “The Quiet Ear” Raymond Antrobus (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) – book review

The palaeography sessions are weekly, on zoom, from America. I have access to them through my fellowship with the Folger. They have become something I treasure: a quiet, thoughtful place of puzzle solving and companionship amongst my otherwise chaotic days of caring and freelancing and trying to write the book. I value the ritual of it. I value the feeling of joining the group and being welcomed. Usually we begin by going over the alphabet, looking at the way that secretary hand can be formed, always with the reminder that the scribes that wrote the documents are people, and each person has their own handwriting. We are reminded of context, that there is a world of difference between a son writing a letter home from university, and a letter from a spy in a royal house. Then we open a document that all the group can see and we transcribe it together, slowly moving along, a word at a time. We are shown how to enter the transcription for scholarly use and although this is not why I am here – I know I will never have the confidence or skill to transcribe anything in the archives – I enjoy the way that knowledge of how it is done brings me closer to the transcribers when I am roaming down the rabbit holes of archive work.

The stories of people are not just embedded in the text that is written. It’s in how it’s written. When we come across letters that are obviously more ornate than they should be, we can see that this is a throw back to an older medieval style and I can imagine someone who learned to write in a medieval hand passing down a habit of over exaggeration of majuscules through the family, the old ways being slowly rubbed away at the edges as each new generation learns to write. I am reminded of how I used to copy the way my mum wrote her capital Es in a double curled sweep, though I had never been taught to do that by my teachers.

Learning to read 16th and 17th century documents is so much more than learning the shape of the letters. Much of the spelling is phonetic, sometimes I think I can detect accent in the way that words are spelled. To learn the hand of a scribe you write the letters out, looking at the ink on the original page to follow the direction of the quill, getting a feel for the direction of the crosses, the way an ‘a’ merges into the minims of an n or an m, and this way you get a feel for their habits, their positioning, the way they might lean a quill on a knuckle joint, the way they get distracted and bunch a letter too close to the edge of a page, or miss a word out and have to go back and stick it in on a slant. A manuscript becomes a moment in a life, then, the dipping of a quill and the fattening of the letters with ink, the thin pale words at the end of a long line where the quill needs re dipping, the drip, the smudge where a sleeve has caught.

Wendy Pratt, The Butcher’s Hook and the Hot Cross Bun

This is the notebook of one William Lynnet (or Lynnett), born around 1622, who was admitted to Trinity as a student the year before, in 1641. William’s notebook contains various bits of Latin and English verse, some of his own composition and several addressed to prominent Cambridge contemporaries, as well as Donne’s translation of Psalm 137, the popular translation of Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’ (which I discussed here) and its ‘answer’ by Henry King, and an English poem by the poet Richard Crashaw, who was at Pembroke College, Cambridge until 1635 and thereafter at Peterhouse. Many items are dated to 1642 or 1643 and several describe or respond to the tumultuous political events of those years.

All of this is relevant because this manuscript also contains two copies of a good Latin poem which is ascribed, when it first appears, to ‘A. C.’. The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts takes this to be Abraham Cowley — who was also at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1642/3, and duly appears in William’s list (in the image above, you can see his name about half way down the right-hand column). Although CELMS accepts the attribution to Cowley, as far as I know this poem has never been published. […]

The poet compares himself to a singing bird who, her nest destroyed in a storm, no longer has the heart for song, and struggles to know what to do:

At si prosternit nidum fors saeva tepentem,
Et nova tempestas quaerere tecta iuvet,
Maesta silet; metuit suspiria mittere, cantus
Ne possit gemitu mixtus inesse suo.
Flebiliter pressis circum vaga cursitat alis,
Et cui adesse nequit nescit abesse loco.

But if cruel fate destroys her cosy nest,
And a storm means she needs a new house,
In sorrow she falls silent, afraid to mourn
In case her song be spoilt by her lament.
Weeping she dashes back and forth, her wings
Close-pressed, she cannot either stay or go.

This situation is compared to that of the poet who, having lain long secure and singing joyful songs in ‘your shade’, now faces the possibility of being forced into exile as a result of the ‘storm’ — that is, of course, the storm of Civil War, which broke out fully in this year, 1642. The ‘you’ of the poem might refer to a particular individual, but I think it is most likely that it refers to the university itself. Cowley was indeed eventually forced to leave Cambridge in 1644 to take refuge first in Oxford and later in France.

Victoria Moul, With hope into the lists: Cowley on the eve of civil war

What I love about “Nostos” is what I love about so much of Glück’s work: the intensity of focus, and the sensation of entering another’s consciousness so completely that it feels like your own, both effects accomplished by careful management of the line, by the way enjambment can cut across syntax to enact the movement of the mind.

The opening five lines establish the logic that structures the rest of the poem, its pattern of incompletion and association, continuity and rupture. The opening line alone give us a microcosm of this tension:

There was an apple tree in the yard—

It’s a complete sentence—and yet not, the em dash denoting fragmentation, the statement breaking off. More accurately, a breaking away from, as line 2 directs us into a new temporality:

this would have been
forty years ago—

The shift from the simple past “there was” to “this would have been” is weirdly complicated. It was forty years ago, and there’s no conditionality implied by the usage, but the idiomatic construction evokes demotic speech—the sense that we are being spoken to, or perhaps speaking to ourselves. It’s a storytelling gesture that shifts our sense of time, from past recollection to present-tense situating of the image. And it colours mood as well, introducing the minor chord of “would”: a word of longing, of distance on its own. This distance is revealed as temporal when line 3 opens with the unit of time—forty years—but abruptly turns spatial as another interruptive em dash is followed by the preposition “behind,” pulling us again into the realm of the concrete, letting us hang there for an instant in uncertainty: behind what?

So there is a lot going on, if you track the movement line by line and word by word, attentive to the subtlest shifts in verb tense, grammatical mood, intonation, and to read Glück I think you must be. But I find this concentration so rewarding, and the precision, ironically, disarming. In this instance, it’s how it captures the way we tell stories, which is also the way memory works. An image arises, unanchored, and the mind finds a place for it, slots it back into a larger narrative.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Nostos” by Louise Glück

Overall, the amount of white space, the amount of enjambment, and the short lines slow the poem down. We’re getting plenty of time to parse the syntax and savor each line. The poem either begins with a single line or as a couplet that includes the title, depending on how you look at it, but the last line is certainly on its own. It’s emphasized because it’s all by itself, cushioned in white space. The question is also emphasized by the repetition of “my hands”:

Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

The speaker is pleading. There’s a sense of desperation and a deep desire to be useful. To be a helper. The repetition three times here also mirrors an earlier repetition: the anaphora in stanza three. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, lines, sentences. In this stanza, “come” is repeated three times:

Come hurricane, come rip current,
come toxic algal bloom.

This poem is full of surprises, reconsiderations, and switchbacks. Form and content are working in tandem. The speaker of “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” wonders aloud about what it can do to be a helper. And, I’d argue, in its articulation, and in its witnessing, it is a helper. I hope if you enjoyed this poem, you’ll seek out more work by Rachel Dillon.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

Copies of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are going out to the media, for review requests, and to the contributors. I received a box of books a week or so ago, and I am thrilled with how it’s turned out. Donna Kile’s gorgeous cover photography, the tactile matte finish on the cover, and even the fonts. And, of course, the poems by our fantastic contributors. We really can’t wait for these to start shipping out to readers in May. […]

In other news, I shared the stage with fellow poets and long-time friends Franklin Abbott and Cleo Creech on Jan. 8 as part of an exhibition of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Decatur Library. It was a moving evening of poetry and I – and the audience – were verklempt for most of it. I don’t do that many in-person readings anymore, but I’m glad I did this one. 

Collin Kelley, The Big Reveal: “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology

I’m excited to share that I have a podcast episode out with Meg of Meg’s Reading Room. I can’t say enough about Meg. She is such a calm, gentle presence in this world. I love her podcast about books, and was so honored when she invited me on.

You can listen to our episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. At the very end, I share a poem from the book that I have not shared anywhere else, so go check it out!

Here’s Meg’s description of the episode:

In our conversation, Allison shares why motherhood gave her the courage to start sharing her work with the world, how connecting with her own voice has helped shape her work as a speech-language pathologist, and why going deep through her writing and creative workshops has been bringing her joy in this season.

Allison Mei-Li, A Few Love Poems

NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Volume 2), ed. Philip Rowland, Isobar Press, 2025, ISBN 978-4-907359-52-2, £12.00

Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, ed. Neil P. Doherty, Dedalus Press, 2025, ISBN PB 978191562933, €14.50

The first time I reviewed two anthologies together here, one of them was the first volume of the NOON one. You can imagine my surprise when Volume 2 arrived with a quote from that review on the back cover:

The work in NOON is poetry tending towards the ideal condition of silence, which is a kind of music, and the visual element, not only within but in the space around each poem, is key to eliciting the quality of attention required from the reader when a poem places so much weight on so few words.

I could use exactly the same words in reviewing this second volume, but I won’t. Instead I want to look in a bit more depth at Rowland’s explanation of his method as explained in his Preface:

As in every issue, as well as the first anthology, the poems in this volume have been arranged in a renga-like sequence. Besides being a creative aspect of the editorial process, this is meant to allow for a range of short-form poetry to resonate in stimulating and sometimes surprising ways for the reader.

…

This is, then, much more an anthology of poems than poets.

In practice, because, with just one exception, poems by each poet are grouped together, this involves resonances within a poet’s work and across the works of the preceding or subsequent contributor. […]

What also emerges is the flexibility around what Rowland means by a short poem, defined as anything under 14 lines. While NOON tends towards the haiku, there’s room for anything that fits, really, including a couple of tiny haibun (or at least that’s how I read them), like this one by Sabine Miller:

VESSEL

If you were a vessel, what shape would you be? I say urn and she says murmuration. I am filled with dusty blue marbles; she is filled with sky.

the dark rock
a darker bird
alighting

In the Preface, Rowland says the book is ‘short enough to be read from start to finish at one sitting’. I can confirm that this is the case, and that at the end the temptation is to go back to the beginning and read it again. And again. Each reading revealing new delights. It’s a delight in ways that few anthologies (or single books of poetry) manage. I’ll finish off with a poem from Caroline Clark that, for me, sums up the experience of reading the book:

Can I be with you
while you read this?
Don’t look up
or say anything.

It’s a book to keep by you, to read and read again, to savour like fine wine.

Billy Mills, A review of two anthologies

There’s been a shift at night. Used to be I’d forget to attend class until exam time. Sometimes my primary school or secondary school or university graduations were rescinded because I missed a class. Pretty common dream among people I understand.

Or I searched a toilet and all would be out of service. I’d show up for meals and it was all eaten. I’d be lost, disoriented. I hid, evaded, be pursued, shot at. I’d run through cities forests in primeval fear. I’d stash myself under furniture, in heating ducts. I’d almost always escape. Sometimes I was a disembodied observer of other people and did nothing in my own dreams but watch chaos unfold. 

There were non-stress dreams of course. But the shift is this: on waking, say, that was stupid, I should have this or that. I broke into my own dreams lucidly. 

In dreams I started asking for other student’s notes, asking the front desk to confirm my schedule, chatting with professors, being in lectures, graduating. 

I started asking directions to a working washroom, pee anyway even if the only one was a urinal in a crowded hallway. I started showing up at buffets before the crowd or before opening. Being lost in another souk, I said in my dream, no not this again, so bored, walked past the vendor, threw up the flap of the tent and hailed a cab. 

Being lost and locked in a museum or store at night I started stealing stuff. Or exploring, finding new underground tunnels, and new rooftops to observe from. 

My run in the forest became a joy of running and watching the neighbourhood sprout houses and businesses and I started talking with these familiar fictional neighbours, each dream a next time lapse. 

Being held hostage, I started to huff, disgusted with fellow prisoners, getting up, telling off the gunmen until he reddened. I demanded cash for damages, or snatched his gun, taking him out and the marksmen.

The shifts have mostly happened over the last year, some spreading back a decade. […]

The dreams are starting to echo being a member of community, taking roles as protector, saviour, competent, self-serving. I move from inaction and reaction to action. 

Twenty years pass and I don’t feel cringe for existing. I ask what I want and instead of writing down goals and sub-steps, on some deep level I give permission instead of self-flogging. I don’t try to manage others or bow to others. There’s some equality. There’s some interdependence. There is something opening. Out of the forest, into the plain. New options. 

Pearl Pirie, Agency

i think we should install more doors to nowhere.
more windows full of bricks.
i am sick of functionality. i want
the nest to be as absurd as it is to be
alive right now while people are being stolen
from their ice cream places. from their schools.

Robin Gow, wild zillow

Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.

In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.

Matthew Paul, Review of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things

Yesterday I was thinking about how being an athlete is unlike being a writer.  I watch the Olympics, and I have no illusions that I will ever be at that level, and worse–the window for that level of skill is tied to youth.  With writing, I can continue to improve.

I thought about this off and on throughout the week, as I have walked from my office to my classrooms and observed clusters of students who are talking about their creative writing.  I don’t think these projects are for a class.  I think they’re just students who like to write and have found each other.  I love the building where most humanities classes are taught.  It was built 15 years ago, so it’s a very different building than any other building where I’ve taught.  There’s more natural light, for one thing, and less decay.  The common area has spaces for informal gathering/studying, spaces that look like a small living room, spaces that look like a kitchen table, and two tables of barstool height, with higher chairs.  There’s a charging station beside one of them, and plenty of plugs throughout the common space.  There are some backless couches that look like waves outside of each classroom.

Some of the students hang out as they wait for classes to start, but other students hang out all day.  As I overhear conversations, I feel inordinately happy.  There’s the creative writing discussions and the students helping each other in a variety of classes.  There are students scrolling through their phones, and others staring at laptops, but more often than not, they’re interacting.

As I walk back and forth, I sometimes feel wistful, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes sad about how long ago my own undergrad days have become.  I can also be prone to the sadness of feeling like I haven’t lived up to my potential.    Yesterday I laughed at myself a bit–I can still keep working on writing projects, and I can keep doing it deep into old age, barring some kind of injury.  In terms of athletic prowess, I’m not going to be skiing ever again; fear of breaking a bone is just too much of a deterrent.

Happily, I’m fine with that.  I didn’t like skiing when I did it in my younger years, so no great loss.  Aging must be much more difficult if what brings one joy is not something one can do with an aging body.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Life, Olympian Life

I’m always surprised when talking with another poet, and they say something along the lines of I should see more modern dance, but I don’t really know what to make of it. This, of course, is another version of what we frustratingly hear all the time as poets—I want to read poetry, but I don’t understand it. I feel like the emphasis on understanding is preventing so many people from enjoying and experiencing not just poetry but the variety of art that exists in the world, such as dance, experimental music, or abstract painting. Even those of us who spend our time immersed and versed in one discipline and recognize that every artwork need not tell a story or be representational, still often find ourselves trapped by the false idea of needing to understand a piece of art if it’s in a realm outside our own.

Here’s my plea. Let’s free ourselves of this idea.

For me, what makes modern dance amazing is that it strips dance down to its fundamental ingredients—the shapes that bodies can take and the motions that bodies can make—and reimagines it front and center. When I watch a dance piece, I observe the architecture of the dance—both for individual dancers and as a group—and I notice repeating and building patterns of gestures, undulations, or transfers of weight. All of this, of course, is anchored by the music and lighting, set and costumes, or lack thereof (some of the best pieces shine because of their spareness, by letting the dancer just dance). Together, it’s about creating an energy, a feeling that you take in, that you open yourself to. And maybe, just maybe, if you just let it happen, Emily Dickinson’s “cleaving of the mind” will come.

When I stand in front of a Rothko painting, such as the Seagram murals, I feel myself vibrate, physically and emotionally. That’s the ultimate for me. Like modern dance, modern painting is painting stripped down to its essential ingredients—color and texture. It isn’t about sense, but the senses. We don’t make something of it; instead, it makes something of us.

As my bedtime reading, I’ve been traveling through Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which speaks to how Stein similarly sought to make poetry new by experimenting with its very textual and grammatical building blocks.

“Each word in [Stein’s] Tender Buttons . . . was recognizable in itself, but here words follow others not to advance any story, but to propel the text forward through verbal echo, surprise, or pure insistence. . . . Tender Buttons is a celebration of mutability, a rejoinder to the rules, where words are set free from the shackles of meaning and grammatical function, made unfamilar, and charged with power to make the world afresh.”

Whether you’re reading a poem or listening to a drone composition that reverbates with found sounds, it is precisely the allure of surprise and the unfamiliar that makes them successful, powerful, and engaging. If we stop asking what it means and start asking what we feel, perhaps we’ll all find our way to the forms of art that we didn’t realize we needed and that speak to us even though we thought they were beyond our grasp.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Celebrating the Ingredients

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

I’m trying to write a poetry of “what is”, at the risk of seeming like some kind of antiquated rational materialist. (Guilty.) What you believe has consequences: if you believe in the literal existence of Santa, you need to wrestle with the existence of the surveillance apparatus implied by that belief, you need to acknowledge that this authority in which you believe prefers rich kids, and so on.

So I’m trying to write about the marvellous world we live in, which means that I write about natural phenomena, often through the explanatory lens of science. I deliberately avoid mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, and other forms of woo that are pretty commonplace in contemporary poetry. But I don’t think that the transcendent and the numinous — the truly wonderful — are the property of those modes of thinking. I’m trying to write about what it’s like to be in this world, to live in it, to experience its aesthetics and poetics. This is a bit different than the way that many poets write about science and nature: either the natural phenomenon is used solely as a metaphor, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, or the poem is a hymn to the phenomenon. (Grossly oversimplifying here.) I’m trying to do something different with my poetry, to write about the world as it is and about our experience of it.

Adjacent to this is a technical question I’m interested in, which has to do with how poems might be constructed differently. If we imagine that words and lines are the atoms and molecules, respectively, of poetry, what happens if we do chemistry with these? If we pull them apart and put them together. This experiment already exists in poetry, of course, in, for example, enjambment or Manley Hopkins-esque portmanteaux. But how far can this be pushed? To what poetic end? Do there exist poetic polymers and macromolecules? What do they look like? What are they for? […]

If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve been a math teacher, and I’m currently a physician. I should have been a physicist, but fear and laziness prevented this. Some days I think I’d like to be a Zamboni driver, or the guy who drives the rake around the infield at a baseball stadium.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Moorehead

The poem was written on March 26, 1802, while Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. “While I was getting into bed,” Dorothy notes in diary, “he wrote the Rainbow” — which does suggest a rapid composition (albeit with later days’ entries in the diary revealing his agonizing about the poem, building toward the move he would make with the Immortality Ode).

We should note too, I suppose, her reference to the poem as “the Rainbow.” Without falling fully down the rabbit hole (exploring, for example, how much Wordsworth meant a wordplay with pi, π, for the semi-circle of the rainbow and the “piety” of the last line), we can still remember that the clash of science and poetry was in the air — and particularly in discussions of rainbows and Newton’s 1704 Opticks.

In the 1728 “Spring” section of his Four Seasons, James Thomson speaks of the rainbow as

. . . refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds,
In fair proportion running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky.
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
And to the sage instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.

But — anticipating Wordsworth — he adds:

. . . Not so the boy;
He wondering views the bright enchantment bend,
Delightful o’er the radiant fields, and runs
To catch the falling glory

Thomas Campbell post-Wordsworthian 1819 “To The Rainbow” makes explicit the opposition of science and childhood:

Can all that Optics teach unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?

Charles and Mary Lamb in their 1809 Poetry for Children, admit the conflict but offer a more ameliorative take:

. . . If I were
A natural philosopher,
I would tell you what does make
This meteor every colour take:
But an unlearned eye may view
Nature’s rare sights, and love them too.

And so on. The question of the nature of rainbows does set up, however, the question I find most interesting about the poem: the meaning of the final phrase, “natural piety.”

In marginalia scribbled in his copy of the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, William Blake would take aim at the phrase: “There is no such Thing as Natural Piety Because the Natural Man is at Enmity with God” — adding “I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually; and then he is no poet, but a heathen philosopher, at enmity with all true poetry or inspiration.”

And it’s possible that Wordsworth meant the word natural in the way that Blake supposed — a declaration of human nature as filled with a native piety and goodness, in rejection of the Christian idea of the Fall.

But a better reading, I think, would take natural to be about external phenomena. The nature here is not human nature, which darkens as we age (hence the Immortality Ode’s “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy”). It is rather Nature’s own piety — both, I think, in the sense that Nature herself is pious, reveling in her creation, and in the sense that Nature, seen correctly, is an occasion of grace. The natural world wants us to be pious, to grasp heart-leapingly in the experience of a rainbow the transcendental characteristics of created being: beauty, truth, and goodness.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Heart Leaps Up

Basil Bunting’s long modernist poem Briggflatts (1966) was published sixty years ago this winter — first in Poetry magazine and then as a book from Fulcrum Press. It was subtitled “An Autobiography”, but Bunting denied that it was “a record of fact”, saying “the truth of the poem is of another kind”. Despite the often abstruse allusions, he also felt that “no notes are needed”. But he provided a handful nevertheless, on the grounds that “a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research”.

Bunting’s notes were titled “Afterthoughts”, and most relate to the Northumbrian landscape and language of his early twentieth-century youth, where the poem is primarily set (Briggflatts, the Quaker meeting house of the title, is actually over towards the west in Cumbria, but Bunting saw this as part of the old Northumbria). He had returned to North East England after travelling widely, and wrote the poem in his sixties, filling notebooks on the train as he commuted to his sub-editing job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

Like T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, Bunting’s “Afterthoughts” have the air of a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal. The first warns that “the Northumbrian tongue” may sound strange to non-natives, and that “Southrons” — those from the south of England — “would maul the music of many lines of Briggflatts”. Further on, we are told to “piece […] together” the story of the Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, “from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Orkneyinga Saga, and Heimskringla, as you fancy”. By the time we get to the word “skerry”, Bunting’s only comment is “O, come on, you know that one” (it’s a small rocky island, covered at high tide). “Scone”, meanwhile, is singled out so that we can be told to “rhyme it with ‘on’, not, for heaven’s sake, ‘own’” (on the question of whether to apply jam or cream first, however, he is silent).

I had a new experience of Briggflatts recently when I read it alongside the much more extensive annotations that have been available for the past ten years at the back of Don Share’s excellent edition of The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016). One of the things I appreciated about how Share lays out these notes for the reader is that, as well as interleaving Bunting’s original “Afterthoughts”, he also uses bold type to pick out everything the poet said elsewhere about the poem: interviews, letters, conversations. So it’s possible at a glance to follow an extended authorial commentary on particular words and lines.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #40: How It Feels Rubbing Down a Gravestone

Rebuff, repulsion, lacking allure – it’s a risk to call an anthology of poetry The Opposite of Seduction and perhaps Nicola Thomas’ brief Introduction to this book of new German poetry in translation suspects as much. She concedes, ‘poems here . . . may test the boundaries of Anglophone tastes’. But that depends on your taste and for most readers this anthology will seem a vigorous enjoyable collection of young(ish) voices, most hardly ever heard in English before like Nadja Küchenmeister’s delicate, flowing lyrics of existential uncertainty (tr. Aimee Chor), or Anja Utler’s sole contribution, a re-writing of the Daphne myth,  exploiting the white page, a choppy fragmentation, exclamation, and a suitably headlong, hectic delivery. A different note is struck by Uljana Wolf, in her whimsical teasing away at self-awareness, waking at four in the morning, or down on hands and knees with an English-speaking partner, to consider dust bunnies (in German ‘Wollmaus’); ‘our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-gray names’ (tr. Sophie Seita). […]

Technique dominates rather than subject matter, though the selection is organised by subjects such as Heart, Body, Soul, Beast, Season, Machine, Home. Oswald Egger writes lush, musical celebrations of the natural world which in Ian Galbraith’s renderings evoke Hopkins, even Dylan Thomas. Dinçer Güçyeter brings material from the migrant experience (tr. Caroline Wilcox Reul) and Ulrike Almut Sandig creates a genuine split-screen reading experience, playing poem texts off against story board instructions either side of the page (tr. Karen Leeder). Given the breadth of experimentation going on here, there are inevitable failures. These are poets working to free both writer and reader from conventions, to open up novel realms of human experience, a liberation from history. Occasionally, Jan Kuhlbrodt’s nightmare vision of a man hoarding books and newspapers hovers behind some poems, so intent on their own language are they, perhaps in need of a ‘reminder of a reality that knows more than paper’ (tr. Alexander Kappe).

Martyn Crucefix, Review: The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in German (Shearsman Books, 2025)

My fourth collection Grey Time (Nine Arches Press, 2025) circles around the themes of grief and loss. These are subjects that I have touched on in my previous collections, but with this collection I decided to give my attention over to it more fully, to read around the subject area and to more fully explore what grief is, and how it affects us and changes – not just in the aftermath of a loss but over the years that follow. I also wanted to explore how our relationship with those we have lost changes over time. Loss in the collection is not just confined to death though; there are other losses too – losses that can be equally devastating. The poem ‘owl birth’ touches on one such loss.

To give some context: when my mother was a teenager, she got pregnant and was subsequently sent to a home for young single mothers. The baby was to be put up for adoption but she was initially allowed to bring the baby home from hospital allowing her to bond with her. This made the handing over even harder and she never really recovered from this loss and she spent the rest of her life looking for that lost daughter. I only learned of this other child after I had already left home. The effects on me were two-fold. Firstly, it changed my view of myself – I had always been the first/oldest child, and secondly, it made sense of some of my mum’s behaviour – her mental and physical absences, her hot and coldness. I was struck by how cruel it was to let a young mother spend so long bonding with their child only to then whisk it away.

I didn’t actually set out to write a poem about this particular loss. The poem came out almost fully formed while I was on a writing retreat. Each night as I was trying to get to sleep, I was disturbed by the sound of owls screeching. Many of my poems contain animals or other things from the natural world, and those owls made their way into several poems in this collection. The pine forest also is a recurring trope in my poems – I grew up in small town surrounded by pine forest and its very particular atmosphere seeps into a lot of my writing.

Drop-in by Julia Webb (Nigel Kent)

Form – what is it good for? Quite a lot, it turns out. The poetic focus and concision, for example, of being required to work within a particular rhyme scheme, or within a certain number of lines. Traditional form engages us in a conversation with a poetic history; it places us within a shared poetic culture and heritage. Poetic form can act as a scaffolding for thought and experience; a container for intense emotion. It is of course, a great way to develop poetic discipline, whilst conversely being a fun and exciting way of playing – trying things we’re not used to, finding new possibilities, taking risks, stepping beyond the habitual and discovering new directions. And perhaps most importantly – for me, anyway – form offers a powerful means of expression, exploration and discovery, deepening the meaning which hovers under the surface of our conscious poetic intentions.

On Tuesday night, Kim and I – aka the Laurel and Hardy of poetry – delivered an online workshop on poetic form. For our paying subscribers, you’ll find a recording of that session in your substack inbox, along with Kim’s powerpoint and sestina template. Yes, Kim bravely and beautifully led us through one of the most complex forms, despite my claim that it was the metaphorical equivalent of bringing cabbage to the shared poetry meal. And of course, Kim proved me entirely wrong – using a stunning example by Kathryn Maris to show how sestinas can offer us all a fluid and powerful receptacle for our obsessions. Which, in Kim’s case, is currently hamsters.

Clare Shaw, FORM!

Some days all I can say is ay yi yi. Or oy. Or fuuuuuuuuck. You know, those wordless expressions of mostly-vowel sounds the outbreathing of which, the offgassing of which you hope will take away some of the poison, some of the poison you’ve inhaled inadvertently from the world, the sorrows, the woe and strife, the basic are-you-kidding-me’s that tumble into our faces, singular and collective, big picture and small. At the level of finding-a-parking-space or the level of world-peace. Oof. That’s another one of my exhales. Jeeesh. Yeesh. Ach du liebe. Eventually I’ll gather my words together and make a coherent sentence. But I won’t be sure about it. It’ll be mostly noise created by consonants, as if I know what I’m talking about. But it’s the vowels. It’s the vowels that carry the spiritual truths, the hopes and dreams, terror and aghastness, the weariness.

I like this poem for how confident it is. Here’s the deal, the poem says. Here’s what’s gonna go down. I don’t know this poet, but I’ll follow her anywhere.

Marilyn McCabe, or maybe things were not communicated clearly.

Think of all the work the weather can do in a poem: symbol and foreshadowing; metonymy, for the spirit of a place or time; a metaphor for the poet’s inner state; a frame for the poem’s cinematography; an event, a catalyst. Sometimes weather functions allegorically, as a sign of divine intervention. Latterly, in its climate-change variants, it seems sent to punish human stupidity and greed. Weather often signals how little control humans have over our lives. We are at the mercy of this world, not vice-versa.

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Ted Hughes, ‘Wind’

To talk of the weather is often to describe our quotidian struggle or ease with our ‘circumstances’. The seasons, though, provide a larger frame for understanding what happens when circumstance – landscape and settlement, and all the human endeavour it hosts – meets time and its changes. Can we grow what we need? Will we thrive or be thwarted?

Lisa Brockwell, South of my Days

Lent starts this week, and as I was thinking about the intersection of poetry and my relatively new reversion to Catholicism, I got a little over my skis and came up with the grand idea to write forty poems in forty days. After some reflection, I have since whittled that down to seven poems in seven weeks, which is far more realistic. I’ve noticed a tendency to want to Lent-max and I’m not sure what drives that. It’s certainly not any kind of innate holiness. Perhaps something about all of the sacrifice, asceticism, and general austere feeling of the season incentives a kind of perverse competitiveness in me. But it’s more likely that I’m just trying to prove to God how good I can be so He will love me. I still sometimes cling to the illusion that I’m in the driver’s seat and that I can earn His love as long I complete some arbitrary, self-created to-do list and wave it up at Him, going, “See? I checked everything off!” Yes, I fully realize how ridiculous I am. The bottom line is, watch this space for a poem a week during Lent. These will be exploratory drafts, so no promises on quality, depth, or literary value.

Kristen McHenry, Rounding Down, Arguing with Robots, Dreams of a Watery Sun

Previous-Bethany (who hangs around) likes to curl into a fetal position (a lot) and say things like, “I have no talent for this!” “I can’t do this!” But I am changing. I’ve attended a No Kings protest,  I’ve written to senators and congress people, I’m getting a new roof (right now in fact, much hammering overhead), and new flooring (much needed but on hold), and dealing with a wet, rotted sub-floor in the kitchen (not sure how that’s going to turn out). I asked my therapist, “Am I going to get through this?” And she said, “You are getting through it.”

And, miracle of miracles, I have a new review up at EIL — of Matthew Murrey’s Little Joy.

And, other kinds of writing keep seeping out, in part thanks to Sheila Bender’s on-line class about writing grief. In addition to Sheila’s books and my classmates’ posts, I’ve also been reading an anthology, The Language of Loss: Poetry and Prose for Grieving and Celebrating the Love of Your Life, edited by Barbara Abercrombie; and Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler, which The Los Angeles Times calls the very best kind of self-help book.

My typical strategy now would be share a poem or short prose section from one of these books (so many excellent choices). Instead I’m going to share my own new poem. Excuse any hammering or thumping that creeps into the audio. And thank you for listening.

Grief wakes me in the morning

and puts me to bed at night.
She stirs sorrow into my oatmeal.
She fusses, adjusting the light
as I read, offering a blanket.
When I leave the house,
she grabs her shoes and goes with me,
walks fast, takes my hand. […]

Bethany Reid, What Am I Doing Here?

These are my first gigs for 2026: Catch me if you can, please come, say hello. Not long now, spring soon come, soon come. I sense a big shift for all of us in March. I can feel it, taste it, the world is turning, changing, the universe is shifting. I know prayers will be answered, and this dark shadow will pass, winter will end, so for now please keep on keeping on, keep reaching for the light, and remember to eat your greens and lead with love, always, lots of love xxsg

Salena Godden, Gigs & Festivals & Fundraisers, March 2026

It is worth taking the time to look at a photograph. That instant holds so much. If you have read my favourite book, Lispector’s The Stream of Life, then, you will have thought of the “now-instant.” “Each thing has an instant in which it is.” “Is my theme the instant? my life theme. I try to keep up with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the seconds that pass, fragmentary as I am and precarious the moments…”

Mama! O Life! What is the heart? What is it to be human? This instant is already the next instant. What divine frequency are you on so that I might connect to you with my own divine frequency. Hello, I am here! In a world where we paint blue hearts on walls by photo booths and dress them in protective vests. Someone else comes along and writes Gaza in a small black heart.

Nothing will be forgotten though it will take some time to see.

Shawna Lemay, We Live in Time

I thought we’d get to do all sorts of things that we never got to do, travel some, a lot more time out and about. We did get to be at Jaipur Literature Festival and I did some amazing work there, but before that I was hit with the most crazy flu-like thing, and then when that passed and I thought, aha, all good now, and we did Jaipur, a few days after we got back I woke up with a funky neck and then lost all power in my right arm and was bent over so that I could not straighten up. Thankfully, I found perhaps the best physiotherapist in the land, just down the road from me, but it was so bad for a couple of weeks that any walking had me in shards of pain. The medication I ended up on squashed my sense of being in my body, and it’s only a few days since, but something shifted and about 80% of the pain has lifted.

But this is Karma Country. In these three weeks I’ve had to meet my body with absolute tenderness and kindness, accepting what it can and can’t do each day, and, in its way, this has found its way into the new writing. I have to write at a Joycean pace, perhaps slower even, but having to be immobile so much, and with no place or position in which there wasn’t some pain, and no amount of determination from my rough, irascible, Irish, determined side that I tend to lean into when I need to push through would do anything to help or advance the situation, I had to simply allow everything to be as it was, is. Once I did this, the spirit of the writing began to grow, show me avenues and routes that I’d never have thought of in years of black coffees. Yet there is something even greater that has come from this enforced period of tenderness and acceptance. The clarity again of being the author I am. Given some of the dimensions of the world I move through, I do observe many an author, some world-stage famous, operating as a kind of story of themselves that they have to keep up. Either that, or recent reading has shown me that many books of the last couple of generations are a kind of bourgeois level of agreement that uses form as a blanket of consensus of what we mistake literature for. It showed me that I’m not part of that, and the writers and books I truly love are not part of this deepening egregore. I’ll perhaps say more in an essay about this.

While I also observe that I, and the authors who, by whatever means, have managed to stay free, pay for dearly not walking in this valley of vasana. The joy my heart feels at being the insistence to be free to write whatever I want, and that there are books and other authors across human time who have done the same, who have not done what is expected of them by the virality of that cultural conditioning that has reduced art so greatly across every form. As I’ve said before, it may mean these works never get published, never get to you, the reader, in the way I would love them to, but know they are being written, mostly by tenderness and patience rather than any force or pressure. I just keep tuning up in tenderness and the words are there. They are not even pushed to fit a narrative, or fit a genre, or style of deference, they are just there. Calliope is coming to the edge of the field each night to play her flute and my heart has learned to listen better than it ever did when I was almost the famous poetry guy who thankfully spotted the trap ahead of me when I was offered Professor of Poetry at Oxford some years back. That, as they say, is another story, and I know some of you know it, and my why for saying no.

Keep on reading, dear reader, and keep on writing if you write, and as I always I’d love to hear your thoughts, what book you are reading, what you love.

John Siddique, Valentine’s Day Weather Report

some of spring’s small teeth shall be my own

Grant Hacket [no title]

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: gods of brokenness, a hollowed-out hosiery factory, end paper mood-matches, quokkas sleeping in the shade, and much more. Enjoy.

There’s something energetic about having vibraphone and parachute in the same poem. Is the opening too seemingly glib in its absurd surrealism? Or is it a good way into the more emotionally more real element of the poem? […]

I do love this failure.

Gary Barwin, ERRATA: how to know if a poem “works” or if it’s finished

Something weathered in the voice that greeted me, a bit creaky, like worn mahogany. Pin-point sharp, too. Trained by my father as a child to guess the voice of a speaker without it being announced, I plumped straight away for Margaret Atwood. She said:

This was Canada. You didn’t think you were going to be successful. You thought you were going to be dedicated. It wasn’t considered a career, it was considered a vocation, like a priest.

Margaret Atwood, Woman’s Hour, 5 November 2025

And I thought: that’s it. That’s all I need to listen to. Nothing can improve upon its wisdom. (I was wrong: the whole interview is studded with such nuggets.) Thank you, Radio 4, I take it all back. My other thought was: that is a proper poet’s answer. It’s basically the same thing a prizewinning friend of mine said to me a thousand years ago: ‘I don’t write for prizes. In the end, the process is all any of us have.’

The coffee now made and the stairs climbed, I shuffled back into my chair, took a sip, and reached for my notebook. Where had they got to, those lines about the [———-]? Could they be worked on for a moment? Could I remember again my vocation and commit to being dedicated? I gazed out of the window. This was not Canada, but Plymouth, in the rain. It turns out I could.

Anthony Wilson, This was Canada

This month is always a tricky one. Some of the best things in my life have happened in November, but also some of the worst. It always feels like an unruly month anyway, posed between the spookyness of Halloween and the festivity of Christmas.  With the end of daylight savings time,  the dark comes even earlier and stays so long.  I am never sure what to wear or which coat to bring. How warm or cold spaces will be. The other night I made sure to wear tights for the first time this year, but still found myself burrowing under my coat while we watched Frankenstein in the chilly theater. I can’t just throw on my shoes and run downstairs or to the alley to throw out trash. Leaving the apartment requires preparation. Tights. Coats. Boots. Many layers. When I stay home,  hours after 4pm are dark and strange and I never quite know what to do with myself. It’s too early to stop working but way too early to just go watch something. It feels like midnight but its only 8pm. 

Still good things can happen. In 2000, I managed to land the library job that changed the course of everything and brought me back to Chicago and settled into the place I worked for two decades after that. I came in for an interview on November 1st, was hired on Veteran’s Day, and moved over Thanksgiving weekend to the city I had left after grad school a year and a half before.  In 2005, I received a call one morning from the press that wanted to publish my very first collection of poems and floated on a cloud all day on that momentum alone.  Other Novembers are hazier. Some delightful. Some darker. Like the one in 2019 where I moved out of the studio, sad that it was no longer financially doable due to rising rents and salary stagnation, which had been supplementing my shop income for the 12 years I had the space.

Kristy Bowen, novembers

The title and first line establish the situation of the poem: a tour guide is showing us around the labyrinth; we infer pretty quickly that this particular labyrinth is the mythic home of the minotaur: the “it” that was kept here. The pathos is quickly established as well, the hard rhyme of “their own” and “soup bone” providing an ironic conceptual rhyme—one typically doesn’t require their kin to subsist on scraps—and the shorthand of “beneath the stair” for the dungeon beneath the palace shrinking the scale down to human domesticity. We need not dismiss this story as yet another expected excess of royalty: instead, Stallings encourages us to think of our own kin, our own homes.

The passive voice that opens the second stanza introduces another sort of ironizing distance in “When howls were heard.” The suffering of the imprisoned minotaur, chucked down into Daedalus’s basement funhouse, is perceivable, sure, but no one’s here to own up to it. Instead it’s presented as an agentless action, the language of academic and corporate writing, employed as abdication from accountability, a means of distorting or mutating language to obscure the active cruelty. Again the scale is reframed, and the king and queen of Crete are imagined as your average upper-middle-class couple sipping sherry after dinner and politely excusing their guests so that they might go manage the monster in the basement.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Tour of the Labyrinth” by A.E. Stallings

Laura Theis’ Introduction to Cloud Care is physically slighter than the Finlay and Kinsella books, but it has its own heft. Theis is a German poet who lives in Oxford and writes in her adopted language, English. The poems collected here offer a series of windows into a world that melds the private and public, domestic and natural spheres. For instance, the opening lines of ‘There Used to Be a House Here’ moves the reader quickly from observation of the world to a meditation on natural magic

but now it’s a tree-walled
ruin under an open sky

she has learned that
the generosity of birds is

a witchcraft beyond
pendulums or sage

But Theis is not indulging in a kind of nostalgic longing for some kind of pure nature, as she calls out in ‘Oak Coppice’, a coppice being a kind of technological intervention in natural process:

Poets have told me over and over about sitting in nature,
staying away from screens. But I am typing this on my phone.
I wish I had not looked up
the meaning of coppice.

Coppicing is, in its way, a form of imposed metamorphosis, and shapeshifting is a central concern of many of these poems, from tips on dating a were-hare, through a lover who it seems is being unfaithful with trees:

She returns home to me with leaves in her hair,
her cheeks flushed,
always satisfied, serene.

to a prose poem called ‘I Wonder How Ovid Dealt with This’ in which the work itself is the thing that shapeshifts.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading November 2025: A Broken Sleep Special

Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.

Ann E. Michael, Magnificent

I started studying this parsha last week in preparation for writing poetry about it and teaching it this week. I had drafted a line or two, but it just wasn’t flowing. Last night I woke in the middle of the night and suddenly realized: I was going about it wrong. Instead of trying to put myself in Ya’akov’s shoes, I should put myself in Rachel’s. The combination of that spark, and this teaching, brought the poem through me.

Of course it’s anachronistic to imagine the Biblical Rachel quoting psalms, which wouldn’t be written for a few thousand years. But that’s no big deal in the garden of Torah interpretation. As the saying goes, אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה / ein mukdam u’m’uhar baTorah, “there’s no before and after in Torah.” In God’s time perhaps it’s all simultaneous anyway.

Rachel Barenblat, Rachel speaks

I just finished proofing some poems (a poem in the Jan/Feb issue of Poetry, two in Sugar House Review) and an essay called “The Unfenced Field and Poetry” (forthcoming in Third Coast), and winter is so in the air here in North Carolina. I’ve been binge-reading Susan Howe after reading her gorgeous new Penitential Cries (so. good.) as well as 100 Years of Solitude, and feeling surrounded by good books, if nothing else.

Han VanderHart, Poetry, Poetry for November and December

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?

Well my most recent work, IRØNCLAD, an illustrated hybrid collection, is coming out mid October with Spuyten Duyvil. I always try and approach a new work from a fresh angle, and IRØNCLAD is my first book that was not written on a typewriter or in word-processing software, but directly into the layout program, InDesign. The reasoning was to try and take advantage of the actual typography of the poem or prose piece. The book is set in the fictional world of The Iron Plier Society, who themselves are trying to make sense of their own archeological record. Fragments uncovered in the geological strata inform the book and the narrative. As you move deeper into the book, you discover, fragment by fragment, artifact by artifact, what appears to be the evolution of a civilization—yet, you can never quite be sure that what you have discovered in the damp earth faithfully represents your progenitors intentions (every interpretation comes with its own set of biases also). And, it is easy to misinterpret those too!

My previous collection, which came out with Unlikely Books in May this year, is the poetry collection Spells for the Wicked, which certainly informs IRØNCLAD. In fact, you might say that IRØNCLAD is the culmination of many years of addressing the subject of mythology and how it informs the later narrative and structure of a given society or culture.

How does it feel different?

Although they are two entirely different books, narratively, linguistically, typographically even, they do address some of the same principles in their own fashion. I consider myself a writer of books rather that a writer of individual poems or pieces of fiction. Much of my more recent work crosses the boundaries between fiction and poetry. In my earlier work, I may have been more concerned with presenting a given poetic form. These days I allow the book to inform me, rather than lying down rules in advance. Essentially though, I always try to approach each book project with a slightly different angle: be it the method for writing it (i.e. handwritten, typewriter, direct to computer), the environment I am writing in, or in some cases with a collaborator, the collaborative process itself. All of these things can significantly influence the outcome and inform the work, sometimes in surprising ways.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marc Vincenz

Now I am standing at the little window on the landing watching the weather and there the magpie is again, sitting in the sycamore, staring straight in at me. I have no fight to argue with a bird today. I’m watching the weather. After driving all the way out to the cancer hospital this week, full of nerves and strategy for sitting through five hours of treatment, they cancelled the chemo and rescheduled. The day the chemo is supposed to happen has snow and ice warnings, the Wolds might be thick with snow and I know we’ll struggle to get across, so we’ll have to cancel and move it to next week, unless my brother can get away from work and take his four by four. If it’s cancelled, my mum will be relieved because she is dreading the treatment like nothing I’ve ever seen. But it will be yet another delay, the clock ticking. Her precious days taken up with all this bullshit of waiting and driving and waiting and driving.

I work on the poetry commission. Finish it, sign it off. A job well done. I’m excited to see it in its next evolution. The simple pleasure of artists working together. The sparks of excitement over idea exchange. I make a big pot of tea, return to the desk.

Snow. But it doesn’t last long. I feel it before I see it. The room darkens around me, the sky pushing down on the trees, then that silent strangeness of snow falling. Frida and I stand at the window and watch.

Wendy Pratt, Blotmonað: Month of sacrifices

I’m happy to share the third poetry video from my book Temporary Shelters. The poem, Gunpowder Homestead, explores my fascination with the old house ruins and foundations I sometimes run into on woods hikes in my home state of Pennsylvania.

Whenever I encounter a place like this, I think about the people who lived here once 150 or more years ago–how their lives were different from mine, how the land and the world may have been different, and what happened that the place fell into ruin.

Grant Clauser, Video for Gunpowder Homestead

Well, I probably shouldn’t write a review of Christopher James’ new pamphlet, The Ice Sonnets (Dithering Chaps, 2025), given that my endorsement appears on its back cover, but I can recommend it thoroughly and suggest you get hold of a copy for yourself by visiting the Dithering Chaps webshop. To give you a flavour of this top-notch collection, here’s that aforementioned endorsement…

‘In The Ice Sonnets, Christopher James tells the story of Shackleton’s expedition via a collage effect of juxtaposing exquisitely drawn pen portraits of its participants, interweaving the characters, drawing out the group dynamics that develop in extreme conditions. These poems tell a highly specific tale with universal ramifications.’

Matthew Stewart, Christopher James’ The Ice Sonnets

In effect, it’s a sequel to The Penguin Diaries of 2017, which dealt with Robert Scott’s ill-fated attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912.

Inevitably, The Penguin Diaries, though similar in that it is a 65-sonnet sequence, had the mood of an elegy, because the expedition ended in tragedy with Scott and his final team dying on the ice just a few miles from safety. While Scott’s story has taken on the legend of heroic British failure – they reached the Pole, only to find the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beaten them to it, then died on the way back – The Ice Sonnets is a celebration of survival against enormous odds.

Once again James chooses to give each member of the expedition a sonnet to themselves. Each acts like a snapshot, a pen-picture, of what made each man remarkable. After all, it was a bonkers idea. Having worked in Canada in winter, I know how horrendously cold it can get – and I was nowhere near the (North) Pole. It seems to me just plain weird that anyone would bother to freeze themselves to death, in Scott’s case, to go to the extreme point of our planet and plant a flag in it.

Exploration of the earth is not something we bother too much about, however, in 2025, because it’s been mapped, scanned, analysed, explored physically and psychologically in intense detail. Any one of us can see satellite images of the tiniest scrap of land or sea. This is obviously a vast contrast to how the ‘globe’ appeared to our ancestors. Britons were fed the idea of Empire, of ‘Darkest Africa’, of a world to be conquered and colonised. Men like Scott and Shackleton captured the imagination – and did, because they took the immense risk of travelling into the vast, frozen unknown, provide us with a greater communal knowledge of the planet on which we all live. Their achievements, as strange as they might seem to some now, remain impressive, their lives enigmatic, worthy in themselves of exploration.

What James has done here is provide, by dedicating to each individual a poem of fourteen lines, a distilled impression of who they were. In doing so, he delves into the character, teasing out detail, giving each a separate identity within the whole, and so providing a convincing insight into not only an individual life but how that person fitted into the overall ‘team’. About how we human beings work individually and collectively.

Bob Mee, THE ICE SONNETS by CHRISTOPHER JAMES

For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.

Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.

And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”

Names

The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.

In these poems, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.

Alina Stefanescu, Nominations in Christian Lehnert’s poetic forms.

Frost left its edges on the deck and steps but I find a dry spot to sit, my coffee’s steam seeming to fill the gray sky. I try to still my mind’s constant conversation and just breathe in the damp cold, hear the barrage as individual songs, ignore the intrusion of should-have-cut-back-the-lavender, of next-year-I’ll-dig-up-the-lizard’s-tail. Study again the difficult present, amid the uncertainty of tomorrow, of the next hour, next minute. It takes work to be in the world like this. To be an extension of it, not a mover through it. But of course, I am both. As I am an impatient observer of my species, and inescapably, one and the same.

I admire this long poem by Barbara Tomash for its unreined wander but its careful containment too. There is no escaping itself.

Marilyn McCabe, to hide the sound of the groaning enormity

Kujō Takeko – 11 Tanka (1920-1928), by Dick Whyte:

All the blood in my body is frozen;
Only the cold sword of reason
Flashes within me.

The Forgotten Poets Newsletter, from which this tanka is taken, “is dedicated to out-of-print, obscure, and generally under-appreciated poets and poems, particularly from the late-1800s and early-1900s.” Dick Whyte, the person who curates and writes the newsletter also has “a specific interest in the intertwining histories of tanka and haiku, both in Japanese and English, and their relationship to the beginnings of free-verse.” The issue from which the above tanka comes is about Kujō Takeko, a woman whose poetry would be a “significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements in Japan. The tanka I’ve quoted above, along with all the others in this issue of Forgotten Poets, were translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki. (There is a slightly more detailed bio of Takeko here.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #50

3rd Wednesday has published my poem “Le Plus Ça Change” on their website.

I am very pleased with this small poem because it was formed by looking at two poems which were not quite working and taking the best parts of each (the images, of course) and combining them. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to try connecting these pieces, since they were both about things French. But the brain gets into ruts of thought sometimes; the process is a great pleasure when something breaks through.

Ellen Roberts Young, Poem On Line

I’m pleased to have five poems and verse translations in the new issue of Literary Imagination (volume 27.3, pp. 299-304). Literary Imagination is the journal of the American Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers and is unusual in publishing a mixture of scholarship, essays, poems and translations accessible to writers, critics and teachers outside as well as within academia. The new editor, Paul Franz, is doing something really exciting with it — the long piece in this issue by James Tusing on Alice Monro is really superb and has already garnered a good deal of attention.

The five pieces I have in this issue are quite varied: the first is a translation of Ancient Greek prose into English verse, from Julian the Apostate (readers who read this post about Greek a while ago will recognise the extract). The second is a poem of my own linked loosely to that passage, called ‘Reading Julian the Apostate on my late father’s birthday’. The third is a verse translation of a Pāli poem from the Therīgāthā, a collection of poems written by early Buddhist nuns. (I wrote briefly about this collection here.) The fourth is a loose and experimental version of Horace, Odes 1.10. The fifth is a poem of my own called ‘Latin didactic’ that is in part about reading the Georgics.

Victoria Moul, Five poems and translations in “Literary Imagination”

If you haven’t heard the term, a beta reader is someone who reads an early draft of a book and provides feedback. They are not editors. They don’t provide line-level changes or suggestions. Instead, they answer questions and give overall impressions.

If you ask ten people for an opinion on poetry, you will get ten different answers. For that reason, I chose to keep my pool of beta readers very small, sticking to only four writers—Heidi Fiedler, Jillian Stacia, Michelle Awad, Elise Powers—and my mom and husband.

It’s a strange thing to share your work with beta readers. You’re not just putting the book out there for people to read. You’re sharing it and asking the hard questions: What’s working? What isn’t? What would you cut? Etc.

My beta readers’ reflections helped me see the book more clearly than I could on my own, and most importantly, made me feel less alone in it all. After years of working on the poems in this collection, sharing it felt incredible. I’d chosen my readers with great intention, and they treated my work with care and respect.

Allison Mei-Li, Behind the book

I’m thrilled and deeply honored that my poem “Clutch” was selected for today’s Poem-a-Day series by The Academy of American Poets, curated by the incredible Tacey M. Atsitty, author of (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, November 14, 2023).

This recognition means so much to me, and I’m grateful to Tacey for championing voices and poetry that connect us all. Make sure to check out the other poems she selected in the month of November. Each poem includes comments from the poet about the poem and an audio recording.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Clutch” selected for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series!

cloud gazing…
I thought about it
but wasn’t sure
what I’d do
with an empty mind

cloud gazing by tom clausen

I’ve been writing a lot about the Firth of Forth. I live near where the estuary opens into the North Sea, and when I look south across the Firth, it’s easy to imagine that this is a scene from thousands of years ago. In certain lights there aren’t many visible traces of human presence. What’s more difficult to picture is how the Firth looked during the Last Ice Age. Immeasurable tons of ice flowing out to sea, scraping away at the land. All vegetation, all animal and bird life, all traces of early human habitation erased. The islands and hills of today are what remain of larger geological forms eroded to stubs by glaciers.

It makes you feel small, thinking on this timescale, reflecting upon the massive impact of the ice on a landscape which you might assume is unchanging. I wanted to explore this feeling in a poem – a long poem, almost in essay form, which progresses incrementally and implacably. I was interested in how human history might be understood alongside a vaster geological history, not least because – from the point of view of an individual – the drawn-out events of human history can themselves seem like unstoppable forces.

Like an essay, my long poem ‘Glacier’ makes a lot of use of quotation. This was influenced by Marianne Moore’s marvellous poem ‘An Octopus’, about a glacier-topped mountain in North America. I like the instability created by the intrusion of other people’s words upon the poetic voice, and the frisson when terminology from other disciplines is put under pressure in a poem. Glaciers pick up all kinds of debris, from grit to huge boulders, finally depositing them far from their original context. I want the quoted phrases in my poem to be repositioned in a similar way.

Garry MacKenzie, Glacier

I know this last year has been a lot for many of us (personally, I’ve felt in some sort of crisis-mode since May 2024!) But I read the other day that the opposite of anxiety is creativity (I always thought it was calmness, as I am highly creative with my anxiety and worst-case scenarios!) But what the author shared was that we can take all those uncomfortable emotions and make something from them—write a poem, journal, paint something, or even string fairy lights in the laundry room just because. Make beauty where there wasn’t any. And I like that idea—leave the world a little better each day. Create when you can. […]

The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi — I just finished this book and I adored it! Gabrielle does something in these poems that reminds me why we read in the first place—to feeeeel (yes, with five e’s). If you’re someone who has one toe dipped in sadness, but who also walks through the world noticing the small miracles of being alive—this may be exactly the book you need right now. Its opening line is: The days I don’t want to kill myself are extraordinary. From there, the book keeps opening up into how temporary everything is, and yet somehow it keeps choosing wonder and finding joy. It’s my current favorite read—the book I keep returning to, the one that keeps returning to me.

Kelli Russell Agodon, My *Favorite Things* List

Publishing a chapbook starts with encountering a mind.

There’s a lot of poetry in the world that can take any shape or position. Authorial summary, imagist embroidery, foregrounding feelings or ironed down lessons, or poet voice’s uniform containment, unshaped lashing, formal, anarchist, anti-hierarchy, storytelling, language-y foregrounded.

Here was a mind questioning and admitting how things don’t quite reconcile. There’s the considered footstep of word choice, and risk of embedded emotions but an exploring mind as if talking to itself not performing an established script. This is a mind that can be self-deprecating. Observant, humble, vivid, self-questioning, That is an exciting brain. 

At an open mic, Tamsyn’s poem (and I don’t recall which, it being a couple years ago) stood out in glittering neon sparkle of aha. What is this alert mind here? Hm, hm, think I might need to meet this person.

Could I see more poems?

These poems reflect a world of citizens I want to live in, to make more of. These are poems I can hear and feel. Ideas and posture relative to the world that make sense to me. Ones that take risk, that can sit with thoughts not all categorically pre-filed for the reader.

So, I got the poems, which I will then sit on as a dragon’s hoard. Read, rest, reread.

I look at line length, poem width and length, consider the potential size of container. Next or simultaneously: Looking at the poems as a critic, call out what is particularly fabulous and goosebump-making. Let it sit, reconsider.

Meanwhile I consider paper types, end paper mood-matches, cover stock options. What sort of cover image would complement the poems? Brainstorm that. Look and draw and make images. That’s a fun imagining stage.

While waiting considering paper stock, reconsider fonts. Doing a few layouts. Give suggestions for edits. Dialogue. Sending a proof of concept for approval and edits.

Pearl Pirie, Process of Chapbooks: for Farr’s

A couple of years ago, Joelle Taylor took part in the contemporary poetry archive project that I was involved in at the University of East Anglia. Her creative response to the project was “dust kings. tough kids”, a “queer crown of sonnets” written in memory of murdered butch women. Here is part of her note on the sequence:

While writing I stared at a cheap plastic snow globe that imprisoned a gold angel. Occasionally, gold glitter rained down on the angel. The snow globe was given to me in the early 1990s by my girlfriend’s brother, Richard. He was the first gay man I personally knew to die of AIDS, and he left behind him a collection of snow globes for the mourners to take home with them from his funeral. As I worked, I thought about the snow globe, about the idea of the vitrine in general, about emergency, about memory, safety, love, and friendship. This Crown of 15 Sonnets is written in response to the idea of the snow globe as an archive within itself.

“dust kings. tough kids” has now been republished as part of Maryville: 1957—2007 (Bloomsbury) […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #38: A Crop of Frost

When I first read Chaucer Cameron’s In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered (Against the Grain, 2021) I was reminded of Mexican writer and activist, Cesar A. Cruz , who said ‘Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ In other words literature should provoke strong reactions, jolt the reader out of his/her complacency, force them to confront uncomfortable truths. Cameron does just that by taking us into the lives of women who work in the sex industry: prostitutes, cam girls, strippers.

She shows us that this is a world in which women are treated as an expendable commodity, their value dependent on their looks. In Erotic, a poem written from the point of view of a pole-dancer, she states: ‘ But here/ tonight/ a pint glass/ does the rounds,/ half full:/ loose change/ that clanks/ against the sides/ is a sign/ I’ve lost./ Skin no longer/ tight against my frame/ fixes me/ at half price./ Doesn’t it?’  The consequence of ageing is a drop in remuneration. There’s something tragic about a woman who describes herself in monetary terms, as ‘half price.’ Her job has undermined her self-image, her self-worth. This is developed further in the symbolic description that follows: ‘My dressing/ room/ has dwindled/ to toilet size./ No door locks/ grime-smeared/ floor tiles/ cracked.’ The squalidness of the environment and its comparison to a toilet suggests the humiliation she feels and the contempt with which she believes she is held. She also feels very vulnerable. Significantly there are ‘no door locks’: she is defenceless. Her position is a precarious one, subject to the whims of her employer.  As a consequence we are told she ‘cower(s) in a corner/ until the owner comes to check.’ She goes on: ‘This time/ he shows pity,/ dresses me/ in finery./ takes me to his table’/ he likes/ the meat,/ the tuck, tuck/twist of me.’ The image ‘he likes the meat’ is shocking in its resonance with its associations of death, carnal appetite, and violence. This is a man who enjoys his life and death power over her: ‘He likes/ to see/ the light/ in my acid eyes/ go out/ just before/ they/ close.’

These notions of male power and exploitation permeate virtually every poem in this pamphlet.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘In Ideal World I’d not be Murdered’ by Chaucer Cameron

Bex Hainsworth is a poet whose work I’ve skirted the periphery of for a while, always enjoyably so. Circulaire has given me the chance to dive in and explore at greater depth, and I’m so glad I did. Hainsworth has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Wales and bath magg, among others. While her debut pamphlet, Walrussey, is described as ecopoetry, Hainsworth says of this collection, in an interview with Sam Szanto, “Circulaire is my confessional era”. Confessional feels right. The poems are corporeal, intimate; concerned with the domestic stage and the everyday dangers of being a woman.

The opening poem somehow reminded me of Colette, who, in her memoirs, gives us a poetic, personal ethnography of the domestic interior. Speaking of her grandmother’s ‘semi-detached’, Hainsworth says:

“It shook knitting needles

and ration books from its cellar,

ready for new visitations.”

(All houses are haunted by women)

A few poems in, in Arcs, she speaks of a first apartment;

“Tucked away in the hips

of a hollowed-out hosiery factory”

and

“the rosy bones of our chilly homes”

There is a repeated merging of the interior space of the home with the interior space of the child, then “almost-woman”. The poems loosely follow a narrative arc from childhood to adulthood, charting “the cycle of female experience” (another interview quote).

Victoria Spires, Tender excavations

I am poor and I owe
an incalculable debt
to the world— I have taken
more than my share of what
it has given, and still
it does not begrudge another
chance to secure my so-called
fortune. […]
And I am rich with
a surplus, always, of feeling.
There is so much, I often
don’t know what to do with it;
and other times, it saves me
from thinking I am completely
bereft, empty as a pauper’s purse.

Luisa A. Igloria, Pauper’s Purse

I came to the cafe thinking I would be able to tap into something creative and instead I found a (nother) way to self-critique. I need to try to use this as a spark (a cattle prod?) to inspire something more. Does this count as writing, this post wherein I complain about not being able to write? What would I tell my students?

I guess I’d remind them that writing is a muscle that you have to work regularly or else risk weakening. Not losing—you can always get it back—but it does get harder the longer you sit on your metaphorical butt.

I’d also tell them (and by extension, myself), not to be too hard on themselves. Life is hard enough. (Especially lately, good lord.) Be gentle. Give grace.

But also: get going.

Sheila Squillante, What Counts?

I cannot wait, I cannot wait, I cannot wait
until we can talk about all of this in the past tense
I cannot wait for these to be the old days
[…]

This week I’m sharing this poem from a wonderful event we did together this month down at STATUS FLO at The Brighton Dome Studio Theatre. This regular poetry night is incredible, with fabulous curation and hosting by Aflo Poet, one of the UK’s rising superstar poets. The evening also featured poetry and vivid story-telling from the excellent Pablo Franco. Both of these poets delivered phenomenal sets and you should check them both out. This film of my poem was kindly sent to me by Gray Taylor. The night was electric, the audience so warm, responsive, which you might hear here, thank you to everyone there. Thank you for inviting me to join you.

Salena Godden, I Cannot Wait To Breathe

Best Small Fictions 2025 is now open for pre-orders on the Alternating Current Press website here. I’m thrilled to be included for the third time & in this 10th anniversary edition! Many thanks to Jeff Harvey’s Gooseberry Pie for nominating my Microfiction “After Reading A Newspaper Clipping Of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” and to judge Robert Shapard for selecting it for inclusion. Thanks to the anthology editors and readers for their hard work. Congrats to my fellow flash writers. I can’t wait to have it in my hands! Please consider pre-ordering which determines the print runs. Thanks!

In other book news, I received my signed copy of Patti Smith’s new book, Bread of Angels, and look forward to beginning reading today. Two of her previous books are among my favorites, Just Kids and M Train. I’ve read them more than once which is a testament to how much I like them. Patti’s is the first Stack I subscribed to a few years ago. I really like her low-key impromptu videos that make me feel like we are having a chat about ordinary and extraordinary things. She spoke about this book as she wrote it so I know it will be brilliant reading. I’ll let you know what I think.

Charlotte Hamrick, Book News!

I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post.  I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I’m listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Patti Smith–the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.

Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list).  I hadn’t even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated.  Some years are like that.  But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011.  I probably wouldn’t have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation.  It showed me what poetry could do, and I’m glad she’s now gained wider recognition for her poetry.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life

A book which has been on my shelves forever is A Wild Patience Has Take Me This Far by Adrienne Rich. I’ve culled my books a number of times but this one remains. However, I hadn’t taken it off the shelf for ages. Lately I’ve been saying in my head a lot, I don’t really think I have the wild patience for this. But then I laugh and do the thing anyway. You know? Anyway the book’s title is the first line of a poem titled “Integrity.” In it she speaks of her selves being both “anger and tenderness.” She speaks of how the light is both critical and critical. In another poem she says, “If you can read and understand this poem / send something back…” I’ve always loved her poem “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Shawna Lemay, I’m Giving You a Free Pass (and a side of wild patience)

Once, in Spain, I saw a two pet meerkats on a lilo floating down a bright river, chattering loudly with what might have been excitement, or perhaps more likely, fear. Sometimes, in the bright, sociable suburbs of Perth, I feel like a meerkat on a lilo.

But when I walked into The Moon Café, with its long bar crowded with bottles, its stage and its rainbow flags, I found my footing again. And to open the reading, an Acknowledgement of and Welcome to Country which made me feel, for a moment, like we all belonged to this one moment in millennia of human history, to all the ages of this dizzingly ancient land.

More of that another time. Because now, I want to talk about quokkas.

And Cath Drake. Since the Moon Café, I’ve been reading her collection “The Shaking City” published with Seren in 2020. It’s unusually thick and accomplished for a first collection – and I read it slowly in these baking hot days of wild distractions. By the time I reach the second section – a sequence of fantastical and quotidian character portraits, each equally magical – I return to the first section, and find new narratives in each of the rich, dense yet accessible poems. It’s a collection which deserves to be more widely acclaimed – but it’s the third section – “Far From Home” – which comes alive for me in 30 degree heat, facebook full of pictures of the snow falling back home, Australian Ravens wailing like babies or peacocks, or mating cats, .

The day after the Cath Drake’s reading, I was due to visit Rottnest Island or Wadjemup, the Noongar name of the island. It’s referred as ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’ – the resting place of the spirits, as well as the bodies of the Aboriginal men and boys who died in the island’s prison and forced labour camps between 1838 and 1931.

In her reading, Cath described how significant the island is for anybody raised in Perth – how quickly and drastically it has changed; how she loves it regardless. I was only on the island for five hours, and my engagement was brief, shallow, and wildly enthusiastic. I loved the speed and breeze of cycling down its tracks and deceptive hills. I loved the snorkelling; the fish like silver flames, the shy and sandy flounder. I loved the white beaches, the rough vegetation, the peeling gum trees and the old buildings; the gulls and oystercatchers. But most of all, I love the quokkas, sleeping in the shade near the shops, climbing into unattended bags, begging under benches, stealing ketchup from our table.

Clare Shaw, The Strange and Shining.

It took several days for me to settle into a travel mode, and leave behind the sorrows and concerns of my daily life. I checked my messages, looked at the Guardian once a day, kept up with Duolingo (switching from Spanish to Italian), but I stayed away from social media and any threaded conversation scrolls, posting only a couple of pictures myself and one blog post. We ate out some, at pizzerias and simple trattorias, and we also cooked. At first I was unable to draw or write much, but eventually this loosened up and I managed to keep a basic written journal and worked in my sketchbook; every day, I looked for ideas for future paintings or writing.

We had a lot of remarkable experiences, and I’ll try to share some of them here as the next weeks unfold. I’ve come back feeling like the creative discouragement and inertia of the last few months has lifted, and I feel inspired to write and do artwork over the winter. This is a relief, and I hope it lasts. But in order to do that, I realize I have to be online less, to be less focused on political news, argument, and the negativity I can do nothing about, to say “no” a little more often, and to determinedly focus my energies and time on the areas where I can actually make a difference, both in my own life and in others’. Distraction is everywhere, and it’s there for a reason — and not a benign one. Resistance, on the other hand, also takes many forms. One is to set a meaningful direction for oneself, and stick to it. That’s never easy. It’s the path with greater challenge, and greater potential serenity too.

Beth Adams, Re-entry

Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted 
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.

Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine.  But as any parent knows, kids grow

competent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:

they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.

Jill Pearlman, The New Thanksgiving Travel

I was thinking about how to make this season brighter—with all the political ugliness and Trump and his horrid party boys trying to kill the arts (defunding the NEA means a lot of presses and lit mags shutting down and struggling)—and I came upon this idea. If you have a favorite press or literary magazine—we may not be able to replace a $25K grant from the government, but maybe we can give a little and if it happens from many of us, it will be enough to count. I know a lot of us are struggling with money these days—more than usual, given the layoffs and the inflation—but giving during the holidays has always been a tradition that usually comes—not from the wealthy, not from the billionaires—but from the little people, from the middle class. There are a lot of people who don’t have enough to eat. Animal shelters need donations of pet food. Even cleaning out and donating from your pantry may do more good than you know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, How to Give a Little, Making the Holidays Brighter…Literally

I know that it’s an incredibly challenging financial time for many, as prices continue to rise and economic inequality deepens. And, there are also so many worthy causes and organizations in need (and even more so with many ends to federal funding), but if you’re able (and don’t forget to ask if your employer offers matching donations) and so inclined, I’d like to offer a couple of ways you can support the arts this season.

First, Black Ocean, where I am editor, is celebrating its first year as a nonprofit publisher and about to celebrate 20 years in publishing in 2026, and is trying to raise money to meet its annual fundraising goal to support its books and translations. Find out more here.

Also, please consider supporting Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), where your gift will enable meaningful arts education partnerships for students, teachers, and teaching artists in Chicago and West Chicago. Find out more about their programs and how to donate here. (What’s more, your gift will be matched by the Wildflower Foundation.)

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Few Reasons for Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving! Isn’t is amazing that we have a whole holiday dedicated to gratitude? (With a side of cranberry sauce.) There’s so much I’m grateful for, but a key element is the sense of purpose I gain from my Makino Studios work. It turns out that being an artist and poet doesn’t bring in the big bucks—who knew?! But unlike hedge fund managers, I get to regularly hear from people how much my offerings touch them.

This weekend a friend told me that one of my cards was perfect for a difficult situation: her brother is in his last weeks in hospice. Another wrote that she was so moved by a poem that she sent it on to family and friends. And there are hundreds of people who make a point of giving my haiku calendar to friends, family, book club members, caregivers and coworkers every year. It’s a real gift to have that impact as an artist and poet. Your support helps my dreams take wing, so thank you all!

Annette Makino, On grateful wings

it was snowing & the sky was bare.
we both stopped. no porch light,
just the glow of white snow lighting
our faces. maybe he saw the creature
staring down at us. maybe he was looking
at something else. i could not make out
the beast’s full body. eyes. claws.
wing tips like mountains.

Robin Gow, 11/22

the view from what happens decides there’s a road. or a fly

on the wall of winter. all things to be done will be done

over. the dark in a dog set to howl.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: the miracle of chance, fluff under pressure, a man in a shattered house, a charm against the inconceivable, and much more. Enjoy.

It is the season of unloosening: the chaos of high winds, torrential rain, sudden squalls. Each day’s a contradiction: beauty and decay in the carpets of fallen leaves; bruised skies suddenly punctured by bursts of a retreating sun. Time to prepare ourselves for the exodus of light and the night’s imminent veil.

shavasana*
we all take a little longer
to return

*shavasana = ‘corpse pose’ in yoga, usually the final pose of a practice session that allows for mental and physical rest and recovery before re-entering daily life.

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Almost November

The frenzy of fall 
after ceding all 
to the sun 

we walk into the pause
rapt, the minus, 
not the slightest jangle
of cicada

silence
sucking down
into earth’s own navel

Jill Pearlman, Silent Fall

I would like to believe in signs — the owl in the tree right outside my bedroom signifying something momentous is about to happen, that period in my life where I kept dreaming of birds, that rock I found that looks like a road map. But I don’t. Shit happens and it just is, without reason nor the benefit of foresight. Is that a sad way to be in the world? I don’t mind the miracle of chance, or chemical combinations plus time and pressure, or the odd ways in which the brain works its own chemistry. It’s all a wonder to me, even without a message. I’m human too, though, and yearn for some advance notice, some way to foretell whether I’m about to make a good decision or disastrous, some way to catch a glimpse inside the unknown of something I can know and clasp to me like an umbrella in the face of possible rain. But I’m pretty much left with the old death and taxes thing. And whatever I can pick up with my five-ish senses, imperfect as they are, and what mind I carry around from day to day in my head. The other day I looked down and saw a tiny manhole cover, a perfect circle with radiating lines. If I lifted it up I might find a tiny sewer into the center of the earth. Turns out it was the lopped off head of a mushroom. One of those little pointy-headed gray ones stuck upside-down in the grass. Hunh. You just never know, though. Anything’s possible.

Marilyn McCabe, I stay up late listening

As I filtered out of a particularly fun workshop-reading-open mic at BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, one of the participants called back to me as he ambled down the dark street, “Thanks, Professor Mushroom!” The featured image above with its weird reflections, taken at a booth at the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, conjures, for me, that slightly wacky persona I inhabit when I bard around with Mycocosmic–as if I know things about fungi (I’m an amateur); am relaxed about performing (ha); and really feel kind of mystical and hopeful about our underground connections to each other (well, that one’s true on a good day). […]

On the trip’s last leg I stayed with Jeannine and Glenn Gailey in Woodinville. Jeannine asked about my favorite moments from the adventure. A few hikes came to mind, but I also found myself saying “talking to strangers.” I’m an introvert who has to pay herself back for socializing with hours of quietness, so this isn’t my usual answer! Maybe it feels true because the “talking” involved a lot of listening. A reading with Matthew Nienow organized by Michele Bombardier, both terrific poets, felt special, as did the open mic that followed and my side conversations with audience members. Open mics feature wide variations in poetic skill, yet they’re one of my favorite formats. There’s something electric about so many people listening hard and taking risks, putting strong feelings out there. The Kirkland one ended with a performance that pinged between witty poetic lines and harmonica riffs–I won’t soon forget it.

Lesley Wheeler, Professor Mushroom listens to strangers

Blah blah blah went the (very well written) review until bang there you were coming alive in your own words (I do like a review that quotes the actual poems): ‘be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note’ and then ‘a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling’ and I felt something in me shift, a small but deeply profound intake of breath, somewhere between the words oh and wow. I can only describe it as an embodied moment. We (I, everyone) overuse the word visceral now, don’t we, but that’s where I felt it, in my good old Roman viscera. I knew I had to find more.

A quick spot of googling later and that’s what happened, a whole page of you at the Scottish Poetry Library no less, in a navy sweater (I have one too!) in front of the obligatory bookshelf, not looking at the camera (I’m with you on that), with a full biog at the foot of which an injunction to ‘Read the poems’. Which I did. Drank them, more like, gulping, swallowed them whole, not even touching the sides. At which point I started again.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark

What is it that separates us,
and what keeps us together?
In the garden, I rake
the leaves from the fruit trees.

I write,
but my mouth has many tongues—
in the city, all the windows open
in the morning.

Kati Mohr, Of Course, The Tissues In the Backpack Are Always Deep Down At the Bottom, Below Anything Else

I envy, to a degree, all those poets who just build up to a critical mass of uncompiled poems, work out an order for them, call that a collection, then start the process all over again. I can’t do that — it feels aimless. I think in book, as much as I think in poem. I like a book to have a thesis, and to know what it is as I’m writing it, even if — as in this case — it’s not something I could ever summarise neatly.

As for ‘Lightning Conductor’, I like that it isn’t about anything much, that it’s a little bit lazy. Check out that comma splice — I’m always telling my students to take those out. The whole thing’s just a bad pun, a newspaper cartoon. It doesn’t even want to commit to the sex or humanity of its principal character — etymologically, ‘mannequinesque’ means ‘man-like-ish’. I imagine it being spoken by someone who means to convince the listener that much of what seems like power is mere theatrical affectation. All that build-up — all that careful ceremony — just for the briefest of illuminations.

I also imagine the speaker gesturing intently at some shape on top of a building. Probably not a figure at all — probably just a chimney or plumbing stack. They want the listener to do all the work of imagining a person who is imagining themselves to be a wizard. Nothing at all has happened, is happening, beyond what occurs in the mind’s eye — even the city and the dark-blooded glass are illusions cast upon an empty page.

Jon Stone, POEM / Lightning Conductor

I wrote this on a wet October day, looking out onto the stony beach at Borth, its Bronze Age forest part-covered by the sweep of a dull metallic tide. As I wrote, early poems crowded into my mind, shouting for attention – and I saw them in my own hand, written in biro on A4 stapled together – my first collections. As a child, writing poetry was gathering shells, shards, bright pebbles. The universe offered small and lovely objects and I picked them up and kept them, and sometimes, I showed them to other people who thought they were pretty. A pocketful of pebbles and kind words were enough.

That changed as I grew. By my teenage years, bigger and darker things came in on the tide. […]

By the time I was detained in psychiatric hospital in my third year of uni, I’d stopped writing poetry. I was too far from the world, and from myself: I had no drive or hope of being understood. The journal I kept in those years is too dark to read, though I still keep it.

I started to write poetry again in a writing group for survivors of sexual abuse facilitated by the author and teacher Mandy Coe. Mandy is a life-force, bright and loud: we were driftwood, and she carried us. She took us to our first performance poetry night – Dead Good Poets Society; we wrote in the Walker Gallery; we cut up our poems and threw in them the air like David Bowie; we performed our poetry in the Everyman and our friends came. I read a poem about my time on the wards: “small wonder that some screamed or swore/ or crept into lonely corners/ and quietly gave up hope”.

I had a story I needed to tell, and I could not tell it over dinner, or in idle chat. But I could tell it in poetry.

Clare Shaw, Poetry and Wellbeing: part 1

[M]y next book has transformed. If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll remember I undertook extensive revision and redrafting to help the book find its story and tell it effectively. After this work was complete I approached Olivia Tuck, who I worked with on my second book Dust to see if she still offered her “poem whisperer” service. Olivia’s insight and suggestions mean my book has really grown into itself . It’s currently out at publishers and up for judgement in various competitions. I’m really proud of the book it has become and that I’m at the point where I feel it is “right.” This sense of completion means I have space for other projects. My first focus is on creating poems for a competition that couldn’t be more up my street if it tried. I’m so thrilled to have a clear focus and to be working on something that I feel so inspired by. I’m also investigating the possibility of working on a project inspired by the action group This Ends Now who highlight the failures of the press to report violence against women without shifting blame, or diluting reality. I’m not quite sure on the form this will take, but I’ll have more news after my meeting with their CEO on Tuesday. I feel like I’ve found my writer’s groove again.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Poetry news from Kathryn Anna

A strange week. The structure of the week falling down when my mum’s chemo was cancelled at the last minute. I would have liked to have been one of those people who saw this as an opportunity to have an extra day to write, but we are back to the incessant gnawing of not knowing what’s happening with my mum’s care, and I can’t write when my brain is fizzy with anxiety.

I haven’t done any creative writing of any kind since I sent the chunk of my novel to my agent to see what they think. Within two days of sending it I realised there were darlings still to kill. I could lose three thousand words of what I think might be writer-scaffolding: the story that I’m telling to myself before it becomes the story, and it would work better. But I’ve decided to wait and see what my agent’s initial reaction is before I scythe a massive chunk off it. I’m actually quite glad to have a week or so away from it.

I’ve used this week to consider what I want to do with substack, and to update it accordingly. I’ve used a lot of feedback from some in person events to shape how I think about what I present here. I’m not sure I mentioned in my last diary post that I was on a bit of a workshop running marathon, piling through a load of pre planned appearances and workshops facilitation which I’d set up before we found out that my mum’s cancer had spread and her care needs would be increased. So far I’m still managing the workload, around mum’s increased needs, possibly because there is an end in sight. A previous version of myself wanted to see if I could reduce my workload, if not take a complete break, in December, and I have left that whole month clear of workshops and mentoring, with just creative stuff and this substack to write.

I’m looking forward to embracing December as a writer, but the truth is that I’ve had a bit of an epiphany while I’ve been out of the cocoon of my writing room and actually speaking to real life people, and that epiphany is that this element of my work, alongside writing on substack, not only nourishes me as a person, but also as a writer. I’m so quick to grumble because so much of non writing work takes me away from actual writing. What I am becoming more aware of are the benefits of non-book-writing on my own writing practice, stuff that bleeds into my long term writing.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from My Writing Diary – Part Two

Over the summer I followed along as his collection of raw photos grew and he started winnowing them down into a smaller, curated selection. Recurring motifs started to emerge: People standing in the sun, big trees with broken limbs, detritus strewn in the park. People embracing trees or plants. People closing their eyes and turning their faces to the sky.

As JP’s photo collection took shape, I started scribbling notes for poems. Some were a direct response to his photo or the theme of the Sun’s rotation. Haiku and tanka seemed particularly suitable to the theme of transience, so I wrote a handful of each of those. Since he’d shared unedited photos with me, I decided to do the same with my drafts, and shared photos of my notebook pages.

As JP entered the final weeks of his residency, he began preparing the gallery show that would be its culmination. This prompted me to edit and finalize my collection of poems, which I shared with him.

It was then that JP surprised me for a second time by asking if I would do a Listener Poet session for him. Of course I was delighted by this request: as a newly certified Listener Poet, I’m eager to share this practice with others. So we spent half an hour one morning talking about his approach to photography, and in particular one portrait session he’d done recently in Berlin. After that, I spent a couple of days letting my notes steep, and then I drafted a poem for him, “Portrait of the Photographer.” (see below)

JP’s show went well. The gallery space looked beautiful, and even though I couldn’t visit Berlin to attend, he shared a video walkthrough of the space. And that’s when he gave me a third surprise: At the end of his video, he zoomed in on a handout that the gallery curators had included as part of the show, including a few of my tanka and haiku.

Dylan Tweney, Collaboration and photography

Albert is taken from my second pamphlet, Case Notes, which is based on my own experiences, both in hospital practice and as a family doctor.

Albert was the first really sick patient I looked after as a newly qualified doctor. Youthful inexperience gave me complete faith that medicine would make him better, despite his age and frailty. […]

The consultant was old-school, with a pin-striped suit and an aura of importance. Despite Albert having been in the services and used to obeying orders, both he and the kindly consultant taught me the need to respect patient autonomy.

My first pamphlet, Patient Watching, features a sequence of poems in the form of a heroic crown, in the voice of a single-handed GP in the Black Country featured in John Berger’s book A Fortunate Man. Berger’s book includes wonderful photographs of his encounters with patients, which I used as a prompt to tell stories from my own patient experiences.

I use the same device in Case Notes, writing in the voices of doctors who cared for actors and artists from the past, including Frida Kahlo, Sarah Bernhardt, Andy Warhol and Wilfred Owen. The added advantage is not having to protect patient confidentiality.

Drop-in by Judith Wozniak (Nigel Kent)

My poetry writing goes in cycles.  The cycle I like best is the one where I have a glimmer of an idea for a poem, a glimmer that takes shape throughout the day as I think about it, and by the time I sit down at my writing desk, I’ve got a shape of a poem to work with–and yet, there’s still a delightful surprise or two.

Of course it’s the cycle I like best.  Who wouldn’t like this part?  It’s where I feel like I’m doing what I’ve been put on earth to do.  It’s the part of the cycle where I feel like I’ve come across some secret portal, available to all but undertaken by few, where I glimpse the secrets of creation (which I mean in all sorts of senses of that word).

Usually my writing process is more like this:  I have a line or two, I see what I can do with them, I come up with a bit more but not a complete poem, I put it aside to think about it later, and I rarely return.  It might be for a happy reason:  the fragment leads to a more solid idea.  It’s more usual that I put it aside and then a week or two goes by, and I don’t have any additional ideas, and life gets hectic.

Lately I’ve been stuck in the cycle I like least:  no ideas, no glimmers, no lines that fizzle out and go nowhere.  I feel like it’s been months since I wrote a line, although that’s not true.

Yesterday, much to my delight, I came up with two poems.  In the morning, I had a flash of an idea about gingerbread houses being evidence of a woman working out her trauma.  I decided to go big:  make the speaker the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.  It’s not done yet, but here is how the poem starts right now:

I deal with loss by baking.
My gingerbread structures tell
you all you need to know
about the trauma that still lives
deep inside me.

In the afternoon, I had the idea to have the gingerbread house speak.  The gingerbread house says that its not its fault that it bewitches small children. From there, the poem devolves a bit.   I had been listening to coverage of the book published by a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, and the stories are harrowing, and those stories were in my mind as I wrote.  I need to do some work on getting the symbolism squared away.  The gingerbread house is not Epstein–that would be the witch.  Or maybe I want to back away and go in a different direction.

Or maybe not.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Two Rough Drafts Composed of Gingerbread

’Tis the season of mists and fellow mutefulness, apparently, and there being no one else available to write the substack this week (the other NSPs are all currently on the road or under the cosh) I thought I’d scribble something about fluff, or at least fluff under pressure. Lint, possibly. The poem below was a commission for Radio 4’s The Verb about three years back. The Verb has been on my mind this week. Late last year, in the course of a conversation with Ian MacMillan about the poetry of train stations, I had foolishly volunteered that no poem could possibly be written about Leuchars. For reasons both topographic and personal, I have long found it the least poetic station in the UK. Obviously, the poem was commissioned on the spot.

Leuchars is the closest station to the University of St Andrews, where I taught for a couple of happy decades, and with which I am still gently affiliated. But the station itself just reminds me of all the hours I spent freezing on a bench outside a locked waiting room in pitch-dark December, trying to mark exam scripts in the teeth of a North Sea gale, while yet another fighter jet from the airbase tore up the sky twenty feet above my head and the board told me yet another train had failed to make it out of Aberdeen. The Leuchars poem may or may not be any good – you can and will judge for yourselves, if you happen to be near a wireless next week – but as a rambling meditation on war, teaching, cutlery, dementia and death, I don’t think it can count as genuine fluff.

Unlike the poem below. It’s really a piece of occasional verse, the occasion being the BBC’s centennial: a few of us were charged with coming up with some kind of poetic tribute to the Reithian project, in whatever form we fancied. Writing poems for BBC radio is done for love, and often just for the love of Ian MacMillan. As a casual contributor, one is rewarded, more or less, only for the amount of airtime one destroys. A sonnet that took you three months will pay you roughly the same as someone else will get for breaking wind across the same minute. Lacking the normal incentives, BBC commissions can therefore sometimes be … deprioritised by more financially urgent work, which is a way of saying that I totally forgot to do this one. The dedicatee here is the poet Denise Riley, for two reasons: a) Denise reminded me that the poem was due in 48 hours, and b) she actually likes this sort of thing, or claims to, and indeed is very good at it herself. (There may still be a few who persist in thinking of Denise solely as some kind of doyenne of the UK avant-garde, but I suspect most of you know she’s many other things besides, and besides was never quite that thing in the first place.) By way of competitive encouragement, she sent me a fine poem on the now-lost rite of the 5pm Saturday footie results, specifically on the cadences of the sportscaster – his ‘RP weighty, self-assured and calm, / avuncular with its velvety inflections’ as its rise or fall foreshadowed the fate of the club. One could be certain Stenhousemuir had nilled again, well before the nil was confirmed.

All of which is to say … This poem was written in a tearing rush. As my NSP colleagues know, I suffer from Pascal syndrome. I often lack the time to make things shorter. I wrote the poem in a form I know I can deliver fairly quickly; this is where a certain motor-skill relationship to the old 4×4 can come in handy, and the rhymes left to dictate much of the poem. The poem had to find its way to its own conclusion, as none had been planned. It takes a while to yak its way there, but I kind of enjoyed the passivity. As Erroll Garner once said after an overlong piano solo, ‘I’m sorry – I just wanted to find out what happened in the end.’

Don Paterson, North Sea Line Caught, #2: ‘Kissing on the Radio’

Tomorrow I’m recording a tutorial on Horror Poetry for Writer’s Digest and the 30th I’m talking to a class at University of New Orleans about publicity and poetry. Doing the tutorial was an opportunity for me to do more in-depth thinking about what makes a horror poem a horror poem—does Sylvia Plath count? Louise Gluck? Am I a horror poet?

But real life threw in a real scare in the middle of spooky season—my father went into the hospital last night with a serious illness, so we’ve been texting and talking to mom and dad back in Ohio. Hopefully he’s in recovery by Halloween.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Poetry Friends and Readings, Horror Poetry, Halloween/Samhain and Some Real Life Scares

In the year following the death of my mother, I wrote a single poem a day for a longer, sustained span of time than ever before. It was the first time I’d ever successfully completed NAPOWRIMO, but then I just kept going for months. […] Part of it was a way to feel more focused, more present in the world. Part of it was a renewed sense of mortality. Soon, I had an entire book about mothers and mothering, some with very gothic undertones, that became my collection FEED. When my father passed nearly exactly 5 years later, I went through a similar spurt of new poems built around memory and grief that formed segments of RUINPORN. These series and poems were much less about working things out (my relationship with my father being very much less complicated than that with my mother–at least from the standpoint of making art within my grief. ) They jived well with other themes in the overall book and formed the backbone of a collection that also explored societal grief and the loneliness of the internet. […]

[G]rief is always a kind of haunting–not supernatural, but just as real as any emotion. The sense of unreality. For months, my mother was in my dreams, not knowing she was dead. Sometimes, I knew this and had to tell her. Sometimes, it knocked the wind out of me to be discovering it for the first time. I would wake up startled and sweating and sadder than I’d gone to bed. It waned after a few months, but would still occasionally happen. I chalked it up to the fact that I was not there when she passed, nor did I want to see her body before cremation. I later thought maybe doing so would have stopped the dreams. When my dad died, it was more sudden, a few weeks of decline vs. several months of hospitalization/care center. But I was there for his last breath in the hospital bed. We sat with the body for awhile after he was gone. My brain decided this was enough, and when he appears in my dreams on occasion, that shock and realization doesn’t come into play. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about how horror as a genre gives us permission to explore the darker corners of human experience. And grief? It sometimes lives in those corners. Even if you can’t see it, you know it’s there. When you’re grieving, people often want you to be “okay” as quickly as possible. They want the neat narrative arc: sadness, acceptance, moving on. But grief isn’t neat. It’s messy and recursive and sometimes it looks like a creature that shape-shifts every time you think you’ve got it figured out. One day it’s a whisper, the next it’s got claws.

Horror poetry lets you name that monster. It gives you the vocabulary for experiences that polite conversation won’t touch. You can write about death not as a gentle sleep but as the violent rupture it actually feels like. You can describe the emptiness as a void that actually swallows things, because that’s what it feels like when grief takes your appetite, your sleep, your ability to remember what life felt like before it existed. There’s something deeply validating about using dark imagery to describe dark feelings. It’s honest in a way that all the usual euphemisms never are.

Gothic literature has always understood that grief and horror are close cousins. Think about all those Victorian poems dripping with mourning imagery—the crumbling estates, the ghosts, the women in white wandering the moors. They weren’t being melodramatic (okay, maybe a little). They were trying to externalize an internal experience that defied ordinary description. When Poe wrote “The Raven,” he wasn’t just crafting a spooky poem. He was writing about the way grief makes you interrogate the universe, demanding answers you know won’t come. That bird repeating “Nevermore” is the truth grief forces you to swallow: they’re not coming back. No matter how many times you ask.

Kristy Bowen, horror and grief

I remember that strange month, sad month, odd month. I remember listening to these tapes and hearing my boot heels clicking on the pavement, then being surprised by voices, how many kind people called out and spoke to me as I walked around my London: Hello Salena, they said, Alright, mate! Sometimes they called my name like this, Hello Salena, passing someone crossing a busy street, Hello, as you bump into someone in a pub. Hello Godden they’d say on these tapes – not knowing I was observing my life in audio, not knowing my pockets were stuffed full, spare batteries, blank tapes, a notebook and pen.

I was a little scientific and analytic about it. But I was also quite smashed a lot of the time, so I would make mistakes, flip a cassette tape over and record over the same side twice or forget to change the batteries and lose some crucial evidence, events and late hours. It was pot luck what actually got recorded and saved and what was lost forever. I know I was behaving unnaturally, performing, sometimes thinking I was being clever, knowing I was on tape, telling people they were on tape and us all performing to the tape. Telling folk it was a wild experiment. And people would change the way they spoke to me. Or react as though I was a journalist interviewing them. All the time I wondered: How much of life is a performance? What is real? Authentic? True? Why do we change when we know there is a recording of our idea of self ?

Each morning I would wake up and make tea or pour a beer and smoke fags and record myself listening to the recordings from the day before and type poems and write diaries about the audio content: how it made me feel, what or who was I hearing. Writing and processing the images and emotions and soundscapes I’d captured. These morning poetry sessions and recordings became a loop of the days before-before-before and the typing-typing-typing and the sound of writing-writing-writing. A mirror looping into a mirror looping into a mirror. I remember I wrote about the sound of October and the autumn leaves and my adventures in Soho and all the people I’d bumped into and chatted and drank with the day before. I wrote about performance, how we perform when we don’t need to. What is real and what is unreal. What is expected? If nobody is looking, are we more ourselves to ourselves?

In pubs and bars (for I was mad and young and out drinking every night) I would tell people, I am recording my life on earth, it’s a poetry experiment and notice them begin to either shout and perform for me and the tape, or go quiet and change when they knew, I knew, they knew they were being recorded.

I forgot about it until now. I’m not going to open the box, not this year. Maybe in another ten years’ time. I know the box is down in the basement, but no, not now, I won’t open it now, it is enough to know it is there, sealed and dusty, it is good to know it is down there. I am gazing out of my window at the orange leafy October light and remembering it and that era.

I recall one tape: I’m with my mum in an M&S changing room as she is making me get fitted for a new bra. We are laughing. It is a moment of intimacy and love. And on another tape I’m with Oli, we’re drinking absinthe up high on the edge of the Hastings cliffs and singing death wishes into the abyss. I want to jump into the stormy sea. I record a taste of loss. Now we are here, and in this October, and the leaves

          still

            fall.

Salena Godden, October Tape Experiment

On Friday, I was one of six readers at an Off the Shelf Festival event in the University of Sheffield Drama Studio’s theatre, as a celebration of forty years of my and every other UK poet’s favourite poetry journal, The North. Hosted by the co-editor (and co-director of the Poetry Business), Peter Sansom, it consisted of a delightful 20-minute reading by the Sheffield Poet Laureate, Beth Davies, whose pamphlet The Pretence of Understanding won the New Poets’ Prize 2022, and then short readings – by Peter, Alan Payne, James (Jim) Caruth, Kate Rutter and me – each of three poems which had appeared in The North. I read Stephen Payne’s superb villanelle, ‘Dai’, Victoria Gatehouse’s brilliant, and brilliantly-titled, ‘Reservoir Gods’, and my own ‘The Prang’. It was another very memorable event, and a fitting tribute to Ann and Peter Sansom’s work over the years to cement The North as a hugely important pillar of the poetry scene in the UK and beyond.

And then yesterday, I went to my third poetry event in as many days. I have to say that by this point I was feeling as though I was permanently living in a bubble of poetry.

Matthew Paul, On the last while

Are you ignoring my message or are we
in the middle of some strange
literary cliffhanger?

I’m pitching real readers, real reviews,
real visibility, and you’re giving me
the silent treatment like I’m asking you
for your Netflix password.

Luisa A. Igloria, A Marketing Bot Reaches Out in Vain (a partially found poem)

Delivered by the postal service earlier the week, a book as mesmerizing as the leaves the leaves falling from the trees along our street this week—- yellow for an instant and then smitten by asphalt — Earthly, a collection of Jean Follain’s poems translated by Andrew Seguin.

Camille Corot’s lithograph, The Gust of Wind (1871), sits lightly on the cover, gesturing towards Canisy, the small village in Normandy where the poet in question was born and fed bread. In the translator’s introduction, Seguin paints a portrait of his subject: this writer named Jean Follain who saw the agricultural lifeways of small towns gutted by the new economy of killing, the human looking for words in the wasteland following World War II, an event sponsored by governments who caused the mass death of young men and starved village economies of the labor required for their continuance. […]

What happens in Follain’s poems?

Things are touched. Things touch back. Subjects pause like objects in a dark painting. Children “dressed in black rags” scamper through ruins.” A man’s smile “vibrates” alongside the spike of wheat in his scythe. Snails sleep as the bread burns. “The protagonist of dreams” savors wine flavored by “myrtle and cypress” as alcohol fuels arguments in the pub. Doors creak through “cold rooms.” The “rustle” of poplars near rivers rouses the blood. A novelist studies the wandering vapors. A glass blushes like a continental sunset. The “already yellow” of lindens in July crosses paths with violins who are napping in their velvet-lined coffins.

In “Landscape of Rural Hardship”:

A small garden of chives
trembles beneath the stars.

The hardship is expressed in trembling of tiny chives.

Follain opens his “Eclogue” with a man in a “shattered house” who “plays at the game of existing” as the wind groans through the orchard. With no transition, Follain abandons the man for “the lightning-struck oak” where a bird perches on a limb, singing, unafraid, slowly morphing into a haunting image:

an old man has placed his hand
where a young heart
vowed obedience.

Gestures consecrate the movements in Follain’s poems.

Alina Stefanescu, Jean Follain.

It’s a largish distance between [Carl] Phillips’ poems of careful observation to the ‘Post Dada’ world of Tomaž Šalamun as translated by Brian Henry, with its determined undermining of polite expectation:

Folk Song

Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys the voice and the people.
His singing builds the technology that destroys
the earth so that the worms don’t eat us.
A drunkard sells his coat.
A scoundrel sells his mother.
Only a poet sells his soul
to separate it from the body that he loves.

This extends from the rejection of conventional narrative:

Stories that have a first scene, a second
scene, a first border, a second border, surrender like
a lump of meat.

To the wish to go naked through the desert, even if it means abandoning one’s child:

No, I said, we’ll both go.
What will happen with Ana, Maruška said.
We’ll leave her in the car and give her
cookie. Cookie was at that time
still a drink for Ana.

But it would be a mistake to read these poems as simply a kind of teenage desire to shock, there’s a serious, almost political, impulse underlying them, a desire to pare life back to some kind of simplicity. One poem ends with the line ‘A person explodes from too much luxury.’ Šalamun has no wish to share that fate.

Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: Part 2

It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.

Fokkina McDonnell, Having Her Cake

I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Writing origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]”

rob mclennan, Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress

Through “Darling Blue”, Sarah James has created two complementary threads. One is the doomed (fictional) affair of a woman with a married man that watches her move from the delusion of love to acceptance that she too was complicit in romanticising something tawdry. The wife is outside the frame: it’s not known if she knows of the affair or if the husband is a serial cheat. But there is a strong sense of self-discovery on the speaker’s part. The affair has enabled her to try out a role and learn what love is not. The ekphrastic poems add to the commentary: the speaker’s reaction to Crane’s “Neptune’s Horses” moves from awe at their power to identification where she takes back control after she realises that she was fooling herself. It’s a collection that rewards re-reading, a slow walk through a gallery, taking time to sit with each piece and choose to focus on the whole or a fragment, ask why a particular shade of blue was chosen or marvel at how the brushstrokes direct the light and the viewer’s eye, guiding it to see what the artist wants to reveal.

Emma Lee, “Darling Blue” Sarah James (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Last week I wrote about a poem that turned out to be a kind of private joke. This produced varied responses — several readers felt annoyed to have been “shut out” in this way, by a literary reference and concealed translation they could not reasonably have been expected to recognise. To them it felt high-handed. But others wrote to say that they didn’t mind this kind of thing — that they quite liked the feeling of “overhearing” something like a private joke, or in-crowd reference, intimate to the poet.

Perhaps this difference in response has something to do with how we think about the balance of power between the author and the reader in determining the meaning of a poem. But sometimes difficulty or obscurity can act as a kind of licence — it occurred to me afterwards that it might in fact have been Longley’s own puzzlement over the obscure names in that passage in Ovid that drew him to translate it in the first place.

There’s a good example of the way obscurity can be a spur to creativity, and even a kind of titillation, in a little Latin poem — little more than a squib — which apparently circulated pretty widely in England for a good couple of centuries. We can start around the middle of its history. In one Cambridge manuscript of the early seventeenth century, a single double-page spread records a series of mock-epitaphs — including poems on Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Sir Christopher Hatton (d. 1591) and a certain Gresham (probably Sir Thomas Gresham, d. 1579, but possibly an earlier one — we’ve met this family in death before). Christopher Hatton’s enormous tomb in St Paul’s towered over the altar and obscured other monuments, which seems to be the point of one of the epigrams, appearing in this case in both Latin and English:

Epitaphs. of S^r Fra: Wal: & S^r Ph: Sid:

Nullus Francisco tumulus nullusque Philipo,
Christoforo mons est, ac tumulus cumulus.

Philipe and Fra[ncis] haue noe Tombe,
for Christopher hath all the roome.

Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, just a few years after Sir Philip Sidney, his son-in-law, in 1586. They were both, like Hatton, buried in (old) St Paul’s, though apparently without much in the way of a monument. The manuscript itself dates from the 1620s, so this epigram had already been going around for a while when it was written down. It can’t date from before Hatton’s death, but the jingly Latin (nullus, tumulus, nullus, tumulus, cumulus) is very unclassical in style and could easily have been written any time between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.

Victoria Moul, The evergreen obscenity

a chatbot tells me:
mother has a Proto-Indo-European root word
that sounds almost the same
so does love
though its Sanskrit cognate — lobha —
can translate to greed
one of the six enemies of the mind.

the brain watches itself process the threads
its recursive algorithm
offers a carousel of images:
picture of a woman #*méh₂tēr
picture of a night sky #thebenignfaceofchaos
picture of a rocking horse #metaphorforsomethingstilled
picture of an unidentifiable object #cellmemoryfromadifferentstateofmatter
wheels skid on ice #noimagefound

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The square root of family

Introduction to Cloud Care – Laura Theis

maybe i’ll call gillian anderson – Rhian Elizabeth

I bought these collections from Broken Sleep Books a few months ago, during a phase when writing at least one review a week seemed like a task I had more than enough energy for (seriously, what was I thinking?!). But even though this review is not incredibly timely, I have been reading and re-reading them the whole while, and they have remained grouped together in my mind, despite their apparent differences in style.

In fact, I think they have more in common than first appears. Both have gorgeous covers (typical of Broken Sleep), with striking, glossy images against a deep blue background. Both are from poets with many accolades and awards to their name. Both are tender and vulnerable, but while maybe i’ll call gillian anderson half-hides its vulnerability within a spiny lobster shell, Introduction to Cloud Care lets its layers of softness and ethereality cloak a deeper toughness and resilience.

Both collections also deal in humour and more than a little dash of the surreal, providing moments of levity that underscore the more serious ones. […]

If I could draw another thread between Elizabeth’s and Theis’ work, it’s a sense of how we continue to be haunted by our past selves, but also a desire for reinvention. As Elizabeth tells us, in the most pleasing of things, “memory is a contemptuous old bitch”.

Victoria Spires, Memory, magic, and the art of reinvention

If you’re anything like me, the news of the congressional testimony by major publishers that, among a sample size of 58,000 books published in 2020, 50% sell fewer than 12 copies, utterly shocked you. According to this data, the average publishing run sells six units (six individual books). This isn’t quite true, but such views offer a window into the cynical state of affairs in contemporary publishing circles.

The dissolution of Small Press Distribution in 2024 was likewise an earthquake in an already unstable literary ecosystem. It was during this tumultuous period that my literary organization, Sybil, set out to transition from an online-only press to an organization with the capability to execute print projects. What came next was something few might have predicted, and which we certainly hadn’t prepared for: success, on our own terms.

The most recent testament to this success came after we published a chapbook of poetry by Megan Williams, entitled Window Person. While our organization was (and, at least in a public-facing capacity, remains) not quite open for full-length submissions, we solicited a collection of her writing, making note of the prominence of the pages we had previously published featuring her work. These had become some of the most visited on the entire site. Over a period of 2-3 weeks, we exchanged emails and editorial feedback, she added poems to the collection, and the entire project was “stress-tested,” (that is, the formalistic qualities of certain poems were questioned, ensuring intentionality). The end result is a powerful chapbook, which combines the ethos of confessional poetry with a sharp satirical edge, and contains references which place it in a literary tradition that is explicitly aligned with our goals as a publisher.

The pre-order for the collection (which was as many as we initially planned on producing) sold out in nearly two hours. After expanding our print run, the collection sold out again after only ten hours. For the moment, only digital copies are available! What more could a lit mag ask for?! How is it that, in the midst of all of this unsettling news and anxiety, we found publishing success? This is the question that I will attempt to answer here.

Despite the click-bait-y title of this article, there is no ‘secret’ to publishing success (sorry!). If there is, the average working writer (like myself) may not want to hear it: work with someone with an established platform, and brand recognition, and create an authentic collaboration for a well-drafted, meaningful project. This was the case here. Sybil’s success in this context is in large part due to the popularity of the author we published. We seek to promote work we sincerely believe in, impacting every decision at every point in the publishing process, but, like any press, we also want our work to succeed, to be read, to matter. This was our aspiration going into this collaborative publishing project, and will be our approach moving forward, as we might expect of any organization we worked with as writers.

It is as essential for small presses to find their ‘niche’ as it is for authors, and for many literary organizations, success entails operating within your network, in a complex dance of circumstance, trust, shared values, and goodwill.

D.M. Rice, On Literary Citizenship and the Secret to Small Press Publishing Success

Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there was likely a floating bridge, like a barge or pontoon bridge, that enabled people, largely traders, to cross. Most of the ancient city is now left to underwater archeologists to examine, alas, since it lies beneath the new Biricek Dam. […]

Our tour guide was excited when I told him that the word zeugma is used in poetry terminology. It’s a figure of speech in which words or images in a phrase are connected, often for humorous or ironic effect, as in a sentence such as: He lost his heart and his wallet at the stage door cafe. The word “lost” joins both heart and wallet. It acts as the bridge. It’s an intriguing little literary device that’s seldom the first thing I notice in a poem, but when I do identify it, I appreciate it. I like knowing the etymology, and I like knowing that I’ve been where the city was.

Ann E. Michael, Zeugma

I understood my own words, but no one else’s.
With all of us yelling and waving our hands
construction ground to a halt. Who even cared?
We left the work site like plaintive baby birds
with our new call, can anyone understand me?
why do I feel so alone?

Rachel Barenblat, Understand

I was listening to Robert McFarlane read from his new book, Is a River Alive? and he was saying that considering humans are mostly made of water, if we sit down, we’re a pond, and if we run, we’re a river.

I’m thinking of place like that. If a place changes, that place is a still the same place. Like a river, that place is fluid. And so one’s home is fluid.

In this way, all of us humans are not diasporic, we’re metamorph-poric. Our place, our home is change. It’s not to take rights from people who have a relationship with a particular place, but to think about that place as flow. If as Heraclitus said, you can never step into the same river twice, these days you can never belong to the same place because place inherently changes. The world is always already changing.

Once the sky was filled with birds. The sky is no longer filled with birds. Our place is birdless and heating up. So we have to think of this kind of change as a working paradigm for the world. And we have to consider how to think about that.

Gary Barwin, Sex with a river; a forest instead of a saxophone: change as a constant, music like the woods

I remember reading about bowler superstitions: Lucky shoes, towels, and socks  or prayers and chants. We just saw “Baby Boom” – executive Diane Keaton saddled with unexpected baby  altering her corporate ambitions – and since Diane has been  good in everything forever, I chose her. On every approach, perfecting my four-step, under my breath – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton – and the ball lightens, rolls straight, connects dead center on the headpin, then it’s strike after strike all night. Four decades flown, and I don’t bowl often, but Diane is still the mantra. And when she dies, I find myself in the supermarket aisle, doctor’s office, subway, watching hellish newscasts  – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton. A charm against the inconceivable,  the bowling gods giving and taking away,  another cursed split in a year full of gutters.

Collin Kelley, Bowling with Diane Keaton

This week while tuning in to POETs Day live with Kate Jenkinson (Fridays at 12:30 via LinkedIn) I found myself drawn to the Venn diagram image in the Poetry In Business Logo. It resonated with my recent thinking around how two of my favourite things (poetry and coaching) intersect. Whilst wondering about this I had also been toying with the thought that people might find it strange that my social media presence often flits between poetry and coaching. My answer to myself was that I am a poet and a coach, and sometimes I am a coach and a poet, and sometimes I am only one of these, and sometimes I am neither, but even when I am neither I still carry their vibrations. And that was my way of saying that like the honeysuckle that grows through the hydrangea in the front garden I see them as entwined. So rather than thinking about separating them as two binary elements my answer seemed instead to focus on dialling up and dialling down (thank you for extending my thinking about this, Kelley). Even with this realisation, the Venn diagram was still drawing me back to its intersection and giving me the hint that there might be something to consider about this part of it. I enjoyed a little wonder about what exists there, and here’s what I found in my intersection of poetry and coaching: Setting something down, trying something out, viewing it from different angles, hearing what it sounds like out loud, seeing what it sounds like out loud, time and space to think, time and space to reflect, moving a thought forward, adjusting it, leaning in to emotions as they resonate in real time, trying on different lenses, wondering what it’s telling you, playing with it, considering different endings, recognising your own threads and patterns, deciding which ones to continue to weave.

Sue Finch, POET, COACH. COACH, POET.

it begins with a november rose. shadows stirring a bowl

of milky blood. wholeness and wild honey die slowly.

remembrance, our permanent home.

Grant Hackett [no title]

yeast of my day
on the way to the bread shop
the sun rises

Jim Young [no title]

This week: intruding in Eden, remembering how to dream, the angel of history, a museum or diaspora of things, and much more. Enjoy.

The leaves are slowly shifting their colors, including the ones out near the street I catch sight of with a slight startle every once in a while. Last night, storms blew in and left more fall-ish weather in their wake, scattering a lot of the less tenacious leaves. Tonight, J is making beef stew, since it’s officially the season for it.  We are loosely planning a trip north in a couple of weeks to go up to see fall color and maybe stay in a cabin or lodge, so fall is happening, so I am trying to hold on to the good, despite the madness of the headlines and the parade of videos featuring people being snatched off the street.  […]

Work continues of edits for CLOVEN, and I should have a clean version before we hit November, which could mean a release in December if all goes well. Things are also progressing on the new book manuscript,  AMERICAN CYCLORAMA. The one benefit of feeling higher-strung than usual is that it often means my writing comes swifter and more regularly, though it’s not always the best stuff I fear. Still, it’s something to focus on when everything else seems chaos and upheaval.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/7/2025

How Does the World Celebrate an End to Genocide?

Solemnly.
With great caution.
Silently accepting each moment
          that a cease fire holds.
          Holding your jubilation deep inside.
                    Where fear still has a hold of emotions
                    that cannot quite be released to run free.

Michael Allyn Wells, How Does the World Celebrate an End of Genocide

We pray for peace even if we don’t completely trust the people on either side of the negotiating table. Even if we aren’t sure it’s going to work. Even if we’re afraid a strong wind will blow everything sideways. So today I stand in my sideways sukkah with my lulav, and as I beckon blessing from every direction, I’m praying most of all for the blessing of peace.

May the blessing of peace rest on the city of Chicago, where ICE is using military equipment and tactics on civilians. [Source: The Guardian.] May the blessing of peace rest on Portland, which the administration claims is on fire due to “antifa,” but is actually populated with activists who oppose ICE (and fascism) dancing in animal suits. [Source: NYT, gift link.]

And may the blessing of peace rest over Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.

Rachel Barenblat, And

We are all distracted.

We are told we are distracted.

We loop—inundated with dystopian messages within our chaotic feeds.

The script of the distracted = care about anything trivial in your algorithm (consume) to avoid.

Anyone at this point in the timeline is:

hyperfocused

hypernormalized (evangelizing consumption, practicing avoidance)

actively engaging in cognitive dissonance, apathy, lack of empathy

or has ADHD, PTSD, OCD, CPTSD, or

all of the above.

This is goal of hybrid soft power. War on the imagination, on the collective consciousness.

(And this is not a poem, btw. I’m writing this way because I can’t think anymore in paragraphs).

Propaganda for anti-propaganda works this way.

So along with my attention span being completely shot (thanks grief brain and menopause combined) deliberate action from day-to-day, for me, is useless.

I jump-cut from sobbing on my kitchen floor to hopping on an online work call pretending to be “normal” (whatever the f that means).

The other day, I used the last of our pancake mix (L and I used to make pancakes on Sunday. It’s the middle of the week). I made way too many pancakes, screamed, and threw out the rest of the mix because I can’t share it with him anymore.

I watch movies about the Holodomor and Hannah Arendt while I’m writing social media posts about synchronicities and watch reels of innocent people being disappeared off the streets of my hometown of Chicago.

I watch Adam Curtis videos while organizing Larry’s poems into a new manuscript.

I listen to records at 3 a.m. and try to conjure him like a witch (I am…but still).

I open the curtains every morning at 5:30, 6:00 a.m. so the sunrise can beam across his urn (he loved the sun, a cup of coffee, fresh air).

I wear his clothes to bed. I talk to him every night.

I am feral now. It’s fall. Full moons, eclipses…HEAVY things are happening everywhere.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Attention: there is no attention.

Last night, as the sun was setting, I discovered that I had made my quilt top too wide.  How could this have happened?  Just last week-end, it wasn’t wide enough, and I didn’t think I added that much?  My spouse and I devised a plan, and I set to work ripping out the seam of part of the quilt that was too wide; later I’ll add it to make the length of the quilt fit–it’s far from catastrophic, as discoveries go.

I looked at the sunset colors in the sky and thought about that time when the crew on one of Columbus’ ships saw land from a distance, that liminal time before all the changes got set into motion.  I am now trying to create a poem about ripping out seams on Columbus Day.  So far, it’s not working, but I wrote down some ideas and maybe they’ll come together.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Explorations and the Imagery of Those Interactions

In these two most recent pamphlets, Henry Gould continues his missives from the front line of Trump’s America, 2025 style. Shady Library and The Gate are billed as books 4 and 5 respectively of the ongoing Shield of Mnemosyne project, of which I’ve reviewed previous parts here and here. The poems published in these latest instalments are dated from May 21 to August 3 this year, and deal with both the contemporary and the timeless in Gould’s unique fashion.

Shady Library consists of seventeen individual poems in Gould’s characteristic mix of rhymed stanzas, from quatrains to nine-liners. Figures familiar from his earlier work appear: Parmenides, Roger Williams, the Mandelstams,  Dante, and Columbia.

This last figure takes on a central importance: as Coulombe, dove of peace, as reminder of the explorer who ‘discovered’ America, as the District of Columbia, seat of American political power (and site of much activity by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, another Gouldian figure who resurfaces in The Gate), and, crucially, as the university that the Trump administration targeted over DEI and student support for the Palestinian people.

                                                    What have we done,
America? Columbia is figurehead for us
and pilot too. Buoyancy marks the end of rage.
(from ‘Equilibrium’)

The sentiment in the last line echoing other explicit references elsewhere in the pamphlet:

Brute force can only outrage innocence.
There is no glory in such mega-gloom –
and shame concludes the reign of every tyrant.
(from ‘July’)

and again, earlier in the same poem, this expression of the ideal Anti-MAGA position:

Love does not boast, or brag, or dominate;
love does not boss, or scold – or persecute
the weak, or curse the poor, or scapegoat
strangers, refugees… O Hypocrite.

Those readers who have been following along will recognise love as Gould’s basis for justice and hope. And there is hope aplenty here:

Somewhere, a child is running towards the sun –
laughing with her light, feeling her strength.
Your summer, Psyche-dove, has just begun:
your ship floats in her sea of grass, full-length.
(from ‘Melissa Hortman: In Memoriam’ a poem, ‘after Osip Mandelstam)

The fusion of Love’s bride and Coulombe in a poem dedicated to the assassinated Hortman, a Democrat from Gould’s home city, is a perfect bringing together of key elements in Gould’s belief in America’s ability to rein in its own worst tendencies by returning to its founding vision. You don’t have to share his optimism to admire the writing, or the intent behind it.

Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: A Review

I’ve been writing and revising as much as I can in recent weeks (some of it recommendation-writing because ’tis the season). A few nice poetry things have happened. About Place published a new issue containing a couple of my recent poems, “Innocent Murmur” and “At Tables.” Both poems sprang from EMDR insights–that’s the therapy I’ve been doing for almost a year, involving this strange eye-movement strategy to process old hurts that linger somatically, even when you’ve talked and written your way around, into, and through them for decades. (I’m good at the cognitive stuff, I’m just a giant head basically, but it turns out the body stores hurt in ways that reason can’t root out.) “At Tables” comes from a cascade of images that poured out in a poetic, associative way. Some of my father’s most frightening behavior occurred over the cherry dining table of my childhood; my boss frightened me into silence by poking my arm under the rim of a different cherry table; my department now meets at the latter table; I teach seminars around similar tables. No wonder I couldn’t feel safe at work. Therapy and poetry are NOT the same thing, but poetry often emerges from underworlds that rational thinking can’t plumb.

Lesley Wheeler, Washington-bound (the other one)

Since July, I’ve been pushing pretty hard on a new poetry manuscript, attempting to compose and accumulate a handful of lyric sequences into a book-length shape. I like the idea of a full-length poetry collection with only a dozen or so poems within, each poem some six or eight pages in length. It isn’t anything I’d attempted prior, although every poetry title I’ve composed since the late 1990s one could claim an exploration of the long poem, or at least through the book as unit of composition. […]

In July 2025, the Anglican Girls’ Choir of Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral toured Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, performing multiple times in Belfast, Galway and Dublin [I’m sure you caught my three travel reports: here, here and here]. As our daughter, Rose, was part of said group, Christine and I, along with our youngest, Aoife, played tag-along for the two week jaunt, accompanying and solo-touristing, and attending performances by the group at the Cathedral Church of St. Anne in Belfast, the ruins of the tenth century monastery Clonmacnoise (Cluain Mhic Nóis), Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Galway, the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Christ Church Dublin and the National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Patrick, Dublin.

Of course, two weeks away from my desk is no small thing, and it prompted me to work like a maniac for eight weeks prior to leaving home, to clear that thinking space for travel. I wasn’t suspending the blog while we travelled, after all, and I certainly wasn’t going to attempt writing and posting reviews, interviews or anything else on the road. I spent eight weeks pushing reviews, interviews and other posts nearly a month ahead on the blog, beyond our point of departure. I scheduled a half-dozen substack posts, chapbook posts and pushed a whole array of chapbook publication and mailing, so our adventuring in Ireland (plus at least a week or so after we returned) could be entirely free to focus on that particular experience. I wished to remain, even beyond the uncertainties of travel internet access, which was tricky at times, present.

On airplanes and bus rides, I read through longer works of prose, which seems another kind of rarity. With notebook in hand, I scribbled thoughts on what I was reading; scribbled notes on churches and monuments, Rose’s performances, scattered reading, architecture, and moments. I took a few hundred photos, and mailed more than two dozen postcards. I asked questions of tour guides, hostel and museum staff, bartenders, clergy. Why are there flags along the wall, clearly aged and falling to shreds? Why are the stones of that wall different colours? I looked up details and answers to things that prompted my curiosity. I asked questions of locals, and of the classics professor that was one of the tour organizers. How does Brexit affect the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland? Why was Belfast so young a city, and how does that reconcile with a graveyard going back to the 5^th century? If Richard de Clare, 2^nd Earl of Pembroke (c. 1130–1176), otherwise known as Strongbow, is buried in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, where was his wife, Aoife? Why is the Cathedral in Belfast where Rose and her choir sang named for St. Anne, a figure not mentioned in the actual Bible, but only in the apocrypha, as mother of Mary? Through the process of questions (and internet queries), I learned that, unlike her husband, our wee Aoife’s namesake, Aoife MacMurrough of Leinster (c. 1153–c. 1188), is actually buried with her father-in-law at Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, a ruin that sits along the Welsh bank of the River Wye.

Perhaps most minds might not go there, but a reference to Tintern immediately returned me to “Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was this example that prompted my own series of title-attempts: “Lines composed in St. Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast,” “Lines composed a few kilometres past Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, on the banks of the River Shannon,” “Lines composed at Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, Galway,” and “Lines composed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church, Dublin.” For each piece, I held the title as a kind of umbrella, working to compose a sequence of small clusters of lyric underneath the protection and stretch of those titles; pulling apart sentences and fragments to stretch the narrative into a sequence of small cluster-points that constellate the physical space of each page.

I’ve now composed a handful of “Lines composed…” poems, set as foundation for the collection, with further pieces set around this particular core. So far, other poems in the manuscript-in-progress include “Epithalamium , a consortium,” a piece composed after the recent nuptuals of Ottawa poets Jennifer Baker and David Currie, and “Lines composed once landing at Al Purdy’s A-Frame, Ameliasburgh,” after a recent visit we made to Ameliasburg, driving by the late Canadian poet Al Purdy’s infamous house, a site that now hosts a sequence of writing residencies. Ameliasburg, a Loyalist territory, of course, named for Hanover Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of English King George III. These are poems for occasions, it would seem, almost in the Robert Creeley sense, which, arguably, I have always done. Poems to mark or document moments of time, of activity; of thinking, across or within the broader spectrum of daily activity.

rob mclennan, The Museum of Practical Things

I like when something is really sour and nothing except that sourness exists for that instant. I like my crooked teeth even though I try not to smile in photographs. It’s comforting to know that, when I am sleeping, my hair grows like grass. I like that since I am not plastic, I will die someday. In a forest, I am flesh and a tiger can actually eat me. I find it thrilling that there is not much difference between me and a dog or a zebra.

It’s nice that, like an apple, I have skin. 

Saudamini Deo, I like having a body

Last month, I posted an invitation to “Ask Me Anything” over on Instagram. I had so much fun chatting all things creativity, community, books, behind-the-scenes, etc. I want to share some of the questions with you here, too. […]

Q: How do you get over the “ugh, I wish I’d written this!” when you read another poet?

I actually love that feeling. It tells me I’m ready to write. It clues me into craft choices or emotions or maybe new forms that I want to try. Ask yourself what you love about the poem. Why are you so inspired by it?

My friend and I say “I hate you” when the other one writes a poem we wish we’d written. Jillian also says she wants to set those poems on fire. 😂

I’m too scared to set fires, so I just go write poems. […]

Q: Fave communities or resources that have helped you fine tune your poetry?

I’ll start with books: Dear Writer — Maggie Smith, The Poetry Home Repair Manual — Ted Kooser, A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver, Poetry Unbound — Pádraig Ó Tuama

I also take workshops whenever I can. Here are some of my favorite workshop leaders: Kelly Grace Thomas, Joy Sullivan, Isabelle Correa, Lexi Pelle, Two Sylvias Press

And community is everything. There are paid communities, of course, that can speed up the process of connecting with other writers. A few favorites are: Gather Poets, Exhale Creativity, and Blue Sky Black Sheep. But I’ve also met and cultivated relationships with other writers simply by connecting on platforms like IG and Substack. I formed a friendship with poet Christen Lee simply by reaching out after reading her poem in Dulcet Lit Mag. Be brave, say hello, and ask to swap work for feedback. It’s so valuable, and much more fun than doing this all on your own!

Allison Mei-Li, You Asked, I Answered

I’ve always been the kind of person who slips easily into dark moods, and the doubt inherent in being a 53-year-old STILL SEEKING her debut poetry collection is a natural portal for that darkness. Instead, however, this revision cycle has made me — and my book — bolder, brighter, and more defiant than ever.

I am incredibly proud of the deep, consistent effort and delighted by the results.

Doubt hasn’t been entirely absent, of course. The ferocity that defined the summer of revision has been book-ended by periods of frustration. In May, on the heels of yet another rejection and just ahead of digging back into the manuscript, I entertained the idea that there just wasn’t a space for me in the poetry publishing universe. And in September, which is the period covered in this blog post, my energy for revision started to flag, and I grew frustrated with a section that just wasn’t coming together as I’d hoped.

I began to wonder if I was failing my vision for the book. Maybe it was time to admit defeat?

Enter the wisdom of writing community… Y’all have been there and done that, and you swooped in to remind me that the process ebbs and flows. Also, so many of you believe in this book in moments when I lose faith. Your guidance and encouragement frequently saves me, including the message I heard loud and clear in September: Girl, it’s OK to take a break.

Best pal Jill Crammond put it in the clearest terms: “I think you should take a nap,” she said. And so that’s how I ended the month. Not stalled out with revisions, but resting. Taking a short pause. Letting some shit go.

We can work so hard we stop seeing straight.

Carolee Bennett, When We Remember How to Dream

Thinking out loud about things that block us in one of Claire Pedrick’s supervision groups this week also had me thinking about focusing and about being temporarily stuck. I have some great strategies for getting unstuck and tackling things that are blocking the way to my next steps or simply getting something done, and I was happy to share these. But I found that I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something particular I needed to find out about being blocked when it comes to editing a set of a poems. How could I have these strategies and still be stuck?

Two kinds of being blocked came to mind – the ‘not wanting to do a thing’ kind and the ‘joy-blocked’ kind. These are the kind of blocks I need to climb over or go round. But here they were showing themselves to both be at play at the same time making the block seem huge.

I didn’t want to edit the poems and I wasn’t finding joy when I did sit down to do it. Thinking out loud with others and then allowing myself time to continue the think enabled me to hear the real stuff going on. Firstly, I had to admit they weren’t all great poems and those that had been sent back instead of being published did need work. I needed to kick into touch the hurry up driver that wanted a set of poems to work on and had pulled them together too quickly. I also had to take on board the feedback I had asked for and respond to it. I also realised that having an overarching theme to the work was hugely important to me, and I had been pushing this aside.

Having leant into all of that I was gifted time to truly focus at a body doubling session. I took along three poems, and during the session I binned one and polished the other two. Without another person sharing time and space it would have taken me much longer to get this sorted. It wasn’t easy, and I felt the twitch of wanting to give in or to check social media to avoid the difficult, but what a wonderful feeling to have cracked the blocks and squeezed through onto the poetry path again.

Here’s to the kind of focus that comes when you stay with something even though it’s hard. And to the joy of being inspired to write fresh poems.

Sue Finch, FOCUSING

Silence is often a cue
that apologies are in order.
Perhaps it is perverse to kneel here
like an intruder in eden
and ask for more.
Nature does this,
weighing down one end of a seesaw
holding me high – precarious, captive, impotent.

I paint a golden eagle in the sky
its six-foot wingspan blocking the sun
the lake turning purple
wind scattering into the branches —
as if imperfection improves the scene
improves me
makes it all bearable
allows me to pray.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where one road ends

I have never been to the mountains in the fall. Teaching always meant vacations were taken during winter break or during the summer months, but those restrictions no longer apply. Two friends and I took a four day trip to hike and drive Rocky Mountain National Park, and autumn did not disappoint. The number of elk was incredible (the last time my husband and I visited, we did not see even one.) Our hikes led us to spectacular views and everyone we looked, the aspens were jangling their gold. Majesty is a word that is thrown around about mountains, and it is decidedly not hyperbole. Coming from the flat Midwest, there’s something magical about mountains that cannot be beat. […]

Unrivered, my fourth poetry collection with Sundress Publications is now in the world. I’ve been busy promoting it and starting to read from it, so I want to thank and highlight those people who have graciously given me the space to do so over the first couple weeks of the book’s life.

• A Wild and Precious Life Series -I was privileged to read with Taylor Byas and Ashley M. Jones on September 24, and host Dustin Brookshire creates such a welcoming atmosphere. (I think there was a video somewhere on Instagram, but I can’t find it now.)
• Of Poetry Podcast with Han VanderHart – It’s always a pleasure to talk poems with someone as smart as Han, and this was no exception. You can listen at the link
• A Word? with Roi Faineant Press and Kellie Scott Reed. This short video conversation with Kellie was so much fun. We talked about the book, yes, but also about music and memory, everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and its effect on driving speed.
• Verse Virtual – Hosted by Robbi Nester and Jim Lewis, who create a lovely welcoming space. I got to read with Jane Zwart, whose work I adore, and the open mic readers were all talented as well. Video should be up soon.
• My Bad Poetry Podcast – I always enjoy listening to Aaron and Dave and their guests, and I had a blast bringing some of my own bad poems to this conversation. Want to hear a poem about nothing, a really odd metaphor for religion, a low-rent Millay imitation? Episode coming soon, and you’ll be able to find it at the link.

I’m reading online for NAWP this Tuesday evening, and my in-person, in real life book launch will be this upcoming Saturday at Yellow Bird Books in Aurora, IL, where I will read and be in conversation with my good friend and fellow poet Kristin LaTour, who runs the Aurora Writer’s Workshop, a wonderful local conference held in June.

Donna Vorreyer, Three Months Later…

My goal for the last few years has been to review 10% of the titles read. I did it last year, nearly did it the year before.

By now, that would be about 24 reviews for 2025. And I am at 12 reviews.

So can I go for broke and do 12 more in 2 months? (I could add to the count one line raves at AO3. Hardly equivalent.) To keep pacing under my own control, I could do the remainder here, rather than a magazine that may plan 6 months or a year ahead. Am I talking to myself? Very well, I am talking with myself.

The point of reading, writing, reviewing, living is the exploration and engagement, the being present and attentive, not the numbers racked up. (Kind of sounds like a relationship instead of collecting followers online doesn’t it. )

I want to go deeper rather than bigger.

I have been doing my small press since 2007. (That means it’s an adult press as of November.) I have been doing a reader’s log since 2012. Next year will be 14 years.

It’s funny how there are no constants in this chaotic universe. Sure, spiders have 8 legs, except when they’ve lost 3 and continue on. Water freezes at 0 degrees, unless salty. I read Feel Happier in nine seconds: poems by Linda Besner (Coach House, 2017) and I couldn’t enter it. I return the better part of a decade later and it isn’t hard. I has a sort of Eunoia about it. Constraints cinched hard. Still a pointing.

I read To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024) and was utterly wowed. How hadn’t read this before? Except I had 18 months before and it was kinda meh then. I wonder if I should reread Guest Book for People in My Dreams by John Levy (Proper Tales Press, 2024) and it too might improve from very good.

Pearl Pirie, Anniversaries

There’s a never too late writing award for the over 60s, an elder fest somewhere and probably enough silver tagged onto old peoples’ events to heat our homes. 

In my city library there’s also a book display for the ‘ageing well’ festival. Mmm…crafting, menopause, gardening, birdwatching. I approach a woman on the desk with purple hair. We’re around the same age. That stand, I say…..it’s so depressing. She keeps quiet. I go on…brilliant women novelists over 60, poets, artists, actors, singers and musicians….composers, inventors and women of history.  We laugh. She promises to tell the person who’s done the display, gently, that it could be more ambitious. That ‘gently’ is telling. It reminds me of words I researched for age in the historical thesaurus (a place to browse on a par with an old-style, ramshackle charity shop). 

Ripe, wintered, strucken, far, oldish, grey, eld, crusted, long in the tooth, over the hill, grandevous, antiquated and my all-time favourite, badgerly. (Someone once shouted ‘badger’ at me when the stripes on the side of my head appeared and much of the rest of my hair was still dark.) It appears in a poem in A Friable Earth. 

Jackie Wills, Pantywaist looking for work

As a midlife, mid-career writer, it seems like a good time to take a moment and think about the habits and goals I’ve become accustomed to since starting to write and submit in my teens. Am I trying to support myself with my writing (and if so, how do I do that better than I’m doing it now?) Am I trying to reach the right audiences? How do I determine whether I say yes or no to an assignment or request? How do I find the right publisher (because it would be nice to find the right publisher that I could stay with the rest of my writing career?) […]

Our J. Bookwalter’s book club is reading a book that just came out in English translation (but the stories were written and published in the seventies and eighties in Japan), Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. It made me think about Philip K. Dick’s sixties-era Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in that it plumbs strangely prescient subject matter – population collapse vs overpopulation, teens obsessed with screens to the point of violence, and a very 2020’s kind of detachment and way of examining gender and class. It also has things in common with Yoko Ogawa, a Japanese writer I very much admire, and Osamu Dazai’s whose ironic detachment in his many books the 1930s set a standard for Japanese literature. It’s interesting to think what people in the past thought the future would be like – and how much they got right or wrong. I’ve been investigating Solarpunk over the past year, partially because I believe if you can’t imagine a better future, you won’t get one, and the relentless oppressiveness of recent dystopian writings, I’m trying to think of how to write a way to a better future for people and nature. I’m trying to be brave and face some things – like disability and chronic illness – more directly in my writing, and in doing that, to maybe make things better (?)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, October – Trip to Skagit, Application Anxieties and the Mid-Career Writer, Reading Early Cyberpunk

Literature cannot save you, but it can accompany you on the quest for meaning.

Quests send us out into the world, send us through trials, send us into the dark lands of wilderness and despair. Quests teach us that we were really seeking virtue, not gold, true love, not a princess. A quest is a cycle to help us see the world and ourselves afresh. It is a long process of moral reformation. All quest is self-discovery, aspiration, virtue riding in the wilderness.

Shakespeare wrote about the journey of the mind. Elizabeth Bishop wrote of the journey to the interior. Those are the journeys on which great authors are our companions in the struggle. It takes a great deal of reading to go on such a quest of the spirit.

Literature is not trying to save you. It is calling to you. The great works of civilisation are trying to show you your life as a quest for meaning.

A lot of people find themselves midway on the path, wandering the wilderness of the world, and they are now turning to literature.

Good. Welcome. Enchantment is the start of change.

Now the journey begins.

Henry Oliver, Literature can’t save you.

It is night walk season and I don my florescent vest. It is night walk season and for whatever reason, the dried-up river rumbles loud amidst the insect song. Perhaps it is the change in temperature. Perhaps it is the body’s tuning into the dark. With darkness comes more sound. And the pupil—that dark aperture—widens like wells ever-ready to receive a message like a dropped coin. And as my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, rhodopsin is produced in my eyes, promoting night-vision. The racoon or skunk is indeed litter. The intriguing dark hole up ahead on the road that looks like a deep void into the earth—like Wiley Coyote’s convenient trap—is indeed a piece of cardboard. This is the kind of darkness, though, where the coyote trots, head down, between the trees.

Sarah Lada, Make Big Shadows I Can Move In

Tonight I’m trying something new: a fighting game and poetry night for students. They can take turns at 4-player arena battles on Power Stone 2 or team up for 2-player ‘Dramatic Battle’ mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 (both from the recently released Capcom Fighting Collection 2 ). I’m bringing some thematically linked poems for volunteers to read aloud in between bouts. Here they are:

‘Wrestling’ by Louise S. Bevington
‘Duel’ by Helena Nelson
‘The Boxers’ by Michael Longley
‘Last Round’ by Kim Addonizio
‘Sonnets to Morpheus [“I know kung fu”]’ by John Beer
‘Elegy for Bruce Lee’ by W. Todd Kaneko
‘Fist of the North Star’ by Kayo Chingonyi (available/first published in Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge!)
‘To fight aloud is very brave’ by Emily Dickinson
‘Duellum’ (‘The Duel’) by Baudelaire (I’ve picked the LeClercq translation)
‘Mortal Combat’ by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Jon Stone, VS. Night Mini-Anthology

I’m so jet lagged I should have a lock on my laptop right now. Writing exhausted and with my internal clock set to no discernible time zone at all is probably not advisable. And yet, here we are! Bear with me.

I spent the last week in Greece at Rosemary’s House, mentoring a cohort of writers—poets, memoirists, essayists, and fiction writers—and eating more feta than one human should ingest in an eight-day period. I highly recommend both. Working with writers across genres is a joy and a privilege no matter where I am, but doing that work in such a beautiful place, with such a supportive group? I kept turning to my friend Megan Stielstra and saying, “This is work,” to remind myself.

It was work, and it was pleasure, and I hope to be back.

Maggie Smith, On Growing Up & Leaning In

More often than seems sensible, I dwell on comparisons between building and poetry. That there is poetry in these bricks is undeniable. They might carry a faded provenance of lime-wash, or azulete; the lime tinted with washing blue, said to keep away flies and the evil eye. (There’s a window surround in azulete in the photo of my house above, also flat bricks forming the sill and capping the buttress at the foot of the wall).

Sometimes the brick might be blackened from a fire surround or even a chimney, and cutting them with an angle grinder releases the scent of an ancient fire to rise with the dust. The unmistakeable sweet vanillin smell of oak is pungent and lingering and occasionally, if the sun falls on one of these faintly charred bricks, I might catch the whiff of another home’s hearth. I wonder what was said around it, and in which language, or languages. […]

So many bricks and tiles, so many words and so many people, been and gone. At a zoom poetry event, a poet remarked rather pointedly that she thought using a foreign language in a poem was ‘showing off’ and I was a little taken aback. I did think about this on and off for quite a while, concluding I was and am happy to throw in Spanish, Catalan, Ladino or even Arabic words into poetry. It means I get to do things like rhyme ‘ever’ with ‘cueva’ and because as someone pointed out, these languages are a part of my ‘lived experience’. Just like the bricks and the roof tiles and the honey-coloured stone, they are the linguistic palette of the land and its lingering traces. They are the raw material from which the words arise, passed hand to hand through Roman Hispania, or the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, proudly Mudéjar, a product of Teruel, where I live. I may be English, but here in Spain, when our heads settle into their pillows to rest and dream, they are still cradled through the night by the almohada, from the Hispanic Arabic: al-Muhádda.

james mcconachie, Mudéjar

This week, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis was published by Faber & Faber. It contains uncollected and unpublished poems, and extensive notes on the writing and publication of Heaney’s twelve collections. For anyone who grew up reading Heaney, as I did, it’s an addictive, behind-the-scenes kind of volume. Here are some notes on what I’ve found so far. […]

One of Heaney’s strokes of luck as a poet was to be taught in schools for decades. Next year, however, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of an incident that almost got him cancelled in the right-wing press. In 1976, an “outraged mother” from Suffolk wrote to her local Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, to complain that the “The Early Purges” had been set as an “unseen” poem that year. It describes the drowning of unwanted kittens as a coldly practical matter on the family farm:

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, “the scraggy wee shits”,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound

Griffiths contacted the Daily Telegraph, who obligingly ran with the headline “POEM FOR O-LEVEL ‘SICK’”, and — in a different kind of sic — identified the poet responsible as “Sean Heany”.

What I like most about this episode— apart from the fact that a secondary school exam board was willing to set an unseen poem that contained (as the Telegraph put it) “language not encouraged in most homes” — is the calm indifference with which the head of the exam board, Dr. F. Wyld, responded to the trouble-making politician:

Dr. Wyld said: “I replied to Mr. Griffiths pointing out that the function of examination boards is to examine. We try to test candidates fairly, without giving offence, and I am sorry that we seem to have given offence in this case.”

As for Mr. Heany [sic], Dr. Wyld said: “I have to confess that I have never heard of him. I gather that he is one of the modern poets.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #37: The Melancholy Spouts of Tractors

Performance of Dirty Old Men 

Highly Commended in Forward Prizes 

Best Single Poem – Performed

Thanks to Bad Betty Press for submitting a video of my performance with the Bad Betty crew in Nottingham. Check out the whole list, my poem is in great company, and I’m sending congratulations and appreciation to all. Thanks especially to the judges for sharing this undiluted fury, it is one of the most fierce protest poems in the With Love, Grief and Fury collection. Huge thanks to Bad Betty, Amy and Jake, for this surprise, for their support and outstanding contribution to poetry as a whole.

On a personal note – I feel heavy-hearted taking any praise and applause for this particular poem. It was written a while back now, however, today we see the dirtiest of Dirty Old Men gaining more power, wealth, votes and momentum, whilst lying to our faces, stripping human rights and profiteering in the deaths of people and planet. 

Salena Godden, With Love, Grief and Fury

In Jonson’s poem, it is not the ‘balanced mind’ of self-knowledge and equanimity that proves reliable, but death itself; the final lines of the English epigram are a moving variation upon the structure of the Latin ending: ‘Which shows, wherever death doth please t’appear, / Seas, serenes, swords, shot, sickness, all are there.’

The emphasis upon the location (wherever . . . there) rather than, as we might rather expect, the unanticipated timing of death connects the end of the epigram with Horace’s point about the unimportance of location for virtue and wisdom. But this insiginificance, which is offered as a source of comfort for Bullatius, is the root of Jonson’s sorrow and loss: when death strikes home, it makes no difference where we are.

Jonson very often used Horace’s epistles as the starting point for poems about friendship, and the epistle to which he returns more often than any other is not in fact the quite brief 1.11 but the much longer Epistles 1.18, addressed to Lollius, which is concerned with how the poet should handle and relate to powerful friends — how to find the delicate mid-point between respect and honesty. […]

It’s been rather a trying week here in Paris. My husband and I are both bogged down in seemingly endless and fruitless domestic admin; two of us (including me) have been unwell on and off all week; and French politics has become completely absurd — comedic, very distracting, and also a bit worrying. But as Jonson, Horace, or Roe would all have said, whatever else is going on, there is always one thing that you can do: my constant mind, I will prepare myself.

Victoria Moul, When I am down at Hackney Brook

You worked as a chemical engineer, a biomedical scientist, and a forensic scientist. I think that’s impressive. Let’s start with chemical engineering.  What kind of chemicals did you work with? What are some key things you’ve learned about this career field? How has your work as a chemical engineer informed your lifestyle, life perspectives, and your poetry?

Instead of listing chemicals, let me offer a metaphor: the haiku mind as a chemical plant. The real estate (including the reaction vessel) is the mind. The reactants are images, memories, kigo, cutting words. The catalyst is a flash of insight or a prompt. The reaction vessel—the brain—responds under pressure (a deadline) and temperature (mood). The distillation column is editing. We purify the product, strip the excess, and maybe collect unused images as reflux for later use. My professors might groan, but haiku really is a high-purity product.

As a biomedical scientist, what were your specialties? What did you enjoy the most about working as a biomedical scientist? What were some of the challenges? How has your work as a biomedical scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?

I was often tasked with translating technical ideas into plain language. One job involved a 10-year modernization plan for fifteen hospitals during the early days of digital radiography—when some physicians still thought it was witchcraft. Another project developed a handheld molecular biology tool to identify pathogens in hours, not days—this was before most medical schools even taught the technology.

As an occupational health consultant, I observed hundreds of industrial processes, assessed health risks, and translated findings into terms both workers and managers could understand. It was all about clarity and credibility—skills that carry into poetry.

What inspired you to work as a forensic scientist? What did you enjoy the most about this position? What were some of the challenges? What are the key things you learned? How has your work as a forensic scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?

Forensics focuses on trace evidence, attribution, comparison. Did the dyed hair come from a suspect? Is that chemical from the scene or just background contamination?

Locard’s Exchange Principle teaches that when two things meet, something is transferred. That’s haiku. You step into nature, and you carry something away—in memory, in your boots, in your notebook. Hopefully, nature is okay with what we leave behind.

Jacob D. Salzer, Richard L. Matta

They are circling, as they do. Something is dead somewhere in the neighborhood. Or dying. So as much as I like these giant hideous creatures whose very existence thrills me with their alienness, they also seem foreboding. Death is nigh. And, of course, it is. It always is. But with their wingspan and their wattley heads and knobby knees they are so damnably alive, these guys. I thrill to the juxtaposition: life/death, hunger/dying, “civilized” streets/wild life, my earthbound body/their unlikely grace in flight. Turkey vultures jolt me out of my earthbound concerns, sneer at my little anxieties. And in so doing, relieve me, for a moment, of the claustrophobia of my me-centered vision and my you-centered fears, and open for me the sky, where eternity drifts like mares’ tail clouds and peace abides in blue.

Here is a lovely and taut poem by Bertha Rogers, also a vulture appreciator. 

Marilyn McCabe, most exalted fixture, an angel

Some readers of this publication will have been wondering when a Lynda Hull poem would appear, so vast and long has been my adoration of this poet, and since another reader casually asked me today when she’d see the next post, and it happens that I once attempted to order said reader a copy of Hull’s Collected Poems1 as a birthday gift only for it to never materialize, the time, it seems, for Lynda Hull is nigh. I’ve been relearning, these days, to not ignore auspicious signs, even when it means I might embarrass myself by publicly declaiming that in fact I do still adore the work of Lynda Hull, and you may roll your eyes all you want. She is not the reason I started writing poems, but she may well be the reason I never fell out of love with them. What I’m saying is, I’d like to be her when I grow up.

Hull is a poet of furious intensity and lyricism, fiercely engaged with the social world at both the micro- and macrocosmic level. Her work is driven by an intoxicating tangle of sorrow and praise, reverence and despair. She is an ecstatic elegiac, or an elegiac ecstatic, and her too-short life left Planet Earth with just three volumes of poetry, each more restlessly felt and original than the last. “The Window” is the last poem in her final collection, The Only World, which was published after her death in 1994. She was forty years old. I am a little stunned tonight to realize, for the first time, that I have outlived her. I guess I’ll have to be myself when I grow up instead.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Window” by Lynda Hull

This week a friend introduced me to a quote by Walter Benjamin about his idea of the Angel of History, the being who surveys and weighs the actions of the past. It is only a slice of Benjamin’s vignette, but here are the select lines he sent:

‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe…’

The extract almost shivered on the first reading, possessing that little vibration common to all things that are alive. Benjamin was said to have been inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), that odd and not entirely appealing monoprint. Reading the extract, I was reminded how we are always looking for ways to understand the past, and this figure felt instantaneously apt; I imagined it large and looming over all our important incidents.

For me at least, the resonance was only momentary, and I found by the second reading of the lines that my heart disagreed. Would any Angel of History really see overarching catastrophe? I have my doubts. I think it is the human habit, rather than any angel’s, to see catastrophe everywhere.

How would I alter the line? I would risk outlining it as this: ‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of catastrophes, he sees one single act of…’ What? Beauty? Grace? Something like this? I think so.

The terror is that this angel would see a chain-link of sadness after sadness and would perceive not a whole sorrow. How incomprehensible to us. This is the terror, and the hope – that all this suffering is not just suffering. 

Niall Campbell, On What The Angel of History Might See

stars pound on the roof but no one hears.

a lost soul settles to the benthic floor. polished

darkness. weight of silence. have mercy.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Erasing Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s metaphysical classic A Thousand Plateaus page by page, until only tanka and haiku remain. Follow Deleuzian Haiku on BlueSky for regular updates.

“All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities. The plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills, [while] flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency, regardless of their number of dimensions.” (D&G, p9) […]

16

speak:
transformed by a line
of ants

[…]

18

microfascisms
just waiting to crystallize . . .
i become cat

Dick Whyte, Delezuian Erasure Haiku Vol. 2

When I was a teen, I used to sneak out of the house and play music in the woods or, especially, at the loading dock of the local mall because I loved the echoey sound and the sense of being alone, “out there,” playing music as if I were Sonny Rollins on the Brooklyn Bridge or some other improviser reckoning with self and the numinous. Later, I’d play in the outdoor concert hall at my arts high school. In fact, the night before graduation, a friend and I snuck out of our dorms at 3am and I played saxophone and he played the organ which was set up for the ceremony. Badasses, I know. I love playing music at night, and especially outside. I still do this, sometimes playing under the bridge to the 403 Highway near me. I like the susurration of the cars above and the otherwise stillness of the night.

Gary Barwin, Playing Music at Night under the Bridge

Never mind the half moons of cemetery dirt beneath its fingernails. Now, time means you no harm.

Those late-night drives when a familiar voice and a cup of coffee get you so much further down the line.

Up ahead,

a sign reads, You Are Here,

but you know there are still many miles left to go.

Rich Ferguson, Just One of the Many Adventures St. Christopher Remembers

In the distance, lakes black
as tar; the clang of instruments for binding

and shattering. The harp of the world
is strung to the point of breaking.

What hope there might be is a small
bubble, a spacecraft with limited seating.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Last Judgment

I’m becoming a real fan of poetry read aloud.  I love to hear words animated.  Silence falls, and the voice, with its hypnotic or musical or walking tones, steps in. Now that I’ve had the chance to read several times from “Diaspora of Things,” I’m fascinated.  Self-conscious at the start, I was careful to put emphasis here, pause between stanzas where I penciled in “pause.”  Then I slid into a rhythm.  The words took over, released from the page.  I hoped those words, riding on the point of a vibrating arrow, attached to wings, knew how to do what they do.  

Homer called it, “winged words,” how poetry is in flight and comes alive, like airborne birds, like carrier pigeons, conveying meaning and power.  In Hebrew, words and things are conveyed by the same word – devar.  In “Diaspora,” things become released “from the gaze of possession” – so why not words?  If they pierce the reader, go directly from one inner self to another, I ask for nothing more. 

Jill Pearlman, Poetry’s “Winged Words”

the cold finale
of a crime series:
even the softest sofa becomes
uncomfortable, unidentified,
a simple thing

Kati Mohr, Oración de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes

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

九月尽く雨の匂いの象を見に　菅井美奈子

kugatsu tsuku ame no nioi no zō o mini

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

                                                Minako Sugai

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Fragile rejoicing – songs for Sukkot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No hill, no poem. I can believe it.

Jeremy Wikeley, Walking with Keats

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

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

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

james mcconachie, Biophony

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ren Powell, Too Many Metaphors

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

Jim Young, the masque

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Lost, happy, and at home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salena Godden, Skin

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

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

Everything just beyond is bright morning—

coffee brewing, journaling,

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

Rich Ferguson, What the Day Does in Some Places

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rita Ott Ramstad, What feeds us

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

Robin Gow, 10/3

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, September Reads

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

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

Sue Finch, PLAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, Reader’s Block

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

Paul Tobin, SIDESWIPE

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, BRIAN PATTEN (1946-2025)

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

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

from  “Sight Lines” by Arthur Sze

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

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

JoAnne Growney, The Geometry of Verse

“Where to begin.”

To quote Renata Adler.

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Bob Creeley’s LOVE.

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

rob mclennan, Susan Howe, Penitential Cries

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, On confidence and self-consciousness in poetry

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

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

Edmund Prestwich, Tolkien’s Lament for Boromir

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

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

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

Don Paterson, Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’

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

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

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

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

I watch you solder bits to a motherboard

This body, a country with no maps

Some days the backyard garden explodes

I keep the quilts made by a spinster aunt.

—–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear willow
you keep our secrets
in your hollow
heart

Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Sideways Suicide” by Michael Burkard

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

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

The poem ends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Poetry Versus Propaganda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The sky in the dock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Mutton Bone Doll

This week: listener poets, an undocumented sun, a mind full of scorpions, the whisper between things, and much more. Enjoy.

I met a poem that left without
saying a word. I still remember it by heart.

Somewhere between the lake and
the glass house on a nothing afternoon
in Lalbagh, a peepal tree fell.
Four dozen people never
heard it. Never looked up from
their phones. Did the tree fall?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Late dirge for the undead

TGLP is a nonprofit that works with hospitals and other healthcare organizations to reduce stress, anxiety, and burnout, and to increase human connection, using the tools of listening and poetry. The organization has been doing listener poet sessions since 2018 at places like Sibley Memorial Hospital at Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care. TGLP works with doctors, nurses, residents, medical students, patients, and family members, all to help people feel heard.

As soon as I heard about this practice, I had to learn more. I’ve been a listener and a poet my whole life, and these modes of being have played significant roles in my career. Being an active listener made me a better journalist, communicator, and leader. Being a poet (even a shy one, of “Barefoot Rank”) has helped me stay attuned to the power and dynamism of language, and it’s made me a better writer and editor. Listening has been an increasingly important part of my spiritual practice in the past decade. […]

The course was a profound experience. Over five weeks in June, ten of us came together twice a week, for three hours each time. Our cohort included a wide range of amazing and talented individuals with deep experience across both poetry and healthcare. Our instructor, Ravenna Raven, led the course with dedication, enthusiasm, expertise, and a terrific sense of emotional availability and vulnerability. She created a welcoming, nurturing, exciting space for learning. […]

We studied poetic techniques, listening skills, how to hold space, trauma-informed practices, crisis management skills, how to connect across difference, and more. We heard from guest speakers, all of them experienced listener poets, who inspired us with stories of healing and writing. We practiced listening to and writing poems for each other and for one remarkable guest, a neurologist with a love of poetry that he longed to share with his patients.

And then, during the course of July, we did a practicum: Each of us held six listening poetry sessions and wrote six poems for six different individuals. I had the honor of spending time with eight amazing “poemees” and writing poems for them (I did two extra because of scheduling complications). It gave me a window into the worlds of those I listened to, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be a therapist, a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain, or just a human being dealing with change, pain, and complexity. And they told me that the poems they received were moving, inspiring, and encouraging.

As for the course’s impact on me, reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry and Singing School and James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line sparked a personal renaissance in how I approach the music and meter of the mostly free verse I write. Learning how to distill interview notes into poems was the transformative practice I was looking for. I know how to hold a conversation, form a connection, and draw people out: I’ve practiced this for years. Now I can use those skills to write poems for them in addition to bylines.

As a listener poet, I can use my journalistic and poetic skills together in the service of helping people feel heard and helping them express deep emotions and experiences. Like other listener poets, I can bring gifts of presence and poetry to those who need them. 

Dylan Tweney, When listening and poetry collide

I go to the hospital, come back wired up.
They’re checking what my heart does if I pick up and carry a sack of pig feed,
haul dead branches to the boundary fence, what happens
if I become angry, disappointed, sad, ordinarily happy, ecstatically happy, calm, still.
If I shout. If I sing. In tune, out of tune. If I stay silent. Breathe normally. Hold my breath.
They already know my heart short-circuits and re-routes itself.
They want to check what I remember, what I forget.
They want to check who I’ve avoided, who I’ve embraced.
They want to know about love, faith, politics, education (self or formal).
They want to know how come I earned a living doing what I couldn’t understand.

Bob Mee, WIRED UP, AND OTHER POEMS

This week’s revisit started in the unlikely inspo of a Pinterest account. A user decided it would be amusing to create a stylish and bougie faux child to populate her pages of decor, fashion, and other pins. It was intriguing, the idea of an imaginary kid, let alone one with incredibly unrealistic and elite tastes. As someone who did not plan to have actual children, and who often thinks of writing projects as strange and wordy offspring of sorts, I started writing prose poems that addressed my own mythical daughter, with an eye toward exploring how it feels to be childless by choice in a world that (even more now) finds that unusual. The series of poems wound up being one of my shorter collage zines, first in print, but you can also read an e-version now. Later, it was also included in FEED, which is all about mothers and mothering. 

Kristy Bowen, throwback thursday | impossible objects

the booming of whale song
hooves across the savanna
the screech of a raptor
a breath at sunset
moonsong above
the crackle of a camp fire
the yes of locked eyes
yes
some words reverberate
homeless in the tome of the ear

Jim Young, a poem for Salem’s poem

We have a thing we call consciousness that we think nothing else has. This consciousness should make us “know better,” should make us able to monitor the results of our actions, and change them for the common “good,” to work against “evil,” for the benefit of our species, our environment, our future. But that is not how we, homo so-called sapiens, operate. We are a learning species, but we don’t grasp the lessons.

It feels like the virus also let loose an epidemic of evil. It started with small refusals: to mask, to distance, to take heed, to be careful. But has blown into a worldwide festering of hate and fear, and a glory of violence, of willful ignorance. It is breathtaking, the velocity and breadth of this epidemic, and how meager the efforts against it, we conscious species the world over.

We are the belching spew, cyclical in our disasters.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, they say in French. The more things change, the more they are the same damn thing. Here is a poem from the recent issue of Blackbird.

Marilyn McCabe, teasing out a future that wouldn’t be

An undocumented sun flees gestapo horizon before morning’s first light.

Secret police riddle it with bullets, and the sun falls, sharing its blood-red light.

It’s just past the honeysuckle hour, and the scent hangs like the death of innocence.

Rich Ferguson, Just Past the Honeysuckle Hour

Another piece of bad news (which has to be read through the filter of even worse news, of course) came through—people who applied for the NEA got the notice that their applications would not be read and NEA grants to writers and artists were cancelled. America just keeps getting greater, right?

I have never won an NEA grant—but it seems like another chip at the arts and academia and anyone that might not tow the party line from the Republicans. Writers and artists are notoriously not easy to control, and that’s not okay in Trump’s fascist government, as it hasn’t been with many dictators—Chairman Mao, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot. I had a friend post on Facebook that her lecture at an Air Force academy was cancelled after someone looked up her work online—although the people who invited her were apologetic, they were not in control. So, this government really is afraid of artists’ speech. Standing up to power has always been our job, but now there are more consequences. I posted on Facebook that Trump’s government is going to make all the talent with the means and energy to move leave the country, and someone commented that that was the point. Trump doesn’t want anyone here who dares to criticize.

Even though I’ve been fighting my health problems, I also feel like I’m fighting the anti-art forces as well, like a video game where you fight one boss, and six more appear. You know, writers and artists are already struggling to earn a living in a society that wants its art for free (or created by AI). Every little bit that’s taken away is a little bit of a chance for an artist to breathe easy, financially, for a little bit. I am struggling with how to earn a living as a writer and survive in a society that doesn’t value the sickly, or the disabled, and I am both. I mean, almost all of our writing heroes were sickly—not all, but a lot. I hope to keep writing, keep publishing, keep teaching and reading and mentoring. Maybe my body and my country throw up obstacles that sometimes feel insurmountable. As we head into a new season (though it’s still in the nineties here for some reason), I am looking for hope.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parents Visit and Sibling Visit, Getting Sick Under Stress, and Writers and Artists Dumped by the NEA

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACHIEVE?

A gold medal pings into my mind as the question lands between us in the silence. But I can’t say gold medal because I don’t know exactly what I want it for. My mind pictures me standing there at the award ceremony, bowing my head forward a little in readiness for the presentation. The ribbon brushes my hair, and I feel the warmth of the fingers of the woman transferring the medal as her hands knock against my ears. My head is cumbersome. People with cumbersome heads shouldn’t be getting medals. The applause suddenly feels false, and I didn’t even hear the start of it. I need to hear the beginning of the congratulatory clap. I need to be in the moment. I change my wish. I want a gold medal that fits easily over my head. No, I know what I want… I want a head that fits through the gap in a medal ribbon without causing a kerfuffle for the person handling the ceremony. I want it all to look flawless so everyone remembers me standing on that podium being given a medal. Given, that’s an interesting word. Medals are won not given. Not in a tombola, one in a hundred chance kind of way. You earn a medal by setting a goal and working on it. Over and over again until you are the best you can be. There’s that question again, What would you like to achieve?

Sue Finch, NEW SHOES

My dog told me he had learned eighty-one languages on the internet.

They were Abkhaz, Acehnese, Acholi, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Avar, Awadhi, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Baoulé, Bashkir, Basque, Batak Belarusian, Bemba, Bengali, Betawi, Bhojpuri, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chichewa, Chinese, Chuukese, Chuvash, Corsican, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dhivehi, Dinka, Dogri, Dombe, Dutch, Dyula, Dzongkha, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Fon, French, Frisian, Friulian, Fulani, Ga, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hakha Chin, Hausa, Hawaiian and Hebrew.

He admitted he still had much to learn. Still, it’s impressive, I said. What motived you? The desire, he said, to speak to all living things, whether creature or plant, chancellor or fern. Snails, rocks, tractors, clouds. Of course, what he really said was, Bark bark bark bark! because though I did high school French and a bit of Spanish in college, I never learned language beyond that of my own people, an insular and trepidatious tribe who cleaved to their tongue as if it were both a small fire and the inside of a tank.

Gary Barwin, My dog learned 81 languages on the Internet

Who are the grape poets? What are their grape poems? And is grape poetry possible any more? These are questions people often ask me — at least, I think that’s what they’re asking.

Grape poetry, of course, begins with the classical world. The opening lines of Virgil’s Georgics — here translated by John Dryden — promise us sound advice on growing our own:

What makes a plenteous Harvest, when to turn
The fruitful Soil, and when to sowe the Corn;
The Care of Sheep, of Oxen, and of Kine;
And how to raise on Elms the teeming Vine

[…]

By the Victorian era, the pleasure of eating a bunch of grapes in polite society had become a trial of decorum. Grape scissors were invented for snipping off fruit from a bunch at the table, and a book called The Manners and Tone of Good Society (1879) described how to eat them gracefully, by performing a kind of conjuring trick:

When eating grapes, the half closed hand should be placed to the lips and the stones and skins adroitly allowed to fall into the fingers and quickly placed on the side of the plate, the back of the hand concealing the manoeuvre from view.

It was in such a context of delicacy and restraint that our next grape poet, Christina Rossetti, allowed the young Laura, in Goblin Market (1862), to be led into sensuous temptation by “pellucid grapes without one seed”:

How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.

Had “luscious” and “bushes” ever been rhymed before in the history of English verse? There’s something outrageous here about their casual pairing, which rewrites the more conventional rhyme associated with Laura’s more conventional sister, Lizzie, earlier in the same passage: “Among the brookside rushes, / […] /Lizzie veil’d her blushes”.

Where, though, can we find grape poetry in the modern era? J. Alfred Prufrock doesn’t dare to eat a peach, and there are no grapes to be had in The Waste Land (1922), although there is Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, with his “pocket full of currants” — one of Eliot’s many images of dryness, as well as one of his allusions to classical civilization (the etymology of “currants” takes us back to the ancient Greek city of Corinth).

This allusiveness is, I think, typical of the fate of grape poetry in the twentieth century. Like the plums in William Carlos Williams’ icebox, the grapes of the modern poet are both there and not there. So, Wallace Stevens calls a poem “In the Clear Season of Grapes” (1923), but the only fruit in it is “a platter of pears, / Vermilion smeared over green”. “The clear season of grapes” is, however, the poem’s subtly metonymic way of evoking a specific time and place: early autumn in north-east America (“This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands”), where clear skies produce the “welter of frost” that sweetens the harvest of native grape varieties.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Who Are the Grape Poets?

Because sometimes our days don’t turn out as we planned. Because there are people who go to work every day to help the rest of us navigate the maladies of the body. Because modern pharmaceuticals not only reduce suffering but take us to a place we fondly remember from our youth. And because sometimes a poem is born in the unexpected places in which we find ourselves, I am thrilled to have my poem “Ode to the Emergency Room” published at The Poetry Lighthouse for the month of August. I hope you check it out here: The Poetry Lighthouse.

Carey Taylor, Ode to the Emergency Room

I was going to ask Sarah Corbett for permission to post her poem ‘View of a Badger on the Heights Road’ from her collection, A Perfect Mirror, but I didn’t get round to asking. However, here’s part of the first stanza.

It looks like a clean death, curled as you are
on the verge, almost relaxed, paws folded
over each other, head turned to the side.
Not a trace of earth on you, killed on a night
walk, perhaps, on this treacherous moor road.

++++
I wanted to post this poem because a week or so ago Rachael and I were driving down to Dungeness and I saw a badger on the side of the road (M20, I think) that looked like someone had just pushed over a taxidermied badger. It looked stiff, but untouched.

I was doing some quality Sunday driving, but still didn’t properly register it, so I sort of forgot about the badger until later that night when I picked out my copy of A Perfect Mirror from my TBR* pile. Well, blass me, thass a rumun‘ (Ask a person from Norfolk) I thought when I saw the aforementioned poem on page 15.

Mat Riches, Lodge (49) some dates in your memory

The memory of doing is the memory 
       of exactitude broken up by lapses
in space. I relearn patience folding
       pages into folios, making sure
the grain of paper runs in the same
       direction. I stack them and prepare 
to sew— concentrating as you push the needle
       shaped like a smile into holes I’ve
made with an awl. Between breaths, the noise
       of the world can seem to soften; 
its edges waxed and cut into lengths like
       linen thread. Someone filmed a rare 
golden cicada in the moment it shrugged
       itself loose from its shell, 
and I marveled at such precision. Clean
       seams, tiny beautiful ruffled wings.

Luisa A. Igloria, Memory of Doing

There are lyrical poems in James Fenton’s Out of Danger, and then there are poems that are very nearly song lyrics. Both give pleasure, though arguably pleasure of different kinds. The book has keen observation, social conscience, and musical intelligence in abundance. Are the rhymes worn-out in places, like tires losing their treads? Maybe, but the Philippines and other South Pacific islands provide new rhymes and treads.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a genial, acute, and personable guide to these 50 poems about a range of outward-looking subjects. It is a good snapshot of contemporary Anglo-American verse, with a few oldies thrown in. I did not think that all the poems were as good as Ó Tuama said, but it would be a big surprise if I did. 

Jee Leong Koh, James Fenton’s OUT OF DANGER and Pádraig Ó Tuama’s POETRY UNBOUND

Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon  debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.

With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.

The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic    trekked the sahara     then / mastered roller-blading    next up / i’m   starting   classes   in   mandarin’.

Matthew Paul, On Mary Mulholland’s ‘Stilling Time’

I’m sure there will be many readers whose knowledge of Margaret of Anjou is derived largely from Shakespeare’s histories in which she is portrayed as a hateful, ruthless and unfeminine figure, ‘the she-wolf of France’. In Daughter of Fire (Yaffle, 2025) Lucy Heuschen seeks to rehabilitate Margaret’s image. However, this is more than a poetic biography of a maligned historical figure, by giving voice to a woman of the past Heuschen seeks to explore the nature of womanhood and our society’s treatment of women both then and now.

There is no doubt that this collection is the product of considerable historical knowledge and a prodigious poetic talent. Based on primary historical sources, Heuschen creates a character very different to Shakespeare’s female villain. In Rough Crossing we meet first-hand the fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou travelling to meet her prospective husband, Henry VI. Understandably she is a little bewildered, (‘how is it   I am here/ but not here’) and anxious (‘I tense’); she is in a new strange world (‘his accent makes me laugh’), and yet the poem ends with an assertion of an ambition surprising for one so young, when she says ‘I will/ tame you//my England.’  Note the possessive pronoun, this is a political marriage. She will be a wife and a queen. There is no hesitation: but rather acceptance and determination given emphasis here by the bluntness and simplicity of the statement. 

We see the same ambition in Margaret and Suffolk at the chess board. This is clearly early in her reign. The description of her in the opening stanza is significant: ‘She skulks in her chair/ scowling at the state of play.’ The alliteration gives the verbs here particular emphasis: ‘skulk’ and ‘scowl’. Skulking suggests that Margaret is yet to reveal her true self, and the reason for this and her ‘scowl’ is made clear subsequently. As in the chess game, currently she lacks stratagem. This game is a symbol of her status: at the moment she lacks political skills, understanding of ‘Patterns she should predict, / sacrifices she could make’ and as a consequence ‘She watches him take/ piece after piece.’  It is also the case that the political system is loaded against women: she remarks at the end of the poem ‘It is silly, n’est-ce pas, this rule/ that only the King can leap.’ However, she is not prepared to accept her current position: she wants to learn the rules of the game to become an effective player: ‘She wants to see every move/ laid out to the checkmate.’ In doing so, she will defy the conventions of the time.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Daughter of Fire’ by Lucy Heuschen

Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.

First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy of an Abduction’ – we see the special kind of breadth this gives: a rain of vivid glimpses of domestic life, domestic violence, war, flight, seduction, abduction, rape, sometimes in nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century incarnations, sometimes in a Homeric one, sometimes hovering between, as when a soldier sent to collect a girl – perhaps  Helen of Troy, perhaps a modern trafficking victim – drives past bullet-holed road signs but carries a bow. Breadth, then, is partly a matter of historical range, partly a matter of emotional variety. The poet moves us from scene to scene with a speed that I would call dazzling except that the scenes we move between are so solidly and clearly established in themselves. This combination of speed and clarity depends on the vivid economy of Dugdale’s images and the sureness of her rhythms. What makes it moving is the quiet empathy with which she presents many of her characters, and the way humble lives, sometimes caught in devastating circumstances, are given weight by the epic context and style of various sections.

The impression of breadth and scale also comes from Dugdale’s virtuoso handling of different forms. There are fourteen numbered sections, varying in length from one to nineteen pages. Most are in verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, but II, IV and VII are short drama scripts in prose with stage directions. II – titled ‘In the Rehearsal Room’ – is a brilliantly comic dramatic monologue, spoken by a patronisingly self-satisfied theatre director presumably putting on a play about Troy. VII, a stage or screen passage in which Helen tells her dreams to a bored, then jealous Paris, is equally funny. It’s more haunting than II, though, because other tones are interwoven with the satire, glimmers of wistful yearning and (this being a dialogue, not a monologue) a frustrated desire for communication on Helen’s part. This section, in other words, is much more layered than the second. For readers of ancient Greek literature, there’s even an apparent allusion to one of the most poignant moments in Pindar’s victory odes.

Edmund Prestwich, Sasha Dugdale, The Strongbox – review

It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that [Aonghas] MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’. There were also poems written in Scots and these variants give an insight into what Colin Bramwell here calls ‘the language situation in Scotland’ within which MacNeacail worked all his life. For a number of years, MacNeacail lived and wrote under the anglicised name Angus Nicolson, but always considered himself a tri-lingualist and antagonistic to the kind of divisiveness such a ‘situation’ might give rise to. His natural inclination was democratic, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, and modernist. Now, the collection, beyond (eds. Colin Bramwell with Gerda Stevenson (Shearsman Books, 2024)) gives readers a selection of poems written in English by Aonghas MacNeacail over the past 30 years. One of the implications of the book’s title is his deeply held wish to look ‘beyond’ division, not to anything transcendental (MacNeacail’s focus was always this world, not some other), but to the next term in an on-going dialectical process. One of the little gems from ‘the notebook’, included here, imagines a cup of knowledge, the liquor within, also knowledge, a grain is added and stirred, and the grain then consumes the liquor and continues to ‘grow, root, sprout / find elbows, crack the cup // find clay’.

MacNeacail’s modernism took its key lessons from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Olson, and Creeley and most of the poems here have that fluid, unpunctuated (hence pointed by the breath), often short lined, often indented formal shape we associate with the Black Mountain. He was a member of one of Phillip Hobsbaum’s fertile ‘groups’ (along with Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard) and the advice given was to go back to his roots, to ‘write about what you know’. In part, this took MacNeacail back to his childhood, growing up in Uig, on the Isle of Skye, speaking only Gaelic. It also made it clear what he wanted to escape from: Gerda Stevenson describes this as ‘the confines of the proscriptive Free Church of Scotland’. Several childhood poems, illustrate the stifling force of religion, on his mother, for example, ‘strapped down tightly / by a darkly warding book thick with orders that drove / and hedged her way’ (‘missing’). The church governed education too, the teacher little more than a ‘stern presence’, who demanded ‘psalms / from memory’ (‘crofter, not’).

Martyn Crucefix, Aonghas MacNeacail’s English Language Poems Reviewed

The collection “I Am Not Light” ends in “Openhanded” with a final phrase “at last, my heart is full.” A line that signals a closure. However there’s a further section labelled “Bonus Poems” – as if poetry books get to do an encore – among which is “Scorpions” inspired by a quote from Macbeth, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” and the scorpions,

They travel the weave of fine veins
padding cushions of shame
with vesicles of acute remembering:
predators of opportunity
inebriated by time ̶
dark and sweet and threatening.

The metaphorical scorpions roam into recesses of buried memory, bring shame to the surface but these are offerings of darker emotions and events to facilitate learning and understanding. It returns to the collection’s theme of meeting life full-on.

Louise Machen’s poems are full of life, positives, negatives and the need to experience. Decorum may be limiting and caution is not recommended. “I Am Not Light” is not light and cheerful, although there is some wry, observational humour, and it unapologetically explores the darker side of human life, the break-ups, a miscarriage, grief and bereavement while offering a torch so the end of the tunnel can be seen.

Emma Lee, “I Am Not Light” Louise Machen (Black Bough Press) – book review

The Madrid Review is out at the end of August. Excited to see some of my poetry translated into Spanish in this edition. At the heart of this edition are Poems for Palestine – a poignant, powerful series of poems written by poets from around the world, addressed directly to the people of Palestine and Ukraine. These poems speak with urgency and compassion, weaving together voices of solidarity, hope, grief, and resistance. Haia Mohammed, a 22-year-old poet from Gaza whose debut pamphlet, The Age of Olive Trees (Out-Spoken Press) has been lauded for its raw honesty and lyrical strength, helped co-edit the issue and there’s an interview with her too.

Salena Godden, New books

A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight, by Elisa Gabbert:

“But for him it was not an important failure” — this, I think, is the crux of [Auden’s “Musée Des Baux Arts] disaster’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the eye does not behold, it’s not disaster at all.

Gabbert does a deep dive into this poem, which is, nominally, a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

A summary of the poem does not do it justice—it is about the significance of the fact that Icarus’s fall, which Auden uses to represent human suffering on a much larger scale, is a minor, insignificant part of the painting that you would easily miss if the title didn’t tell you to look for it in the lower right hand corner, the point being that the suffering of others is something we have to choose to pay attention to, that it is something we can look away from all too easily. Here are the first few lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

And here are the lines specifically referencing Breughel’s painting:

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;

Gabbert’s digital tour through the poem is well worth paying close attention to. She makes the poem’s underlying mechanics visible and accessible and shows how Auden constructed them to arrive at the poem’s “meaning.” She also illuminates the poem’s ekphrastic nature by uncovering paintings it refers to in addition to the one Auden names. What struck me most, however, and made me want to include her article here is the way her analysis arrives at this:

“Musée des Beaux Arts”…offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason…What the poem really does is ask questions. The truth, we might infer, cannot be told — the truth is always changing; the truth is an ongoing inquiry…It asks us to question our place in the world — to ask what we might be missing…Do we spare a thought for…suffering, or sail calmly on? Moral absolution is available, the poem seems to say. That doesn’t mean we deserve it.

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #45

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts. […]

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

One concern is with poetry’s rescue of discourse, where the poem, or the kind of thinking a poem is, can be a true statement, albeit one that we only very briefly inhabit or are allowed. Recently, I’m invested—to my surprise—in rehabilitating the old quarrel between Shelley and Wordsworth, via Mill, poems of the head vs poems of the heart, to ask: why choose? As in, why is that the choice we are asked to make again and again? There’s (always) questions of what reading is good for; in what ways does poetry do a kind of (moral) philosophizing; interest in humans, their behaviors and reasons (actual, believed), and the lives of creatures.

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

Writers and artists and thinkers I admire tend to believe in some different or other reality, the pursuit and discovery of which language, image, aesthetic expression uniquely allow. Art is a bridge one walks on and toward—an earthy, clumsy substance and a spiritual, extravagant one. It often encodes a personal longing but it’s also social, environmental, historical, political. Who but writers and artists will honor these stubborn, modest, generous dreams?

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hannah Brooks-Motl

Winkles are small molluscs, around the size of a 5 pence coin, and you need to collect them by the hundreds for them to be worth even a small amount. My brother David and I, as the two eldest, took a handle each of the faded, red plastic bucket that served as a receptacle for coal, peat, potatoes – and that day, winkles. My mother would lead the way, holding the hand of a younger brother. When we stopped, it was always her hand that lifted the dark weeds from the face of the rock. I remember she always parted it neatly, up and over. It was graceful and methodical. How an islander might lift the veil of his bride. The action set sandhoppers skittering in the disturbed sand. Sometimes it would uncover green crabs with soft, young shells. But the rock exposed, the purpose was to pick the ten or so winkles from where they hidden beneath the weeds, wetly dark as black pearls.

On that day, approaching one especially large outpost stone, our bucket already half-full, my mother pulled back the seaweed and revealed the large surface of a rock covered completely, every inch, with winkles. Even decades later, they laugh about my reaction – I jumped around the beach proclaiming that we were rich. Of course, we were not.

All children are conscious of their situation. I knew our need not as something necessarily shameful but as a cloud over things. But still, I’d maintain that my reaction was less to do with the potential for being rich and having our problems alleviated, but more to do with that other thing that I have been thinking about, the idea of the world as a place that responds – a place that understands the want or the need of the person, and reacts. Back then, the world was alive – and in more than just the way of animals and plants, lapwings and bog cotton. It was a place that might listen. Now, returning to Uist, it is hard to feel that old belief. Once, it seemed the hard wind blew the body in a certain direction because it was serving as a guide. Now, mostly, the gale is just the gale. That old faith has all but elapsed.

Which brings me to John Ruskin’s definition of a poet as a person to whom things speak. I understand it is a less subscribed-to position. My contemporaries seem admirable as types who follow that idea of Shelley’s, where the poet is the setters of standards and rules, ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I saw Alice Oswald recently and thought about the strength of such a stance. Praise difference, perhaps – I feel my own life lean more towards Ruskin’s definition than Shelley’s. For me – what the poem can be, now and then, rarely and seldomly, seems linked to this act of hearing the world speak back. It hears the whisper between things.

Niall Campbell, On the World That Calls Back

we have one chicken who cracks her own eggs.
i find them, not smashed but with tiny holes.
at first i thought they might be hatching
but i always found the eggs empty of creature.
runny gold yolk. the white, like a fresh halo.
the more i care for animals, the more i am certain
they all write poetry. this is hers, a little fracture
in the dark of the coop.

Robin Gow, a thousand fractures

Even in a world as calamitously greed-ravaged as ours, redeeming beauty may be found outside of our narrow, anthropocentric philosophies. 

But for how much longer? The world has already diminished from that which poets described only decades ago. The ice caps are rapidly shrinking, the soil is blighted and fatigued, and conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of species vanish annually. Meanwhile, those with the power to ameliorate the situation do nothing — unless they make it worse. They’d clearly rather incarcerate the vulnerable, criminalize our joyous differences, wage eternal wars, and weaken our already meager environmental protections. 

What should the nature poet do in times like these? I don’t think any single answer is equal to this question. The tragedy is too immense for an individual to fully grasp. But for what little it’s worth, here’s my answer: perpetually renew people’s love for whatever is left, even as it opens them up to the pain of loss. As we face the destruction of so many things that make life worth living, as we turn paradise into our own unmarked grave, I believe that cultivating an anguished love for the fading world lays the groundwork necessary for whatever change remains possible. 

If we’re to meaningfully reverse course in this eleventh hour, I think one of the first hurdles we have to overcome is the ubiquitous nihilism that breeds inaction. Upon learning of the profound threats to the environment, the power of those reaping short-term benefits, and our culpability in it all, many feel helpless and (understandably) give up, closing off their hearts and looking away. Despair is the thing with feathers, plucked. But loving the world through each loss keeps your skin in the game. It keeps you from letting it all pass undefended and unmourned. It keeps your eyes fixed on what’s happening. By loving the world even as we confront its dying, I believe we can conquer our paralyzing despondency that only serves the status quo.

Writing Nature Poetry as the Earth Dies Screaming – guest post by Joe Roberts (Trish Hopkinson)

Thanks to Devin Kelly’s Ordinary Plots, I have been reading The Inextinguishable, poems by Michael Lavers and it is exactly what I needed right now. There are in fact three poems in the book with the title “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Right there, I’m delighted. Read Lavers for lines like “and since chaos so often wins / let’s demand what we can.” Another poem ends, “This is not an argument or an idea. / It’s just a feeling, and these days feelings / are all I have. Feelings are everything.” And they are, aren’t they?

I was reminded of a post from days gone by on the word “tenderness” and of Galway Kinnell’s line: “The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.’” 

And maybe the secret title behind “The Happiest Day of Your Life” is “Tenderness.” This book felt very human to me at a time when I think we crave the very human more than ever. I would honestly love a book where every single poem is titled “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Please feel free to write it for me.

Shawna Lemay, The Happiest Day of Your Life

Who can say anything definitive about the United States? It is chequered with the complexities of a self-governing people: one nation, perhaps, but not one set of rules or laws. From the condo board to the state legislature to the President there are dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of Americas. Everyone knows this: it is foundational to American culture. And yet, the Americans never tire of telling you this. Every time I write about America, I am reminded of this fact by someone. Even the briefest note, a passing observation about my neighbourhood, elicits the response: “ah, but not everywhere in America.” Perhaps this is what the Americans fear most. It is not tyranny they scent on every breeze, but the fear of being mistaken for their neighbours. […]

On Sunday evening, children fed, wife in bed eating plain crackers, I walked up to the diner and read the paper. I came home through the woods reciting Robert Frost. I saw a rabbit and a series of unfamiliar birds: bright yellow, speckled grey, a flash of red. It was a brief outing, but a splendidly American one. The Washington Post had a good article about how George Washington became America’s first great leader. There is something perfect about the combination of reading the paper in the diner and walking home through some (brief, tame, with a path) woodland.

Henry Oliver, Cigarettes in the pharmacy

This is a good
place for walking. Getting from island to island
absorbs all your attention. Hop from a rounded stone
to a flat one without crushing an orchid or
twisting an ankle, move across a whole field
like this, away from the portal tomb, the sad bones.

“The Burren” was published more than ten years ago in Hampden-Sydney Review, then in my 2015 collection Radioland. I fell in love with the Burren, a karst landscape in the west of Ireland, not far from Galway, during my first trip to that country, and something about the stark beauty of the place helped me move from angry poems about my father’s death to a more peaceful one.

That was a gray, cold June day; on a brilliant August one, the last day of our recent, second trip to Ireland, we revisited the place. In 2025 certain locations, especially the Poulnabrone portal tomb, are much more heavily touristed (I can’t remember it being roped off before). Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, though, and there were lots of quiet places, too. We dodged and hopped through a field of cow poop, for instance, to climb down to the ruins of a twelfth-century church, where a couple of people had tied red rags on trees in hope of healing or some other magic: an ash, a hawthorn. I can’t take long hikes at the moment, between the sprained ankle and sciatica, but I was in good enough shape for short walks, and they were again restorative.

Lesley Wheeler, Hawthorns, bogs, & undersongs

As I rolled out the dough, in a way that I rarely do for just myself, I thought of that quote attributed to Martin Luther, about the world ending tomorrow.  I thought, if the world was ending tomorrow, I’d be making these kind of luxurious pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

I looked up the Martin Luther quote, ignored the debate over whether or not Luther actually said such a thing, and found a quote at an environmental stewardship website:  “As the story goes, when Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he answered, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’”

I thought, if the world were to end tomorrow, I would make a batch of cinnamon rolls–two batches, one for today, and one for tomorrow.

I decided to use extra pecans and sugar because my friend was coming over for coffee, and a poem started to sprout in my brain.  I wrote down these lines:
If the world was on schedule to end
tomorrow, some of us would plant
an apple tree. Others would spend
the evening phoning every friend.

I would make two pans
of cinnamon rolls, one for tonight,
and one for the morning of the day
the world was on schedule to end.

I wrote a few more stanzas and let the poem sit (or rise, perhaps) overnight.  This morning, I added another line here or there, and I’ll let it sit longer.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Cinnamon Roll at the End of the World

calendar
only now

wristwatch
only now

this moment
only now

drop of rain
only now

cat stretches
only now

Jason Crane, POEM: only now

It seems to me that one path forward for each of us is to examine our own innocence and the reasons and ways in which we shy away from being more inclusive, open, and generous. We can begin to take small steps toward an embrace of “radical hospitality” and to learn from those who are not like us. We should neither waste time mourning the loss of programs and protections, nor wait for the large systems to correct themselves; it is up to each one of us to do what we can to make a better world in the spaces closest to us, here and now.

Beth Adams, Radical Hospitality

I’ve been aghast these many months
the months bunch up, 
like a patient upon a table
anesthetized, 
on half-burned grass, 
aghast again, at August’s end

So many months with broken breath, 
now snot rags, ragweed,
wheezing; the peeved grass,
having lost what was naïve
also clotted in a sneeze

but think, the patient, I, anesthetized,
might salvage breath for what’s ahead
the ghast extending out in time 
to breathe, to lay a hand upon a head
to pay respect to a flattened bird
the breath to bike around its head
the rag we hold, so dear, to make it
last, to count no matter what

Jill Pearlman, Aghast

This week: a green snake, the sound of a lawnmower, worms without mouths or stomachs, a protest dance, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s the time of year when, according to the lunisolar calendar, we move from 小暑 xiǎoshǔ–when the heat begins to get unbearable–to 大暑 dàshǔ, the hottest time of the year. It may also be the greenest time: my garden suddenly plumps out huge squash leaves, giant sunflowers, masses of beans, zinnias, basil. The tomatoes are finally burgeoning after a late start. It’s too hot to spend much time weeding and pruning: I harvest what I can and retreat to the shade as soon as possible, where I can read. […]

I’ve been taking a break from reading poetry, though that wasn’t planned on my part. July brought a wedding, a death, and some travel; and now, in the intense summer doldrums, I prefer to read for entertainment or information, or just to pass the time. Poetry takes more brain and heart space for me, more “intentionality” or concentration, than most non-fiction books or novels do. This is not to say any other genre is less demanding in and of itself. It’s a personal quirk: I am more attentive when reading poetry than I am when I read other forms of literature, probably because I’m unconsciously (or consciously) endeavoring to learn something of the craft and style and context of poems by other poets. It’s a method of processing how to write poems. But as I have no plans to write fiction or non-fiction, I read such genres for entirely different reasons.

Usually I try to read outside on the porch, in the hammock, on the garden swing. Some days it is just too damned hot and humid, though, and I resort to the air-conditioning indoors. The indoor climate has no flies or gnats but also no bird songs, cicada hums, cricket calls, breezes, scents of summer.

Ann E. Michael, Reading in shade

Soon it will be time to read something new–I got Alison Bechdel’s latest book from the library last night.  But in some ways, it will be a return to the old.  Sure it’s not officially the dykes to look out for who are all grown up now.  But I suspect it will be like visiting old college friends.

I am hoping that much of my autumn will feel like revisiting old literary friends from college days.  I spent part of this week trying to remember the name of a book that came out when I was last teaching this literature, a book about the women of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle.  Yesterday it just popped into my head:  A Passionate Sisterhood.  And lo and behold, the public library has it!  I’ve requested it and should be able to get it before I need to teach the material.

I remember loving it so much that I bought my own copy back in the early days of this century and promptly never taught that literature of the early days of the British Romantic era much again.  Did I keep the book when we moved 3 years ago?  I can imagine thinking my days of teaching that literature had come and gone and getting rid of it.  I can also imagine that I kept it for sentimental reasons.

I am wondering if this fall will also feel like a time when I meet up with my old creative writing self.  Clearly I am not going to write a novel–or even take notes on a novel–this summer.  But maybe teaching a creative writing class will inspire me in new ways, or in old ways.  I’d be grateful for either.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Last Saturday in July: Saturday Snippets

We’ve reached that strange mid-point of summer when I start to long for fall. It’s usually around the time the heat and the humidity gets untenable and inhospitable to being outside much at all. I start to long for rainy afternoons, chilly air, and hot beverages all day long (not just coffee in the AM.) Start to long for pastries and dishes involving apples and pumpkins and cranberries. Fall makes me long for various serious projects and very serious poeting after dallying much of the summer, even if this summer has been productive for getting poems on the page. I am rounding a corner on the CLOVEN series of Iphigenia/myth inspired poems and nearing the end, I can feel it. Possibly before September if I keep at it. There is still traces of summer left to grasp, however, so I intend to enjoy the cool of the A/C at my back in front of the window while I write, icy afternoon cocktails courtesy of the wedding gift blender, and occasional outings into the heat.

Kristy Bowen, July Paper Boat

I often think of Paul Celan while walking alongside the Seine that, in the summer, smells like fish, sweat, and rotting apples. One can look at the green of the river and imagine the countless bodies that have fallen in it or will fall in it in the future, or one can also try to guess how many of the people sitting there, with their feet dangling above the dark greenness while drinking beer or wine, have imagined falling in it. It’s not because the Seine is particularly reminiscent of death but there is something sinister about a green snake eating its way through an almost ancient beige city, a hungry void. When I first came to Paris, almost 10 years ago, I remember a young man flashing his naked butt to tourists floating on the Seine river cruise holding their glasses of cheap champagne, erupting in laughter.

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People

I walk in the pale hollow woods
and find a poem hanging in the trees—
did I make it out of the generative engine
that is my mind or does poetry exist out there,
waiting for me to process it? Where does thought end
and language begin: heart, veins, throat, tongue?

Ruth Lexton, The Work of Poetry in The Age of Large Language Models

I began this week with yet another “thank you but no thankyou” response to a pamphlet competition. It’s tough to keep “plugging away” at this, and to challenge the thought that I’m just not good enough. Then I remind myself that this group of poems has been longlisted in a major magazine, shortlisted by a respected publisher and highly commended in a well-regarded prize. There is something there – but it’s hiding.

Back to the drawing board I go. I read the book as a whole, rather than focusing on individual poems and allow my impulses to guide me as to which poems don’t quite fit. I cut them, read again and think about what is missing. This pamphlet is a story, a journey and as I’m cutting and reworking I realise I’ve been trying to cram two themes into one book. Rather than start at the beginning and consider what I want this book to be, I’ve started halfway through; I’ve taken a group of poems I like and tried to shoehorn them into a single concept. The end result was a group of poems that kind of fit, but unless you live in my head the thread is a bit jumbled. I’m confident in the poems (as much as one ever can be) and feel that I’ve made something that works as a whole and sent it back out into the somewhat narrow world of poetry. Apparently the average number of rejections for a book before publication is 15 so there is still plenty of hope. We will see.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, An aha moment for my latest work in progress.

I fell off my meditation cushion
like theology without underpinning.

I was so delighted by the sound
of a lawnmower I forgot how to walk.

I wrestled with an angel all night,
clung until they blessed me.

Rachel Barenblat, I Came Home from the Meditation Retreat With A Black Eye

On Roaring 20s Radio we try our best to share a brilliant and diverse mix of new discoveries, bold new voices, exciting indie outsiders, and some of the more mainstream big names too. When choosing books for these lists, I often boost writers that I meet on my adventures, at poetry events and book festivals, and I also select hot books to preorder from my towering proof piles. Roaring 20s Radio champions poets and indie publishers, artists and writers that are smashing through the silence, that shine a light on the here and now, there are so many courageous people and organisations that we include and love and admire. […]

Oh Big Blue

The poems in this collection were written and illustrated by children aged 9 to 17 from Palestine. They are some of the Palestinian entries from the 2024 Hands Up Project poetry competition. They are presented in the form in which they were originally received, with a foreword by Alice and Peter Oswald.

The title of the collection was taken from one of the competition entries, a poem by 13-year-old Joud Isleem, who wrote: “Oh great sea, oh big blue! Take my dreams and bring me hope.” These are poems written by children, written in a second language, written from the centre of impossibility, written under bombardment, written with no water, written with no internet, written in a notebook and decorated with butterflies and sometimes decorated with blood. They show the beauty of the world, even in impossible circumstances.

Salena Godden, Roaring 20s Radio: book recommendations

[George] Szirtes’ first full collection, The Slant Door, won the Faber Memorial Prize in 1979, he won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2004 (for Reel), and in between he was one of the ‘Oxford Poets’. After the Oxford Poets series closed, he switched to Bloodaxe, and they published a New and Collected Poems in 2008. Just last year he was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for poetry. Recently I read a fascinating interview with him about his cultural and linguistic identity (he moved to England from Budapest when he was eight), and you can read a few of his poems — mostly from the more recent collections — on the Poetry Foundation website. As well as his own poetry, he has published many translations from Hungarian.

Alongside all this, he regularly posts poems or fragments of poems on Twitter — including, for instance, a villanelle on the spectacularly vulgar wedding of Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos last month in Venice […]

Szirtes’ conventionally published poems are unquestionably much better than most of the Twitter poetry. On the other hand, a literary culture without occasional verse — verse as part of the cultural response to events as they happen — is surely a dead one. I rather admire the courage and humility of as good a poet as Szirtes being happy to put his ‘first thoughts’ out there in this way, and by following his account as well as his published work you could certainly learn a lot about that mysterious transition from an early draft to a finished poem. I think how we feel about this gets in interesting ways at our ideas about poetry as a craft or art: should the poet be working away privately and only allowing “out” the most polished work or should they be putting communication first, encouraging engagement and response by circulating drafts as they are written and letting us into the workshop?

Victoria Moul, The poetic tweet

There’s always a blue door in our dreams,
in our former lives.

A cerulean blue door, with wooden slats 
held by a small hook in the white plastered wall.  

It opens, closes and opens, screeching like a sick
owl, such are the vagaries of age. 

Jill Pearlman, The Blue Door in our Dreams

This is the second poetry/art book to come into my life recently.
Once again, a perfect marriage of word and image. The twelve short poems are by Beau Beausoleil, who shares his daily poems with friends worldwide by email. In the last year, recovering from illness, he has been taking therapeutic walks in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere in his neighbourhood, and giving fresh attention to the world of nature as it intersects with the human sphere. In Poet as Naturalist, the poems are paired with Nanilee Robarge’s very appealing semi-abstract paintings and collages. Each double-page spread balances an image with a poem. Almost every poem begins as an observation, often quite straightforward: …I look up … too late/ to see the bird fly/ by the kitchen windows/ seeing only its quick shadow … and ends with a startling, amusing, or profound thought: ... One day/ I too will leave only/ the breath of my shadow/ behind

I’m not a fan of centred poems, but in this context the centering is wholly appropriate. The book is beautifully designed by Robin MIchel, and published in San Francisco by Raven and Wren Press. It is a joy both to handle and to read and re-read.

Ama Bolton, Poet as Naturalist

A whale dies, and once the gasses have left it,
it falls, slowly, to the sea-bed, where it sustains
(nurtures if you prefer) an eco-system.
As it rests under the crush of the sea
worms without mouths or stomachs
whose males live inside the females
consume its bones. It can take centuries.

Anyway, so, I’ve been reading poetry again.

Bob Mee, PERMANENCE

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.

It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.

I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).

Maria Popova, Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness

I think a lot about how time seems to just slowly unfold, not much going on, really, not much changing. Then boom. Something is thrust upon us to which we must react/respond. Allow/manage. Shift to or remain stalwart from. Sometimes we sort of see it coming, like watching a movie. Like we forget this is real life. Until it is undeniable.

I like this poem because of how it depicts the onset of storm as an interesting thing from which we remain detached. I like how it unsettles our confidence, this poem, in what we know or think we know. That chilling moment when we realize, oh…wait…

So many tornados coming. Or wait, no, they’re here.

Marilyn McCabe, pressure change and distant noise

The Bean Eaters is one of the perfect poems. Gwendolyn Brooks won’t need much introduction to American readers, but I don’t think she is well known in England, or at least not as well known as she should be. I found about her in a workshop sometime after I moved to London.1

Then again, one of the things I love about ‘The Bean Eaters’ is that it needs so little introduction. It is a loving, knowing portrait of a couple who don’t have much. The title reminds me of Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. Here they are:

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Everything is reused, both words and their component parts: ‘plain’ is there twice in that third line, ‘chipware’ calls back to ‘flatware’. The original rhyme is everywhere, so much so that it becomes invisible. The poem is literally economical. It makes do.

Jeremy Wikeley, Twinklings and twinges

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

My first book will always be a reminder to myself that what I have to say matters to someone out in the universe. When I started writing poetry, my wildest dream was that a press would actually take my ridiculous poems about sentient sexy potatoes, Prince, and Predator seriously. I am still amazed that my poems find readers and now that I have a second book out, I am constantly pinching myself that this is my reality. After I finished my first book, American Radiance, which is largely about my family, I promised myself I would move on and write about a new topic. My second book, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, is even more focused on my family. I realized that I’m essentially going to write the same book over and over again, because every poem about my grandmother is ultimately a poem about the moon, and everyone knows how poets feel about the moon.

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

I am drawn to poetry for the privacy. Most of the time, I feel naked writing in prose, and while I love reading novels and essays, I need the distance that the lyric provides, or to put it less poetically, I want to keep my top on. […]

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

I generally avoid prescribing what the role of a writer should be. As a teacher of young writers, I see firsthand the tremendous impact that poems have for helping people understand themselves, and also for understanding others. To me, empathy and poetry are connected in a way that is essential. I teach “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski every year because that poem saved my life; I don’t know what role that gives me as a writer. Mostly, I’m not that different than a person handing out pamphlets on the street. I’m giving you something that has transformed the way I see the world, Maybe you’ll remember a line from this poem when you need it, maybe you’ll immediately throw it into the recycling bin.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Luisa Muradyan (rob mclennan)

grant

a star

its anger

earn

a range

garner

aster

Luisa A. Igloria, Inside the word stranger

I discovered Fanny Howe’s poetry through her Selected Poems, published by University of California Press in 2000. Her previous books – poetry and prose – had been published mostly by small American presses, and described as “experimental.” I didn’t then (and possibly don’t now) have a strong grasp of what constitutes the experimental. But Howe’s early poems were invigoratingly strange to me for how they inhabit a corridor or anteroom between Language Poetry and the lyric. They love the line as a unit of sound and sense; syntactical relationships are clear even when how the referents relate might not be; associations feel spontaneous but not arbitrary, assertive but not labouring to subvert lyric convention. The writing doesn’t appear effortless; the discipline of its attention and choices reminds me of an animal’s stillness as it confirms the origin of a sound or scent (what Howe wrote about Simone Weil’s work, that it’s “tense with effort,” could apply to her own). And as the animal is in that moment, the poems – for all their concerns with justice, with ethics, with others – are, resolutely, alone. They are deeply, naturally, weird.

When I left the west for Toronto, Catholicism was among the things I abandoned. It was, like the landscapes and work I grew up with, thrown into relief against a hyper-urban aestheticised agnosticism whose cathedral, back then, was the bar. Location became inseparable from dislocation. I had just published my first book and felt claustrophobic in my own anecdotes. Despite not really having a style, I wanted to blow it up. The way Howe’s work lingers in the temporary felt spacious, accommodating. The poems don’t make a home of the temporary so much as find its midpoint, wander through its empty house, look out from the middle of it. That this suggests a luxury of time the temporary wouldn’t seem to possess is part of the work’s effect. Time passes differently in the mind. The poems are like gaps that expand in the narrative when we realise that each of us is essentially wandering in our own wilderness.

Often, reading her Selected Poems, I was in over my head. At the same time, phrases, lines, passages would surprise with unpredictable and uncanny accuracy, abstractions articulated with an unsettling precision that’s felt in the way that proximity to a cliff edge is felt.

Karen Solie, What Did You See?

I’ve recently heard 2 female competition judges discourage writers from entering stories about “The 3 Ds” – “Death” (especially of babies), “Dementia” and “Domestic violence” – there are many entries on those themes. Increasingly, the same advice applies when sending to magazines – when the success rates get into the 1% range, and editors need to quickly read 100s of submissions, stories need to stand out, and editors don’t want too many stories on a single theme.

I often try to write stories that are quiet. I’ve even tried to write about middle class families who have middle class problems. The characters are not so content that “happiness writes white” (i.e. you don’t see the white ink on the white paper) but nobody dies, goes mad, or gets hit. In fact, nothing much happens. If artists can do still lifes with apples, grapes and shadows, why can’t I do a story about getting the kids off to school and taking a thoughtful walk back along a stream?

Not only do I leave out dramatic events events, but I’m careful with the language. Any striking phrase/image that comes to mind when I’m writing prose tends to end up in the poem I’m currently writing (which becomes a rag-bag of fireworks at best).

Tim Love, The 3 Ds

The artist is mid-step,
toes of one foot raised
as if he’s debating whether
to go on or turn back.
The gray and the rain are strong.
The stomach is stronger.
It’s this, just this,
then back to the tiny studio
crammed wall to wall
with imagination realized;
electricity in the brain transferred
to the hands, to the clay,
to each of us admirers.
But first, coffee.

Jason Crane, POEM: Cartier-Bresson’s Alberto Giacometti Going Out For Breakfast, Paris.

Consider, if you will, that a footprint in peat can last for 25 years, and that peat grows at a rate of 1mm a year. Some of the peat on Walshaw Moor has been growing since the Bronze Age. It is 3000 years old. Once peat is disturbed, it begins to emit carbon, rather than store it. This will be a very dirty wind farm.

The development is opposed by major ecological and heritage organisations, including the RSPB, CPRE – the Countryside Charity, and the Brontë Society. Nevertheless an application for a Development Consent Order (DCO) is expected to be submitted to the Planning Inspectorate in June 2026.

All of which translates to – this existential threat to these extraordinary moors is very real. It comes as a particular shock to the people of Haworth, which relies heavily on its moorland and its Brontë heritage. People began to come to Haworth soon after the death of Charlotte Brontë, the last surviving sister, in 1855. Patrick Brontë, the father of these extraordinary children, was bemusedly dealing with curious visitors until he died in 1861, and Haworth gradually became the literary landmark it is today, now second only to Stratford-on-Avon in terms of visitor numbers. The Brontë Parsonage Museum has over 80,000 visitors every year and Haworth is regarded as the jewel in the tourism crown in West Yorkshire.

Hundreds of local businesses, from the shops and restaurants which line the iconic cobbled Main Street to the hotels, guesthouses and holiday cottages spread across the wider area, thrive as part of the tourist industry. As well as the village, the surrounding moorland attracts people from all over the world who walk up to Top Withens: the signposts, which are written in both English and Japanese, attest to this.

We need clean, green energy. But energy produced built on peat is not green. Energy produced at an irreversible cost to threatened species is not green. Energy produced at an immense cost to Northern communities, only to meet our ever-growing demands for energy, is not justified, nor is it clean.

Tomorrow, we dance in celebration, in protest, and in hope.

Clare Shaw, Actually The World’s Most Wuthering Heights Day

sometimes i wonder if
the humans are wolves. if maybe
we are farther than ever from resurrection.
in the dark of the museum, we howl.
sometimes one of them will hear us.
they’ll stare into the glass until
their skull is one of ours. jaw
& ragged teeth & tar-black bone.

Robin Gow, 404 dire wolf skulls from la brea tar pits

My parents are coming out for a visit in two weeks, and after that, I’m going to a short residency to work on my manuscript, and maybe on some more essays. I’m trying to be more deliberate with the time that I spend and still put time aside for joy, relaxation, and all that stuff we type-A folks are bad at. If I don’t put time aside for rest, I won’t do it. I’ve been writing essays for five weeks, and enjoying it, and even sending some out. I’m waiting to hear back from publishers on my latest poetry manuscript, but I’m wondering if putting together a book of essays might be a smarter way to spend my time. It seems urgent to get voices out about disability, and while both books deal with that subject matter, the essays might be a better choice for a wider audience. We’ll see.

This weekend was the lavender festival at our local lavender garden (JB Family Growers Lavender Farm), and we went both days and had fun, and the weather blessedly cooperated (no rain, but also not crazy hot). I also noted that a lot of my friends and family members are experiencing a melancholy that isn’t specific to one bad thing, but rather a pervasive mood. Maybe that makes sense, politics and plagues and wars are bound to make a dent in our souls, and if they don’t, maybe something’s wrong with us. Walking at sunset in a field of lavender does something good to our nervous systems, or spending time picking blueberries or watching birds and going to the forest. We need to remind ourselves of the good things still in the world, of the possibilities. We need to give ourselves something to fight for.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Change in the Air, Lavender Festivals, and Melancholy

U.S. 1 newspaper is a venerable publication here in the Central New Jersey towns and businesses that line the Route 1 corridor.

Each July, the paper dedicates an issue to the poetry and prose of those who live and/or work in the region, and this year a prose poem of mine is in it. I hope you enjoy it! :- )

Summer Trip

Sitting under a striped beach umbrella, SHE is absorbed in a paperback novel.

Off to the right and closing fast, HE is running toward her at full speed, his eyes fixed on the plaid kite trailing behind him.

Destiny is like a word problem: if one train heads east and another heads west on the same track, will two strangers fall in love at the point of impact?

Shouting a warning that goes unheard, I can’t help but wonder about inexorable forces and immovable objects (and the dubious taste of pairing stripes with plaid).

Bill Waters, U.S. 1 summer fiction issue 2025

July is a month that feels like a long walk in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is normal with beautiful lawns fronting neat homes and the walk moves along at a steady pace. July days are waning, though, and I’m ready for the walk to end so I can hunker down in my sheltering house to wait out August, a month that feels like flailing in the deep end of a pool. August is my least favorite month for many reasons. August 29 this year will be the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I’m contemplating posting some of my (scarce) Katrina-related writing, both published and not. Some days it feels like what I should do but other days I don’t want to review those memories. I’m a little sick of thinking about it still after all these years, to be honest. But sometimes a mood will hit and I’ll write about that time again. Anyway, we’ll see what August brings. I’m not sure anyone is interested in reading about all that now, anyway.

My July Listopia begins with three stellar pieces I read in litmags this month – a prose poem, a microfiction, and a nonfiction. After assembling the links and quotes, I realized they’re all about parents and how they affected the lives of the characters/writers.

Charlotte Hamrick, July Listopia

We sit on the terrace in the pouring
rain with a steaming bowl of Maggi.
There is the spectre of absence.
Of wrongness. As if death is
everywhere. Except here.
As if that is okay.

Gibson’s poem pings in the silence:
“When I left my body, I did not go
away.” I think of Alareer. “If I must
die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”
“Death be not proud,” said John
Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” I
say it aloud to the rain. “Death,
you shall die.” It rains harder. Colder.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, If you say it’s okay

It isn’t easy to know if you are doing anything that matters in the whoosh and rush and pilloried crush, especially in the arts. There is no pause, no gratitude, no real vacations, no bonus, no moment of glory, no pedestal, no island, no floor, no window, no spar, no acknowledgement, no paycheck that gets you ahead, and no way to ever stop. You stay on the merry-go-round. You’re forced to keep proving yourself to keep your work alive.

I met a friend this week who said, “Are you sure you want to keep going? Other presses are closing left and right. You could move to Ireland.”

It is getting hot in Los Angeles. I am no longer sleeping. We have an espresso machine, so I drink too much coffee. Ireland is far away. But despite the impostor syndrome, despite my attention being pulled in a million directions, I want to be a great writer. I want to spend more time on my work. I have always wanted to write something lasting. I have always wanted the great tango of intellect and imagination to be my life. That matters to me.

I still have game. I’m in this. Someday, I’ll feel I belong. I will walk into the room and know how I got there. I won’t have to prove it.

For now, I’m swimming upstream. Above me is waterfall. But I swim. I write. There is no win or lose, I tell myself. I will give it my all. I will save nothing for the swim back.

Kate Gale, Swimming Upstream, Running Uphill: On Belonging

Last fall we had the good luck to be in Florence for a couple of weeks and one of the highlights was visiting the Odeon Theatre and which is now also a Libreria / bookstore. I’m sure I posted about it at the time, but as I began spiralling after looking at the news this weekend (I know you likely know that feeling), I needed to get my brain headed somewhere else, and I thought of the Odeon as a happy place. I was thinking about the instruction to touch grass which is mocked, but hey, it works. And another thing that helps is for me to look at photos of a previous happy place.

So I spent time also reading about ordinary affect theory, affect theory and architecture. Which led me to think about my happy places on this earth. Of which there are many. My study, my backyard. And how weird it is that we might get to be in our happy places at this particular moment in history. And I’ve been thinking about how even so in the past, my brain has broken, being in these places. My goal these days is to protect my own nervous system because what use am I to anyone in a broken state. Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism has said that they are “interested in how people live through historical moments of loss.” We are in the middle of a great shift, ongoingly, and Berlant says that the historical present is “a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions.” And though they wrote this before the present historical moment, they talk about the “urgencies of livlihood” where “futurity” is without assurance. Certainly de-stabilized. And this seems in the face of others’ more life and death situation to be a small thing to complain about, one’s future livlihood. You might be “happily managing things” or “discouraged but maintaining” while others are mentally on the edge.

In catastrophe, in the traumosphere of today, how do we live? I remember reading, during all the unknowns of the early pandemic, Berlant’s words, that we are in a spot “when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust.” It was comforting somehow to feel understood in this way, less alone. All of us in the unknowing, adjusting, adjusting. […]

I think back to all the museums and galleries and libraries I visited in Italy and what drew me to them. Today though I’m thinking about the Odeon in Firenze and the delight of it. I’m remembering the wonderful architecture, the inviting books as you walk in, the colours, the lighting. The fun of seeing what will be on the screen next, the Italian subtitles. Sitting in the seats with a book and a coffee, lifting your head up now and again to see what’s on the screen. The moment of buying the book about the history of the Odeon and finding one of the co-authors worked there and then getting the book signed! That feeling that you were in a special place, one with history, and hope, a future.

Shawna Lemay, Reading Day, Happy Places

Mountain tops, mouths,
romantic languages lingering
In the ears of the blue trees.

But God of distraction,
I’m tired of all the distractions.
The choiceless choosing.

Let me have one moment that rises
over every other desire.
Let it be enough

to stand still, under this one church,
eight hundred images
of Christ suffering.

The pigeons, nailed to their mortal perches.
Lifting into the sun, like petals
blowing open.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Once in Florence

The poet Simonides of Caes was the single survivor of the Thessaly house party in 5th century BC. According to legend, Simonides used his memory to relive the seating arrangement, thus identifying the buried dead beneath the rubble. Ancient Greeks took dreams as oracle, pre-visioning what would come, removing “the terror of the unexpected from the future,” to quote Judith Schalansky. But dreams don’t prepare us for the wind shear of facts. 

Attention to dreams prepares us for the fragmentary, the disconnected, the fantastic, the immaterial. But dreams are not always unconscious— we dream of a world in which we can be whole, or be wholly ourselves without violence and terror. We dream of a world in which our dreams matter, our dreams are material to the conditions of living. In this sense, perfect memory can be a handicap that prevents us from re-membering, or piecing the past back together, by making it impossible to choose among pieces. Like the rich, the house of perfect memory is so big that one feels trapped, one becomes  claustrophobic, in the ordinary, small houses of others. The richness of one’s house ruins the ordinary by estranging us from inhabiting it. One can’t abide in the chaos of unpruned synapses. So we pare things down; we reduce and highlight; we narrate over the gaps.

But poetry, perhaps more than any other mode, calls our attention to the gaps. The field and lineation makes those gaps visible and tangible. And this is the visionary, the radically-threatening possibility of the poem. We mourn when touched by the vestige of an absence, when startled by the echo of a correspondence.  There is something missing. Everything that exists is a ruin waiting to happen once the curator disappears.

Alina Stefanescu, Tsvetaeva in the margins.

like home or history
the body is shrapnel
a fragment

head, arms, legs blown off
only a torso. Rilke writes
it glows, illuminating

everywhere and nowhere
is it rage, or pain, righteousness
or some other radiance?

no. it is only a corpse
but understand: there is no place
that does not see you

Gary Barwin, Not an Archaic Torso of Apollo (for Gaza)

a deep hole opens in my shadow—

a black umbrella turned to ash.

the breath of one risen from the dead climbs out.

Grant Hackett [no title]