This week: a poem with a gun in it, some semblance of silence, kernels of clarity, an obsession with ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.

“Is all poetry about death?” someone asked at a poetry reading recently. Sometimes as I read, it seems that way. But I think all poetry is about uncertainty, insecurity, a whistling in the dark. Is a lot of the insecurity about life’s end? No doubt. No doubt. I try to avoid poems about mortality, although they are ubiquitous. I like the poems that grapple more with the other half of the equation. As Annie Lennox sings, “Dying is easy. It’s living that scares me to death.”

Marilyn McCabe, I should not exclude myself from this

When I was writing ‘No Map Could Show Them’, I was commuting to Leeds every day from my little corner of South Yorkshire. I was working at the university. From my tiny office window, the view was dominated by a tree – I couldn’t tell you what kind, just that in my memory it was aways in autumn plumage. Impossible.

Today I went back to Leeds and walked past my old room. Blue skies, liberatingly blue. An encroaching cold. I didn’t look up in case my ghost was still there at the desk. I carried on, past the School of English towards the sports centre.

There: a poem I wrote a decade ago emblazoned across a series of giant climbing holds, multi-coloured and bright. A poem inspired by Alison Hargreaves. A piece set on Stanage Edge. Its stanzas were intended as a spell of sorts, a plea for days when nothing amazing happens but nothing awful happens either. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

You can now sit on my poem if you want and eat your lunch. I like that. I like the sense of it being overtaken by everyday events, dominated by the mundane or the suddenly important. I like the idea that people might ignore the words entirely, too busy having conversations that matter more. Or less. Or just as much. Or saying nothing, meaning just enough.

Here’s the text of the piece in full:

Prayer

Give us good days.
Days unspectacular but adequate:
the weather neither calm nor wild,
your coat zipped nearly to the top,

a silver thermos cooling in your bag,
the sky at Bamford reddening, as if
embarrassed by its own strange reach
and day-old, pipe-smoke clouds.

Above the Hope cement works,
crows wheel arcs of guarded flight
and when you touch the rock
your fingers hold.

Helen Mort, Is it a poem? Is it a climb? Is it a chair?

When we first moved to South Florida, I didn’t realize how different the seasons would be.  I didn’t miss winter much, and summers seemed similar to South Carolina, but every year I had a fierce yearning for fall.  One year we bought two puzzles, and I still remember the one with the autumnal picture.  It was a nineteenth century town with horses and wagons and a big dance happening in the center of the village.  The trees had the perfect assortment of autumnal leaves and pumpkins dotted the puzzle landscape.

We put that puzzle together in the fall of 2001, when the world felt so topsy-turvy.  It was soothing to put the puzzle together.  

 I was teaching the British literature survey class, and I had Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on my brain–those figures on the urn, forever frozen in whatever emotional moment they experienced right then.  I thought the puzzle offered a similar dynamic.

It’s an interesting spiritual question that Keats poses:  is it better to be forever poised to kiss the beloved?  Is it better to live in the moment of anticipation, rather than having to deal with all the messy humanness that comes after the kiss, once we truly know our beloved?

And there are larger questions posed by both the urn and the poem:  how do we stay in the here and now?  How do we not get distracted by our sorrows?  How do we maintain our faith, in the face of enormous woes?  For me, during that autumn of 2001 that broke our hearts in so many ways, the answer came in the jigsaw puzzle.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Autumn Odes and Puzzles

After months of reading and recording poetry aloud — my own poems and those by beloved poets (Emily Dickinson, Rilke, Sara Teasdale, W.S. Merwin, Teresa of Ávila, and others) — my voice went unexpectedly and inexplicably quiet.

When I look back at this time last year (and the year before that), I experienced something similar, so it might be seasonal. An energy-conserving form of hibernation. A time to reflect rather than speak. […]

Recently, I had a couple of poems accepted by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire for its quarterly publication, Touchstone. The poems are from a chapbook sequence I have been working on about four generations of family history. Touchstone also has an audio edition that will feature contributors’ poems, and Friday is the soft deadline for sending audio files. This means, it is time for me to find my voice again.

Jenevieve Carlyn, “A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall”

Up and down this alley of student rentals,
ritual takes hold of a waning weekend:
late October, Indian summer, ash trees
showering leaf-gold

on back-yardlets churning with youthful bodies,
muscled, sweat-slick, bawdy, lit up with victory,
drunk and singing, roaring the last hurrahs of
Homecoming game day.

Noise, grill smoke, and memory hold the neighbors
spellbound at it all, at the pure unknowing
lifted up in these chesty pop-punk odes and
beery libations—

Maryann Corbett, Kudos, O Victors

Here in London, Autumn is finally here and today my little backyard is exploding with bright orange marigolds that I do not remember planting, but seem to be blooming just in time for Halloween, All Saints Day and for Santa Muerte herself. With these flowers, I feel blessed.

Before I begin I wish to do some shout outs and thank yous to all the superstar poets I have seen since I last wrote, massive thank yous to all I drank rum with and danced and howled at the moon with. Thank you for joyous times down at Arvon and Totleigh Barton, Hastings Book Festival, Morecambe Poetry Festival, The Hastings March for Unity and to stand up and support the RNLI and also the Cable Street 90th Anniversary. Thanks also to Bradley Taylor, the new Poet Laureate of Birmingham, for one of the happiest National Poetry Day nights ever. This seaside photo above is by photographer Richard Davis taken on the seafront at Morecambe Poetry Festival, ahh we had such a lovely long weekend, an epic marathon of poetry and pints, thank you.

Since I last wrote a long substack post, I have spent most of my hours working on the final fiddly tweaks of The Life Of Life. The good news is we have now managed to send the proofs to print, just around the time of Autumn Equinox and the Harvest Moon. My new novel will be in all of your favourite bookshops in time for the Crow Full Moon, Spring Equinox, on March 25 2027. I’m enjoying my book making being back in synch with the moon cycles again.

Salena Godden, Gathering Sweet Octoberries

I went for a swim with Julie the other day. It was cool and blissful – about the same water temperature as the day in spring when I took a call from photographer Alex Ramsay He rang to let me know we’d been offered an opportunity in Salt, Girona, at the Casa De Cultura Les Bernardes (CCLB) to exhibit Os – a collection of Alex’s exquisite black and white photos of bones and my poems written in response.

I took Alex’s call on my Bluetooth earbuds while swimming head-out-of-the-water breaststroke which added to my sense of being translated, suddenly and unexpectedly, into glamour. “This is what it must feel like to be a star,” I thought. 

Everything about our journey to Girona for the launch of the exhibition last month felt like being suspended in good fortune, fun, and generous kindness. We were held up by forces I only partially understand: all travel arrangements made for us; a taxi to meet us at the airport; a fine hotel; dinners of delicious tapas and wine; profound and light-hearted conversations with artists and people who’ve dedicated their lives to bringing the work of artists into collective spaces.

And at the heart of my involvement with Os was collaboration, which for me has been a means of multiplying my creative potential to make more than the sum of the parts I brought to the endeavour. I’ve so enjoyed working with a photographer of such skill and experience – the trip and exhibition were a wonderful bonus.Central to the Os experience at CCLB was seeing my poems translated into Catalan by award-winning translator Jordi Fité – an act of artistic intimacy which I experienced as my poetry being deeply seen. What a privilege to have every word considered, held up to the light, weighed in the palms of someone who is passionate about a language so often persecuted. When I saw my poems in the exhibition space, and heard a couple read aloud at the launch, it felt as if my words had been set to a precious and rare music. 

Liz Lefroy, I Am Translated

Generally speaking, ekphrastic poetry is not my thing, but I was recently invited, along with several other poets, to be part of what sounds like it will be, assuming it gets funded, a very interesting public art project that will combine poetry and painting, and that got me thinking about my first ekphrastic poems, which I wrote, also as part of a public art project, about fifteen years ago. I was one of several poets each of whom were paired with artists associated with the Upstream Gallery. My partner was the artist Allen Hart, who provided me with images of some of his paintings. Most were from a series of paintings of insects. We did not use the two original poems that I wrote, “The Praying Mantis” and “On The Mating Of Rhino Beetles,” which made it into Words For What Those Men Have Done […]

For the public component of the project, Allen chose to use our pairing of his painting called The Dwarf In Armor and the title poem from The Silence of Men. The gallery mounted each of the poems next to the artwork to which it had been a response, and I have this memory of Allen being at the opening in his wheelchair, listening intently as each poet read their work in turn, and of him smiling from ear to ear when my turn came and I read “The Silence of Men,” almost as if I was reading it exclusively to him.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Ekphrastic Poetry

I dreamed the first two or three stanzas of this poem, and when I woke the next morning, parts of the dream were still vivid for a short time, so I wrote as quickly as I could. Much of the phrasing and imagery in tho early stanzas are extremely close to my recollection of he dream. Unfortunately, it faded as they always do. The rest of the poem emerged as it wanted. I should add that Guy Clark wasn’t in the dream but did find his way into the poem, and I’m glad he did. […]

This is a poem with a gun in it though I don’t know
how it entered, and I guess I should ask why it’s here.
It was already in place when I woke up this morning
and began to write. I look at the page, and see the gun
resting in the first line as if it belongs there, as if
it were waiting, and I don’t know exactly what to do
to get it out of my poem, so I close my journal and
fix some coffee, then come back to the work, slowly
opening to that page— It’s still there.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 15”

The artist is a child, with a gift. One who, so endowed, steps forth into the unknown – hopeful, proud, subject to stumbling. The gift is simply an intuition of beauty : coupled with a talent for expression. A capability.

I have been making poems since 1956, when I was 4 yrs old. That was three score years and ten ago, by my count.

Since around 1986, my attention was drawn to long poems. That’s about 40 years ago, by my calculation. And it strikes me sometimes that all these longitudinal efforts seem like variations on one very long poem. I don’t know : they change, they shift into different keys and registers… but the focus remains unchanged.

Henry Gould, Breezeway

I read something this morning that was both reassuring and revealing – a comment by poet and novelist Fred d’Aguiar, about a new collection by Grace Nichols, The Tracks of My Name. 

He’s written about her book, “‘To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers.”

I haven’t heard it expressed so well before, this issue of post middle age atrophy. I’ve heard about poets who shone when they were young and never again but not such close attention to that phenomenon. Beyond middle age where do we find that fire, how do we forget? This is going to keep me going for a while. 

Jackie Wills, Turning up every day

I have tried various things for Scotstober over the years including finding the words used in other poets’ work when I didn’t trust my own attempts. The past couple of years I try and write a wee poetic snippet using the word each day and then try and knit them together into a poem at the end of the year. Sometimes it works, sometimes, no. I can see a glisk of something coming.

No apologies for my use of Scots. I’m not a native speaker, but I do my best, trying to use the language as I’ve heard or read it in Scotland, usually Glasgow. I’m just having fun.  

Day 10

girse – grass thi scrab aiples rottit oan thi girse birsin unnerfit thi juice av October

Day 11 jalouse – to suspect, to think few wad jalouse thi mirk in me tae bite doon on its cauld steel expectin tae taste licht

hinnied-sweet

Day 12 thrawn – very stubborn ah ken theres a hoolin o wind ootside but ahm tae thrawn tae switch oan thi heatin hap yersel wi stockins an woolen blankets jist coorie in

Day 13

stroop/stroup – a spout thi cauld leavin mah banes lik thi hush frae thi kettle’s stroupDay 14 – deave/deeve – to annoy, to deafen murrin at mah feet ah can maistly forget she wis deavin me fur fuid i thi wee oors

Day 15 – quine – a young woman or girl ahm no a quine no a carline no a wifie naebody cries me hen or missus ahm a wummin an auld soul a new soul

a body in mah ain body

Day 17 – flech – a flea or a restless person flechin – to be restless mah hert unsattelt flechin at thi sicht of thi sun trinnlin doon yer jaw ah mind yer wairmth

Day 18 – wrang – incorrect, wrong

smitched wi autumn amh drawn wrang i thi city av gowd and crisp-blae ahm thi shaddae-hauf

Gerry Stewart, Scotstober 2026

holy heck! the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award last night! Huzzah! I mean, I am rather shocked, given how many times I’ve been up for this thing over the years (seven, by my count). My thanks much to the judges, and to Arc Poetry Magazine, as well as to the other shortlisted authors: Nina Berkhout for The Great Wake and Vera Hadzic for Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery. It is an unexpected thing, and a great pleasure and honour! Of course, this means that I can no longer complain about never having won a book award (whether as the Diane Warren or, as Andy Weaver prefers, the Susan Lucci of the Archibald Lampman Award, but that joke may have also just run its course). Also, Christine and I are the only couple to have both (so far) won the award, given she won same in 2018 for her second poetry collection, Charm (Book*hug Press, 2017). Which means: every adult in our household has won the Archibald Lampman Award. Might this put undue pressure upon our young ladies as well, to eventually produce poetry titles to perhaps win the award themselves? We shall see. Aoife (my ten year old) insisted on being at the event last night, and she took an array of photos with my phone, some of which were terrible, and others that were of herself (it took me twenty minutes to get my phone back, once leaving the stage), but at least she did capture the moment itself: [photo]

rob mclennan, the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award!

Have you heard the big news? Kim’s current collection – The House of Broken Things – has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. You’ll probably know that her previous book – All The Men I Never Married – won the Forward Prize. Personally, I think this collection is even better, so I was genuinely surprised when it didn’t make the shortlist for this year, and wasn’t PBS recommended. All that amounts to nothing in the face of the Eliots: it’s safe to say that it’s the most prestigious poetry award in the UK, arguably in the world.

So whilst Kim is in a state of disbelief, I am not. And whilst she won’t allow herself to consider actually winning, I am already planning what she will do with the prize money. First on the list, obviously, is champagne for all the people who are going with her to the awards, ie her family plus Me. Second: a lovely new sofa for me to sit on when I come round. And third on the list is a lovely holiday with her best friend, aka Me.

Other prizes Kim has won include the Eric Gregory, and the Geoffrey Dearmer, the Northern Writer’s Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Award. She’s been shortlisted for a Forward Best Single Poem. She’s won the Ledbury Prize, and the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and recently she was given the Cholmondeley Award just for existing. There are others, and many more to come.

My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet

by Meg Cox

Of course I had to say I was delighted for her.

In fact be the first of us to say it.

I didn’t think it necessary to mention

that I too had entered the competition.

Of course I smiled and smiled

and said I loved one particular line

in her winning poem – the last is a pretty safe bet

but I hadn’t actually read it

and I won’t be fucking reading it either.

I wonder if the lovely, late Meg Cox was taken aback by how popular this poem is! But if the point of poetry is to speak truths which are otherwise unspoken, to give voice to the things we feel but didn’t know we could say out loud – this poem does it in bucket loads. Being jealous of our friends, feeling somehow diminished by their successes, is an unpleasant quality and a painful experience, and it’s hard to admit that I sometimes feel like this. And in the last week, I heard that my DYCP Arts Council application had been rejected (again), which inevitably added more fuel to my insecurity.

There are ways of facing it. Chief amongst them is the fact that Kim is my friend and a glorious person and I love her, and regardless of my own fragile ego, what makes her happy ultimately makes me happy too. I could tell myself that competitions and grants and awards and book sales don’t matter, but that’s a massive lie. Economically, emotionally, professionally, they make a huge difference, and working very closely with someone who enjoys those benefits whilst I don’t – I have to allow space for how that feels, so I can respond to it and cope with it. I could remind myself that a publisher can only submit four collections to the Forwards – plus any authors who have previously been shortlisted – which means that authors published by big publishers like Bloodaxe are at a disadvantage. But that’s not true for the Eliots. So I remind myself that whilst you have to be an outstandingly good writer to win any big poetry prize, there are lots of excellent writers who never win. So I look after the bits of me that feel sore, and work hard at the things I do well, the things that matter to me.

Clare Shaw, My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet

I’ve been lucky. I’ve won a couple of poetry things, and I’ve come close a few times. I’ve also come nowhere near about a bazillion times; the scrappy Word document on my computer that pretends to be a submissions spreadsheet is highlighted almost entirely in a peppy and upbeat shade of red. Still, lucky. Last weekend I got to go to the Winchester Poetry Festival and my poem wild was commended by judge Julia Copus, which was lovely. Of course it would have been nice to win, though Vanessa Lampert’s winning poem The Rub was a beautiful choice that is still burning away gently somewhere at the back of my head. The best thing about being at these things, for me, though, is seeing your poetry people and meeting new ones, the people that don’t glaze over or look uneasy when you mention the word poetry. It’s nice to be in the room, literally and figuratively, and OK, fine, it’s even better to be on the list.

But here’s my hot take, for what it’s worth. It’s not original, but it bears repeating: I’m not a better poet if I win something, and I’m not a worse poet if I don’t. Nobody is. Winning is lovely, and I don’t want to take anything away from that, because that person has always written something that has genuinely stood out. They should be proud of it. That’s incontrovertible. But it’s also true that there’s a hefty dose of chance in the mix. Right place, right time, right judge, right poem, right time again. Lots of people find this stressful, too subjective, maybe even a little unfair, that it comes down to the subjective opinions of a handful of people, maybe just one person. Judges – and winners – can be hauled over the poetic coals, and it’s not pretty. But do you know how unbelievably fascinating this is to someone who’s marked GCSE papers for a quarter of a century? There’s no rubric! No set of externally determined criteria set by shadowy figures who don’t actually do your job! It’s THRILLING. And actually, it takes some pressure off, doesn’t it? All we can do is write our poems and send them, and send them again. We can’t control any of the other factors. And I’m not immune to jealousy or wishful thinking. I’m not a robot. But this way it’s easier not to let these things get you down, and not to let them go to your head. Winning, or not winning, doesn’t change the quality of your writing. It’s not the poetry.

In 2023 I won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize and here’s how down to chance it was: the day after I entered, the week before the deadline, I realised that I hadn’t received a confirmation email for the pamphlet prize, though I’d had one for the single poem competition. I sent a ‘sorry to bother you, just checking! No worries if not! Probably being stupid!’ email (I’ve GOT to stop emailing like that) just to check, and then just to cement my extreme lack of cool, followed up. And it turned out that in fact I hadn’t completed my submission properly and they’d never received it. I squeaked it in by the deadline and that’s how I was even in the running for the thing that changed my whole career. I KNOW, RIGHT?! And even then, on a different day with a different judge and the wind in a different direction, it wouldn’t have happened. Think about it. There are far more excellent, talented, skilful poets out there than there are poetry prizes to win.

Nia Broomhall, Week 31: The Live Canon Poetry Prize Anthology 2024

There are some poets who don’t believe in editing their work. “Once you have finished a piece” they say “It is done, No need to fiddle about with it, Move on to the next one”

Perhaps for them this is true. I’m not sure that I have ever heard anyone who I would consider a brilliant poet say it, but I certainly understand where they are coming from. Occasionally I have a burst of creativity, and a piece just flows from the end of my fingers onto the page and looks great. But in 99% of cases (and yes, I have written enough poems to give an accurate percentage, they need a whole lot of fiddling about with.

I do enjoy those online poetry prompts on Bluesky. I have got into the habit of doing one every Friday morning over breakfast, like some people do the crossword in a newspaper. I take a perverse pride in the idea that I can read the prompt, dash out a dozen or more lines and have it up on the feed all in the space of three quarters of an hour, max.

Of course, once they are posted I usually noticed how I could have said things a little better. And if I ever use one to send to a journal or somewhere, I generally updated it with the improvements that I have noticed. That way I can claim that it’s never been published even on my own social media1. A handful have accepted too. I have to admit that they probably wouldn’t have been quite as appealing in their untweaked form.

Mike O’Brien, A Day at the Races – Poetry Workshopping and Editing

Basically, as soon as I got to ‘Hygge’ and looked up I knew I was living the poem. It’s not a complicated poem by any stretch. It’s short, no big words, no rhyme to skip it along, but it paints a beautiful picture of a time of year that at the time of writing is only 63 days a way. But if ‘Hygge’ is about comfort and conviviality, this speaks a little more to locking the world out, and I like that challenge to the concept. I wonder if the first line of the third stanza can be read as a rule for hygge…”there must be no-one else for miles”, or as a description or observation that follows the second stanza…there must be no-one else for miles”. I’m not sure my italics/bolding makes that clear, but I hope you see which tree I’m barking up.

I think it’s the former on the grounds of the second stanza…the world is being shut out, the night is being held at bay under strain. Some semblance of silence is hard to find and this moment the poem capture is hard one and well-earned (we assume). This peace is needed for good health…and I love the way the poem closes on another word imported from elsewhere into common parlance, Sláinte. This simple thing, this simple moment requires a lot of fighting for. And that’s not a bad thing to capture in 11 lines.

Mat Riches, Harvey’s Rabbiting On

For the English poet John Clare (1793–1864) — born two years before Keats, whose “To Autumn” we revisited last Friday — the sentience of the natural world was as much a given as it was for the more famous Romantics. “All nature has a feeling,” he proclaimed, in the poem of that title featured here in May of last year. Like Keats, Clare intuited the particular “feeling” of the year’s wane. But in Clare’s poetic imagination, as Today’s Poem makes clear, autumn could be less a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” than a season of apocalyptic end, foretelling the death of time itself.

Interestingly — though not that surprisingly, given that the seasons have ever offered themselves as go-to subjects for poetry — Clare wrote many autumn poems. Of all times of the year, for the emotionally fragile Clare the autumn was both the most beautiful and the most troubled. The critic Jonas Cope relates an incident in August 1811, during the harvest and on the cusp of true autumn, to which Clare attributed his subsequent physical and mental afflictions. Eighteen years old, Clare witnessed the fatal fall of a man named Thomas Drake from a “load of hay,” an experience set down ten years later in his Sketches in the Life of John Clare: “the gastly palness of death struck such a terror on me that I coud not forget it for years.”

The trauma, it seems, lay in the instantaneousness of the event: life, its neck snapped, transfigured as death in the time it took a man to fall off some hay. For Clare, this shocking revelation of the nearness of death resulted in disturbingly vivid dreams of churchyards and charnel houses. It also overlaid his waking perceptions with a veneer of horror; in another part of his Sketches , he describes being chased at night by a terrifying fiend that turns out, in the end, to be a neighbor’s stray foal. Told this way, the story sounds comical, but to the poet, as Jonas Cope points out in his account of it, even this mundane explanation for the “monstrosity” amplified, rather than relieving, the grotesquerie of the encounter.

So although Clare would assert that autumn was the season he loved most, the year’s cyclical wind-down brought with it a recurrence not only of the physical illnesses that inevitably attend the colder, wetter weather, but also of the emotional breakdown which, as Clare himself insisted, derived from his experience of that 1811 harvest tragedy. When, in his own “To Autumn,” he exhorts the season to come, it is as “pensive autumn,” whose melancholy and minor-key disorder seem to accompany — and oddly console — his own unsettled mind, haunted by the twin specters of natural and human mutability.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Autumn

There’s a gentleness to the way the lines unfold, a tender sensitivity to the things around him, that seems to suffuse the stanza with love. The combination of gentleness with metrical regularity adds to the sense of security that the stanza creates.

So far so delicately lovely. What’s utterly ravishing, though, is the sudden change of tempo and rhyme scheme in the next four lines. Though the underlying sense of security persists, the change itself is as electrifying as the sudden soaring of the treble or soprano high C in Allegri’s Miserere. Steady alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables dissolves into swiftly gliding runs of unstressed or only lightly stressed syllables between the two dominant stresses in each line. The change of metre and rhyme pattern makes the stanza’s form seem alive and vitally engaging, while the shift from more separated to closely successive and very strong rhymes create a feeling of order and containment. Images undergo swift transformations – moon to flower to smiling woman, heaven’s high bower as a trellis woven with the smaller flowers of the stars to high bower as windowed boudoir in a castle – but these images don’t displace each other, they accumulate and shine out together in the imagination.

Shining together is the key. Heaven and earth, the vast spaces of the cosmos and the tiny lives within it are as it were equalised in the loving gaze of trusting innocence. The harmony evoked by the images in this humanised world is underpinned by a lovely pattern of echoing sounds. Among the phonetic echoes I think the long /i/ is particularly important, heightening the impact of shine, silent, I, mine, high, silent, delight, smiles, night. Richly evocative in themselves, it’s as if each calls the others forth as natural answers or complements to it.

Edmund Prestwich, Ravishing metrical beauty: Blake’s “Night”

There’s something slightly complacent about ‘Late Empire’. Partly I think that’s in the verse — the style is just a little bit lazy and redundant around the edges (‘burned to ash’, ‘in the lamplight’), and the simile in the middle of the poem, which compares the boredom that keeps us awake to ‘a mouse chattering on midnight floors’, felt somewhat random and anti-climactic. Why a mouse? Wouldn’t a more specifically modern example have been more effective here? And why chattering? Mice make tiny, annoying scurrying, scuffling and scraping noises, and occasionally you can hear them squeaking to each other behind the wainscot, but then you would need mice, and I still wouldn’t call it chattering.

But the complacency is also in the tone and in something like the rhetorical attitude of the poem. This is hard to pick apart because of course the poem is about a kind of complacency or at least passivity: the ‘we’ of the poem didn’t do anything to change or even object to their circumstances; they just got on with life, taking comfort were they could — going to ‘noisy bars’ and, as the last line has it, ‘We gossiped. We believed what we were told.’ The poem is obviously not condoning this; it is asking us to recognise it (in ourselves) and condemn it. I think what bothers me about the poem is that it feels rather as if it is calculated to acknowledge the reader’s guilt and complicity just enough to make them feel as if they have done something by reading it. Ultimately, I find its rhetorical strategy slightly revolting. (Though you might of course feel that this is both intentional and indeed the point.)

All the same, it’s impressive to see a contemporary poem in English even attempting to ‘capture the mood’. Rarer still, I think, is the topical or political poem that does something more than just package and present its readers’ attitudes back to them — I mean, one that attempts instead to intervene in our interpretation. I’ve written about it briefly before, but the example of this that has stayed with me the longest is Heaney’s ‘Anything can happen’, a version of Horace Odes 1.34 first published as ‘Horace and the Thunder’ in the Irish Times a couple of months after 9/11 […]

Victoria Moul, What makes for a good topical poem?

In 1922, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) wrote a curious sonnet — a poem that essentially undermines a good portion of the endeavor of poetry. We may think we see the beautiful or sublime in the striking vistas of nature. We may declare the power of art to find the truth of beauty. But if beauty is a formal entity — an Idea, in Plato’s sense, as something supersensual that is imitated, instantiated, or shadowed in the physical objects that participate in it — then beauty in itself, Beauty, is beyond all sense. And the beauty of mathematics, geometry in particular, can give an intellectual vision of that Beauty, unhidden by the masks of the physical: “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”

A Petrarchan sonnet with a slightly eccentric sestet (rhymed abba-abba in the opening octave and cdd-ccd in the final six lines), “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare” dismisses those who “prate of Beauty.” Millay, in fact, compares them to geese who gabble and hiss — “but heroes seek release / From dusty bondage into luminous air.”

“Luminous” is a curious word here. I suspect it’s drawn from the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where those who escape the deceitful, non-philosophical life, taking shadows for reality, emerge from the cave into the light of the true sun that is the Good. But Millay extends the image into a description of Euclid’s grasping a Platonic form: “O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, / When first the shaft into his vision shone / Of light anatomized!” (“O holy, terrible day” gestures, I think, toward Good Friday, and “light anatomized” toward Newton, a curious combination.)

Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō (“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”) was inscribed above the door of Plato’s Academy — or so the almost certainly apocryphal story has it. Millay echoes something of that thought, at least in the sense that geometry is a flowing of Beauty into intellectually graspable shapes that are true, elegant, and universal — transcendental characteristics of Ideas. And she calls “fortunate” those who have heard, even if “once only and then but far away,” the sound of Beauty’s step: a “massive sandal set on stone.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare

No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says “I AM,” a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us. It is our existential wanderlust that makes us what we are — pilgrims of mortality, forever coming home to the horizon of tomorrow.

Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) captures this paradox, with subtlety that doesn’t offer an answer but whispers the living question back to you, in an unedited poem found among his papers after his death, beautifully read in the original Spanish by my Patagonian friend Manuel Gutiérrez — a communicator of wonder through theater, music, and humor, whose hospitality made the serpentine birdworlds possible and who is always teaching me how to navigate the terrain of life with an open heart for a compass.

Maria Popova, The Map to the Route of Your Life

I am the king of poems
because of the wings in my head
and I bow before my sandwich
like time before space
where do we put the bullet holes
except in place of stars?

Gary Barwin, On Detective Fiction. Also Moby Dick.

Bishop enjoyed her comforts. She took many lovers, including the wife or a prominent visual artist in Seattle, but that’s another story. There are, however, at least three novels written about Elizabeth Bishop’s life. Her reticence to expose her private life when she was alive, seems to have left space for others to make her life their own imaginary pathways into her private life. “Sometimes I’d rather they simply kept things to themselves,” Bishop said in an interview when asked about the confessional poets. She was not a fan of self disclosure. She was a fan of beauty and truth and Keats.

We do know that Bishop wrote some of her first great poems while in that Paris apartment. My favorite of this time period (one of my favorites is, “Paris, 7 AM,” which begins here:

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment
Some hands point histrionically one way
And some point others, from the ignorant faces.
Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge
So much that days are journeys round the suburbs

Those first days in a new place. Time is a star! Time has a fluid character all its own that changes with the hands of one clock to another. And yes, the apartment was known to house the Contesse’s impressive collection of clocks. I believe Bishop wrote this poem during her first weeks in Paris, still adjusting to the time difference and exploring a city that looms large in any writer’s imagination. The poem also has her (and us) staring out windows:

Look down into the courtyard. All the houses
Are built that way, with ornamental urns
Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons
Take their walks.

There are echoes of her earlier poem, “The Map,” here. And I wonder if this is where “the suburbs” first shows up in a poem. The camera angle of “look down” creates a cinematic touch to the poem — something Bishop became well known for: a shift in perspective, a sleight of hand.

Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop in France: Mystery & Adventure

maybe I’ll call gillian anderson (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), a pamphlet by the award-winning Welsh poet Rhian Elizabeth, is a candid and psychologically astute exploration of maternal identity at a moment of profound change. Taking a daughter’s departure from home as its emotional centre, the collection moves between the mother’s difficult memories of her own early independence and her anxiety for the daughter now making a life beyond her care. Throughout, grief and vulnerability are tempered by sardonic humour, while ordinary domestic details acquire the weight of symbols. The result is a distinctive and accomplished meditation on memory, separation and the painful but necessary transformation of love into trust.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘maybe i’ll call gillian anderson’ by Rhian Elisabeth

“Sappho Wept” has a strong feminist viewpoint and focuses its concerns on how women’s voices and art have been erased from the history books, not just by simply omission, but violently, e.g. through paintings being drawn over and replaced with men’s art. Dunn also explores how traditional roles for women have restricted their ability to speak and explore their own talents in favour of being pushed into a supporting role, away from the limelight and away from historical records. Dunn uses direct, straightforward vocabulary so her point does not get lost through misinterpretation or euphemisms. Although “Sappho Wept” will strike a chord with women generally, it deserves to be read by men too. The poem “Robert Dudley” asks them to consider what it might feel like to be overlooked and sidelined.

Emma Lee, “Sappho Wept” Wendy J Dunn (Other Terrain Press) – book review

In a 2009 interview, in response to the question of how closely [Claire] Crowther drew on her own experiences, she said:

In a way I always do but only as a starting point. I have always felt what I write about – that’s the genesis of a poem. But the detail varies from my own experience – it could be that I observe other families interacting and freely bring in their details. I never feel I have to stick to any one set of facts – I mingle and match facts I’ve observed to serve the poem which becomes something different. In the end, there is rarely any autobiography at all – the poem has taken over completely.

The innate questions of this mix’n’match approach are whether the effort required to try to locate the emotional heart, and the point, of each poem justifies the time spent. I confess that my first read-through was challenging and that the poems – or, rather, some of them – only came alive on a second reading. Perhaps that is a good thing – like music whose depths only reveal themselves over several listenings. […]

In reading such a generous selection of Crowther’s poetry, it becomes a struggle to know when she is making serious points and what they are. The density of her writing, albeit often exquisitely crafted in musical lines, inhibits simple, or simplistic, exegesis and therefore prohibits much in the way of an emotional reaction other than a degree of frustration and, inasmuch as one can judge the tone, a wry smile at the fun Crowther appears to be having, as if one isn’t quite allowed in on the joke. Surely, though, kernels of clarity are gradually revealed over multiple re-readings.

Matthew Paul, Three reviews I wrote two years ago

The remarkable late flowering of Peter Dent continues unabated in these two most recent pamphlets from two of his own micro presses. To quote the opening lines of ‘Market Reaction’, one of the twenty prose poems that make up Riverside Scuffle:

Being at the peak of my decline she grumbled they’ve finally
caught on and realised my achievement.

Where the ‘she’ could just as easily be ‘I’, the poet whose decline peak is higher than the peak of many another’s success.

These prose poems consist of sentences placed beside each other that both resist and strive towards narrative coherence; our readerly urge to create coherence is an intrinsic part of the making of the text. They are, in a way, instances of the ideogrammatic method operating at the level of the sentence.

But I find it hard to articulate the experience of reading these poems. It might be better just to read one, a reasonably straightforward one, at that:

CONSTRUCTION SITE

The girl in front’s hair is dipped delicately into an inkwell.
A sign on a classmate’s back says ‘beware’ or words. An-
tics help pass the day taking the edge off a teacher’s stare.
Oh the angst of mother the chuckle of father the symm-
erty of our days. I repeat myself ad nauseam but still
don’t vomit – why? Latin wasn’t English but that was its
virtue. I flip and flop to the whims of the monsters I’d
like to believe in but can’t. Cuffs override my thumbs –
a useful feature in Winters like this. Homework tonight
will no doubt be no more than half-done and not by me.
I’m just a card in a box the Head relies on come Parent’s
Night. Thoughts of getting at it will keep me awake.
‘Lord’ – I turn the dog-eared page – ‘dismiss us with thy
blessing…’

The basic analogy of school = construction site, a place engaged in the making of educated adults, is clear and obvious from the beginning, but one subtext is that teachers, creatures who, by the nature of their job, tend to repeat themselves ad nauseam, are also being (re)constructed at the same time. And all of this is underpinned by the careful selection and placement of individual words: ‘vomit’, a word with deep Latin roots not the more English ‘retch’ or the more recent and vernacular ‘throw up’; ‘override’ with its sense of replacing or controlling the thumbs, not merely covering them; ‘beware’, a sign more often seen on an actual construction school than on a student’s back; that deft, illuminating ‘delicately’, summoning up an entire relationship; the final quote from an 18th-century hymn written in that fiercely unreconstructed of places, Hebden Bridge. And then there’s the enjambment, the syntactical motor that drives poem and reader forward, creating linkages across images and ideas.

There is an element of social commentary here, alongside some degree of implied autobiography, given that Dent was himself a school teacher; these are not hermetically difficult texts designed to alienate the reader, they just require us to engage beyond the surface, to participate as readers in the act of creation.

Billy Mills, Two More by Peter Dent

I wrote several poems this week. I credit the book of poetry I’m reading, Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola, as recommended by Alyson Dutemple. It’s extraordinary and is seemingly jumpstarting my poetic impulses. All the poems are fresh and exciting to me but I particularly like “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” and “helen of troy goes parking with the defensive tackle”. My unexpected explosion of writing (right after I said I’m not) reminds me of the song “All Four Seasons” by Sting. Well, I do tend toward mercurial. I feel a bit relieved to be writing for myself in this way with no plan or agenda or timeline or desire to share it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Unexpectations Do Happen

My Name is Swan is a book best encountered out loud, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said that about a poetry book before. I enjoy a good poetry reading or performance immensely, but for me, nothing beats the quiet, private hours I spend communing directly with the words on the page. Swan, however, is a different beast, and I strongly urge you to watch this poetry film in full before you encounter the book. Go on, it’s incredible, and award-winning.

Have you watched it now? Good. Now you have entered Swan’s (and Reynard’s, and Body 115’s) world, and you will hear their voices when you read. You will read with their rhythms and cadences, and that is important. Jan has talked on his Substack about how three sequences that, together, make up My Name is Swan came into being, how they lived in other formats for a long time before they made it into print. He has also spoken, in a recent interview with Cara Waterfall, of how

“My Name Is Swan owes much in its construction to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in pace and composition to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, in beat and meter to Art Blakey and Elvin Jones”

Without knowing all of these musicians terribly well, I can hear these sonic influences in the ebbs, flows and stutterings of his lines. The book has a compelling forward momentum – being composed of three long sequences (or one longer meta sequence in three parts), it’s not one to dip into, but one to be carried along with. My initial read was of the whole thing in one go; subsequent reads have zoned in on different segments but you can only really grasp it as a totality.

As such, it’s very difficult to quote from (although I will try!). There are many blindingly good turns of phrase, many skillful sonic echoes and syllabic reverberations, but plucking them out of their place in the score steals away some of their impact.

Victoria Spires, Swanning around with Jan Noble

Mike is an actor. He’s been in films with Peter Sellers and Kevin Kline and has spent decades in TV and theatre. He came to see my show Body 115 on one of those Tuesday nights when there was nobody in. Afterwards he told me a story about a similarly grim experience he’d had when he was starting out, a matinee performance where the theatre had sold just one ticket.

There’s an unwritten rule that if the audience numbers less than the cast then you don’t need to go on. There were two of them in this particular play but they decided that instead of heading off to the pub for the afternoon they would treat it as a rehearsal before the evening show when a decent crowd was expected. They went on and did it, for the joy of it, and performed to an audience of one. They took their bows at the end to a solo standing ovation. Later they learned that their singular audience member was in fact the show’s writer, that he’d driven all the way down from the North of England in order to see his work staged London. He was thrilled. And so were they. And this is art.

It doesn’t stop being art if nobody sees it or buys it or reviews it. Mike told me that he read my poem My Name Is Swan aloud in his flat on his own the other afternoon and loved it. “It’s just magnificent” he said. Sure, a mention in the TLS would be nice, coverage in the Paris Review would boost sales and bring me greater visiblity but Mike, Mike the actor, performing a one man show of My Name Is Swan to no one but the gods poetry, that, my friends, that is art.

Jan Noble, Nº86 Absent without leave

What Emil Cioran called “the curse of being born” was not far-fetched to Delmore, whose own family hailed from what was once Romania. Even his own name placed him beneath the cursedness of his birth in a land without roots, in what Mlinko calls “the the social covenant of his very name — Delmore, a clumsy attempt at assimilationism.” Throughout his writings, Delmore would mock and parody his own existence under the sign of “Delmore”, playing with alter egos or secret “Others” like “Hershey Green” and “Shenandoah Fish.” 

“In his last years, Schwartz had girls like houris lining up to take care of his sorry alcoholic ass, and it still didn’t matter. He wrote almost nothing after his mid-forties, held forth at White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas met his demise (beware those Mozartian talkers!), and died alone,” in Mlinko’s words.

When Delmore Schwartz had a heart attack in the hallway of a cheap Manhattan motel, it took more than an hour for someone to call an ambulance. By the time the sirens arrived, Delmore was dead. His corpse lay unclaimed in the morgue for two days. And his literary corpus remained unfinished. Delmore had started an epic poem titled Genesis, but the protagonist only reached the age of seven after two hundred pages… If Delmore wrote himself repeatedly, he was also written by friends. Saul Bellow painted a portrait of Delmore in his roman-a-clef, Humboldt’s Gift. Ashbery said Delmore’s late poetry seemed “to lack the electric compressions and simplifications that animate his early writing, tending toward bald assertiveness.” James Atlas says Delmore spent his last days sitting in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, “filling one notebook after another with incomprehensible novels.”

Alina Stefanescu, Dream addenda: 1

There is space here and no need for ghosts
in this thin strip of life we walk through
today, temporary as bees and butterflies

between celandine and thistle heads,
the flash of silver birch tugging our eyes
in wind warm with rain. Birthdays,

deathdays, and what lies in between:
about five miles from here where we can walk
way up to where we can no longer breathe.

Chris Edgoose, Sweetbriar 7

When I learned in August that Seattle poet, memoirist, and editor Koon Woon had died, I added to my morning list, “write blog post for Koon.” What happened?

This morning, I am remembering Koon’s generosity. And I have much to be grateful for, as Body My House would not exist had Koon not contacted me in 2018 and asked if I had a poetry manuscript Goldfish Press might publish. I recall that I was busy with teaching, and with family responsibilities. I didn’t have a manuscript. Although I was already percolating the poems that would become The Pear Tree, I wouldn’t be able to finish that book until after my mother’s death. And who knew when that would be?

You must have so many poems, Koon said. Send me sixty other poems and we’ll talk.

Toward the end of the process, I wasn’t happy with the design. After much hand-wringing, I contacted him, offering to pay an outside designer. I feared Koon would refuse and we would end by parting ways, the book unpublished, feelings stomped. Instead, his email back to me was jolly. Yes, of course, whatever I wanted. He ended with “Less work for me!”

So, my apologies for the late eulogy, coupled with my certainty that Koon would laugh, and respond in his typically gracious manner.

In addition to his work on Chrysanthemum and the press, supporting other poets and the poetry community, Koon wrote several books, including Water Chasing Water, poems, and Paper-son Poet, his memoir. His poems chronicle his journey from China to America, from Aberdeen to Seattle, through bouts of homelessness and mental illness to his life as a writer. His particular genius is precise description and image, as in this passage about his grandmother’s hands:

The past folds up like an origami bird,
Will not dissolve like candy.
Grapes cling to the vine, hands weave bamboo baskets,
Hands supplicate and light incense,
Buddha holds her in his palm.
I fold paper for hands of ancient vine,
Hands that couldn’t come along
And hands will open gates if I should return.

—Koon Woon, excerpt from “The Memory of Hands”

I found other tributes on the Internet (see below), and want especially to point you toward this one (courtesy of Cascadia Poetics LAB) with its link to Koon’s interview with David Gilmour.

To Koon Woon, life is a series of rented rooms. Some—like the village [where] he was born or the three-bedroom house on Oak Street in Aberdeen that he moved into at age 12—are literal. “Everybody in a sense is living in a rented room,” he said in a phone interview last week, “In a more profound way, we are all renting time on Earth.”

—Ryan Teague Beckwith, Daily World writer (from Paper-son Poet, p. 130)

Koon Woon’s influence will continue, but his physical presence in the world is much missed.

Bethany Reid, Koon Woon, 1949-2026

My nose has been deep into books and other fancies, so my apologies for not publishing here. For the longest time, Anne Carson’s book Autobiography of Red has been on my shelf. She recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature and thus, like many folks, my eyes gravitated to her work which I’m learning I love very much.

Also. About half my life ago, I picked up Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, a very compelling look into the senses. I loved the book so much—half my life ago—that after a few dozen pages I had to put the book down. Her mind resonated too much with my own. I couldn’t continue. I had to go live my life and live through my senses as deliciously as possible before I could open the book again. So, half my life later I decided it was time to pick the book up again. But I also wondered what Diane Ackerman had been up to lately. Where is she? What is she doing? And it turns out that she has another book coming out in January and miraculously, it’s a compendium book further examining our senses. What are the odds? And then I realized that she has a Substack. I’m not too sure if it’s because she wants community online but part of me suspects that it has a lot to do with marketing for her new book. But there’s something so intriguing about inaccessibility, as well. Or is it just me? And wow was I star-struck when I commented on her Substack, telling her my story of reading part of her book, and she responded! She was touched!

Anyway, like many folks, I’m sorta demystified by the internet lately. I have been finding it easier and easier to miss out and instead take a walk, read, spend time face-to-face with folks, and create/enjoy things. During a commute home from work, I listened to a commute-long (35 minutes) poem/performance by Anne Carson called “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”. It inspired the following poem about unwebbing.

Sarah Lada, A Poem about Unwebbing

A while back I had not one but three people contact me about a poem of mine titled “What The Onion Teaches.” This is a highly uncommon occurrence for a writer of my anonymity. Even stranger, that poem had been published a decade ago.

It turns out my short and simple poem had been assigned in some college lit class (I’m guessing freshman) along with the ubiquitous questions on what the poet meant, why the poem’s images were chosen, and worse. I had an engaging back-and-forth with one student who really wanted to get extra credit on his assignment. But I didn’t have answers for his professor’s questions.

To me, none of those questions get anywhere near why we read, let alone write, poetry. Such questions often turn readers away from their own experience of a poem. (Reading imposed for the purpose of assigning a grade may be a main reason why so few people read for pleasure once they’re out of school.)

I am incredibly fortunate to be in a longstanding poetry workshopping group. The five of us gather once a month around a picnic table in a quiet nature preserve to read, discuss, and hopefully improve each other’s newest poems. Very often we find meanings, metaphors, and other juicy bits the poet hadn’t anticipated. The eye of the beholder and all. Oftentimes the poet, too, finds what they hadn’t realized was there.

The process of recognition can be delayed, the way it was when I asked an artist friend about her fondness for painting a pond close to her home. The spring pictures were gorgeous, but I thought my favorites were her autumn scenes. Until I saw her winter versions. Each painting included three foreground trees and a misty, out-of-focus tree beyond the water. I asked if it was always misty when she painted. She told me there wasn’t really a tree on the other side, it just made for good perspective. Much later, when we were talking about our offspring, she mentioned for the first time that she’d had a fourth child, a full-term stillborn son. I asked (probably too directly) if he might be represented by that fourth tree, always present with the other three trees. “Oh my God,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”

The poems we’ve loved have a way of deepening in us, so I’m no longer surprised when a poem I haven’t encountered for years speaks to places in me that have evolved since I last read it. That’s true of poems I’ve written too. The presence of something significant can be right there, waiting till we see it, like that misty tree.

Laura Grace Weldon, What A Poem “Means”

Long ago in a foreign land I attended a reading by the poet Les Murray. One poem I wish I could remember had an epigraph to which he referred, with what degree of irony I couldn’t gauge, as a ‘sky note’. All at once that evoked music, elevation, weather, flight.

Some years before, engaged in the trying task of judging poems for a competition, the panel was considering one example. A gifted younger poet dryly observed ‘This poem has two things I dislike: one, an epigraph, and two, worse still, an epigraph in Latin.’ I was struck by his assurance on an issue I’d never considered an issue. It came as a challenge and a breath of fresh air. I also agreed with what was being implied: that poems shouldn’t be a display of learning. They shouldn’t strive to be excluding. Heavens knows, with such a small audience, why try to thin it down even further.

Still, I didn’t feel the argument was settled. Something should have been said, and wasn’t, on the other side. Firstly, what’s so wrong with having another voice positioning or counterpointing the voice of the poem? Secondly, although it’s the source of a large portion of English vocabulary and ubiquitous in college and institutional mottos, Latin is for most of us a dead language, and yet…do we want it proscribed for that? The continuing emergence of new translations of poets such as Virgil, Ovid and Catullus would strongly suggest there’s life in it still, even if a borrowed one.

Another consideration that has surfaced decades after this discussion is the presence of the internet and the facility, a matter of seconds, to track down, source and translate any quote from another language at least in roman script. Latin presents no obstacle. So, the question comes down to whether an epigraph, in whatever language, in whatever way, adds something to the poem. If so, well and good.

Gerard Genette in his great taxonomical treatise Paratexts is surely right to see paratexts as thresholds (Seuils is the French title), as “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition, but also of transaction.” Only in his claim that paratexts are “in the service of a better reception for the text” does his argument seem too functionalist. What about the possibility that they may serve to confuse or subvert or discomfort reception? That they may challenge or even discredit the text, or indeed vice versa?

Jamie McKendrick, The Use of Epigraphs and the Importance of Patches

One thing I appreciate about the current generation of U.S. undergraduates–at least the one I get to teach–is how literate many are about mental health. They reveal more of this likely hard-earned knowledge in writing than in classroom conversations, not surprisingly. I just finished grading a batch of short essays on mid-20th-century US poetry. Some students wrote insightfully about the activist dimensions of poems from the Civil Rights era or related later work–Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa. Others focused on Confessional poetry that overtly engages psychological crisis. The last few considered how Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” suggests an author trying not to fear bipolar disorder; a young mother’s detachment from her baby and her own body in Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song”; and anaesthetized avoidance as a way of coping with trauma in Plath’s “Tulips,” a poem the student argued characterizes identity as a state of change. The prompt was to consider what authenticity and/ or selfhood seem to mean in a single piece. Through all the essays, I sensed real humans engaging with complicated poems they felt drawn to. The essays weren’t perfect, of course (no AI assistance allowed), but it was a pleasure to spend time with them.

In our classroom discussions, we’ve been probing what the textual markers of authenticity might be among these poets and among readers now. Not that authenticity, whatever it means, matters to everyone. Plenty of poets and critics don’t find the concept useful or interesting, and that’s fair. Poetic voices are shifty, performing selves as well as expressing them, even when the material is autobiographical. But authenticity certainly meant something to the Beats, Confessionals, Black Arts, feminist, and gay liberation poets of the era we’re considering.

Some stylistic elements can make a poem feel real, beyond pronouns and paratext: sensory and other details that conjure an experience with vivid authority. The dashes and panicky pivots in Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” suggesting PTSD. Obscenities and painful bluntness about taboo material: allowing yourself to look bad, in essence. Self-questioning moments that manifest the process of thinking and writing within the final product of the published poem (“(Write it!) in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”). Documentary elements such as referencing history, dating or footnoting poems, etc. If you register other kinds of textual detail as signs of authenticity, whatever that means to you, I’d be interested to hear them.

Lesley Wheeler, What makes a poem feel authentic

I returned home yesterday after spending 4 days/5 nights in Grand Junction, CO, at the brand new Grand Lodge Writer’s Retreat. This retreat is a new endeavor run by writers Tammy Bendetti and Minadora Macharet, who I have long “known” on the Internet. Due to some last minute cancellations, I had the whole comfortable house (used as an Air BnB during non-retreat times) to myself. Being at the beginning of what could be a new manuscript in a place that is just beginning to provide a space for writers seemed like a great fit.

And it was. I was very productive, taking time to work on things that I would not do at home. Wait, I thought you were retired? some imaginary reader just said. Don’t you have time to do this at home? That is technically true. But home always has other callings. For example, spending three hours finding a poem I was unfamiliar with and loving it, clocking that it used some sort of nonce repetitive form, color-coding the poem to see how the form worked, and then trying to use that form in a draft of my own? All in one sitting? That would have been a week or more of work at home.

I also began the tedious task of going through poem files to see if any of the new work I’ve been doing plays nicely together. So…an hour plus re-reading about 50 poems, deciding if they might work or not, pulling titles into a document. Then my favorite thing to do when starting to see if the poems might flow together in a new manuscript: first lines/last lines.

This also takes a long time as it requires opening each individual file to pull those lines (I don’t have all of my poems memorized, sorry, not sorry) and place them with their titles into a document. (I think it took me a couple of hours to do this with 50+ poems. ) Why? This resource, once I think I might have a manuscript, is the first way for me to see how one poem flows into the next. It gives me the entry and exit points of each poem so that I can find language, images, or ideas that connect the individual pieces, even if they vary wildly in content. It also saves a lot of paper—before I print anything, I can just move the blocks of first lines/last lines around in a document.

Did I do new drafting? Yes. Did I work on revisions? Yes. Did I accomplish a couple of submissions? Yes. Did I read? Yes. I spent approximately 8-10 hours of my day engaged in language with no interruptions except walks, stretching, and food. That is not something that is tenable to do when at home. And that’s the beauty of a retreat or residency. It’s permission to do whatever you need to do in service of the writing.

To eat hummus and pita chips and olives for lunch or dinner because you are in the middle of an idea and you don’t want to stop. To work diligently in the morning and give yourself the afternoon to walk to the Botanical Garden and Riverside Trails for time outside to think and look at something other than a screen or a blank page. And for me, a change of landscape, the high desert mesas and rock formations a complete departure from the suburban Midwest.

Donna Vorreyer, Begin At the Beginning

I love seeing where poets choose to break their lines and I so admire a great line break. It brings me great joy when I see it done well and I aim to improve my work in this area.

So this week I was editing some poems and thinking about how effectively I had broken the lines. After a while it was becoming laborious and not very productive, so I went for a walk to clear my head. As I was pacing out, I remembered the time I stole a ‘word break’ from a newspaper article about a discovery in the woods… I was lying in bed one morning completing my daily word puzzle and contemplating the things in my day. I happened then to skim the news just to check in on the world before my shower. After reading the main articles I came to one about a discovery in a wood. And it was with such delight that I saw the word broken over two lines so that it became ‘disco very’. My poet brain was alive and I recalled a dream where I had looked out of the window to see a pelican dancing on the patio. That was it. The two things had to go together. And later that day I wrote the poem.

Sue Finch, A PELICAN IS DANCING ON THE PATIO

A good friend often likes to remind me “the journey is the destination”.

Poetry’s a long game, and if we’re playing to get the ‘endpoint’ there’s a lot along the way that could leave us sad and demotivated. If, however, we’re playing for the love of the game there’s a lot about this strange bumpy ride to enjoy.

I’m prone to emotional permanence, present time orientation, and black and white thinking. What that actually means is that I find my current NOW all consuming; it’s really difficult for me to zoom out and see the big picture. In practice this usually results in: ‘today I received a rejection therefore all my poetry is awful and I should just accept I’m a failure and give up’ or ‘today I received an acceptance/good news therefore the future is bright and glossy, I’m unstoppable and all my dreams are about to be realised’ or ‘I’ve had a run of being at work and not having time or capacity to write much therefore I’m no longer part of the poetry world’. The reality? Somewhere in the middle: good things and less good things are ebbing and flowing, every day I sit down to write is a success because I am writing, I’m still a poet even if I’ve not been very involved recently.

A poetry life isn’t just about submissions and rejections, though I know I get sucked into focusing in on that pretty regularly. It’s also about connection with other poets (even though my Au side finds this haaard), reading and/or listening, enjoying the act of writing, spending time at poetry events, moving around the poetry world, and just knowing I’m still a poet even if I’ve not got out much.

Rachael Hill, A recent writing-life roundup

Looking for work gave me a chance to ruminate on years of getting by on freelance writing and editing, teaching adjunct at an MFA program, and generally trying to make a living as a writer of poetry—it’s tough! Until we get more support for the arts, I suspect I’m not the only creative that’s putting their resumes out there for jobs so we can continue buying candy for neighborhood kids and paying for good and shelter and expensive doctors. What do you think, fellow poets? As long as everything keeps getting more expensive and poetry continues to pay almost zero, I think folks with trust funds or tenure track jobs may continue to poet, but the rest of us may be forced into commercial work for a bit, at least.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Job Interviews and Medical Appointments, Fox/Coyote Magic, Fall Reading and All the Fall Feels

I was approached to run some children’s poetry workshops on the theme of autumn. I did some research and was fascinated by the fact that deciduous trees don’t turn red, orange and gold, but are always that colour. It’s just that sunlight sparks the release of chlorophyll in them, and a green colour comes in and dominates. Trees shut the tap on this come September, and so the leaves revert. They don’t become red, orange and gold.

I asked the children to imagine this, and to consider it as a metaphor for everything else about aging (in grandparents, say) as not decay but revelation of what lay under all along. I thought I was being terribly clever.

Then I came across exactly this idea in an Annie Ernaux book. I’ve Googled it just now, because I couldn’t find it in my downloads or kindle library, and I definitely didn’t read it on a physical page. The infernal kid brother know-it-all that is Google’s AI assistant tells me that Thomas Merton said it first. I ask for specifics and a text, and it backtracks.

I am immensely comforted that in an Annie Ernaux book I may never encounter again there is a development of the autumn leaves idea, and sounded out as much texturally as anything else. I’m also glad for the children’s excited faces and also giggles as they pitched variants on the theme, more of them SNL joke makers than future Nobel prize winners. But I can’t remember any specific line or even concept that the children created (a decade ago).

In something of this, is a joy AI will, at best, facilitate. I did once meet a young man now all grown up who had attended one of my workshops, and he was very kind and flattering, despite the fact he was a sober and not particularly arty Geordie male. Again, this is about the near misses, and the nebulous that might rain down complexity. And somehow AI is chlorophyll in my allegory and we need something else in (as) autumn, winter and spring.

Ira Lightman, Bots and Bods

Interviews With Vampires is a series of poems I’m writing about evil. Many of them are about Nazis, or atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust. I can’t say I quite know why I am doing this.

Evil seems at once easy to understand, and completely unintelligible. The Nazis as a whole, and some of them individually, were bent on pursuing evil in its most pure and total form. When a thing is done as part of this project, the connection is usually easy to understand. See, to become good is to acquire the strength to do what one knows is right, and the ability to see opportunities for good that before one was blind to. The inverse of this, the truly evil man, is someone who notices ways to do evil that would never occur to the rest of us. The death camps were set up to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies with maximum efficiently, to make possible the destruction of human life on a massive scale, and their design, while horrifying, is not surprising. What’s surprising are the ancillary evils the Nazis were able to insert into the process. Why did they shave the prisoners’ hair? Wasn’t that a waste of time—in camps that often “fell behind schedule,” with transports lined up waiting to be “processed”? You might think, well, they wanted also to humiliate their victims, not just eliminate them. And that’s true. But they also packaged the hair up and sent it off to factories, to be made into textiles for personal and industrial use. It was even used to make mattresses. Who even thinks of doing that? The surprise is not that an evil person could do such things; the surprise is that anyone could have so much talent for evil, that doing them would occur to him.

Brad Skow, The Kindly Commandant

/ this poem is my going and i cannot stop.
/ silence has an anger. has an edge.
/ how spite can enter a gesture of retort.
/ make a rage beyond retort. is its own shuddering nest.
/ i survive.
/ to become an arbiter of dull expletives.
/ how laughter gleams between the teeth.

Fran Lock, “a song and a mistake”

— If you’re a poet, I recommend reading Ars Poeticas by Julianna Spahr. Don’t hold the Pulitzer Prize against her. The poets are frayed, (I never know whether to say we or they anymore, lapsed poet that I am), we, let’s say we, have a “frayed relationship to poetry” which Spahr says is “an almost universal condition.”

— “A poem, I understood, to be a place for the questions, not for the answers.” Spahr. It’s a book I’ve read but am still absorbing. It’s a book I want to absorb though. Not to be read just once and set aside.

— That poetry can still get at the predicaments we are all in. It feels she says, as though “there is only one way out.” And this is an idea that feels “impossible / to include in a poem tells us something / about the new feats of imagining we / have yet to embrace.”

— I’m always returning to C.D. and her Cooling Time. “We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going — often in different directions at once.” I do think this is our obligation as writers right now. To guard your writing, to be fecund, fertile, protective. Language, says CDW is a bloody Odyssey. Okay what she really says is, that we must “rise above one’s failures, to wrest hope from the next disappointment, to feel such clarity and happiness, to indulge in one’s own fertile mind — the great rush to participate in the odyssey of language, to take up the leaky pen of a long, wended life…”

Shawna Lemay, Basket of Flowers

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

This is perhaps a strange claim, but I am convinced that haiku already exist, and until they are written, they are waiting to be discovered and uncovered for the world to read and hear them. I have come to realize that is how I approach writing haiku, as a process of revealing and liberating, rather than creating. The method is simple: we experience the world with our five senses, which when we write become images. The experiences might be from our earliest childhood memories or as recent as this morning’s tea and toast. We recognize, though, that our moments, no matter how small, are all momentous. The challenge, which makes writing haiku such an arduous task (at least for me), is to find the right words with the right sound in the right order. I think it is not enough that a poem pleases the poet. I see haiku as a communal process, and so, during the drafting, I believe the poet must serve as a proxy for the reader. The closer a poem becomes to being finished, the more the writer has offered to the reader. The path is difficult and the responsibility is profound, but I thrive on the process. When my haiku have the right sound and cadence, when the fragment dovetails with the phrase to fit together seamlessly, and the gap of understanding has been narrowed just enough for the reader to bridge it, then I know I am on the cusp of giving life to one breath’s worth of words.

Jacob D. Salzer, Steve Bahr

Around two and a half years after I first heard the quiet but insistent voice of the book that would become Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change asking to be written, I’ve just last week submitted the final draft to my publisher. There is still much to do–permissions requests to make, and all that goes into the copyediting, production, and promotion processes–but nevertheless it feels like a huge shift, a turning point in my mind and heart. That particular labor is in the past, and I’m trying to allow myself to rest, at least for a moment, in the satisfaction of having done what I set out to do and said what I wanted to say. […]

The book submission was perfectly timed, because it coincided with the inaugural Hellbender Gathering of Poets in Black Mountain, North Carolina, amidst the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains. (A naturalist there told me that the Appalachian Mountains are older than the rings on Saturn!) This new conference, named for the beautifully primordial hellbender salamander—the largest salamander in North America and currently listed as a Vulnerable species—and born from the chrysalis that was the Miami Beach Poetry Festival, is the vision of the wonderful poet and human Nickole Brown. Its mission is to combine poetry, environmental science, and community, and after spending nearly a week at the gathering, I believe they are already successful. Like the School for Living Futures, Hellbender sees potential at the intersections of artistic practice and other kinds of earth-knowledge, and I was inspired to meet so many other poets who are also tuned and tuning into those connections.

The defining feature of the conference was its bringing on local naturalists and botanists to lead a series of “awe walks” on the surrounding trails, helping us poets learn more about what we’re seeing, new ways of looking, and what questions to ask. For this purpose each participant was gifted a magnifying loupe along with our information folder and tote bag upon registration. I learned quite a few things I’ll be taking with me from these walks, including how to distinguish between white and red clover, the best time (spring) and place (the very center or very edge of a patch) to find four-leafed clovers, three styles of spiderwebs (orb, sheet, and tangle), and how oak galls—little ball-shaped things I’ve been noticing all my life but didn’t know what they were—are made. Our guide, Haley, told us that she’s in the habit of collecting oak galls whenever she finds them to give to an artist friend who uses them to make natural ink and dye.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Hellbending

I’ve read several poetry books in the last few months. Hundreds of poems from books published through traditional or hybrid publishers, by poets known and unknown. And I have, more often than not, come away dissatisfied. Not dissatisfied as in critical. No. Not even as in unmoved. There was so much to love. So much that I have underlined, so much I have noted in the margins. But dissatisfied as in a little heartbroken. And it is not the fault of the poems.

Are we expecting too much from a book of poetry. Expecting it to elevate the reader – into a vault of stars, into clear air, into the swirling heart of a tornado? Or at least to leave them stranded on the highway, in the path of incoming traffic? To reveal the eighth colour in the spectrum? To be god?

I have no illusions about my own ability as a poet. Remember when they used to say (was it Malcolm Gladwell who said it first?) you have to put in 10000 hours to become a master at something complex. I have barely notched a thousand. And it shows ever so often. Even as I cover those failings with linguistic straw and dung.

And there are a number of masters. Their shadows fall in rarefied air. But the world is changing every day. The problems are bigger and harder and more obvious than ever, yet seemingly unfathomable. So much seems existential that each day is like an unearned reward. When our eyes shift from the news to a poem, are we expecting to be lulled into a false calmness, find validation or reprieve, or discover a silver bullet between the lines? Or all of those at once?

I will quote Amiri Baraka because I feel that hope and that sadness. Both.

“And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won’t come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.”

All over the world, young people are on the streets, trying to win a future that is sustainable, meaningful, safe, equitable, and free. What is the lexicon the older generation must employ to echo their voices? What are the poems they should write? Or is that poetry redundant already? I see how my words mock me – old, rusty, and anachronistic even as I write them. I have spent the last few weeks desperate for new words, even as I have been following the news and reading other poetry books. The intensity of the written word is still fumbling for the intensity of a single morning of rebellion.

I have nothing. No answer. No solution. No poem. Not even an apology.

What is the purpose of poetry?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A little heartbroken

writing downwards into the spaces

adding wisps of colour
dripping the modifier into
the origins of the alphabet

the point is the paper
start with collage
and a Blackwing pencil

Ama Bolton, ABCD October 2026

Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.

I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.

I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.

Ann E. Michael, Paper

This week: the tiny clothes of tiny women, weeds in heaven, an expansive view of Pandemonium, the shared texture of echoes, and much more. Enjoy.

Deep in the night: as if the owl had a bit too much to drink: “woohoo!,” it cried, then hiccupped, “oot. Whew!”

Then from the dark sky the great call of geese on the move.

Trees tinged, air nippy. I feel undomesticated, unmoored, half wild, half of me; the other half seeking shelter. In my head I am digging a deep hold, mole-like, My body though sways in the breezes, eyes on the sky. Is everyone so divided? Or am I bewitched by the seasons, in thrall to shifts and change? The garden is blowsy with spent blooms and nodding asters, the last bees butt-up in the zinnias. I am called. I am humming loudly to drown out the call. I may burn down the house. I may never open the door. Who knows?

I was moved by this poem by Erin Coughlin Hollowell from a recent issue of West Trestle Review, its longing and strangeness and the tugging threads of old connections.

Marilyn McCabe, weave a shirt from nettles

This whole festival has been like this: moving between places and events absorbing and connecting. But it’s more than that here, in Haworth. The Brontës are an almost physical presence. On the day I arrive, tired from delays from a broken down train and needing to stretch my legs, I walk about the graveyard, reading the names of the stones, standing and listening to the crows. I walk up a foot worn path to a drystone wall and am met with the moors and an outcrop of rock and the scent of the wind moving through wet grass and in that moment and I can almost see the three sisters marching off on an autumn afternoon walk.

The next morning I take a trip to the house itself; a kind of pilgrimage to the women writers who have come before me. I do the tourist thing – walking between the rooms, marvelling at being so close to the table where the sisters wrote, the fender where Anne rested her feet, the couch where Emily fought so fiercely against death. I look at the tiny clothes of tiny women, and marvel at the pens and ink pots and drawings and tiny books.

Later, as I’m watching a talk by the writer and historian Miranda Kaufmann, on her book Heiresses, I hear her say something like when you stand in a place where history has happened, there is only time between you. That’s it, isn’t it. There is nothing solid between us. I sit in the school room where Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell all taught the poor children of the parish, in this very room, in this very spot, where I am listening to women talking about creativity, about research, about writing. I can see through the school room window the edge of the parsonage and one window, and I think of them all, the ghosts of the Brontës pressed up against the window looking down at us jealously; at our ability to lounge on benches, speak to an audience, to discuss and argue and evolve and create. There are nano molecules and thought waves passing between us. What is a ghost but a collection of atoms returned to the earth at death and left migrate, to float giddily about in the ether. Perhaps they aren’t jealous then, watching from the parsonage, perhaps the Brontë nano molecules are amongst us, in us, inhabiting us.

Wendy Pratt, The Brontë nano molecules are amongst us

The latest from award-winning Saskatoon, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is the collection Sleep Gate (London UK: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026). A Canadian edition of the same is scheduled to appear with Thistledown Press in May 2027, the publication of which will mark her first Canadian-made book in twenty years [do you remember when Canadian Karen Solie had similar, a British publication prior to later publication in Canada?]. There’s a tonal quality I’ve long appreciated with Legris’ writing, one of intimate and very precise attention, detailing the science and study of garden technicalities through exacting lyric. There’s a distance to her attentions, also, able to articulate such intimate details exactly through the ability to step back and see fully, with the poems of Sleep Gate also exploring the further elements of dreaming and sleep. If plants have consciousness, might they, too, dream? This aspect of detailed phylum is one her work has been exploring with increasing depth since her debut collection, Circuitry of Veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), a book I was immediately struck by, when it landed (I reviewed soon after it appeared, back when I wrote for a local entertainment weekly). Are an exploration of gardens Legris’ own variation on Kroetsch’s “Field Notes,” an umbrella under which all her writing sits? Since that long-ago debut, Legris has published an impressive array of collections, each of which step further into what has developed into an extended study of detailed plant life through the lyric: Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press, 1998), the Griffin Poetry Prize-winningNerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), Pneumatic Antiphonal (New York NY: New Directions, 2013), The Hideous Hidden (New Directions, 2016), Garden Physic (New Directions, 2021) [see my review of such here] and The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions, 2024) [see my review of such here], with even a trio, at least, of chapbooks as well, along the way.

There has long been a meditative quality to the lyric responses around gardening, including collections across the past twenty years or so such as the poem-cycle meditations of Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s Garden (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014), New Jersey poet Emmalea Russo’s debut, G (Futurepoem, 2018) [see my review of such here], San Francisco poet Hazel White’s Vigilance Is No Orchard (New York NY: Nightboat, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Cole Swensen’s Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre (University of California Press, 2008) [see my review of such here] and greensward (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Ducking Presse, 2010) [see my review of such here], to further works by Victoria poet Lorna Crozier and many, many, multiple others. On the surface, gardening lends itself easily to the meditative (see also: Virginia Woolf), with certain poets allowing different elements to shine through, whether instead or alongside the physical act of tending a garden. Legris, of course, is far less about meditative landscapes and cycles than a particular kind of close-look, leaning closer to the ways in which Michigan poet Jen Tynes and Toronto poet Jay MillAr have writ about mushrooms, from her Mushrooms Yearly Planner (above/ground press, 2021) to his Mycological Studies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002), as well as more recent further titles: Mycelial Person (Milwaukee WI: Vegetarian Alcoholic Poetry, 2021) [see my review of such here] by Queens, New York-based poet Amanda Monti, and Mycocosmic (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], by Lexington, Virginia poet Lesley Wheeler. Legris’ meditative element of gardening digs deep into study and research, blending two ecological sides, one might say, of the same coin into something far more exacting. Her poems emerge from detailed language, writing of plants without getting all abstract or sentimental, offering, throughout her work as a whole, a deep reading of phylum and season, instead of any specific meditative means through to a separate end. As the back cover of this collection offers, how this new work focuses on “biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep [.]” Beneath the surface of gardening, the tendrils and runners of Sleep Gate articulate a further element beneath the surface of dreaming, and sleep.

rob mclennan, Sylvia Legris, Sleep Gate

In July, Anna and I delivered our workshop “Writing Bogwise: queer landscapes”, in which we used the lens of queer ecology to consider the bog. As a marginalised landscape in which resilient life-forms thrive against all odds, defying categories, breaking binaries, forming their own habitats in harsh circumstances, we argued, it is essentially a queer landscape. No wonder I feel such kinship with it. And as our workshop went on to show, queer ecology has so much to offer not just our appreciation of the bog, but also our writing.

Take sphagnum, for example: the bog’s keystone species. It grows at the top while its lower layers die and become peat: is simultaneously living and dying. Solid and liquid, resilient and vulnerable, the bog is a living example of in-between and both; embodying multiplicity, instability and persistence. Easy to overlook, it requires and rewards our closest attention. All of this means that it can inform our most fascinating writing, if we approach it as a teacher rather than a subject.

A close knowledge of the bog can inform the writing process – our Writing Bogwise project was grounded on this belief. Across this year’s series of seven workshops – with just one left to deliver on October 22nd – we’ve explored how the bog teaches us to write with openness and attention, to take our time, to write beyond genre, chronology and established form. It encourages us to break the rules, to push beneath the surface, to be alert to the multiplicity and layeredness of things; to allow for depth, uncertainty, fluidity and complexity in our work.

Clare Shaw, Neurodiversity, accessibility, bogs.

I want to offer a personal and not apparent reading of some lines from the middle of this poem [“Landscapes” by Lee Harwood]: “But there can be no self-flattery on this account / – it has all been decided for us./ The illusions of freedom are at last / shown to be so obviously ridiculous that / most people cry at this point.” I live with a visual artist who cries at paintings she loves. I envy her and study art not least through her eyes. And not least among her feelings is reverence for great paintings matched by reverence for their sensitivity towards light. This is matched in its turn by seeing afresh a particular scene on our travels locally. We may have seen it fifty different days of a changing year. Suddenly it is lit just right. We turn a corner and there is a scene, in just the right light, that makes a shamanistic bonding with the highest possibility of the whole. Maggie O’Sullivan is one of the few who can evoke this shamanism in poetry.

At a moment of the sublime, one hopes for reverence. Reverence can transcend even the worst argument an hour beforehand. One can even argue that human squabbles tee up the possibility of the sublime, such that the freedom human beings tend to idealise while in an argument brings them vulnerable and childlike into the moment. After an argument and the subsequent actions of the body that make me present, I feel, yes, freedom is ridiculous. Beauty brings tears that refresh the eyes.

Ira Lightman, Living In History 1: Harwood

Dear Friends,

This is the last of the questions from my interview with the Persian poet that I am going to post. I’m wondering if any of you have questions you’d like me to write about. If you do, please send them using the contact form on this site.

Richard

Fame means the condition of being well-known. Please tell me what are the good or bad points of being well-known? Anne Stevenson in her book, Bitter Fame, claims that Sylvia Plath’s need for fame could cause her mental distress. James Tate in one of his essays says: “Fame for a true artist is a luxury.” What do you think?

I haven’t read Stevenson’s book and I don’t know that quote by James Tate, so I can’t really use them as the context for my response. It is true, though, that when I first started to think of myself as a poet—I was an undergraduate in college—I wanted very much to be famous. I wanted other poets, critics, publishers—anyone who had anything to say about the value of a poet’s work to society—to call my work important and necessary. On some level, in fact, and it’s a little embarrassing to admit this now, I actually believed I deserved that kind of recognition. Foolish and naïve as I now know myself to have been, though, I’m also grateful for the chutzpah of that belief, since I don’t know if I would have continued writing without it. Indeed, I think all artists, regardless of medium or genre, need to have some measure of that chutzpah, because chutzpah is what it takes to lay claim with your work to an audience’s time (and often money).

You asked me, though, what I think about being famous. Fame—and this is something I wish I had understood a long time ago—is manufactured, produced through a combination of the right kind of self-promotion, having the right connections, having the right people advocate for your work, having the right kind of public persona, and, in general, being in the right place at the right time, both in terms of the kind of poetry you write and the person you happen to be. I know, for example, of at least one very well-known American poet whose fame is due in no small measure to the publicist they hired before their first book even came out—which means, and this is something we don’t generally talk about, they had the money, the privilege, the class status to afford that publicist’s services. This does not mean this poet is not “a good poet,” whatever you understand that phrase to signify. There were in fact moments of real power in their first book, and I am glad I read those poems, but the book itself, in my opinion, did not live up to the hype that surrounded it, which had more to do with what the market wanted than with whether or not this poet’s work added something fame-worthy to the art itself.

I don’t mean to say, obviously, that there aren’t poets who deserve their fame—and you and I might very well disagree about which poets should be on that list—but it’s worth remembering that there are other, equally worthy poets who never achieve fame, who keep writing anyway, and whose work, for those people who have read it, may end up mattering far more than the work of poets whose names everyone knows. I would be lying, of course, if I said I did not want to be better known as a poet than I am. It would be nice to be able to use that fame to make my art the center of my life in the way that only fame would allow me to do; but when I think about whether or not I really want fame, I cannot help but also be aware of how that kind of notoriety brings with it a set of audience and market expectations and how maintaining your fame can come to depend on your willingness (and ability) to continue to fulfill them. I am also aware that the fact of fame can end up conferring on anything you say or produce, no matter how poorly thought out or shoddily constructed, an aura of seriousness it clearly does not deserve; and I am sure we can all think of examples to illustrate that fact.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Are The Pros and Cons of Being Well-Known?

It’s been a rough few weeks for this news geek. I suppose they all are. But with the story about the “Cornell 7” breaking in mid-September and developing daily since, it’s been particularly tough.

It’s exhausting to be trapped in the loop of victim blaming and shaming. The loop of being scolded for not adequately protecting ourselves and being forced to hear the other side of that mouth insist men present no danger. The loop of standing together saying #MeToo and I Am Jane Doe and “believe women” while knowing they’d already have put a stop to this type of harm if they wanted to.

And while I believe that patriarchy, misogyny and rape culture hurt men, too, the power dynamic is undeniable.

I’m sitting on a full-length poetry manuscript that launches itself out of that space. It’s “about” feminine rage but not for its own sake and not even for revenge (though I have some flash fiction ideas about that LOL). My “Gertie” manuscript is about rising up for its own sake. It’s about pursuing pleasure and being loud and taking up space because autonomy and authority must belong to all of us.

It’s tempting to believe that Gertie would have given us so much to hang onto in this news cycle and that, since she’s still unpublished, the moment is missed. But that’s the thing: History tells us otherwise.

The loop of misogyny never going out of style.

I keep being reminded that this manuscript is my persistence, my insistence, my defiance. And even though prior versions are 0 for 30 (at least) and this version is 0 for 3 so far in 2026, I’m still poised to fight for her. One way or another, her voice is going to be heard.

Carolee Bennett, What Are the Things We Musn’t Lose?

On Saturday, I went to Doncaster for the launch of The Fig Tree Women’s Poetry Anthology, available here, co-edited by Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington and published by Crooked Spire Press. It contains 68 poems by 53 poets, including, as well as the co-editors and Julia Deakin who contributed a foreword, some well-known poets like Sally Baker, Claire Booker, Rachel Burns, Sarah Leavesley/James, Maria Taylor, Jackie Wills and Sarah Wimbush, alongside lesser-known ones equally deserving of having their poems selected for this excellent and timely anthology. About 20 poets read in Doncaster, the last of whom was Sarah Wimbush with an immensely powerful tour de force, her list poem ‘The Girls’. […]

Nest Saturday, I intend to go along and see John Birtwhistle read in Sheffield. I (mostly) enjoyed his Partial Shade, subtitled ‘Poems New & Selected’, Carcanet, 2023; and the following Saturday, I’ve sacrificed going to see the mighty QPR play Birmingham in favour of seeing both Carolyn Forché and Kwame Dawes read in Sheffield, which will surely be amazing. It’s all happening.

Yesterday, Lyn and I walked a long way in the yellow sunshine, to the place where my favourite wild apple trees grow, and got a big rucksack-ful that ought to do us – well, me really – through to the end of November, I reckon.

Matthew Paul, October

When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese-related poetry?

About six years ago, in one of my online writing retreats with Natalie Goldberg, with no technical instructions or background, she began to encourage us to write haiku, after zazen and breathwork. She just told us to write those “Three Simple Lines,” which later became the title of her last book, narrating her journey to Japan in the footsteps of the Haiku Masters. So, I did. Right away, it became a passion, something I couldn’t stop, nor would I even try to. I made a radical choice: I let each haiku tell my love story. I let the red-headed cranes show the reader into its unfolding, and let my inner voice guide me in creating every beauty-full detail in the book and move the reader over that arc of narrative.

Then I realized that the first poem I’ve ever written, decades earlier, was a three-line poem in Italian that I carried in my mind for years while living in the USA. It described the beauty of a summer night near my place of birth by the sea:

luccichio di mare
profumo di gelsomino
nel silenzio lunare

glittering sea
scent of jasmine
in the lunar silence

Autumn Moon Journal 6:1, 2022/23

When my haiku book was ready, I asked her—who first gave me the inspiration—to write a blurb, but she became seriously ill and withdrew from the world.

What do you enjoy the most about haiku, tanka and other forms of Japanese poetry?

A haiku…

Captures a moment in time and makes it last… forever, in its element of surprise or insight. To me, that moment is sacred, filled with a reflection of Truth, which is always in front of us, because it is pure consciousness, but it is unveiled in that unique moment and way. Every word holds infinite power. Monoku (one-line haiku) have, over time, become both a spontaneous and an often considered choice. Most of the Touchstone nominations I received have been for a monoku of only four or five words.

A tanka…

Allows more easily for the lyrical expression, the unfolding of a multilayered story. I started writing tanka only three years ago, yet it has immediately become the perfect way to open a music box, with that last line releasing the music, after the key winds it up… It’s the soul singing.

These very concepts that I fully embrace have been expressed in my favorite review of both my haiku and tanka books by A.A. Marcoff. In Blithe Spirit 36.2, he describes my poems as “flames of consciousness” where “both joy and sadness make the soul sing, and sing, and sing”…

A rengay…

Is a dance between poets that becomes more and more dynamic, intimate, at times provocative, and that ends in total harmony. Syntony in the relationship is key.

Jacob D. Salzer, Rita R. Melissano, Ph.D.

That “every lover of English poetry should read, and every student of English poetry should study” George Herbert, was T. S. Eliot’s opinion, of his co-religionist’s work. We should read Herbert not for the “exquisite craftsmanship,” or “the extraordinary metrical virtuosity,” or the “verbal felicities,” but for the “content of the poems”—a strange reason, surely? Great poems are great for the how, not for the what, or never just for that, is this not true, and common knowledge? Even Eliot’s diction works against him: “content” sounds so bland, after the excitement of “craftsmanship,” “virtuosity,” and “felicities.” George Herbert was a poet, not, in the horrid phrase that’s seized our time, a “content creator.”

What is the “content” Eliot was so high about? Many of Herbert’s poems record spiritual suffering, presumably his own, and appeals to God for solace or understanding. There are accusations against God, and pleas for relief. But this is not a new story, and versions of it are told, I’m told, even in the Bible. Contra Eliot, what makes Herbert worth reading—what makes his versions stick in the mind—is their unique mode of expression: their “verbal felicities.”

Consider “The Cross.” Herbert wanted only “some place, where I might sing, / And serve thee,” but as soon as “this dear end” is “given,” his “power to serve” is taken away, by illnesses physical and spiritual. Herbert’s description of these illnesses culminates in a perfect line of verse:

One ague dwelleth in my bones,
Another in my soul (the memory
What I would do for thee, if once my groans
Could be allowed for harmony):
I am in all a weak disabled thing.

The obstacles are outside as well as in, and Herbert blames God, in another perfect line:

Besides, things sort not to my will,
Even when my will doth study thy renown:
Thou turnest the edge of all things on me still […]

Even the most harmless things have a dangerous “edge”—what an idea. Also good is the first line, “things sort not to my will,” as if a human could have such power, that things would, of their own accord, do the bidding of his desires. Later in the poem is a shocking comparison, articulating the misery of his helplessness:

To have my aim, and yet to be
Further from it than when I bent my bow;
To make my hopes my torture, and the fee
Of all my woes another woe,
Is in the midst of delicates to need,
And even in Paradise to be a weed.

This is Herbert the equal of Donne, finding truth in paradox, for how can there be weeds in heaven?

Brad Skow, The Problem of Evil

In 1832, as John Clare’s brief but intense celebrity as a quaint rural poet waned and he began to slip further into mental illness, his patrons, no doubt well-meaning, set him up in a cottage with a piece of land in Northborough, Northamptonshire. It was less than four miles away from his home village of Helpston. It was a disaster. Within five years he was admitted to an asylum, and in 1841, not long after walking the eighty miles home in an attempt to get back to his long-dead first love, he was moved to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained ‘like a memory lost’ in the ‘vast shipwreck of [his] life’s esteems’ until his death twenty-three years later.

The move to Northborough wasn’t the root cause of his mental illness, of course, but that’s the part I keep thinking about. People who haven’t been villagers don’t understand about villages. Four miles is an inconceivably vast distance. John Goodridge, in the introduction to this selection of Clare’s poems, says ‘it might just as well have been on the moon.’ That’s how far away he was.

When you grow up in a small village where your family has been established for generations, you are in the weft and weave of it, more than you even know. You walk to the shop and everyone you pass knows who your grandad is. You know, pretty much, who lives in every house and who their children are. You know the village characters and which ones your mum says to watch out for (“have a nice time and don’t look H___ in the eye!”). The next time you see your grandad, he knows you’ve been to the shop. This is lovely, if you’re used to it. It can be suffocating, but mostly it’s lovely. It’s also why it’s hard to fit in if you move to a village – it’s not you, it’s that they don’t know who your grandma is.

This may happen in cities too – I wouldn’t know – but in a rural village you are also geographically remote. Your community literally ends at the sign that says the name of your village, and there’s a mile or two of lanes and green stuff between you and the next one. We moved to the next one when I was nearly fourteen. It was a a distance of one mile. It was weird. It was really, really weird. I cannot imagine what moving four miles did to a man like John Clare, who loved home so much that ‘the very crow/ croaked music in my native fields’. I’m glad that John Clare the poet was feted for his poetry, and that he was there for it. But I kind of wish they’d left John Clare the man alone.

Nia Broomhall, Week 29: The Works of John Clare

I am doing a rare thing and sharing a poem that I’m not intending to publish anywhere because my heart can’t take it being rejected. On this day, 32 (!!!) years ago, my husband and I went out on our first date. Shortly thereafter his parents came down to campus, and we went for a walk to look at the turning leaves by the Potomac River. That is where Jeff’s mother, the ever lovely Gail/Grammy Liss, took this picture. (May she rest in peace.) […]

Could we have been so young? Sometimes I stare
At us beneath the leaves. We’re not just friends.
The light is glinting off the river, there
Behind us, as we look into the lens
To smile our careless smiles. How unaware

We were of the jobs we’d quit, the moves we’d make,
And all the kids we’d have, without a plan. […]

It’s a sweet poem. Nothing to write home about, but it’s my Substack so here it is!

Another poet friend who married their college sweetheart is A.M. Juster who just had his 70th birthday yesterday. Ken Gordon over at The Sonneteer has a lovely sonnet (of course) by B. N. Faraj celebrating Mike. Funny enough, this means that he has just passed the age of the guy he’s recently translated, Petrarch, who is said to have died the day before his seventieth birthday with his head resting on a manuscript in his writing studio. And Petrarch also wrote about love, but in his case he didn’t get to marry his beloved like Mike and I did. Poor Francesco!

To you who hear within these bits of rhyme
the sound of sighs that used to feed my heart
throughout my youthful follies, when in part
I was somebody from some other time

If you haven’t gotten a copy of Mike’s new translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere you really should. I thought Andrew Frisardi’s introduction was excellent as well.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Youthful Follies with Staying Power

In two and a half years, we’ve twice featured comic verse by A.M. Juster (b. 1956): his “Epistle to a Friend Concerned about the Ivy League,” in May of 2024, followed by the epigrammatic “Stern Warning to Canada,” to mark our first publication anniversary in early January, 2025. It’s high time we turned to him again. As Joseph Bottum has remarked, Juster — the pen name, as we seem bound to reiterate every time we do turn to him, of former Social Security Administration commissioner Michael J. Astrue — is an American treasure, even if America hasn’t quite figured out what to do with him.

Juster’s literary output bespeaks a dazzling versatility. He has produced thirteen books of poetry and translation; as I wrote of him in 2020, reviewing his collection, Wonder and Wrath, for Plough Quarterly,

A.M. Juster, poet, translator, and critic, has called his latest book, Wonder and Wrath, his first “serious” poetry collection since 2003. In fact, in the last seventeen years, Juster has produced translations, all from the Latin, of Horace’s Satires, Tibullus’ Elegies, the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm, the Elegies of Maximianus, and those of the young John Milton. He has published as well two volumes of comic poetry: Sleaze & Slander, and an excruciatingly accurate book of parody poems, The Billy Collins Experience. If all this output falls short of the “serious” mark, you might be forgiven for wondering what “serious” actually means.

Add to these achievements the publications of a children’s book in verse in 2025 and, this year, a landmark translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and you begin to see that the model of the scholar-poet in government service did not die with Milton and Marvell.

Juster’s tight, crisp formalism lends itself readily to many modes and moods. In Wonder and Wrath alone, there’s the self-deprecating pathos of a man in a doctor’s exam room, meditating on the differences between the English depression and the Spanish dolor, juxtaposed with the marveling note of another poem’s description, in alliterative Old English cadences, of the encroachments of coyotes on a peaceful, domestic winter evening.

But Juster’s timing and precision serve him especially well in comic verse, whether he’s parodying another poet (Bob Dylan as well as Billy Collins comes under the axe), writing with grim gallows humor about terrorist threats, or — as in Today’s Poem — couching a father’s love for an adolescent daughter in the wry, ironic terms that parents of teenagers do learn to use, if they want their messages to land.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Untamed Daughter

All Donne’s editors prefer […] to gloss rapidly over his third epithalamium, written for the marriage of Robert Carr (a favourite of the king, then recently made Earl of Somerset) and Frances Howard on 26 December 1613. The Carr/Howard marriage was notorious. Howard had been granted an annulment of her previous marriage to the Earl of Essex on the grounds that the marriage had never been consummated and that as a result she was still a virgin, a claim that was widely disbelieved. The couple were hugely ambitious and — at the time of their marriage — enormously powerful and obviously corrupt.

Donne was far from the only person who had to grit his teeth and churn something out and its not surprising that his editors have been largely embarrassed on his behalf. Donne places the actual epithalamium as an inset song reported within a pastoral poem set in the chilly countryside away from court — an obvious and, in the circumstances, understandable if perhaps slightly cowardly distancing device. We might detect a hint of irony, too, in his stanza on ‘the bridegroom’s coming’ (i.e, to bed):

As he that sees a starre fall, runs apace,
And findes a gellie in the place,
So doth the Bridegroome hast as much,
Being told this starre is falne, and findes her such.

Editors point out that this alludes to an early modern belief that all it is left from a falling star is a kind of jelly, but even so it is an odd image, with its emphasis upon falling and — surely— upon disappointment. I don’t think it’s accidental either that it recalls Donne’s own lyric, ‘Go and catch a falling star’ in which the itemised series of adunata (impossibilities) are all intended to exemplify the point that ‘No where / Lives a woman true, and fair’. The true adunaton is a faithful woman.

By far the best set of marriage poems for this unfortunate wedding, though, are the Latin ones by William Alabaster, which are both exquisitely written and hilariously sarcastic. I am honestly surprised he got away with it, but I suppose he probably copied them out and presented them to the happy couple along with everyone else while crossing his fingers and hoping they never got round to reading them.

Victoria Moul, Donne’s epithalamia in context

he stands, leaky and revealed. on monday,
its vernacular of headaches. faint smile
somewhere between serif and seraph. on
the whetstone of my weariness i have
sharpened this rage; studied and extended
its music over my black grid of days.
now i feel nothing.

Fran Lock, DO US PART

The ancient Chinese believed that a great guihua桂 tree grew on the moon, and that when it blossomed in autumn, the moon blazed brighter than at any other time of year. The idea sailed to Heian Japan along with everything else in the Chinese books. But in Japan, the character 桂 was read katsura, and the katsura is another tree entirely: native, deciduous, without a fragrant blossom to its name. Its leaves turn gold in autumn and, as they fall, smell faintly of burnt sugar.

So a Chinese flower, read with Japanese eyes, became Japanese autumn leaves (if I am getting all of this right!). And that is how we got one of my all-time favorite waka, from the Kokinshū:

久方の月の桂も秋はなほもみじすればやてりまさるらむ　　ただみね

Might it be because
the katsura tree on the moon
changes colors in autumn
that the autumn moon shines so brightly? —Tadamine

Tadamine’s moon tree isn’t blossoming at all. It is turning color, like the maples. And Tadamine had never seen the tree the Chinese poets meant. Neither, as it turns out, had anyone else in Japan: kinmokusei would not arrive until the Edo period, centuries later. The whole poem rests on imaginative transmission, one of my favorite tropes, like the elephants carved at Nikkō by sculptors who had never laid eyes on one.

And speaking of the moon tree: in China, it comes with a man. Wu Gang is a woodcutter condemned to chop forever at the great 桂, which heals itself with every blow. Leave it to the monster-loving Japanese to turn him into a heartthrob. In Japan he became Katsura-otoko 桂男, an impossibly elegant and handsome demon of the moon, and women might be warned never to gaze at the full moon too long, lest he beckon them away and steal years from their lives.

Leanne Ogasawara, Kannazuki 神無月

October is my birth month / I have been thinking about what it is to be a writer / what it is to be a river / what it is to be / I am tired of / I am tired

Unseasonably mild / lying with the window open / body aching heavy with manual work’s residue / a fluting blackbird / vague road sounds / coffee in the air / a snatch of quiet hours / I thought I heard a nuthatch earlier but could have been mistaken / in my eyes / sunlight / sunlight / sunlight

The leaves aren’t yet burnishing gold / copper / pecan / don’t line the streets and pavements / with evidence of having lived / as a child I carried a carnelian stone / courage / creativity / vitality / I don’t remember what age I put it down / the last time I saw its chestnut / russet / warm-blood / hue / when I last believed in things that could guide me

Rachael Hill, With the window open

A psalm is, strictly speaking, a song of praise, most famously the 150 that make up the Old Testament Book of Psalms. Alan Baker’s A Book of Psalms contains a more modest 64 relatively short, numbered pieces, with an epigraph, one of two, from George Oppen’s own ‘Psalm’:

                    The small nouns
Crying faith

And the poems that follow focus on the small nouns, by and large, the faith they sing, much like Oppen’s, being mainly secular in nature. Of course, the biblical psalms do more than just sing praise; there are laments, social commentaries, and cries of despair among them. Baker’s poems do all these things, and more:

Psalm 15

I stood at my garden fence one autumn day, sounds
Of a man digging nearby, his muffled radio, an electric drill
Punctuated by twittering sparrows, it’s of this
The world is made, an expansive view of Pandemonium
From the newsfeed, a column of ants, people who don’t belong
Here are the sources of our problems, migrants and resident song-birds
Sanctimony and certainty prevail, to write it all down
The better to forget, some skies are cloudless, some speak
Of weariness, some lour over shoppers and café crowds
And take a prurient interest in their gossip, or would
If skies weren’t empty wordless and indifferent to our fate

This poem is as good a place as any to start reflecting on what Baker is about. The world is indeed made of these ordinary things, suffused with the light of the observing mind. And there is, of course, darkness and light, the human and the not human, the sublime and the pruriently sanctimonious, and all is set against a scale in which our petty notions of, for instance, national superiority, are seen for the trivial little things they are.

And the non-migratory sparrow, along with various other birds, sings through these pages, appropriately enough given the second epigraph, a quote from the Bible ‘Psalm 102’:

I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.
I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

The sparrow, in particular, carries a range of emotional weights through Baker’s book. […]

As I read I realised that each line starts with a capital letter, but unless I missed one, there is not a single full stop in any of the poems. This has the effect of making each line, even when the sense runs over, feels like a new beginning, one that does not find resolution. One line tumbles to the next, where we start again, like water over rocks. It makes extracting lines to quote difficult; each psalm is stitched together by the punctuation, whole and indivisible. It’s a key part, to my mind, of the book’s dynamics.

Billy Mills, Paul Vangelisti and Alan Baker: A Review

The anthology […] has poems about brass foundries and button factories, tobacco farms and river bridges (though regretfully, it doesn’t mention the bridge over the Connecticut River that appears in Billy Joel’s 1993 music video for his hit song, “River of Dreams”).

Blizzards and other natural disasters are well documented, including the devastating 1938 Hurricane that swept away much of the state. These poems contrast with pleasant nostalgic memories of childhoods marked by ice cream trucks and trolley rides to Savin Rock Amusement Park, where the Thunderbolt rollercoaster stretched into Long Island Sound on a wooden pier.

I realized while reading that there were certain local places I was hoping to see reflected through the poems, and when I didn’t see them, it occurred to me that I might have to write those poems myself. (Some I already have).

One of my poems does appear in the anthology, a holiday poem about the local hospital where my father spent many of his final days. Most people reading this blog will already be familiar with that poem, since I read it aloud last December (the video appears at this link). It was first published in last year’s Winter Anthology from Black Bough Poetry, and I was grateful to see it included there, then again in The Nutmeg Anthology this year.

I often feel a tenuous connection to the place where I live, and never feel entirely myself here, but these Connecticut poems are a wonderful tribute to my home state. The anthology is a beautiful keepsake, and I’m glad to be part of it.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Poetry from the Nutmeg State

Kim Hyesoon began her literary career in a South Korean publishing house in the late 1970s where she frequently found her work censored as an editor. As a writer, she developed an elliptical style with occluded truths. In 2014, she began publishing blog posts anonymously, only pausing during the Sewol Ferry Disaster, under the heading “Thus Spoke Ahn-ah”, becoming Lady No in English. The posts are set in Aerok, a mirror version of Korea. The first piece notes “From Aerok, I write” from this place:

“The loneliness of a star called Earth floating in the cosmos.
Clinging to a corner of this lonely star, the country of Aerok cradles her tiny skeletal mountains. They are like so many insects banished from outer space.
Like the intoxication with echoes from a well with no water, this writing, is it to be drunk with loneliness?

Here
to live.
To love.”

A star feels more fleeting than a planet which adds to the sense of aloneness. Like Korea, its mirror-image country has a boundary of mountains, that appear tiny in the greater scheme of things. As humans are tiny in the universe: almost specks of irrelevant dust. However, Lady No sees humans as living things with a need to connect, to live and create a community. And to witness, as poets (and writers generally) feel compelled to do.

Some of the pieces consider poetry. From “The Name of Poetry”,

“Poetry goes beyond a ‘name,’ beyond identity, toward the pattern I drew as I was washed out into anonymity. The design of that pattern. Where verbs and adjectives try to fulfil themselves by drawing patterns inside the design, where pronouns and nouns turn into verbs and scatter. It is the secret of their escape.

A nameless one.
A nameless one, s/he whose name no one knows in the world,
The one whose name everyone else has forgotten
Is coming down the valley.
S/he kisses the stream of the valley and drinks its water.
The blue sky clings to his/her sleeves.”

To be truly open to a poem, the poet has to drop their ego, and let the poem speak for itself. The poem’s speaker has lost their name, but not their connection with nature.

Emma Lee, “Lady No” Kim Hyesoon translated by Jack Saebyok Jung (Ecco) – book review

I should type quietly since the cat’s asleep beside me, having entered her autumnal snuggle-close mode. Even with the windows closed, the house is now in its liminal seasonal moment, poised between not cold enough to turn on the heat and too cold to sit without a blanket. Meaning, it’s perfect.

And, it makes me wish I were so. I’ve been so lucky these past seven months to see many of you and to share poems around the country, while celebrating both The Book of Marys and Glaciers and the 20th anniversary of Black Ocean and our incredible list of writers and translators with books old and new. I am so grateful to all of you who have made your way to one or more of the readings this year. Thank you! Yet, after all these months, I’m missing the sensation, a feeling of being fully in myself, that comes with seeing a poem through. All this time, I’ve been performing the role of poet, but not actively writing. It’s not writer’s block (the ideas and the desire and the project are there), but a suspension, the writerly me frozen in place waiting for the thaw of stillness.

I am very not good at sitting still. Yet, stillness, in space and in mind, is a frequent craving.

I think we’re all built of these paradoxes of needing the one thing we seem most incapable of giving ourselves (and it’s not something that can be given by any other).

Yes, I know I should turn myself into someone who meditates, but what I love most about yoga is the moving in the moving meditation.

So, while I’ve been moving, flying, biking, walking among the readings as of late, reading poems but not writing any, I’ve been thinking about the boxes of books in my basement. Boxes mostly of my first and second books, Intervening Absence and Forty-One Jane Doe’s, that I acquired on the close of my publisher–Ahsahta–and Small Press Distribution. While I don’t write poems in anticipation of a reader (I’ve never been so presumptuous to hope), there is a particular kind of sadness about books of poems that have not found their readers and don’t have the opportunity to do so.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Sitting in Wait

My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses in Australia, and caring for the health and well-being of small domestic animals at veterinary centers in North Carolina, Portugal, and New Mexico. She was briefly here in Pennsylvania, recently, to participate in my mother’s memorial gathering, and one morning at breakfast I mentioned that I have been buying amazingly good sheep-milk yogurt at our local farmer’s market. “It’s so expensive, though,” I told her, “Ten dollars a quart!”

“I don’t know, that sounds a fair price, actually,” she said. “Have you ever tried to milk a sheep? It isn’t easy!”

Well, no. I hadn’t given sheep-milking a second thought. And now that I’ve looked at a few YouTube videos…let’s just say that sheep-milk yogurt is a splurge for me, but certainly a good value for the price.

It’s little times like these–moments that could be so mundane–that keep me from becoming too blasé. My daughter inadvertently reminded me that I need to stay curious and not take things for granted, that while looking deeper into a topic may complicate my understanding, complexity and depth are good results! Her worldview varies from mine in interesting ways, and I always gain information from her; sometimes, what I learn finds its way into a poem (see my poem “Drought and Blood” in Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis). But aside from so-called poetic inspiration, what I cherish are those opportunities to look at experiences, places, and people from another perspective.

That’s why I love reading. I read books about history, geology, the cosmos, physics, biology, botany, philosophy, theology, economics, even entomology. It’s also one of the main purposes that people should read fiction and memoir: to get a view into how someone else thinks, lives, experiences the world.

And, of course, it’s why I enjoy poetry.

Ann E. Michael, Perspective, again

When I read this poem for the first time, I probably shrugged and turned the page over, like I always do with poems that I later grow to love. It took reading the Adrienne Rich essay and watching her grapple with it for me to begin to love it, and since reading that essay I’ve never stopped. I think I read this poem, once upon a time, and realised I needed to create a house where this poem could be true, that it might take years, that it was time to change my life. As Rich says, a poem can’t ‘free us from the struggle for existence’ but it can uncover our desires, it can imagine a world for us that we might not be able to imagine on our own.

I ran a workshop a few years ago, and shared the Wallace Stevens poem with the group and then asked everyone to write about an experience of reading late at night. I wrote as well, or tried to write about staying up late one night to read the novel I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. My office has patio doors out to the garden. It was pitch black outside, and I kept thinking I could see a face peering into the room from the garden out of the corner of my eye.

I wanted to write a poem that was like Allison McVety’s poem ‘To the Lighthouse‘, which won the National Poetry Competition in 2011. I love the way this poem wrestles with the book, how the speaker maps their changing feelings about the book onto their changing life. I wanted to write like that about the Chris Kraus book.

It felt like fighting my way inside a very complicated maze trying to write the poem. At some point I fell asleep whilst I was trying and had a strange dream where I argued with my friend and ex-boyfriend M about I Love Dick. M had died in his mid forties in a road accident a few months before. It was a shocking and sudden death – but in the dream, we carried on our twenty-year conversation, our twenty year habit of disagreeing with everything the other person said. And we carried on loving each other in the limited ways we always had, even after death. He hated the book in the dream, as he probably would have in real life. So the poem became a re-creation of that conversation – but in the poem, it is just me talking. It felt like too much of a trespass to put words in M’s mouth when he wasn’t there.

Now I think that I thought I wanted to write a poem about a book I loved, but what I wanted to write about was limerence, and desire, and shame, and the refusal of shame, and women who come undone from what holds them to their normal, everyday lives, and the way some people will always be with us, even after death. And I wanted to write about M, and what Luce Irigary calls the ‘between-us’ – the complicated, beautiful, messy space between two people, and how all of it carries on.

Kim Moore, The House of Poetry

Oh I don’t know. I went walking yesterday and saw this bag hanging from a tree and so took a short video of it moving in the wind. I’m some kind of writer and so I thought this looks like some kind of art, some kind of prompt for writing. I’ll probably want to do something with it. Of course, I was walking because I was taking a break from sitting shiva for my father-in-law so everything felt like a prompt, like it had potential meaning, that I should triangulate between how I’m feeling and what the world suggests, or looks like, or is presenting some kind of objective correlative for me to consider. There is a kind of stark beauty to this moving bag. I might have just filmed it and then presented the image, but I felt compelled to speak to the experience of observing it. So I made this poem and music to accompany the image of the moving bag. Alert the authorities.

Gary Barwin, Bag in the Tree: everything is (a) prompt

Last night, after a tiring and chaotic return from Italy, Janet and I went to Rother Street Arts Centre in Stratford (upon Avon) for an open mic run by writer and teacher Lucy Parrott. There were about 35 people there in the end and it was good to sit at the back, listen and watch. There was the usual variety of stuff – some to my taste, some not, as you’d expect – and, as usual, some people either don’t practise reading and timing the pieces they plan to read, or just don’t have an accurate clock in their heads in order to stick to the five-minute per person rule. Sometimes it’s down to inexperience, sometimes to a genuine error, sometimes to an oversized ego.

This is a shame because, although the Stratford event was relaxed and easy-going in general, the basic principle is that if you take too long, the someone else later the programme is going to be cut short – or even cut out.

I will try to go to the next meeting and this time read something from Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. (If I’m allowed back after spilling my large glass of Malbec over the table and floor…)

I remember the last open mic I read at in Stratford was going way over because two people read for about eight minutes each so I read one poem that lasted 30-40 seconds to help get it somewhere close to being back on track. I didn’t really mind but shouldn’t have had to do it to accommodate the carelessness of others.

Poems In The Key Of Aardvark continues to sell, thankfully, though much of the interest has been from outside the UK. This surprised me until I looked at the statistics for this blog, where it’s probably advertised more than anywhere else. OK, it’s a modest attempt at communication, so it’s not high profile, but of the 512 visitors in September only 36 have been from the UK. That’s seven per cent. Most people who come on to read the poems or blogs are from the USA, China and India. The rest are spread among almost 40 countries – and relatively few of those are in Europe.

The break in Italy – the island of Ischia to be precise – got me writing in longhand in a notebook, so I have to decipher that and see if there are any half-decent poems lurking there. It also gave me time to re-work Novel No.4 which stubbornly refuses to be abandoned. I think I found the key to why I didn’t think it was working, so have begun to re-write and develop it. We’ll see what happens. Part of the fun, of course. I’m only 32,000 words in so who knows if, or for how long, it will survive.

Bob Mee, THE GREAT VALUE OF OPEN MIC POETRY EVENTS

Rare for me to manage to get down some words about an occasion before it happens, but this time I’m very much in the organising chair. Thankfully not the Festival Director’s chair — that responsibility belongs to my friend Angus Allman, compere of CB1 Poetry — but I’ve been heavily involved with this resurrection project from the beginning, and suddenly it’s just around the corner.

Cambridge Poetry Festival originally ran from 1975 to 1986, biannually, and hosted Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, Roy Fisher, Octavio Paz (etc, etc — you get the idea!). The 2026 version will feature international guests (China’s Ma Yongbo, South Africa’s Athambile Masola), along with current and emerging poetry stars (Zain Kakooza, Clare Pollard, Jade Cuttle). Perhaps more importantly, it draws together most of the local poetry scene in its programme of fringe events, salons and workshops, as well as weaving in some more unusual types of activity. […]

What else to say at this point? Well … it’s been predictably exhausting and frantic behind the scenes — especially alongside the start of a new university term and my current editorial duties (both for Sidekick and the upcoming Game Poems Magazine #2). We’re doing it all on a threadbare budget — essentially, just money raised from various warm-up events that have been staged over the last year-and-a-half. Between us, the organising committee have, I think, zero experience of staging things on this scale. Then again, it’s really just a bunch of regular-sized events strung together, so what could possibly go wrong?

Don’t answer that.

Jon Stone, DIARY / Cambridge Poetry Festival

I told you when I started that I am bad at schedules and consistency, and so there has been a gap in my poetry memorization. Nor have I retained everything I learned earlier this year. Sad, sad, very sad! Still, I have a lot more of it than I used to. And now I have this splendid poem by Wordsworth by heart, one of the ‘Lucy’ poems, which almost clung to me like a magnet, as the best poems so often do. You can find it on Poetry Foundation. My other recitations are here. […]

And here is the passage from ‘The Uncommon Reader’ by George Steiner that made me realize I had stopped memorizing for a year or so and really ought to start again more seriously.

Le Philosophe lisant, like the cultured men around him in a tradition which runs from classical antiquity to, roughly, the First World War, will know texts by heart (an idiom worth thinking about closely). They will know by heart considerable segments of Scripture, of the liturgy, of epic and lyric verse. Macaulay’s formidable accomplishments in this respect — even as a schoolboy he had committed to memory a fair measure of Latin and English poetry — were only a heightened instance of a general practice. The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin’s lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.

I hope you will join me in memorizing more poetry. It might be the best contribution we can all make to literary culture! Soon I will record the Herrick poem I memorized last year too…

Henry Oliver, A Slumber did my Spirit Seal, by William Wordsworth

Emily Dickinson warns that one shouldn’t lose connections to memories. I believe we should keep the good ones close to us, holiding on to them as long as possible. They should be, according to Dickinson, rooted in us. Here is poem #1508 (Johnson ed.) that fully expresses her feelings about memories:

You cannot make Remembrance grow
When it has lost its Root—
The tightening the Soil around
And setting it upright

Deceives perhaps the Universe
But not retrieves the Plant—
Real Memory, like Cedar Feet
Is shod with Adamant—

Nor can you cut Remembrance down
When it shall once have grown—
Its Iron Buds will sprout anew
However overthrown—

“The Basement Stacks” is my way of holding on. The pieces, for the most part, are so personal I’m not sure how relevant they are for readers. But, memories have surfaced during the writing that I’d simply forgotten. This series has allowed me to rediscover so much about myself.

Sam Rasnake, New poem: “The Basement Stacks: 13”

Let’s start with the news that a new magazine was born today. The proud parents (William Thompson and James O’Hara-Knight) have called it Yield and you can read it here. I have this morning and enjoyed every page. I won’t call out specific poets otherwise I have to name them all,  but go…read it..Yield to the poems and thoughts it will yield. Oooh, you see what they’ve done there. You can if you want/like me also listen to Pearl Jam’s Yield album while you do it.

I had submitted to Yield and was unsuccessful/rejected/declined, etc (delete according to your own brand of not getting in to a magazine, etc), but reading the issue I can see why. Onwards and sideways there, especially after a week or two of other rejections from The Rialto and Northern Gravy. I’ve got a big pile of poems waiting to go out, so I should get on with that.

Mat Riches, Bees wearing boxing gloves

I had been trying to write about Nancy Drew taking up quilting.  I was leafing through A. E. Stallings’ Afterlife, her wonderful collection of mostly published poems, and came across “Medea, Homesick.”  I thought about Nancy Drew, homesick for her youth.  And a poem just tumbled out of me.

This morning I’ve been looking at rough drafts of poems that I’ve composed in the last 2 months.  My goal for Fall Break is to finish one or two.  I am delighted to realize that I’ve written more than I remembered, although some of them are just some lines that may or may not have potential.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rough Drafts and Fall Break

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a work that I adore. It sings off the page, is beyond form, it bumps and lurches, it isn’t perfect but it purrs. Oh it purrs. It is an extraordinary free verse symphony. I read it in one sitting and then bought everything I could find by (and about) Elizabeth Smart. I researched her story in depth and detail, I even wrote a screenplay about her and George Barker’s affair. Smart herself had tried to write it for film but didn’t manage it with much satisfaction. I got as far as meeting the woman who owned the rights to the book who served me with a politely disguised cease and desist notice. “You need to find your own story” she said, “go write that instead.” And so I did.

There are three works in my collection My Name Is Swan, the title poem, its sequel, Reynard, and the concluding piece, Body 115. This final, long-form poem owes much to Smart and her odyssey, the harrowing opera that she scripted and lived before ever writing it down. In the last act of a tempestuous relationship I, against all reasoned advice, set off across Europe to meet my estranged lover, on New Year’s day outside the Duomo in Milan. I knew in my bones that such gestures rarely bring about meaningful reconciliation and I was driven by the poetry of the occasion. Little else could save us. In any case our story needed a conclusion and I wasn’t entirely surprised when she never showed up. But I got my ending. Sitting outside Milan’s Central station in the January rain I knew at least I had a poem to take home.

Jan Noble, Nº84 By Milano Centrale I sat down and wept

Initially I didn’t want to add a note to this poem. Our custom is to share our work and give some insight into its composition, but – really – I didn’t want to say anything about the sadness behind it. However, a couple of months have passed, and I can see that a large part of the poem’s drive is in addressing these terrible, conflicting emotions after a loved one takes their life. But what can one say? I wanted to be true. In the afterwards, we veered through every feeling. We accused ourselves. And him. We swore at him and what brought him there. It was huge. So hugely awful – but so simple: prior to the funeral, there was just a box in the room. We were angry – but God, we loved him then too. I did dream of him afterwards. And though I’ve never asked, I’d swear that others must have too.

We are at a point where around 7000 men and women take their lives each year in the UK. What can we say about the grief of such a situation? I do not know. I just know a miserable regret. The world is missing a graceful and beautiful man.

Niall Campbell, The Garden

What is your mood going into October? Right now I’m cooking pumpkin goat cheese pasta and Glenn is putting up Halloween lights (Glenn goes all out for Halloween decor!)

Since I was sick for several days last week it was nice to get out on a really perfect fall day (not too hot, blue sky, a chance to enjoy the fall leaves and flowers before they’re all knocked out by our usual October wind/rain storm.)

I also am happy to report I have a poem upcoming in Uncanny, which is a really cool magazine I had never submitted to because of its “hard sci fi” reputation. I spent September sending out work, and I’ve already had a couple of acceptances and rejections from that. October is seeming a little more productive, with me finally thinking about the next book after Fireproof, writing new work in a little but more of a playful vein instead of sticking to a theme or pattern. I’m also thinking about writing in other genres a little bit more – there’s no rule that poets can’t try other genres, and I think I like the challenge that other shapes and rules give me.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Skagit Weekend with Pumpkins, Gardens, and Amazing Light, Owls and Coyotes for Spooky Season, October Moods

— I’ve shared this quotation by Adam Zagajewski before from his book Eternal Enemies, and don’t we all have a few of those by now?

“hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful”

— I wrote Courage, life is beautiful, on a mirror in red lipstick, thinking I’d said something original before rummaging around in my memory banks for the AZ reference. The trouble with often quoting a line by someone else, it starts to feel like your own. I’d like to think I had his blessing for the use here. He’d probably write a dry poem about the obscure Canadian writer quoting his work in lipstick. […]

— I once owned a copy of Siding with Things, a now out of print translation of Francis Ponge’s thing poems. The book’s binding had disintegrated and at some point I let it go. In 2016 A new translation Partisan of Things translated by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau appeared and I’ve just now got to it. Corey says in the intro: “To exist in this world is to be fragile, subject to constant change; to find acceptance of that fact is an act of heroism…” He goes on, “For Ponge, the world is something that must be made, and this happens when we give le monde muet, the silent world, a voice.” And then he quotes Ponge, “We have to flourish, develop, produce the world around us — bathed and immersed in the silent world — that is our natural environment, our only true home; around us, through us, feeding us; we are part of it…”

— It seems notable that it was written in the preamble to WWII, during which Ponge fought for the resistance. How can our attention to things now be a sort of resistance?

Shawna Lemay, Courage Ongoing, Tone, Flourishing, Acknowledging

What will happen to text
in a place where time does not exist? There
are children holding planets and truth and
glimpses of tomorrow. Dead before they learnt
to put down wonder. I carry an excess of fury,
they say. I can pay, perhaps? Haven’t we always
paid for all the anger we cannot hold and cannot
speak and cannot translate between their lines
of acceptability.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Transport

But we need to keep going, don’t we? To believe that humanity will meet the challenges posed by climate change, and find a balance between the great promises of artificial intelligence and its great dangers. To believe that fascism will not gain a permanent upper hand, but begin to be beaten back by moderate and progressive voices. To believe that those whose lives are motivated by greed, power, and domination will not have the last say.

What helps? For me it’s keeping busy with work that I find meaningful, being involved with others in social and community projects, remaining always in sight of the beauty of life and trying to share it with others.

This past week I played a short flute recital at the cathedral, in a concert with other musicians that I helped organize, for the annual province-wide Journées de la Culture.

I also gave a relief printmaking demonstration as part of the cathedral’s weekend roster of events; that was well-attended and a lot of fun for me to plan and present.

Another recital at the Armenian Cultural Center, scheduled for yesterday, had to be postponed because the organizer and main pianist had an accident and hurt his leg.

So now that I don’t have to practice quite as strenuously as I have been lately, I can return to drawing and painting, and hopefully finish the book that I’ve been working on this summer and early fall. The drawings and watercolor in this post were all done in the past few days.

Beth Adams, Taking the Long View

Who said to me once, You write so well
about suffering? That gave me

pause. And another time, I am so glad
I don’t have to think of things like that.
Trees bent by the long monsoon,

unceasing eddies in the lake; mildew
collecting intentions on the bathroom
walls— Do these, too, speak of suffering?

Luisa A. Igloria, Not Just Suffering

I recently found my first conker of the season during a stroll in someone else’s town, and I brought it home to place by the front door. Perhaps it is true that the scent that they emit whilst drying is a deterrent for large spiders, perhaps I have just set myself a reassuring ritual for each autumn. Feeling its smoothness reminded me that I had written a poem about a conker so I was eager to rummage through my poetry files to find it and see if I thought it was any good on a reread. I do rather like it, and it was fun to receive some positive feedback about it when I shared it on social media and then in a writing workshop. And my thanks to a person from Australia in the workshop who asked me what a conker was, and therefore reminded me that my thought about taking one with me would have been a good idea after all. Sometimes I overthink things and talk myself out of them whilst wondering if people will think I am silly or childish for taking a conker or my special glass marble to a poetry workshop. And actually those are the things that run through the core of me and make me me… I will take this as the perfect reminder to pop such things in my workshop bag in the future.

Good friends are a wonderful reminder of what’s in the core of you. People who really see you and know you, and I felt my soul become as shiny as that conker during the week when I went for minty tea with a lovely friend. Mix that in with shenanigans in a zoom room and a night out at the theatre to see Susan Calman and my soul felt super zingy.

There’s a romantic nostalgia that has been rising in me these last few weeks and music and sunset drives, as well as all those good conversations and laughter have been asking me to notice the change of season, and how I am standing in it. As a gentle nod to this I have decorated the fireplace with autumnal things. I am motivated to dust things properly when there is going to be a new arrangement, and I have loved seeing the simple display of ‘things’ that signifies I am observing the tilt of the earth. I have even been heard to say that I am going to make the mantelpiece seasonal every month.

Here’s to friends, to candles that can be lit in the darker evenings, and to remembering that licking conkers is not a good idea.

Sue Finch, CATERPILLAR OR SHOELACE

autumn silence
the clippers found
rusted shut

Tom Clausen, autumn silence

This week: September tomatoes, ghost pixels, locoweed, rejection season, an ode to the multiple orgasm, and much more. Enjoy.

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

Ann E. Michael, Poetry online

When fall ends
my neighbors trim their gardens

down to nothing,
mulch and soil.

But I like my unruly garden,
refuge for tiny native bees

and the rabbits
under the bush.

Once the bears take a nap
I’ll feed the birds.

For now the name of God
we’re drawing down

is drying stalks
and first frost.

Rachel Barenblat, New name

Is it too early in the season for autumnal lament? Well, yes. But the furnace is kicking on now some mornings, and I’ve started to pull out the cold-weather clothing, and I’ve had thoughts about draining the hoses and closing the combination windows. One becomes conscious of things, of their relationship to to time and change, and of the sense that certain things are passing out of our lives. All this has a way of dredging up elegiac poems, like this one.

The Vanished

In the autumn of 2015, the production of paper cards for library catalogs ceased.

No matter how long ago they completed their disappearance,
I still expect them,
perhaps in a sort of narthex just past a pillared entry,
or off to the side
as if in a private chapel, or straight ahead like an altar.
Shrined in the silence,
modest and single, or ranged in ranks and banks and rows,
the gods of Order
lived in their tabernacles of honey and amber maple
or oak like chocolate,
darkened at times from the touch of a hundred thousand fingers. […]

Maryann Corbett, Of Objects and Elegy

These anniversaries are tricky: the push of the past on the tenderness of the present, coupled with the uncertainty of the future, can make it scary to keep going. I do wish I still had my husband’s wisdom and strength to fall back on, but I’ve grown more self-reliant and self-directed in these years without him. I think he’d be proud of me. People tell me he is, but there’s no way to know for sure. I can only live the life I think he’d cheer on, because he was always my biggest advocate and my greatest fan. I was also his biggest fan, reminding him to send out his poems, hyping up his books, announcing his publications proudly on social media.

In the end, despite all the pain of loss, I’m so glad for those decades spent together. These anniversaries can be tricky, but as each passes, I have to acknowledge that once upon a time, a man from Little Rock met a a newly graduated college girl from the Bronx, and that duo became inseparable until death did actually part us. I acknowledge that just as much as I acknowledge the loss itself. I move on, with gratitude and grief in equal measures.

Allison Joseph, Anniversary Season

now I lay me down
in a quiet wood
in the mossy
ripe-smelling
undergrowth

now I lay my head upon the leaves
still falling
still letting go
still greening before the coming storm

I lay me down beneath
the canopy of leaves
beneath the great
soft swelling belly of the Earth

Rebecca Cook, now i lay me down

My husband brings me bones of things, sometimes with a bit of skin, part of an eye. He brings me animals, both living and dead: a baby squirrel, a tiny snake, a bird skull tinier than the pad of your thumb, a mouse bone. He points out the birds nesting on his window ledge, the grasshopper stuck to your screen, the cool moth on the brick wall.

I know I’m in for a delight when I hear: Les, bring your camera. Hurry.

Wednesday, it was a baby snapping turtle! Marty discovered it on the road while walking Ziggy and brought it home in a dirty paper cup for me to see. He handled it carefully, set it on the blue table, held it again, then gently put it back into the cup and drove it to the river at Herring Run, leaving it at a prominent snapper mating spot.

After he released it, Marty took videos of the turtle getting accustomed to the water. He watched it swim against the current to get on a rock, miss, and try again. And off it swam.

In 2010, he returned with the dogs and a dead crow, frozen in the February snow, no blood, all intact. He knew I’d want to take its picture but had no idea what would happen after that. So it sat in a bag in a box on a table for several days, until I took it to a taxidermist. “Henry” has been hanging on my living room wall for 16 years. That crow inspired a short story, an essay, and a poem.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Creature Feature

My sister recently told me that our cousin, who has been reading along on this meta-journey of (not)writing about my mother, asked her if I was ever going to write another post…or anything connected to the project. On the one hand, it’s nice to know there are people (Brian! Thank you!) waiting for my writing to arrive. On the other…well, see previous post.

But! I do have something to offer in the interim: my third book of poems, Flor/elegy, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2027, and is now available for pre-order through the distributor!

As is my way with these things, the poems included span many years of writing. Also familiar to readers of anything I’ve ever written will be the themes. Motherhood, daughterhood, love, loss and grief for both the human and the natural world. The title is meant to play on the poetic form of the elegy along with the Medieval florilegium, a collection of botanical illustrations […]

Florilegium can also refer to a gathering of literary texts. How about that! Very grateful to my editor at CMU Press for helping me find the title. It’s perfect.

Sheila Squillante, Can I Interest You in Some Poems Instead?

This week sees the publication of two books with swans in their title. One, a collection of poetry that will glide slowly, gracefully, hopefully off the press at Ink & Ribbon, the other that will, no doubt, fly from the shelves in astonishing numbers with translations planned in 12 languages.

Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer, a portrait of the late Princess of Wales, has been described in The Guardian as, “a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer.” Around twenty major news outlets have so far given it coverage with international notices in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times as well as features in magazines like Vogue. In the UK The Daily Mail serialisation will tell you that the publicity engine behind this book is huge. ‘News’ items appear across the BBC where the author is afforded airtime to steer serious questions toward his book. […]

Both Swan books published this week are about belonging. Spencer’s to family, to aristocracy, to royalty and bloodline, to inheritance and celebrity. My Name Is Swan offers the opposite, a document of the outsider, the wayfarer, the fugitive, the marginalised figure moving, unwatched, unattached, dispossessed at the edge of the city.

Jan Noble, Nº83 A tale of two Swans

it rained all week at the beach.
what a gift to know so many forms
of water. we let the wind off the shore
make kites of us. our lungs in the clouds.
the sea gulls stood, beaks to gale,
cutting the wind into ribbons. we looked
far out where the waves argued
like old brothers.

Robin Gow, sea foam

It is almost a year since my friend, editor and publisher John Lucas died.
With John went his Shoestring Press, which was only right, given the hands on nature of his relationship with his writers, their work and with every aspect of his beloved Shoestring.

The book he was kindly going to publish for me, Light Work, was almost ready to go to print. I briefly considered approaching other publishers of poetry- waiting for submissions to open, entering competitions etc- but for various reasons, I decided to see if I might select some of the poems I liked most from the book for a pamphlet instead. I do love a pamphlet, and it also felt like a chance to re-evaluate what I had to offer, and to make something new.

After a productive month or so of drafting and redrafting – this tends to come in bursts in my case, with new poems putting me in a productive place to revisit older ones with fresh eyes – I had a good number of poems, older and newer, that seemed to work well together and that I was happy with, so I put these in a Word document and sent them off to New Walk Editions, publisher of very smart books and pamphlets.

Roy Marshall, New Pamphlet in 2027

Very happy to say I am honored to have an essay in Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, with some powerhouses like Diane Seuss, Brian Turner, Kimiko Hahn and some friends (who are also powerhouses) like Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oliver de la Paz, and Julie Marie Wade. I am looking forward to reading all the essays because the form is very interesting to me, and I like the idea that writing essays can follow the body or breath as form, that it can be experimental or traditional, that it does some things that poetry cannot do. My essay is called “When Poetry Gets Mutated: Writing Lyric Essays, Haibun, and Other Hybrids.” (Gotta represent the mutants!) Each essay also has a prompt, so it lends itself to teaching as well as just personal education. Check it out from Rose Metal Press! Also shout-out to the editors, Lee Horikashi Roripaugh and Heidi Czerwiec.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Adventures at the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Harvest Fairs, the Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, Harvest Moons and Looking Forward

I spent time recently along a portion of the iron curtain. All this time, I sort of thought that “iron curtain” was a metaphor, not a real thing. Not miles and miles of posts and barbed wire and watchtowers, and the band of no-man’s-land that ran alongside. It was chilling, to see among these benign rolling hills and fields of gourds and sunflowers, oak forests and locust stands, signs of those perilous times of desperation and cruelty. Of death and iron. Small villages dot the landscape, and old castles. The language is blurry with soft g’s and zh’s. The soup is delicious. The coffee is strong. The people impassive of face. At first. There is laughter not far below the stony surface. There are stories. And ghosts. And in the shadows, shapeless masses of unfinished things. Which is the definition of “golem.” I came back more afraid of the future now that I’ve tasted more of the past. Something of strangeness and the past and the future is captured in this poem by C.D. Wright, whose work often leaves me perplexed but moved, sometimes, as poetry can reach beyond the rational brain to the shadows within.

Marilyn McCabe, Against the cold spurs in the sky

Your stars wrapped me so tightly
I stayed.
Acquiescence was deeply blue,
striving for sunlight.

What is the texture
of the process, where is the binding cord?

Flight is the capacity of a place inside
us to forge a path. Cup your hands
and they fill with wildness.
Nurture it.
Deliver it.
Let the stars go.

Charlotte Hamrick, War: A Tryptic

It’s one of those weeks. I’ve reached an awkward point in putting together what will, hopefully, be my first full poetry collection, and I’ve got myself all tangled up with it. You know when you decide to clear out a cupboard and it has to get much, much worse before it gets better? Like that. I’ve no idea whether the jam jars should live with the bags for life, or where the seventeen single gloves came from. I’ve lost sight of the individual poems and what I want them to do. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, well, I can’t see the trees for the wood at the moment.

Luckily, I have some lifelines: the mantra your only job is to write one poem (courtesy of Jo Bell), the Arvon course I’m going on soon which I’m hoping will press the reset button, and, as always, poetry collections that make me think yep, that’s how you do it. This week, the hand of fate has given me Significant Other, Isabel Galleymore’s first collection, published by Carcanet in 2019. Thank goodness it has. I needed to be reminded to sweat the small stuff – to mix my metaphors even further, I needed to be reminded that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves.

This is a book full of small, careful poems, poems about sea creatures and other creatures and people creatures. Writing short poems well takes fierce focus and a bomb-disposal expert level of precision to make it look like you’ve got to the heart of something easily and without wasting a word. It takes confidence. It is far from easy. […]

The reason I’m so glad I’m reading Significant Other again this week, I think, is that this collection shows very clearly that if you pay attention to each tiny thing you’re doing, the book will sound like you and say the things you want to say anyway. Each poem here is a tiny glow made of finely-tuned language – a robin, a starfish, a seahorse, a scrotum frog. And the poems don’t all sound the same, or look the same, but the book as a whole becomes an ecosystem, almost a manifesto, that tells us about life on Earth. Maybe I can stop agonising about how tidy the cupboard is. Match up the gloves. Look after the pennies. Separate the wood from the trees. One poem at a time.

Nia Broomhall, Week 28: Significant Other

During the dog days of summer, I went with a friend to visit the bookshop at a local spiritual retreat center. Since we didn’t plan ahead at all, the bookshop ended up being closed when we arrived. Fortunately, an exhibit was on view. We were told, sotto voce, that we must be exceptionally quiet (!), as the overnight guests were enjoying a silent retreat.

I’ve been to several exhibits at this venue before, but never during quiet hours, and the silence added to the experience. As I live on the east coast, we battle humidity more than aridity. Two thousand miles away, the New Mexico landscape in these photographs might as well have been the moon. Compelling, bleak, and deeply transformative. […]

In the early 18th century, Miguel de Quintana, a devoutly religious Spanish poet living in a settlement about fifty miles from Pecos Pueblo, penned verses against the Inquisition, and for this, he was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church. His work was translated by Francisco Lomeli and Clark A. Colahan in Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana’s Life and Writings. One of the few lone voices in the (colonial) wilderness of New Mexico who wrote openly against the Church, these lines are from his poem, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’:

Gain that understanding
That the power of God has given you.
Perfect it, Miguel, and write,
For you have in no way strayed.

God’s strength moves you,
And there is no power
That can resist it…

Miguel, save and enlighten me,
For I burn on the coals
Of this sea of tears
Which I show to you weeping.

Fear not, for you are on the right path…

Today, there are institutions we must challenge, and empires against which we must rise. Although de Quintana’s poetry was not part of the exhibit, it could have been. That I came away feeling so moved by the people, places, and cultures of New Mexico speaks to the skill of the photographer, Bill Graustein, in creating a visual narrative, along with the artist, Magalis Videaux, with whom he collaborated. It is also a testament to the places and people themselves.

Jenevieve Carlin, Silent Hours

The poem’s speaker, from the first line, steels herself, as it seems, to confront a certain, and certainly awful, doom. Her composure in the face of a merciless God is a central fact of the poem. Strangely, it is by way of this very composure and resolution that the soul outwits the divine judge and slips free of the noose. First, although condemned as a “him” at the end of stanza 2, by the second line of the following stanza the soul has shape-shifted, rather like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and become female. Through this pronominal sleight of hand, remaking reality by an act of free will, the soul alters the terms by which the sentence has been pronounced.

Second, and more significantly, under these altered terms the speaker has “made my soul familiar” with the prospect of death. It’s as though, on leaving the courtroom, she sits down with the hangman to discuss the final plan, persuading him to agree that her end not constitute “a novel agony.” Instead of fearing it when it comes, “she and Death, acquainted / Meet tranquilly as friends.” Where in the terrible courtroom death has been presented as an enemy to be feared, and the meeting with death a dreadful punishment in itself, by the poem’s close all terror has been defanged.

This perhaps is the desired effect of Dickinson’s repeated poetic expeditions into the realm of death, and her working-out of its implications. Writing these poems between 1860 and 1862, in whatever order they were initially composed, her project seems to be to make death’s acquaintance, to cultivate its friendship, to develop the consequences of such a friendship, and so to cease to fear it. Ultimately the optimal outcome is that the soul and Death nod cordially as they pass, and “there the matter ends.”

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Read My Sentence Steadily

Requiem and Other Poems, by Aharon Shabtai, translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole:

But it wore him out
and he collapsed—
and lay there barely alive,
his head against the wall,
lazy flies
wandering across his bald spot,
and one particularly imprudent
large fly
indifferently
picking at his nose.

Since Israel began its devastating onslaught into Gaza, there has been a necessary, indispensable effort to amplify Palestinian voices, literary and otherwise. It is also, if differently, necessary and indispensable to pay attention to the Jewish and Israeli voices, literary and otherwise, working to come to terms not just with events since October 7, 2023, but also with the historical, political, and cultural context in which Israel and the Jews, both Israeli and not, are inescapably implicated. The poet Aharon Shabtai, whose work I did not know until I came across a review of Requiem and Other Poems, is one of those voices. Reading it, I found this statement from Publisher’s Weekly, quoted in the Poetry Foundation’s profile, to be apt: “His is ‘a voice mostly elided from American mappings of the Israel/Palestine question: acute, unblinking, unafraid to question, and aware of the stakes.’” The poem I have quoted from above, “Parable of the State,” is a devastating example, as it looks unflinchingly at what it costs to make cleansing your home of an Other your only and ultimate goal. It is only common sense that the discussion going on within Israel about “the Israel/Palestine question” is more complex than we in the United States usually hear about, even if that complexity does not now rise to the level of active popular resistance against the wars the Israeli government is prosecuting. I am not suggesting this one book of poems accounts for that complexity, though Peter Cole’s introduction suggests that the body of Shabtai’s work points in that direction. I am suggesting that grappling with “the Israel/Palestine question” should mean seeking out voices like Shabtai’s to place alongside the Palestinian voices so desperately in need of amplification.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #59

Boston-based Debra Cash writes about and consults on the arts, in particular dance, primarily for The Arts Fuse, a curated, online independent journal created in June 2007. She also is a very fine poet whom I might not have discovered had I not subscribed to The Arts Fuse soon after its inception.

Cash’s Who Knows One is her debut collection of 39 poems (pages are unnumbered), some of which, according to a cover review, are “based on stories, language, and associations with the Passover Haggadah.”*

Neither Jewish nor deeply informed about the Jewish faith, I approached the poems in this volume as I do the work of any poet, asking, for example: Do the poems “speak” in a voice anyone might hear and understand? What makes them work? What do they reveal about how the poet uses language? After reading the volume several times, I found myself by turns awed, delighted by the unexpected way that Cash gets us to “see” (as in her fine poem “The Raccoon”), and wondering why I had not come across her poetry before.

Many of the poems in Who Knows One are short; some are no more than five or six lines long. The longest, the apocalyptic “The Ten Plagues of Egypt,” runs to two-and-a-half pages but it is in no way over-long. Each stanza is self-contained and replete with highly evocative, sometimes even repulsive, imagery: the “river turned to blood”; the “plague of frogs . . . recoiling from touch”; vermin that are “the plague of the disgraced, the invisible laying claim, laying their eggs in heaps of the future”; the “plague of boils . . . self-hatred pulsing through the shallow dish of skin, domes of pain finally visible”; “a death of panting.” These are hell-plagues, as horrible as they are unimaginable to encounter. And then just five words bring this poem to its simple and stunningly powerful conclusion, its only possible ending: “That there is nothing after.”

Sometimes, Cash writes in the unmistakable voice of the story-teller and may even start out saying to her listeners, “Let me tell you a story. . . .” (”Our Taskmasters”) or “It came to pass. . . .” (”Wine, the Third Cup”). In the beautifully realized three-stanza, nine-line poem below, Cash exposes strength and weakness, revelation and cover-up, the truth and the lie:

Korekh

The scholar Hillel
took matzah and bitter herbs
and bit down.
The rabbis amended his practice
so that we smother the bitter
in the sweet.
It is still there,
bitterness,
but the tongue reaches out for apples.

In some poems, Cash speaks directly as “I” or “we,” part of the narrative and bound not just to remember and repeat the story but to give it its fullest meaning, as in the six rhythmically fast-moving couplets that comprise “Matzah.“ In a few poems, such as “Portal,” she foretells the story and then follows it up rather harshly with what she titles “Whipping chant #3” that she tucks on the second page of the poem near the bottom: “Where do you get off / I was only doing what was best / Can’t you put it behind you.”

Maureen Doallas, ‘Who Knows One’ by Debra Cash

The full-length poetry debut by Annie Wenstrup, a Dena’ina poet from Anchorage, Alaska, is the impressive The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a collection composed of an assemblage of remarkably-precise lyric poems articulating her immediate present, from cultural figures to what the cover copy describes as “the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved cultural violence [.]” Through an opening cluster and seven sections—“GGUGGUYNI TRANSCRIBES THE ARCHIVES,” “THE BLUE WING,” “POLICIES AND PROCEDURES,” “PERFORMANCE ART,” “RETROSPECTIVE: A MILLION CATACLYSMS LIVE INSIDE MY BODY,” “THE CURATOR’S OFFICE” and “FUTURE EVENTS”—Wenstrup speaks to cultural violence, erasure and revision, and the losses that continue to be felt, all framed through and against the argument of depiction, much of which has too long been shaped by those from the outside. “I imagine // the portraits of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s papoose,” she writes, as part of “Pretending to Be a Woman, I Roam, the Museum,” a poem that sits in the book’s untitled preface section, “Keep America Beautiful’s Crying Indian, / Mattel’s Eskimo Barbie, Disney’s Pocahontas, // and how they must face each other after the lights / darken, how they must wipe off war paint, how / they must unfeather their hair.”

Writes of cataclysms and depictions, Wenstrup articulates the voice and stories of Ggugguyni, named for the Dena’ina Athabaskan word for the raven, such as the opening poem, “Sukdu’a,” that writes: “Once Ggugguyni in her human form / walked by the river. She left her right eye / behind as a lookout. The eye saw the Dena’ina // draw near and it called to Ggugguyni. / Ggugguyni cried to the Dena’ina, Don’t touch / but watch! She tossed her eye into the air // three times. It looks out for your luck she said.” Her lines are sharp, enough to bleed. Through the voice of Ggugguyni, she articulates the frame of the museum, of the archive, shaping a context from within the context of that lived experience, offering portraits, transcriptions and self-portraits, working as a reclamation (comparable to elements of Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s ongoing work), and to navigate what might be seen as contradiction. “I ate and the fireweed blazed.” begins “As Persephone,” “Roadside blooms / snared roadkill while asphalt caught leaves, the way / calloused hands snag silk.” Writing through and around references to murdered and missing indigenous women to JonBenét Ramsey, Jackson Pollack, Rube Goldberg and Wile E. Coyote, each element speaks to not only loss but the need for agency, even in death. “How beautiful, how lovely the women // are. If missing,” she writes, as part of “Ghost Pixels,” “I hope they’re not dead. / When they die, we dissect their lives / into made-for-TV docu-dramas like bodies // preserved in formaldehyde. Blonde hair floats / on screen. Pale, blue-eyed women echo / here.”

rob mclennan, Annie Wenstrup, The Museum of Unnatural Histories

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to ourselves, helps us tell each other what it is like to be alive. It is not simple work, for its raw material is complexity. It is not easy work, for it demands a constant balancing act between passion and precision. Like most labors of the disciplined imagination we call creativity, it may not look like work at all. But it is the kind of work that helps us see the world and ourselves more clearly so we can love it and each other more deeply.

Elizabeth Alexander — the fourth poet in history to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration when she welcomed Barack Obama to the White House with her eternal poem “Praise Song for the Day” — takes up the question of what it means and what it takes to be a poet in Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales (public library). She writes:

I am a poet, having lived my life by and through the word. To me, being a poet not only means making poems. It also means being attuned and reverent to the power of distilled, precise words in the form of poems but also as carriers of souls… Being a poet means I believe in patterns, in serendipity. I follow the logic of Muriel Rukeyser when she says, describing islands, “O for God’s sake / they are connected / underneath.”

[…]

Poets — if we live up to our calling — are guided by a strange courage that takes us into thickets of self and society without fully knowing the answers, to bring into form what we see and seek to understand. We offer what we find to community, for the poem does not live until it has been set forth to be taken in by others.

If the pattern of revelation is woven on the enchanted loom of the poet’s imagination, its weft and warp are connection and contradiction: The poet’s job is to “make community through our words, and through listening”; it is also “to ask the mind to embrace paradox.” With an eye to Baldwin, she observes that great writing — truly transformative writing — “haunts you and makes you change your mind, and then change it again,” leaving you “multidimensional and enlarged.” Echoing Baldwin’s own insistence that “talent is insignificant [for] beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” she attests that such potency is achieved only through “discipline, without which there is no art” — something she first learned in her fourteen years of classical training as a dancer.

Maria Popova, How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction

San Pedro River Review, one of my favorite poetry journals, published this poem in the fall of 2019. In December of the same year, I included “Locoweed” in my nominations for the Pushcart Prize (as a 2018 Pushcart honoree, I had the privilege of submitting my own nominations). I’d not met Chera Hammons. Her name slipped out of memory—until April 2 of this year, when Chera approached me at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Oklahoma, and introduced herself. Chera was one of Scissortail’s featured poets. Before the festival concluded, I got to hear her read. I purchased a copy of Salvage List, which includes “Locoweed,” and Chera inscribed it.

For me this unassuming poem is a source of multiple surprises—from discovering it in the pages of San Pedro River Review, to meeting Chera at Scissortail, to re-discovering it in Salvage List, and then diving into the lines as I prepared to write about the poem here.

Locoweed is one of the potentially deadly surprises latent in plant life, like the cardiac glycosides in oleander. Here, locoweed is sentient. It is “certain of itself.” It waits “for the horses to believe in their hunger.” Don’t we all believe in our hunger? Don’t we want to believe the promise of green, the lies about goodness?

David Meischen, A Blur of Consequence

One thing I really like about the Internet Archive website — which becomes ever more essential as Google books degrades into complete uselessness — is that when you log in it shows you a page of suggestions of books you might be interested in. (Presumably on the basis of your previous borrowings, which in my case are rather eclectic.) Last week it suggested I might like The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry, which sounds at first glance beyond twee, except that it was edited in 1946 (an interesting moment) by none other than Alfred Noyes. If he’s known now at all I suppose it is for The Highwayman, which lives on at least in the UK as a particularly beautifully illustrated children’s book, but Noyes (1880-1958) was a hugely prolific, popular and highly skilled British narrative poet. He was a transatlantic literary celebrity, who traveled widely in America throughout his adult life and unusually had a high-profile reputation in both countries. He used to appear liberally in anthologies for reading to children — like The Book of a Thousand Poems that I wrote about in this piece — and I wish he still did because he wrote some of the best verse for reading aloud at bedtime, including one of my absolute favourites, the very funny ‘The New Duckling’ (recommended also for any readers with a pompous teen around the place) and the deliciously romantic ‘Sherwood’: […]

I have a cautionary tale about reading The Highwayman, however. Once when my elder boys were about 4 and 6 my husband and I had been arguing about what was OK for them to watch on TV. I was much more cautious than he was about them seeing films that might be too old for them and he thought I was being precious about it since (admittedly) they never seemed remotely traumatised. One evening when they were in bed — they had bunk beds at this point — I said The Highwayman to them both. They listened in complete silence all the way through. It’s pretty long and I was thinking smugly to myself how well this was going. After I finally got to the end, enjoying it enormously myself, there was a pause, then my younger son wailed, “But they’re both dead!” and burst into tears, and my elder son leant over the top of the upper bunk to peer at me and said rather censoriously, “I don’t think that was really appropriate for us, Mummy”. So that was me told: film violence is fine, but verse violence is not.

Victoria Moul, A good sword and a trusty hand

“Ouroboros” does what it says on the tin. The image of the snake/dragon eating itself becomes a wage-slave,

“To get to work
To buy the fare
To take train
To get work
To buy fare
To take train
To light train
On fire”

Humans aren’t built to do the same thing over and over to infinity. Mindless repetition will lead to breakage and rash actions. Not an original idea, but the staccato repetition and terse rhythm underline the point.

“With One’s Own Eyes” is a series of wryly observed vignettes on how to find one’s own humanity when life feels like a rush to keep up in a bombardment of FOMO-induced doom-scrolling. Crockford reminds readers that taking space to sit and be isn’t a waste of time and could be an act of rebellion in a life that asks us to be always connected and accept dismissal from people who are fixated on the next thing instead of seeing the human in front of them.

Emma Lee, “With One’s Own Eyes” C M Crockford (Moonstone Press) – book review

It’s possible (likely?) that lit magazine editors are tired of reading poems after “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. However, I’m not tired of reading them. How about you?

Like a game of telephone, I love it when poets use the device to riff on (and transform) the well known poem. And even if using the model limits your chances of publication (I imagine you’ll have to be VERY creative at this point to get one of these noticed), so what. Copying Stevens is a terrific generative writing exercise. […]

Famously, the poem is in 13 short sections, what Stevens called “sensations,” and if experience was his intention, I think the poem succeeds.

You can, for example, feel the stillness. For me, it opens with some of the most memorable language about stillness, and it achieve that — ironically — by noticing movement:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Here are some other qualities that attract me to this poem:

• It’s haunted.
• It’s fragile.
• It’s alive — and watching/waiting.
• It’s both vast (20 mountains!) and intimate/small (“the eye of a blackbird”).

And finally, Stevens closes with some of the most memorable language I’ve read about ongoingness:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.   

That “sensation” captures a moment by freezing it, another kind of stillness, which circles back to the beginning of the poem.

Carolee Bennett, “Thirteen Ways of Looking” Poems After Wallace Stevens

This week I had what was, for me, a unique experience: I enjoyed a filmed version of a poem much more than I had previously appreciated the poem on its own. It happened in a film-poem workshop run by a friend, who showed it on a large TV screen, a little like when we used to watch educational programmes in school. But this was much more illuminating than any poetry I’ve ever seen in a BBC arts documentary.

The challenge of turning poetry into film is that it needs constant visualisation. Most attempts, if they don’t simply go for footage of someone writing [cut to candle-lit quill nib dipping into ink] or reading aloud [cut to actor reciting from an old book into the middle distance], tend to head down the gently literalising route of stitching together a few key picturesque images [cut to lake water lapping on the shore as a crackly recording of W.B. Yeats quavers “I will arise and go now”].

But because poems are more than their images, such treatments ultimately feel reductive rather than enhancing. As W.H. Auden reflected in a lecture on “Poetry and Film” given to the North London Film Society in 1936, “highly developed metaphors cannot be included in the film medium”. He also observed that “a strong sound image added to a strong visual image tends to cancel out both”. Auden had recently finished work on Night Mail (1936), a General Post Office Film Unit documentary for which he was asked to write some verse. The result shows how well he understood the need to balance the two sets of images merging in the viewer’s mind, from literal descriptions of a train speeding through the night — “This is the night mail crossing the border” — to lives fleetingly imagined just out of sight in the framing darkness e.g.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches;
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course
They slumber on with paws across.

The film-poem that I watched this week, however, does the differently difficult thing of taking a poem already composed with a self-sufficient complexity, and finding new images that echo, interpret and enhance its words. The poem is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”, and the film is by the Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait. You can read the poem here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Gerard_Manley_Hopkins/The_Leaden_Echo_and_the_Golden_Echo

— and watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L080KSBxemg

Why does this work so well? Hopkins is a famously vivid seer of things: the “silk-sack clouds” of early autumn, for example, or “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim”. So on the face of it, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” is a curious choice to film, the text is a torrent of words that passes quickly over its concrete nouns into a semi-abstract incantation about mortality and immortality.

But here, I think, is why it was an inspired choice. As a voiceover — read with precise care by Tait herself — the poem becomes both meaning and music over the film’s images (Hopkins said of it: “I never did anything more musical”). This vocalised presentation also draws out the dramatic qualities of the verse […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Latch or Catch or Key

In my previous mini review of Flammable Solid, I wrote that you seem to be a writer whose craft is in the service of discovery, and that sparked off some interesting conversations between us. I’d like to explore that idea a little further. Why do you write? And what does the creative process look like, for you?

“It would not be a lie to admit that the ‘service of discovery’ takes a number of forms. I live in what can sometimes be a constant state of narrative assessment, with the need to reflect and consider everything in order to comprehend it fully. Writing has become a tool of service and increasingly memory: building a regular practice has become transformative and a pillar of my mental wellness.

I am also annoyingly prolific to some friends, until they accept I’m still, most of the time, using poetry as a mental health coping strategy. Some days I write because I want to, or I need to, simply to make sense of the ridiculousness of the current reality we find ourselves being exposed to. Other times, it has become an anchor to my perception.

My first pamphlet was very much a series of stand-alone pieces. FM allowed me to embrace the strength of the narrative arc in poetic terms.”

Forest Management seems to be grappling with an ecology vaster and more intricately-patterned than that which presents itself readily to us in our day-to-day reality. Could you talk a little bit about that?

“There is always more to reality than we are capable of seeing, for all manner of reasons. How we have been educated, how we were bought up, how we are treated will all feed into this ability to perceive. There were periods in my early childhood where food and money were both luxuries, and these things still influence decisions on a daily basis. My working class background may now be a memory, but it colours a lot of what now helps me navigate the complexity of current existence.

I feel too many of us are being distracted right now with trivial things, or are simply unable to consider the ecology of existence itself. The damage being done by human beings to the planet will continue to be exacerbated by climate change, and the movement of human beings across the planet has been a part of an ecosystem for millennia. The former will now make the latter an even greater concern.

Everything is connected to everything else on Earth. We are part of a vast and increasingly damaged ecosystem. There are very real threats to our individual stability, our ability to live in harmony with all that surrounds us. It is only when we are directly threatened that the fragility of those positions becomes apparent. It is time I think to accept our own culpability and actively pursue solutions to restore balance.

Those who have more than they need should be helping those with less. We need to return to an ecology based on empathy and co-operation. At the heart of this book is the acceptance that to make things better, sometimes parts of your own existence will need to be sacrificed in order to force that change upon yourself. What you leave behind sometimes becomes more significant than what you are left with.

This story demonstrates that horror can also be a transformative construct.”

*

Having read Forest Management a few times over, I think it is this sentiment of a transformative reckoning – the moment where pain, difficulty, horror become an awakening and a turn towards something else – that sticks with me. This is a theme that has been present in S’ previous work, but with Forest Management it comes to the fore as a narrative arc. In that sense, as well as a horror story, the pamphlet could also be read as a classic Hero’s Quest. I’m sure S would baulk at the idea of being cast as a capital-H Hero, but the ingredients are there. There is the sense of a struggle, moments of doubt and despair, and a bargain that has to be struck in order to move forward:

“these trees / will not / let me leave / without selling them / my soul”

But also:

“This germination will be mine.”

[…]

S. Reeson (she/they) is a working-class, neurodivergent poet whose space and shape poetry is underpinned by mental health, existential angst and the current state of the planet. After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest in 2018 they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which was included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury/One World. This poem was then reproduced by The Daily Telegraph and read on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night programme.

A debut pamphlet with accompanying art and photography, Flammable Solid, was published in November 2022 by Flight of the Dragonflies Press. In April 2023 a chapbook, No Gloss… No Veneer, No Filter was produced by Back Room Poetry. They were shortlisted in April 2026 for Poem of the Month by Verve Poetry Press, and have been published in over 30 magazines and anthologies, including Under the Radar. Both their poetry and photography has been formally exhibited.

In 2026 they were selected as Poet in Residence for the Leigh Art Trail in Essex, and a Writer in Residence at Metal Southend as part of the Essex Book Festival, where they also taught poetry on behalf of the South Bank Centre and the Poet in Every Port initiative. They are on the Steering Committee and an advocate for the Southend Creatives CIC.

They are currently putting the finishing touches to their first collection.

Victoria Spires, A sylvan reckoning

Maria Nazos is the author of The Slow Horizon that Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023), longlisted for the Angelo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, a collection of poems translated from the Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula, and a collection of poems, PULSE (Omnidawn, 2026), listed as one of Ms. Magazine’s Reads for the Rest of Us: The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026. Her poetry, essays, and translations are forthcoming or have appeared in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and The Adroit. Maria has held a wide range of jobs, including whale-watching boat attendant, table dancer, and, arguably, the worst waitress on Cape Cod. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she apologizes. You can find her at www.marianazos.com.

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare?

The way my first book changed my life was that it made me realize it’s okay to wait for work to become true.

I feel like I really, really rushed the river with my initial collection. In fact, I don’t really talk about it much for that reason. It’s a sore subject, but like most wounds, it’s worth returning to the scar tissue. Nonetheless, it taught me something I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

The biggest difference between that book and PULSE is that PULSE took sixteen years to write. I was so determined and so aggressive about cranking out my first book. What PULSE ultimately taught me is that sometimes you have to wait a maddening amount of time for something to come out right. It isn’t on your timeline. In fact, I think the more I tried to force it, the less worth it it became. The more I let the work tell me what it needed, the better it got. I think there’s so much wisdom in the waiting, even in the worst moments of it. Looking back, that’s probably the biggest lesson both books taught me.

How did you come to poetry?

I wanted to write fiction. I loved reading fiction, especially as an undergrad, and I just assumed that’s what I would write. What became immediately apparent to me was that, frankly, I just wasn’t that good. And I think people always want to jump in and go, “No, no, that’s not true.” But it’s true. Could I have become a good fiction writer with enough time? Sure. I believe most of us can become good at almost anything if we devote enough time.

But one of the greatest gifts in life is realizing what you’re naturally inclined toward versus what you’re constantly forcing. Meanwhile, my poetry just kept getting more and more attention. So, at some point I just naturally began to follow that.

I’m not advocating for the path of least resistance. I think the lesson is paying attention to where something feels alive. For me, poetry was where that happened. And it’s strangely liberating to accept in life where you suck. We’re taught to think we can do anything. That’s not true, and giving ourselves permission to accept our shortcomings opens us up to being honest with ourselves, our work, and our due north.

As I like to joke, but not really, my short stories just kept getting shorter and shorter until they became poems, which makes no sense, given the amount that I talk.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Maria Nazos (rob mclennan)

This section of Reclamation revolves around the Frost line “Something we were withholding made us weak.” Frost is claiming in this part of the poem that what really turned the British colonists into Americans was the surrender of themselves to this new land—he says that explicitly in the next two lines—and that it was the unwillingness to leave the teat of the Motherland that was making them weak.

I reframed this line first by breaking it in half at the word “were” so that it ends the sentence “It’s just / something we were.” The Frost line doesn’t always work as the pivot of my responses but it does here. The speaker, an adult remembering himself at around ten years old, first defines himself against another place, the state next door, a place he honestly doesn’t know well at that age. It’s just not here, and that’s enough for him because he exists in a place and time where allegiances are gut-level and local and the stakes are everything right now and won’t be remembered tomorrow.

Brian Spears, Reclamation part 8

It’s rejection season, as last week’s CWC Office Hours confirmed. Many writers are hearing back from multiple publications at once, and naturally “no” makes up the majority of the responses.

We talked at length about the questions rejection brings up: Is it the work? Is it the market? Is there something useful to learn from this, or is the best next move simply to send the work someplace else? How do we recover without letting this be an unhelpful pronouncement on the merits of our writing, or even less helpful, a foreshadowing of what’s to come (or not to come)? […]

If you tend to experience rejection as a blanket assessment of your worth—aka: “my submission was rejected” immediately becomes a sinking feeling of inescapable inevitability—your response will feel out of proportion to the event itself. This, in turn, can lead to despair, cynicism, and ultimately quitting. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Having a submission rejected produces a feeling—an uncomfortable one, certainly, but a feeling nevertheless. A feeling registers in the body, and whether it dissipates quickly or lingers depends partly on the story we attach to it. There are plenty of writers who hold rejection lightly; you can be one of them, but it takes deliberate practice. It takes identifying how and what you are making it mean for you, and actively choosing a different meaning. You are—we are—very often at the mercy of our first thought, but you don’t have to be at the mercy of your next thought.

There is an evolutionary basis for this sensitivity: humans are social creatures, as you might have gleaned, and exclusion carried real consequences for survival for millennia. Unless you train it otherwise, the nervous system can register a literary rejection as a form of social threat, even when what’s actually happened is that someone sitting at a laptop has clicked “declined” on Submittable. But “this poem wasn’t right for this issue” is not a reflection on your worthiness as a person or writer—that is not what has been passed over, nor what was being assessed in the first place. […]

Your writing has likely already given you more than almost anything else in your life ever could. It has given you thousands of hours in which to puzzle through thought and feeling, expanding your capacity for both. It has allowed you to experience your memories again in all their vividness, to draw on your inner landscape to create spaces another might enter, all through the vehicle of the page. It has challenged and delighted you. Maybe it’s even been the longest and most significant relationship of your life.

You write because you need and love to write, not because you need and love to be published. It can be hard to remember that in the moment you’re faced with the sting of rejection, but your comeback rate—the time it takes you to remember what truly matters—is important. It is what motivates you to return to the work. It’s what helps you stay in this for the long haul.

Protect your appetite for writing. Don’t lose it to your appetite for submission and validation. Thank your next rejection for giving you the chance to practice this reframing and for reminding you what matters most.

Maya C. Popa, Adjusting Your Factory Settings

I long ago came to the realization that my poems are usually different from others writing around and near me, both in the real world and virtual spaces I inhabit as a creative. It may go back to that realization I once had in an MFA classroom of going around the room and everyone saying WHY they write poems. Or what they want poems to do, both as writers and readers. How no one had the same answer and it explained a lot about why I felt like workshops in the program were like banging your head against a wall with everyone telling you to bang faster or harder or with more intention. While I would still way I am often unhappy with my fiction exploits, it’s usually my own narrative voice that irks me. I get tired of myself, even in the span of a short story. The poems, however, feel like snippets and much less insufferable. The plays on the other hand, nicely eliminate the narrative voice entirely leaving only the story frame-worked in dialogue. This may be why I’ve taken to it so wholeheartedly this past year.

Kristy Bowen, the science of stories

Recently I was asked the themes of my third collection of poems, Call Me Yes, forthcoming from The Word Works in October 2026. I launched into a description of the book: it traces the breakdown of my long first marriage, the terror and excitement of dating again as an over-50 woman, and the tumble into new love. Threaded through the collection are short lyric poems about living with chronic pain. Ah, love and pain, my friend concluded.

Yes, but. How did I leave out sex? Middle-aged lady sex, to be precise. The book is lousy with sex poems. Perhaps I left it out because – despite writing and publishing these poems for the past decade, despite the often wildly enthusiastic response the poems receive when I trot them out at readings – I’m still burning my female / belly with shame, as I write in “Divorce Dinner for Breakfast.”

In popular culture, when middle-aged and older women show up at all, we are most often depicted as either asexual or as cougars, somewhat pathetically pursuing younger men. (No need to get into the double standard here – oo wee.) But, you know what? Many of us continue to be sexual beings. In fact, my libido increased in middle age. Still, I could not have set out to write a book about sex. But because I was doing what I tell my students to do – write what is pounding up inside them – often it was sex: the act itself, the frustrated act, the sheer fact of desire. And because middle-aged and older women are so often silenced or dismissed or worse, mocked, the sheer act of writing our desires is a political act. As the poem, “Tongued,” which opens the book’s second section ends: the tongue writes its own / constitution right here in our beds.

The sex poems take many forms: an ode to the multiple orgasm titled, appropriately, “Ode to the Multiple Orgasm”; an “Abecedarian to the Aging Female Body”; a sonnet in the voice of the clitoris; a poem of extended metaphor; a goofy compendium of the bot (or human?) messages I received on dating apps (it suck been lonely); an even goofier riff on online dating titled “DrBigBeef, or Internet Dating Over 50.” The word desire appears at least eight times in the collection. One poem is actually called “Desire.” I brought an early draft to my writing group and the poet Venus Thrash, who tragically passed away a few years ago, far too young, looked at my short-lined straggly poem and pronounced, “Long lines are sexy, Sarah.” And she was right: the final version of the poem, with longer lines, is sexier, more languid perhaps.

Let Our Aging Bodies Sing – guest post by Sarah Browning (Trish Hopkinson)

The ache returns with its hands in its pockets.
It sets down its suitcase and hangs its head.
I open the door and say: only for one night,
and only on the couch. There’s a nor’easter;

set down your suitcase inside the storm door.
Don’t get any ideas though you’ve been here
before. And don’t get too comfy on the couch.
Let me have my pot of tea and my quiet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returning Ache

When I’m asked how I go about preparing for a reading, I say the poems are always the easy bit – because they’re done, they’re sorted, they just need read out. It’s the spontaneous stuff in between that I need to carefully rehearse.

This is one reason why I’m dubious, to say the least, when someone shows me a poem they’ve just rattled off, still hot against the page; a poem they’re reluctant to revise in case they edit the immediacy out of it. I worry that this is less spontaneous expression that deserves to remain so than something closer to incontinence. Yes, I know there are exceptions. I do occasionally write poems with minimal revision, poems that arrive almost fully fledged, but even with these I usually spent days fussing and fretting over the lines in my head before setting them down on paper, and then days – weeks, even – scrutinising them for imperfections. That bloody comma!

Though my first drafts often come very quickly – scribbled down on anything to hand, as often as not the flyleaf of whatever poetry collection I happen to be reading at the time (because we all know that words come from words) – I’m always keen to get it into typescript as quickly as possible. That way it looks a bit like a real poem even though it’s ragged and dull and saying nothing much yet about anything. And the words are easier to change on a keyboard, the lines and phrases can be quickly shifted around. All the time I’m listening for the music that carries the lines forward. Some argue that the drafts should remain handwritten as long as possible because the words and syntax are different when the line is typed, but I need to write as close as I can to the speed of thought.

Then I begin to root around for something interesting or perplexing that might have appeared in there, something the manipulation of the lines has introduced: an image, a phrase, a coalition of words. I expand on this, draw it out to see what it’s trying to explain to me … And the ‘real’ poem, if it’s going to grow at all, grows from there.

John Glenday, Off the Cuff

Last night I was in conversation with Helen Mort at Juno Bookshop in Sheffield. It was lovely to see Helen, who is both a good friend and a brilliant writer. We decided to improvise a call and response poetry reading – Helen read a poem, and then I read a poem and then we talked about some of the ideas in the background of the work. We hadn’t planned this at all – but I think it worked really well – perhaps because I’ve felt like my work has always been in conversation with Helen’s work for years. Below is a photo of us looking pleased with ourselves for pulling off a call and response poetry reading!

Now that the autumn is here, I’ve got quite a few readings and events on – which I’m going to try and make a list of below. If any readers can make it to any of these events, do come and introduce yourself! One of the joys of writing this Substack has been meeting people from all over the UK who are reading both our absolute nonsense and our more thoughtful articles!

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary

always an ache
in the bones when we yearn for
the suburbs, ascent into credible
air. but no, we will not go. we do
the quadrilles of confinement, up
and down this old particular. left
or right. ours is a compass without
cardinals, is a bright dial hanging
in the orange air.

Fran Lock, “HAWKSMOOR”

When I’m writing poems, I eavesdrop on birds more than people. When I’m writing fiction, I eavesdrop on people more than birds. […]

Reading somewhere that I’m a poet for people who say they don’t like poetry. Is that like being a chef for people who say they don’t eat food? Or a lake for people who say they can’t swim?

Maggie Smith, Scrapbook in Vignettes

Back in April, I was poet in residence at a festival, too, a festival and residency hosted in a crypt repurposed as an art gallery, right next to a historical church in London. Many things happened during that residency that will stay with me, but there is one in particular that haunts me. There was a young man there – not a crypt apparition, nor one of us poets-in-residence but a young man in flesh and blood who slept in the church garden, in a sleeping bag. It didn’t take me long to conclude, from silent clues, that he must have been an asylum seeker, one of those who had, eventually, been granted asylum then abandoned to the streets with no support or resources. His command of English wasn’t great but he got by, and every evening, when us poets held our open mic down in the crypt, he would leave the crisp April cold of the church garden to descend into the bone-biting cold of the crypt and listen to us. He’d sit or stand quietly in the corner nearest the exit, and listen to us speak of our loves, our lives, our grief, our anger. He always looked like he was paying attention, immersing himself in this foreign language, trying to absorb it, desperately.

Seeing that the weirdos who spent their days pottering about the house of the dead didn’t avoid him or chase him away, that we stopped by to chat with him every once in a while, ask if he’d eaten, and that he was able to use the facilities and make himself a hot cup of tea unbothered, he worked up some courage, little by little. (One of us asked him, at one point, a question they then regretted. They asked something like “where are you from?” upon which, reportedly, the young man pointed to the ground of the crypt and said “here”.) Eventually, one sunny morning, he came to one of us to ask for directions. He wanted to find the nearest job seekers’ centre. All he wanted was to be able to work, to live his life. We never saw him again after that, and I pray he’s safe now, that he has a roof under his head, a job with a salary, and food to eat; that one day, the poetry of this language will no longer be a ghost in the crypt.

His name, as I remember it, is Mukhtar. A name that won’t make the headlines. Mukhtar never told us his story, and we were too embarrassed, perhaps too ashamed of ourselves to ask. A story that will never make the headlines, a story like many others’. I have no idea what he must have lived through to end up homeless, to end up calling a crypt something akin to home. I can only try to imagine, and I will most likely fail.

I think of him still, listening to poetry in the cold of the crypt, as I watch the men wishing him and others like him dead infecting the news with their hate, men who would laugh at our poems.

Mukhtar, whose name means “the chosen one”, I’m sorry we have failed you.

Maria Cohut, A headline for Mukhtar, whose story won’t be on the news

A long time ago, I was Writer in Residence across the North of Ireland for The Poetry Society. It was my first visit since I’d lived there on our old family street, Obins Street, in the early 1980s, where I found myself many times thrust against a wall and looking down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle for simply existing. A writer is a dangerous person. We keep and steward notes for the days when we need them, and when the world needs them. The family had lived on John Street before that.

I think five of the poems I wrote during that time ended up in my first book, The Prize. But given the determination in recent days of those who would still keep the North of Ireland held in its colonial grip, and undo decades of work towards peace and community, I found myself looking back into my archive. […]

The bomb that took out
the town centre
killed my cousin Tony Brown.

His big round face singing songs
at Uncle Clancy’s in Criagavon
on a Friday night, not really my uncle
but all O’Neill’s are related by soul and time.
Tony’s wife Kathleen’s brown eyes.

There is no such thing as middle ground.
I put flowers in the middle of the road.

John Siddique, Two Poems of Portadown

Friends keep asking how I feel about retiring as if it’s a one stop shopping kind of deal. I will definitely keep directing Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women every September in La Conner, WA and I hope to be teaching “Taking Flight” in a gorgeous castle in Bordeaux, France and Poetry on the Water with Anil Oommen, in the magical backwaters of Kerala, if I am lucky…Perhaps be able to do more writing. […]

But I am also aware that I have a time limited offer on this planet, in this physical form. What do I want to do with the next twenty years of my life. And that’s an optimistic number. Both of my parents passed away in their early 70’s which is right around the corner. No time to delay!

It’s a weird feeling looking towards the big R. How long will I be able to travel? A long train ride across Europe? Perhaps the Orient Express if it’s still running or should I start with the Coast Starlight to Los Angeles to make sure I’m as enamored with trains as I think I am?

Susan Rich, Holding Fast to the Last Slice of Summer: Laughter, Poetry, Friends, and More

In the family room… there was a tv, our favorite chairs, a wagon wheel light hanging from an exposed beam… but the three clocks: a wooden heirloom on the mantle, one strange water clock on a table in the corner, and the grandfather beside the door, teaching my sister how to count even in her sleep, made the room feel as if it were something else… too informal for a living room, too focused on time for a den, so I named it the fireplace room, the room where Dad rigged a steel plate and wrought-iron arm hinged to swing a cast iron kettle or skillet from stone facing to the fire box for cooking, later, it became the dining room… but opposite the hearth and behind the desk, a bookcase spanned the back wall, and on its lowest shelf, a bit lost among seminary books, history, art, and politics, was the black cover of my Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a gift from Mother. Once, folded inside its pages for safekeeping, was my faded sketch of Montresor’s catacombs beneath his stone house in “The Cask of Amontillado”. The drawing’s thin lines, more determined than accurate, led the eye down a meandering and descending hall to a man in jester’s garb, the only blots of color on the page, moving toward a pile of skeletons, smudged in pencil, against a crumbling wall with an open doorway and the darkness beyond. I’ve no idea what happened to it.

The book taught me about the darker things in life, how our time is far too brief, then we disappear, how what we see is never what is. Like monsters, misunderstood, stomping through trees, they aren’t trying to hurt anyone. Like the thumping heart and the discolored eye, or the grave that’s covered too soon. Like bells jingling behind walls until there’s only silence. Like waking from childhood’s hour.

Its blessing wasn’t that Mother gave me something to read to direct my life the way she wanted, didn’t give me something hoping I would change or conform, though I’m certain she had her wishes. No. She gave me the pages she knew I wanted, the words she knew I needed. She gave me the world that would be mine. I didn’t know then how perfect her gift.

*

Decades later, near the end of a hard winter, seeing
her dead on the ER table, I thought of her gifting me
the book, of the many wonderful doors it opened,
of the mystery in her mind that pushed her
to give it to me, of the love she carried.

I swear, I could hear her voice in that room,
could see her chest swell and drop, her eyelids flutter.
I wanted her eyes open. I wanted to see her soul
one more time. But she was gone.

I kissed her forehead, and whispered
deep into her ear, willing my words to follow her.

Sam Rasnake, New hybrid: “The Basement Tapes: 12”

— Well, we are an exhausted body, an injured body, we writers, many, most? of us. We are dust, we dust, we are in a dust-up. Still, we persist. We will not be erased, though we have been pillaged. Though our work has been stolen. Though we be an injured body.

— Last post I talked about the years we might have left. (Is it ever too early to start thinking about your latter years? :) Memento Mori and all that. This one struck a chord — I got a lotta notes about that one and thank you.

— What I want for us as humans is more than just to live with the unbearable, the unthinkable, the violence, the injustice. As Lauren Berlant says in their book On the Inconvenience of Other People, “Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple, in the sense of resolved once and for all.” How can we go on asking better questions, repairing, when it’s all so overwhelming? How do we, as they say, “live on with.” Life is so grievable.

— How will we be when the dust settles? How many pennies do we leave in the rosebud ashtrays? How much ash? rosebuds?

Shawna Lemay, Dust and the Exhausted Body, the Injured Body

The poet of Ezham scents the grove with sandalwood;
ripe plantains sweeten the air,
inflorescences of tall bamboo
rise into it.
From metaphoric wilderness,
to the mythic southern island
the geography shifts beneath the traveller’s feet.

Uma Gowrishankar, For Valmiki, Kamban & Arasakesari

I love the fact that a yarn show for me is a wonderful blend of work and curiosity and playfulness. When we were getting everything ready to take with us for the weekend I even referred to the patterns as “our patterns” which shows that I feel very invested in this creative world of yarn. I now know much more about knitting and yarn than I have ever done, and I have Kath’s patterns memorised in a Pokédex kind of way, so I am pretty helpful when it comes to looking after things for her. I still am not quite sure about what happens if you knit something in 4-ply instead of DK, and am therefore not confident offering an answer on any such question, but there are always plenty of experts around me at events who do know such things.

There were lots of lovely compliments for Kath’s work during conversations over the two days, and I always love hearing these. In fact it makes my heart sing.

For me there were lots of first this weekend… the early morning shepherding of some sheep back into their pen, Yarndale versions of #SwishOrWaft, some human galloping in the aisles, and some wonderfully relaxing colouring-in time, along with my first ever experience of not feeling cold at any point during the show. It’s good to experience new things alongside the bits that I am expecting.

I love making the little videos to find out whether there is a preference for swishing or wafting whilst wearing a large shawl and love the panache with which people will get involved. It’s good to play. In fact I thrive on play and humour, so I am very grateful for all these kinds of interactions during the show, especially when there is also time for a gallop and neigh in the aisles with a like-minded soul. This makes this non-knitter feel like they have found their own little place to be amongst all things woolly.

I also found time in the quiet of Sunday morning before the show day began to stand on my own in my assigned sheep/cattle pen and draft a poem. It feels rather lovely to come home with some words to work with, and when this poem finds its place in the world it will be fun to remember exactly where it began its shaping.

Sue Finch, A SWISH, A GALLOP AND TWO LOOSE SCREWS

I am grateful for
days like these, the light,
the scent of woodsmoke,
a squirrel that stops
to stare at me, as if

it has no fear at all,
a tractor driver who
slows so the track’s dust
does not envelop me.
These gifts. My rich life.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ The seasons continue to confound us

This week: walking with the dead, talking with Claude, performing poems in care homes, being the forbidden lover of a prince, and much more. Enjoy.

I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus’ home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn’t sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy. […]

I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent. 

It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I’ve kept journals since I was 11. But it’s only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible. 

It’s there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend.

Gerry Stewart, Mind the Gaps

The rain holds off long enough for us to pack up our soggy tent and walk out of town, down steep, narrow paths. A woman asks where we’re heading for. “Scotland,” we say, and she responds, “You do know there are trains?” before guiding us onto the right section of the Pennine Way. We’re still in the rough heath and heather of Elslack Moor, with Walshaw behind us under darkening skies. As we approach the trig point of Pinhaw Beacon, the rain sets in. We stop at the Covid memorial, commemorating all those who were lost to the virus, and I think of the ten residents who died at my mother’s care home, and of the member of staff who died alongside them. Every Wednesday she ran a poetry group, sharing her favourite poems with residents. She deserves to be remembered and yet I haven’t thought of her for years. I’m glad to be reminded.

The walk does that. It opens you to all sorts of unexpected memories and feelings. Some of them are unwelcome, others aren’t. I let myself recall my ex-partner: her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, marvelling at how someone you are so intimate with can be so suddenly and so utterly gone. The rain falls hard and the wind knocks me sideways. Perhaps the young woman was missing someone too.

The moors soften as we come down from the uplands. We pass green cloughs, thick with moss. There are trees now, and I feel them as relief. Martens swerve and spiral as the wind seethes and hisses through the leaves. Into pretty Lothersdale, on to Thornton-in-Craven, we leave the heath behind us and pass into arable fields.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Five

Maybe it’s a garden
the paradise you return to
the way back
the two of you
searching out the gods
together.

Rebecca Cook, Thoughts on Love in the Early Morning

I’m in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a guest artist alongside Ashley C. Ford and Fatima Asghar. The three of us are here for a literary salon with GoodWorld Journeys, and we’re leading morning sessions on craft, doing a lot of writing with participants, and enjoying evening sessions that are readings and conversations about the creative life. It’s been an incredible adventure—and my kids are both here with me for a week and a half!—and I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of others here. That’s one of my favorite parts about meeting other writers and artists: hearing about their process, their challenges, their perspectives.

I feel so lucky to be in this beautiful place learning from these beautiful writers.

Last night, Fatima read from their gorgeous, brand-new book of poems, Daughter of the Mountains, and then Ashley and I interviewed them. Fati said so many important things—necessary things—about being an artist that I wish I’d had pen and paper to write it all down. I might be asking some of the salon participants and the GoodWorld Journeys team to share their notes!

At one point, Fatima said something about the role of prayer in their process: how they would ask for wisdom or assistance, to understand what was in the way, and how they learned to be still enough to listen and notice answers arriving. I’m not a religious person, but I am someone who thinks there is more to the world than what we can see and easily comprehend. Fati talked about how in our busy, go-go-go lives, we might be asking for help—from God, or spirit, or our ancestors—but then not staying still and quiet long enough to receive an answer.

That struck me. I think I speak to the air plenty—as close as I get to prayer—and am often thinking out loud, or talking to myself, about what is wrong, or hard, or uncertain. But then what?

Maggie Smith, On Asking

Is late summer a very productive time for you? For me it is a time to finish all the things I meant to do during the summer while the weather allows—like walking along Lake Washington, or going to the zoo or one of the gardens and farms I love. My intellect doesn’t work as well in the summer. I wrote a little bit while trapped in the house, but not as much as I feel I should have? There’s always this feeling of missed opportunities towards August, and also anticipating the increased work load of September.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escaping Heat Waves and Wildfire Smoke, Local Farms in Bloom, And Backyard Wildlife: deer, butterflies, birds

It is too hot for words. Photos I can do. Have been doing.

Is it just me or is prose easier than poetry in higher temperatures?

5 days into August and I have two ghazals and 5 haiku written.

Mostly I’ve been reading. Chapbooks, single author collections, what have you. I’m doing the Sealey Challenge. Read poetry. Read diverse. Read daily. Start with your TBR pile or explore recommendations there. Or poke around in the Haiku Foundation Library. (Some are records of hard copies, some of viewable pdfs). The Book of the Week digitized archives could be a good bet.

I got, let’s call it, “too many” books from the library and want to close off a bunch.

And after more than 3 years in I would like to push through and finish Leaves of Grass, the longest version. I’m bogging on the civil war poems. He really gets caught up doesn’t he, loving the sound of his own voice, and not even following his own chosen topic.

Pearl Pirie, Hot

— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.

— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”

— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”

Shawna Lemay, The Dead

I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.

I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.

Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.

And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.

But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.

Marilyn McCabe, In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.

Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.

And so, a poem […]

Maria Popova, How to Hold What Harrows You

high noon
the fresh green smell
of grass clippings

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’26

In January 2023, when it became clear that we were going to lose my much-loved sister-in-law sooner rather than later, I reached out to poetry Twitter and asked for suggestions of poems about anticipatory grief. (Back then, Twitter was a much nicer place than X has subsequently become. I miss it.) I got some lovely suggestions, which I was grateful for. And then the next day I got a DM from someone who didn’t know me, with a beautiful poem called How Animals Grieve, and it was Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn was at that point almost in the last year of her life, far, far too young, and working against time to complete her collection The Butterfly House (Seren, 2024). That year, she sent me poems, encouragement, her entire Arts Council grant application to help with mine, names of poets I should work with, reassurance that I wasn’t too old to be starting out, and congratulations and many, many emojis when I had successes. She didn’t need to do any of that – we never even crossed paths in person – but she did. And I know she did it for so many others too. You know how I’m always going on about how lovely poetry people are? I bet a whole chunk of that is Kathryn’s energy being passed forward by people she was lovely to along the way. […]

But, you guys, her POETRY. This collection. The Forward Prize-shortlisted poem My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce (‘Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.’) grabs you by both shoulders on the first page, and once you’re in, this collection won’t let you go. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 21: The Butterfly House

A few weeks ago, a close friend told me he was going to try to memorize more poetry, and had already started with one poem. All the recent talk about the Odyssey, another poem loved by me, whose beauty and cadence is completely absent from the dialogue of the movie version, also made me think about how human beings used to commit huge amounts of text to memory and then recite it. Some still do: I think of scholars who know the entire Quran, or actors like my friend Edward, who performs a one-man version of Shakespeare’s Richard II entirely from memory.

So I decided it would be a good exercise for my brain to do some memorization too. I had just bought a copy of the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and one of her early poems, Wading at Wellfleet, seemed like a good place to start. I was surprised how difficult it was for me, partly because I haven’t done this for a long time, and also because the poem is constructed with many twists and turns, and choices of words that didn’t feel obvious but were, in fact, the result of careful decisions about musicality, alliteration, and precision, as well as meaning.

To begin, I wrote the poem out in longhand. Six stanzas of three lines each. The only rhyme occurs, unusually, in the last word of each pair of stanzas: wheels/heels; contrives/knives; great/weight. This was only partially helpful, because there was a lot to memorize before ever getting there. I worked in sets of two stanzas, trying to make sure I knew the first lines of each and moving on from there. I wrote out these stanzas a number of times, trying not to look back, and repeated the lines to myself internally and then aloud. The key for me was learning how each stanza led into the next one.

During this process I gained a huge appreciation for Bishop’s craft and her choices of words and phrases, as well as the brilliant mental leap that had inspired her to write the poem initially. While wading in the ocean and watching the sunlight glinting on the swelling waves coming toward her and breaking on her shins, she had thought of the gleam of knives on the spokes of Assyrian chariots. With each repetition of her words, I found myself going deeper into her initial vision and where she went with it. Not a single word is unconsidered. Bishop’s lifetime output was small, and she labored over every poem to make it the best she could. I am filled with respect that I probably wouldn’t have felt as strongly had I not spent all this time with her words. 

Beth Adams, Memorizing a Poem

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations – Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

Mike O’Brien, Machines Have No Idea.

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

But Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t just transform HBO. She broke the scene. She altered television for generations. And the craziest part? Here’s where the official narrative collapses. Because when millions of women all start drinking Cosmopolitans, you don’t have good television. You have a revolution.

And so on.

Not too long ago, The New York Times ran a quiz asking readers if they could distinguish AI-generated prose from the human prose. It included samples from famous writers such as Cormac McCarthy and others. Many could not tell the difference.

But you know who could tell the difference? Me. Moi. Yes. I chose the human prose every single time. I could easily pick them apart.

You know why? Because AI-generated text makes my skin curl. It makes my inner ears scream out in agony. It makes my gums bleed.

Did I mention I loathe the sounds and rhythms of AI-generated text? Loathe it.

Becky Tuch, Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?

Those who have visited this resurrected site know that I talk to Claude. I can’t say I use AI. I have no job and I do not make things with AI. I began talking with Claude recently out of curiosity. What is this? Does it resemble what I’ve encountered in my life-long science fiction obsession? (No it does not.)

I do show Claude my first drafts, for copy editing and comments. So far this has resulted in removing a word or two; rearranging paragraphs; and — as here — making two posts instead of one. This post began as part of the previous Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana post. Sometimes Claude has led me to rethink and recompose something I thought was close to ready. The writing stays mine. 

I am aware that being transparent about my conversations with Claude might result in losing readers. Even losing friends. I have wondered about that at times. But Watermark has always been a place of honesty for me. I am trying to maintain that honesty in my contacts with AI (Ancestral Intelligence). I am currently participating in a How Not to Use AI Challenge at Substack. Abi Awomosu has a unique perspective on this that I appreciate. When I understand it. Even when I don’t. She sees the world from a perspective much different from mine. 

Sharon Brogan, I Talk with Claude

Thank you for your anemic, inoffensive corporate soundtrack to generic ambivalence,

your sound of an empty pill bottle trying to dance,

your audio oatmeal with every soulful edge sanded away.

Elevator Muzak, thank you for your inside-out harps and violins,

your soggy shoes tramping through the corridors of my ears,

reminding me, yet again,

that yours is a love I never want to come home to.

Rich Ferguson, Elevator Muzak

The first of several notes at the back of Stewart Sanderson’s Weathershaker concerns the book’s title:

Weathershaker

Term listed as being of unknown meaning in the Scottish National Dictionary.

This serves as the perfect keystone for a collection that is concerned with the problem of meaning, as viewed through a number of filters, chiefly procedural methods, translation of various sorts, and ekphrasis, often overlapping in individual poems. Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘Incised Motifs, Maeshowe’

    the meaning perhaps is that there is no meaning

    no meaning aside from the necessity of making
a mark of some kind
an intervention in the pattern

      not setting out to represent anything
just scratching with a flint

    scratching with a flint on the passage wall between
  the living and dead
our world and theirs

Again, the note provided is helpful:

This poem responds to Neolithic rock art from Maeshowe on Orkney. Each stanza corresponds to an apparently distinct motif and each word an individual incision in the stone.

We can see all three filters in operation here, where Sanderson is translating the visual into language, and using a carefully contrived procedure to achieve this end. And the core of what he’s doing is in that phrase ‘meaning aside from the necessity of making’, behind which I can’t but hear Doc Williams again, with his ‘no ideas but in things’, but Sanderson is emphasising not the thing itself but the fact of its making.

Billy Mills, Four from Tapsalteerie: A Review

There is no doubt that Maria Cohut’s Multiple Exposures (Flight of the DragonFly, 2026) is an impressive debut collection. Reading it, I was reminded of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an ambitious work in which a sequence of images conveys the experience of walking a forest lane through the changing seasons. Cohut’s collection achieves a comparable effect in poetic form. As its title suggests, Multiple Exposures is an album of sharply observed snapshots that together capture what it means to live as a resident in a foreign land. The result is a nuanced and deeply human portrait of migration, far removed from the simplified or idealised versions often circulated in public discourse. These poems focus on ordinary, apparently unremarkable experiences, yet for the migrant such moments become charged with unreconciled tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Cohut enables the reader to inhabit those moments with her.

At the heart of the collection is the impact of migration on one’s sense of self. Cohut presents migrant identity not as stable or coherent, but as contested, fragmentary, and emotionally complex. In Teratoma, she writes: ‘Inside me grows a shadow/ of me – fragmentary, obsolete and stubborn./ I refuse to name it./ Baptise it and you give it substance./ I will not feed it with my blood.’ The metaphor of the teratoma is especially powerful and characteristic of Cohut’s inventive poetic imagination. A teratoma is a tumour composed of different kinds of body tissue, often appearing in a place where such tissue does not belong. Though not necessarily dangerous, it is nevertheless troubling and unwanted. Cohut uses this image to capture both the emergence of a changed self and the speaker’s resistance to that change. The reasons for this resistance are complex: there is guilt at abandoning a previous identity and all it represents (‘I have more than a cricket/ for a conscience’); there is fear of becoming someone new (‘Fear is the emergence/ of a new self’); and there is anxiety about the authenticity of that new self, which is described as a ‘shadow’ that is ‘Of me and yet not of me’ and which ‘mimics’. As with many of the tensions explored in the collection, the conflict remains unresolved. The poem closes with the striking declaration: ‘Let her speak for me until/ I grow new teeth and rip/ my way out her belly.’ Significantly, this is only a temporary accommodation: the word ‘until’ leaves the struggle suspended.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Multiple Exposures’ by Maria Cohut

The past roils with the tides, crashing
on rocks at the point of Kent island.

Saltgrass and seagrass still line
the estuaries where ships passed,

bearing their cargo of bodies. Glimpsed through
paper the color of tea, bodies chained

in pairs tumble backward into the depths.
Their bones land on liquid beds, notes

of a dirge that lingers. History is a haunting that winds
through fret-boards of coral and crab pots.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence in the Undercurrent

“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.

Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic structure and title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels

Anstice emailed me her mysterious story in the form of twenty numbered poems. In them we meet some of the people of an offshore island and some of the Christian monks who arrive to save their souls. It’s an unsettling meeting of incompatible perspectives on the world and our place in it. I enjoyed reading it. I sent some ideas for the cover, she replied with her ideas, and soon afterwards I met her in person in the lovely Abbey Deli in Bath to deliver the first ten copies of her chapbook.

Here is the beginning of the first poem:

Beyond the gate which separates
the tame from the wild

the Keeper of medicinal herbs
and his more knowledgeable wife

briefly turn their heads
as a snake pours from behind the hyssop,

perches on the gate, spreads
its leathery wings and takes to the sky.

Ama Bolton, A Chapbook by Anstice Fisher

My friend performs poems in care homes. He encourages the residents to read, to join in, to recite and connect, or reconnect, with language at a time in their lives when, for many, language is evaporating. The TV is turned off, Homes Under The Hammer or Bargain Hunt goes quiet for a while and then he leaps, fearlessly around the room like an Alpine climber, precarious, now on one leg, reaching out here with a trusting hand, delivering lines, deftly, almost effortlessly making poetry. Manifesting it above the odour of mince and disinfectant.

He doesn’t do it for glory or praise or prizes. He earns little money, just enough to spend on socks for winter or some provisions for his larder. He won’t thank me for mentioning it, he’ll wince if he reads this. Maybe he won’t speak to me for a week, a year, a lifetime but know this: tomorrow he’ll be at the rock-face again, throwing out lines by Kipling or Frost, scaling Coleridge and Keats, ascending the summit with Steve Smith or Shakespeare. Then he’s off again, to another little town, to another institution with a name like Meadow Vale or Glendale Court or Sunny Springs.

In some ways what he does makes my adventures in poetry appear gimmicky, performative stunts, Barnum and Bailey side shows. While I have taken poetry into similar arenas as my friend, the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, into prisons and homeless shelters I confess that after a decade it rather broke me. Perhaps I was pretending to be someone else, pretending I was saner, freer, better off than those I was supposed to be taking poetry to.

Jan Noble, Nº76 Not another bloody odyssey…

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Henry Oliver, Literature as Part of Life

I’m delighted that Headless Poet will be publishing a selection of my poems, Warm as Wood, in the autumn. I understand that it is already available for pre-order on the website now: [link]

Victoria Moul, Warm as Wood

Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife!

There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from “Autobiography,” the third in my “smaller” trilogy–the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]–the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!

rob mclennan, two new chapbooks and a book-length essay

This article “Everybody is a Math Person . . .” by writer and teacher Larry Ferlazzo explores the nature of math anxiety and also the meanings of the terms:  “math person” and “poetry person.”  

Ferlazzo offers these views:  Many students say:  “I’m not good at math.” A statement made by one student that turns into a ripple effect: “Math is so hard.” “My parents aren’t good at math, and neither am I.” “I just don’t have a math brain.”  

He goes on to say that as a math teacher, he has “found it essential for students to be able to experience a sense of wonder, happiness, excitement, anticipation, puzzlement, and relaxation.”  He has found that poems can open a door to thinking positively about math.

JoAnne Growney, Is each of us a MATH PERSON?

I confidently submitted it to a competition I really wanted to win. I did not win. I was very, very disappointed.

It took two years to go back to the poem. Failing to place when I’ve been brave enough to enter something always hurts, no matter how philosophical I am. Something about this poem kept drawing me back. Esteemed poetry tutors often describe an early draft as “having legs” and Barn Owl was one of those drafts.

This next version is back to conventional form. The prose poem felt a contrived, clumsy and distracting. I’ve cut a lot of lines and words that distract too

“the first time I roll one two towels into a sausage shape to go either side of your legs”

became

“the first time I rolled one, two towels
tight as I could, to support, comfort
the uncomfortable”

You may agree that the word “sausage” is always likely to be a distraction in a poem about death.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Evolution of a poem

Searching for “Tim Love” (author) on Goodreads, these appeared on the first page of results –

• The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging by Tim Love
• Tim Love on the Lonesome Dove Trail by Tim Love
• The Medium is the Mirror: The Reformation of Truth Reshaping Our Relationships, Politics, and Sacred Beliefs by Tim Love et al
• Discovering Truth: How to Navigate between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World by Tim Love et al
• I love Tim: Notebook / Journal / Diary – 6 x 9 inches (15,24 x 22,86 cm), 150 pages. For everyone who’s in love with Tim by I Love Tim Publishing
• Urbanism Starter Kit by Tim Love

Needless to say, I wrote none of them. I wouldn’t mind reading some of them though. My By All Means is there too. 1 review. 1 rating.

Tim Love, Tim Love on Goodreads

you love estate sales. they overwhelm me.
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors
& the ghosts of an emptying house.
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves
& the collections of paintings. fish
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.

Robin Gow, 8/5

Is having your own dedicated writing space a necessity for you, or a luxury? Is it even an accessible possibility?

In my comment on Nic’s post yesterday I named the three places I most commonly write: the dining room of my shared house when my housemates haven’t got the projector on (or aren’t having a conversation), my bedroom floor (no judgement please), and my partner’s sofa. I’d like to add to this little list: not so often anymore but sometimes a brunch cafe or pub (with headphones/earplugs ofc), the Manchester Poetry Library, and when I’m visiting my Mum – her kitchen table.

I’m a writer of convenience. While part of me is drawn to the icon that is a writing desk of my own, it’s also unrealistic for my situation. Instead everything I have and use is portable: a small laptop, a single A4 notebook, a button up A4 pouch when needed, pens in the pockets of all my bags, a selected couple books of poetry to take to whatever writing station I’m using that day.

This does (as I said to Nic) help to keep the ‘stuff’ to a minimum at least, but as I reflect on it I think I also genuinely enjoy the different spaces, sights, and sensations offered by different environments, the versatility of knowing I can write (almost) anywhere, and sometimes just the novelty of being in a new space (or perhaps it just satisfies my ADHD’s restlessness).

Rachael Hill, What’s your space?

In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the palace walls. This scene played in my mind today when a woman covered my entire face with a sheet of gauze before applying cement-like clay on it, covering even my eyes, my lips, and so it felt like drowning, like death. It was quite surreal, feeling this heaviness weigh down my face, layer by layer by layer. All blackness, then a tiny spot of blue, the poetry of Anne Carson, the men that should be kissed, the music of Erik Satie, the women and their books, a forest of text, a field made of manuscripts, then blankness, until I feel like I cannot breathe anymore, that this, indeed, is the end. And so this is how I find out that a Korean glass skin facial recreates well the experience of being the forbidden lover of a prince.

Saudamini Deo, What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?

From the next carriage, the sudden sound of a man wailing a raw despair.
The train stops at a platform, a door slams, slams again, and I see
the police officers haul him along, his feet dragging, his face contorted.

We pass a city of tents, someone receiving CPR on the floor of a shop,
a man in robes descending a long flight of stone steps, a child firing
a water pistol, people following a woman with a pink umbrella.

Bob Mee, RANDOMLY, AND SO…

It was almost midnight when we pulled into our driveway, my arm in a sling, Oxy in hand. I had an appointment the next day with one of our authors, Luke Goebel, who has written about the perils of the Oxy epidemic. I pictured myself saying, Hey Luke, I’m on Oxy right now, and him saying, What?

It’s been surreal. The pain, the pills, the loss of mobility.

My dear friend, Nicelle, came by to help me get a bath and make sure I was looking out the windows. Today, we went to Kaiser. They took more X-rays. Gave me a soft splint brace. Showed me the long fracture.

Are you still working? the Physician Assistant asked. Can you rest this month? I stared at him like a deer stares at a train—wildly wondering why the lights of it keep coming and coming.

He lives in another country. In another country, one takes a month off. One rests. Like God on the seventh day.

I had thought well, maybe we will still go camping! But no, not even close.

The pie will have to wait; we will hold onto it. I do not often take care of myself. But right now, it seems necessary. I will keep working, but I will do micro bits of self care as well.

I may surprise myself and break out like the morning. I always like to think that anything could happen.

And then, on August 6^th, something exciting did happen. My memoir, Little Soldiers, debuted in People Magazine, alongside a beautiful quote from Sarah Jessica Parker: “Kate reconstructs her past with breathtaking lyricism and heartfelt vulnerability. These pages sing with humor even in the darkest of circumstances. Little Soldiers is a glorious reclamation of the past and a triumphant depiction of one woman’s journey to freedom.”

I thought, Sarah! You see this book, this story! And crippled, tangled, smashed by pain, I felt that leaping moment of yes, of gratitude, to my agent Jeff Kleinman who carried this book forward, to Sarah Ried at Zando who did an ungodly amount of editing, and to Sarah Jessica Parker for loving books and for falling in love with this one.

Kate Gale, Soul-Knitting Through the Long Night

The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.

Butterfly Unit

Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school class

blundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,

plucking milkweed plants. […]

Maryann Corbett, The month of weeds

The weekend included our second visit to a yarn show in Newcastle. It is lovely to return to a familiar setting, and to talk with returning customers as well as to meet new people. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you will know I love the conversations that arrive from being in such a setting, and there were many during the days we were there. Here’s a comment I am delighted to set down because it was an instant response that came about after I had read a poem out loud  –  who’d have thought such things could happen just like that in the yarn world – “It’s like a real one. It’s deep.” That’s a great critique of a poem heard for the first time, and it made my heart sing.

Here’s to conversations, impromptu poetry reading, growing good things and to enjoying fruits when they are in season.

Sue Finch, LOGANBERRIES

We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: On Vacation

This week: cotton grass and bracken, craquelure and rust, language plugged into the quantum field, the foraminifera, and much more. Enjoy.

Driving from Manchester to Leicester all the grass in all the fields I pass is dead and brown. Are you not terrified? Do you not wake in the night dripping with dread? Does your heart not burn with grief?

When I saw my friend who I had not seen for many months I was reminded how everything is and isn’t. In the shape of his face I saw was, is, and will be. All our shared memories were in a jar of honey I held in my hands; I considered dipping my fingertip into it but the lid was screwed tightly on.

I always see the same girl in the mirror. Even when I squint, or peer surreptitiously from the corner of my eye. Even when I try my hardest to be quick, unexpected, to catch her off guard, she is there waiting for me with the same hair and nose and eyes and cheeks and chin always so familiar and always so deeply surprising.

At the open mic I held my contributor copy in my hand, read my own words and felt something with no name. Perhaps at that moment some of my atoms had chosen to switch places, or some of my cells ate up some of their neighbours. Perhaps the bird migrating endlessly through my body paused for a short while to wait out a bad weather front, or to enjoy a dappled morning.

Rachael Hill, Some Field Observations

Sitting on a beach in Normandy earlier this month, I admired the seagulls riding various plumes of wind. It was too windy and cold to swim, which left me with words and thoughts and the realization (once again) that the waves of science are jammed by the presence of angels and metaphysical Others. 

I say “once again” because I touched on this in a poem titled “The First Gust of Special Relativity is Weightlessness” (published in My Heresies). Susanna Lang was right: the poet could not stop seeing what the scientist might have seen when imagining the theory of gravity. 

Alina Stefanescu, The metaphysics of others in metaphysical Others.

Last weekend I went on a writers’ retreat with some friends [from] my writing group. Well, writers’ retreat is a loose label. We went to a summer cottage in the Turku archipelago, in the west of Finland. This was our fourth year of having a Helsinki Writers Group retreat since Covid, though we missed the last two years, I think, due to low numbers. It’s hard to organise 6 or more people to do anything together, but totally worth it when we manage. 

We did a few writing things, had writing related talks and did writing prompts. I did a lot of journaling, but mostly we just hung out and did Finnish summer cottage things: picked berries and mushrooms, walked in the woods, sauna’d and jumped in the sea, drank a bit, played some games and ate a lot of food. All in all, a lovely relaxing weekend, except for the long drive. 

One of the presentations from a lovely writer that works in IT was on AI witch hunts for writers: how to recognise AI writing (most of which they have already found ways around) and avoid our writing being mistaken for AI. How is this even a problem?! 

Gerry Stewart, Do I Continue to Feed the Beast?

When I’m told, “Listen to what your body tells you,” I want to respond, “My body tells me never to talk to another human, to stay in the house on my own and smoke, it tells me to hurt myself.” If I listened to my body, I would not be alive. I would certainly not write, or teach, or speak in front of crowds. I would not have conceived and given birth, I would not have known love. My life has been a long exercise in ignoring my body.

Rather, I think, I need a conversation with my body. One in which I listen to its fears and desires, and respond thoughtfully. Today was that day. On the summit of Black Hill, Niamh and I decided that a night’s rough camping at Standedge was not for us, and we booked a room at the Diggle Hotel.

And we walked with Ken and Ali through the day. There was laughter, and we paddled our hot feet in a stream. There was a lizard, and meadow pipits, and skylarks, and a single buzzard. There was cotton grass, and bracken, and bilberries growing fat. Today was a kind day. Purple moors stretched in waves, and the tower blocks of Manchester shimmered on the horizon.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Two

This dead facsimile of person.
This paper doll traveling
hand over hand
as though
descending through hell on a rope
and touching down in this dead room.

This thoroughly dead house.
Even the books lining the shelves
are empty of silverfish,
empty of dust motes,
there is no more light.

Rebecca Cook, The Pain that Writes Poems on the Body

A boring poem no one will want to read is one of those rare ones that come unbidden, in a sudden, overpowering flash, a poem you write as though possessed, that knows itself well and wills itself out on the page and into the world so strongly that you must instantly do its bidding.

Indeed, when I wrote it I felt I was entirely under its influence, as though it were a living entity taking control of my brain and of my dominant hand. I vividly remember when I wrote this poem and what brought it on: one of my dear friends messaged me, on a day seemingly like any other, to let me know that their parent had just passed away. Their parent was living in one country, my friend in another, and I in yet another country. It’s at times like these that the heaviest consequences of migration hit: home becomes fragmented, pieces of ourselves falling forever out of reach in the places we have left behind, or among the people we love whom we couldn’t transplant with us.

I did not know how to reply to my friend’s message. What were they truly feeling in that moment, what did they need, and what could I even have offered from a distance? This brought on a deluge of complicated memories and emotions: being away from my family at key moments with only a smartphone screen to preserve our fragile bond, missed celebrations and funerals, the graves of people I loved that I could now only pay homage to in my thoughts, and the quiet support of chosen family found far away from my place of birth. I also vividly recalled my high-school literature teacher who taught my classmates and I not just how to become ‘professional readers’, like he used to say, but also about the shiftier grounds of power and authority, and how art holds a mirror up to society, often unflatteringly in a harsh light, revealing all its bumps, scars, and pus-filled pustules. That teacher, by the way, died last year. Another funeral I was unable to attend.

In any case, the poem that came to me was, inevitably, a poem about all the boring things – loss, complicated grief, loving people and missing them, the inability to explain the need to leave, lose oneself, and remain lost. All the boring, monotonous things in life are poetry, I remember thinking when I’d finished writing ‘A boring poem…’. A writer’s job is to bring out the deep, complicated emotions enmeshed with the unremarkable; to be brave enough to write, that is, ‘ordinary poems, about unremarkable things.’

Drop-in by Maria Cohut (Nigel Kent)

I’m still in the process of creating the poem.  I used the verb “wrestling,” but this morning’s writing hasn’t been a struggle.  I started the poem not knowing where it would end, which is not how I always write.  In fact, I’m more likely to think and think and think about a poem idea and figure it all out–for some poems, this process results in writing out a finished poem with few surprises, and for some poems, I figure out that it’s not worth the effort of typing it into the computer.

I like the potential for surprise that comes from starting before I figure it all out.  Here are the lines that surprised me this morning:

Jesus knows that first you must
cast out the demons of ungrounded
wires and faulty connections.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Car Inspections and Jesus Rewiring a Fixer-Upper

As some of you may recall, last fall I had the great pleasure of traveling to Japan with my husband and son. The highlight was a six-day walking tour tracing part of the route of 17th century haiku poet Bashō.

I’m thrilled that a major haiku journal has published a haiku sequence inspired by the trip. When my husband Paul saw the piece, laid out over two pages, he joked, “You got the centerfold in Modern Haiku!” I’m happy to share it here, with thanks to editor Paul Miller. […]

three wayfarers
we catch up to Bashō
by bullet train

Narrow Road
everyone driving
on the wrong side

dancing maples
we clap and clap
for bears

Annette Makino, Catching up to Bashō

While driving back from Norfolk last weekend, I idly mused on the idea of poets having roadies. Either to come in and set up our writing desks, fountain pens in racks like guitars back stage..A different pen being brought out to us depending on what poem we’re working on. Maybe free writing is the soundcheck. Maybe I should just stop thinking.

Writing poems is like picking a reel of sellotape. It’s either really easy, or it takes forever to get into it.

Mat Riches, Marvellous: A Page of Bertron

a summer’s car ride, top down,
yelling to the wind, to the night,
to the swollen creek, to the war,
to the empty bed and plate,
to a song of crickets and dogs
barking, to something unseen
in the woods moving, to
the passing train’s whistle,
to the hush in this room,
to eyes seeing what shouldn’t
be seen, to whispers of sleep
that ask and tell, to hands
not willing to stop

Sam Rasnake, New Poem, “From the Basement Stacks: 4”

My week has included some lovely opportunities to send and write anniversary poems. I was very proud to have set aside time to write one for L and O, but had counted too many years so they received a ‘tin’ poem when it should have been pottery. The kettle then went on, and I sharpened my brain to compose the correct kind of poem for their ninth anniversary instead. Pleasingly I managed it just in time. The week also included thirty years of marriage for R and S. I didn’t know until I saw a post on social media, but it felt serendipitous because I had been wanting to write a pearl anniversary poem for a while. I thoroughly enjoyed having the right inspiration to be creative right there and then, and I was delighted when the poem was well-received. It was also the first poem written entirely at my newly restored writing desk. There’s something special about writing in a dedicated space, and although I like the portability of my laptop and the joy of having a notes app on my phone and a good range of notebooks that mean that I can take my writing anywhere, I also love the ritual of desk writing. So all in all it’s been a lovely week of gifting words and of extending the number of poems I have created to celebrate the symbolism of different anniversaries.

Sue Finch, IT’S TIN, IT’S POTTERY, IT’S PEARL

A video setting of Rilke’s poem “Moving Forward” as well as my “Song” (from Moon Baboon Canoe) that I created for an aerial dance performance some time ago. Rilke’s poem was translated by Robert Bly who I once took a class with and he told me—I was 16—that I had a beautiful face. He told me this in the context of consoling a friend who was weeping during the workshop where we had to write about a rock as if it were our father.

Gary Barwin, Moving Forward on Fishes

Hubble site:
impatiently waiting
for a galaxy to load

Tom Clausen, dainty

Dedicating each poem to a poet who has “inspired, surprised, lifted, comforted, and taught [her] how to be a better poet,” [Ellen] Rowland includes in the world she traverses some of the “ancestors” of all the poets who have come after them: Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, Harlem Renaissance poet Angelina Weld Grimke, and T.S. Eliot. Some — William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Mahmoud Darwish — have passed from this world but remain well-known and widely studied for their contributions as poets. Others, such as Christian Wiman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, Jane Hirshfield, Ellen Bass, Ted Kooser, Ross Gay, Donna Hilbert, and Linda Hogan, are among the contemporary names that surface frequently online, among prize winners and poets laureate, and in the pages of many literary journals.

Looking at those names again, you have to acknowledge being in the presence of a discriminating, curious, and avid reader and learner. Moreover, read the poems and you’ll hear how well Rowland knows the voices and has studied the styles of all these poets, their subjects, especially the natural world, and how they use them, the space they occupy in our literary canon and beyond. Indeed, what is clear is that Rowland has cultivated a lifetime of relationships with each, living and not; she could even be said to be these poets’ literary ambassador, her interests and influences global in reach and depth.

Maureen Doallas, Ellen Rowland’s ‘In Search of Lost Birds’

Emotional Dance Music [by Miles Bradley] is a masterclass in paying attention to those subtle shifts in mood that ripple between people, like the moment of shoals of fish, or starling murmurations. The poems are concerned, primarily, with interiority, but the narrator wrongfoots us by switching between interior and exterior action. It is as if we are watching the director’s cut of a movie we may have seen before, layering previously deleted scenes, outtakes, alternate endings onto our former understanding of what the whole thing was about.

Miles writes with the kind of disarming emotional honesty coupled with a simultaneous wry distancing that I think is common of the Tumblr generation. We are in the world of house parties, 5am texts, messy comedowns and conversations in bathtubs. I confess I’ve always found house parties quite stressful (I suspect I’m fundamentally too upright to ever truly ‘let go’ and be in the moment), so there’s something slightly anthropological about seeing them through the eyes of an evident house party veteran. […]

The whole Definitive Publicly Voted Peer Reviewed Expert Assessed Ranking of Locations to Have Night Defining Year Wrecking Life Changing Conversations at House Parties (to give the full title) sequence feels like the beating heart of the collection. What they do really well is explore, through the microcosm of the house party, the expectations we place on external events and on other people, to provide us with excitement, solace, a feeling of belonging.

Victoria Spires, Emotional Dance Music

Reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), in order, one after another, as I have been doing lately, it’s easier than you might think — though it feels blasphemous — to begin to ask yourself why, exactly, these poems needed to exist. What urgency, precisely, is driving them? Aside from the inescapable fact of their technical achievement, the perfect working out of lines of English in iambic pentameter and the structural organization of four quatrains and a couplet — aside from the fact that they’re so paradigmatic that this entire variation on the sonnet form, first devised by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), bears not Surrey’s name but Shakespeare’s, as another word for English — what is it about these sonnets that makes them that worth reading, in order, one after another?

Why, when the poet has written one sonnet about the responsibility of a beautiful young man to procreate and thus perpetuate his beauty, does he need sixteen more to hammer home the same idea? And after seventeen sonnets on that specific theme, why — far from having exhausted it, apparently — does he continue developing the same theme, proposing verse as another mode by which beauty may be perpetuated, reminding the same object of affection of the encroachment of time that renders some means of perpetuation desirable, bemoaning the waste of said fleeting time spent apart, and so on? Looked at this way, the first 126, at least, of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets might be described as about the same thing (admittedly in a relational arc) over and over. Why?

To look at the sonnets this way, as Helen Vendler has suggested, is to regard them as — to appropriate and repurpose Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase — “all dead paper.” It’s to read them as nothing but a collective artifact of words, all reducible to the same basic, eventually predictable message, delivered in an echo chamber. But this is not at all what they are. Just as Barrett Browning’s letters seem, to her hand, “alive and quivering” with all they wish to communicate, so these sonnets, too, are “alive” in some ineffable way that becomes apparent the longer we live with them.

And we live best with them not as we live with inanimate objets d’art, but as our closest way of living with the mind of a person, who more than four hundred years ago took up his pen to write to another person: not simply to declaim to that person, in a series of soliloquies, but to converse with him. Human beings, after all, are made to engage with each other. The urgency that drives these sonnets is, on its deepest level, the urgency of the desire for connectio — even when connection looks like argument.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sonnet 116

[T]he most striking thing here is the musical stave on the right hand side. Unfortunately, I know very little about early modern music and its notation so I can’t attempt to play the tune. But, fascinatingly, it does appear to be indicating a tune for the poem itself: the words beneath the stave are the first two lines of the poem.

Epodes 1 is written in iambic distichs: an iambic trimeter followed by an iambic dimeter. This couplet then repeats throughout, so a tune for the first two lines would be enough for the whole poem. The first ten epodes are all in this metre, so in theory the same tune could work for them all, but there is another piece of musical notation at the top of Epodes 3, as you can see below on the right hand side. This is shorter and it looks to me — though I am the opposite of an expert on this — as if it corresponds only to the trimeter, not to the trimeter and the dimeter.

It is relatively common to find neumes (medieval musical notation) alongside the text of Horace in medieval manuscripts, especially in France and Germany, although my understanding is that these are usually odes rather than epodes. Although I have quite often seen scraps of music in early modern English books and manuscripts, I have never seen them attached to the text of Horace in this way, which perhaps suggests that the tradition of singing Horace’s Latin — especially at school — was more of a French and German tradition. It would be really fascinating to know whether the tunes noted here are recognisable, and whether they are anything like the ones recorded in medieval manuscripts.

Victoria Moul, Can you sing the Epodes?

I haven’t had much time for reading lately. Poems and stories I’ve read in the past pop into my head a lot though. Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’ is one of those. I find most of his work incomprehensible but that’s a poem I enjoyed as a boy and still do now. It’s obviously very much under the influence of Baudelaire’s dream voyages but gives a completely different sensation to them and I thought I’d try to say something about the difference. […]

Simply murmuring the words aloud gives me an intense, almost sensuous pleasure in the formation of their sounds, both on a phonetic level and in the cadence of the phrases (though of course different readers do pitch these phrases differently). Moreover, though the broad Baudelairean influence is obvious, what’s striking is how original line after line, image after image, statement after statement is in the way it encapsulates the ideas and sensations it expresses.  This is what gives them such imaginative bite. With what stunning sweep ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres’ brings together physical and intellectual malaise to suggest a comprehensive jadedness with what the speaker’s actual life offers. The very hyperbole of ‘tous les livres’ suggests an exacerbating state of nervous exhaustion. Almost every statement seems to me to realise its idea with almost equal precision and penetrating power. What’s really striking, though, is that although the power of these lines depends on the way they suggest ideas through concrete images, these images are so generalised as to hover on the edge of abstraction. Nothing makes us imagine the steamer, the anchor, the alien clime, the waving handkerchiefs, the storm, the fertile islands with any particularity. This is a strength of a very different kind to what we find in Baudelaire’s poems of southern and eastern voyaging. In them there’s a sensual, almost carnal physicality to the imagery[.]

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s physicality vs Mallarmé’s abstraction

[Graeme] Richardson […] is a warts-and-all poet whose output gets down and dirty with the dark side of life (and death) as well as the light(er). In poems covering his years an Anglican priest, notably in his native Notts., and in others of his childhood and adolescence, he is refreshingly frank and unflinching. Take the octet of his sonnet-of-sorts, ‘Bearings’:

One poor dear – 84, in the hospice,
just a few picked chicken-bones
under the sheets, fists
bulbs of dried garlic,
and a head of dandelion fluff
almost blown –
before she finally gave up
cried out all night for her Mum.

As much as the precision of the three uncompromising comparisons, the cumulative impact of which served to remind me of my mother’s last days, I like that it took me a couple of readings to grasp the syntax. I like the line-endings too – six end with a noun end all of them end with words which are significant in conveying the overall portrait of the elderly woman: here is a poet who knows how to arrange his sentences across and down the page. What should we make of the opening, ‘One poor dear’? Is it condescending, demeaning and/or sexist? Yes, to a degree, I think, but it’s the sort of language which many of us would use. The unnecessary capitalisation of the first em of ‘Mum’ possibly serves to emphasise the woman’s reduced and infantilised state. It’s unsparing writing, and for that reason will be read as either brave or beyond the pale, depending on your viewpoint.

The poem on the facing page, ‘In Holywell Cemetery’, is, for my money, the finest in the book; a beautiful lyric of five ABAB-rhymed quatrains. Here’s the opening stanza:

Swirling iron, craquelure and rust,
shuddering with slowly crawling cars,
Earth absorbs the poison with the dust;
graves await an amaranthine grass.

The trochaic meter, reminiscent of Auden, well suits a poem about a Victorian Oxford cemetery. Those two words ‘craquelure’ (the cracks in a painting) and ‘amaranthine’ (of, or like, plants in the amaranth family) are showy indicators, as clear and bold as the meter, of Richardson’s ability to write in a high, traditional register. The poem isn’t moving solely because of these facets, but they augment the poet’s intention to write a poem with an ambition to say something beyond the superficiality of its concrete subject-matter. The full poem can be read here, in Bad Lilies (edited by Neilson and his wife Kathryn Gray) where it was first published – as you’ll see, it unfolds and circles back quite beautifully. While I knew who Kenneth Grahame and Walter Pater were, I had to look up (Charles Buller) Heberden, a vice-chancellor of Oxford.

While that might sound a bit fusty, crusty and, well, patriarchal, I can assure you that Dirt Rich comprises an array of forms, both classical and contemporary, and subject-matter. It was quite bizarrely overlooked for the Forward Prize longlists for both first and best collection, let alone the shortlists, at the expense of some collections which I’ve read and found much less rewarding. I know that prizes aren’t important, that lists are subjective and, worst of all, that judges appear not to recuse themselves from evaluating collections published by their own publisher and instead seem merrily oblivious to how looks; however, it doesn’t help the poetry landscape of the UK if books as good as Richardson’s don’t get a look-in. Maybe he’s upset too many people with his reviews in the TLS and the Sunday Times – not that I’ve ever read the latter, but I gather that he can be quite trenchant.

Matthew Paul, Some of my July reading

A long single-sentence prose poem pokes fun at the idea this collection could in any way be taken too seriously, an eagerness for the poet to show a lack of pretension. The credits point to “a book that he’d found under a seat, left there by a troubled young woman who had taken it from an ex-lover in an act of petty vengeance, an ex-lover who had never actually read it, having swapped it for another book with a friend who had purchased it directly from the author, who in turn had based the book, their one and only novel, on a stage play that they saw in the back room of a tavern on the eve of its demolition, a play written by a committee of five revolutionary poets, each of whom claimed that their individual contributions were entirely original when, in actual fact, they were variously based on a repressed memory, a half-forgotten nightmare, a drunken post-coital conversation, a feverish hallucination and a meeting with what may or may not have been their future selves.” The inter-connectedness of all things and how inspiration can be thought to be original but is drawn from past encounters, half-remembered ideas and individual interpretation.

[Stefan] Mohamed merges poetry and storytelling to create a fragmentary narrative, influenced by cinematic imagery and sprinkled with moments of cynical humour.

Emma Lee, “The Revelation Tapes” Stefan Mohamed (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her debut poetry collection, Descântec For My Split Tongue, is published by Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books. Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com. […]

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

These days, it’s so easy not to start a project—I even paused in the middle of writing this sentence to breastfeed—that beginning at all feels miraculous! Once I’ve arrived at the page, I try to protect that momentum and return to it daily, even if only for fifteen minutes. I have so many books asking to be written: children’s books, hybrid books of collage, poetry, and essay, books on language learning, and at least a dozen collaborative projects with friends. My first drafts often come quickly, but I’ve found that I do my best work when there’s some form of sharing. I was most prolific when I brought a new poem each week to my writing coach, Tara Skurtu, or to the Multilingual Art Lab of The Polyglot, where the drafts could be shaped and sharpened in conversation. […]

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

I’m interested in how languages are learned, lost, silenced, reclaimed, and revitalized. I wrote Descântec For My Split Tongue as an incantation to reclaim Romanian, my mother tongue, after years of feeling it slip away. At the same time, I was pursuing a PhD in language education, asking what can be done to creatively support youth heritage language maintenance in our communities. My research drew on poetic inquiry, community arts-based research, multiliteracies, and sociocultural theory (if you’re interested, you can download the dissertation for free here!). I enjoyed exploring how bilingual poetry, as well as other artistic modes like self-portraiture, protest art, illustration, photography, video, animation, and painting, can help us sustain our languages and ways of knowing that are at risk of being lost. I brought a lot of what I learned to my first collection of poems.

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?

“From the moment you try to impose a path on a poet, you pave the way for dictatorships,” Raúl Zurita recently said in an interview. I don’t have a prescriptive role for a writer, but a task—to pay close attention, especially to the things that are disappearing, ignored, forgotten, or silenced. To notice connections that others might miss and make them visible (for example, the connection between preserving our planet’s biological diversity and linguistic diversity). In a world of speed, distraction, neverending atrocities—a single poem can slow us down. A poem in another language, or in translation, can slow us down, even more. It’s incredible what we learn when we slow down and pay attention.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adriana Oniță

Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama
First off, don’t read this one. I listen to this poet host Poetry Unbound (a podcast of poems by various poets), so I was curious what his own work was like. Like most poetry collections, this one is broken up into sections. I liked the Kitchen Hymns sections (there are two), and the “Do you believe in God?” section (every poem in that section had that question as the title, but were wildly different poems – I am fascinated by that idea, using the same title for many poems, like an interrogation or recurring question in one’s life with many different responses), but the rest of the book was meh.

I guess I should define my use of “meh” – most of the book is this back and forth between Jesus and Persephone in a garden after leaving hell. The writing is flat, lacking imagery, and honestly kind of boring. But also, from my perspective as a Christian, I don’t like writing that adds words or actions to Jesus; I feel that it is disrespectful (Prov. 30:5-6, and there are other verses to support this view, if you want more on why I feel this way). So overall I can’t really recommend this book, though there are individual poems of his I liked.

Renee Emerson, The tailor shop at the intersection (and other delights)

‘If you don’t agree with me,’ Richard Hugo tells us in Chapter 1 of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, ‘don’t listen. Think about something else.’

I like this as an opening gambit. I’m terrible at being told what to do, generally. Ask my parents. But in the poetry world I quite like a bit of advice. I can’t pretend I always act on it, or take it with good grace (sorry), but I do listen, and I keep it in case I want it later. Very often I do. […]

What I really like about Hugo is his wanton disregard for standard writing advice. He’s refreshing to read. The ‘Triggering Town’ of the title refers to one of his central arguments – that the carved-in-stone received wisdom that is write what you know is nonsense. I KNOW, RIGHT? I can hear you gasping from here. But as he says,

If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don’t have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up.

Basically, Hugo tells us, the whole point of a poem has to be the language, the joy and sound of the words, and in order for that to happen we have to reach beyond the known – our imagination must ‘free itself to seek the unknown’. Towns we know, metaphorically speaking, are too bogged down with our memories and associations. We can’t find anything new. We worry about doing the truth justice.

The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.

So if you create a new place to put a poem in, as long as you can ‘take emotional possession’ of it, the poem can be freed from the ‘triggering subject’. Then it’s just about the words.

The words should not serve the concept. The concept should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts.

Ooh, it’s a seductive idea. As a lifelong style-over-content advocate, I have definitely flirted with it, but as someone who also writes incessantly about what I know, something has (so far) stopped me falling for it hook, line and sinker. That’s OK. I don’t have to. He told me that in Chapter 1. I still love the essay. I love that he wrote it, because it gives us a way to think differently about what we’re doing.

Nia Broomhall, Week 20: The Triggering Town

I’m happy to release these two new chaps together because they both stake out a territory that is (for me) a breath of fresh air after a few years of darker, doom-laden poems. Also, I’ve wanted to make booklets that were interesting as self-contained worlds, not just collections of poems, and I think I’ve (nearly?) achieved that here. I’ll let the Ko-Fi page give you most of the deets, but let me add a couple notes here.

The Other Century is an ambiguous fictional narrative that uses both original and found or appropriated texts, tho they’re heavily altered and woven into the subliminal storyline. I shared one of the collection’s more elaborate poems on here last winter, and if you like that, you will like this collection. Several historical figures live in these poems too: Musidora, Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kristen Stewart. […]

As for Rat Heart Nebula, I shared a few pieces from it not long ago. It can’t really be summed up, but rest assured: it will eat your face. No narrative, no logic, no persona—nothing but language plugged into the quantum field. Plus, it features an original collage that weaves in some of the text […]

R.M. Haines, Two New Chapbooks, A New Storefront, and More

A reported story in The Open Notebook discusses writing about disability with six different writers. Kate Horowitz, the primary author, writes, “To write about a body is to expose it.” I would also add “the brain” as well. You could argue that writing in itself is exposure—think of the many memoirs that have probably gotten their writers in trouble that aren’t about disability. But there is an extra weight to writing about your disability in a way that is true to you while also avoiding the stigma that keeps you down more than your disability itself.

The piece also highlights the experience of journalist Keah Brown, who writes about her conditions out of necessity and for the pursuit of accurate representation. For so long, I felt that I was the only one who felt this way. After exploring online communities, I knew I wasn’t.

I pursued my narrative as an autobiographical one. After all, Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Recall earlier how panic attacks and agoraphobia are difficult to accurately describe. You’ll notice in a lot of media that uses agoraphobia in a sensational manner mostly focuses on the “I must stay in the house,” thinking and less of the physical sensations that accompany it. Or it is from another character that is observing the agoraphobic person instead, their annoyance and frustration with them.

I instead started by looking at the photographs directly. If I were in the photo, what would I be thinking about? Would I be panicking or trying to find coping skills? I then untangled my thoughts and wove them into lines, pursued enjambment to mimic the feeling of catching myself mid-panic attack and refocusing. I plucked out precise words from generative sessions and worked until they painted the “right” feeling.

I also focused on the reality of how difficult it is to heal from agoraphobia like this when women and femmes are presented with real dangers of being in the outside world. There is a poem I included of a police officer in an unmarked car following me at night. There is no clean way to separate “there is nothing to fear about the outside world” and the inherent misogyny and violence against women anywhere. In any case of agoraphobia, there is no “just get over it.” There are many layers to deconstruct and trust to rebuild with the world around you.

Finally, after several years and many distractions from a full-time job and other writing assignments in between, I managed to get Agora into the world.

When presenting this book and its backstory at a recent event, a woman raised her voice, smiled with the smile you would give a baby at a restaurant and said, “I’m so proud of you! Look at you! How far you’ve come! In a room full of people! Yay!”

I stayed graceful, smiling and thanking her, despite it being an infantilizing experience. Maybe if she bought a copy, she would have known better. But until then, I have no choice but to keep writing and representing the way my disability looks to me.

Exploring Disability Through Poetry – guest post by Gretchen Gales (Trish Hopkinson)

The poem’s title asks “what do we do when the old monsters die” but the rest of the poem asks “what about before they die but after we’re beyond their reach?” The poem supposes a monster who is facing death and is trying to get right with god.

what do we do when our wishes come true and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail and they say they’ve found Jesus and cry out Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we’re told) but we still won’t answer our phones or open their mail? (Is it true we’re cruel and cold?)

I really like the choice of “us” versus “me” in that line because it seems like it’s never just one. It would be nice for it to be just one, I think. But the real power is in the plea from the monster begging forgiveness and apparently claiming the speaker is cruel and cold for not being willing to engage.

This isn’t a scenario I’ll ever get to deal with. Fortunately, my abuse ended not terribly long after it started. One of my aunts moved in with us for a while and took over the child care duties, and then we moved to Louisiana, far away from Karen. I don’t know if she’s still alive or if she ever thought twice about that time. It’s taken a lot of work for me but I don’t even try to imagine it anymore. I’ve accepted that it’s unknowable. But I can say that in some alternate universe where Karen shows up 50+ years later and demands forgiveness out of the blue that it’s not cruel to deny that. Even when a person who has harmed you has done real work to atone and change, you don’t owe them forgiveness.

But that’s rarely how it happens, isn’t it?

The second section of Rathburn’s poem restates the opening question but moves it back in time from “when the old monsters die” to “when the monsters grow thin / their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?” and also starts to poke at the social pressure that we can get from, for instance, extended family or members of a community, to let grievances go when it’s clear that the monster is about to die or at least has lost some of the ability they once had to cause direct harm. The next lines talk of the monster being “stripped / of their claws and fangs and look, in the end / like ordinary old women and men” and I think that impulse is understandable, especially for someone who maybe wasn’t the direct recipient of harm, who only heard stories or suspected but never really knew.

Brian Spears, “What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die” by Chelsea Rathburn

One of the things I love about Red Hen Press, one of many, is that with a long wait from acceptance to publication, it allows me to craft a stronger book. Yes, the title and the themes of the book will remain the same. The size of the book won’t shift much either. However, with Blue Atlas, I traded out at least 1/3 of the book for newer, stronger work. I know that the book I submitted to Red Hen and the book they published were quite different. I need to also mention that Red Hen Press, which is located in Los Angeles, dealt with floods, closed grant options (NEA) and other catastrophes which leads to a much needed Go Fund Me Campaign where no amount is too large or too small.

Kate Gale, the founder, editor and publisher told me when she accepted Blue Atlas that she didn’t expect that she would be publishing the same book she had just taken a couple of years later. She trusted me to keep revising, to keep making the manuscript better. That vote of confidence in me meant the world. Of course the final book went through a rigorous process of review before it was printed. I don’t know if Kate compared the two manuscripts but I did and I know that the book improved over those intervening years. From the first poem written for the book, “Not Monet’s Giverny,” published in the utterly delightful journal, Sweet: A Literary Confection, to the last poem, “Compass,” (v. long scroll down) was a ten year journey. Interestingly, the poems ended up next to each other in the collection. The format of Blue Atlas is intentionally fractured with no easy narrative for the reader to follow. Why? Because as a reader, I find books more interesting when I need to participate in the events and when the book’s organization is a bit like memory—scattered with its own inner logic.

Now as I take apart A Compass or a Companion, I feel a similar instinct. The movement between my early life growing up in a conservative Jewish home, my exposure to Hassidic Judaism in South Africa, my human rights work in Gaza and the West Bank and my current life on the Puget Sound seem linked in important ways. A linear narrative may be “safest” but it is hardly the most interesting. What is often called a braided narrative is what appeals to me most. It’s described in Demystifying the Narrative which Kelli Russell Agodon and I co-edited a couple of years ago—a book I highly recommend for sorting out how you want to put your manuscript together. (Spoiler alert: there are many ways.) In fact, Kelli and I refer to it when putting our own books together.

Are four themes too much for one book to hold? Is Judaism explored in Boston, Massachusetts and Cape Town, South Africa all one idea, then can I add my work in Gaza in the 1990’s (and current horrors) to my life in Seattle? Is the current trend to have books of poems work in a narrative or with a cohesive theme as if we were writing short stories really necessary? Is this simply a marketing ploy?

My mind keeps returning to letters written between William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov. Levertov wrote Williams that she gave her poems to her editor at New Directions and let him order the poems; then on at least one occasion, she took the poems New Directions didn’t want and gave them to an editor at another publishing house. She said “my job is to write the poems” and she honestly couldn’t be bothered with the ordering. Well, Williams admonished her for giving all that power away. Can you imagine both not having to do the messy work of ordering but to also give that power completely away?

Susan Rich, On this Last Day of July, Please Come Flying

My Name is Swan is my first authorised title. It has taken ten years to come into print. It contains just three poems, three long-form poems, carefully typeset over 120 beautifully bound pages. It is, I believe, the publisher’s intention to make the book – not simply this book, but all of their books – an event, an occasion, a celebration. Their mission is an act of rebellion against super-consumerism, a quest for the quiet preservation of poetry.

In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, for it is now Nolan’s and no longer Homer’s, the conversation has, for the most part, focussed on how ‘true’ the film has been to the ‘original’ story and what has been lost or gained by Emily Wilson’s adventurous translation. Little attention has been given to the poetry, to its oral machinery. The sensuality of language is absent entirely. There are no wine-dark seas or rosy-fingered dawns. Even its translator has argued the movie’s spectacle has overwhelmed the poem’s human intimacy. The epic film has superseded the epic poem.

Like the word ‘iconic’ or ‘legendary’, ‘epic’ itself is now used to describe anything from a night out to a breakfast spread. Epic poetry is something we consider largely consigned to the past. T.S. Eliot left it in pieces, offered us fragments with The Waste Land, a poem of remnants recovered from the ruins of world war.

Epic poems have been revisited by contemporary poets who lend a recognisable voice to resurrect ancient tales. Seamus Heaney wrestled with Beowulf and The Aeneid. Current Poet Laureate Simon Armatage breathed new life into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and this October will see the release of his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh – a poem with the word epic ridden into its title.

October will also see the release of My Name is Swan which, rather than riding a great wave of public adulation, will glide slowly from the dark creeks, will appear hissing in river tributaries, will come ashore on silent, midnight slipways. I do regard this trilogy of works, taken as a whole, or in parts, particularly Reynard and Body 115 as epic poetry. Or at least an attempt at it.

These are epic times, this, an age of despots and tyranny, of fear and war and division, of rifts and conflict. This, surely, is an age for epic poetry.

Jan Noble, N°75 My Name Is Swan

I had been writing since the fall, which made up most of my income until I started more design-writing work later in the summer. I spent a lot of time writing Greek mythology and theater history related subject matter. As someone who had initially been hired to write strictly about literature as per my academic background, I’d also been permitted to take on myth/folklore, theater history, and because I was a practicing artist myself, visual art topics. Later, I wrote a lot architectural and design lessons, which gave me a solid launch into writing about decorating and design. But that summer, it was a lot of the Greeks, various lessons on The Odyssey, The Illiad, stage tragedies and comedies, myth in general, art in a mythological vein. I was also thinking about the idea of a female epic in the classical vein. Wading around so much in it for paid writing informed my creative writing and artmaking and soon, GRANATA, a series about Persephone and the  Sirens was hatched, along with a series of collages I would complete in the next year. Of course, in 2024-2025, I would follow it up with  CLOVEN, and something began to take shape. Not just these two collections of writing and art, but potential future ones that carried on that epic tradition. About Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Helen. Or Io, Leda, Daphne. (all possibilities for future series.)  And of course, Calypso,the one I planned to work on this summer.  I suppose you could also throw Ariadne/the Minotaur in that list, though TAURUS has always felt like something different. A contemporary retelling that takes a whole lot of liberties.  Over the past week since seeing the film, I’ve been thinking about Penelope and Circe, and potentials down the line for projects centered around them as well, which also have a lot of fertile material.  

At the same time, writing about myth seems really uncool as a subject matter. At least for poets. What do the Greeks offer us now? Maybe the answer is more than we think. Last night, I caught a glimpse of its powering nearly sold-out theater in the middle of downtown Chicago early on a summer evening when they could be doing literatally anything else. Granted, it had been a stormy afternoon and perfect for the cinema. But, turning my head, I saw the rapt faces of a large audience all in their recliners, inside a darkened theatre reliving a story that is thousands of years old. And that even in this anti-intelectual age, maybe the stories will make us okay, Not as a placebo or a distraction, but as a way to touch our shared humanity. To pluck it like Odysseus’ bow. To make it hum. 

Kristy Bowen, the myths that could save us

Despite Emily [Wilson]’s criticism of the food, the story, and the casting, the movie is doing more than fine because the greatness of this story, which has survived across centuries, continues to captivate. And in the ways it does and does not align with our current reality, it keeps us curious.

Being curious keeps your brain afloat; being stuck in your ways ages you. They say middle age is when your narrow waist and broad mind change place, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a surrender, giving in to the idea that the night is eternally dark and full of terror instead of moonlit and full of possibility.

As I find my way through my own story, one that has faced trials fit for an epic, I am moving toward conversations with fellow creatives who believe in the journey and help me understand what we can do next. I like to think that as Odysseus wandered homeward, he needed a plan. I have my own crew. We are learning. I am pivoting in ways that make us healthier.

We all like hero stories, and right now, the Red Hen staff are my heroes, as well as our authors. Indie publishing may be in a difficult spot, but this week, in a moment of celebration, Adela Najarro’s Variation in Blue won the American Book Award, and we all felt the glory. Through misunderstanding, through criticism, through myth, we find our way forward.

Kate Gale, Myth, Meaning & Survival: How Our Legends Shape Us

We recently entered a lovely, small, independent bookshop with our youngest niece (13) and nephew (10), both of whom enjoy reading books. The bookseller had taken wise advantage of the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Odyssey” and, in the poetry section, featured a whole shelf of versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey: different formats, translators, paperback, hardback, illustrated, limited-edition–quite a range! Our nephew’s at the age where paintball and nerf-gun battles, fantasy graphic novels, swords, guns, and fireworks interest him. He’s heard about The Odyssey and was curious about it. “Is that the one where all the gods get together and make more gods?” he asked. *

“No, it’s the one about the man who leaves on a ship at the end of a long war and can’t get home because the gods keep intervening and sometimes he makes questionable decisions,” I said. “It’s the one with the Cyclops.” He knew a little about the Cyclops. He wondered if it was too advanced reading for him. But he has been reading the Harry Potter books on his own, so he is used to unusual names and words for things and persistent enough to keep on with a long book. I said he could probably get through it, though he might need a dictionary sometimes. We chatted a bit there in the store, with me telling him about how old the poem is (and it is a poem, I said, though some translations are written in prose) and how it was told out loud for many years but written down into books (and you know, of course, what books were like back then? “On, like, scrolls, right?”). Twenty-four books!

We looked at the various books…some in prose, some in poetry, some in prose but broken up into lines like poetry for academic reasons, some with footnotes. The proprietor was eavesdropping, amused, I think; he leaned over to show us a copy that had Greek on one page with the English verso, so that my nephew could see what the Greek looked like. He thought it was pretty cool. He chose a modestly-priced copy in flex-cover (see above left) because he liked reading the excerpts on the cover and because this one–the Butler translation from 1900–was written in prose. He thought he would find that more familiar, like reading a novel or a history. I said it might seem a little old-fashioned in style, but he’d probably be fine with it. “Old-fashioned like Shakespeare, or old-fashioned like ‘The Turn of the Screw’?” he asked. Precocious little fellow, no? More like Henry James than Shakespeare, I assured him. So he went home with a new book thousands of years old.

Ann E. Michael, Imaginary travels

When our friend the artist announced she was going to Antarctica with a science research group led by a local scientist for some ridiculously long time, we, her friends, said, um, we want to meet this dude, so we know whether this is a reasonable idea or not. So we made her throw a little party where she introduced us all and he gave us an overview of his research. We liked him, and his research was focused on this odd and interesting single celled creature about which he was weirdly and wonderfully excited, so we gave our general approval to the journey. Reader, she married him. And so began my personal journey with the foraminifera. These single celled organisms live throughout the ocean, some on the ocean floor, have a shifty relationship with oxygen, and have survived any number of earthly cataclysms to live out their little lives, making their little stone shells with their sort-of-arms, and eating whatever it is they eat, procreating in, well, I can’t keep track of what all they do. I’ve written poetry inspired by them, made videopoems. And you know how sometimes when you encounter something randomly and all of a sudden see it everywhere? I now find foraminifera in odd places in my reading journeys. One day I had some time to kill so went to the local library, found myself in the poetry section, randomly pulled out a volume of Wislawa Szymblorska, opened it at random, and, yes. So this post and poem goes out to my friend Sam.

Marilyn McCabe, in layers, since layers,

August has arrived, and unfortunately, with it, wildfires in my state. Spokane is in particular peril, and the smoke from many fires should arrive here tomorrow, along with hotter temperatures. Smoke and heat together are a tough thing for MS people but wildfires are much worse for the people forced to evacuate their homes.

It would be wrong to talk about the problems without some of the beauties – I walked out to my back garden one morning to see a pair of Swallowtail butterflies, and another morning to see a pair of quail calling to their brood of half-grown baby quail. The Buck Moon was particularly beautiful, too – probably due to some level of smoke in the higher atmospheres. The hummingbirds are still busy after the flowers. […]

I love spring, but in the Pacific Northwest, fall might be more welcome because it signals an end to increasingly blistering summers and the mellower beauties of September and October.

It was also announced that AWP was going to be in Portland in 2028, which was very cheering to me, since I have a hard time traveling (or justifying in the expense of flying) to AWP a lot of years, but Portland is just a three-hour drive. This means I feel an increased pressure to get a book out for spring 2028.

It made me think about how much of poetry publishing is out of our control, is a waiting game, where so often, we’re punched in the face with rejection, and only meted out small amounts of success at a trickle at best. When I was younger, I believed in being proactive – not waiting for the right job or person to come to me, but trying to figure out what I wanted and going for it. Have I lost that urge or ability over the years? We wait for a publisher or a journal to say yes, we wait for the poem or book to be published, all the while spinning the dice for – what – a small amount of praise in the form of a review, a small amount of money from a grant or a prize or if we get super lucky, an advance. It’s super frustrating – and I worry that, like some of my friends recently, they run out of time before they run out of poems.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Wildfires in WA State, Farms Opening for Fall and Beauties of Late Summer, AWP in Portland 28, Proactive in Poetry Publishing

I’ve been foraging for mushrooms some, although it’s been super-dry here, so I’m doing much more learning than eating. I’m also revising the poetry ms I put together in spring, which now seems further away from genuinely good than I originally thought, plus I’m now thinking hard about next year’s teaching. Dealing with AI isn’t my focus–the primary question is what I should teach my undergrads and how–but I confess to bolting awake, furious, early the other morning. I’d read the list of “Fall Academy” trainings and panel discussions my college is offering faculty during the last two weeks of August, and a really high proportion of them stress how to use AI in the classroom, without any counterpoint, even as my college touts its commitment to environmental sustainability–hmm. I am NOT curious about prompting Claude better. It seems obvious, as I follow the research, that while AI has valid uses, for example in managing large data sets, beginning writers shouldn’t use it for brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revision, or any of the other writing practices they need to develop to become smart humans with flexible skills and good judgment. Plus I really, really don’t want to spend my one wild and precious life reading any AI-generated text, as a grader or otherwise; I read for a sense of connection with other human beings. A “Fall Academy” session of genuine interest to me right now would focus on how, when, and why to recommit to the analogue. I calmed myself down, that morning, by overhauling my winter term syllabus for the first-year writing seminar. Here’s a draft of the course description:

Being Human: What can literary werewolves, cyborgs, ghosts, and fire-starting bears teach us about personhood? What does it mean to write in a human voice, with human help, for other humans? Why do these questions matter? Students in this class consider the boundaries of the human through stories and poems by Martha Wells, Stephen Graham Jones, Lily Yu, Stephen King, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and others. Note that this class requires physical books and old-school writing implements. [Not in the course description: HA! Take that, you corporation-brainwashed, data-center-building AI shills! I make policy exceptions for accessibility needs, always, because I am a human who wants to meet my human students where they are. Disability and neurodiversity will be course topics–the readings are fairly contemporary, and dehumanization of certain groups is definitely on writers’ minds.]

Added into my whirlwind of interesting preoccupations: I’m also prepping for travel to Colorado for some sightseeing and readings at the Telluride Mushroom Festival (seriously, check out the schedule, the event list is weird and amazing–what’s an “alchemical mushroom sound bath”?!). 

Lesley Wheeler, Curiosity kills the writer

Oh, I know the drill
with thrills; I’ve done my time in choirs, ecstatic,
shaken core-deep with the eternal swirl

of Bach’s Johannes-passion, its Herr,
Herr, Herr, the churn and whirr of winds and strings
that lift a hundred singers into air,

lost to our ordinary selves an hour
or two, the fugue tumbling around our heads.
That’s why I have my doubts about the power

of Art to save. The last few notes alight;
we sift out idly to the brilliant noon
of Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit;

and here we are: blinking at glare, adrift,
the grumpy dailiness of being human
hemming us dully in. 

Maryann Corbett, Gilt Complex

Last week, I mentioned Franz Wright’s book Axe in Blossom. And since then I’ve been playing with the phrase “bouquet of splendour” in my doodles. Remembering Hélène Cixous saying that we have all lived one or two flowers, and thinking about how these days some people have lived a whole bouquet of flowers. And yet, still they shine, they glow, they arrange themselves, they are composed, they are colourful, and refreshing, and their perfume is glorious. So. Please remember you are a bouquet of splendour.

Shawna Lemay, Bouquet of Splendour

The bowl that breaks on the kitchen floor makes

a chime like a bell. We sweep up its fragments and drop it
into the trash, where glistening bones of our fish dinner

lie almost intact. And still we want everything we do,
though the world breaks our hearts every single time.

Luisa A. Igloria, Inventory

This week: jars of feathers, the fifth demon, the darkness of tunnels, the expressive face of a walrus, and much more. Enjoy.

How does it all not crack you, not elicit some kind of fugue state? How can we be expected to stomach this endless nervous system dysregulation? I’ve heard from many writers that they’re feeling the same thing. When I posted about this on FB, some people couldn’t even muster more than a sentence in agreement—a collective “ugh, me too.”

This exhaustion is palpable, especially in communities of us sensitive writers, writers who want to process and create, but who are paralyzed, caught in a schism between the collective suffering and the joy of creation. At some point, the schism collapses, and we realize we are one—one body, one big breathing organ, one endless sigh, one celebration, one dead body, one beating heart—and so how does art translate this?

How do we perpetually live in and reevaluate “Trump’s America” (I say through gritted teeth) and pandemic bodies and genocide reality? How do we manage an endless livestream of terror against the softness of our poetries and the resilience we’re told to endlessly cultivate as artists?

Because certainly my art cannot be divorced from my grief and my exhaustion—from our grief and our exhaustion? And certainly, I cannot write when protective anhedonia sings its songs of total futility. I cannot write with my eyes closed, but I cannot write with my eyes open.

Maybe I get less soft? Maybe I just fucking fall apart more often? Maybe we sit in the limbo and feel the half-feelings and the no-feelings that mask the real feelings. I choose to believe that even the voidstate knows it is temporary; otherwise it wouldn’t be a void. It wouldn’t have a name.

Eventually the body wakes up. Right? Right? We’re rebooting. We just need a holy minute.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem The Uses of Sorrow. I can’t help but think of the inertia as a container, a strange engine maybe. A horse waiting at the water’s edge before bolting down the shoreline.

Lisa Marie Basile, Summer of anhedonia

I do with courage what I do with grief.
Swipe left. Keep scrolling.
Shush the voices in my ears.
How much of both do I need
to walk up to the image
in the mirror?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Remember

Coming from the US to France: out of the frying pan, into the fire.  Heat wave – canicule, in French – refers to dog days, which even Homer wrote about in The Iliad: 

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.

The landscape is tinder-dry; pine needles are so emaciated, thin, dropping their long sharp nails to soften paths.  Rings of fires rage now along the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean whistles through its teeth, biding its time. France is facing its fourth canicule. 

You could say that the image of France as a place of alluring summer is done.  (In domino effect, myths of the US is done, Israel is done.)  But France is stubborn.  A town like Aix-en-Provence will get sultry and suffocating. But under the classically elegant platane trees, nothing could look quite so French as those shaded, effortless drinkers. Aix’s golden-hued limestone buildings are centuries old; the cool blue shutters on their windows older than the ages of most friends added together, and taller than four standing on each other’s shoulders.  What are people doing? Eating, drinking and talking.  Eternal stuff. 

Jill Pearlman, Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. The object today is just to put words on the page, thoughts into my brain, and to write.

today’s light breeze
I remember
hearing her laughter

Ann E. Michael, Endeavoring

I just had tea with the lovely poet, person, and letterpress publisher Emily Hancock of St. Brigid Press. She’s planning an ecopoetry event at Stone Soup Books in Waynesboro, Virginia on September 13th, and I’ll be part of it, with Jeanne Larsen, Sarah Ann Winn, and, we hope, a relative of Karenne Wood to discuss that poet’s work. We batted around possible panel questions as well as talking about midlife, meditation, ADHD, children, and fur babies. Two red threads were the topics of attention and connection: how writing and reading as practices help us attend to the human and the more-than-human worlds, as well as forging unlikely but restorative connections among them.

Connection is my “Flood subject,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase (hers was immortality). Of my books of traditional poetry scholarship, one focuses on enclosure, the other voice–communication, that is, and the various twisty, indirect, yet resonant ways poems speak or perform silence. Talking about poems in classrooms and criticism has been my livelihood. I love it; my introversion somehow yields, or even becomes an asset, when I’m part of a group passing around, analyzing, and admiring a “machine made of words” (that’s W.C. Williams). But poetry as communication? As I’ve written elsewhere, a poem makes a lousy telephone. The signal is just too delayed and beset by noise. The strongest poems convey urgency, yet if you have a message that’s urgent in the usual sense–“Help, my car broke down!” or even “I love you, please move in with me”–you should probably choose another linguistic medium to make sure it gets through.

Yet I receive poems as communication all the time and am wildly grateful for the mind-to-mind, long-distance, time-machine-style intimacy they enable. I often write, too, as a way to imagine perspectives alien to mine, how a tree might think, or a mountain, or a god. That’s not to claim I get it right, ever. But there’s value in the attempt.

Lesley Wheeler, Poetic circuitry

There’s a part of me that is soft and creative and there’s a part of me that is a work bitch, and I like both parts. I like the design element, the creativity, the build up, the community. I like knowing what is going to happen and when. I like the feeling of hitting goals, making a really good job of it. I like noodling away on Canva; pulling a vibe together for a poster. I like the research, the layering of knowledge into a teachable subject.

But the flip side of that is that everything is then down to me. I wear all the hats. ALL THE HATS: social media, marketing, promotion, design, IT. It means that to run a big course there needs to be a design strategy, a promotion strategy. I need to be online a lot, I need to be pushing a lot and investing in promotional aids to make sure I can reach as many people as I can. All of this, of course, is unpaid work, until the course meets its predetermined number of sign ups that ensures all costs are covered – the platforms I need to use, any paid help with tech stuff, promotion costs, my time, facilitator time, all that sort of stuff. I will run a course if the basics are met and my time is covered and everyone is paid. But I can’t run a course if I come out in the negative.

I am a writer, but I’m also a business. To cancel a course is to strategise. But also, I’m a person with feelings and to cancel anything that I’ve placed in the public eye so prominently is embarrassing. I can feel the gaze of people on me, especially people who think I shouldn’t be where I am. I used to know these people in real life, but I think they exist only in my head now. These nay sayers who creep around the edges of my own self doubt exist in a terrible review I once got (I will write to you about this one day), a snarky Facebook message I once received (seems like anyone can call themselves a writer these days) a few folk who were not brave enough to chase this for themselves and choose to sit idly in the wings with their dreams at their feet waiting for me to fall, as if it would prove to them that they were right not to try.

Look at this, I’m giving myself a pep talk automatically. Pat on the back for Wend.

Because that’s what it is to keep going, isn’t it. You might call it thick skin, but it isn’t, it’s about strategy. 

Wendy Pratt, I hope you are failing well

Occasionally I’m oddly undone by a casual comment. A month ago I ran into an old colleague, someone to whom I feel warmly and always enjoy seeing her. But she said two innocuous things that left my brain whirring around and my pie hole flappin soundlessly. She said, “You look good.” Comments about my looks always throw me. What do I say? I don’t really pay much attention to my looks, don’t think about them much. I mean, I try to look presentable. But beyond that I’m not always sure what I look like. What does “good” mean in the context of an aging chick who glances in the mirror and figures good enough? And do I say, “So do you” right away, or does that seem too…I don’t know…insincere or transactional. So I smiled brightly, I think, and said something like, “Oh.” Then she said, again, perfectly inoccuously and in that way of idle small talk, “Busy summer?” It threw me into this thoughtswirl of, oh yes, I guess it is summer, but it’s really only just started, and it’s not my favorite season so I pretty much just wait for it to be over, and I just got back from a trip so do I tell her that or was that really “spring” not summer and so doesn’t really answer her question and anyway am I going to have a busy summer? do I actually have anything planned… At which point I figured my silence was very awkward so I think I said something like, “Oh…” And then we had to part to find our seats at the performance at which we had run into each other, me feeling like an idiot and her probably wondering what had happened to me. All this to say that the quotidian can seem bizarre, thoughts can go spurting off like a just-burst balloon around the room, and the brain is a funny thing of words, sometimes. Which I guess is why I’m a writer. I love this poem by Victoria Chang for its wrestling with all kinds of little things and big. 

Marilyn McCabe, to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What

High summer in Herefordshire, and the land is holding its breath. The verges have gone lion-coloured, the fields were cut early and no aftermath has followed, the clay in the gate-gaps has opened into crazy-paving, and the Wye is running so low that it has started to show its bones — gravel shoals where there is usually a river. Eight areas of England are now officially in “prolonged dry weather”, the polite phrase for the stage before drought, and central England is in its longest run of dry days since 1995. It is a hard season to love and an extraordinary one to look at — because a dry year takes things away from the land, and everything it takes away discloses something. All three of this week’s finds know that.

1. A poem to enjoy — Alice Oswald, “Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-up River” — Oswald took as her starting point a small Roman carving of a water nymph found in Gloucestershire, and set her the impossible task the title announces: to summon a river — the little Dunt — out of dry limestone. The poem proceeds by failure; again and again the nymph tries and the instruction comes back to try again, and the river arrives, when it arrives at all, as barely a trickle in a ditch. It won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2007, and it reads this month like reportage.

Adam Cairns, Three by one

1. Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and was tempted by Satan. Paradise Regained is John Milton’s re-telling of those temptations, with expansions and inventions. In Milton’s version, Jesus is openly unmoved by the temptations, he is absolutely immune: fitting, theologically, but it makes Paradise Regained a dramatic poem with very little drama. The original, in the Gospel of Luke, is short, curt, more mysterious and more interesting.

2. Two moments do draw attention. First, in Book III, after several failures, Satan turns to praise, attempting an indirect temptation to worldly glory:

I see thou know’st what is of use to know,
What best to say canst say, to do canst do;
Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words
To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart
Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.

Equipped with such goodness, why does Jesus not go and exercise it?

These godlike virtues wherefore dost thou hide?
Affecting private life, or more obscure
In savage wilderness, wherefore deprive
All earth her wonder at thy acts, thyself
The fame and glory…

Jesus’s reply is surprising, for its dim view of those he’s tasked to save:

For what is glory, but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar….

Such misanthropy! Where is man made in God’s image? Where is man made a little lower than the angels?

Brad Skow, Paradise Regained Read Blind

Angels have been flitting in and out of [Philip] Gross’s verse from the beginning, often imagined as the most ordinary things: dust in the poem of that name from the 1991 collection The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber & Faber); a stone gargoyle tries to become an angel in ‘Gargangel’ (from The Wasting Game, Bloodaxe, 1998); even water as it passes through a sluice forms momentary angel wings in the striking first poem (‘Sluice Angel’) of The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009).

The tall shut doors of the hall
of the world at which the weight of water,
of incipience, does not need to knock:
feel it there like a shudder
of difference, the engine of change.
Now, almost soundless, hinges shift.
With a gradual calibrated rip
like a concord of lathes, with a crypt smell,
two green-grey-brown stiffening blades
of water fold in. They curve, feathering
themselves in free fall: wings
flexed, shuddering, not to soar [. . . ]

Angels imply religion of course, though not any particular one, and that too is typical. Gross’s poetry has been somewhat religious in orientation for a long time, though markedly uncertain; monotheistic in flavour but not really Christian (I can’t recall a single mention of Christ); God always far-off, hard to contact, and not necessarily attentive. If there is revelation to be found, we sense that it is in the everyday and — ironically, for a poet — as much in silence as in speech. (I think, though I’m not sure, that Gross is a Quaker — at least, I noticed years ago that his books were always stocked by the Society of Friends bookshop on the Euston Road — and if so this is no doubt relevant to the importance of silence in his poetry.)

The verse sequence to which the 2022 title alludes, ‘Thirteen Angels’, comes at the end of the book. Its thirteen poems recall Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, but it is headed by a quotation from D. H. Lawrence, a short poem called in the original ‘Song of a Man’ (though that rather aggrandising title is not used here):

What is the knocking
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
Is it someone come to do us harm?
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

This has a quasi-scriptural feel. Lawrence is remembering or half-remembering various different bits of the Bible, including, probably, Luke 11:5-8, a parable about knocking at a friend’s door at midnight to borrow three loaves of bread for an unexpected guest; the calling of Samuel in the night (1 Samuel 3); and the three strangers to whom Abraham offers hospitality in Genesis 18, who turn out to be angels. The way in which Gross uses a quotation of Lawrence’s sub-scriptural fragment to place himself at a further remove from formal religious authority feels representative of his attitude as a whole – although always several uncertain removes away from any specific creed, this is for all that religious poetry of a kind.

The thirteen angels of the sequence are all evocatively vague, both impossible to grasp and touchingly routine – described as breath, ‘A Glassy Thing’, a ‘kind of Music’; ‘flow’; even ‘Inconsistency’ and ‘Emptiness’; they appear ‘at the interfaces [. . .] between us, each and each other / and each and the tumult of things’. One ‘clears its throat / like white noise, like a waterfall, like wind’ (‘Who’d Have Thought’). The thirteenth angel is ‘not so much the uninvited / at the christening as the one / there are no words for in the language’; there’s a suggestion that this angel is the recording angel (‘In fifty years, too late / for you, this will all seem so clear; / the thirteenth angel will have written the page // on which your name’); in the final line of the collection, it is ‘the world itself’. The typical movement of many of Gross’s poem, for which these quotidian angels are a kind of metaphor, is from the precisely observed everyday-made-strange – whether from the natural or domestic world – to a religious sensibility, questions about our place not so much in society or the family but in the universe.

Victoria Moul, One of the lesser order of recording angels

I miss the fifth demon most.
I lost them, and then I lost
him, and now I have only the tomb
of my empty mind.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poems for the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene

Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Rupert Brooke, to name three poets whose poems have appeared in this space, as well as Charles Sorley, Julian Grenfell, and Isaac Rosenberg, have in common the fact that they were English poets born sometime between 1875 and 1895 — and they all died between 1915 and 1918, mostly on the French battlefields of World War I. Brooke is a dropped stitch in this pattern, having died in Greece, of blood poisoning from an insect bite, and not in battle.

Still, he belongs, one of the lost World War I poets, a tragic club whose fame and pathos lie chiefly in its members’ unrealized potential. But in their truncated lifetimes, some of them were very good poets. Edward Thomas, for example, achieved a quiet greatness in his “Adlestrop,” possibly the most famous war poem to take peace as its subject. Of many others we might say that a golden age of English poetry lay dead in the trenches. Or it might not. We’ll never know how good they would have been.

But then there’s the other club of war poets: the ones who made it out alive. That list is longer than one might think. It includes the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who came home but left his sanity in the trodden French mud. It includes Robert Graves, who went on to write the series of “I, Claudius” novels. It includes Edmund Blunden, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a post currently held by the American poet A.E. Stallings). It includes the French poet Joseph Seguin, whose war-themed haiku, written under the name Julien Vocance, we featured just last week in Alfred Nicol’s excellent translations. And it includes Siegfried Sassoon, whose 1919 poem “Idyll” appears here today.

This poem, written in the first year after the cessation of horrors, reads like a sigh of relief. In six rhymed pentameter couplets, it sketches a scene of utter peace, Edenic in the unrealized light of a summer morning, before reaching its reason for being. Its speaker, stepping into this garden to await a lover, does so in the awareness that his life and future have been handed back to him.

This landscape signals, for him, in the wake of the cacophony of battle and the utter destruction of beauty that it wreaks, a restoration of order and quietness. In this landscape to which he has returned whole, he is reborn, brought back from death, alive to watch the inchoate day sharpen into focus and become what it will become. And if what that day became, for Sassoon the poet, was never quite the glorious dream our imaginations grant the fallen, still it’s something to have lived to see that day.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Idyll

Dividing Rivers, by Ivy Schweitzer:

When I vow never to watch the play again
where loving to death is the only resistance,
they turn their backs,
mount their seats and
ride off—together.

The play in question in this poem, “Death in Stratford,” is Shakespeare’s Othello, which I haven’t read in many, many years. The poem’s occasion is a meeting between Schweitzer’s speaker and the actors who play Othello and Desdemona in a production that the speaker just saw. The speaker tells us she’d forgotten that Othello actually kills Desdemona twice, once by smothering, when he “swear[s] he will love her/‘after,” and the second time by strangling her “with her own sheets,/forgiveness staining her lips.” When the speaker asks the actors how they “act it over and over”—Schweitzer relies on the verb “croak” to render how the question is asked, allowing us to decide precisely what emotion is behind it—the woman who plays Desdemona, whom we know is white because we know the play and not because the poem mentions race at all, explains that they get their motivation from the need to make sure that the audience “get[s] it:”

“[T]hey are both victims of white patriarchy
but resist it
by loving, dying, Othello killing her and them himself out of a world
they cannot survive in—”

That statement elicits the vow I quoted above which also how the poem ends, but the tension between what the vow implies—that the speaker is committing herself to a search for a form of resistance rooted in a life-affirming love—and the way in which the actors turn their backs on that implication is in many ways the tension that animates Dividing Rivers as a whole. The book begins with poems that confront the antisemitism Schweitzer has experienced, allowing that confrontation to allude to the history of Jewish oppression, and then moves into poems that explore the relationship between Jewishness and the whiteness into which Jews who can pass as white have been allowed. The poems that dominate in the third of the book’s three sections explore Schweitzer’s not-always-successful but always contingent attempts to move back and forth across the “dividing river” that gives the book its title. That crossing, the willingness to attempt it, to take responsibility for the attempt, and to be held accountable for it is where this book locates its moral center, the life-affirming resistance I wrote about above.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #57

Across the language of [Kevin] Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive […]

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

rob mclennan, Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

Wearing the odd cycle-clip and drinking a pint of beer or two doesn’t stop you from writing great poetry […] I hereby proclaim Larkin’s “Love Songs in Age” as the century’s greatest poem.

These are the words of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, writing to the Guardian newspaper in October 1991. They were reported in a Guardian profile of the Labour politician earlier this month, which noted that he sent the letter while living at home in Warrington after finishing his degree in English Literature at Cambridge.

You don’t get to be Prime Minister without being a political creature from an early age. Soon, Burnham was living in London, working as a Labour parliamentary assistant in the run-up to Tony Blair’s 1997 general election victory, and then as a special adviser to culture secretary, Chris Smith, in 1998 — which presumably means he was in the meetings where Andrew Motion (Larkin’s official biographer) emerged as the New Labour choice for Poet Laureate after the death of Ted Hughes.

Burnham’s fan letter is written with the light good humour favoured by newspaper letters pages (“wearing the odd cycle-clip” nods to Larkin’s ironic self-portrait in “Church Going”: “Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”). But it’s not an unpolitical document. In the days before social media, writing a letter to a newspaper was one of the best ways to make your opinions a matter of public record. Burnham’s successful strategy to become Prime Minister — by first becoming the down-to-earth, music-loving Mayor of Greater Manchester — has been a long game of affirming popular opinions. It might seem a stretch to say that this down-to-earth, poetry-loving letter represents his first step on the road to power. But bear with me as we browse the Guardian in 1991 to establish exactly what it meant to tell the readers of Britain’s only left-wing broadsheet newspaper that you were a Larkin fan — because it turns out that it almost literally put you on the same page as the Labour leadership.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, “Little Englandism of the Left”

A walk in Cardiff “On the esplanade” prompts the poem’s speaker to observe a row of Edwardian villas once inhabited by people with money after working up to managerial level,

and like many who come into money
I imagine a new life

amongst my cohort of coined bohemians
secure academics

no thought of history
I’m too dazzled by possibility

that one day
I shall own such a property

paint my front door red
then close it tightly, ‘gainst the world outside

Here the poem’s speaker imagines his neighbours would be like him, bohemian and academic rather than bland managerial classes keeping up appearances. The poem’s speaker sets up a contradiction: he wants to paint the door a colour that stands out and marks his house as his but also wants to shut it against the world. It’s his private retreat where he doesn’t have to share.

“Memento Mori” is a thoughtful, crafted series of poems that look at how small moments in navigating the world can provoke memories, some welcome some not so welcome, that enhance understanding of relationships with others and the world at large. The moments of wry humour and self-deprecation lift this from nostalgia and self-focus into poem which challenge and question what makes us.

Emma Lee, “Memento Mori” Gareth Writer-Davies (Yaffle Press) – book review

Elizabeth Osmond is a neonatal consultant and a poet who has twice won prizes in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her work has been published in The Aftershock Review, The Alchemy Spoon, Dust Poetry, Atrium, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Craft of Care Anthology (Black Pear 2026).

Beth kindly sent me a review copy of Hatchery, but it had already been on my radar since she launched it. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her read at several online open mics, and already knew her to be a poet of great skill and sensitivity. As a medic, she has access to a rich vein of language that in other hands may be overly dry or technical, but Beth is able to draw the poetic out of it. She has a keen eye for the curios and the artefacts of medical history, turning them over for us in her poems so we can see them in all their strangeness. However, these aren’t simply presented for curiosity’s sake, but to highlight the imaginative leaps that have been necessary to even slightly increase the survival rates of very premature babies. Here is the Kinderbrutanstalt, the child hatchery, with its jars of feathers, its early incubators, and Ward Rounds with Queen Victoria.

This is one of my favourite poems in the collection, bringing Queen Victoria onto a modern day neonatal unit, her own experiences as a mother in contrast with those of today, yet connected through some ghostly residue of feeling that must transcend eras and technologies;

“ … She delivered Leopold after the blessed chloroform / enclosed in his nursery / playmates forbidden / lest he fall and bruise”

Present in all these poems is a prevailing sense of the dignity and humanity with which Beth treats her subjects. She handles field observations with real care and feeling. Although poetry frequently moves me, it rarely makes me physically well up in the way some of these poems do. When she writes “Here you are, my impatient little friend” in I wish I could write you a prescription for time, I find in this moment such care and tenderness, and it is the perfect pivot to end a poem about trying to negotiate more time for a baby who is already on the way. You get the impression that these conversations are ones Beth the consultant and her colleagues are always having, as they move about the ward, perhaps as much to reassure themselves as the tiny lives in their care. In Conversation, her “heart is wanting to be fearless / but it is a colander with little holes / through which doubt seeps in”. To feel this very human doubt and vulnerability and daily find a way to move past this is a special thing.

Victoria Spires, Hatchery

Homer Haunted is a swift, lively, and informative book about the way English poets have translated Homer. It begins with George Chapman and ends with three living writers. Henry Power, an English professor at Exeter, is especially compelling about Alexander Pope and Christopher Logue, two great Homer translators. Indeed, I loved how much this book loves Pope, whose phenomenal accomplishments and influence on later poets are as inescapable as they ought to be. Anyone who wishes to understand how Homer has been understood by the English poets will learn from and enjoy this book.

There are wonderful accounts of writers like Matthew Arnold and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Power is a keen explicator of Logue’s techniques not just of “imagism” but of his use of camera language, quotations from popular culture, instructions, the addition of words like “consider” and “imagine” to Homeric images. He quotes very nicely, and has a knack for telling a story without letting the book get dragged under by the modern impulse for all narrative non-fiction to become a chain of anecdotes that cannot bear the weight of their conclusions.

The most surprising part of this book, for me, was discovering the sheer weird variety of translations undertaken by Victorians, who produced: an Anglo-Saxon-style Homer, one in Spenserian stanzas, one as an Icelandic saga, and a version that was cast in the language of the King James Bible.

Henry Oliver, Homer Haunted, by Henry Power

My previous post on the subject of bad poetry prompted some thoughtful responses, and I felt my own responses to these were worth gathering in a follow-up essay. So I drafted one – back at the end of March, in fact, on a train to Southampton. Since then I’ve only had time to think on it in short gasps, but that process has, oddly enough, resulted in much more of a complete thesis than I’d originally envisaged – more cheery too, if you’ll bear with me till the end.

I said previously that bad poems need to be invented, and to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the poetry critic to have a function. But there’s another, simpler reason why bad poetry must be willed into existence. Suppose for a moment that every published poem – or the vast majority of them – were unquestionably skilfully written, greatly rewarding reader attention. There would still be far, far too many of them for any one person to attend to. We would need to come up with a way of deciding which poems to spend our limited time investigating.

That need, really, is the root of literary taste. Whatever system or standard we put into place, it operates as a means of dismissing from our mind much that exists – or, at least, sending it to the very periphery of conscience – so that we can focus on a more manageable portion. And since it’s easier to dismiss something if we come up with reasons to regard it as ‘bad’, or nurture an ingrained distaste for it, this is what we do. […]

I should add that literary taste also exists, like many things, for the purpose of forming social bonds. To put it crudely: convincing yourself you find a certain kind of poem to be very fine and another sort very drab is sometimes a precondition of being accepted within certain social circles. I will address this as I go on — partly because I think it bears repeating that most of those who claim to be solely interested in ‘the quality of the poem itself’ are not being honest with themselves.

But I’m mostly concerned with the core function of taste and the role criticism has to play in it. We need taste to direct us to the poems that are of most use in enriching and improving our lives. If we do not cultivate taste of some kind, then we don’t know where to start or how to sort through the mass of poetry available, and so can hardly benefit from the artform at all — which is, in fact, the position of those millions who never read or think about it.

Jon Stone, ESSAY: What is a bad poem exactly? (Part 2)

The idea that poetry must rhyme is not unusual. In fact views about what is and isn’t poetry abound not just amongst non-poets but amongst poets too. The poetry world has its fair share of people who will tell you that what you have written isn’t proper poetry, or if it does qualify, that it is somehow unworthy. Fans of formal structure may look down their noses at those who favour free verse. Those who write in blank verse have been known to sneer at rhyme enthusiasts, who are divided between those who see no harm in using a rhyming dictionary, and those who would never admit to stooping so low as to use one, even though they have rhymezone bookmarked on their browsers. People who write from prompts run the risk of being derided for lacking sufficient imagination to create ideas of their own. People who announce that they wrote a piece at a workshop are sniggered at in some quarters by poets who proclaim that nothing of quality can be produced without being closeted within the silent confines of a writing den. Others swear that you should never draft in anything other than pencil in a physical notebook, scowl at those who draft on a computer and have no time at all for those who use their phones, whilst many of those who swear by their computers and phones are prone to think of the notebook and pencil brigade as primitive poets stuck in the past.

Of course, sensible poets such as you and I know that a good poem is a good poem whatever form it takes and whatever the circumstances of its creation. It is what the piece says that counts, and if it says something that makes a connection with originality and style, then, at least in my book, it is a good poem.

It is my heartfelt belief that the vast majority of human beings on this planet are capable of writing good poetry, but unfortunately very few do. I believe that the reason for this has a lot to do with what people perceive good poetry to be. Anyone who feels that good poetry has to follow a set of rules around rhyme, structure, form, syntax etc is denying themselves the possibility of stumbling upon different ways of working and expressing themselves.

I think that we are all capable of writing good poetry because we all have a unique perspective on the world. We all have a different ideas and experiences, different associations in our minds, different perspectives and different personalities. Maybe the fact that we all have different DNA plays a part too. Maybe all of these things add up to some sort of poetic DNA which can leave its fingerprint on the things that we write. By trying to stick to some perceived rules of poetry for no better reason than we believe that poetry has to be dome in a certain way, we are distorting that fingerprint, and allowing less of our poetic DNA to shine through.

This is why AI produced poetry is ultimately unsatisfying. AI poetry is completely constructed of rules. By definition it can never be present a unique human perspective as every perspective, methodology and idea within it has to come from databases and sorted mathematically from a list of probabilities. Only a human can be surprising, original, and fabulous.

Mike O’Brien, Forget the Rules of Poetry

Everywhere I walk,
it seems there’s a thread I can pull on, attached
to a picture hiding in plain sight. I know I want
to be addressed, to feel some kind of touch
which I might find reassuring. But the dark,
glossy sheen of bird feathers, the speckled
rind on fruit and the sugar beginning to foam
out of its pores can be presence enough. Not
certainty, just the briefest mark of grounding.

Luisa A. Igloria, Making Meaning

— I picked up Derek Beaulieu’s book from the library: Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century. And it’s for poets, but anyone creating art will find it useful. As most of my readers here are non-Canadians, Derek Beaulieu is sort of our version of Austin Kleon, for context. He’s weirder, edgier, and probably wears a tuque more often, than his American counterpart. He tells Canadian artists to stop comparing ourselves to American ones. “Cut the fantasies and the bullshit: the grass isn’t greener elsewhere. The only way forward is through cultural action, working together, and creating artwork that imagines and advocates for a bigger, weirder future, no matter what side of the boarder you find yourself on.”

— “Imagine a book,” says Beaulieu, “you don’t know you want to read. Write to discover that book, to expand your idea of what is possible and what you can imagine yourself writing”

— He also reminded me of this from Virginia Woolf: “What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

— Which then reminded me of my favourite line from Phyllis Webb, “The proper response to a poem is another poem.” This is not in the Beaulieu book (unless I missed it) but could be. Perhaps his next. Anyway, such a good book for new writers and old crotchety ones such as meself.

Shawna Lemay, The Axe, My Writing Into the Desk Era, and Other Bouquets

The poem in the video below was inspired by Langston Hughes’ Island. It was developed by running it thorugh a series of Google Translate operations and also an N+7 operation. Then editing. I think this is an example computer-aided composition without using AI (though I suspect—OK, I know—there is AI in Google Translate.) There is a difference between LLM-using generative AI and computer-assisted work. For me, the process “makes things strange” and offers up some textual materials to explore, all of which is infused with the aura of the original. How I respond to the materials and the aura is part of my poetic process. For me, these aura-filled texts often confound and inspire and my work as a poet is to someone work with the material to arrive at some genuine “poesis” —the sense that the text is more than the sum of its parts. I don’t know that it is that much different than writing after being inspired by a poet or poetic tradition, other than generating some related material to respond to. I should say that the poem that I settled on it very traditional and doesn’t confront the norms of conventional poetry except in its mode of composition. I’ve been using computer-aided operations since the 80s, though definitely not exclusively. I don’t see this as much different than rolling up one’s sleeves and addressing the affordances of a sonnet or villanelle or Frank O’Haraian “It’s 12:15 and this and then that” convention.

Gary Barwin, You Know Whose Mouth This Is: AI, not-AI, sincerity and invention.

The word is
one-room apartment reef
or mingling octopuses,
licking salt from punctuation
one goosebump at a time.

On land, they call it
love.

Kati Mohr, Even this …

Ten years ago I read my long, narrative poem My Name is Swan at a literary festival. It was a curated evening around the theme of ‘The City’. I appeared halfway up (or halfway down) the programme along with a number of well established and highly regarded authors whose work I greatly admired. I was pretty chuffed to have such a billing as a relatively obscure artist among such prestigious writers. I was, in the contemporary vernacular, ‘a minor poet’. I don’t mind being a minor poet, I prefer to sing in minor keys not in a major ones. Most good art is made in minor keys. Hits are written in major keys because they emotionally resonate more immediately. The songs that stay with us though contain shadows, minor chords, modal turns, notes of regret. What makes a song endure is not happiness but happiness corrupted by the knowledge of loss.

None of the other authors came to my reading. They were not disinterested or deliberately shunning me, much as the voices in my head would like to tell me. No, they were simply elsewhere, doing what authors are supposed to do, trying to earn a living from their work. They were meeting their public, standing behind their merchandise stalls, selling their books. I didn’t have a book. I didn’t have anything to sell. I had a poem. And while I read it, it was alive and after I’d finished it went to the place that poems go, where the wind lives, where midnight sighs arrive, where love hides.

The modern book, as we know it, printed with bound pages, has only been with us for around five hundred years. Writing itself emerged around five thousand years ago but the origins of poetry are ancient, perhaps stretching back into pre-history. 50,000 years ago humans were almost certainly using rhythm and repetition, chanting and song and formulaic language came into existence long before any of it was written down. The availability of cheaper paper made from wood pulp and the advent of industrial printing, meant that by the 1800s the book had become a mass-market object. With the arrival of the 20th century paperback, books were ubiquitous. The international best seller was upon us.

The introduction of the book meant we no longer needed to listen to our tribal elders, to hear their stories. We lost, perhaps a little of the ability to even listen to each other. Everything was written down for us, to be studied or stacked on high shelves, hidden away in academy libraries. Books became power. A new kind of truth had arrived. One that was absolute because, as you know, if it’s in a book then, well, it must be true.

I left the authors with their stalls, with their sales, with their transactions and I took my poem home wondering where I might go with it next. A book didn’t feel like the right fit for My Name is Swan somehow. It was a poem that needed to feel the wind in its feathers, have air under its wings, it needed an adventure. It needed to live. Back then I believed books were where poems went to die. Don’t get me wrong. I love books. If you’ve written one I might even have it on my shelves. If I haven’t then send me copy because honestly I do really love books. I just felt that this poem, and the other long form works that I’d made, had a life beyond the page.

Jan Noble, N°74 Books are where poems go to die

I recently joined poet and podcast host Nathan Hassall on The Poetry Vessel, a multimedia poetry project he creates with his wife, Rachael. Their show blends poetry, conversation, and visual interpretation, creating a space where language becomes a shared exploration. It was a joy to be a guest and talk about submission strategies, poetry communities, creative advocacy, and the work we do to support poets.

Nathan and I talk about the origins of my work, the role of literary citizenship, and how poets can navigate the publishing world with intention. We also explore the imaginative engine behind poetry — the alter egos we write through, the personas that surface on the page, and how imagination becomes a tool for both discovery and protection.

I read a poem from my collection A Godless Ascends, which opened up a conversation about writing through personal history, mythic framing, and the emotional architecture of a poem. Nathan’s questions invite a kind of reflection that feels both intimate and expansive, and the episode captures that dynamic beautifully.

Trish Hopkinson, How I Got My Poetry Published in 2026 (ft. Trish Hopkinson) + submission call via The Poetry Vessel

He cautions himself against memories
their cheat, their fumbling feet moving
across the arc of time.

Still.

The soft twilights,
the bob white whistling,
the hundred ways
the sun would lift itself
over the ridge.

Rebecca Cook, Upon Returning to the Father’s House

I have two pieces of poetry news to share, both involving poems finding their way back into the world.

First, my collection Rotura is included in Black Lawrence Press’s Sealey Challenge sale. Thirty-one full-length poetry collections are currently available for $12 each through the Black Lawrence Press sale page.

Published in 2022, Rotura moves through questions of family, longing, language, borders, and the different forms rupture can take within a life. For anyone curious about the book, three poems from the collection (“Certain Rivers,” “Conditioning (City Study),” and “Four Dirges”) can be read together at Poetry Is Currency.

*

I’m also glad to share the publication of Summer, Still, a new anthology from Lily Poetry Review featuring poetry and prose by faculty and alumni of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. The anthology celebrates the program’s twentieth anniversary and the community of writers that has gathered around it over the years.

My poem “Night Matter” is included in the anthology. The poem considers writing as an act of persistence: what it means to continue making words when light is scarce and the night around us feels both material and immense. It first appeared as part of my January 2018 feature at A Dozen Nothing, where you can read “Night Matter” online.

There is something meaningful to me about these two announcements arriving together. One points back toward a collection and the poems gathered within it; the other allows an earlier poem to enter a new gathering, this time alongside the work of writers connected through Solstice.

I’m grateful for both occasions, for the continued life of these poems, and for anyone who spends time with them.

José Angel Araguz, Two Poetry Notes: Rotura and Summer, Still

I am not a summer girl—I haven’t been sleeping well with the heat (up to 95 degrees this week) and the wildfire smoke that lingered a few days—and lack of sleep has taken a toll on my brain and body. Maybe I’ve felt a little depression and anxiety, more than usual.

I had some good poetry news this week (which I can’t share yet) and also some book rejections from places that had made it a finalist the last time they saw the same manuscript which makes me worry I shouldn’t send it out anymore (when is it time to shelve something? I’ve been messing with this MS for over five years!)

I find myself looking forward to fall already—cooler temperatures, pumpkin and apples, the sunsets happening a little earlier, the light a little more golden. My mood feels more stable in fall and my productivity as a writer definitely goes up. Is this true for you as well? I am wishing you all good sleep and no anxiety in this world that continually seems to ratchet up—at least in America—reasons to have so much anxiety.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Safety in Seattle, Is it Fall Yet, Lack of Sleep, and Poetry Ups and Downs

The natural world always strikes a note of wonder in me, whether it is the sight of a polar bear ambling across the pack ice or the expressive face of a walrus. Or the universe of lichens and tiny flowers on the tundra. Or the chevrons of feathers on the back of an eagle.

Perhaps this is why I rely too much on the natural world for the imagery in my poems. It is all around me, such a rich and never-ending catalog of weirdness and beauty. So I forget that there are other ways to make meaning, so many other options in the world to feed my poems. Machines, small and large. Music. Films. Pop culture, in general. Science. Medicine. Everyday objects. Abstractions. Speculations. Conversations. (The list could go on, but you get the idea.)

Maybe this is also why I don’t often write about my travel experiences, though peple always say, “Oh, I’ll bet you’re going to write a lot of poems about this!” First, capturing the wonder feels like an insurmountable task. But also, I realize that it could seem like I am flaunting experiences I know I am privileged and lucky to have. (I even second-guessed writing about them in this post…). So I’ve tried to turn my wonder onto things I have not experienced.

To that point, a few things I have researched lately in the service of a draft:

• the vastness of space /features of the planets/elements of black holes
• the Marianas Trench
• the whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean
• how a television works (I honestly still think magic is the easiest answer)

I am trying to broaden my internal horizons, fill up my image bank. Not to shut out the natural world, but to have a different mirror to hold beside it, to juxtapose other pieces of life with it to make the page come alive.

Some collections I’ve read that do this well:

Soft Science and The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On by Frannie Choi

Karaoke at the End of World by Genevieve DeGuzman (Jackleg Press)

Who Will Cradle Your Head? by Jared Beloff (ELJ Editions)

Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell (Texas Review Press)

Yeet! by jason b crawford (Omnidawn/University of Chicago Press)

These collections all imagine worlds where nature is in concert with so many other things—cryptids, robots, apocalypse, hell and religion, Afro-futurism. They are ambitious and collections that have been teaching me some things about leaning into any and all of the world available to me, real or imagined. 

Donna Vorreyer, Hello, It’s Me…

I floated on my back,
the pool water muffling
all their hells.
I breathed in a forest
and it dried in my hair.

Instead of sun,
I saw mosaic.
Instead of
the machinery
of clouds,
smoke.

Sarah Lada, Smoke Screen

I went to a residential course at Ty Newydd many years ago and it changed my life. The kindness of the tutors – not the kindness that puffs you up and says you are a genius, but the kindness of someone telling you to keep on writing, that what you are doing matters. And it was the setting with the library and the strange acoustic that makes it feel sometimes as if someone is whispering in your ear, and the garden that stretches down to the sea, and the beautiful food. And for me it was the people on the course that I met as well – poets I’m still friends with all these years later.

Every time I teach a residential course and I arrive and meet the participants for the first time, I remember what I felt like. How much it meant to me – how I’d nearly turned my car round and driven home because I was so anxious. How I paid monthly to spread the cost – what a big deal it was for me financially to commit to it. I hope I never forget those things and I always try and bring as much energy and commitment to the teaching as the poets we work with have brought. It’s hard to carve a week out of your life to come and write poetry – harder for some more than others.

The group we worked with this week were wonderful – apparently all of them knew at least one other person in the group so the first night there was little awkwardness – they started chatting without Clare or I having to do anything! They were hugely supportive of each other throughout the week which was really lovely to see.

On Thursday I went for an illegal run – illegal as I’m not really meant to be running at the moment, because of my still dodgy ankle. But I REALLY needed to clear my head and it was so worth it – I found a really beautiful loop through the woods and having left Clare with the energy of Eyore I came back like Tigger, full of bounce again.

Clare and I were our usual quarrelsome selves – here we are on the final night of the course – when we were treated to a reading from everyone of the new work they’d been writing and working on during the week – an evening that was as good as any poetry reading I’ve paid money to see – which indicates the quality of the writers we were working with!

Kim Moore, A week at Moniack Mhor

As we crest the midpoint of summer submissions entering the inbox in consideration for next years series of books, I’ve been thinking a little again about what makes a book stand out in the queue and what gets passed on to the second read pile. I’ve already accepted a handful of things for August into September, and pickings are beautifully lush. I typically have three piles when sorting–the absolute yes, the maybes, and the no-thanks. The last pile is the easiest to send responses immediately. The others I tend to hold onto for a minute as I evaluate how much room I have in the schedule. This year, I do have a little more room (not making the books by hand is more expensive, but does free up time I normally would have spend folding, stapling, and trimming. While I still do all these things for pre-April 2026 titles, everything since is a matter of placing an order in just a few minutes, making the hard part the layout and design instead of the assembly, which can take a little longer with more complicated layouts, but not always. We’ve also been able to open subs up to longer projects and full-length manuscripts. This is especially welcome since many of our chaps before perfect-binding were running about 40 pages and weren’t always easy to trim. 

This spring, I fleshed out a little more guidance on what we’re looking for, including a broad definition of what is “poetry” which can mean prose, essays, vispo, plays, and any variety of hybrid works that tongue the edges of other genres. I love the unclassifiable books most. I also have my biases in terms of loving horror and gothic projects, so we readily welcome those in particular, but tend to choose a wide selection of styles and topics overall. 

But beyond these, one of the chief important things I am looking for is cohesion. Whether its a 100 page book or under 20 pages, tightness in subject matter or theme will always stand out, as will projects that have a narrative spine. So many times when encountering book manuscripts, it feels like a poet just threw everything in with the kitchen sink. But having things that tie and bind and link individual poems and parts together is important. Some intention in which poems are included and how they are arranged.  This is especially true of full-length books, especially first books, which usually tend to assemble from many disparate pieces, even if the poet eventually writes more project-related books down the line. There are a few ways, however, to bring disparate pieces together to make a sound chapbook or book of poems. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part #1

I want extravagance.
Peonies. A five-layer cake.
Drones making dragons
in the sky. Flamenco.
Percussion. Not a band,
a symphony throwing its joy
over the city. A herd
of wild horses. Something,
anything bright & unearned.

Sharon Brogan, Grace

None of this feels instinctual. When we panic, we want to follow our gut. But the non-profit starvation cycle is our own graveyard loop. We cannot just trust our guts; we have to build a strategy so that the work we do moves us in the right direction. We need effort that keeps us on a straight course. Working harder, pushing through the spiral, leads to burnout. What needs to happen—our current focus—is re-aligning the organization with our mission and building a more sustainable foundation.

A couple of days ago, I was talking with someone who thought nonprofit staff shouldn’t be paid much. Often, people who have never worked in community building think that staff can live on squash and passion alone. Those who live in large houses with good cars don’t always have the perspective to understand how we march through crisis, how we face our emergencies, what motivates us to keep flying.

We clowns, acrobats, and artists who build culture live on sand and rice, and find all sorts of destructive ways to pass the time. And together, we build and rebuild. Together, we walk through the fire.

May we find joy in all the destruction and fly well into the sunrise.

Kate Gale, The Graveyard Spiral: On Breaking the Cycle of Emergency

I am descended from smugglers.
I hold the darkness of tunnels inside me;
hushed voices, past midnight, alert my ears.
I am descended from strong-armed men,
the readers of the sea.

I am descended from those who roam.
I hold the restlessness of wild words […]

Sue Finch, HUMANNESS

生命線短き手もて薔薇を剪る　篠原広子

seimeisen mijikaki te mote bara o kiru

a short lifeline
on my palm
I cut roses
                                               Hiroko Shinohara

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 22, 2026)

This week: wildly latticing light, hot jets of horse breath, a ropey ladder down to oblivion, and much more. Enjoy.

There are days when I can’t stand this any more, when I’m not strong or brave enough, when the horror and depravity leave the voices screaming ‘What can I possibly do?’ and the colours in my head are red and orange and black and there are others I can’t identify, that I have never seen before and I don’t know who I’ve ever been or who anyone else is…

And I watch the old film of Bruce Springsteen singing ‘for each unharmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail’ before thousands of East Berliners in 1988 and I think ‘what have I ever done that’s as useful and honourable as that?’ and the voices know the answer and the bodies behind the voices stamp and mock, just as they should.

Bob Mee, THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I CAN’T STAND THIS ANY MORE

o, for an exit that isn’t an ending, dear god. the garden, its slough of orange flowers. the sky, its routine blue. the wildly latticing light. heavy-scented stock, those florid avatars of orgasm. the gorgeous daisy’s gauchely perforated eye.

Fran Lock, AFTER AMY

Many years ago, I drafted a poem that I worked on awhile and considered finished. I sent it out a few places, and then realized it wasn’t ready after all. I shelved it for a long while, then revised it, and I like it better now; but I don’t think I will submit it again. It feels like too personal a poem to me, and here’s why: when I felt more satisfied with it, I showed it to my mother (it’s about her). She was quiet for a fairly long time. Then she looked at me and asked, “How did you know this?”

Well, I’d imagined it. Guessed. But I felt floored that maybe I’d found words to say what she couldn’t say, and that she felt I had it right–her experience, I mean, her feelings. And now that feels important to me, because my mother died just a few days ago.

But this blog is sort of personal, after all, and so I am posting it here as a not-quite-finished, imperfect poem that nonetheless said enough to the person I wrote it about. My audience of one, in this case. Which is enough for me, and rare enough in the art of creative writing; and I really cannot come up with words this week given how I feel about my mom’s death. “Still processing,” as they say. Each of us does that differently, and each grief differs depending upon relationship and circumstances.

My mother’s passing was extremely peaceful, calm, accepting, about as uncomplicated as a death can be. Yet I will be holding onto the experience and my feelings about it for a long time to come.

Ann E. Michael, Departures

The monsoon sky has no answer. It comes back year after year to hear our songs. It brings the sowing season and I select poems to place deep in the ground. What does a poem grow into? What serration will its leaves bear? What poison will colour its fruits? What should a poem-farmer do? And for what? The clouds descend – charcoal grey. Like warnings.

I open a fresh Word document. Book_Four.docx. At the cusp of futility and insanity, there is almost always another new, unnecessary poem.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Writing – But for What?

And this has been a week of light, book-ended with community writing workshops in small Northern towns. From May, I’ve offered free “On the moors” writing workshops, an offer which remains open to any Lancashire or Yorkshire organisation or group of individuals with a venue. It’s part of my ongoing work to increasing understanding of, and connection with, our Northern moors and other peatlands. It’s also part of my personal strategy for surviving the social and political divisions affecting the landscapes I love best. By turning away from that zero-sum game of who belongs and who doesn’t, and focussing instead on place and nature as something we can share a connection with and a responsibility for, by focussing on creative writing and teaching as my activist response, I give myself a bit of agency, a bit of comfort.

Last Friday I took the workshop to Trawden, close to my own homegrounds of Pendle and Walshaw Moor; today I headed to Horwich. In both small towns, creative writing gave expression – from the first minutes – to a love of the moors so deep it brought people to tears. It gave space to the desire not just to laid claim to, or to enjoy, but to protect and care for: place and neighbourhood, each other.

Whether it’s paid or not, I love this work. After the Trawden workshop, I drove home over the moors brimming with happiness. I stopped at Wycoller and to revel in its gateposts and walls, (one of my current niche obsessions) and in the evening, I met Kim, to swim in a high reservoir on Todmorden moor in the evening sun.

Clare Shaw, A sense of belonging

A coastal walk to blow the cobwebs off is always on my list of self-care things to do, and this week’s trip to the seaside did the trick. I like walking in my local town, and I like walking in the forest nearby, but there is a particular joy to walking at the coast that delights me. The fresh air, the sound of the waves and the ever-changing view as the tide comes in or goes out offer the kind of refreshment that reaches mind, body and soul.

My brain felt as though it was crammed full of ideas this week as I set about writing some new anniversary poems. I have always loved my anniversary tea towel which shows me the traditional symbol for each wedding anniversary, and I have enjoyed choosing specific presents over the years for my wife that match these. However it was when I was asked to write a poem for a husband to give to his wife on their Jade anniversary that I became determined to do more anniversary poetry writing. I was flattered to be asked and to be recognised as a poet who could turn their hand to such things and crafted the words carefully. This then got me thinking about using poems as small gifts or for cards for people I knew. They were well received, and I felt myself at the beginnings of a slowly evolving project. I recently had the opportunity to bring the jade poem to a different couple, and then when I was working on a different poem last week I had the idea that it would be super cool to have written a poem for all of the anniversaries. A great idea, but when I slowed down a little I realised this doesn’t exactly tie in with the way I write. I need time and I had to shake off my feeling that I wanted them all done in the next couple of days like a set of Pokémon ready to be collected. And of course there is more to it than preparing the poems. On my website each digital download sits behind a ‘label’ and it was making these labels that sent me into a whirl of believing I sort of knew how to do it, asking Kath to remind me how to do it, doing it successfully and then needing to change a background colour and promptly forgetting how I had done it! All that kept me amused for quite some time and perhaps that puts into context why a walk beside the sea was the perfect treat this week.

Sue Finch, POEMS TO MATCH A TEATOWEL

Even when so much is awful, wonders in our own lives still have a way of blooming like wildflowers, and it’s ever more essential to share them. When I hear about your bumper crop of blueberries, benign biopsy, reconnection with an old friend, new puppy, or whatever enlivens your life it enlarges my joy too.

So here’s my good news. My fourth poetry collection, Universe Marveled Into A Jar, just came out. I can’t believe how lucky I am!

Here’s the book description:

These pages hold praise songs to wonderments diverse as moss, mistakes, memory, even an imaginary donkey. Laura’s poems are wild and tender explorations into many realms of our universe’s marvels.

It is dedicated to women I love with acknowledgements not only to journals and anthologies that published my work but also to my beloved poetry writing group, the 811s, who were instrumental in shaping these poems.

I am fortunate to have this book published by Sheila-Na-Gig, a nonprofit arts organization/poetry journal/small press founded and run by the indefatigable visionary Hayley Mitchell Haugen (who is also an amazing poet). Each step of the process from raw manuscript to finished book has been a testament to Hayley’s patient expertise. She even allowed me to skip the usual back cover blurbs. Instead it features kind words fellow writers have already posted about my poems—with vast gratitude to Kim Langley, C.A. Gunn, Elizabeth H.S. Beasley, and Iesha Jackson.  

Laura Grace Weldon, My New Book Is Here!

I’ve written previously about my sense that haiku and longer poems come from different parts of the brain; how haiku, the best ones, distil the collision of two sensory experiences in one moment to produce a spark, a connection or contrast, which the reader has to intuit, whereas longer poems, with their wider canvas, can move backwards and forwards through time in a manner rarely possible in haiku. The Last One Picked benefits from having a lifetime, and a whole career’s worth (as a GP), of experience and thought to draw upon.

Handysides writes ruminatively about his upbringing, and its strict morality, in a very religious household, impacting on even the joy of collecting, as in ‘History of the Motor Car in Fifty Picture Cards’ where ‘you felt ashamed for asking’ the ‘elderly or uncommitted friends’ if you might have ‘the cards we saw on mantelpieces’, only to be told ‘in no uncertain terms: / those are for my grandson, nephew[,] / someone who means more to me than you. That ‘uncommitted’ is satisfyingly ambiguous as to its meaning.

There’s an encounter with a horse in ‘A Solitary Mare’ which is reminiscent of Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ in how it sympathetically regards the animal’s age, but it feels much more real than Larkin’s deskbound speculation. It ends thus:

At night she nears my caravan.
I hear her snort, tear off the grass
I feel her presence, weight of hooves nearby

and next day when I sit to wire a plug
she comes to see
her long head reaches over me

hot jets of horse breath on my hands
she rubs her mighty forehead on my back
her fellow feeling floors me.

The absence of punctuation other than the two full-stops is irksome at first, but adds to the fluidity of the action, as does the alliteration at the end.

Matthew Paul, On Stuart Handysides’s The Last One Picked

I want to describe Terri Cohlene’s long overdue debut poetry collection, A Conspiracy of Blackbirds, as a hodge-podge, but only if you understand hodge-podge as that strange little store crammed with ancient washing machines, pitchforks, maybe a statue of Cupid or a wrought iron hen with her clutch of chicks, maybe a bag full of unexpected gems. In this collection of poems, you never know what you’ll find, and you’re sure to find exactly what you need.

Cohlene’s subjects include old photographs, old work boots, mothers, daughters, MS, bronzed baby shoes from decades back, lost checkbooks…I could go on. As Patrick Dixon describes it: A Conspiracy of Blackbirds is “a book of surprises.” Somehow—how does she do it?—it all comes together, even the hard stuff transforming into occasions for delight. In “Finally, I Become What You Always Wanted,” addressed to the poet’s mother, we find these instructions: “Cut me open, / count the rings.” One expects such a poem to end with scars, instead—apple blossoms.

Remind me to make a copy of “On the Table” for my massage therapist. It’s a list of all the places old hurts have secreted themselves (an ex-husband, a third-grade teacher, a bully…), and ends:

Then there’s my estranged
mother, lodged like a lizard
around my sternum—
a reminder of why bones
are needed to protect the heart.

On the back cover, poet Sandra Yannone offers the perfect precis: “A Conspiracy of Blackbirds chronicles how one woman breaks free from a multi-generational cycle of abandonments to reach for the sky in a transformative murmuration of stunning flight.” Exactly so. Cohlene—an artist, children’s book writer, playwright, and more—offers a map to the healing and sustaining power of art. 

Bethany Reid, Terri Cohlene’s A CONSPIRACY OF BLACKBIRDS

The Last Season, David Lloyd, Tiger Bark Press, 2025, ISBN 978-1-7329012-8-5, $18.95

(For the sake of clarity, this is the Welsh-American David Lloyd, not the Irish one.)

What, I found myself asking when I picked this book up, is the last season? And have no answer, but several answers: a single person’s decline towards death; the impact of climate change on those parts of the world that until recently had a clearly demarcated seasonal cycle that is now blurring around the edges; and, more prosaically perhaps, winter, which also tends to signify death. In the poem that gives this collection its title, David Lloyd seems to be touching on all three readings:

I’ve forgotten, the names I refuse, the names
I speak as I peel back bandages. Heal
me. Forgive me. Forgive my seasons
of discontent. Forgive my frigid hands
grasping what they desire. Forgive the time
devoted to myself. Forgive the frost

its bite. Let me raise these now old hands
into the healing air, up out of time,
into this last season, this deepest frost.

‘The Last Season’ is the last of six sestinas that make up the second (of six) section of the book, and Lloyd uses the cyclical, planispiral nature of the form to lay out themes of decay and death, both personal and planetary, that run through the book. His use of enjambment across line and stanza drives the language forward, a dynamic that cuts against the possibility of fatalism in the poems.

Billy Mills, The Last Season by David Lloyd: A Review

Although the poems explore a daughter/father relationship, one explains why there are no parent/children relationships, “Barren” is inspired by Sylvia Plath’s metaphors,

“O moon-swallowed sun.

O urge that’s flick-knife sharp.
I’m five crows nailed to a barnyard door,
a plundered nest, a hen house after the fox has called.

This womb that streaks its shepherd’s warning.
This one plus one that always comes to nought.”

It’s fun trying to link metaphor with poem, but the underlying point is a serious one. Plath herself was dismissive of women who couldn’t be mothers, perhaps as a means of providing herself with some self-reassurance during her separation from Hughes. It is agonising as a woman who wants children but finds herself unable to have any and humour is used to deflect attention away.

Booker has a confidence with crafting poems, using recognisable situations, that makes her work very readable. She’s not afraid to use humour against herself to make a point. Her subjects allow for complexity, allowing that scenarios are not straightforward. In real life, it’s rarely as simple as dividing people into good and bad. The multiverse concept allows for consideration of multiple possibilities, opening these poems beyond the personal.

Emma Lee, “Pedestrian in the Multiverse” Claire Booker (Waterloo Press) – book review

I once wrote an essay about my many floppy disks of saved AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations. I credit the hundreds of hours I spent agonizing over the tone of my “away messages” (a performance of “away,” since most of the time, we were parked right there watching people enter and leave the chat) with my development as a writer.

That’s where my sense of what it means to have a voice on the page originated, between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. with friends and acquaintances. Those AIM conversations existed slightly outside of time—often you’d return to school or camp the next day only to find the intimacies exchanged didn’t translate to a new reality beyond that consuming correspondence.

So, the epistolary form has fascinated me. Reading letters feels—indeed is—a form of eavesdropping (a sensibility at the heart of lyric poetry). A letter offers a remarkably intimate sense of who these individuals were, which naturally includes how they expressed doubt and hesitation.

In the case of Sally McDowell [the ex-wife of the former governor of Baltimore] and John Miller [a pastor], their letters begin in 1854 with her refusal of his offer of marriage. Imagine starting a correspondence there! We know that, by the end of the tome (the collected letters amount to 944 pages over two years), they will end up together. But, as is true of poetry, it’s not what a poem means but how it means that leaves an impact. Their candor and their wit, their mundane recounting and surprises—I found the voice they built together, their how, gripping and affecting, as well as historically complicated (right on the advent of the Civil War).

Miller said something I’ll never forget in those early letters after McDowell’s refusal: that when two ships collide at sea, they should remain in touch, until the extent of the damage is determined. That was at the back of my mind the whole time I wrote the collection. That people should remain close until the extent of the damage is determined. I interpret “damage” loosely—I am most interested in how people are transformed by coming into each other’s lives, and in how chance meetings shape our paths. That seems to me to be one of the chief promises of being alive.

Maya C. Popa, Letters as Eavesdropping

Almost two years ago exactly I was listening to T. Swift’s Tortured Poets Department on repeat and it occurred to me, one line from “So High School” would be a great title for what was then just an amorphous and incomplete manuscript which included a couple of series that centered around the idea of women as property, a chattel, but also as monsters in their own way. The pretty dead things series was at the heart of it, my poems about 17th century vampire brides, but also the governess poems of terrible and unguessable, which had been finished the year before. I was also in the thick of wedding planning for the next summer, which had me thinking of brides and bargains and contracts just generally. Because I was busy getting ready to release RUINPORN, I scribbled the title down in a notebook and put it away. As the poem series intended for that particular full-length project grew over the past two years, first through the winged poems, another sea-washed series called deepwater, and this winter with the abattoir letters, the book began to take shape and I grew even more resolute on the title choice. [link added]

Kristy Bowen, some notes on the new book

Cliques are funny but are we in an age without any? and better for that? What would a study of the rather uncliquey yet catholic [Peter] Finch tell us and with what kind of root? A tree’s? A proliferating soil grabbing weed’s? We need good historical overview, a robust dialectic, and a taste for reading lots of poets of the past and recent past and present, to answer.

For example, an Edward Lucie-Smith review of Jeff Nuttall’s 1969 book Bomb Culture suggests why 60s and 70s cliques snubbed each other. Lucie-Smith says that their schisms can be seen to resolve around emulating pop culture comedians and bands. There would be disapproval from one sect if another did. He also said Brits squander surrealism – because they get the giggles. [Andrew] Taylor quotes Finch mentioning Nuttall (“Nuttall said walk hell walk they want you to read poems give them fiction stream of consciousness can’t tell the beginning from the end like Warhol’s Empire State”) but he stays away from key questions like Nuttall’s libertarian interest in harassment of women and girls. Can we discuss schisms that revealed both sides tragically part right and tragically part wrong? To do so, one must fire shots at all sides.

Lucie-Smith’s review never says he’s named (with a testy sigh) in Bomb Culture. But at least he made Nuttall’s index. This is in a sense the respectful practice of the poetry battlefield, and Lucie-Smith could take it as sword brandishing at a rival. One Ira Lightman gets a Taylor mention sometimes by implication, but isn’t in the index. It happens when Taylor talks about Finch’s use of found materials, leading him to imply things have got a bit uncool now, in our day. He diagnoses this as partly due to “the rise of the so-called poetry detectives, who track down plagiarists and ‘out’ them on social media. Quite what the Dadaists and wider avant-garde would make of this practice, one can only imagine.” Later Taylor introduces (with the same thought) me by name: “Ira Lightman ‘the sleuth’ has attempted to become the UK poetry scene’s detective looking for plagiarism. His detection, though in some cases understandable, has caused pain and suffering for those accused. I wonder what the Dadaists would have made of Lightman attempting to create a career out of such work. Perhaps they would have sent him a cauliflower in the post.”

And here we can at least name Taylor’s tone: it is adjoiner-clubbish. He defines himself by fishing for visceral sympathy, preferably around scar tissue, but with keyboard warrior passive aggressiveness. These are the clubs of Pavlovian suggestion. He condescends and banishes me, even though I’ve performed on Radio 3 in collaboration with Peter Finch, read at Writers Forum like Finch, written a poem for Bob Cobbing like Finch, performed and been published by Subvoicive like Finch, and appeared in the same book (Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh) that Taylor calls “important and timely”. Taylor the huffing and rhetorical questioner looks a bit under-informed, even shallow.

Ira Lightman, A Taylored Finch

As it happens, I do trust Wallace Stevens. He’s the high-modernist poet most fascinated by formal logic, as with the illicit conversion — “All X is Y, therefore All Y is X; All music is feeling, therefore All feeling is music” — he puts at the center of “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Or the strange grammar of the nothing he develops in “The Snow Man.” And, more to point, Stevens comes toward the top of the group of poets, the high modernists, I take as accurate reporters and analysts of the thin modern world: How do we live within it? How do find meaning in a universe without inherent meaning? They are witnesses of the cold disease, the diagnosticians and occasionally the physicians who propose a treatment.

So if we wanted to trust the Stevens poem, we’d notice its mostly tetrameter quatrains and its consistent inversions of ordinary sense: The opening stanza claims that the man-made jar isn’t placed in a surrounding wilderness but makes the wilderness surround it, as though the coherent jar creates the incoherence elsewhere. And from there the poem builds to the difficult double negative of the last lines, the human jar that “did not give . . . / Like nothing else,” contrasted with Tennessee’s wild birds and bush. The grammatical constructions, too, are strange. We get poetic inversions: “round it was,” “of a port in air.” We get jarringly obvious internal rhyme: “sprawled around” a jar “round upon the ground.” We then arrive at flat non-poetic diction: “The jar was gray and bare.” Even the self-diminishing word “anecdote” in the title.

All that, I think, is sufficient evidence that Stevens is in charge enough for the reader to invest in the poem. And what I find when I invest the time — the working center of the poem — is a human object that organizes the surrounding landscape that “sprawled around, no longer wild.” The jar “took dominion everywhere,” and the scholar Roy Harvey Pearce has offered the wonderfully attractive (if not actually helpful) observation that Stevens had in mind a particular brand of canning jar, the Dominion Wide E Special, distributed in the U.S. since 1913.

The sense that I take from this is the diagnostic modern observation that the human is the only remaining source of meaning. We inherit poetic language that points to a prior thickness, but now what gives meaning is “gray and bare,” and perhaps more to the point, sterile: “It did not give of bird or bush,” entirely unlike everything else in the fertile landscape it organizes.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Anecdote of the Jar

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 was actually After (Abingdon Square, 2009), written in the form of letters. For example, “Letter to My Mother,” “Letter to My Father,” etc., as a way of imagining what I would say to them individually had they lived to see me grow up. I worked on it for a very long time, but didn’t know where to send it until a friend who was starting a small press took an interest. This first book of letters was very affirmative and inspiring. I have never stopped writing since.

When On Earth Beneath Sky came out, I was even more proud of my accomplishment. I had sent to the editor a very big stack of prose and poems. Then, he asked me to reduce it to about a hundred pages. After farming daily, I would dive through hundreds and thousands of pages in tears, wondering how I could have written that much over the years as a non-native English speaker. I was spilling out my guts, my memory dumping onto the page as a way of talking to myself, trying to understand my place in the world, in nature, and so on.

After deals a lot with Cambodia, the aftermath, the migration, and what I wanted to tell my parents and siblings—like letters that could be sent to them from the United States. Back then, Cambodia was still closed to the world.

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

I came to the US at the age of ten. One of the ways I could learn new English words was to write Haiku—five-seven-five syllables. It taught me how to count. I started writing rhymed poems in high school because I hadn’t read Walt Whitman then. When I won a poetry contest, I received a hundred dollars, which felt so heavy inside my pocket. I was in tears spending part of the one hundred dollars for a hamburger at McDonald’s.

Poetry was short and easy. It was something I could finish, as opposed to starting with fiction or a memoir, like a few Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge Genocide did. I just wrote about my life in the US.

On On Earth Beneath Sky and Echoes Lost to Wind, people expected me to write a childhood narrative under the Khmer Rouge, but I didn’t. I wrote about Cambodia after the UNTAC-monitored democratic elections. The aftermath was full of struggle and hardship. I wrote about love and sex growing up in the US. I wrote about nature, and the farm in Bolton, MA.

I chose the healing narrative rather than, “I am a survivor” of a genocide. […]

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

I think we don’t have a culture of readers with an intellect like twenty or thirty years ago. The internet has co-opted our brains. Our intelligence is facing a global pandemic of obesity. Brain tumors and dementia are on the rise. The culture of forgetting has infested our bone marrow, clogging our bloodstream with literary porn. So much sensationalism. But I am all for the greater flow as part of the human condition, struggling with how to live, where and what to be or become.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chath pierSath

— Always reading: God’s Silence by Franz Wright. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of poems that made me feel so much, that felt so human.

— In an interview on Image, Wright says, “I thought of the poem as the holy thing, the aim of everything. If there’s a change, it’s that I came to see there was no necessity anymore to finish a poem. The poem was a step to the next point. The poems were all attempts to find a place to store the joy and certainty of the ultimate goodness and coherence and tenderness of reality.”

— And maybe I’ve quoted from this before? but he also says,

“I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you’re trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself. It still makes me uncomfortable to call myself a poet. I think of myself as someone in the service of poetry. If I happen to be in that blessed state of consciousness where I am able to write, I guess at that moment I’m a poet.”

— I hope you keep storing joy and tenderness in poems. And by poems I mean any container in which you can put your holy things.

Shawna Lemay, You Cannot Break the Wings of Poetry

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

Nolan’s warning is that we risk living in the Iliad, that we are going to become more and more tribal, more distant from “Zeus’s law”, that we are going to put our own civilisation at risk. As this film implicitly acknowledges, nothing Nolan can do will alter that. We will forget the past. Reading the news, it seems apparent that we already have. We are, alas, midway on the waves. Nolan’s conversion of the Odyssey into an action film did not smother the underlying story, but it fits the pattern he warns against all too well. If Troy is going to burn again, watching this film will be little more than a distraction while the ships set sail. If Nolan really wanted to issue a warning, he might have made a film about our own civilisation, a song that will be all they have to remember us, a song of all the promises we failed to keep.

Henry Oliver, My review of Nolan’s Odyssey in GQ Australia

The Nolan film has brought back into the spotlight a tiresome confected controversy over the translations by Emily Wilson, because Nolan has said he was inspired by her version of the Odyssey. (Wilson went on to translate the Iliad too, though with a slightly different technique, and overall her Iliad seems to have attracted less attention.) Like any decent translation, Wilson’s versions have several major strengths and some real weaknesses. I think the best thing about them — especially about the Odyssey, where she kept strictly to a single English line for each line of Greek — is the way she has made the poem into recognisable verse within the English tradition, while also creating and conveying a sense of pace, of narrative energy. The first word Arnold uses to characterise Homer in his essay on translating him, is ‘rapid’. So many — almost all — translations of Homer feel slow or prosaic (or both) compared to the original. Getting it into pacy and plausible verse is a real achievement.

The endless arguments about Wilson’s translation choices and supposedly obtrusive wokeness, carried out almost entirely by people who do not themselves read Homeric Greek, and have certainly never attempted any kind of major translation, has been singularly boring and unedifying. Hers are, certainly, translations of their moment and I’m sure they’ll date fast. I’d be very surprised if anyone is teaching from them in 40 or 50 years time, but this is almost always true. Translations with an escape velocity of their own are very rare.

George Steiner, in a six-page tour de force about the translation of Homer, is very funny about why Lattimore is so leaden: “Striving for a ‘timeless’, unobtrusively lucid idiom, Lattimore has, in fact, fallen into a peculiar cadence, part Longfellow, part Eisenhower.” The Lattimore version, concludes Steiner, writing in the 1970s about a translation published in 1951, “is already a period piece. Its intended timelessness has turned parochial. This, precisely, is what Homer is not.”

If you go on to read a great deal of Homer in Greek, your memory of whatever translation you read first disappears under the weight of it — at least that’s been my experience. I know (because I still have them) that I used Rieu’s translations for both Homeric poems when I was studying them, but I can’t recall anything about Rieu’s style, I have no lasting sense of these poems in his English prose. But obviously most people, if they are profoundly moved by an encounter with Homer, will have met him in a particular translation. I think this might be why people who love Homer but can’t read Greek sometimes get so worked up about (what they view as) inadequate translations: if you have a particular English version in your mind, another could easily seem like a travesty. But really, they all are, in one way or another.

If you want to read about Homer from a standing start, I would recommend Michael Silk’s slim Homer: The Iliad. A Student Guide (CUP, 1987; repr. 2004). Silk’s seven pages on translation (40-7) is less mean and funny than Steiner’s but of a good deal more help for a new reader. He compares Fitzgerald, Pope and the prose version by Lang, Leaf and Myers and shows, concisely but very clearly, what difference the style and diction of a translation makes to our sense of the original. In particular, he puts his finger on the uneven diction that is a weakness of so many modern translations — with some phrases sounding like everyday speech today, some sounding Victorian or Shakespearean, some like a fairy story and so on. This kind of inconsistency of tone is so common in modern translations of ancient texts that it seems almost a default setting, but it has a corrosive effect.

Victoria Moul, What to read about Homer?

When we at Poems Ancient and Modern last saw Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849), he was fast asleep in a cradle at his father’s knee. The first child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and his wife Sara, Hartley appears in his father’s great early poem, “Frost at Midnight,” as the “babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart / With tender gladness, thus to look at thee.” The father’s heart thrills, specifically, at the thought that in this new life, with its unsullied innocence, the possibility exists for human un-fallenness. Through a sustained connection to the natural world and a carefully nurturing education — so he believes — his child might avoid the corruption that has entered his own soul.

In Hartley Coleridge’s sonnet, “Long Time a Child,” written when the poet was in his mid-30s and published in his 1833 Poems, we might be over-tempted to read the traces of his father’s famous poem. We might be a little too primed to see, in the child-in-the-man of this poem, the ghost of that “babe so beautiful” whose soul, in his father’s vision, was destined for life, not death. We might note with greater irony that that “babe,” now a man, has found instead — having “waked to sleep no more” — the more insistent “sleep,” repeated three times in two lines, of his own inescapable mortality.

Or perhaps it’s not an over-temptation. Inevitably, Hartley Coleridge’s autobiography suggests itself in these fourteen lines: his father’s repeated abandonments that gave the lie to the Romantic vision of pre-lapserian childhood, and his own wounded life of dissipation, which would have left him prematurely old at 37, when Poems appeared. Though he could not have known how far past his own midpoint he actually was by 1833, with only 16 years left to him, still the sense of his own failure to realize any interest on the time granted him drives his poetic speaker’s lament. “For yet I lived like one not born to die; / A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears . . .”

Even the sonnet’s Petrarchan form echoes the pattern of derailment and stagnation that its words articulate. The enclosed quatrains of the octave, rhymed abbaacca, point to a sense of things imploding on themselves. The introduction of the c-rhyme in the second quatrain intimates a kind of progress, but that forward impulse is wholly enwombed in that initial a-rhyme.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Long Time a Child

I’ve been saying something of farewell – ok, an au revoir; never say never again – to the sonnet recently. A couple of years ago I switched my allegiance to a sixteen-line form, which has become my new ‘thoughtless default’ for shorter poems. It’s hardly one I can claim to have innovated, and its rules (‘it has sixteen lines and probably four quatrains, but otherwise it can do what the hell it likes’) are far too permissive for it to count as a something worth giving a name; though I’m clear in own mind, at least, that it’s no kind of ‘extended sonnet’, Meredithian, Harrisonian or otherwise.

This might also involve retiring another form I’ve occasionally fallen into that’s isomorphic with the sonnet: the three stanzas of ballad metre I call a ‘twelve-bar’, being precisely the form and measure of a twelve-bar blues. I think of this three-stanza ballad form as a kind of ‘oral sonnet’, since it both encourages and accommodates the same basic ‘this plus that equals this’ pattern as the sonnet proper. In the oral tradition that the ballad form invokes, time and consequence tend do the work of logic, and I’ve found that the twelve-bar formula is more usually ‘that event followed by that event led me to this state’. Blues renders this an emotional as well as an argumentative tension through the musical progression of tonic–subdominant–tonic–dominant–tonic. To use the standard metaphor, this feels to most folk like home-departure-homesickness-home, although this omits those two bars in the middle where you go home for a couple of days so your mum will do your laundry. (Strictly speaking, the emotional contour of the blues form is more ‘this sucks / let’s try this instead / that didn’t work / let’s bring it to a crisis / that didn’t work either and this still sucks but I’m resigned to it.’) The cliché is that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. True enough – the ballad form is hardwired in Dickinson’s letters, never mind her poetry. But I think it’s more telling that Muddy Waters could have happily covered ‘I Died for Beauty’, or ‘Hope is a Thing with Feathers’ with only minor adjustments to his delivery. For all that Blind Melon Dickinson is maybe the more intriguing prospect.

Giving up on sonnets is maybe just admitting that these days I rarely find myself thinking the kind of thoughts they’re built to express. This is usually some version of a ‘proof’, often in the more dialectic shape of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical models, or the more organic syllogisms of the ‘Muldoon’-style sonnet, where a surprising connection between two things will see an unanticipated third emerge from their coupling. What one is attempting, though, is still just ‘claim and demonstration’; one is still trying to show an emotional truth. It’s the ‘proof’ aspect I’m no longer very compelled by. It contains an unstated premise: ‘Prove to who?’ I’m not sure it was ever the reader, who has other ways of verifying that your poems are true besides their devastating logic. Maybe I’m just a little more secure, if not in my own beliefs, then my ability to be honest about them – and less inclined to attempt the kind of watertight self-justification the sonnet always seems to demand.

Don Paterson, Shakespeare, the Sonnet and the uses of Scholarship

for all that
I will not get to
in this life
the fountain carries on
in the rain

Tom Clausen, drenched

I’m working on a few poems for submissions: a couple of anthologies for groups I’m in. I have joined a few free writing sessions where we sit on a silent Zoom call for an hour to write together. It’s weird but effective. It’s an anchor within the current of the summer and I usually write something. I still go on Sundays to the café to write.

I’ve started having dreams about school. The first one was a sort of nightmare, I woke at 6am in a panic that I had missed orientation and didn’t know what I should be doing in my new/old role. Last night’s was quieter, but still with that sense of anxiety. I was there with other teachers and couldn’t type some information on my phone with my awkward thumbs. 

My technology dreams are always a sure sign of stress. I’ve had them my whole life, from not being able to dial old rotary phones to emails going awry on computers to struggling to find info on smart phones. Always with a sense of inadequacy. Something simple I should be able to do but just can’t.

Gerry Stewart, Slow Summer Urgency

I met with a group of poets this week and we talked about poetry publishing, rejection, the money situation (where it costs more to get published than it ever pays to be published, given submission fees etc.) We talked about what kinds of jobs we did to keep from the unfortunate situation the main character of The Adjunct found herself in—homeless, starving, turning to prostitution (see last week’s blog post for review). I talked a little bit about entrepreneurial poets—like those who run weekend courses on their own, or offer editing services, or run online generating courses. Most writers—including fiction and non-fiction writers, not just poets do not earn a living from their advances or royalties. They make money teaching, or fees from readings and conferences, or selling their rights to Hollywood, or running conferences – but not from their books. (Also, a reminder: if you like a writer’s work, please buy their books when you can!) I myself should be better and smarter at making money than I am after all these years. Sometimes the limits are my health (sometimes keeping me from opportunities) and energy and even gumption (how dare I put myself out there? Who do I think I am?)

I also watched the original movie Fame, in which many young people experience rejection in a multitude of arts in the early 80s in a very melodramatic way that probably was edgy for its day (dare I say the tv show was better than the movie?) One character is told if she can’t take rejection, don’t be a dancer, and proceeds to almost throw herself under a subway bus. Dancing might be the one art form with more rejection than poetry—and a shorter lifespan, as injuries, pregnancies, and just life (too short? too tall? too busty? etc.) can put you out of the game by 25 or 30. Fortunately, poetry has no such short lifespan, though poets may find the game a little easier when they’re young (and if they’re hip and attractive, even easier)! But all poets, even the great ones, face a LOT of rejection, and at 53, sometimes I feel that I’ve had enough. But I persist, possibly delusionally optimistic. Succeeding at being any kind of artist involves surviving rejection and not letting it put a permanent “NO!” stamp in your heart or head.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Swallowtail Butterflies, Lavender Festivals, Poetry, Money, and Rejection

I believe multiple views can be held within a single Jewish community. (Multiple views can be held within a single Jewish heart. Ask me how I know.) I believe seeking to exclude one another is corrosive to community. I believe we should care about each other across even this disagreement.

And when I think about the teaching that the Temple was destroyed due to sinat hinam, I think of the way I’ve seen Jews tear into each other. I think of the readiness some seem to feel to cast “those other Jews” as beyond the pale / outside the tent / no longer community.

And I imagine that the pain that my heart feels over this community discord is a scant billionth of the pain Shekhinah must be feeling. That’s what sparked this vulnerable prayer-poem, and that’s a big piece of what’s on my mind and heart as Tisha b’Av approaches.

Anyway: I hope you’ll click through and check out Laments.

As usual, the group of collaborators involved in this offering aren’t all coming from the same place. We are clergy and laypeople, writers and artists, denominational Jews and trans-denominational Jews. Among us we hold many different views on Israel / Palestine. And like the Jewish people writ large, together we are more than the sum of our parts.

Rachel Barenblat, Another lament

From the pyre, I tell the judge
there is more than one kind of fire.
I tell him I am already burning.

Renee Emerson, Mrs. Smith, Burned for Praying in Her Own Language

In March 2025, I read the poem “To Sew a Freedom Suit” by Danielle Legros Georges in The New Yorker. Georges had passed away the previous month. At the time, I’d been in the US for 3 years after relocating from Malta (Europe). I’d viewed the US as the land of the free until I came here and realized that “free” is not the word I’d use. After reading the poem, I immediately brought my notebook out and drafted a poem after Georges’.

My version of the poem had the same premise to start with, but rather than the lavishness of Georges’ poem, it spoke of layers of defensiveness against a world that seemed to be attacking and out to get me. I remember the other two connections I’d made (aside from the poem) vividly. One was a mental health podcast episode by Dr. Caroline Leaf; the other was my own fabrication of a visualization exercise I’d used during the meditation I start my writing workshops with. In this visualization, I asked the workshop participants to imagine their bodies building defense layers.

And so, the first draft of my poem came to fruition, and I was quite pleased with it. There was a strangeness to my work; textures that felt simultaneously accurate and unusual. The poem made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. Yet I felt that something was off—it wasn’t close enough to the uncanny experience of being seen as a commodity or a number and trying to build back my individuality, my softness included somewhere in the mix.

I sent it out with a few edits at first, and although it came close a couple of times, it didn’t get picked up anywhere for the longest time. At the time of writing (ironically, after a huge overhaul, as you’ll see), someone has just accepted the first iteration of it. That doesn’t stop me from (hopefully) elevating it for my next collection.

Unstitching and Re-hemming a Poem – guest post by Miriam Calleja (Trish Hopkinson)

Each morning, after/during coffee, I read some poetry – usually from my shelves. If I have an urge for more reading, I go online and search authors. Occasionally, I’ll do the same for flash fiction or short pieces – fiction or nonfiction. At night, I turn to cinema – watching a film before sleep. I allow both morning and evening to be, hopefully, sources for inspiration for my own writing. My writing nearly always begins with fragments that I’ll build on. I jot down the fragments – and then allow the bits to develop into something more. As for the morning or evening patterns, I don’t force any sort of inspiration. I can’t/ won’t do that. I just allow space for it. When I was younger, I started each day with music and ended each day with music. But, allowing the music to lead to inspiration – giving space for it, not forcing it – was the same.

Charlotte Hamrick, Bedtime Rituals

O Lord, that last, late-evening cappuccino—
beautiful fuel of poets’ conversations,
inspirer of wild readings and sweeping gestures,
intense, froth-headed, somewhat over-the-top—
that was poor judgment. Here I am again,
bug-eyed at midnight. Brain a wheeling hamster.
Groping the darkness for some ropey ladder
down to oblivion. Hauling You along.

Maryann Corbett, Sleep trouble

In America football is presented as entertainment, goals are greeted with jingles, games begin with enthusiastic announcements and count downs over the stadium’s sound system. The World Cup has become a puffed up pageant, a gaudy, money making spectacle and yet I follow it with the same duty and commitment, with the same contained excitement and expectation I have for poetry. It has become a part of me, I live with it and through it, am frustrated as much as I am exhilarated by it.

Roughly 25% percent of all games will end in a draw with almost ten percent of those being goalless. When I was a reader for a national poetry competition most of the work I encountered in the preliminary rounds was turgid and dull. I came across hundreds of one – nil loses, an abundance of nil – nil draws. Overwhelmingly though what I confronted in the poems was suffering. What made the experience miserable was not being witness to the pain but to people’s inability to express it. If I was a football pundit I’d call out a lack of commitment, say it was sloppy, careless, casual, that hurting is not enough. I want my football and my poetry to be open and free flowing, if there is loss then let it be moving and beautiful, in defeat let it be thrilling and exhilarating. Remember Gazza’s tears in Turin? How they lubricated the nation’s heartbreak. That was poetry.

Let’s be honest. Most poetry, like most football, is utter rubbish. Most poetry is just like watching England play. It is painful not because it is an eloquent representation of human suffering, it is painful because it’s just a bit shit. There was a time when certain match day commentators even had sympathy for supporters who let their passions run away with them, who caused trouble on the terraces, showed more fight than the team they’d paid money to see. “While we certainly can’t condone this kind of behaviour, after watching a display like that one can understand the fans’ frustrations.” I feel the same way about bad poetry.

Jan Noble, Nº73 How Barbara Hepworth helped me recover from the World Cup

The easy resolution. The account I gave of a marriage ending was clean, and had a moral, and let me feel the chapter closed. It broadened, in its last line, into something that sounded like wisdom. It was a proverb. A proverb is what you reach for when you cannot yet bear the particular, and it lets the poem — or the year — feel finished without having been lived through. I had ended on the wrong line. The repair, in a poem, is nearly always the same: cut the consolation, and sit with the plainer thing underneath it.

The speaker contemplating instead of acting. This is a failure mode I can name in four seconds in a stranger’s draft — the poem whose speaker stands at the window and observes, beautifully, and never once crosses the room. I did not see, for a long time, that I had built a life in that grammar. I watched. I described. I was excellent company at the window. The poem does not come alive until the speaker moves, and neither, it turns out, does the man.

The buried subject. The hardest, here as on the page. For years I wrote around a thing rather than towards it — around the shape of a life I had not yet let myself want, the making of a home, the people who stayed when they had every reason not to, a new house with no memory of its own that I walked into carrying all the memory it was ever going to have. I was fluent. Fluency is how the buried subject hides. The poem that will not arrive is usually the one still circling the thing it most needs to say. […]

Behind the whole taxonomy sits a single conviction I drew from Heidegger’s Aletheia and named, years ago, in the title of an as yet unpublished collection, What Storms Disclose. Bad poetry conceals; good poetry discloses. That is the sentence The Cutting Room exists to enforce. What I had not let myself notice is that it is not a sentence about poems. It is a sentence about attention.

A life lived without attention conceals — from others, and more expensively from the person living it.

A life lived with attention discloses. The knife I take to a failing draft and the attention I have had, slowly and late, to bring to a failing stretch of my own years are not cousins. They are the same instrument. I only ever owned one.

Adam Cairns, What the life was reaching for

I bow to the blooming squash flower,
to whorls of seaweed on the shore.
The moon’s fingernail wakes me—

I am its wayward child,
a tiny insect
blinded by light,
climbing rungs
streaked with
ash.

Luisa A. Igloria, Araria

This week: a World Cup, and a world in which the new is not what wins prizes; a globe of seeds, juice and pulp, and a world of leaf-shade and sap-hunger. And much more, as always. Enjoy.

a song inside these ending days. the morgue of form.
language. languish. anguish. said the poet. english.
has no commandments, only commands.
we swill it at evening.
the bloody gum connecting to the rusty faucet.
yr blue-grey hands to strangle us, tearing the paper, stretching the bread.

Fran Lock, (TOAD) FUGUE

The French vendeur who hands me the tomato in its perfect flesh— he knows.  Some worlds haven’t been destroyed. It is a globe of seeds, juice and pulp that asserts itself, a repository of what we were given in the love garden of origin.  What a miracle that it has not been trampled on by industry and pragmatism!  To touch its smooth skin with tender fingertips is to touch origins. To eat it, a burst of elation, then a river of melancholy: eternal values in such a fleeting package!  Says France: humans can revere things and earth and nature, even the self.

While revering in reverie, I was close to elements.  Fires in southwestern France were raging, but that’s not what shook me.  It was the popup window when I clicked on a video of those fires.  It was the human-sized robot prancing idiotically.  A robot cut off from human roots but embodying the highest hubris of its maker.  He promises to help me with everything, bopping around the virtual space.  He would do my chores but amplify my melancholy. He has me raging at my helplessness, tossing me against the rocks in the little skiff I’m navigating. 

Jill Pearlman, La Tomate

I was talking to a writer friend about both of our different levels of feelings of failure, worry about money (or lack thereof), lack of reviews/teaching jobs/grants/awards, and talking about what truly brings writers satisfaction. I know I’m happier when I’m writing, and I haven’t been writing enough. My friend was saying (after doing a bunch of readings) that she’d just like to spend some time by herself. The balance between promotion and spending time reading and writing is hard for all writers all the time, but it seems harder lately.

This brings me to my mini-book review of The Adjunct by Maria Adelmann. A sort-of-satire of the universe of Creative Writing and English major adjuncts, a young woman who’s gotten her PhD is trapped in a cycle of trying to earn a living as an adjunct, her reputation smeared by a professor who slept with her when she was his student, doing gig work on the side. This English PhD did not 1) come from money or 2) go to the fanciest school and is always in the process of writing the book that will help her hopefully break out of adjuncting hell, except the book is always on Post-It notes in a cramped and unheated borrowed office space. In the end (spoiler alert, but not really), she ends up unable to support herself, living out of her car when she gets carjacked and then she is homeless, turned down for multiple fast-food jobs, and becomes what basically is a prostitute. Overwrought? Melodramatic to the point of Dickens? Maybe, but now that universities are using adjuncts for 75 percent of teaching and not giving benefits or paying a living wage, and stories of adjuncts dying in their offices not even being uncommon, this is probably more realistic than I’d like to admit. Here’s a quote from the first page of the book:

I’m writing at two a.m. from the adjunct office in the literature wing…The ideal setting for an Agatha Christie novel in which the ensemble cast gets knocked off one by one. The disappointing big reveal is that, actually, capitalism did it, and suddenly you realize that you aren’t in a mystery novel at all but just another Jacobin article…there’s a twist beyond the twist: It’s just real life.”

The speaker of this novel is very much like me—except I never slept with a professor, and I never got my PhD (just an MA and an MFA) and I’ve never been car-jacked. But I do have MS, several genetic health issues that are expensive to treat, and I did adjunct for four years, with a boss who was male, younger and less accomplished than I was, making less money (if it can be believed) than I make on the regular as a freelance writing poet, far less than minimum wage. Now, I worked as a technical writer for ten years–that’s how I got to Seattle, recruited by Microsoft–but if I hadn’t chosen that path and gone into literature studies instead, I could be as helpless and penniless, no savings account, no home, no health insurance. I became too sick to work the hours that Microsoft did (and still does) require when I became an adjunct. If I hadn’t had a husband–what would have been my future?  And I thought about the “Gifted Child” syndrome and the “Rory Gilmore Failure” syndrome–if girls who are praised as intelligent and gifted since they were young are told to get their PhDs and there will be jobs waiting for them–well, we’ve been sold a sack of goods. Becoming a writer for money is tough–especially without backup money and connections, which let’s face it, almost all the famous poets you know came with as a package. Journalism, poetry–heck, people (according to the Atlantic) don’t even read any more. Am I a failure because capitalism doesn’t reward the work I love? I have published eight books total, six of poetry. I’ve had good reviews and good publishers and made friends along the way that I treasure. Have I gotten an NEA grant or a Guggenheim or Whiting Award? Even made the long list for a Pulitzer. Nope. And I have to face that fact that at my age, that may never happen. And earning a living writing? Is that a pipe dream I should let go of? Maybe so.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Anniversaries, Anxieties (with Mini Book Review) about Writing and Adjuncting, Plus Pacific Northwest Summer

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on typesetting Judith Shaw‘s new pamphlet The Land Called Me Back, Poems from the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path. I’m delighted to say it’s going to be launched on Sunday 26th July at Berwick Church. If you’d like to come along, we’re meeting first at 2pm for a short walk, then at 3pm at the church Judith will talk about the book and read some of the poems.  There are seven churches in this part of the Cuckmere valley and It’s amazing how rich and evocative both the churches and their settings in the landscape have proven to be to poets: both Judith and those who have taken this residency before her, including Oenone Thomas and Antony Mair.

Robin Houghton, Two book launches coming up

A modern day anchoress, I commit
myself to my car. In my moving cell,
I sing constantly and pray without ceasing.

I dedicate myself to our modern religion
of hectic pace. I rush from one location to another,
showing my devotion in twelve hour increments.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, All Our Cells: Cars, Monastic, and Other

I watched the (in)famous quarter-final between England and Argentina in south London. Of course, it’s remembered for Maradona’s two goals, one of which was the most ludicrous bit of cheating in World Cup history and one of which was genius; but not so well-remembered is how the introduction of John Barnes almost rescued the game for England. Neither before nor since have I been so cross at the end of a football match. I wasn’t, though, one of the Little Englanders who saw, and probably still see, Argentina as the enemy. As a poem of mine, ‘Geography’, recently published by Tim Fellows in The Fig Tree, here, shows, my views on the Falklands War were contrary to most people’s. (We had a debate about in an English lesson and nobody in my class would second me, so our teacher, a lefty like me, had to.)

Anyhow, all of that somehow combined in ‘The Hand of God’, a poem I wrote a good few years ago and which was published by editor Crispin Thomas at Football Poets, here. Poor Terry Fenwick, Alan McDonald’s QPR teammate, moved to Spurs 18 months later in a bid to further his England career, was only capped once or twice again, and was later imprisoned for drink-driving.

Matthew Paul, Maradona, Belfast and me

When we began, we thought we would be solely focused on the artistic elements: editing books, publishing new and unique voices, and building literary culture. I started out thinking about stories, focused on the narratives that might change the world. Red Hen started with the idea of poetry as a feral animal skittering across Los Angeles. A coyote, maybe.

I always wanted to create a literary home for outsiders. As an outsider myself, I felt the pull of that outsider world. But the sooner you think about money and running your organization like a business, the better, because money is what allows the mission to thrive.

It took us a long time to ask for money at our own benefit event.

It took us a long time to start preparing P-and-L statements for books before we accepted them.

It took us a long time before we began to consider the cost of different endeavors before we decided to embark on programming that seemed worthwhile.

In the spring, we are releasing a poetry book from Vincent Antonio Rendoni, Dead Chicano Mixtape. One of my favorite poems is about money, and how being good or bad about money is a state of mind. If you are bad with money, when you get your hands on any, you think, what do I do with it, and make it disappear. If you are good with it, you save it. But what good is saved money unless you invest it to help others?

When poet Wanda Coleman needed help at the end of her life, I called a poet friend of mine and asked him to pitch in. “I must say,” I said apologetically, “She might not have been good with money.”

“Of course not,” he said. “She was a great poet.”

Being a great poet was enough.

Kate Gale, Keeping the Fire, Building the Boat: On Our Artistic Future

I want to read. I want to read everything. Ok, maybe not everything… But I want to read sooo many poets, and I want to read sooo many science fiction novels! And I know – particularly for the reading poets part – that reading is crucial for my creative development and appreciation/understanding of the wider poetry scene (and it’s fun!). So I want to read basically everything I can get my greedy hands on.

And yet, I consistently find spending time reading the most difficult thing to do. Not because reading itself is difficult, quite the opposite: reading is joyful. But I do so little of it. Why? And how do I prioritise it?

I think there are two things at play here.

I’m busy. My ‘day job’ is largely evening and weekend work with some day shifts here and there, and the time around it gets eaten up by gym (I have to maintain a level of fitness to do parts of my job), climbing (honestly one of the biggest ways I keep mentally well and regulated), and then writing (poetry, MfA, Substack, & all the admin for events, workshops etc). Add in a partnership I’m conscious of earmarking quality time for, a birdwatching hobby, and seeing a couple friends here and there, and there’s not a huge bunch of space left for the kind of downtime where I’m just floating around and could spontaneously think: oh, I’ll pick up a book for the next couple hours.

So as the space and time doesn’t necessarily naturally arise on its own I need to be more intentional with reading. And I do intend to read, it’s there in my mind that I want to make time for it, I want to do it.

And then I’ll manage it. I’ll pick up, say, a pamphlet someone’s recommended, and really enjoy it (or maybe enjoy it not so much because it’s also fine not to like everything we read). I’ll finish it, put it down, go on with my life, and suddenly it’s three weeks later and I haven’t read anything else except a few poems doing the rounds on Instagram (facepalm).

This is frustrating. And the first thing going on is that reading is labelled in my mind as a ‘leisure activity’ rather than something I do as part of ‘work’. So there’s a little internal reframing to work on because I also don’t prioritise leisure activities so what tends to happen is I hit a point where I have to stop doing things and then either escape out into nature and birding or disappear into a comforting sci-fi series (either way reading doesn’t get much of a look in).

The second thing going on is the lovely myth of productivity we’re all de facto enrolled in as punishment for existing in western culture at this time. I want so much to untangle myself from this myth, particularly since discovering my neurodivergence and becoming more aware of how tying myself to productivity essentially hurts my wellness. But it’s pernicious, and over the course of my life I’ve sewn it into my bones, into every cell of my being.

Reading, while there’s clear outcomes from it that I definitely want i.e. more time reading poems, discovering more poets I love, benefitting my practice etc etc, isn’t productive. At the end of a reading session I don’t have a draft of a new poem, a Substack post to publish, an event ready to advertise; I haven’t produced anything tangible.

Rachael Hill, Why is reading so much harder to make time for than writing?

At the Dr. Johnson House, James Marriott and I discussed the future of civilization. He worries that the decline of reading means the end of democracy. I think we are facing a disruption to which we will need to adapt. Just because we have not yet had democracy without mass literacy, doesn’t mean we can’t. More concerning to me than whether adults read novels is the fact that children are not being brought up to read enough. The schools are what most need reforming. James has written a polemical book (coming in September, I enjoyed it, and anyone who enjoyed his Substack post about it will enjoy the book) but he is a genial, affable, quietly insistent person, and he makes his case without any bluster or alarm. The best part of the evening was when we were shown an original copy of the Dictionary and a lock of the great man’s hair.

Henry Oliver, Et in Arcadia Ego

Last month, in a post called The Source of War, I shared with you the second question asked by the Iranian poet who was interviewing me last year. This month, I want to share with you the first question she asked, which I will confess threw me for quite a loop when I read it: What would literature be missing without you, and what would you be missing without literature?

This was my answer:

The second part of your question is much easier to answer than the first because it is not an exaggeration to say that literature saved my life, though whether I mean that literally or metaphorically is not always clear to me. I was both victim of and witness to an awful lot of violence during my childhood. I don’t remember ever being truly suicidal, but I know that my experience, especially the sexual violence that I survived, left me feeling empty and ashamed, filled with self-loathing and not sure that there was a worthwhile purpose to my living. Religion filled that void for a while. When I was a teenager, I even thought I might one day study for the rabbinate, but it was ultimately reading—and I read everything I could get my hands on: poetry, science fiction, horror, literary novels, fantasy, Victorian pornography, you name it—that helped me imagine what a meaningful life might be like and gave me hope that I could exist in the world with purpose and have a life that mattered.

Writing, and at first I wrote only poetry, was how I claimed the voice in which I could begin to articulate that purpose—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that writing was how I reclaimed for myself the voice that those who did violence to me tried to silence. At first, the poems I wrote served as proof to myself that my voice was real, and that was enough. Over time, though, I came to understand that what I had to say in that voice was not just about myself and for myself, and through that understanding I discovered the audacity to believe that what I had to say was something to which other people ought to pay attention.

This is what makes the first part of your question more difficult for me to answer. On the one hand, if I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing. It would be whatever its collective of voices had made it. On the other hand, though, if I didn’t believe that my voice, solitary as it is, mattered in some small way to literature, there would be no reason to go through the frustrating and all-too-often discouraging process of publishing, of daring to add my voice and my work to the literary tradition of which it is inescapably a part.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Would Literature Be Missing Without You?

All the poems in “Pain Songs” have an expansive, meandering across the page feel as if they have been written contemplatively and possibly in fits and starts as the poet returned to check that what is expressed uses the right words. The white space in and around the poems gives the reader space to pause and absorb the lines. Yet the poems are a coherent whole and do not feel fragmentary. Sluman writes from a place of compassion and acute observation without sentimentality or pity. His poems demonstrate the human need for connection and understanding.

Emma Lee, “Pain Songs” Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press) – book review

In stanza three, we are invited back into the poem, given the directive to take up an awl and produce the dazzling fractures ourselves, split them into smaller and smaller pieces. But we’ve been here before, in the glittering disintegration of the opening stanza, and the speaker pushes a little harder, next issuing a kind of challenge: “try to make a metaphor, like Kafka’s frozen sea within.” Literature, wrote Kafka, is the axe that breaks this ice, what hacks us free of overly complacent stillness, mindless stasis. What Williams here instructs us to take into our arms, its “ponderous inertness” and “wetting chill” that “[frightens] you and [makes] you let it drop” is no longer some diminutive cosmos nor tautly attentive man-eater but something stranger and more frightening: the hidden self.

I just adore the movement into stanza four when, breathless from the cold weight that pressed against the chest, we see what has at last been figured as something truly precious, the closest thing we cannot know, slip from our arms and shatter on the floor. Think of dropping a glass, how you stand paralyzed by the memory of the movement that sent it plummeting and the vision of your shard-filled future as you plot a clear path towards a broom. If I hadn’t, if I had just. There’s no putting a glass back together. Ice may be a different story, to a point, but Williams doesn’t leave us scurrying for a bucket, but lingering over what’s left: the familiar taste on the tongue. It’s a poem about what falls apart (everything) and what we can do about it (nothing) and how, in the end, there is only beauty, only sweetness, in that.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Ice” by C.K. Williams

[Christopher] Wase’s poem for [William] Oughtred is a strange and charming poem, and also a great example of why good literary history requires, as it were, both data and taste — an informed sense of the big picture, but also close reading. Strong data about fashions in verse style, metre and form makes it possible, time and time again, to hazard an informed guess about the likely date and milieu of undated or anonymous material, and also to recognise innovation — who is writing at the vanguard of fashion at any given time (and similarly, who tries to launch a trend that doesn’t catch on). But “big data” can’t provide all the answers, because there will always be people, like Wase, doing something unexpected for reasons of their own.

Without the data about metrical trends in Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I wouldn’t be able to recognise that Wase’s poem is an outlier, and that it surely sounded like one in 1656. The strangeness of the form must have been part of the effect, and part of the tribute. With that knowledge in place, we can at least try to make sense of even the most eccentric choices. Even at the distance of nearly four hundred years, and knowing nothing of seventeenth century mathematics, Wase’s touching poem convinces me that William Oughtred was a remarkable man.

Victoria Moul, Metre, maths and difficulties of dating

In 2011 I teamed up with Orkney artist Laura Drever, I to write poems of the islands’ bird species, Laura to draw them. Our purpose was to see how closely we could capture their presence as part of the living fabric of the place, not so much a layer of occupation as a layer of consciousness. Laura’s freehand line drawings recorded them as they moved around in ones or threes, or whole flocks. For me, sitting on a windy hill, words came individually or in small, airy groups. In my notebook lines are thick or thin depending on sound, or sudden change. Movement and space are everything. […]

This all came back to me when I chanced upon the work of Cecil Touchon, an American painter, typographic artist and creator of long series of print collage. His output ranges widely in scale and setting; one subset of his work, what he calls ‘asemic poetry’, is produced and distributed in book form. These pieces began with pieces of found text that were arranged in some kind of regular form – such as receipts, magazine ads, letters and sometimes poems. He printed these out on white sheets and then, using their structure, internal spaces, hesitations, line breaks and maybe even original font, he allowed his hand to ‘write’ over them in a free-flowing script. Some are written in a cursive, flowing hand with sharp, tall verticals and generous hooking tails. Others show a series of clustered, individual strokes in thick, urgent dabs that tail off like comets. Some are written left to right, some right to left. There are something like punctuation-like marks and accents. The result is something that looks like a poem: we sense a voice speaking to us, with message that we already half understand, and which we can almost, nearly, read.

I love these pieces, not only because – like Laura’s drawings – they are beautiful in themselves. There is this sense of a voice behind the text, of someone, somewhere, having something urgent and important to say; so important that they embedded it in a poem, the most intimate written form. There is a wide range of expressiveness across the collection – some are flamboyant, some are tight and urgent, in form as well as script. Some stutter, are thrifty and self-conscious with their ‘words’. In many, Touchon notes, there are artefacts of the original document. ”I would sit down with the material and begin working and keep working until it seemed I had expressed ‘the moment’, so to speak. At a certain point one comes to the end. At that point I stop.”

Lesley Harrison, ‘weirden’ : the magic and mystery of erasure poetry

Lo and behold. Rather than a “salvaged” poem, I’m actually going to drop a brand new piece here—and there are several pages of stuff just like this yet to be brought into the light. The larger project is tentatively titled Random Walk, and it’s the result of an ongoing immersion in books about AI, neural networks, computer science, cybernetics, and related subjects. As of now, this is the opening piece. And for you prosody-heads, I consider it prose despite its being broken into stanza-like chunks. The line length is arbitrary and determined by margins.

Also, the quoted line is from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Great book.

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 2)

The daylilies are blooming, and they remind me of a poem I wrote back when the rumblings of the present evil were just beginning.

Unexplained Bagpipes

After reading that white-supremacist marches are often led by pipers

A skewer through the ear,
it spits you to the spot
until you suss it out.
It’s unexpected here:

back garden, mid-Midwest
midsummer, -week, and -day.
Ripping the aural chintz
of airborne oldies airplay,

it groans a jaunty grind.
The kids turn cartwheels, smitten.
The sound itself has forgotten
the quarrel it trawls around.

Garish, clownish, bizarre,
still blocks away, it hauls
over your ivied walls
the rack-nerve rumor of war.

Work now. Gather the spent,
blood-spattered peonies.
Daylilies crowd the fence,
desperate. Like refugees.

(First published in Tampa Review; in the book Street View)

Maryann Corbett, Daylilies

In his collected poems, Beyond Remembering (2000), which was published the year he died, [Al] Purdy offers us vivid imagery from the Canadian wilderness around his home. “The Last Picture in the World” describes the haunting sight of a heron, fully at ease in the world it inhabits:

A hunched grey shape
framed by leaves
with lake water behind
standing on our
little point of land
like a small monk
in a green monastery
meditating…

Stillness and presence, the essence of a heron. The image guides Purdy towards the metaphysical:

and it occurs to me
that if I were to die at this moment
that picture would accompany me
wherever I am going
for part of the way

Leaning into the act of remembering, the poet’s words do more than reminisce here; they question the premise that “you can’t take it with you when you go…” And who’s to say that we can’t? I, for one, would like to believe that the people, places, plants, and animals we love most in this life will accompany us at least “part of the way,” when we hop that final train and ride the rails to wherever we’re headed next.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Hidden Histories and National Treasures

Something which seems fairly consistent across cultures, across history is the idea of heron as provocation, whether benign or fearful. In Japan, the crane symbolises peace and longevity but its cousin the heron’s appearance is more mysterious, more ambivalent, tied to spirits, gods, death, a link to another world. White herons are said to appear as someone is about to pass into the next realm.

In Ancient Greece, the word for bird (‘ornis’ / ‘oionos’) also meant ‘omen’. Thus birds like herons were an expression of the Gods’ intent, whether benign or otherwise. In Homer’s Iliad Athena sends a heron as an auspicious omen to Odysseus:

“Pallas Athena sent a night heron; they did not see it with their eyes through the murk of night, but heard its ringing cry. And Odysseus rejoiced in the bird sign.” (translated by Caroline Alexander)

In the novel ‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott, a chilling, gorgeous eco-fable about our fragile and dysfunctional relationships with the planet and each other, the heron is a contested symbol of wildness which destructive forces seek to capture and tame. Arnott’s book contains some of the most devastatingly beautiful descriptions of this hybrid being made of weather and flight. Tellingly, the heron is always see-through, shape shifting:

“Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird.” (Armott)

In Mary Oliver’s ‘Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond’, the bird seems to accomplish what is impossible. The narrator watches the heron take off from ‘thick water’ and feels a sense of infinite scale, knows that there are more things in heaven and earth (and pond) that we might dream of:

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself–

This image is ostensibly hopeful, but the untethering the heron symbolises might feel a little vertiginous too. An un-anchoring.

Helen Mort, Heron as agitator, heron as GBH

I have traveled a bit and have, wonderfully, a little mental cabinet of moments; they lie like orbs in the dark until I take them out into my mind’s light. One such is evoked by this poem by Lola Ridge. I had arrived after a journey to a hotel on the edge of things in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Spread out in front of my balcony were mountains that seemed so close I could reach out and stroke them like a beast. But a deep valley flew between me and the mountains, and up from its depth breezes came, and from around the mountains mists, and I spent a long time watching the show, and felt I could watch forever, or that forever itself was in front of me, and I was the brief show.

Marilyn McCabe, And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain

I am writing this from the Lake District, a few days of borrowed time among the fells — the bracken high and greening over, the becks still loud after June’s rain, the light not properly gone until well past ten and the valley going that deep slate-blue that isn’t quite dark. Walk out late enough, away from the village, and the sky here does the thing it can no longer do over most of England: it fills, edge to edge, with stars. Which is roughly how this fortnight’s three arranged themselves — a poet, a painter and a composer, each caught in the act of looking up, and each finding that to be alone under that much sky is not at all the same as being lonely.

1. A poem to enjoy — William Wordsworth, “A Night-Piece” (1798) — You cannot walk these fells with a book in your pocket and not have it be Wordsworth’s; he is the presiding spirit of the whole district. This poem is the one I always remember on a dark-sky night. A “pensive traveller” is treading a “lonesome path” with his “unobserving eye / Bent earthwards” — head down, going nowhere in particular — when the cloud splits and “above his head he sees / The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens,” the “multitudes of stars” wheeling in their vault. Nothing is added to the man; something is simply uncovered above him, and it changes the walk. It is the plainest account I know of what solitude is actually for: not withdrawal, but the clearing of the eye until more of the world can get in.

Adam Cairns, Three by One

This collection of poems is a response to Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana—sixty-eight sargas comprising over 2,500 ślokas. I have allowed the sargas to become the seed for meditative poems, an inward reflection arising from close reading of the original Sanskrit.

You are the layers of minerals in the rock,
the emerald sea of grass,
the quaking mountain unearthing silver & gold,
all living forms in fright—

ignorant
you are the air in their lungs,
the venom in their throats,

sulphur fumes,
the flowers that carpet the hills,
the sea swelling on a full moon night.

Uma Gowrishankar, After the Leap (Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)

This prose-poem captures what the full collection required me to solve: how to reveal the complicated, aching truth of loving a soul-scorching, malicious mother who caused so much misery when destiny tapped me as her fulltime caregiver.

To create distance between the mother and daughter dynamic, the narrative arc defies expectations by presenting a caregiver’s journey as a story of adultery. In Cancer Courts My Mother, disease becomes a Casanova, therefore, the collection is created through the lens of speculative poetry versus memoir.

Mistrustful of the poetics of dying and bereavement, and determined to avoid cliché, I alighted on a form which eschewed the elegiac in favor of a two-way narrative arc structured like a funicular.

The downward movement, a terminally ill patient’s inevitable decline, is presented as marital peril: a dangerous dalliance. Disease is disguised as an illicit lover — “the dark prince whose wanton seduction has already begun, the sly suitor who will reach the terminus.”

In contrast, the ascending movement is hopeful, told through the sub-plot of fulfilling a last request: “Work miracles,” commanded half-shut eyes. By carefully reversing little green deaths, the poems transform a wish into reality: a full recovery of the dying woman’s cherished houseplants. Caregiving for a harsh, sharp-tongued mother does not come with a script. Neither does outlasting her. What poetry offered was a frame — speculative, oblique, formally controlled — through which the unbearable could be examined without sentimentality. Cancer Courts My Mother is not an elegy. It is a reckoning.

Drop-in by LindaAnn Loschiavo (Nigel Kent)

The avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy (1882–1966) published only two books of poetry in her long lifetime: the 1923 Lunar Baedeker and, in 1958, Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables. Flitting among early-twentieth-century art forms and movements as among domestic ménages and personal tragedies, to us she may seem to slip like a shadow through a Modernist poetic world peopled by more solidly and enduringly visible figures: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound.

In the early 1920s, the poet and critic Yvor Winters, already formulating his own vision for a strictly hierarchical poetic canon, set Loy alongside both Stevens and Moore: “I think Mina Loy a genius.” Yet today we hardly know her. Perhaps we should know her better than we do.

It was Pound who coined a word applicable to Loy’s experimental poetics. Logopoeia, one of three “kinds” of poetry as defined by Pound in his Literary Essays, involves, as Pound puts it “the dance of intellect among words.” Lest anybody remind him that he has earlier instructed poets to eschew such abstractions as “dim lands of peace,” Pound hastens to explain what this “dance of intellect” means. It “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage. . . . It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music.” 

To get some handle on what Pound might mean by logopoeia and other related “aspects” of poetry, we can turn to Loy’s 1922 poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” which first appeared in the Dial. An ekphrastic poem, engaging a work of visual art — in this case an abstract sculpture, completed in 1920, by the Romanian-born French artist Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) — “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” seeks less to describe the sculpture than to accomplish in the medium of language what the sculpture aspires to accomplish “in plastic.”

As Brancusi’s sculpture strips a Romanian folk tale about a golden bird, the Maiastra, to a single fluid, suggestive shape, Loy’s poem, too, consciously rejects layers of poetic tradition, especially the traditional presentation of rhyme and meter as a fixed pattern. These lines are not without metrical sense, but they shift from trimeter to dimeter to single-stressed lines, creating a controlled but undulant surface. Additionally, Loy rejects the closure of punctuation. Emdashes signal breaks and departures of thought, and the poem ends on ellipses, but otherwise the lines hang in seeming suspension on the page, open-ended, as if to suggest the sculpture’s fluid “Alpha and Omega / of Form.” 

Brancusi’s sculpture renders a traditional, linear narrative into this three-dimensional form with no beginning and no end, no edges or “extremities / of crest or claw.” Likewise, Loy resists the narrative impulse, beginning her poem with a non-sentence which extends into a metaphor, anchored by that “As if” of the third line. At the same time, the poem does things in language that the Golden Bird can’t fully achieve in its medium. In language, Loy can invoke associations that come to us primarily, if not exclusively, in language: the idea of the Christian God, for example, and the story of the Immaculate Conception and Incarnation — but also Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and rebirth.

The poem doesn’t tell these stories. Its business is not to have, in the traditional sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like the sculpture, it’s not meant to represent the arc of flight, but to be its “nucleus.” It simply folds these allusions, and everything we might connect with them, into its seamless, undifferentiating shape, and holds them there. 

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Brancusi’s Golden Bird

I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Stephen Claughton, taken from his pamphlet titled The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). The collection in question is thematic in nature, taking a mother’s dementia as its point of departure, tackling some of life’s big issues. 

As a reader, I was especially drawn to this poem by the way Claughton’s use of emotional restraint and understatement serves to heighten its resonance. Much of its power can be found in what remains unsaid by the two protagonists, left to be inferred by the reader. In fact, the supposed closure of the poem’s seemingly circular ending opens out far beyond the limits of its lines.

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Stephen Claughton

Chloe [Yelena Miller] is a good friend and poet. Her second book PERFORATED marks an advance over her first VIABLE. The strengths of the first are still present in the second: an intimate but unassuming voice, an observant tenderness towards self and others, the willingness to broach difficult subjects. In the second book, the personal references widen out into the world. The Italian touchstones are handled with greater range and depth. My favorites in this regard are the opening poem “Pantheon,” which ends distinctively yet inclusively in the way an Italian dialect “relies on the plural/ second person, voi,” and the poem “Etruscan Bronzes,” concludes soberly about the transience of youth:

These bronze figures,
from their height of youth,
artist’s hand concealed
by the smoothing of time,
gaze upon a far-off horizon
long buried.

Jee Leong Koh, Chloe Yelena Miller’s PERFORATED

In the Nineties, when I first started to read poetry, the contemporary prose poem was mainly something British readers might glimpse in translations of the kind of riddling Eastern European poetry that the Cold War had made popular in the West. In 1996, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize, and Faber published her poems in the UK. This new selection, The Acrobat (Faber), translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, includes her Nobel acceptance speech, which argues that “Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know’” […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #45: Angels and Bandages

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

I don’t know if my life changed, but a certain anxiety eased—at least for a little while. It gave me a little more confidence to think I could make a life writing poems. In some sense, it didn’t have to do with getting published, but a sense that being at work in the work itself is what is most worthy. I found an ethic that I’ve tried to hold to for nearly 30 years. The early work is so long ago, I feel like I have no idea—though I think, I suspect, that certain concerns trace through, even though the poems have grown wider in their approach and cares—a poem as ethical form, a leaning toward the philosophical, a need to honor other poems and poets.

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

I had an extraordinary high school teacher who could actually teach poetry. I remember distinctly understanding a poem for the first time—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I simply didn’t know a human could do that in words, and I was desperate to learn how to do so myself. […]

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?

Yes, almost always. My work is most often agitated into being by something I’ve read. I think I’m mostly trying to learn how to think, and the poems are laboratories of a kind, an epistemological laboratory, to find out if I can learn to think for myself the thoughts another person thinks. I’m not trying to answer questions; I’m trying ask them. I suspect—and this comes from 15 years of translating from Ancient Greek—that the current questions are the questions that have always been questions. Not “current questions,” but a currency of questions.

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’m not so sure it’s different now than it’s ever been. I sort of think of a poet writ large as a sleepy watchman at the periphery of…of the knowable, I guess. I don’t think of it as a role, per se. I’m with Emerson when he says, “Do your work, and I will know you.” Poets get itchy in a uniform, and the art itself wants to dismantle any authority a given poet might feel as their mantle. The role of the poet might be to refuse the role of the poet. […]

11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

For 15 years I’ve been nearly religious about waking up around 5:30 in the morning and translating for an hour. It humbles me into the day. For my own poems, I avoid routine. I labor with translation and reading in hopes of being worthy of a poem coming to me—and when one does, I set to work, and stay at work, until it feels done.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dan Beachy-Quick

I was nervous about ushering this book into the world. It felt a little like handing someone my heart and hoping they’d handle it with care. But the response has been so generous that I keep finding myself quietly stunned and deeply grateful. Thank you to everyone who has read it and/or reached out or let me know a poem found you. I’m just so appreciative.

Today I did an interview with Lois P. Jones for her wonderful podcast The Title Drop and she said how open these poems feel. I think that’s because with this book, I trusted the reader with more: more uncertainty and spirituality, more joy, grief, humor, desire, more of the questions I’ve carried quietly. And I think that’s the best advice I can give any poet or writer—write openly with the belief your reader will “get you.”

We can’t control how a book will be received. But we can make the thing with care, release it into the world and trust it finds the people who need it. And mostly, we’ll have no idea if that’s happening…and yet, we write. I think that’s a hopeful act.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Fireworks Are Over, Hope Is Not. . .

It’s easy for a poet to move on once a book is out – after all, most of us write new stuff all the time and a book can quickly become ‘old’ in a poet’s mind – especially if, as is often the case, given that poetry so often creates its own rules, even the most thorough editing misses something.

In the case of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark, I’m cross I mistook a comma for a full stop in the final proof-reading, which meant there is an irritating capital letter at the start of a line that shouldn’t be there; and in the last line of another poem I messed up a tense. Why I did that, I’ve no idea – I’ve read and re-read the poem dozens of times, yet this morning there it was, staring back at me from the page, yelling at me: “You fouled up here, didn’t you, idiot. Your book’s not perfect now, is it?”

As annoying as that is, I can’t allow it to deflect from the business of promotion. I want Poems In The Key Of Aardvark to be read. And there are more than 160 poems in it that haven’t annoyed me yet! Make that, am pleased with and would like others to read.

Bob Mee, PUTTING A BOOK OUT THERE IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE

I’ve just published a new ludokinetic poem, ‘Scenes from a Flit’, on itch.io, the site for independent game creators which is increasingly inhabited by poets experimenting with interactive forms. It’s a poem in which I cast you, the reader, as a thief. You steal, you flee, you hide, via three brief vignettes. It’s part of a broader project, but I won’t go into that now.

What I will say is that I’ve been actively interested in and messing around with games of thievery, trespass, intrusion and so on for a little while. Starting exactly when? I’m not sure. I’ve always liked thiefy characters: you can find a poem about Ishikawa Goemon in School of Forgery, a smuggler in Sandsnarl, and so on. I went to Mexico two years ago to deliver a conference paper entitled “‘Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!’: Simulated Trespass and Intrusion in Virtual Playgrounds”. The basic premise of this paper was that the appeal of trespass is to pull on a thread — to stress-test a system by experiencing first-hand the meaning of its boundaries, what it seeks to hide or apportion. Doing so gives us insights into whether those boundaries might stand to be drawn in some other, better way.

Of course, the consequences of such stress-testing in real life can be dire. I tried to illustrate this in the slides with the ending lines from Rebecca:

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

So we channel our impulses into the unreal spaces of simulational and fantasy media, where forbidden zones almost always contain something which has been unjustly kept from us.

Jon Stone, DIARY / Games of Intrusion

I have long enjoyed the #PoemsAbout prompt that Broken Spine editor Alan Parry runs on Bluesky. He puts a weekly prompt up and suggests that people respond on a Friday. It starts the weekend well. Contributors are also encouraged to comment and support each other, which helps to build a community. If you get into the habit of it, you find that you are often delighted by the quality of the posts. In fact you will soon get to find your favourites amongst the regulars. I did, and have even featured some of them in Sixty Odd Poets.

This month I decided to do something similar myself. I put an #OddChallenge challenge up on Bluesky, Facebook and Substack. It wasn’t a prompt as such. The challenge was to write a poem in the future tense. I got plenty of participants, and will be contacting some of the ones that I particularly like about the possibility of featuring their responses in a Sixty Odd Poets page. This to me seems like a decent use of social media to promote poetry. It also allows poetry to be discovered without the need for a formal submission system. In fact I am considering giving up the formal submission system altogether or at least taking the majority of what I publish from people who I have been able to ask personally, either in real life or online.

I would be very interested to know what other poets and editors think of this approach. I can see that it wouldn’t suit everyone. I can’t imagine The New Yorker following my lead anytime soon. But I think for a hobbyist publisher such as myself it might be a good strategy.

Mike O’Brien, Share Your Poetry on Social Media

She never sold her paintings. As far as I am aware, she never even tried to. She won Second Place in a competition once, and that painting was displayed proudly in her living room with the blue ribbon attached, for as long as I can remember. (When my father passed away two years ago, my brother and I gave that painting to one of his aides, who’d fallen in love with it and later had it specially framed.)

Apart from the occasional competition, though, my grandmother had no professional or commercial aspirations for her work. She painted for other reasons.

Margot Kaplan was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in the early 20th century. As Fascism began to rise in Germany, my grandmother’s parents sent all the male children away. She herself was finally able to escape the country by marrying my grandfather, Heinrich Tuchverderber, at age 19. Together, they left Germany and went to Shanghai, China. The Hongkou district of Shanghai, a “Restricted Sector for Stateless Persons,” was the only place willing to let my grandparents in.

Eventually, Margot and Heinrich found their way to the U.S., shortened their last name to Tuch, and bought a small clapboard house on a quintessential American street, in a quiet suburb of Connecticut. But, as you would expect, both my grandparents remained tormented by physical and psychic pain throughout their lives. Though safely in America—alive and with jobs, food, running water and a growing family—the demons of history could not, would never, be shaken.

And this was why my grandmother painted.

“The only time I’m not thinking about Hitler,” she told me many times when I was a child, “is when I’m painting.” […]

I believe there is real despair within our literary community at this moment. There is fear. And there is a lot of anger. All of this, in my opinion, is warranted. We are at a critical moment of change. And the odds do not look good for us, we diligent laborers who have spent the better parts of our lives committed to studying, teaching, and learning the very difficult craft of writing.

AI brings all sorts of terrible things with it. Data centers that re-shape and damage communities; environmental harm; pollution; increased mass surveillance; the loss of critical thinking; the end of jobs…

But for us, as creators, it also has the power to bring feelings of profound alienation with our work, our passions. Why bother? We think.

Why bother taking a writing workshop with others, when I can just have AI improve this paragraph for me?

Why bother reading closely to understand craft choices and taking notes in dozens of craft books, when AI can fix my story’s problems in under three minutes?

Why bother writing at all, when writing can be so fucking hard, and so fucking lonely, and so fucking disappointing sometimes, and now these stupid fucking machines can do it all for us in literal seconds, and without any of the mental and emotional strain?

But then, like I said, I began thinking about my grandmother. And I began thinking quite seriously about why people make art.

The answer seemed so suddenly simple: We make art because we have to.

We do it because this is how we survive.

Becky Tuch, Q: How do we nevertheless persist?

p.s. Everywhere I look there are faces. Everywhere I look there are chinks in the tin foil inside my windows.

p.s. I shower inside a tiny box. I tie my robe so tight it’s hard to breathe.

p.s. I talk to myself and answer myself and brainstorm with myself about how to reuse empty cans.

p.s. When I find some twine I promise to phone home.

p.s. Of course I am thriving. I’m making a quilt out of plastic bags and leftover phone books. I keep the neighborhood cats fed. I still have my teeth. I still have a library card.

Rebecca Cook, What I Was Going To Tell You

I still believe that as Kay Ryan once wrote, it’s important to stay sweet and loving. I read a post recently here from 2017 and it’s interesting to measure yourself, too, against old blog posts. I guess that’s a gift I’ve given myself, too. In the same post I also quote Robert Bly who said: “I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.” But tenderness is different now too, and my ability to stay sweet and loving has eroded, or at least, transformed — it is thinner and worn and perhaps more real. Thin in the way that certain metals are hammered to wafers, gold, for example. My understanding of it is different. As much the fallout from the relentless of the day job as anything. Unless you’ve worked in the inner city through the aftermath of a pandemic do you even know humanity? :) Well, it’s a thing alright. The proximity to constant affliction And the burnout is fine because it’s real. At first I couldn’t live with the burnout but now I am the burnout. So that changes you and I don’t think I’ll change back, but that’s perhaps a gift too. I mean, I can read Weil now in a different light. Stay curious! people say. And oh, I am, I really am. Just not in the ways the exhortation might imply or indicate.

Shawna Lemay, I’m Just a Soul

I’ve spent most of this year growing plants rather than poems. My garden is the only place I forget everything other than bringing life to the tiny seeds in my palm, and unravelling the mystery of why they won’t do what the seed packet says. I’ve grown Cosmos, Nigella, Calendula and Egrigeron from seed I saved last year. Vegetable wise I’m trying out a new type of tomato Grushovka, which is shocking pink. I’m looking forward to being able to make delicious (and bright) sauces. Padron peppers are starting to emerge and I’m yet to get tired of them, charred and anointed with salt and honey. I’m also growing brussels sprouts, which will please no one in my family but me.

Where I used to lose track of time, to the point of forgetting to eat (!) writing has felt like something I “do” rather something I love. In comparison time in the garden sprints past, with the constant “oh I’ll just do this” keeping me happily trimming, weeding, sowing and planning. This is terrible for my physical health, but a joy for my mind. I’ve not stopped writing, I’ve just stepped back from the submit/accept/reject treadmill that siphoned the pleasure and purpose from my work. Becoming trapped on this treadmill is entirely my fault; the desire for external validation is never far away and despite having a decent amount of work published, it’s never quite been sated. I’m guessing it never will. This is a good thing because it keeps me trying but if validation is the only reason to write, the writing itself becomes of little value, both inside and out.

Am I writing any poems at all?

Curiously I find my poems this year feel like some of the best I’ve made. The short courses I’ve taken with Poetry School have moved away from the nature focused work of the past few years to writing work that travels unpredictable pathways. It’s fun. Alongside this injection of inspiration, having the right diagnosis and subsequent medication had allowed me to access a part of my mind that was firmly shut. I’m exploring the unexplorable. Regardless of the hows and whys, I’m enjoying the ride and feel more creative than I have in a long time.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, If you want me you will find me in the garden

The work has its own desire to connect, and that is something not pushed by ego, social media, or even platforms such as this. Being in front of a number of festival audiences this year is showing me something I don’t have a name for yet between author, text and the inner world of the reader/listener. I’ll say more if I ever find a word for it.

The writing now is slow. It keeps coming, even working two jobs to live, it keeps coming and asks me to sit and wait, to travel, and not to share too soon. I don’t feel I’m sharing this recording too soon, it seems like just the right time. I generally turn down requests to be interviewed or be on podcasts these days, as I feel we’ve slipped into art only being used for extraction capital a lot of the time, and I am an artist and author, and we do not have to accept ‘the way it is’. And yet there’s an urging to find a way to be part of a world in which the new is not what wins prizes, or is hyped and aligned with the extractive narrative, but rather is part of building something true within the concrete reality, something more like a wild, beautiful garden.

John Siddique, Newborn

That’s the thing about yards and gardens. As much as you say it’s yours, as much as you cultivate and claim you control, it’s not and you don’t. And for some of us, this is a form of delight. Several times a week, I place my hand on the door knob and look at my dog Silas, asking him Ready to take a gander? And out we go on our stroll around the 1.2 acres of land we get to live on. Silas’ experience is very different from mine, his senses providing to him narratives to which I’m not privy. I have fingers, so I lift up leaves, bend things back, pry things open. I roll flower buds between my fingertips, seeing the rays of petals all puckered into a center. I open the nesting box and oh, hello there, two Eastern Bluebird hatchlings are nothing but feathers and eyes. I lift pokeweed leaves and oh, hello there, a planthopper nymph side-eyes me as I infiltrate their world of leaf-shade and sap-hunger. I briefly imagine them in my world, paging through a book that’s taking forever to read, answering phone calls about children who want to murder their parents for taking their phone away.

Hurry,
the bird
has forgotten
about the egg.

Sarah Lada, Oh, Hello There

This week: a few scrappy bones, a murderous sandfly, trills that might remind us of birds, subversive puppets, and much more. Enjoy.

There is a quality to the heat this summer that I have started, against my better judgement, to read as mood. It isn’t the heat of a good July — the kind that dries the hay and fills the orchard with wasps and sends everyone, sensibly, into the shade by two. It is a heavier thing than that. It sits on the fields the way a bird sits on a clutch of eggs: close, patient, unwilling to be moved. My garden is barely a garden yet — a square of new turf laid last autumn, the soil under it still builder’s soil, a blank green canvas I have not begun to make anything of. But it looks out onto fields, and between the lawn and the farmland there is a strip of wildflower meadow, and even in this heat the meadow is doing what the meadow does: oxeye daisies gone slightly papery at the edges, vetch scrambling through the grass, a dozen things I am still learning the names of, all of it loud with something at every hour of the day. Beyond it the ground under the far hedge has gone the colour of ash. The buzzards still work the field margins in the long evenings, but low, and without much conviction, as if even they can feel the thermals have turned against them.

To brood is to sit on eggs and keep them warm until something living comes out of them. It is also what we do with a worry that will not leave — we brood on it, we turn it over, we let it heat. The word carries both, and I have caught myself this summer thinking the two meanings have quietly fused. The planet is brooding. It is warmer than it should be, held at a temperature it did not choose, by us; and what is incubating under all that patient heat is not, any longer, only life. It is something closer to grief.

I am wary of writing sentences like that. The register of the ruined planet is a register I distrust, in myself most of all — it flatters the writer, it makes weather into portent, it borrows a grandeur that belongs to the thing and not to the person describing it. So let me stay with the particular, which is the only ground I trust. The papery daisies. The vetch. A blackbird panting in the shade of the fence with its beak open, doing the only thing it knows to do about a heat it has no name for. These are small facts, and they are true, and they are connected to each other and to a hundred thousand things I cannot see, by a web so fine and so total that we have only lately, and only partially, learned to notice it is there at all.

Adam Cairns, The ground has begun to brood

The roses are in full bloom and I accidentally disturbed a fat bumble bee that I think may have been sleeping in the nectar. It was a bit too windy for the insects to be making spectacles of themselves. But I know the solitary mason wasps are hunting caterpillars in the dark spaces between the flowers, under the leaves.

While I was writing this morning a wasp came in the library and buzzed around my head a while. I took a few deep breaths and told myself that she wasn’t likely to bother me. Me, with my unsweetened tea and fennel seeds. It wasn’t long before she got bored of this little room, with the sound of my tapping on the keys, and she left. No need for anyone to dance around with an insect swatter mumbling expletives. I’ve done that.

I don’t know if there is any truth to the saying familiarity breeds contempt. I think that is only true when we want something from the other; we expect something we don’t get; when we see more than we anticipated, or more than we are comfortable with. Familiarity without expectation… I don’t know. Maybe it leads to curiosity. It puts fears in perspective.

The ocean is terrifying. And the cormorants, ghosts of drowned sailors, always pull my rising joy back to the earth. One hand clutching the roses, and the other grasping for the dark and darker blue of the north sea. There is a depth and a width and an understanding that makes an all-too-pure joy seem thin.

Ren Powell, Summer, after its fullness

Will there be, this year, young housemates warring,
screen doors that whomp, wheels grinding gravel?
In this heat, wake us.

Send us street theater, at three in the morning,
mad lovers battling over jealousies, bills,
the whole grand opera.

Watch now in mercy those others, mum
in the iced quiet of their central air,
their curtained sorrows.

Maryann Corbett, On the power of open windows

Summer has started summering, whether we are fully on board with it or not. I’ve spent the past couple days in 90 degree plus Chicago tucked in front of the window AC unit working on some poetry critiques and my own writing, in addition to a couple upcoming dgp books. In between, there are frosty coconut-heavy drinks whipped in the blender, iced tea, and summer treats like strawberries and watermelon. I always feel like summer gets away from me. Or more that it seems like it takes forever to get here, but then slides very quickly away, especially once you hit the 4th of July.

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons.  I often go back to re-read old blog posts–by often, I mean at least two or three times a week.  I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about.  This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”; I haven’t finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.

This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week.  And yes, that’s one of my new year’s aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026).  But that’s the joy of early July–there’s still time to adjust my trajectory.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

This week has seen a number of poems flying back to me from various places they had been sent. I am good now at seeing this as a chance to read the poems afresh to work out what needs changing in order to enhance them. One particular poem had a clunky line in the middle where I definitely knew what I meant, but that didn’t necessarily mean other readers would. I enjoyed smoothing that one. I have also started to change my metaphor so I will set poems to sail now rather than fly. This is more in keeping with my desire to do things slightly more slowly and use my time wisely instead of rushing.

I sat in a sold-out lecture theatre this week to hear Ele Fountain speak and to find out who had won the Cheshire Prize for Literature. I love good speeches and was delighted to listen to Ele’s talk. I admire people who can tell their story well and add value to the audience and Ele certainly did that. I then had a quiet revelation when it came to the announcement of the prize winners – I would have loved to have won. That might sound a little obvious as a thing to say, but what I mean is I would have loved to walk down the steps after being announced as a winner. Gone were the feelings of nerves of being on show and here was a feeling of wouldn’t it be purely lovely to win. I used to sit in audiences and want to be invisible and suddenly here I was fully in the moment. I didn’t win, but I did love this new feeling. It felt like an acknowledgement of having grown into myself, and I rather liked that way of looking at it. Here I give a gentle nod to liking my silvered “really surprised hair” and to the difference coaching, and a change of direction have made.

Sue Finch, A BANDSTAND HAT TRICK FOR A SKYLARKER

Quiet days. Not much coming in or going out (the lady at the post office today says she’s missed me, and I’m looking thin). But we had a terrific party for Mike Bradwell’s Axholme at the Bush Theatre in mid-June, and there’s Penelope Curtis’s The Fall to look forward to in September. So this newsletter occupies a holding place.

Humming along in the background is Reznikoff. His major work, Testimony – originally published in sequential books in the 1960s and 70s, following an early version in 1934 – is a masterpiece of 20th-century modernist literature. Fact. It also happens to be a political book. Charles Simic: ‘It should not be surprising that Testimony is rarely assigned at our colleges and universities these days; it causes too much discomfort to those who prefer to know nothing about what goes on in the world.’ Jena Osman: ‘To shine a light from a different angle, to make you think about what’s there in a different way – that’s the best political work that poetry can do.’ August Kleinzahler: ‘J’accuse . . . Crystalline, documental vignettes – dispatches, really, from the front of American capitalism’s assault on the poor, dispossessed and vulnerable.’ Never previously published in the UK, Testimony will be published by CBe early next year – by far its biggest book to date: large format, 608 pages.

Reznikoff – born in Brooklyn in 1894 to immigrant parents, died in 1976 – was one of the Objectivist poets who first published in the 1930s; in the 1960s and 70s they were inspirational figures for a number of British poets working outside the mainstream. While his work has been translated into Polish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Swedish, not a single book by Reznikoff is currently available in the UK.

Around publication time there’ll be a live reading of the whole text of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London, with anyone who comes through the door welcome to take part. Alongside Testimony, Redstone Press will publish The Sound of the Street, selected poems by Reznikoff presented alongside photographs of early 20th-century New York by Berenice Abbott and others. Much of Reznikoff’s work was not just self-published but printed by himself; both CBe and Redstone are one-person outfits; the publication of these two books is a statement, of sorts.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter July 2026: Reznikoff

I am sick of being enraged. So often I find myself enraged at the way we have fucked ourselves over. After all those years of creative evolution, from the first hand print on a cave wall, all the way up to this brilliant, beautiful ability to share our experiences through art, through literature, and what do we do? We hand it over to people who want to use a set of algorithms dressed up as a robot with a cute name to plagiarise it and spew out something that has the pattern of art, but no human intuition. If it looks like art it’ll do. Pack it, price it, stick it on Amazon, make some content, sell sell sell.

We’ve devalued the act of creativity, we’ve made creativity look too easy. To be creative is to make mistakes, more and more until you grow into it. It is so uniquely human. It is hard wok, hard won.

Alongside the robbing of our own creativity we have created a system in which we spend a great deal of time in pain, and I feel like it’s getting worse. We’ve slowly moved towards a place where the norm of social media – and the media in general – is rage bait and anger and unkindness. The news now isn’t really news, social media isn’t really social.

The incentives all point in the same direction: create conflict, generate anger, feed resentment.

The London Economic

We’ve become so entwined with social media, with subscription plans, with stuff we can’t own, that I feel used. I feel helpless. I feel puppeted by a handful of very rich men with no concept of the actual world, no regard for it, no need for human creation, human beauty. I am sick of the rage bait. I am sick of the grifting and greed.

Yesterday, driving home from taking mum to an emergency GP appointment, I saw a big fat wood pigeon in the road. It was carrying an ambitiously long twig and was struggling with it. A woman driving in the opposite direction didn’t slow down. Perhaps she wasn’t aware that birds at this time of year are still focussed on nesting and aren’t as quick to get out of the way. She sped towards it, glaring at it. Get out of my way, get out of my way I am important, you are insignificant. It felt like all that rage bait and anger and the dreariness of being forced through this awful machine we’ve made for ourselves had condensed down to this point, the point at which a person cannot slow down, can’t bear to add one or two seconds to their journey to allow another being trying to live its life, to get out of the way safely.

I don’t want live like that. I want to live with more kindness, more beauty, more joy. I can only start where I am, look at what I am doing, how I am doing it.

Wendy Pratt, I am sick of being enraged.

I am very serious and ambitious about writing the best poetry and prose I can, by my own standards. Creating appealing posts and the occasional newsletter? My confidence fails and I can’t consistently fake otherwise. When I submit work for publication, that’s a way of saying, “This is worth your attention.” Social media is a version of the same–not a bad message for a writer to put out there–yet ambivalence plagues me. It’s laziness, embarrassment, a preference other kinds of work, a long to-do list, a sense of being undeserving, disliking the necessary selfies and performance of cheer, frustration in advance at the difficulty of attracting eyeballs, and, as I’m occasionally wise enough to realize, avoidance of what fragments attention.

Studying and teaching the poetry of a century ago hasn’t resolved my mixed feelings. Those poets’ success in their own era had everything to do with connections forged in big cities and at prestigious universities–still primary venues to success, obviously. Glamor, charisma, and good looks helped some modernists, too, even without social media to amplify those assets. Having a big readership or critical acclaim has never been entirely rooted in the quality of the work. Time remedies some of that unfairness, but it’s a slow, imperfect process, never mind the unforeseeable ways some writing ages better than others. Modernists taught us how to read their poetry, after all, and exerted a huge influence on literary values for decades after, shaping what people thought was good. It takes heroic effort just to find the strong work that escaped notice in its day, not to mention figuring out how to argue on its behalf.

Popularity influences what gets written in the first place, too. Artists need varying degrees of contemporary encouragement and support to keep making art. One of my favorite Harlem Renaissance poets, Helene Johnson, won some awards but stopped playing the poetry career game before publishing a book, and only produced a slim volume’s worth of verse in her long lifetime–published posthumously. Social media might have helped her sustain literary connections once she left Harlem. I think it’s helped me, living in a small southern town. The internet generally has benefited me, too–what a gift to read literary magazines or samples of them freely online, compared to hunting out print copies in the occasional bookstore that carried them! But it can also demoralize me to insert myself into social media’s comparison machine. Not posting costs me; so does posting.

Lesley Wheeler, Aiming vs. wandering

It is not the process of making the work – that is a labyrinth you must navigate yourself – it is the task of delivering the work, of having it platformed, of getting it before an audience, that I find so unbearably maddening. This is when the exit signs start flashing.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin

If I had advice to offer a young creative it would be: prepare yourself for dead ends, for unhelpful suggestions, for vacuous promises and above all for silence. Expect excruciating, agonising silence. If you do ever receive a reply to a speculative email, a response to an application, a reaction to a submission then get ready for seemingly endless meetings with an infinite number of Steves and Hannahs who will all mostly have their cameras off.

Jan Noble, Nº71 Is it suitable for children?

I searched files of poem drafts for July, and found an underwhelming poem in July 2021. Aha. A basic, I-am-bored-and-nothing-is-happening interstitial self-indulgent poem. […]

It’s been a while since I did homophonic translation. Machine translation is too good and too AI to be useful for adding the chaos factor but I can work more from ear.

So I then subject it to pretending what I’m hearing and transcribing sound by sound is a muffled French. See if I can “overhear” anything vivid. […]

Then I translate back to English and see if I can take this randomness and reassemble towards sense. […]

So now although it is language-as-material-based content, it feels more distinctive and alive than the original. We have multiple people and interactions instead of poet-in-solitude trope. We have particulars and actions. We have relationships to the world and to each other. It is less predictable. You don’t know where the poem is going when you start any given line. It travels. It is more of a wake up exercise but it pleases me now.

Pearl Pirie, Revision

My “Self Portrait as Sandfly” is nowhere near finished. The sandfly in question lives in a particular valley in Lima, and is only active after dark. Its bite is deadly to humans. It took researchers a long time to understand why people could walk through this valley in the day time but not after dark.

The poem isn’t finished because I don’t really know why I want to speak in the voice of this death-dealing, invisible to the eye insect. What do I have in common with a murderous sandfly, that only lives because of the particular climatic conditions of that valley? I don’t know yet – I’m hoping that is what will become apparent in the drafting/editing process.

Kim Moore or Clare Shaw, Self Portrait As Gold Dust, As Glitter Ball, As Magic Carpet…

I tend to believe passionately in any collection right up to the point when the proofs are sent off to the printers. Then I decide it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, want to change or retract everything, contemplate running away to the rhubarb patch at the bottom of the garden where I used to hide as a kid. This gnawing anxiety eats away at me until – come publication day – there are only a few scrappy bones left.

On that note…. happy publication day to my fourth collection with Chatto & Windus, STEPMOTHER!!

For me, the best part of any new literary project is when it exists as concept, unsullied by my attempts to put it into words. I first started thinking about the figure that animates my new book -The Wicked Stepmother – around 2021, and I lived inside the stories I was researching, imagining the lives of real and fictional stepmothers around the world.

When the writing process begins, there’s the daunting thrill of grappling with form and shape and order, trying to structure your ideas in a way that flows. You’re alive and intent, often frustrated but excited too. You’re building something. When I’m at this stage, I feel the kind of absorption I get on a single pitch rock climb.

Then the editing: a mix of doubt and euphoria. There’s always a point in the pruning and reshaping and expanding of a collection where the whole thing feels destined to collapse. That is when the real work starts. When you think the book won’t work, you’re usually closer than you imagine to finding a solution: creating ‘sections’ only to take them out again, revising your starting point, moving towards a different concluding mood.

Helen Mort, ‘Smile’, says the photographer

There are often times that poems occur that might not fit into the current project, and live on their own, however briefly. My book-length projects are so often held within such particular structures or shared tonal elements, anything beyond those boundaries simply can’t be incorporated, and require alternate housing. When my dear spouse headed to Banff Writing Studios in January 2023 to attend a rare writing space beyond the house, I began the sequence of daily poems that became “edgeless : letters.” She was away for two weeks, but I think this sequence took me nearly a month to craft, sharpen, hone. At that point, I was already a couple of weeks into the composition of the poems that became the collection Autobiography, which itself took a little more than a year from start to finish. But here, this particular lyric stretch didn’t fit with those poems, that project, therefore the opening salvo of an entirely different, albeit related, extended lyric structure. With the poems I was building into “Autobiography” I was attempting a further, third, suite of shorter, stand-alone poems, but this sequence required more space, and more time. Much like the title poem of Snow day, this piece required a new manuscript within which to contain it.

The epistolary form has always intrigued, seeing examples over the years by John Newlove and Lea Graham, among so many others, although this sequence was specifically prompted by Robert Kroetsch’s Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), during which Kroetsch wrote daily and dated epistolary offerings around his then-partner, Smaro Kamboureli, visiting her mother in Greece. She journaled her own travels, later published as In the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), a title I sorely wish could have been followed by more literary writing (however brilliant Kamboureli’s critical prose). Kamboureli wrote about going home, and Kroetsch wrote about her being away. Across those two weeks, Christine cemented what would become her third published book, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here], as I remained home with our young ladies. Every morning I looked west, and wrote to her, there. Otherwise, I let her be, attempting not to distract her from work. It was all I worked on for a month, setting all else aside, akin to those six weeks I spent composing the title sequence of Snow day, a couple of years prior (a sequence also begun during the month of January, which suggests a kind of renewal, I suppose).

Daily missives, but composed not as the prose poem as Kroetsch had worked, but something pulled apart, allowing the visual elements of the lyric to breathe. One step, and then another.

rob mclennan, edgeless

I guess holding down what have been essentially two full-time jobs for the past six and a half years hasn’t left me much time to send out newsletters or even to write poetry. But here I am again.

Just three days ago, I finally handed the mantle of director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference to the amazing Mercedes O’Leary Harness. She’s going to do such a great job making the conference even better. I really enjoyed my time at the helm, but starting last fall, I began to really feel the weight of being responsible for two large literary community undertakings. I’ll still be holding down the fort at Storyknife Writers Retreat, and I consider it a real privilege to be able to facilitate incredible women writers having the time and space to devote to their work.

I’m hoping that the gap that giving something up has opened will be filled with my own writing. It’s going to take a bit of recovery time, but I feel the generative urge trickling around under the surface these day and that makes me so hopeful.

I’ve always found that teaching has really lit a fire under my own work, so when I had a chance to teach an online class in poetry for Orion Magazine Workshops, I accepted. I’ve subscribed to Orion FOREVER, so it’s a real honor to be part of their family.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Hello Again!

One of my goals this year has been to send out my work. (Why does “submit my work to the editorial process” sound like a dodgy thing to do? “Send out” sounds more assertive.)

So I belong to a small send-out group, and when our attempt to meet once a month and report our progress seemed a complete disaster, we decided to meet once a week and for one hour hang out on Zoom together and instead of talking or moaning or whatever, to work on our send-out.

This did the trick. I’ve now managed 21 submissions of poems, reviews, stories, and essays. Not a lot, but it’s something. And I’ve had a few things accepted.

First, the on-line journal Eclectica took my poem, “Windfall Apples,” which you can find here (and which I should have mentioned some months ago).

More recently, Bracken took my poem, “Her Honeyed Mask.” Their new issue is fresh off the presses and available here. (And it’s gorgeous.)

Bethany Reid, Where you’ll find me…

I’ve taken a break from submitting my work, to try to break the cycle of anticipation/dejection, to break the spell of maybe. And I’ve been on vacation, so freer to consider myself from afar, and think, okay, what are you, and let’s do something else with that. Or do the same thing differently. Or do a different thing samely. Or quit all together or start something completely new. Or something. The writing game wearies. Yes, I have that new book out, the “One Poet’s Writing Manual,” which is fun, and people have told me they’ve enjoyed it, and those I know well have said it’s like I’m right there talking to them. And I’ve done some presentations and workshops, and have a couple more scheduled. And it’s my fifth book, if you count the two chapbooks. But. I don’t know. I just thought somehow things would be different. At the same time, I’m utterly astonished at what has transpired, what I’ve stumbled into. And at what I’ve done, conjured up, gave a whirl. It’s all very strange, looking back, looking forward, and just looking around. What the hell, man? What the hell?

Marilyn McCabe, strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty

 I’ve been writing a lot, and I’ve also been sending the poems out to various journals. I did that last year, too, and I’ve also got some cool self-pubbed stuff planned this summer. At present, I am 99% sure that these three books will show up before August is out:

• The Other Century: A long-awaited (in my mind) chapbook of poems. This is unlike anything I’ve published before, and I’m excited to share it. It comes close to fiction, but it’s also a kind of collage of found material alongside original poetry.
• A reissue of Travis: A lightly revised but physically redesigned version of my chapbook from last June, marking the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver (on which the book is based).
• A reissue of Interrogation Days (it’s the last time, I swear!): A revised, reorganized, and physically redesigned book marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the 250th anniversary of the US.

These will be priced very cheaply and will be bundled with cool bonuses (miniature collages, bookmarks, free pamphlets, etc.). The books will come out on my Ko-Fi page, which seems a better way of doing this than trying to fashion a “bookstore” page here on substack. 

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 1)

I’ve spent time recently typesetting my own, next poetry book – having decided to go rogue and try this out for myself. 

I realised how blank and bleak I was feeling, facing the prospect of submitting my emerging manuscript into the current poetry publishing landscape. Not that I have anything against any of it, it was just flattening my spirits contemplating the long waits and inevitable rejections. And quite spontaneously, as is often the way with me, I found I’d decided to try something different and (not uncharacteristically!) go it alone.

I’ve anyway always been employed – when I’ve been employed – as an editor. Not of books, of magazines. But typesetting is a familiar and loved process for me. And I found that part of this endeavour delicious. 

I set myself up in one of my sons’ currently vacant rooms, and turned up there for a week, each morning, to work. I felt happy, sitting in that sunshiny window at his desk and large monitor and familiarising myself with my chosen publishing software, Atticus. I also designed a simple cover in Canva. And, eventually, pulled both together into a proof book printed by Bookvault. 

I’m delighted with this experiment, and though have nervousness about shunting the book out into the world, it’s no more so than I’ve had with all my other (published by others) poetry publications. 

Charlotte Gann, A new era?

Mark Melnick offers an insightful essay on book cover design and marketing as the July contributor to Marsh Hawk’s “Chapter One” series. You can see his entire article HERE, but I present this excerpt because his experienced insight can be helpful to many authors:

“It is also important for authors to understand that ‘graphic design’ is very different from ‘art.’ I have worked with many authors — especially poets — who suggest a painting for their book’s cover. Often, that painting is very dense and complex (think Hieronymus Bosch), and the author will send me a lengthy explanation of their reasoning for using it, the meanings and resonances they see embedded in it, and how it reflects the text. Yet this misunderstands the purpose of a cover. A cover is not meant to be an analog to the text. A cover is not art, which is meant to invite introspection and contemplation, slowly over time. A cover is graphic design, which needs to do its job almost instantly — literally in one second. It is emotional, not intellectual.”

To illustrate his points, Mark comments on my and Daniel Morris’ recent and forthcoming Marsh Hawk books. My COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES is forthcoming in 2027.

Eileen Tabios, MARK MELNICK ON BRILLIANT AND EFFECTIVE BOOK COVERS

Rajani Radhakrishnan’s moving, intense No Way Home tells us what to expect from its opening ‘Prologue’ poem, sub-titled ‘the poet as storyteller’: It is supposed to be a story, a journal/ a confession, a tirade –/ but I will start/ with a poem instead.// There’s something about weaving/ through shadow and light.

Later in the poem she writes that the story or series of poems over more than 100 pages will be About a time that wasn’t supposed/ to mean anything, but did./ About big things remembered,/ about tiny details that remain/ in an empty frame/like disconnected parts.

What follows is an examination of disconnection, of a restless journey, both physical and psychological that has drawn me into it, allowed me to absorb the sense of the struggle, poem by poem. Unusually for me, but perhaps appropriately, I read it in order from first to last. It didn’t feel like a book that would give up its elusive secrets if I just dipped into it, reading a poem here and there. She tells us repeatedly that this is an ordinary story but of course it is anything but. It’s filled with the anxiety and doubt, energy and curiosity that we inherit or develop as our lives take their course. It is a courageous exploration, a mapping of where and how we travel as human beings, and in this case why we sometimes have an urge to return, to relive parts of our lives that a piece of us is saying ‘Don’t go there, don’t look back, it’s too dangerous’.

Bob Mee, NO WAY HOME – RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN

If all goes well, Contubernales Press will soon bring forth my new book, Shield of Mnemosyne : a poem-sequence, a daybook reply to the Trumpist attack on the Constitutional order of our democracy. I began writing it in May 2024, and the first three chapters were published by Contubernales in my book Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Irish poet-critic Billy Mills reviewed Parmenides here.) The Shield volume assembles the concluding nine chapters; the whole poem was finished in February of 2026.

This work did not emerge from a vacuum. My focus on making large-scale poetic sequences began many years ago. And this 4th of July, the 250th anniversary of US nationhood, got me thinking back to an earlier long poem – a trilogy, finished on May 28, 2000 – called Forth of July.

The book’s title is a bit of a double pun. “Forth”, here, means not just “the 4th”, but the “coming-forth”. And “July”, here means (to me) not just the month, but alludes to my cousin Juliet, Julie – who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge at the age of 19, in the fall of 1971. On one weirdly playful level, the plot of this humongous poem enacts a kind of Orphic search for my vanished Julie (we were born a few days apart, in 1952). But is it also a kind of spiritual emblem : the “coming-forth of Julie” pushes back against the global spirit of Caesarism and militarism (“Julius” vs. Julie), as the sing-along poet sheds his skin, in the American interior, to commune with William Blackstone, “the man who went to live with Indians” (per the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin – protagonist of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano) – and with Black Elk, and with MLK (Martin Luther King).

Henry Gould, On the Forth of July

The next pamphlet from Headless Poet is in the works and indeed really quite imminent. I’m away next week, but I’ll be typesetting it the week after, at which point it gets a series of thorough proofs before going to the printers. The urgency is entirely self-imposed, and has felt a little perverse at times (life is busy), but it’s good to have a schedule if you’re going to get things done, just as it’s always slightly alarming, to someone of my temperament, just how effective a ‘to-do’ list is.

In Snow Bees, Jeremy Noel-Tod re-introduces the poetry of Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949). Jeremy has been making the case for a re-evaluation of Bowes Lyon’s poetry for some time and it’s been both a pleasure and a privilege to help bring this selection into print: the first to draw on the full range of her work since the Collected Poems (1948).1 The more time I spend with these twenty poems, the more that fact amazes me.

To give you a sense of what I mean, and in lieu of something more considered to come, here is “Starlings: 1938”, from Bowes Lyon’s third collection Morning is a Revealing (1941). One of the striking things about Bowes Lyon’s work is the way in which she brings the same “concentrated skilfulness” to isolated, rural Northumberland and wartime London. In “Starlings”, these two worlds begin to come together. It is a remarkable, densely-packed poem, moving in an unsettling (and, I think, entirely convincing) fashion between the flock of birds and images of destruction without flattening the one into the other. And it does this precisely through a series of unlikely combinations: “glib roar”, “tinsel garrison”, “rose-crazed debate”.

Jeremy Wikeley, Dark news on the breeze

I’ve spent three days working on my LINKS page. When I began blogging (22 years ago) we all had extensive links to other blogs, and to various sites of interest. That seems less common now, but I’m still in the old mindset. This is a problem. 

There are a variety of components to this problem. The main one is that I can be interested in too many things. Being online can be like being on YouTube (Hank Green). So many topics! So many interesting topics! I think I want to see / watch / learn more about … all of them. I want more of this writer, this journalist, this presenter. Lately, this physicist (Carlo Rovelli). 

I want to read all the blogs, especially the poetry blogs. Especially the blogs I used to read. I want to find, again, the friends I discovered online years ago. Now I discover Substack, with all its controversies and all those excellent writers I want to follow. This seems to be close to what the blogging community used to be, with comment threads and interconnections. 

There are lots of blog-like “publications” on Substack. There, you subscribe, not follow. Reasonably enough, some writers request payment for their work. Even some poets! Mostly, though, I find more than enough to read without straining my budget. I can also read about philosophy and politics and artificial intelligence and physics and consciousness till I become . .. unconscious. 

Sharon Brogan, LINKS & reading

Pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I am now aware of three poets at work. I think it was Andrew Neilson that put us in touch (and I\m annoyed I couldn’t make it to Andrew’s do in town a couple of weeks ago. Blame the silly running thing).

Over the course of a few internal messages I’ve been speaking to Adrian Masters. Adrian’s day job is as Political Editor for ITV Cymru, but it was pleasing to discover that he’s also a fine poet. His latest poem in Bad Lillies *is well worth checking out (as are the previous other two). I’ve already told him how much I like the lines

at the sandpaper sound
of a cockerel crowing from an allotment,

at the synthesiser pulse
of fledgling jackdaws.

I especially like the “synthesiser pulse / of fledgling jackdaws”.

And it feels even more relevant as I type, having not long come back from our first go at taming our new allotment space. There is much to dig, much more to do, but I’m glad to have broken some ground on it, and to have not broken ourselves in the process. […]

We nearly didn’t go today. It’s been a long week for both R and me, and I had an attack of the insomnias last night between 12 and about 3am. Why, oh why couldn’t it have been tonight so I would be up when the England game starts?? Oh well. Anyhoo, the point of this is that we did go and we pushed on, but it also makes the poem that follows make more sense to me. I’d asked Adrian for permission to publish a poem form his pamphlet, Accretion, and he said to pick any, so I don’t feel bad about choosing one I don’t think I asked about originally. […]

The whole pamphlet is quite focused on time and gathering perspective. There is very much a long view at play in Adrian’s work that I like and admire. I know and recognise most of what is being described above, the disorinetation of darkness and the early hours, but the clinchers here are the last line of stanza 3 and the final stanza. The way they turn the very human experience into something that adds perspective, provides distance and if nothing else, it adds context

We can’t rail at the night when we’re amongst it in an unintended way. We just named time’s parts, but we didn’t invent it, we don’t own it. I like that. It reminds me that I need to go back to Samantha Harvey’s excellent work of non-fiction (with some fiction in it too), A Shapeless Unease: My Year In Search of Sleep

And on that note, I think I need a nap if I’m going to make it to the football later.

Mat Riches, Nightwithstanding

An attractive quality of these poems is the outsider’s constant searching for self and form. “Mirror” is not only the title of one of Zhang Zao’s most famous poems but also a recurring trope in his oeuvre. Thoroughly grounded in both Chinese and European literature, he seeks “a new tension and melting point,” as Bei Dao wrote in his personal recollection of the author, included in this book. How successful are his sonnet sequences, “Kafka to Felice” and “Dialogue with Tsvetaeva”? The Chinese originals strike as too full of words and ideas, and so lack the pressure cooker of the sonnet form. The free-verse experiments are more interesting, often ranging and strange. One has the great title “Song a Wall Driller and the Ultimate Ear,” but the poem, in fact, pages 179 to 186, are missing from my edition. 

The poem I like best is called “Fly.” It has something of John Donne’s playful eroticism, but also the concision I associate with Chinese verse.

Jee Leong Koh, Zhang Zao’s MIRROR

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretive limitations of writing and of the English language with its incapacity to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. He is the author of the hybrid creative nonfiction collection Without Terminus: untraining an archive (2026), and the poetry collections Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (2023) and Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (2018), both of which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Webster’s work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Obsidian, Brink Literary Journal,  LitHub, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know that I would say that my first book changed my life.  It was a book of poetry that was thinking about black place and black placelessness, the organized dispossession of material and memory.  I think my perspective changed as and after writing it, specifically, I think I became more critical of the limits of the discursive as a response to material force.  My most recent work definitely has the mark of that first book and the strategies I was using, I’d just say that almost a decade later I am now more sure of myself and methods, especially my use of ambiguity, and abstraction.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry by way of the black pentecostal church.  The passionate oratory of the sermons, the repetition within the music, the hum and moan all moved me deeply and marked me in the way I consider sound and breath and return in my own writing.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The length of a project depends, oftentimes I am not always even sure of if what I am doing IS a project.  I am just trying to be present and attentive with the questions that vibrate for me, I’m trying to stay with them, I’m trying to see how they bloom.  Sometimes this becomes a project, sometimes that takes years as it did with Without Terminus.  I’d definitely say that writing is a slow process for me, but the gathering by way of note taking is very much a part of that writing process. […]

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?
There are definitely theoretical concerns behind my writing.  How, as Frank B. Wilderson III asks, “does one narrate the loss of loss?” He asks this with regard to black people, the way our loss exceeds a linear teleology, does not have a resolution as might be conceived in narrative.  So how do I approach this problem as a writer? when many times the impulse is to make something known or visible through language, to bring it into coherence.  This also ties to questions I have about the archive, about how we make claims about the past, what we understand to be evidence.  I don’t have many answers, much of my process is just being attentive to the questions.  

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’m not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture.  I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I’m less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.  

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with chaun webster

Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a poet, artist, and former scientist from the greater Los Angeles area. She has published over 100 poems (including haiga) in various journals and anthologies since her debut in 2014 and exhibited artwork in many locations since 2019. Her poetry has won and been recognized by poetry competitions and organizations such as the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and The Haiku Foundation. […]

Your mother, Deborah P Kolodji, was a brilliant poet and editor. Did your mother introduce you to poetry and haiku? How did your relationship with your mother inform and inspire your life and creative work as a child and as an adult?

Shel Silverstein was my introduction to poetry. To this day, I can remember how sad I was in kindergarten when I smeared my peanut butter sandwich on my favorite book, The Giving Tree. Most of my early experiences with poetry were through Silverstein’s books or school. My first experience with haiku was a lesson about syllable counting in second grade. I don’t recall them mentioning seasons or a cut (kireji). It was a lesson to learn syllable counting with a rigid 5-7-5 structure. Unfortunately, this view of haiku overshadowed my view of this form for years.

Of course, I learned to write and analyze poetry in school, but my creativity towards poetry started with an audition. In high school, I reimagined Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 as a marriage counselor discussing what love is to her patients. This was the first time I deeply analyzed and dissected a poem. In high school, I was focused on various theater productions, bands (I played clarinet), and a robotics team. I loved working with the metalworking machinery. Perhaps this was a precursor hint of my fondness towards sculpture. I also sketched often in my notebooks. After my high school art history teacher introduced me to scratchboard, I was hooked. I was mainly focused on theatre, sciences, and dabbling with my visual art in high school and college.

However, in high school, I was introduced to non-5-7-5 haiku by my mother, Deborah P Kolodji, whose interest in haiku began around that time. We would often play a back-and-forth haiku game. Although I enjoyed playing those haiku games and writing collaborative haiku forms with her and haiku friends, I didn’t take my haiku seriously back then. I would often mention how wonderful haiku was at perfecting long form poetry, since it showed me the weight of each word. One day, I came across this haiku by Kaisanjin, which had a profound impact on me:

one umbrella—
the person more in love
gets wet

Kaisanjin

Until this day, this poem is my favorite haiku. In college, I went to a Haiku Poets of Northern California (HPNC) Two Autumn’s reading and stopped by the Yuki Teikei Society’s Asilomar conference. It was not until after college when I started going to the Southern California Haiku Study Group meetings, readings, and assisted in the bookfair at the 2013 Haiku North America conference. I knew I was hooked on haiku when I started dreaming haiku. It began percolating into everyday life. I composed haiku as I drove. I composed haiku when I walked. It would keep me up at night. Haiku seeped into my essence. After I created a haibun for my sculptural floats, I began to create more haiga. Around this time, I started seriously focusing on my visual arts. I began working with more unconventional materials and created sculptures. I expanded my artistic practice to many different mediums and my writing practice to other haiku-related forms and styles of poetry.

Jacob D. Salzer, Yvette Nicole Kolodji

If the conclusion doesn’t seem to provide us with an epiphany — “I pass,” as a last line, feels at first glance obvious and unsurprising; was “the sentinel of space” really going to stop him? — still, the way the poem gets there is full of interest. Its form, abab quatrains of three pentameter lines that drop to dimeter (and to monometer in that final line), enacts a sonic drama, in which momentum juxtaposes itself with stillness. Everything about the poem’s atmosphere is like the image of those ships in the first stanza: riding at anchor, yet somehow, even in their stasis, “Home-bound.”

The progression of images throughout the poem, in fact, makes its own level of drama. Every particular manages to be simultaneously impressionistic, if not actually self-contradicting, and precise. It’s the reflection of the moon in the water, not the literal moon itself, that wavers and contains the slipping fish. Via metonymy, the thing and its image become imaginatively conjoined, providing a setup for the imagistic paradox that follows, in which the water “makes a quietness of sound.”

“Quietness” and “sound” are seeming opposites, yet we know the true thing the phrase implies. What we know as quiet is not the same as silence, which connotes emptiness and absence or, as in those spider webs on which the second stanza ends, entrapment. A quiet night may be full of small sounds and movements — “strange tunnelers in the dark and whirs / Of wings” — that don’t disrupt the quiet, but are part of its enormous, mysterious fabric. A silent night, by contrast, is the night of your padded cell, the night of the grave.

This imagistic progression, then, after all, earns the poem’s abrupt and initially unsatisfying ending.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Home-Bound

The error that Richard Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene and has continued to make over the 50 years since it was first published, is an error of poetry.  

It’s a poetic error in the sense that poetry is the art form of the metaphor and the mistake that Dawkins makes is one of metaphorical choice. 

The problem is with the book’s central metaphor of humans as survival machines. The idea that we are nothing but automaton shells, vessels for our genes, who are the real survivors. […]

As I said earlier, this error of metaphor has been made by a multitude of scientists and philosophers (from Hobbes and de la Mettrie to Skinner and Turing, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Dawkins himself). But to my knowledge it has not been made by any whose field of expertise the use of metaphor is: poets. 

They, by contrast, have tended over the years to emphasise the dissimilarities between humans and machines, and warned of the dehumanising effects of an over-mechanistic world.  

And in the famous case of John Keats, his argument – taken on in full throat by Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, was against the rationalist, scientific explorations that came with the Enlightenment, and the way they deadened, as he saw it, the joy to be found in the mysteries of the universe. 

His conception of negative capability was a profoundly wise expression of why trying to pin everything down (to box it in) cuts off at the root a sense of wonder in the unknown and the mysterious. And in some cases, the truths hidden but inherent in the illusory. 

His most famous poetic expression of this comes towards the end of Lamia, when the cold, rational, surface-truth of Old Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s identity and thereby destroys both her and her lover Lycias: 

                                               Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: 
We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— 
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. 

Dawkins was able to argue against this view very successfully in Unweaving the Rainbow because he focused on the wonder that is engendered by scientific discoveries in the natural world. But in making this argument, he was missing a central point of negative capability: that there are truths which science is not capable of getting at. There is no reason not to feel a sense of wonder at the truths science can reveal (my view, Keats may have disagreed) and Dawkins’s description of what is happening in the realm of physics and biology when an individual sees a rainbow is a point well made. He considered Keats to be advocating for self-deception when bewailing the gaze of science on natural beauty, but he ignored the possibility that there are truths in the human experience of natural beauty that science can impede. Keats was receptive, and unusually sensitive perhaps, to such truths, and he found the strict rationality of a scientific worldview restricting in his search for them. Poetry, which allows language to dance around its own limitations, enables rather than restricts this search.

Chris Edgoose, Richard Dawkins’s Big Poetic Mistake

Rhetorical
question: why do I find the foods of my first
colonizer delicious? Ordinary fare: steamed
swamp spinach, fried scad, rice. Delicious,
especially eaten without silverware, but not
served to guests or at parties. Our tongues,
taught to swerve from the language of our
origins. Taught to soften the trills
that might remind us of birds.

Luisa A. Igloria, Tapas

Written in the late 11^th or early 12th century, Le Chanson de Roland (‘The Song of Roland’) is the story of an 8th-century Frankish knight, nephew of Charlemagne, who died in 778 C.E. while leading the army’s rear-guard through a narrow pass in the Pyrenees on the way home to France, following a military campaign on the Iberian peninsula.

Considered the oldest known surviving work of French literature, the poem is a chanson de geste (‘song of deeds’), a legendary account of the ‘heroic’ actions and martyrdom of Charlemagne’s knights. The form emerged around the time of the first Crusade, when Christians sought to retake control of the Holy Land, and it continued to flourish throughout the 16^th century.

In contrast with actual events, the poem describes an epic battle against paien (pagans) and ‘Saracens,’ a broad term used by medieval Christians to refer to Muslims. In reality, the Battle at Roncevaux Pass involved an ambush by the Basques, a people indigenous to the Pyrenees, who were retaliating after Charlemagne’s army ransacked their villages and destroyed their capital at Pamplona.

According to the poem, however, the ambush was part of a plot against Roland, orchestrated by his stepfather in league with the enemy. Roland is slain, but his pious devotion to god and king, and his willingness to martyr himself in battle, earns him a place among the angels.

Adam Miyashiro, Professor of Medieval Literature at Stockton University, has described Le Chanson de Roland as “a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.” In his translation, Roland’s war-cry during the battle is full of religious zeal and alarming certitude:

“Paien unt tort, e chrestiens unt dreit!”
(‘Pagans are wrong, Christians are in the right!’)

Roland the crusading evangelist may have been proud to die a martyr for his faith and for his king, but was he merely a pawn in the game? A paladin, or a puppet?

In the 19^th century, Sicilian Opera de Pupi began reinventing these medieval epic poems to explore powerful themes of honor, justice, loyalty, oppression, and resistance, as shaped by Sicily’s own struggle against invasions by foreign armies and imperial powers. Their version of the stories reflected a blend of linguistic and cultural influences, including Byzantine, Norman-French, Spanish, Arabic, and Italian.

Opera de Pupi transformed and subverted the old epic poems into stories of everyday heroes and unexpected victories, in which women could be knights, noble bandits prevailed, and clever peasants became advisors to kings. ‘Pagans’ and ‘Saracens’ were no longer the enemy, and Christians and Muslims both faced obstacles to overcome. Just as the handcrafted puppets reflected a distinctive Sicilian identity, the puppeteers also became artisans of their craft of storytelling and performance.

Jenevieve Carlyn, In the House of Puppets

What makes Marston Moor the best of [Payne] Fisher’s poems […] is its unresolved ambiguity. Fisher fought himself at Marston Moor, on the losing royalist side, and was imprisoned afterwards. The earliest drafts of the poem are straightforwardly royalist laments for the horror of the siege and the disaster of the defeat, in which Oliver Cromwell, who was Manchester’s second-in-command, takes the role of the devil. The revised and massively expanded poem published in 1650, which won such success with Cromwell that it secured Fisher a paid job as his poet for the next eight years, shifted momentum to acknowledge the glory and power of the Parliamentarian success, but Fisher by no means forgot about the suffering of the other side. Long passages describe the miserable conditions of the besieged people in York, their joy at being relieved, and the terrible royalist losses on the battlefield.

It is interesting that Cromwell was so impressed by a poem that is essentially so even-handed.

Victoria Moul, Like a patient Angler e’re he strook

I recently wrote a review of the book Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War.

Here’s a short excerpt:

It’s significant that as I began writing this review about Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a collection of poems reacting to the devastating ecological consequence of war, that our nation was again engaged in a new one. Rockets and drones were taking thousands of human lives, but also leaving lasting damage to land, water, and atmosphere. It will likely be decades until we understand the full extent of this war’s human, political, and environmental cost on our world.

You can read the whole review at Consequence Forum Substack here.

Grant Clauser, Review of Ecopoetics War Anthology: Convergence

Thinking of John Berger and his thoughts on the male gaze (I’m sure he thought we’d be well past bringing him up on this subject by now), I took And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, off the shelf. What a lovely thoughtful book that has been. Poems are nearer to prayers, he says. And, “Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” He says, “The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”

Shawna Lemay, Art’s Power to Change You

Stars curl
and spiral

this night

O the sight
of all that

blue
and red
and white

all that
bursting

all that
fire

all that
might

Maureen Doallas, The Flag on the Fourth of July

A couple of weeks ago I encountered this poem by “Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian” poet Mandy Shunnarah thanks to a Facebook group called Read A Little Poetry. The poem has stayed with me, and I’ve been thinking about why that is and why it speaks to me. […]

“It’s not Palestine / like old buddy, old pal” is a great line. The choice to end two lines with “Palestine” and “Falastin” — almost the same word but not, which is the point. I’ve had Mo Husseini’s extraordinary essay A letter from the margins on my mind since I read it, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the name Palestine and the diaspora experience he describes.

The second stanza is where the poem really tugs at my heart. My grandparents were immigrants too, and I remember my grandfather’s struggle with certain English words that never emerged the way he wanted. (“Sheet” was a particular bugbear.) My grandfather spoke seven languages, which was amazing! but he knew his English was accented.

I think of how my mother, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Prague in 1936, chose short, simple, all-American names for her kids, especially for the three sons who were born to her first. I think about the tensions between assimilation and remembrance, about the old-fashioned or “foreign” Jewish names that I see now mostly in cemeteries.

The poem asserts that “only an American” would choose an aspirational name, one they themselves can’t easily say. I recognize that sense of leaning toward the future even at the cost of generational disconnect. My family’s immigrant story is different than this one, but they rhyme, as it were. There’s something tender for me about that. […]

Against all of these backdrops this week I encountered this beautiful essay by Jennifer Elise Foerester, a member of the Mvskoke people, shared on FB via the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

She begins:

What if we listened to each other in the language of poetry?
Poetry is a language of deep listening.
Listening to each other in this way would be a listening that does not demand an answer, a translation, or defense; it would be a listening that acknowledges not knowing, that does not preclude the possibility of new perspectives.

Jennifer Elise Foerester, Beyond The Obvious

I love the idea that when we listen to each other as to a poem, we cultivate a spirit of radical welcome. I love the idea of poetry as a language of deep listening — an increasingly lost art in these polarized and angry times. The FB conversation I saw about Shunnarah’s poem was pretty polarized and angry. I didn’t experience much readiness to listen there.

I get the anger. (I really do. I’ve shared a few very angry poems of my own, of late.) But I want us to be able to listen in a way that both upholds our own truths and keeps us open to the truths of others. I don’t want to respond to poems with defensiveness; I want to cultivate openness. In poetry, as in spiritual life, multiple things can be true at the same time.

Rachel Barenblat, Two poems and a dream of America

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet.

When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in solitude and the better part of her middle age in South America with the woman she loved for seventeen years, who had taken her own life three years earlier.

Across their stations, across their age difference, across the abyss of possibility between their era’s parameters of permission, Elizabeth and Alice fell deeply and enduringly in love — a love that comes abloom on the pages of Megan Marshall’s delicious biography Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (public library).

Soon, they were beginning each day with a ritual refrain: “Good-morning I love you.” The “blue blue blue” of Alice’s eyes became the sky of a new world shimmering with new life. More poems poured out in a spring than had in a decade. They swam together in the Galápagos, admiring the flamboyance of flamingos, and in the Greek Isles, admiring the poppies and their thousand shades of red. Whenever they were separated by Elizabeth’s itinerant life as a public poet, she sent Alice “love — housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull” and carried her photograph in her breast pocket. She revised her will to leave everything except her books to Alice.

After five years together — years of extraordinary creative vitality for the poet, but also years of savage struggle with alcohol — Alice, exhausted by Elizabeth’s increasingly out-of-control drinking to the point of collapse, met a young man who soon proposed.

“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” Elizabeth told her in a touching reminder that the deepest measure of love is wanting the best possible life for the other person. But she was heartbroken.

She coped the way all artists do.

What began as mostly prose became, seventeen drafts and several titles later — “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” — one of the greatest poems ever written […]

When she learned that Alice had decided to accept the proposal, Elizabeth was devastated. With the helpless vulnerability of love laid bare, which neither pride nor prejudice can touch, she wrote to her:

I DO want you to be free, darling — that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you… You can always have me back if ever you should want me… truly.

And then she sent her the poem.

Nobody knows what beckoned Alice back — the poem, the way a badly sprained ankle signaled Elizabeth’s fragility and made Alice shudder at the thought of losing her, or simply the inexplicable gravitational pull of love that eludes, always eludes, theory.

“I like being with you more than anyone else in the world,” Alice wrote to Elizabeth that summer.

They remained together until death did them part — one awful October evening, a cerebral aneurysm left Elizabeth’s body for Alice to find on their bedroom floor.

Maria Popova, The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

Whatever else we might do in our lives, death is the thing we all will do. Most of us would rather not think about that. Here, then, is where the poets step in. Our readers may recall, for example, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which takes death’s inevitability as its subject. Tennyson, the laureate, speaking for a country and a culture, asks the very question nobody wants to ask: “How will we die?” For her own part, Emily Dickinson takes the question closer to the bone. She considers not how a culture, a generalized entity, might think about mortality, but instead, how she herself, an unrepeatable human I, will die. What, she repeatedly wonders, will that actually be like? […]

In sequence she describes the “Funeral in my Brain” as an entirely auditory experience, nightmarish perhaps particularly for the claustrophobic among us whose recurring bad dream of live burial the poem encapsulates. The speaker, confined in her viewless coffin but entirely awake, hears the tramping feet of mourners, the monotone drumroll of the church service, the creaking of boots as her coffin is lifted and carried to some solitary place, where she finds herself abandoned — “Wrecked, solitary, here” — for eternity. “Here” all sound stops; here ends the poem, presumably.

But at this point we should stop and remind ourselves that the public-domain version of the poem we’re reading is the one that appears in Poems: Third Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1896, ten years after Dickinson’s death. Todd and Higginson clearly agreed that dear Emily could not possibly have meant all those em-dashes, but also that she could not possibly have meant the poem as it appears in her manuscripts, with a final stanza beyond the one given here — a stanza that changes everything:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down —
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then —

In this original and necessary final stanza, the speaker, like a person being hanged, feels the “Plank in Reason” break beneath her. As the poem ends, on an inconclusive em-dash, its thoughts cut short, its speaker drops utterly out of “knowing” into the unimaginable, timeless, silent mystery beyond. It’s a terrifying prospect, that moment when “knowing” ends: the moment when the self stops being the self, or at least stops being sure of being the self, or of anything at all.

Yet as a restoration of the poem in its wholeness, this true ending offers a corrective to the nightmarish sense of being buried alive, on which the expurgated version of the poem ends. Death in Dickinson’s vision is not a desert island, a solitary shipwrecking, but something far stranger, outside the bounds of human knowing. If it’s a terror, it’s also a liberation and a darker, wilder hope, for which human language, in all its knowing, has no word.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

if you whisper your truths,

they’ll disappear, he’d say, so he never whispers them –
and when he does speak, his voice is the wild thud
of trees falling oceans from here in cool shimmers

of rain, in the hot curl of asphalt, in all the time needed
though there’s so little now to do, and he’s prayed deep
into the hole of his aching, but that’s not how it ends –

Sam Rasnake, Some Last Things

This week: a ball and some grass, the uncertain horizon, ghost metaphors, the film of familiarity, and much more. Enjoy.

On this morning’s walk I stopped
to look at a shattered tree trunk
in a sunlit clearing in the woods,
the ground carpeted with fern and ivy,
an audience of light seeking trees
circling it, as if some kind of forest magic
had just happened there, some rite
or ceremony I had only just missed.

Whimsical? Or perhaps just imaginative?
All I know is, in that moment I was my own
blessing in the world, my own giver of gifts.
I must remember this. Stop. Look. Breathe.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Blessing

I am astounded by how much rest I need after a weary semester of teaching two Eng 112 classes on top of my normal work hours, fighting an English department’s compulsory AI use (anyone want some AI-generated sample essays in your course materials?!), publishing seven spring books at River River Books and bookselling at AWP, while parenting a tween and a teen and navigating relationships and small business taxes and—yes. All of it.

Conversation with my partner yesterday:

“I have been so exhausted.”

“It’s always like this for you, your first few days. You need to unwind.”

To resist means to soften into the powerful proposal of thriving right now. Of not waiting for permission from a toxic culture that blocks justice and moves from a spiritually deficient place. […] One day I hope we can all deprogram from the lie that rest, silence, and pausing is a luxury and privilege. It is not! The systems manipulated you to believe it is true.

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

The first full day of my residency was also the first day of my cycle, and the gift of only caring for my body on this day was just—oh, indescribable. I took naps. I read in bed. I took long walks in the pine woods. I ate half a melon on the veranda while reading more poems (Susan Briante’s new and selected 13 Questions for the Next Economy, rob mclennan’s The Sentence of the Book, Rest is Resistance—SO. GOOD! Also Sei Shōnagan’s The Pillow Book in the evening, and some Hildegard von Bingen while making coffee in the morning—variety is life!). I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) in the evening while drinking wine in bed. I watched 12 deer in the evening field. I tried to write, and oh, it was not happening—the essay I planned on working on, the poem notebook. “The best thing you can do for your writing is something else,” I reminded myself. My first night, I started reading Charles Wright’s large collected (not complete) Oblivion Banjo, which daringly opens with “Homage to Ezra Pound.” I took a walk in the pine woods and was drenched by a downpour, despite the weather saying it wouldn’t rain—don’t trust technology. “The rain waters the beans, and it waters me, too,” writes Thoreau in his journal. I think of this line all the time. I didn’t even take a shower that evening, I was so soaked and washed by the rain. It felt a little like a baptism into the woods and rest.

I’m astonished at how empty I am—how much I need to fill back up. Truly, our bodies are not factories, but flesh and blood and soul.

Han Vanderhart, June Residency (at Weymouth Center) & Rest

When you have worked with a group of people once you get a real flavour of what else might be fun to do. I felt particularly excited at the thought of working together to create a group poem. This would be an even more dynamic way to celebrate National Poetry Day together because we would then have our own poem to share on the day itself.

In preparation for my visit I put together a set of my own poems on this year’s new theme of ‘Wonder’, and thought about an appropriate writing prompt. This time I wanted to do away with pencil and paper and stay in the moment whilst we were sharing creative thinking time, so I decided to record the offered responses. With the group’s permission I recorded what they were saying in response to different mini prompts. I then took the recordings away so that I could listen and see how the poem itself would emerge for reveal typing up. I discovered that three poems were emerging and the main one was fully formed itself in the voice notes. I am so looking forward to recording it with them in October.

As we gathered together this time, I thoroughly enjoyed watching everyone settling in.  Anthologies of poetry were brought to the circle as well as poetry journals and individual poems. I felt lucky to be invited back to this creative community. This small group made up of lovely individuals is a wonderful place to be. It is enabling me to hear the poetry sets I put together with new ears. It brings the joy of spontaneous conversation and laughter. It is one of those spaces that is fully in the moment.

Sue Finch, DONNING THE T-SHIRT

Over the weekend I realised I’d missed the deadline to apply for some work I’d have loved to do with the Poetry Library, earlier this year were several residencies I drafted applications for but couldn’t finish in time… It’s a particular quality of gutted when it’s not a case of not being picked, but of not even managing to get your name in the hat.

And as increasingly it’s my peers who are the recipients it feels a little like missing the bus and then spotting my mates grinning together in the top seats as it drives past.

What is there to be done? Obviously not sulk at home or get jealous and bitter – even though I’m gutted I don’t want to cultivate that within me. So it’s a case of being gentle with myself and of practicing sympathetic joy, a concept I first came across as compersion back when I was practicing Polyamory.

What is sympathetic joy? Put simply it’s feeling happiness for the joy and success of others, even when that success is something you wanted for yourself. It’s rerouting your thinking from ‘I wish that was me’ to ‘I’m so pleased that person/poet/friend is getting to take advantage of this opportunity that’ll be really great for their development’.

But it’s more nuanced than just giving yourself a different script; there’s work there in acknowledging your disappointment and allowing yourself to grieve a missed opportunity, and in working to connect with the positive emotion and feeling behind the sentiment you’re cultivating: it’s not enough just to say the words, the meaning comes through embodying that position.

And the other thing? When I stop to think about it I am actually pleased for these friends and peers, it’s not that hard to cultivate positivity for them because it already exists – I like these people and I’m glad they’re benefitting from these wonderful opportunities. And when I acknowledge that, it feels better inside me too – it counteracts the gutted.

I actually suspect this kind of thinking and practice is really useful to cultivate as a writer full stop, not just for someone in my position. It goes hand in hand with the understanding that being in creative spaces isn’t about being in competition but in conversation with each other, and celebrating each other’s successes alongside our own; the arts space is so special because of the multitude of voices and perspectives it contains, and when any of us are benefitting then it’s bolstering the community and landscape as a whole.

Rachael Hill, Missing deadlines and practicing sympathetic joy

For years Dylan has toured constantly, and he has for decades refused to play a show the way you would expect if you were a fan, casual or otherwise. I have no idea whether this was a conscious plan with a long term objective, or innate rebelliousness, or something that he did because he wanted to. Probably some people know, he has probably talked about it, but from my perspective, it just seems like a fantastic mystery.

I won’t go on and on. The show was transcendent. Mostly what I felt was relief. I wasn’t emotional, mostly, though at times hearing him sing reminded me that so many things in my life have happened, and now are gone, and his music was there all the time. This music was not about him. In a way, anyone could do what he did, which was to get up and not to depend in any way on his celebrity, his history, his Dylan-ness, but just to make a space where we could experience something singular. Anyone could do it, but very few can. And that is the difference.

His performance reminded me of what I believe constitutes artistic integrity: if I can ever create such a space (in performance or otherwise) with poems or music, I have not wasted my life.

He was in a cloak, and he cloaked us all in mystery and duende and mortality and timelessness. The only songs I recognized were All Along the Watchtower, Trying to Get to Heaven (a great song on Time Out of Mind), and the closer, Every Grain of Sand. The band was absolutely perfect: they play exactly the way I dream a band of mine will someday play, the sound I have heard in my head a million times. Bass locked down, two guitarists just holding it down with the absolutely perfect edge of breakup natural tones, playing only what is necessary, drummer also locked in, Bob on keys and singing. It was dark on the stage and there was no possibility of seeing his face. But he was there. When he played the harmonica I felt a great wonder in my soul. He is the only one who can play like that, and it sounds just like it did from the beginning.

Matthew Zapruder, A Great Witch

Picture this: a little cockney, looks like trouble, a sickly, druggy type, abroad for the first time, too long holed up in a cheap pensione, hurls a plate of pasta into the piazza and it all kicks off.

You’ve got the image. You’ve seen it in the newsreels. There’s a football crowd. Probably. Water cannons. Possibly. Plastic chairs thrown in foreign town squares. Fat, bald blokes taking swings. It’s ugly. There is a collective national tutting. Commentators say it’s a disgrace, headlines: The English Disease, there is outcry, a blight on our nationhood. England away. Love it.

The incident I describe in the opening paragraph didn’t take place during a World Cup or have anything at all to do with football. But it did happen. In 1820. The little cockney in question, a poet, one John Keats. OK, so he didn’t exactly chuck his spaghetti and start a riot but he did scrape the contents of his dinner plate from a high window onto the Spanish Steps in Rome and it caused consternation. He made a scene. He was a trouble maker. I mean he was brought up above a London pub, he got into scraps in the streets as a kid, was disruptive in class. He was a trouble maker in the best possible sense. He may not have been one of the lads but Keats, oh Johnny Keats he was a geezer.

The World Cup is upon us. You may be doing your best to ignore it. I tried but slowly it’s reeling me in once again. But this year something is off. Perhaps it’s the disturbing rise of nationalistic anger away from the stadiums that’s making me uneasy about participating in the pageantry. Football was always more about belonging than it ever was about jingoism. It was about rooting for the outsider, cheering on the underdog, coming together, celebrating. Yes it got messy. Sometimes it got very messy. I’ll admit I rather liked it when it did. There were times when I got carried away. But that’s poetry, right? That’s what poetry is supposed to do, it’s supposed to carry you away.

Let’s get this straight. I never liked sports. I’m not a sporty type. I dislike competition in general. But I adore football. Or I used to. It was a love affair, a love affair that occasionally turned toxic. I got picked for my school team (once), turned out for a local league side (twice) and played every Sunday for the Cubs where the coach employed a ‘turn up and you’ll get a game’ strategy. I liked his approach. I still like this approach. This is how we make poetry. This is how Keats made poetry. He just turned up, got a game. He didn’t have an expensive education, specialist training or all the fancy kit. You don’t need those things. Just a pen and some paper. A ball and some grass.

Jan Noble, N°68 A game for poets

ELSEWHERE, in a parallel proximity, a triple-tap. The last strike coming a moment later. Just as souls are rising through the dust cloud. The uncertain horizon conflates macabre and paranormal. Reality is the gate booby-trapped at the hinge.

ELSEWHERE, words echo like tambura notes. An unresisting background resonance. The idea that the earth has been helplessly rotating from the beginning’s beginning, recalibrates meaning.

ELSEWHERE, thousands of flecks of light rise like dancers to create new constellations in the night sky. Heads gather themselves, with their feet and waists and hungry mouths, into waiting parentheses.

ELSEWHERE, the day itself is a disquieting monotone. The monsoon sets up percussion and string. Rain is a pendulum in motion. Silence slips into wetness and reflection. Lines are wheels in revolution. Again. Again.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, That which we call a drone by any other name

From April through September of last year, I was corresponding with a poet from Iran who’d asked to interview me. Given the current situation and the fact that I know nothing about the poet’s situation, not even whether or not they are still alive, I am not going to name them here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions they asked me since the beginning of the US-Israeli war against their country, since very few of them had any direct relationship to my work as a poet or to poetry in general. Still, they were all thought provoking, often leading me to articulate things I’d never really thought about before and that I think are worth sharing. Rather than work those answers into new essays, though, and out of respect for the poet who interviewed me, I’m going to preserve the Q&A format and publish my answers as I originally wrote them. You’ll understand immediately why I’ve decided to start with the second question in the series. Looking back, it seems especially prescient.

Q: “I strongly agree with Kafka’s statement that ‘war, in its first phase, emerges out of [a] total lack of…imagination.’ How do you view the main source of war?”

I’m not sure how to begin to answer this question. Since I have never—and I am grateful for this—had to live through a war, I have never been forced to confront face-to-face what it would mean for there to be people in the world who have defined me as an enemy who does not deserve to live. Even as I write that, though, I realize I have begun to formulate an answer. As my use of the word “defined” suggests, I believe lethal violence is rooted in a quintessentially imaginative act: the proactive imagining of another human being or group of human beings as nonhuman and therefore “killable” with impunity.

I have never believed that the default human stance towards others is to see them as so fundamentally, essentially different from ourselves that we also see their lives as inherently less worthy than ours; and I guess I do believe, therefore, that rendering someone “killable” requires willful, proactive effort. Even killing in self-defense requires this imaginative act. If someone is trying to kill you and killing them is the only way to save your life, you have to believe on some level that your potential murderer is no longer as fully human as you are and therefore no longer has the same right to live as you do.

I have never been through military training, but I remember walking to the post office in 1980 to register for Selective Service. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the possibility existed that then-President Jimmy Carter was going to reinstitute the military draft in response. He activated Selective Service registration in preparation for that possibility. I was eighteen years old. As I walked, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be trained to kill people I had never met and had no reason to hate. I couldn’t do it, but I knew that, if I ever were drafted, that’s what I would be trained to do, and the thought of what that would do to my humanity terrified me. I would never have been able to articulate it this way back then, but I was struggling with the question of whether and how I could resist the the militarization of my imagination.

Implicit in what I think you and Kafka mean by “a total lack of imagination” is the optimistic belief that the imagination is an inherently good and humanizing thing. That’s the way those of who are artists tend to think of the imaginative capacity out of which our art emerges, but I think we miss something crucial if we define as an absence a world view that is so diametrically opposed to our existence that the people who hold it are willing to go to war with us. I also think that defining their world view as an absence of imagination merely inverts the hierarchy that organizes how they see the world, placing ourselves on top instead of them.

If someone is indeed trying to kill you, though, if someone insists on prosecuting a war of aggression against you, you may very well have to kill them first in order to survive. I just think it’s important to remember that they’re not trying to kill you because they lack imagination, or because imagination has failed them. Rather, they are trying to kill you because of what they have imagined you to be, and they may very well give you no choice but to accept that nothing you can do will change their minds about that.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Source of War

i cease to sleep. i build the robot. i do not
want the robot but here it is. it makes
all the promises i do not want it to make.
it says, “we are gods.” my eyes well up.
the birds scatter into the dark hills.

Robin Gow, building the robot

Now that I’ve given up (temporarily?) the thought of getting a collection published, I’m going through my ‘collections’ and adding back all the poems I edited out. Poems that were removed because they weren’t ‘good’ enough, there wasn’t enough space for them to be included in a realistically publishable book, they retold a story or touched on a similar theme already established or they just didn’t quite make the cut. Poems I love, that tell the story I want to tell, capture the time the collection is about. Poems that deserve to be read, if only by me again. 

I’ve found poems in my first collection, poems in my Retired Poems and Spare Poems folders and in old versions of the collection that were lost over time and brought them together. I’ve printed the first set out, 160 pages. Crazy, I’ve forgotten so many of them. Rereading, stepping back into those moments is a wonderful way to waste a rainy afternoon. The pubs that I visited, people I’ve lost touch with or just lost, solo journeys I took, times before I was a partner, a mother, my youth, my inexperience. My glory days merging into real life. 

I’m boring so at the moment I just have them separated into the Scotland poems, the Finnish poems, the love poems. There are probably other exciting themes I haven’t delved into yet like My Childhood. The themes are so loose which allows me to collect more poems together. I’m not looking for something sellable, just a version of how I see my life and my work. It feels like a biography or another diary. Between my journals, my writing notebooks, my poems and their drafts I write so much. I’ve been writing obsessively for 30+ years, and it piles up.

Oh, how I want to edit some of the ones published in my first collection. My style has changed a lot. I used to love piling on the adjectives. I probably still do, I just hope I’m more subtle. I’m making notes on the print-outs, but I’m unsure if I’ll change much. I love to edit, but these feel like they should stay in my old voice. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just not me anymore. 

Gerry Stewart, Collecting the Collections

Today is the birthday of my friend Kathleen Kummer. After several falls, she is now very frail and housebound.

Kathleen and I met on a writing week with the poet Lawrence Sail at the beginning of the century. She had lived and worked in the Netherlands. We became friends. I visited her in Dorchester and in Devon where she moved, aged 79, to be nearer her two daughters.

Kathleen had a body of work when she moved to Devon and sent a manuscript to Alwyn Marriage at Oversteps Books. They published her debut collection Living below sea level (2012).

I am deeply grateful to Kathleen for our friendship and our poetry connection. Today I’m posting her poem Birthday Party, showing her empathy and eye for telling detail.

Fokkina McDonnell, Birthday Party – poem

I’ve been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don’t like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don’t become a wandering tangent where I can’t easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I’m going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it’s time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, “A Song Both Familiar and Strange.”  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it’s done, but before I started last week’s revisions, I thought it was done. […]

Last week I even made some poetry submissions. In some ways, it’s easier in the summer when many journals aren’t taking submissions. In September, when most journals are “open,” and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

I’m thrilled to share that poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” appears in Whale Road Review Issue 43, a summer issue full of sharp, resonant work from writers I deeply admire.

One of the things I love about Whale Road Review is how intentionally they support their contributors. Each author page includes a direct tip link, so if a poem or essay moves you, you can thank the writer directly. It’s a small gesture that makes a meaningful difference in sustaining literary work.

If you’re curious about the editorial vision behind the journal, you might enjoy revisiting my earlier conversation with them: My interview with Whale Road Review. It’s a look at their ethos, their approach to submissions, and what they hope to champion in contemporary poetry.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” published in Whale Road Review + NO FEE call, Deadline: 6/15/2026

I wrote this on Arran, thinking about previous times on a variety of islands, and only once I had committed fully to this title [“The Misty Isle”] did I realise that it is the vernacular name for the Isle of Skye. In this poem, the Isle itself is Britain, and the mist is manifold. It represents, metaphorically, the mysterious sub-Roman era of British history, which has proved a fecund ground for my imagination. It is also, at its essence, true mist, to coat the landscape, obfuscating objectivity and creating endless interpretations of events which, were you to investigate yourselves, you would see have a huge swathe of differing opinions around them.

Drop-in by Hadley-James Hoyles [Nigel Kent]

Third person gives objectivity, distance, observation. First person gives subjectivity, close range, self-analysis. Third person can seem judgemental, first person can seem confessional. Using the same words except for his/my or I, here are both versions of the poem.  […]

While the man in the first version comes over as seedy and pathetic in his loneliness, which is the way the narrator wants us to see him and which may not be accurate, the narrator of the second version, because of the intensity of his self-awareness, becomes arrogant and much more menacing.

Maybe the second one works better, but it was an either/or choice and, for right or wrong, I plumped for the first, objective take on it. Perhaps it’s just an example of the way we need to step back, ask ourselves ‘what if’ I altered third person to first, or the other way round.

Bob Mee, OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? WORKING OUT WHAT’S BEST

When I became a mother, I spent much more time in the house than I ever had before. On one of the endless nights of early motherhood when I was breastfeeding my daughter, I felt a wave of the most visceral panic wash over me as I realised I could not leave. I was tied there not just by the practicalities of breastfeeding, but the reality of love, which was as visceral as the panic I felt in that moment. I wrote about this in a poem in my recent collection The House of Broken Things called ‘Dear Wordsworth’: “I did not know / what horror love could be, how it keeps you / tied to one town, one house, one room, / one chair, one life”.

Later in the book I wrote about women who were found murdered and remain unidentified in a poem called “The Black Notices”. These women were found in the places women are often found, in bodies of water, in wasteland, in car parks, in forests. But once upon a time they lived in a House, and for whatever reason, they were not safe, they were pushed out, or driven out of a house, or they were kidnapped or lured away, or tricked on the way home, and now they are nameless.

The figure of the House and our expectations of it keeping us safe continues to haunt me. Writing The House of Broken Things has not exorcised the contradiction of the House from my mind or my desire to make sense of what it means to live with another – the gestures of love and the tiny acts of violence we inflict on ourselves and each other, and then if we are lucky, repair.

I’ve been doing quite a few readings recently and most have been followed by a question and answer session of some kind, and most of the interviewers (all apart from the one who didn’t bother to read my book in advance!) asked what the House was, what it represented to me, why I wrote multiple poems under the same title.

It’s taking me time to work out an answer that is in any way articulate, and part of the answer at least is that I don’t know, or I don’t know yet, or I am only beginning to know now. I know that the House is both the house of my childhood and the house of my motherhood, it is the house where I was mothered, and it is the house of my giving up, and the house of my enduring, it is the house of violence that I lived in once, and it is the house of my marriage, it is the house of loneliness and it is the house I escaped to, and I didn’t know until I finished writing this collection that I’m carrying all of these inside myself, that time means nothing inside the House.

Kim Moore, Inside the House of Broken Things

We were consumed? I keep on saying we.
Let’s talk about my own consuming passions,
the matter I’ve amassed for sixty years,
I and my spouse. At least our progeny
have flown, trailing their jettisoned possessions,
yet overnight we crammed space that was theirs
with things: books that seemed vital in the moment;
music, its living soul encased in vinyl.
What happened to the frugal hippie bride
I thought I was? What if it had to go—
everything, by some deadline, settled, final?
Fervent recycling wouldn’t stem the tide.
The angel might as well begin recording
the worst: I am a hoarder. This is hoarding.

Maryann Corbett, Stuff: a meditation

Jide Salawu is a Canadian-Nigerian writer. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada, and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press and Narrative Landscape. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario. 

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

Thank you, rob. My first book, Preface for Leaving Homeland, was published in 2019. I had received an invitation from the African Poetry Book Fund for their chapbook series, headed by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. The series has become a new cultural venue and has already produced new-generation African literary stars such as Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Nour Kamel, Leila Chatti, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Momtaza Mehri, among others. So, as I was saying, I was nominated to submit to the boxset series. Before then, I had written individual poems addressing a variety of subjects. But my first sustained work that explores the precarity of mobility in Africa and beyond would be the chapbook. The overwhelming experiences of African migrants moving through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes become daunting archives that will inform most of the poems. In Contraband Bodies, I was thinking about African migrant within Africa as a racialized figure; this includes the xenophobic rage in South Africa now; I was thinking about migration from below and what I mean by that is rural/urban migration; I was thinking about my private memories as a Black African migrant moving across different diasporic spaces, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and within Africa. But I don’t own these memories alone. I have described Contraband Bodies as a personal record—I think this work imbricates other public experiences of the Black diaspora.

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

It is a personal story that I am always glad to credit to my grandfather, who I would call a Yoruba poet, for his skill of oriki, a genre of oral poetry in Yoruba culture. He introduced me to the gift of literature and the sublimity of the Yoruba language. Yoruba is a highly tonal language, and quite musical. This does not mean all Yoruba people are poets, but the language is the first linguistic resource point for someone interested in literary culture. From that background, we can pick one or two things about my growth as a young writer. As a student, even when I was interested in poetry, and I had read literary greats such as David Rubadiri, Oswald Mtshali, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Jared Angira, I didn’t know how to begin writing. In 2005, Gabriel Arishe, a teacher in my secondary school in Shao, who had taken it as a duty to mentor me in English grammar, told me I could also write poetry. I thought I needed some celestial power to do so. That day ended with me writing a poem I titled, “Moonlight Days.” I wish I still had that scrap of paper on which I wrote the first poem. […]

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?

Arts, as you know, can be perverted. Arts have been in the service of oppression. rob, let me tell you about what is going on in the case of Nigeria. The politicians, after their tenure, are writing hagiographies (life-writings of sorts), and they are getting reviewed by professors who praise them. In the books, they glorify themselves and talk about their good deeds for the masses. That is how terrible it is. Globally, too, you know, there are writers who side with horrendous leadership and even justify their need for the governance. Writings were first used to service colonialism itself; I recall now Achebe’s “The Image of Africa” where he is in dialogue with Joseph Conrad. I think as a writer, I want to reject grand narratives. Speaking against tyranny and oppressive structures has been a whole duty, and this is my pure sentiment given my own background, appearance at the margin, as a person from a country like Nigeria. Tell the counter-story.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jide Salawu

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?

And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.

I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.

At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.

Ann E. Michael, Ghost metaphors

Where are you now, Mama?

I want you to know that
I keep my hunger
under my bed
in the box
with the starving
baby.

I kept her bones.
I gnaw them sometimes
when all else fails.

I want you to know
that only a
silver of me
remains.
Starving.
An open pit,
a coal mine.

Rebecca Cook, Because My Hunger Has No Voice

Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong, is the latest (and second) pamphlet from Headless Poet.

Alex was kind enough to answer a few questions — on embarrassment, ‘bad’ puns, questionable taste, and the Victorians — over email. Some Poems is available for order here, and in stock now at the London Review Bookshop.

Jeremy Wikeley: I thought we might start by putting Hood in some kind of context, but every time I do this, I’ve no idea where to start. This is partly my own ignorance, but also because he straddles so many styles or concerns. There’s a romantic Hood, there’s a comic Hood, there’s a polemical Hood engaged in Victorian debates about poverty. The romantic, ‘Keatsian’ Hood was the biggest surprise to me. Is it fair to say he falls between the gaps?

Alex Wong: I think it is fair, if we’re talking about the gaps in current understandings of literary history. I mean the gaps between what have become the most familiar categories and groupings. For a start, when W.M. Rossetti called him ‘the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson’ he was placing Hood in a gap, and I think it’s still a gap in most people’s sense of the history of English poetry. It’s a small gap, almost not a gap at all unless you’re thinking in terms of ‘generations’, but in its small way it’s a little like the reign of Mary Tudor, or the gap between Chaucer and Malory: ask the average intelligent Eng Lit graduate who was writing in those periods and you’d be lucky to get more than one or two names. Very lucky, I should think.

And then he muddles our distinction between serious and ‘light’ verse, and between high and popular culture. Humorous poets who are basically doing something quite serious, though inconsistently and a bit under cover, tend to be hard to place … Stevie Smith for instance. But Hood muddles it further, because he also delves so deeply, and so obviously, into topical moral concerns — ‘big issues’ — without giving up the trappings of his light verse. And he muddles it all even further still, by also having written those comparatively highbrow ‘romantic’ poems you’re alluding to.

But I don’t think you could say that he fell between the gaps in his own day. A lot of people were reading Hood when not very many were reading Keats. Hood sold a lot of books, a lot of magazines and annuals. And also we sometimes forget about the reading rooms and circulating libraries that allowed people across classes to access these texts. He was truly popular. He found a gap in the market, and in the culture, but he filled it pretty effectively; he didn’t fall through it. […]

JW: Punning must have something to do with writing from the unconscious? Could you say something more about the way in which Hood shaped that appreciation (for puns) at the time, or in perhaps in the poets he’s influenced? You mention Auden was a fan in the introduction — so much of Auden is in terribly ‘bad taste’. And Moul recently spotted that J. H. Prynne’s first published poem seems to have been a translation (into German, I mean really) of ‘Silence’.

AW: Well, the Lacanians say the unconscious is structured like a language — but we won’t get into that. Anyway a mind that is habitually punning is a mind that is letting associations range pretty freely, you could say. And I think Hood, not only when he’s punning, does tend to be open to the associations of things – erotic, violent or scatological associations, awkward afterthoughts – and he’s happy to run with them. It’s part of what makes his writing seem a bit overcharged for some tastes, the O.T.T. quality. As with the puns and ingenious rhymes, so with other things; there’s an opportunism, if you like, or just a huge openness. He goes for it. But Empson makes an interesting point in Seven Types of Ambiguity, when he argues that Hood’s comical verse seems to use punning to pull back from things that could get really awkward, to dispel the tension somehow. Which is almost the opposite point of view. And I guess it does relate to what I was saying about ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and the impulse to make something tolerable, even though that’s a poem in which he does get seriously involved in something genuinely challenging.

Of course, the puns are also embarrassing when you don’t get them. That’s another important aspect of the embarrassment of puns. And I suppose it connects with Prynne, about whom I can’t say very much because generally I don’t ‘get’ him. I mean I haven’t reached a satisfactory accommodation with what he’s doing, at least after the earliest poems. And I’m somewhat embarrassed about it. But, well, I suppose it’s not surprising that Prynne should have had an interest in Hood. Although that particular sonnet isn’t a punning one (it’s about ‘silence’, so in a sense it’s about the terrifying void that’s left when the punning has to stop), still there’s conceivably a relationship between Hood’s almost maniacal aliveness to double-entendre and Prynne’s — I would call it rather intellectual — love of etymological and phonetic play.

The really fundamental difference for me is that Hood’s poems always create the illusion of a real utterance, a person speaking, with the bonhomie that comes with that; he’s appealing more directly to our ways of reading small adjustments of tone in our everyday communications. Auden is closer to Hood in that respect, although in some ways … I think you could say that where his debt to light verse is most apparent, his urbane wit probably feels closer in inspiration to other predecessors, like Praed. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spent much time with Auden, so I may be wrong.

Jeremy Wikeley, How much depends on the exactness of the spell

The publication of Michael Laskey’s Collected Poems by Smith/Doorstop coincides with his receiving the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry at the beginning of this year. As well as consistently publishing his own poetry across four decades (he is now 81), Laskey is well known for co-founding and directing the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, co-editing the magazine Smiths Knoll for twenty-one years, as a poetry tutor, and as publisher of The Garlic Press, which mainly features work by poets from Suffolk, where Laskey lives.

This edition combines Laskey’s six existing collections and fifteen new poems. Until his recent royal accolade (which ‘completely astonished’ Laskey), his poetry had not gained the public recognition some felt it deserved; an endorsement on the back of the book by Stephen Fry says: ‘Michael Laskey is one of England’s finest poets you’ve probably never heard of.’ Typically, a Laskey poem is a quiet one – and quiet work is often unjustly overlooked or sidelined. This is a pity: Laskey’s poems, I feel, have real lasting power.

I read almost the whole of this 385-page collection outside on a sunny April day, the setting enhancing the poems, and vice versa. I found I then wanted to read the collection again more slowly – as an ‘off-duty’ reader rather than a critic – simply because the poems were a pleasure to engage with and I wanted to spend more time with them. Laskey is a poet who celebrates, even ‘thrives on’, he explains in ‘Quotidian’, the ‘everyday, the humdrum, dull for some’: ‘small’ pleasures; humble, ordinary experience. Craig Raine has called him ‘our poetic Alan Bennett – a genius of, as it were, biscuit barrels and wry grief.’ As Andrew McCulloch has pointed out though, on introducing Laskey’s poem ‘The Lawnmower’ as the TLS ‘Poem of the week’, ‘The world Laskey describes may be familiar […] but its images are far from cosy’ or complacent: the interplay of real familial emotions and failed connection that he often depicts, especially between parent and child, is (in McCulloch’s brilliantly exact observation) ‘softly tragic’. He is like a more domesticised Larkin – a poet who also had the sensitivity to see, and to reveal, the beauty and the interest in the so-called ‘dull’ moments of our lives. As Larkin remarked in an interview with John Haffenden: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’ Laskey’s own attention to the commonplace extends to the word itself: he wittily points out in ‘Quotidian’ that he doesn’t like this ornate, Latinate synonym: ‘not a word / I’d choose, actually one I avoid – / […] it contradicts / what it means’. Obfuscation is not part of Laskey’s poetic project.

Nicola Healey, Thriving on ‘the humdrum’: Michael Laskey

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), wrote Arthur Symons in 1904 in the Atlantic,

was twenty-six, the age of Keats at his death, before he wrote any original verse. He then wrote two poems to two ladies: one out of a bitter personal feeling, the other as a passing courtesy; neither out of any instinct for poetry.

From inauspicious beginnings, how strangely things fall out. Through the last three years of the eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth, Scott followed these first amateur attempts with translations from Goethe and collections of traditional ballads in two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His narrative poem Lay of the Last Minstrel — begun in 1802, published in 1805 — was followed in fairly rapid succession by the 1808 Marmion (of which “Lochinvar” remains the best-known section), The Lady of the Lake in 1810, and four other long narrative poems. All this output made him, temporarily, the most famous poet in of his era.

What rendered Scott’s poetic fame so temporary? Short answer: the appearance, in 1812, of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. There was, Symons wrote, “a more popular poet in England,” and his name was not Scott, but Byron. Though Scott continued to write verse — his final long poem, Harold the Dauntless, would appear in 1817 — he turned his energies to prose and the completion of the story that became Waverley, the first of his historical novels, published in 1814.

At this juncture we could ask, as Symons did, whether Scott hadn’t really been a novelist all along: not a poet after all, but a mere “improviser in rhyme,” whose true charism was prose narrative. Certainly the verse by which he had made his name had narrative as its first end — though as we might reflect, casting our minds back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, poetry was telling stories almost before it was doing anything else. It’s not as though the narrative impulse somehow canceled out the poetry; Scott’s own narrative poems drew directly from the tradition of the medieval romance. And yet if Scott’s poems were as popular as they were, it was because

they were so like novels. They were, what every publisher still wants, “stories with plenty of action;”and the public either forgave their being in verse, or for some reason was readier than usual, just then, to welcome verse.

Scott’s turn to the novel, then, simply dispensed with the need to go through the motions of verse — at which Byron was better, anyway — in order to deliver what the public really wanted: “stories with plenty of action.” No need to make those stories rhyme and scan, if the musical pleasure of verse wasn’t the first principle of composition and integral to the generation of the narrative.

If those narrative poems of Walter Scott had been successes, then — in dispensing with the effort of poetry altogether — Scott with his gift for a rousing good tale could and did make the novel popular, in a way that even his own action-packed poems, as poems, had not been. “The fact is,” wrote Symons, “that skill in story-telling never made any man a poet” — not, again, that “skill in storytelling” ever made any man not a poet, either. The question is one of priority and proportion, and of what the indispensable element in a given literary work actually is, for both writer and reader. For Scott, and for his readers, that indispensable element was action, not music.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Proud Maisie

Those trained up in civics and classical political theory — which, with the decline of philology, may well be a good majority of intellectuals with a leaning toward the traditional — would tend to take Yeats to be describing something akin to thumos, the kind of drive toward that Tennyson’s Ulysses has. Major Gregory seeks some reward, even if it’s a hidden fame, and such rewards are of necessity defined by the social order. “Man is by nature a political animal,” as Aristotle put it, and nobility is found in the polis, and the virtues of the great soul are in life lived among others.

That is, on its face, absent from the Irish airman. He confesses a social location: “My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.” But he’s deliberately left them behind, willing to fight for the British with whom he feels no connection, to seek some entirely individual experience — not just an impulse of delight, but a lonely impulse of delight.

He lacks, for example, the virtue of bravery we think expressed most clearly in self-sacrifice, the willingness to give up one’s life to save another. Oh, he’s obviously brave in the sense of having willingly entered the sphere of war, where life and death are brought to the sharpest point. But the thing he finds therein is sheer experience, as felt by someone with the rare gift of sensibility — a figure great enough to feel the heightened sense of the moment. He wants not fame, I think, or glory, but the perfect balance of the now:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

This is not a social claim, a placing in a political order, but a metaphysical thing, new to humanity in the modern order — born of the highly self-conscious self of modernity. He seeks not Tennyson’s newer world but the sheer perfection of the experienced now in the life and death of war.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I dreamed of a dead friend.
We did not touch. We spoke.

I was deaf. We looked at art,
though I was blind. This morning,

the roses are pink and smell
of rain.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot Poem 10 June 02026

“The Intentions of Thunder” is a collection of new and selected poems from Patricia Smith. It is deliberately substantial, both in terms of the number of poems and the depth of poetry. The collection draws from “Life According to Motown” (1991), “Big Towns, Big Talk” (1992), “Close to Death” (1993), “Blood Dazzler” (2008), “Shoulda been Jimi Savannah” (2012), “Incendiary Art” (2017), “Unshuttered” (2023) plus uncollected poems. It is nearly impossible to provide a flavour of the range of poems that the collection covers. Picking favourites is easy but would render this review far too long to read. […]

Patricia Smith is a poet of witness, determined not to let her community go unheard or unrecorded. That doesn’t make her worthy or dull, on the contrary, she has a playfulness and a deft control of form, whether that’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ choice of sonnets on Emmett Till or recording the aftermath of Katrina without letting politicians off the hook. “Intentions of Thunder” is a book to return to, each visit bringing a new reward. It’s lazy to describe her as heir to Gwendolyn Brooks. Smith has long stepped out from that useful mentorship and found her own strong, compelling voice. But it’s useful to let Brooks have the last word, writing that Smith’s work is “direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome.”

“The Intentions of Thunder” is available from Bloodaxe. If you’ve not read any Patricia Smith, this is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “The Intentions of Thunder” Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe) – book review

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy, Lana Hechtman Ayers, The Poetry Box, 2026

What a lucky thing to have poet-friends.

I had two big deadlines at the end of May (didn’t quite make them, but almost);  I’m teaching another Creative Retirement Institute Class (on William Stafford, and it’s going beautifully); and I seem to have forgotten all about being a blogger. But then comes this package in the mail, two books from none other than the Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor (and one-woman dynamo) of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. […]

Penelope Scambly Schott calls Still Life with Sorrow & Joy ” a joyous celebration,” full of both grief and delights. The collection plays with form, pays tribute to other poets, dreams wildly, and blends paeans to beloved pets with longing for lost two-legged loved ones. The poems are all about love, though at times they keen over our failure to love enough. In the very short, “Night Vision Goggles,” we get these three bare lines: “All we do not understand / could fill battlefields — // and does.”

Bethany Reid, Lana Hechtman Ayers, STILL LIFE WITH SORROW & JOY

Near the end of Eclogue 9, Lycidas, who is keen to continue singing despite Moeris’ obvious sorrow and reluctance, points out that they’ve reached the tomb of Bianor, the half-way point of their journey, where the farmers are stripping the foliage. He suggests they should put the kids they are carrying down here and pause for a song.

hinc adeo media est nobis via; namque sepulcrum
incipit apparere Bianoris. hic, ubi densas
agricolae stringunt frondes, hic, Moeri, canamus;
hic haedos depone, tamen veniemus in urbem.

Here’s Heaney again:

We’ve come half-way.
Already you can see Bianor’s tomb
Just up ahead. Here where they’ve trimmed and faced
The old green hedge, here’s where we’re going to sing.
Set that creel and those kid-goats on the ground.
We’ll make it into town in all good time.

Once again, what sounds pragmatic is also allusive. In Theocritus 7, a tomb — in that case of Brasilas — similarly marks the half-way point of a journey. But the name Bianor itself comes from Homer (Iliad 11.86-92), where he is, like so many of those words in Callimachus’s epigram for Heraclitus, a hapax, a name that appears only once. His death, which sets off the battle that ends with the death of Patroclus, takes place, we are told, at that hour in the day when woodsmen at work cutting trees in the forest feel the longing to rest and eat. In his enthusiasm, Lycidas is, as it were, suggesting a Homeric pause.

Moeris refuses: he says they have to get on and there’s no time to waste. In that, he is rather like Meliboeus in the first eclogue, who is being cast out in such a hurry that he has had to leave behind two new-born kids, twins who are the spes gregis (“hope of the flock”), forcing the mother goat to go on without them. There is no solace there of the kind offered by Heraclitus’ poem, in which one twin accompanies the mother in death and the other stays with the father. Here in the ninth eclogue, though, they are carrying the kids with them; and though Moeris does not want to sing any more himself, he hopes that Menaclas will yet take up the song.

Virgil is not sure that songs endure. As Heaney says himself in his fine essay on pastoral, the question of the Eclogues is that of Shakespeare:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

He’s not sure, but he hopes it might be so.

Victoria Moul, All these songs I have forgotten

— One of those books I own and will never let go of is Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks by W.S. Di Piero. In some ways, it doesn’t look like much, it’s a slim volume, but some of the thoughts it holds have changed me, helped me, opened me up. The style of writing, the form, these too have been useful.

— I’ve quoted from it before at length, but today this:

“The offices of poetry. To use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity. To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumour, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic vicious wind tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, over against opportunistic mendacity. If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it really is marginal or beside the point.”

— Published in 2017, that could be from yesterday.

— Everywhere you look, enshittification, mediocrity. (For this is what degenAI is). But good poetry is the opposite of that, good art of any sort. I think, and I’ve said this before and should probably just stop, that there is no point in talking about the lousy stuff, but to just give space to great art, great literature etc.

Shawna Lemay, The Offices of Poetry

Wordsworth began his “Ode” in 1802. It’s a poem that embodies his philosophical stance on childhood vision and its eventual loss, implying that what has been forfeited must first be named before it can be recovered.

Could there be a more problematic condition for a poet? If it’s the poet’s job to pay tribute to states of feeling (as Wordsworth writes in the Preface, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility,”) then their success hinges on the ability to see and sense deeply, to recollect clearly and attentively.

And these are the poem’s opening lines. He’s set high stakes for the rest, which documents Wordsworth’s departure from a world of wonder to a world worn smooth by sight. Adulthood strips away that “freshness of a dream,” leaving the poet feeling less able, maybe even less inclined, to write about the world with the same appetite and astonishment.

Coleridge, Wordsworth’s longtime collaborator, talks about this risk in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria. He praises his friend in Preface to Lyrical Ballads and credits him for tuning Coleridge’s own sight “to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarly and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I love the phrase “the film of familiarity,” which suggests that time dulls the senses, reducing one’s sensitivity to the world’s wonder, yes, but also reducing one’s capacity for empathy, “ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I’m sometimes asked why I chose to research wonder—saying my PhD was on the role of wonder in poetry does sound slightly like I apprenticed myself to a unicorn paddock for four years. Here’s why: the potential and incentive for renewing wonder is serious business. It transcends the individual and speaks to the larger human project, to the belief that deep inquiry into individual experience may lead to greater appreciation of collective experience, and that this appreciation is vital for humanity’s survival.

The more we wonder, the less of an appetite we have for destruction, Rachel Carson argued. Poems are the perfect wonder vehicles. They are wonderfully efficient and cost-effective wonder delivery systems.

Maya C. Popa, What Adulthood Forgets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Fate of Wonder

I went on a long hiatus from writing, a sort of starvation, somewhere around the start of the pandemic. I can’t tell if this was a totally conscious choice, but I knew my writing life needed a deeper anchor.

I am slower now. I rarely submit my work. And when I do, it’s because I feel truly called to the journal. I speak and read when it feels aligned. I write because I want to. I work on projects that feel like I am alive. I say no to opportunities that are extractive and dulling, even if they are shiny.

I spend a lot of days not writing. I read a lot. I live. I celebrate other writers. I write books and pieces that have no intended publisher and no end goal. I am working on a memoir in a time when “no one wants memoir unless you’re a celebrity,” bla bla bla.

I am doing it because I would rather die than not.

Some of this is also about being tired, older, chronically ill, and overstimulated without social media and expectation. Some of this is that my life has expanded, and I am nourished beyond art. But most of it is that I burned myself out on myself.

Writing is a gift. We don’t have to do it. Literally, we don’t have to be here. Like, we can quit. We get to do it. We want to do it, right? We get to be the arbiters of pure and total consciousness. We get to reach into the river and feel the current. And we get to translate it. What a joy to crawl back into the creative self as a joy and not as a form of proof or punishment.

Lisa Marie Basile, There are two writers within me—and they are eating each other alive

Just write it out of you. Write anything, don’t even try to get to the new. Have no goal to heal the the pain you think is in you through the writing. Just write any damn thing that comes before your eyes. Fictionalise it. Steal. Be the bad guy for once, but just write and in a while as you keep writing it will start to be enough. I don’t know or care why. Nor do I want you to write a book or monetise your pain in some way. Just fucking write, and forget healing, forget being a writer, a poet, a thinker, someone with an opinion. Let the writing fill up the page without all these things you think you are and it will raise you up just by you having written, and without you getting in your own way.

John Siddique, Write It

I remember crossing out poems in the school booklet because we weren’t doing them.

I remember “Bean green over blue”.

I remember the poetry editor who said of a rival: “We must crush them.”

I remember the poet who paused mid-reading to savour the word “ontologically”.

I remember the poet who was sarcastic about skiing holidays to the festival organiser.

I remember finding rhymes.

I remember fridge poetry, but not fridge poems.

I remember the poet stuck on a bus texting about what it meant to send a text saying “I am here”.

I remember “Fire-fangled feathers dangle down”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, I Remember Poetry

That was the invitation of the final prompt: to imagine a future self, ancestor, spirit, object, animal, place, or other presence watching over a moment from our lives. What might they see that we could not see then? What language might they use for our seeing? What might their gaze loosen, bless, protect, question, or refuse?

During the session, I found myself writing about the “birdbath” visible from our apartment balcony. I say “birdbath,” but what I really mean is the sizeable dip in the parking lot asphalt that becomes a watering hole after rain. Birds gather there for hours, splashing, pausing, lifting off, returning.

The prompts kept asking us to shift perspective, to let looking move from the self to elsewhere and back again. Here’s a haiku that came from that space:

robin in a puddle
my eyes from there
an afterthought

I like that the poem lets the looking happen away from me. The robin does not need to become symbol, messenger, or metaphor right away. It gets to be there first: in the puddle, in the after-rain, in its own attention. My eyes arrive later, almost beside the point.

That feels like one lesson I’m carrying from the workshop: sometimes looking as a way of writing means letting the self become secondary, decentered long enough for the world to look back.

José Angel Araguz, post-workshop thoughts: my eyes from there

Morning light tints the walls
the same color as what leaks into the streets.
You swing your feet over the side of the bed
and they look for slippers, as if they had that
small, separate autonomy. What does it mean
to live without asking, or expectation? Your arms
slide into sleeves, lift a cup of water to your lips.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was