For the past couple of years, I’ve gotten lazy about doing any kind of year-in-review post, despite having read some truly remarkable books, especially in translation. I took the attitude that no one really cares what I’ve been reading but me—which might well be true, but ignores the fact that blogging is how I keep track of things for my own purposes, as well. This was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago when I nearly ordered a friend’s book for the second time, forgetting that I had bought and read it just six months earlier… and that it had been absolutely marvellous! I’m talking about Sarah Sloat’s Classic Crimes.

So in order to avoid any further such forgetting, I have combed my emails for tracking notifications, gone through my order history of second-hand books at eBay and Amazon, and attempted to locate all the other collections I’ve picked up hither and yon. I now have a vast pile on the sofa next to me, and am re-reading books I liked on the first read to see what I think of them now. I cannot recommend this enough as a year-end activity. I’m having so much fun!

I very much doubt I’ll be able to pick a single favorite, since they are all so different, and it hardly seems fair to put, for example, a young author’s first collection in competition with a seasoned poet’s collected works. But let me start with a few examples of the latter.

Following my re-read of Neruda’s Residencia en Tierra in late 2024, I wanted to revisit a few other Great Poets. I’d left my copy of Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works (edited by Jenny Penberthy, University of California Press, 2002) in the UK, and initially I couldn’t find an affordable copy on eBay, so I picked up the earlier selected, The Granite Pail, which is the one edited by her literary executor Cid Corman for Gnomon Press in 1985, and I thought he did a brilliant job—so much so that, as soon as I finished it, I took another look and found a copy of the Collected Works in hardcover, mint condition, for far less than any of the paperback copies, so I ordered and devoured that too. More and more, Lorine Niedecker is the poet I most want to be when I grow up.

Idly going though City Lights’ online catalog one day, I noticed a translation of the 20th-century Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, Horses in the Air and other poems, in a bilingual edition translated by Cola Franzen way back in 1987. The other two translations of Guillén in my library are devoted entirely to poems from his magnum opus Cántico, but this later volume focuses on his later works, especially Cántico‘s companion work, Clamor. One can never have enough Guillén, and Franzen’s translations are spot-on most of the time, I thought.

Michael Longley’s Collected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2006) was catch-up reading of an essential English-language minimalist and war poet, after first being extremely impressed by his 2011 collection A Hundred Doors (also from Cape, or Wake Forest University Press in North America). I’m not sure how well known he is stateside; he never developed anything like Heaney’s reputation, I gather. I’m afraid I was only prompted to read him by the memorial posts on British and Irish poetry blogs following his death in January.

I tend to prefer single-author collections to anthologies or journals, but I did really enjoy my contributor’s copy of Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple (Penn State University Press, 2025). It’s an excellent introduction to the state, organized geographically, and does include a fair number of poets from outside academia and from working-class backgrounds. It does such a great job of representing how residents feel about the places where they live and work, or where their people are from. Every state should have an anthology like this!

Haiku 21.2, edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press, 2025) is a follow-up to Haiku 21 (from the same editors), for my money the most important English-language haiku (ELH) anthology of the 21st century. Like its predecessor, Haiku 21.2 devotes plenty of space to experimental and avant-garde haiku, but includes more traditional ones as well, so might be even more useful as a snapshot of where ELH has been going in recent years, and what else it might be capable of.

I can see that if I continue this post in a discursive vein, I won’t finish by the end of the year, so let me speed things up a little and transition to a list. I’m afraid I’m gonna be extra boring and put it in alphabetical order by author’s last name.

Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey (Penguin, 2020)

Gillian Allnut, Lode (Bloodaxe, 2025)

Jean d’Amérique, Workshop of Silence, translated from the French by Conor Bracken (Vanderbilt Univerity Press, 2020)

Beau Beausoleil, War News II: 12/9/2023 to 6/3/2024 (fmsbw, 2025)
See also the first volume, published online in December 2023 by Agitate! journal: War News

Sean Thomas Dougherty, Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023)

Charlotte Eichler, Swimming Between Islands (Carcanet, 2023)

Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth (Archipelago Books, 2025)

Eve Luckring, Signal to Noise (Ornithopter Press, 2025)

Marc McKee, Consolationeer (Black Lawrence, 2017)

rob mclennan, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025)

paul m., magnolia diary (Modern Haiku Press, 2024)

Billy Mills, a book of sounds (Shearsman, 2024)

Wendy Pratt, Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Martha Silano, Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025)

Sarah J. Sloat, Classic Crimes (Sarabande Books, 2025)

Robert van Vliet,  Vessels (Unsolicited Press, 2024)

Donna Vorreyer, Unrivered (Sundress Publications, 2025)

These were the poetry books that really blew me away in 2025. Most were either recommendations on blogs or impulse purchases after reading a selection online. Poetry Daily has been really useful for finding out about good poetry in translation, and the Charlotte Eichler book was from them as well. I also learn about new books by signing up for emails from small presses I like.

Currently I’m only subscribed to three print journals: Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Rattle, plus I always buy the print anthology of a year’s worth of The Heron’s Nest. There are a welter of other online magazines I struggle and mostly fail to keep up with. As I age, I find I prefer reading print to screens by a long shot.

Which, yes, may have implications for how I share my own work with the world at some point. I suppose this is where I should mention that my most impactful and chin-scratchy nonfiction read of the year was Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, which painted the condition of us cloud serfs in pretty stark terms.

Cross-posted to Substack.

This week: plastic dragons, writing for the bees, earwig spiracles, the planet as a prayer wheel, and much more. Enjoy.

I found a forked willow twig whose shape seemed to suggest a sail.
I had a bundle of offcuts of heavyweight handmade paper from making “The Soul as a Bird”.
On waking one morning this week I had an idea for putting them together.
The upper strips were briefly dipped in walnut dye, the lower ones in diluted blue ink. [image]

one step
from shore to ship
and everything
has changed

This is one of the ten-word poems from my little book “Ten Words”. The prompt-word was liminal.
Being a classicist I went with the literal meaning of the Latin word limen, a theshold.
This piece is for our exhibition in Wells Museum next month.

Ama Bolton, A sculptural book

The first panel of Day 3, “Future Forms: Inventing Literary Forms for the Twenty-First Century” (Kai Carlson-Wee, Kate Folk, Alexandria Hall, Keith Wilson, Hua Xi) was a wonderfully creative and eccentric take on poetic forms. In fact, the moderator, Kai Carlson-Wee, termed it “the spirit of the weird,” which I resonated with immediately (I’m always urging my students to get weirder in their poetry). Forms shared included the “palindrome poem” (watch this poetry film based on Carlson-Wee’s poem “Nomad Palindrome”), “Magic Eye” or the stereogram, where if you stared hard enough and in just the right way, a poem would rise from a block of text (like the Magic Eye posters), a poem written completely in symbols which captures what it feels like to have a psychotic break, and some text-based pieces from Kate Folk and Alexandria Hall. 

I gave this panel high marks for its fearless and imaginative transformation of forms, for the energy of the panelists (especially for an early-morning, last-day panel), and for the fun they managed to inject into a category that includes traditional forms such as ballads and sonnets.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 3

I had a hectic week, but this morning—with nowhere to go, no errands, no doctor appointments—I decided to read a book of poems. I cheated, perhaps, by picking up a small book.

But, oh my. Mostly I am here to tell you how exquisite and inspiring I found this “small”—only 30 poems, printed in a 7 X 5 inch format—but powerful book, produced by Empty Bowl Press. The original Chinese of the poems written by Li Qingzhao, a Song dynasty poet (1084-1151) faces the English translation by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei. I don’t read Chinese, and have, really, not a clue about it, but there’s something about seeing (and almost feeling) the weight of the original characters that deepens the experience.

I remember the January day when I picked this up, from a book display at Book Tree in Kirkland. Despite my resolution to buy fewer books, I couldn’t resist it. (Just look at that cover!)

James and Xuepei explain in the introduction how in their partnership they tried to honor the original spareness and artistry of the poems. They do a brilliant job. They add titles to the poems, but preserve the poet’s habit of naming the song each poem honors. (Alas, the music is lost.)

Their introduction also succeeds in briefly sketching for us the life of Li Qingzhao, a rare woman poet of her time, lucky enough to be educated, and to have married a husband (also a poet) who valued her voice. When exiled during a time of war, she lost almost everything, including her husband. Her poetry persists. Even writing of despair, her lines sing.

Bethany Reid, Plum Blossom Wine

We cannot walk backward. We can only walk forward. Like Wangari Maathai, we can create great visions, work towards a sustainable future. Plant trees. Save animals. Protect our communities. Keep literary culture, art, and the humanities alive.

With billionaires controlling the supply chain, there isn’t room to breathe. But every day, I hope that Red Hen will receive a transformative gift that will allow us to keep publishing books in this inhospitable climate. We ride the train of risk and believe in magic. In the thrum and haul of it, I wake early. Walk to the green, breathe into the sun.

The struggle, glory, and wild of it is every day. Books, literary citizenship, uplifting marginalized voices: our smudge of resistance against erasure.

Kate Gale, The Alert Circle: Who Will Lead America?

As a poet, the modern real-life parable of aquatic Lego lost at sea and still being routinely found on beaches was hard to resist. But I have a lot of ambivalence about this poem. Almost ten years ago, I remember reading the words of Robert Macfarlane on the meaning of a new coinage to describe our era, the Anthropocene:

Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the “Plasticene”. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.

Robert Macfarlane, “Generation Anthropocene”, The Guardian, 1 April 2016

Somehow the thought of discarded plastic making its way into the geological layers that will define our era in the future is even more shocking to me than the terrible images of wildlife suffocating in a world of plastic waste. Several years after this article was published, a wave of anti-plastic action swept through the UK, fuelled in part by the 2019 BBC mini-series “War on Plastic”. The programme documented the infiltration of plastic into our homes and everyday lives, followed the trail of recycling to rubbish dumps abroad, and challenged ordinary residents to reduce their plastic waste. There was a sudden and visceral reaction in our local community which led to the formation of a voluntary not-for-profit group advocating for a plastic free community and various efforts by many of us to reduce our single-use plastic waste, including switching to refillable products. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As we all reached for something, anything to combat the virus, plastic made a comeback, perhaps most painfully represented by the suddenly ubiquitous (and, as it turned out, money-wasting) PPE, but also in household items that went from unnecessary extras to routine items on the shopping list like anti-bacterial wipes. Those of us with young children stuck at home were also buying Duplo, Lego and other plastic toys to keep them amused while we tried to work or manage day-to-day life. The tide of plastic washed back and kept coming.

The last line of my poem riffs on Macfarlane’s powerful rewriting of Larkin. It feels bleak hence, I think, my ambivalence about publishing this piece. I’d like to think that change is possible, that solutions will be found to the overwhelming prospect of an Anthropocene climate changed world but it’s getting harder and harder to hold onto that hope. In the meantime, it must be said, that the dragons are rather beautiful.

Ruth Lexton, Legacy of a Container Loss

Oh, let me out of here now, let me walk in the woods. Thud.
The first bluebells. Primroses in full bloom. Thud.
Celandines. A few violets. A wood anemone. Thud.
Bumble bees in tall grass. Thud.
Let me peer Thud.
into the darkness Thud.
of the pond. Thud.

Bob Mee, TRYING TO READ EXCERPTS FROM RANDOM BOOKS AND THINK WHILE A TALL BUILDING IS BEING DEMOLISHED ACROSS THE ROAD

Harpocrates, it seems, was adopted from the Egyptian pantheon – the God Horus manifested as a child, with a finger to his lips representing the hieroglyph for ‘child’. This was misinterpreted by the Greeks as an injunction to haud yer wheesht. So he became the god of silence and secrets.

In his 1911 painting ‘Silence’ Odilon Redon’s subject is Harpocrates holding two fingers to their lips. The figure is enigmatic, eyes downcast like a Flemish Christ from the Middle Ages as they peer out from wherever into wherever; from darkness into light, from silence into uproar, as if language were a place they dared not enter.

There’s a careful balance in poetry between what we say and what we don’t. Silence is there for at least two reasons – as a means of avoiding saying what needs said, or of saying what needs said. Every word comes bedded in silence – we know that – there’s a tiny silence between words; a wider one between verses; a huge silence surrounds each poem – just look at all that white paper and imagine what I’m not saying. […]

One of the crucial decisions a poet must make is how much to say and how much to leave for the reader to say for themselves. An unemployed reader is a bored reader. My early drafts are usually far too pretentious and blethery – they butt in before the real poem has had a chance to speak – a sort of linguistic warming-up exercise – and then keep on talking long after the poem has run out of things to say. I then spend days, weeks, longer, taking out most of the things I want to say, so the poem ends up as a sort of epitaph to itself, if that makes sense. A gravestone with no grave beneath it.

John Glenday, The Harpocratic Oath

Beautiful youth on red rocks,
rough dimpled, smooth skinned, muscles
curved as old sculptures, hands full
of panpipes. Wrap the sky’s heat
around you, and answer this:
what have we lost by selling
off science, the living seas?

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 300: Not to Sell the Fields #NaPoWriMo

Bee lore escaped me until I entered the world of poetry. “Tell it to the bees” is a tradition that’s both ancient and modern, built from ancient Greece and at home in the most domestic of settings. The tradition rests on the idea bees can slip between the living world and the world of the dead, that they are messengers, predictors and vessels for our secrets. […]

This idea has got me thinking. Over the past few weeks, during those liminal moments between waking and sleeping I’ve been jotting thoughts about what I would write if I had no name, or how I would talk about all the decisions I’ve never made. I have begun to crave anonymity, to see it as freedom and realise the constraints that writing in public brings. I have so many snapshots of poems on my notes app, the things that come in the middle of the night (with various degrees of sense) and so many of these are words that could become something that resonates and that I’m proud of.

Here lies the conundrum. To write to be read means being comfortable with people knowing what’s inside. Being comfortable with people knowing what’s inside means being comfortable with yourself, and with the story that got you to this place of needing to put it down on paper. It also means being comfortable with the fact that people may be angry or upset about what you write.

Or does it? the brilliant thing about being a writer is that it allows us to use metaphor as a means of expression. It allows us to create scenarios that are close enough to the truth to feel like our story, but not so close as to be recognised. 

Kathryn Anna Marshall, How do you go about writing for the bees?

Flowers love this spring, 
but worms sprawl helpless on sidewalks 
and die in the first patch of sun. The dog 
comes home bedraggled from his walks, 
happy and shaking on the stoop. I drape 
my slicker over a chair with a towel beneath 
to catch the drops, brew some tea, open 
my journal.

Sarah Russell, New England Spring

I’ve been working for over a year with Thoreau’s ‘Walden,’ and enjoying it so much. I’ve tried to avoid classic books but somehow I just got into it and couldn’t extract myself. It’s been wonderful reacquainting myself with Thoreau.

Unfortunately I haven’t worked on this project in some time, starting with when my mother fell in early December. Now that I am finishing up with her paperwork I hope this pause will soon end.

In the meantime, I’ve got visual poems from ‘Walden’ in Amsterdam Review, Moist, Sixth Finch and Fugue. Click on the journal names to read the poems. 

Sarah J. Sloat, Bucolics

Three collections I read recently have got me thinking about the grittier sonic elements in poetry; the use of scientific, foreign, antiquated, and invented words; wordplay in general as a poetry component; and how sound can push both experiment and meaning in a poem. I’ve been mulling about the task of writing anything that feels “new,” to me or to my readers, and about the challenges more sonic wordplay would mean for me as a writer. I’m saying here I think it would be difficult to do, because it differs from my long-accustomed voice and style. I’m also saying I like a challenge in creative work, and that my style(s) go though changes always, so why not? In creative art of any kind, the passing of years makes a difference in many things. Content (because: experience). Situation (because: life happens). Methods (because: technology and materials). And influence–what I was reading in high school vs. grad school vs. today–though some favorites will always hold a place in my creative mind.

My poems tend to be plain-spoken, although I’ve never been shy about going beyond the standard vernacular to employ a geological term, a botanical name, or a somewhat archaic noun or adjective when it suits the feel and sound of the poem. Most of my poems don’t fall under the description of experimental or edgy. I’m not making waves with language, but some poets are. And my recent reading has me wanting to experiment more. It will mean failing a lot, because I’m working against my habitual methods of composition. I won’t be as good at it as these poets (below) are. What I’m hoping, though, is that the practice of trying more sonic wordplay in my work implants a tracery of that practice onto my poetic voice.

Ann E. Michael, Reading my contemporaries

One might think that, unlike an actor, the writer’s over-intellectualizing would be an advantage: being able to really dig down into the motivations and cause and effect progression of a narrative. But an intellectual presentation of a scene can be as cold on the paper, as it is on stage.

On the other hand, no one wants to read a text that is flooded with adverbs or takes colorful or obscure verbs to an extreme, tipping into unintentional melodrama, or bathos.

A writer can find the middle ground by utilizing onomatopoeia, which I believe is a form of physical action. Even when we read silently, our body is anticipating performance and has a muscle memory of the spoken word.

We have a hard-wired relationship to our mother-tongue. The plosives (b,p), the fricatives (f,th), the afficates (ch), the nasal stops (m,n), and the glottal stop (in American English it is the silent t in oral contractions like moun’ain), all carry prelinguistic meaning.

Sounds, which I’m asking you to think of as a form of gesture, will always pull up emotional memories. Of course we can override those memories, but as writers, we can also choose to utilize them in our readers.

There’s a difference between the words rip and tear. Don’t think about it. Feel it in your mouth, and listen. Rip starts as a growl and stops with sudden explosion, as though the speaker is spitting. Tear, on the other hand, begins with a plosive effort, slides through a dipthong, and ends with a growl.

Ren Powell, Writing with the Body

The traditional tannery workers in Fès seem to be the ultimate act of immersion: could they be more immersed in color?  Could they put their whole selves into their craft, crawling into vats that fill entire planes with dyes once and often still of turmeric, indigo, pomegranate, mimosa flower, saffron and indigo?  Sinewy limbs stripped to the waist, having cleaned skins with limestone and softened them with pigeon guana droppings.  The radical ‘70s artists who dipped their naked bodies in paint, then rolled on canvases had the same idea. To be one with.  Saturate. With not an ounce of doubt or self or restraint. They are beautiful in a way that horrifies us – how is their health?  Their pay, their hours?  But they uphold long cultural tradition that dovetails with seeking union, here with color.  I’m in. 

Jill Pearlman, To Be Immersed in Color

So if an ode or praise poem can be anything, what’s their magic? “Focusing the poetic lens to dissect, understand, and communicate the beauty and mystery of life.” (That’s Writers.com again.) For me, much of that “beauty and mystery” can be found in odes’ ability to go deep, deep down into the good, bad and ugly while still holding the spirit of appreciation or homage.

Writing for the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Stacey Balkun describes it this way: “I’ve been drawn to the ode because this world needs some celebration in it, and yes, there is much to celebrate. But even more interesting is the intersection between the light and dark, and contemporary poets are using the ode’s form to explore that space.” Balkun crystallizes this even further when she says odes “imbue praise with complexity,” which 100% explains my attraction to them.

That vibration between praise and complexity gives odes and praise poems an abundance of energy and tension and makes the style terrific for poems of witness. In a description for a class on writing the ode, Brooklyn Poets expounds on this communal and political role: “The praise poem, in light of recent global atrocities, is perhaps more necessary than ever before. … The power of praise poems [is how they help us] heal and bear witness in this present moment.”

Carolee Bennett, 40 Odes and Praise Poems

I don’t seem to be able to let this poem be. I’ve had a couple of goes at writing it over the years but a definite version seems to allude me. It is based on the conceit that an avatar of mine is conjured in the head of the man who sold us all down the river with all the horror that comes with the phrase.

INSIDE THE HEAD OF THE MAN WHO SOLD US ALL DOWN THE RIVER

His weasel words of self aggrandisement
once again conjure me into existence
and I am told where to stand and what to say […]

Paul Tobin, WEASEL WORDS

I wanted to let him speak for himself, to express his own anger. To me he is one of the many voiceless dead, resulting from Covid, especially those in care homes (both my parents ended in such a place and died there), those who could not be visited by relatives and friends due to contact restrictions:

and in the quiet I’d hear ashes stir
a murmuring of lips beyond cracked
and inaudible though I know the gist
that I was let down—they’re slow to act

letting people come they let people go
running it’ll be fine! up their fucking flagpole
then backhanding fat cat chums
with a hundred and fifty thousand lives
a fire sale fobbed me off with shit deals

even dangling one last Christmas before me
only to shove it—old ashy whisperer—
folded into yourself a dishcloth
on the drainer—a hiccupping cough
into your pillow—a last companion—

too old to ventilate . . .

We all read the stories of deaths of this sort. None of this is ‘true’ to my own experience (or my parents) but this is where the ‘larger’ truth surfaces, and this was my own way of trying to say something about it. The poem ends very emotionally (for me) because it returns again to autobiographical details. I DO have this picture on my mantlepiece (behind me as I type this out). I’m drawing on my own sense of loss, but I hope the dovetailing with what is fictional (for me) is effective enough. People wrote indicating their compassionating sense that I had indeed lost a parent during Covid and I want to again take this as a compliment to the technical success of the poem in its final state.

Martyn Crucefix, ‘I am not I’: the Slippery First-Person in Poems

It takes tenderness to peel away

what held you so long in the dark.

And so, much as I admire the self-

containment of the daikon, also

I can’t help loving how it’s blushed

with the palest stroke of green.

Luisa A. Igloria, Wearing the Skin

National Poetry Month is wrapping up, and it turned out to be a little more hectic than I expected. Wonder & Wreckage turned one year old, so I celebrated with fellow poet and sister/friend Karen Head with one of our “Call & Response” round-robin-style readings at the Georgia Center for the Book. Thanks to the folks who came out to listen. 

I also had the pleasure of reading at the Cecilia Woloch  & Friends virtual reading today, along with the fabulous Brendan Constantine, Carine Topal, Carol Muske-Dukes, Yona Harvey, Kevin Prufer, Lynne Thompson, Pam Ward and Francisco Letelier. It was wonderful to hear these poets and see that so many people from around the world chose to spend their Sunday afternoon with us.

Megan and I continue to steadily work on the Stevie Nicks anthology. We’ve got a working manuscript together and are polishing off an introduction, so we’re still on track for a Spring 2026 publication. 

Collin Kelley, A National Poetry Month recap

I have not posted anything here for quite some time. As I’ve said before, that is why I will never monetize this space. I’ve been reading a lot of your posts, learning from you, taking notes, finding new things to read, new music to check out. I’ve been working with my editors at Sundress to be sure that my fourth collection Unrivered is ready for layout/cover design. But I haven’t had much of anything to say, so I’ve let this platform be the thing that fell off my plate. So I’ll share today some things that have brought me joy/energized me/kept me writing over the past couple of months.

Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters

It was exciting and exhausting for Rachel Bunting and I to work through our first open submissions cycle as co-editors of our new journal, but the second issue arrived on April 20. We are so proud of the variety of writers and artists that are represented. I invite you to dip in — 5 poems, 2 essays, a very manageable read—and if you like what you see, share it! We are still new and want to grow our audience for our contributors the best we can. (And if you’re a writer or artist, subs for issue three open on May 1!)

Hundred Pitchers of Honey Reading Series

I cut the reading series back to four larger readings this year due to some upcoming travel and commitments to getting Asterales off the ground, but April’s Poetry Month reading was a reminder as to why I love to host this series. You can click on the link to the title above and watch the April reading (as well as all the previous readings) on YouTube anytime you need a little poetry fix. Next year, I hope to return to a more regular format, perhaps six readings a year.

30/30 for April

I haven’t felt very connected to my writing self, so I decided to do a 30/30 this year, loosely using the forms calendar provided by poets Taylor Byas and Seamus Fey. I’ve tried to stay open to whatever comes, to not force any sort of theme or “project”, to just go with whatever comes out. And it’s been working. So far, 22 days in, I have at least 5 pieces that I like, that I think are worth revising. (Yes, I revise. Obsessively. I know some poets who don’t, and that idea gives me the heebie-jeebies.) I won’t share any of the drafts here, as they are all in VERY rough places, but I will share some of the titles, my least favorite part of writing a poem.

• It Doesn’t Have Feathers, Emily
• Self-Portrait as Juliet with Insects
• Self-Portrait as Virginia Woolf Thinking of Frost As She Walked into the Ouse
• Sestina Where I Keep Asking Neil DeGrasse Tyson the Same Questions Over & Over
• When the OED Fails, I Seek Definitions Elsewhere
• Body, Don’t You Owe Me Something Good?

Donna Vorreyer, Back in the Saddle

 I’ve written before that April is the loneliest month. As a poet, you would think it would be a celebration, a month of revelry and readings and reaching new readers. Aprils are always an unusually packed month, not just when I was still working at the library. There I blamed the rise and fall of the semester, which, last couple weeks of April was reaching a head before finals, meant we had a last chance for exhibits and programming that people would actually be likely to attend. Wait too long and everyone was immersed in papers and projects. This was also my experience too as a student, when the deadlines loomed just over the end of the month. This was also typically when I was in rehearsals in collage for the spring show. While May was a bump and then an unraveling to vacation, April was always a little more demanding. 

As a poet from around 2004-2018,  I tried unsuccessfully to do NaPoWriMo, and mostly failed. In 2018, having started a year where I was climbing out from under the grief over losing my mom, I was already writing daily in the months before, so trying it in April seemed a fair bet. That was the first year I ever succeeded, having gotten down a writing routine that worked. Mostly it was just switching trying to write at night to writing first thing over breakfast in the studio. The only thing that changed each April was I included weekends . For a few years, this continued. I had a great slew of projects that had their origins in April’s past (I’ve been sharing peeks of them over at IG this week.) including memoir in bone & ink,  a project about wanting to run away from poetry like a child wants to run away from home. They also include series about The Shining, about Walter Potter dioramas, about Alice in Wonderland.  

While my writing process has a changed a little this past year and I tend to write a few poems a couple times a week instead of one poem daily, my focus is much more narrowed and intentional than it was prior. Nevertheless, I considered mixing things up and doing back to daily writing. Only then I remembered how lonely writing and sharing daily makes me feel during this month of all months. So I decided not to. 

On one hand, this may just be a continuation of years feeling lonely about poetry.  I remember being younger and engaging in the online and in-person communities with relish and enthusiasm. Those communities don’t always exist, or they break apart and form anew.  Every once in a while a poet will ask me where they should send work or where they should do readings when they are in Chicago, and sometimes my answers are incomplete or wholly disappointing. I am not sure I know. Most journals and presses have dissolved over the past two decades, reading series have come and gone, bookstores have risen and fallen.  All that’s left are the poems. 

Kristy Bowen, only the lonely

I always look forward to a new collection from Pascale Petit, and this one [Beast] didn’t disappoint. It also, I realise now in writing this post kind of dovetails nicely with the reading I’ve been doing in Art Monsters – ideas around monstrosity, beastliness, female creativity, excess etc.

Transformation, metamorphosis and the body as a place of unstable ground is always central to Pascale Petit’s work. The speaker of the poems, and family members often shift into the bodies of animals, birds, insects and plants to reveal emotional truths about power and the way we relate to each other, and sometimes fail each other.

Much of Pascale’s poetry is concerned with trauma, abuse and violence […] but she is a poet who writes about multiple places and brings that fascination with transformation into her writing about place. I really enjoyed two of the Odes in Beast: one is called “Ode to a Cornish Hedge” and starts:

Thousand-mile-long rainforest, shaggy remnant, where I slow to hear air pass through earwig spiracles, and bumblebees are thunder-loud in foxgloves

and a little earlier in the collection we have “Ode to the Camargue” which starts:

Your waterlilies are wings of rosy flamingos opening their dawns. You are imparadised with mornings of wild blue iris skies.

Both poems continue with this richness of detail. Writing just those opening couplets out now I can see how ‘“Ode to a Cornish Hedge” is concerned predominantly with sound, whereas “Ode to the Camargue” uses colour to focus on vision. Both then open up to incorporate dazzling writing using all five senses.

Kim Moore, April Reading

It seems the poem’s speaker’s father was simply continuing the abuse he endured on his own children, repeating the cycle. So the speaker is asking if the father’s memoir will be a hagiography or honest. Does saving the family image matter more than speaking the truth. Or is the father just talking about writing a book because he knows his daughter is a writing and she can’t be allowed to celebrate her success. Readers effectively come full circle to the writer’s dilemma about how she can be authentic in her writing.

It doesn’t end on a downbeat though. The final poem “Hope, the Everlasting Sacer” talks of possibility and ends, “The kind people I will meet,/ And the things I will write./ I am set free.”

“I Wish I Could Write” explores intergenerational trauma where abuse repeated instead of the cycle being broken, and the issues that a family member who wishes to write honestly about their life (and abuse) faces. The dilemma is whether to keep up the expected family image or risk being ostrasized for telling the truth. Widner sees this from both the point of view of the adult child facing the dilemma while acknowledging that her parent was damaged. The tone is hopeful, writing the past will free the poems’ speaker to write what really matters to her, overcome that block and fulfill her wish.

Emma Lee, “I Wish I Could Write” Katherine Widner – book review

Rosie Johnston’s previous book, Six-Count Jive was a study in domestic abuse and escape presented in sets of haiku-like poems. Her new publication, Safe Ground sets that experience, ‘a bad case of bad, bad husband’, in a wider context of trauma and recovery that reaches back to a troubled Belfast childhood, with a much-loved womanising, hill-climbing, opera lover father and a mother whose resentments ruined her relationship with her daughter, and forward to a happier present in poems that are baggier, more discursive, than those in the earlier book.

These personal troubles are set in a background of the Troubles, and at moments the public and private seem to overlap, as in this poem on the Abercorn bombing in 1972:

Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.

Her escape was, and remains, the sea, right from the very first poem here, ‘Carnlough Bay’:

I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size. I’m
tallest in bare feet, on sea-rolled shingle, back
heavy in my heels, cupping the weight of
whelk shells in my pockets.
Constant in it all, so
many years, the
need of
sea.

We see the breakdown of that bad marriage and the speaker’s fraught relationships with her children, but in the end, in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea:

We run, crabs loose from a spilt
green bucket,
back to the best of childhood.

Content with plastic spades,
we burrow
where our simplest selves can find us.

On Margate Sands songs and laughter
ride the winds,
connect us all with all.

That ‘loose’ brings us back to the Abercorn poem, but the worst we can be is transmogrified into the simple best in an echo of marvellous deftness.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading April 2025: A Review

Rebecca Goss is a poet whose work I have hitherto been unfamiliar. Regular readers may recall that I wrote a brief post, here, commending the podcast Goss recorded last year with Heidi Williamson about poetry of place. Like Adrian May, she lives in the middle of East Anglia, in Suffolk. I suggested her most recent (2023) collection, Latch, published by Carcanet and available here, as the book for next month’s poetry book club. It concerns her return, with her husband and young daughter, to the area she was raised in, after living for a long while in Liverpool, and the memories it sparked. At times, it felt like the rural feel had transported me back to the prose of Ronald Blythe in his unclassifiable classic Akenfield. (Though when I think of Suffolk and writers, Roger Deakin, Michael Hamburger and WG Sebald, all of whom I’ve written about on here, also come to mind, as does George Crabbe.) Three poems from Latch were first published in Bad Lilies in 2021, here. As you can see, Goss writes beautifully about a country upbringing. I’ve also now read – in one sitting – her very moving and transfixing second collection Her Birth, about, principally the birth and death of her first daughter Ella. […]

Now I’m working my way deliberately slowly through Jane Hirshfield’s amazing set of essays, Nine Gates, subtitled  ‘Entering the Mind of Poetry’, published by Harper Collins back in 1997. As you’d expect from Hirshfield, it’s immesely thought-provoking; the best book I’ve read about poetry in a long time. It would be very difficult to try and summarise Hirshfield’s ideas. If I were the sort of person who’s deface books by using a highlighter pen to mark the best bits, then my copy of Nine Gates would like an Acid House night had been held within it. This sentence is typical of Hirshfield’s Zen-infused (cliché alert, sorry) insights: ‘Originality lives at the crossroads, at the point where world and self open to each other in transparence in the night rain.’

Matthew Paul, April reading

It’s official news now, but a while back the excellent poet and person that is Matthew Paul told me that his long-awaited second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was coming out soon via Crooked Spire Press. I am enormously pleased for him, having loved The Evening Entertainment.

He has also very kindly invited me to read with him at the London launch in June (17th, from 7pm) alongside Vanessa Lampert and Ian Parks. I can’t wait.

Mat Riches, Corinthian Spirit

Denver, Colorado poet and editor Wayne Miller’s sixth full-length poetry collection, most recently following We the Jury (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here] is The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025), a collection that continues his lyric explorations at the collision between the dark realities of American military culture and the intimacies of home, family and childhood. “My best friend’s older brother had posters // of nuclear explosions all over his bedroom.” he writes, as part of the poem “THE LATE COLD WAR,” “At night they became the walls of his sleep.” There’s a sharpness to his lyrics, his lyric turns, able to change course mid-thought, allowing the collision of ideas or troubling connections.

The End of Childhood is a title, of course, that provides layers of possibility, from the complicated and naturally-human simplicity of emerging out of childhood thinking, from discovering that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist, to the realization of the failings of trusted adults, into further shades of darkness of human possibility. These are poems on multiple levels of realization, and a broadening scope. “Last week, a violent mob / of thousands stormed the Capital. // They wore sweatpants and flags,” begins the second part of his three-part “ON HISTORY,” “puffer coats and tactical gear. // If I ignore the details of their chants / and the silliness of their face paint, // they become a historical form. / That policeman on the television // being crushed in a doorway / over and over is trapped inside // of history. If you feel nothing / for him, then you are inhuman. // Yet all of us were pushing / from one side or another.” His title allows for a further suggestion of innocence, in thinking that such could not happen, could no longer happen; could not happen here. Through his articulations, Miller knows full well that he and all around him live deep within history, from the best moments through to the worst. The storming of the Capital Building, or a teenager felled by a bullet while waiting for the bus. These are poems that meet the present moment, even amid the intimacies of home and memory, children and those recollections of childhood that becoming a parent can so often prompt.

While, for the most part, these troubling elements of “America” sit at the background, almost as a shroud, they are still deeply present, even as the book as a whole writes around childhood, from his to that of his children, offering moments that stitch together that accumulate into narratives with the lightest touch across lines, one phrase carefully set upon another. Whatever the subject matter, there is such a lovely slowness to his lines, a deliberateness, offering hush and a halt amid such careful measure. “My grandfather—just a boy— / discovered his father’s body,” Miller writes, as part of “ON VIOLENCE,” “the trauma of which is why, / my grandmother would say, // he never aspired to more / than basic, menial work. // My grandmother’s father / drowned in Sheepshead Bay // after a night of heavy drinking / with the fishermen // he so admired. Foul play / was suspected, but never proved. // This was in 1920. Back then, / my grandmother told me, // things like that happened / all the time.”

rob mclennan, Wayne Miller, The End of Childhood

While I haven’t properly written poetry for eons, I’ve been reading it all through. Once you start reading poetry you’ll never stop. It gives so much. Life feels weird without reading poems. I’ve been lately reading a couple of books written for poets but I also think that anyone could stand to read them who might like to infuse poetry into their lives and those around them. A book I’ve talked about before here is We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher.

On a chapter on W.S. Merwin, Teicher says:

“Major poets make themselves, with effort; they are not born. I would argue that many major poets begin minor, though the best of them begin with the promise of becoming important voices for their time. They begin weird, out of step in some fundamental way, esoteric, in their own heads. Eventually, their strangeness comes to shape the poetry around them. They give voice to the poetry of their time, and one can no longer understand it without understanding them.”

I like thinking about this even if I’m not sure the world, poetry world, still works that way? Maybe it does. I’m at a distance. Which is to say, can you in this time make an effort, and alter the major / minor situation? Who gets to be the voice of their time? What are the factors, the conditions? What are the obstacles?

The average enjoyer of poems likely just wants to get to the poems. For the average reader, all the poets are minor, perhaps.

Shawna Lemay, Ode to the Minor Poets

Convention has it that Desnos wrote this poem about music-hall singer, Yvonne George, whom he met in 1924. In this story, she haunts his dreams here and returns in the poems of Ténèbres. It was a case of unrequited love, unsuccessful love, or unrealized love, depending on the narrator. By ordinary standards, it was a ‘failed love’— though writers must amongst themselves as to whether the poems realize a love that is perhaps more ‘real’ than a romantic relationship.

Desnos’ poem gives life to the dream, an eternity of life. Yvonne is also said to be the person invoked by Desnos’ haunting final poem (though I’m inclined to suspect Louki deserves consideration).

Born in Brussels in 1896 as Yvonne de Knops, George began her career on stage, where she met Jean Cocteau. In 1922, after being discovered by the influential Paul Franck, Yvonne George moved into a nice apartment in Neuilly that became a hub for meeting artists and writers. Last FM offers a brief history of George’s life, including the following statement: “In 1924, well-known in Parisian intellectual circles as a charming singer, George became the subject of a passionate love affair with the French poet Robert Desnos, who wrote her numerous poems including the famous J’ai tant rêvé de toi (I have dreamed so much about you).”

It is well known that Desnos introduced George to opium, or that opium was in the background of their encounters, as written in Desnos’ novel, La Liberté ou l’Amour (Freedom or Love), a book that received the honor of being condemned for obscenity by the tribunal de la Seine.

Styled as an emancipated woman by her peers, George died of tuberculosis in a hotel room in Genoa on May 16, 1930. Like Jesus of Nazareth, she was 33 years old. “Weakened by her the excesses of her lifestyle, George fell ill with tuberculosis,” says Last FM, leaving us with exemplary palaver of the sort slung at artists and bohemians who died young from tuberculosis or Spanish flu. Ode to the heavy lifting done by “excesses of her lifestyle” here! I say this with sarcasm dripping from my fangs.

Last year, I had the pleasure of being consumed by Desnos’ novella, The Die Is Cast (1943), published by Wakefield Press in Jesse Lee Anderson’s translation, and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in Desnos’ relationship with Yvonne George and the perfusion of deliriums wrought by opium. Desnos published the book in occupied Paris a year before the Gestapo arrested him for his Resistance activities. The Die marks “a shift from his earlier frenetic surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as from his career as a journalist,” a realism that happens to include his opium experimentation “and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George” in the 1920’s. It may be “junkie literature.” Certainly, Desnos marks an end to utopias “in a distinct break from the ‘artificial paradises’ explored by his predecessors, moving towards “a new era of ‘artificial hells.”

Novella aside, in Desnos’ poetry, the dreaming continues. The poem gives us a world in which the dream, alone, is an honest or decent guide to what could possible. The world is a wreck, a failure; the dream reimagines what it cannot rescue.

Alina Stefanescu, Desnos forever.

But the greatest achievement of The Golden Gate is, I think, its mastery of tone and tonal transitions. [Vikram] Seth himself said that this was what particularly attracted him about Johnston’s (verse) translation of Pushkin which initially gave him the idea for the book, which he wrote while a PhD student in economics at Stanford:

I found in the poetry section [of a bookshop], two translations of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s great novel in verse. Two translations but each of them maintained the same stanzaic form that Pushkin had used. Not because I was interested in Pushkin or Eugene Onegin, but purely because I thought, this is interesting technically that both of them should have been translated so faithfully, at least as far as the form goes. I began to compare the two translations, to get access to the original stanzas behind them, as I don’t know Russian. After a while, that exercise failed, because I found myself reading one of them for pure pleasure. I must have read it five times that month. It was addictive. And suddenly, I realized that this was the form I was looking for to tell my tales of California. The little short stories I had in my mind subsided and this more organically oriented novel came into being. I loved the form, the ability that Pushkin had to run through a wide range of emotions, from absolute flippancy to real sorrow and passages that would make you think, during and after reading it.

It is the combinations of such transitions — as he says, from ‘absolute flippancy to real sorrow’ — with passages ‘that would make you think’ that really mark out Seth’s own achievement. There are many straightforwardly ravishing passages in The Golden Gate, as well as dozens of genuinely funny ones. Seth isn’t afraid to be serious.

Victoria Moul, He left irregular (moronic) / Sentimentality behind

It’s only been a few days since the Supreme Court Judgement, but it feels like a decade. It’s as if one sunny April day, I stepped through time, back into the atrocious overt everyday homophobia of the eighties, the days of protests and marches. With each headline and every piece of guidance from the EHRC, the world gets darker.

This time, of course, it’s trans people – specifically trans women – at the centre of the storm. But we are a community, and we are in it together. In the 1980’s, as gay men were demonised in newspapers and hospitals even as they died, lesbians and trans people were alongside them. LGBTQ+ people are united by the anger and hatred directed at us through the decades. It echoes around us, it lives within us. I have been spat at, shouted at more times than I can count. I’m scared for myself, but I’m more scared that that we will lose more people, that the damage it does a person to be told that the identity they have painfully built for themselves is over. I’m scared that it will be too much for some people to bear.

And because of that, I want to think of joy. Queer joy, and queer hope. Because by its very nature, being queer – even, or especially, at the darkest times in our shared histories – has joy at its core. After all, our desire for love and freedom is what brings us together. To come out, to transition; to love when you’ve been told you cannot; to be yourself when the cost is horribly high – you have to be hopeful. You have to be deeply committed to joy.

If you want to celebrate queer lives and queer poetry, you could start with 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022). Edited by Andrew Macmillan and Mary Jean Chan, it gathers together queer poems from across the last century, from Charlotte Mew to poetry so fresh it feels like it was published five years in the future. Good poetry is rarely all light or all dark – and this anthology takes in the pain and violence of queer lives – for example, in Jay Hulme’s In the Future:

In the future people like me
will not be able to distinctly describe
the scent of the floor in the men’s toilet
that time they were slammed into it

But at the heart of the anthology is the fact that queer people walk over hot coals just to love, to live honestly, to be happy. We are hopeful.

Clare Shaw, Queer joy, queer hope, and poetry

In the future
insects will sing their vast
chattering wave, and the waves
will crash in rhythm until,
eventually, time dissolves
the poisons. Bright shards
of sea-worn credit cards
mosaic the beach in unintelligible
patterns. The future knows
no center, no margin, no page.
The headless table will seat
no king. Take heart, my love,
for the glaciers grow back also.
Newly ancient and clean.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, bright shards of sea-worn credit cards

In a desert, there is a rain puddle that refuses to die.

In a cemetery, there is honey on the tongue of a tomb that will forever taste sweet.

Winds, waters and ruins press against us, break us to rubble, then build us back up.

A kiss can be a planet, a planet can be a prayer wheel, a prayer wheel can be a shiny coin in a pocket.

When is that moment during the day we live and love our brightest?

Rich Ferguson, The Currency of Certain Occurrences

This year Ali, who I chatted to about poetry last time, was there again and I was delighted when she came over to say hello and let me know that she was still enjoying dipping into my poetry book. Other conversations from new people I met included the joy of dawn chorus, the wonderful Dolly Parton, and finding time to treat yourself as kindly as you do others. I love all these things and it was good to converse with so many like-minded people.

The lodge we stayed in was in a wooded area and I was able to practice using my new head torch (perfect for watching the rabbits in the fields) as well as being immersed in the sound of dawn chorus each morning. I have been thinking about dawn chorus a lot lately. The beauty of this moment in each day, the way it becomes so magnificent at this time of year, how wonderful it feels to stand in the start of a new day or a new venture, and how it feels when darkness breaks. In celebration of all of that I will share ‘It is Not About Dawn’ from my first collection Magnifying Glass.

IT IS NOT ABOUT DAWN

It is about that moment
before the dark time breaks,
being present in the silence,
standing still in an exact moment.

It is all about when that first bird sings,
first light,
the fact that there is an order
that layer upon layer
sculpts the day’s beginning.

It is about discovering how long it takes
before the crow starts to echo back
with his rough
cruck, cruck.

Sue Finch, HAIR BUNS AND PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES

It seems we’ve moved from spring directly into summer, rain evaporating, temperatures rising. The tulip fields have bloomed and ended in what seemed like two weeks—cherry petals litter my lawn as lilacs bloom. It’s a topsy turvy gardener’s problem, because two weeks ago it was too cold to plant seeds and now we have to wear sunscreen when we go out to water.

This last week marked the 30th anniversary of Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, so we visited, picked up a few books, got to talk to Billie and Gabrielle and John (if you know, you know!) and after they closed, went to Seattle’s Japanese Garden to watch birds sing on top of flowers and observe summer flowers—azaleas, rhodoendrons and wisteria—taking over. […]

You may have noticed, with the return of nice weather, came the return of bird pictures to the blog. And the time has rolled around to my birthday once again. It always makes me introspective, and though I’m happy I’m getting another year on this earth (never guaranteed), the first four months of 2025 have been awfully challening, personally, financially, health-wise, and even poetry-wise. And that’s not mentioning politics or world news. It’s tough to feel like celebrating.

I did sign up for a class on essay writing and got some tickets to see Rebecca Solnit when she comes to Seattle. I’m also starting to meet with other writers again to talk about work. I’m trying to be pro-active, doing positive things with my money—choosing new charities, looking at (gulp) retirement accounts, and trying to bring in more with my writing—and trying to make new friends and build more community around me. I don’t want to ignore that I’m getting older and be too resistant to change to miss the signs that I should be doing something different.

In the meantime, I will try to pay attention to the singing bird next to me, the timing of the stars and flowers, and some of the gifts that aging brings.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Springing into Summer, Open Books, Japanese Garden, Spending $11,000 on Book PR, and Birthdays Coming Up

The poems I’ve been working on lately are about love, but also growing older. Loving the person I’ve become. Aging has never really bothered me, but I can see how the world glances side-eye at me now that I look older, for not dying my graying hair or wearing makeup to hide my wrinkles. I feel as if I’m not allowed to age as I see fit, to be menopausal, hormonal, irrational and maybe in love with all of it. Luckily, I and my poems don’t care how the world sees me and though I may complain about the aching joints, I am celebrating my newly crazy middle age.

These themes have also been popping up in my GloPoWriMo poems, the write a poem a day challenge for April.

Gerry Stewart, Aging and Love are Involuntary

The poem? I opened the trapdoor and let
the birds fly out of the poem. Not one turned
or sang goodbye. Their silence shocked the
poem. The sky shocked the birds.

Then I threw the flowers out. Turned the
poem upside-down, let the water run into
the sink. It smelt of rot, of displacement.

I drew clouds over the moon, unwilling
to wait till morning. Dark, smothering.
Now the poem must, perforce, find a
new source of light. Cast a new shadow.

And I struck out every reference to
food and drink: The poem must starve
till it becomes a tree. It must grow
roots and finds sustenance in the soil
beneath my feet. Or pray for rain.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, It all ends at line fifty

first day of life
the moon counting
its delicate birds

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: sound and silence, the worm moon, war news, the lost forest of time, and much more. Enjoy.

I heard the author of this poem read it at an open mic, and it haunted me, this haunting. It’s a dream poem, but ghostly. I think it’s the sounds heard in the poem that haunted me, the creak of oars, the voice, and also the inability to see, that straining that is a part of so many dreams that are remembered in the morning. The unmet desire to reach. But how can sorrow be beautiful?

Reading poems that make me teary feels like practice for the real times of sorrow. Rehearsal. Or a revisiting of times I had to push away, a chance to sit with them again with the pain less acute. This is, after all, someone else’s sorrow, safer, and made art. Art that makes us feel what the maker feels is communication magic, the kind that defies mere words. Yet poems are mere words. Isn’t it strange?

Marilyn McCabe, of trout or perch, gone before I could relish

---

Needless to say, I haven’t posted in forever. Work and traveling occupy much of my time.

My mother died in late January after an accident in early December, and I was out of commission for weeks, first trying to prevent it, then trying to make it bearable, then (and still) sorrowing over it. She was 88. She was lucky to have her wits about her until her last days. She was a very good mother and person.

Along with many other people, I’m in disbelief about what is happening in the U.S. But everyone reads the news, one way or another. And some people who don’t like democracy think it’s all just fine. May they boil in oil.

As a respite from the news, I turn to nature and books written long ago. I’m rereading “Swann’s Way” in a different translation now, and it’s as fabulous as it was 10 years ago. I am again cataloging the abundant flowers.

Sarah J. Sloat, Needless to say

For months after his burial tourists came to the cemetery to see where he was buried. If people saw me kneeling at my daughter’s grave they would come and ask me where he was and I never thought i could tell them to fuck off, but I wish I had, because they were paying no reverence to my daughter, who had also died, who was also buried there, and they were paying no respect to me. It was all about the fame of Jimmy. When I wrote The Ghost Lake, I talked a little about this moment, when someone almost stood on my daughter’s grave, leaning through the hedge to ask me where Jimmy was buried, without even a hello. Is if by being a part of the cemetery, by having a burial in the cemetery, I was somehow now a guide to the burials. I hated it. I hated the way Jimmy’s gravity was affecting the peace of the place, how all our smaller stars were being sucked into his story. He had a triptych gravestone put up, of course he did, black marble, obviously written by himself, with stories of his charity work, of how loved he was. They had to put one of those iron chains around his grave because so many people wanted to see it.

And then the allegations and the investigations began and Scarborough didn’t know what to do with their town celebrity. Even more people were coming to the cemetery and it began to be a source of shame to the town. The gravestone disappeared, taken down. Then later the iron rope, leaving no trace of him in the cemetery. People did still come, but couldn’t find his grave, unless they were obsessed with it and knew where it was. Less people came over time, now very few come. The town defended him for a while, until he became indefensible, and then they quietly removed the blue plaques and the street signs and the only stories told about him were like this one – I met Jimmy Savile once…and we change the narrative slightly, pull out from our memories the places of darkness, the unnerving awfulness of him that was always there, it was definitely always there; the creepiness, but now we pull it to the front, and we are embarrassed that we could be so easily taken in by the script of Jimmy, by the rose-glow of nostalgia.

Sometimes I think about what archaeologists will find in the cemetery in hundreds of years time. They will find this person encased in concrete, different to the other graves because of the burial’s strange angle, the gold still bright and sharp as the day it went into the grave. They will think, here is a high status individual. And there will be so little left of everyone else, nothing of my tiny daughter, and the stories around Jimmy will be shaped in that way, as they always were.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: The Day I met Jimmy Savile

Red-winged blackbirds make the mornings noisy–they have so many different songs and calls that three or four of them sound like multitudes, almost drowning out our year-round singers, the song sparrows. Early migrant passerines have returned, but it’s still winter here. Some bugs have gotten active and are emerging from hibernation or incubation. No bees as yet. When I turn over rotting logs, I find amphibians’ eggs and lots of different varieties of soil centipedes.

And, of course, worms. March’s moon is sometimes called the Worm Moon, and tonight there’s a total lunar eclipse around midnight here in PA. Is that auspicious? It’s also when I will be reading at the Lambertville Free Public Library in Lambertville, NJ. I’m excited to participate in an on-site, in-person reading again…I’ve been hibernating a bit from poetry events, but it is time to get stirring. […]

A concerned European friend recently asked me how I was faring under the stress of these first three months, and I told him that since making art (poetry) has generally been an unconventional act/behavior/response even under the patronage system, my response is to keep making art. Granted, it isn’t much, nothing earth-shattering, not gonna change society that way; but it keeps us observant little non-conformers on our toes, creative, and flourishing in the face of weirdness and oppression.

Which is something we can do. Like early bloomers in the cold days of late winter.

Ann E. Michael, Mid-March

The same day I got two crowns, we also had a beautiful full lunar eclipse, which I managed to get some pictures of. The bad news is, like many times in the past, getting dental work and lunar eclipses both seem to equal MS flares, and this time was no different. (See this poem about the night I was diagnosed with MS, which was also a Blood Moon Eclipse) Feeling incredibly fatigued, in pain, and slow-brained and clumsy, we’ve also had to deal with a crown complication, an error made to make the accessible bathroom counter six inches too high (which we have to pay to fix, even though it was the company we hired to design an accessible bathroom’s mistake,) and dwindling money and health, plus terrible political news. It has all been very draining. So if I owe you something and you need it urgently, let me know – right now I am postponing things like crazy and trying just to rest and drink fluids until I’m feeling a little better. I am also prepping for AWP and hoping I feel better enough to attend. I could also talk about putting together how submitting a book manuscript can feel incredibly dispiriting and hope-inspiring at the same time, how going through a home renovation is hard on the body and on marriages and checkbooks (so don’t underestimate it!), or how trying to guess how to manage money when a madman has ahold of the economy and is seemingly trying to strangle it is tough. Lunar eclipses usually portent a shift in energy. Let’s hope it’s a shift for the better.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Lunar Eclipses, Dental Work and Cherry Blossoms, Plus MS Flares

I am a bird squatting on a rooftop in March’s chill.

Do they really grow back once you’ve clipped them? The feathers?

This week, the x-ray technician will press my foot to the cold plate and take an image. The doctor will decide if I can walk again. If the bones in my toe have grown together, after the chiseling and the scraping. If the metal plate and the screws have done their job.

This body isn’t a jaguar that can swallow the moon. It isn’t a dog, a sow, or a soft toad on the running trail. It is a hybrid of slings, and stents, and screws. It walks because humans strip the bark from yew trees for chemotherapy drugs, because they eviscerate the earth and make oils, and metals, and plastics.

I mourn the passing of this Blood Moon. I feel my loss, because from this perspective, from this landscape so far from my toddling, my arm-grabbing, “look at this” home, I’m reaching for something to blanket all the exposed hurts. A bit of superstition, a bedtime story.

Goodnight Moon. The jaguar, the sow, the dog and the toad will surely devour you again. You will survive them. Yet I fear for you.

I look up now and apologize in advance for our footprints, our defiled planet’s relics, and for what’s coming.

Ren Powell, A Blood Moon Blanket

It has been a long winter. I just tested negative after ten days of being cooped up with Covid 19. I am feeling much better with mostly fatigue and upper respiratory congestion as the main symptoms. Five years in and I feel fortunate our family was not hit harder in the beginning with this novel virus. I am grateful for vaccines and medicine that I believe helped lessen the burden this virus may have had on my immune compromised friends and family.

Last November I sent an Ode to an organization called “Poets for Science” which is a movement that explores the connections between poetry and science. I sort of forgot I had sent it in until today when I was cleaning up my “submissions” folders and saw I had not heard back. I found out today after going on their website it was in fact published in the “Global Gallery” section on the web. Maybe it is good I found it today after a bout with Covid. Enjoy “Ode to Paxlovid” directly on their site and check out other poems about science as well. May you all stay well.

Carey Taylor, Covid 19

Perhaps it is time to ransom my soul
which has been sold to this empire
of the modern workplace.
I look to the monks
and their rigorous schedule of prayer.
Feeling like a true subversive,
I insert appointments for my spirit
into the calendar. I code
them in a secret language
so my boss won’t know I’m speaking
in a different tongue. I launch
my coracle of prayer
into this unknown ocean,
the shore unseen, my hopes
rising like incense across a chapel.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Coracles of Hope on St. Patrick’s Day

I suppose it’s the teeming abundance of images, ideas and suggestions it contains that makes ‘The Windhover’ such a remarkable poem but it was the sheer energy of its utterance that made me fall in love with it at school. At that point I had only the faintest, most general idea of what it meant beyond expressing the poet’s joy at the sight of a bird and moving from that into thoughts about Christ’s self-sacrifice. This ‘energy of utterance’ still seems to me the most solid, immediate and irresistible element of the delight it gives. By ‘utterance’, of course, I don’t just mean the sounds you hear in the poem, I mean the physical energy demanded of you and released in you as you say the words, even if you articulate them in the silence of your own mind.

Edmund Prestwich, Sounds of glory – Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’

In 1982, I saw Denise Levertov read at Santa Rosa Junior College, where I was a student. I had read her poems since I was a child, and I knew what she looked like from the photograph of her on the backs of her books, but nothing prepared me for hearing her voice. On that early Spring day in Northern California, I learned how a poem should sound.

Levertov herself was unassuming: a small woman with short dark hair going gray. She wore glasses and a pink checked dress. She must have been close to sixty then, impossibly old to twenty-two-year-old me. But when she approached the microphone and began to recite her poetry, I was transfixed. Her delicate, British-accented voice rose and fell as she took the audience, a large, packed hall, into that emotional place that only poetry can create. 

When she spoke, it sounded like a friend telling another friend the most profound secrets. She told us about surviving World War II, about her love for her former husband, about how her sister struggled with her mental health, and shared epiphanies acquired on the subways of New York. With a slight lisp resulting from a missing front tooth, she pronounced each word as if it were holy text.

I left the hall a changed being. Now I knew how a poem should sound. 

Erica Goss, How Should a Poem Sound?

People turn away, chat among themselves.
Who are you talking to?
I don’t know.
I didn’t know I was talking.
I thought it was just sound.
After one revolution, before the next.
After one mad president, before the next.
After one poem, before the next.
A poem is an instinct, nothing more.

Bob Mee, POEM AS INSTINCT

Voice is love’s voltage to energize and empower our lives.

With a well-honed noun or verb, we can sweep someone off their feet.

But when adjectives turn tragic, we’re swept under the rug.

Have you ever heard the cry of a newborn revolution?

Have you ever noticed a day that couldn’t modulate because a gun was stuck in its throat?

Sometimes we speak in hushed tones when reciting poems, prayers, or lullabying a child.

I like it when we’re loud—

when we sound like gasoline saints in the combustible church of cool.

Rich Ferguson, Voice Up

The silence stays close, a shadow. I don’t
mean the kind without form or sound.
More cloak or armour, its texture
changing: corrosive, calloused, molten,
foul like maggots in the carcass of
another time, cold and solid like ice
cubes, the last memory of warmth
frozen out of them.

It sits with me at dusk, offering
words.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What will I find if I stop searching?

The poet himself is a gentlemanly presence throughout this, his fifth collection, never more so than when he’s introducing ‘Deliverance, 1961’ the novella-in-thirty-two-cantos which takes up the back half of the book. Like a good-natured aide conducting us to the office of an eccentric royal, he’s at pains to explain the poem’s form (so that we may better appreciate it) and prepare us for the dubious views and behaviours of his period characters (so that we might refrain from judging them unkindly). The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into ‘Our Better Selves’, ‘Our Lesser Selves’ and ‘Our Contemptible Selves’, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.

Jon Stone, The World You Now Own by P. W. Bridgman

The most recent issue of Rattle, which just reached me in Paris, has a focus on the haibun, described by the editors as ‘the combination of haiku with prose (and sometimes other forms of writing), popularized by Bashō in 17th-century Japan’. The majority of the published examples — 22 of them — take the form of a single paragraph of prose followed by a haiku or something like it. One or two do it the other way round (haiku followed by prose). A couple are made up of a series of prose paragraph + haiku alternations, and there are one or two other variations.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t love this form in English and I wasn’t won over by any of these poems. But I am fascinated in general by prosimetric work — that is, literary forms that combine prose and poetry — and I can strongly recommend the interview with Lew Watts, a Welsh poet living in the US, who’s a well-established writer of both haiku and haibun. The interviews in Rattle are one of the best things about the magazine — the editor Timothy Green does a great job of eliciting thoughtful, detailed and wide-ranging conversations prompted by questions which always seem respectful and well-informed, without flattery or soft soap. This particular ‘Conversation’ takes up a good chunk of the issue, and Watts speaks compellingly about the relationship between the prose and haiku elements, and about his own evolution from writing mainly rhyming verse in quite demanding traditional forms (like villanelles) to haiku and haibun. In fact, this background comes through in his own contribution to the issue, which is the only one to combine not just prose and haiku but also some rhyming verse (imagined I think as a song). Watts’ contribution is unique in having this three-way formal alternation (prose/haiku/song).

Anyone who’s written a few poems has probably had that experience of starting off in prose — perhaps a diary entry, memory or description jotted in a notebook — that then starts to turn into poetry. To me, the modern American haibun too often feels like that — a writer’s exercise more than a fully-fledged form. But thinking about — and learning to write — verse in close relation to prose has a distinguished history. Ben Jonson claimed that he always wrote his poetry as prose first, and then converted it into verse, because that’s what he was taught to do by his schoolmaster, William Camden.

Victoria Moul, The Anglo-Latin haibun

The first time I thought of myself as an American was when I left the country. I had a scholarship to France, and spent the summer learning French. Our last night in Europe, we were set to fly out of Brussels because the Paris airport was closed, so we went dancing. But I was lonely dancing, thinking how much I missed the United States.

What I missed more than anything was Mexican food. Around ASU, the Mexican food was delicious: layers of cheese, avocados, tortillas, salsa, the enchiladas perfect, the mole, abundant. The Belgian boys were happy to be dancing with this frothy cloud of American girls, and suddenly “Born in the USA” came on, and we were screaming to it, as if it were our lifeblood. I remember feeling the Boss’s music throbbing through my American veins and dripping with longing for margaritas and salsa.

When we miss America, we miss Mexican food. We miss the churros at the park, the Chinese food we eat on Thursdays. We miss the Vietnamese place where we go for soup when we are sick. We miss our favorite Armenian bakery, the place we go for naan and tandoori on Sundays. We miss kosher delis and Middle Eastern grocery stores. In Los Angeles, we visit Korean markets to buy fresh fish and sushi rice and make sushi at home, spreading out the nori, preparing our rolls.

When we say we miss America, we are missing all the cultures that make America glorious. When you go to Greece, they have Greek food; when you go to Japan, they have Japanese food; when you come to this country, we have everything.

All of this is why being at the London Book Fair this past week was overwhelming.

Kate Gale, Born in the USA: Why Do We Stay?

a baby
trying to scroll the window
mum on her phone

Jim Young [no title]

I am taking all the dopamine hits I can. Today, it’s a day devoted solely to writing things. J was away overnight (late night karaoke and early morning DJ gig at a party downtown before the river dyeing and the parade had him catching some sleep in his car instead of driving all the way back to the northside after loading and unloading gear all night.) I slept in, made coffee, and started working on edits on some poem efforts from last weekend, fueled by Cadbury caramel eggs, which are frightfully cheaper than actual eggs this year.. Since my days are feeling cumbersome and prone to distractions, I’ve switched from daily poems to more chunky groups of poems on certain days. Right now, this works for the more sci-fi project underway (you can see some bits at IG in the past couple weeks.) I don’t know how long they will keep going, but I am giving them some space to grow..

Every March I contemplate NAPOWRIMO and usually decide to do it, but I may sit it out this year. This clustering approach to writing is yielding nice results and the month of April is always a morass with things like taxes and my birthday anyway. I’ve also noted before how lonely it all feels…when I am just writing and posting normally I don’t feel it or mind if it feels like poems get shot out into the universe with no response, but it feels especially lonely in a month that is supposed to be devoted to poems. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 3/16/2025

San Francisco poet and activist Beau Beausoleil has sent me his new book, War News II, number 23 in the Page Poets Series published by FMSBW (ISBN 9798989413393) and available from Amazon UK for £8, a price that makes me suspect that the only one making a profit is Amazon. This is ironic! I don’t buy from Amazon so I’m not allowed to post a review there.

Many of us – and I am guilty of this – have from time to time switched off the news. It’s easier to sign petitions and donate to Medecins Sans Frontieres than to take the news, day after day, deep into our consciousness and to wake night after night with a scream stuck in the throat. Beau has remained attentive to the cruelty and suffering, and processed it and its fallout in his life, by writing a poem every day from October 8th 2023 in response to the war in Gaza – ‘ … a visceral and personal reaction to what I was reading and seeing in the media each day.’ Such an undertaking comes with serious dangers to the poet’s health and peace of mind. I am happy to say that Beau is making a good recovery from the illness that struck him down last November.

The first one hundred poems, covering the first three months, were published in December 2023 as a free ebook by Agitate! Journal. Volume two takes up where the first leaves off, on December 9th 2023. In his Preface, Beau describes this work as ‘both useless and necessary.’ Each poem has the same title, and each one is a meditation, a daily prayer almost. The book has a bed next to mine, and each morning I wake it and it gives me a text for the day.

Ama Bolton, War News II

Non-poets often wonder about the use of patterns in poems — does following a set of constraints help of hinder the process?  For me, often — though not always — constraints push me to discovery.  Below I offer a triangular poem by Washington, DC poet E. Laura Goldberg which I re-found recently in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM);   Goldberg’s poem remembers the costs of war.

JoAnne Growney, A Triangular Poem

Daniel Hinds’s “New Famous Phrases” is a collection of poems, playful on the surface, but with deeper intent as a conversation with earlier works and myths, whether creating a magpie inspired by Ted Hughes’s “Crow” or evoking Merope in “The Pact of Water” “signed in a squirt of squid ink spray”,

“Put your ear to a stone shell or a seal’s black flank,
Hear the submerged voices raised in the world’s blood.

Now we look down in meropian blindness,
Discern no cities capped beneath blue braes.

We let the water fall through our hands.
It leaves a tentacle pucker mark.”

Water, both essential to life and capable of destroying it. As human life heads towards a climate emergency, rising temperatures mean rising sea levels. The suggestion here is that current human life will see cities submerged as Atlantis was. But humans shrug their shoulders, ignore the warnings from history and let it become tomorrow’s problem.

Emma Lee, “New Famous Phrases” Daniel Hinds (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

As you may remember, I’ve finished a full-length poetry manuscript called Words with Friends. I post a request for words on Facebook, and folks contribute one each. I then use all the words in a single poem, one supplied word per line. Here’s a poem about this detestable month. […]

be still and you can feel the dirt beneath you crack
with promise of tender shoots and sturdy stems
just like every other march first in your memory
the way it comes in and perches itself on the edge
how it teases you with moist breath, dangles
the songs of birds, parades these salacious days
then turns beastly cold like spring was all a lie.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, March

Anaphora in poetry — repeating the same word or phrase at the start of each line — is one of my most used (and most successful) generative writing exercises. As Rebecca Hazelton says in Adventures in Anaphora, “Students write more creatively when they repeat themselves,” and I find that to be true for myself, as well.

But anaphora isn’t just for getting started on a blank page or in a writing journal: It also works in finished poems.

Without a doubt, part of my affection for anaphora in poetry is its sisterhood with the list poem. Anaphora does result in a kind of list, and I love seeing how poets use it to create momentum and play with language.

Carolee Bennett, Anaphora in Poetry: 40+ Examples

What if editors provided more incentives for reviewing issues of lit mags? Post three reviews on Facebook, send the screenshots to the editor, get a free subscription.

What if there was a central platform like Goodreads but for lit mags? There, readers could post star-ratings, talk with one another about what they liked and did not like? Readers could follow one another to see what their peers are reading, what’s on their “TBR” (to-be-read) pile, what they’ve labeled as DNF (did-not-finish).

Might editors consider hosting reading clubs of their own? Imagine lit mag clubs hosted by five lit mags. Every six months, the editors host a live chat, with contributors. They offer their issues in a packaged bundle. Would people pay for these journals in order to attend the live chat and hear from the editors and contributors? I think so. Especially if the conversation is fun, honest, real.

What if editors buried secret codes inside the pages of their journals? The first person to crack the code gets a fast-track read on a submission. The next ten people to crack the code get a free subscription. Editors could build up mystery around the secret codes, plant little Easter eggs from one issue to the next.

What if editors offered rewards, badges for sharing the work from their pages? Share five different pieces from the latest issue on social media, write a sentence or two about the piece, screenshot your posts and send it to the editors, get a tote bag, a chapbook, a shoutout in the next issue.

As for writers, what if we approached reading lit mags with the same game-mindset that we approached submitting to them? Check out my reading spreadsheet! Let’s start the 100 creative-nonfiction pieces challenge! Who can stuff their bookshelves with the most lit mags! Show me all the lit mags on your TBR pile!

Could we have the lit mag counterpart of BookTok, in which readers discuss their lit-mag-reading goals and invite others to participate in challenges? Let’s call it LitMagTok. I would happily watch.

Becky Tuch, Q: Could gamification inspire lit mag readership?

This week, in my “Modern Poetry’s Media” course, I told my undergrads about poet Helene Johnson‘s success during the Harlem Renaissance, subsequent disappearance from the literary scene, and rediscovery late in the 20th century. “Rediscovery” is a funny term, of course–she knew where she was the whole time, although other poets and the critics weren’t tuned to her signal. I adore her work and am grateful for the existence of the posthumous anthology This Waiting for Love, edited by Verner D. Mitchell and containing poems, letters, and lots of background information. It’s a great example of how literary scholarship can serve us all, notwithstanding the university-haters who are loud and powerful right now.

Next week I’m teaching excerpts from another amazing piece of scholarship: Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, edited by Robert Dale Parker. (Notice both books were published by university presses.) Parker combed through decades of newspapers and magazines, finding treasures I’d never seen before, much less encountered during my own education. Mary Cornelia Hartshorne is on the syllabus for Monday, and as I prepped, it clicked how young she was: she wrote these poems (originally published in The American Indian) in her late teens. And then she went on with her life in a way Parker couldn’t discover.

My current favorite is “Fallen Leaves,” also the only poem by Hartshorne that seems to be online. Subtitled “An Indian Grandmother’s Parable,” it begins by quoting “white sages” to the effect that Native American lives and cultures are “scattered” and gone like last year’s leaves. The rest of the poem is the grandmother talking back to that ignorance, depicting the leaves in detail, chronicling how “discarded fragments” become “dry, chattering parchments / that crackle and rustle like old women’s laughter.” The leaves go on to protect and nourish a new spring’s “leaflets,” helped by streams “manumitted” from the ice (=released from enslavement). In short, scattering isn’t the end of people a militarily dominant culture wants to forget. Those leaves are still delivering news.

Lesley Wheeler, Rustle like old women’s laughter

“March” is a sharp word, brusque and bracing, like its month. “January”, “February”; they meander like rivers; “April” is like the sound of raindrops on the windowpane; but “March” is a gust of wind flinging grit.

Adrian Bell, 1 March 1958

The anniversary of the Covid lockdown in the UK last week took me back to this post about the poem that I thought of when it was announced: Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”.

And thinking about the historic shift from horses to tractors took me back to Adrian Bell, one of my favourite writers about rural life. I first read Bell’s newspaper columns, “A Countryman’s Notebook”, in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, when they were being reprinted about fifteen years ago. The original series ran from 1950—1980, and seems to me one of the great literary achievements of the newspaper column as a form — perhaps not to be compared with Baudelaire’s feuilletons, which became the “little poems in prose” of Paris Spleen (1869), but an enduring contribution to the art of the sentence nevertheless, written with a poet’s feeling for words.

One thing I enjoy about “A Countryman’s Notebook” is how many light-hearted allusions to English poetry Bell manages to work into a column ostensibly about life in the Suffolk countryside, to be read over East Anglian breakfast tables each Saturday morning. As he told his life story, at the age of sixteen he read Tennyson’s lines about “The moan of doves in immemorial elms / And murmuring of innumerable bees” and decided to dedicate himself “to the plough and poetry”. His allusions are often to such Golden Treasury-style touchstones, but his range is wide.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #29: Slow Bars of Light and Shadow

Found myself wandering through The Arcades Project today, looking for Napoleon’s Madeleine (or its ruinscape) only to wander off into a passageway that led me back to Baudelaire’s sonnet, “A une passante”— which Walter Benjamin discusses in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, among other flaneuries . . .

Lightning . . .then darkness! Lovely fugitive
whose glance has brought me back to life! But where
is life—not this side of eternity?

[…]

The final verse of Baudelaire’s “Damned Women” sticks to the skull:

Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies,
Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains,
Pour vos mornes douleurs, vos soifs inassouvies,
Et les urnes d’amour dont vos grands coeurs sont pleins.

And since all of the translations included at the Fleurs du mal website felt a bit stuffy, I decided to wrangle my own:

You whom my soul has pursued into your hell,
My poor sisters, I adore you as I mourn you,
For your anguished sighs, your quenchless thirsts,
In your grandiose hearts, love’s urns are filled to brim.

Alina Stefanescu, “A une passante”

In the Midnight Hour

a thousand recalls
tongue
moan
whisper
shadow sleeping storms
cry hot man-made howls

Today I used the Magnetic Poetry Kit online for inspiration. But instead of scrolling through different pages of words, I chose all my words from the first word page presented. It came out a bit on the dark side.

My “Something Small, Every Day (or so)” series is inspired by Austin Kleon’s piece here where he says, “Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day’s worth of effort over time.”

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): In the Midnight Hour

Zinesters, I’m passing this along…the poetry collective RODAISUN, has been distributing their poetry monthly in Montreal since July 2021. The group is three multidisciplinary female artists, Iva Čelebić, Emma Cosgrove and Catherine Machado. They’ll next do 6 issues annually by subscription, thicker, slicker double issues, sent out every two months, for a total of $12. Link to sign up for mailing service: https://www.grapeseedbooks.com/product-page/rodaisun-in-the-mail

Pearl Pirie, Events coming

Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room – a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristran Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I’ve read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening’s poetry – “fog makes surprising what it does not conceal”, etc.

Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance read one’s poems out is worth paying for. I didn’t read but at least half the attendees did.

Tim Love, Vona Groake and Karen Solie

My birthday this week, and so, naturally, like all normal people, I’ve been thinking about what books I have and haven’t read. What classics, what essentials, what life-changing glorious tomes have I neglected?

The past few years, I’ve been trying out some of those books that for some reason or other were never assigned to me during high school or college or even grad school. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace. I’m not afraid of a long book or a difficult book. I do, however, give myself complete permission to quit a book if I don’t like it, because I am adult, and this is my own independent study.

Renee Emerson, 40 books before 40

The birthday, and the birthday poem; similar, one might think, in how I’ve also been approaching my “Sex at 31” poems: a declaration and exploration of where I might be. Fifteen years ago, the chapbook-length examination that became Some forty (2010), offering similar question:

some forty: an almost

ambiguity, the space

of numbers, age; what does all

this time mean, spent?

Can one learn anything from going through one’s own work? I’m probably too close to it, still. Moment such as these suggest all poems are poems of mortality, of time. Of where one is at, a moment which will quickly fall into the past. What can you see in this, from where you are now. American poet Robert Creeley, his poem “A Birthday” from Words (1967), published when he was forty-one, offering similar lines of questioning: “I had thought / a moment of stasis / possible, some // thing fixed— / days, worlds— [.]” The question of where one is at, and if any moment might be held, like a breath. Or this poem by John Newlove from THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (1999), a little unnerved to think about how close I am to this age, now:

FIFTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

I seem to be forgetting what words sound like.
Soon I shall be reduced to a tiny vocabulary of phrases
such as I love you,
or I hate you,
or death.

“[…] my / birthplace, / that is substance / of me, quick against the form,” wrote Thomas Clark (1941-2018), as part of his poem “BIRTHDAY,” from a 1964 issue of Poetry Magazine. One could suggest this a substance with further clarity these days, given the administration south of the border continues to push the idea that we become the fifty-first state. I write a substance, against the form. I spent years attempting an annual birthday poem, but I’m not entirely in that mindset these days, working instead in other directions, although, as they say, the poems will come soon enough. Is that what they say? The poem might not have occurred this year, but the return to those same questions, those same clarifications, hold. Perhaps this is my poem this year.

Or my poem for forty-five, which seems both recent and distant: “We measure, syntax.” Is that all there is?

rob mclennan, the green notebook

i buy the cicadas barbie shoes & leave them
in the dirt. an offering. i am hoping when they come
that this time they will have an answer.
some kind of prophecy. “here is how
you save yourself” or, even better,
“here is how we will save you.” the year before i left
my hometown they broke free. left their
shells like brooches all across the pine tree trunk.
some of them became pendants in the amber sap.
i harvested as many as i could. put my ears
to their husks & heard them sing.

Robin Gow, waiting for cicadas

I started this blog in May 2011, fourteen years ago, and this is my eight hundredth post and I would like to thank all the people who have supported the blog over the years. I am not sure what I make of this latest piece. It is still in its early stages. An EMP is an Electromagnetic Pulse. An airburst would destroy all electronic equipment retendering everyone back into the analogue age. […]

That would kill every screen stone dead
and soften them up for the expected invasion

He had prepared for this
if they ever dropped the big one

He would go out listening to West End Blues
and its beauty would carry him into the next incarnation

I’m not happy with it at the moment as it feels out of balance. West End Blues is a tune by King Oliver. My favourite version is by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. I do have a 78rpm disc of the tune.

Paul Tobin, CARRY HIM INTO THE NEXT INCARNATION

I’m a bit ashamed to say that, though I love poetry, I can go long periods of time without reading it. One of the many things I appreciate about running January Writing Hours is that for several months, I absolutely have to read – to return to old favourites in new ways, to discover new collections, to fall into rabbit holes of language. In the first half of the month, I shared a poem by Ursula K Le Guin, whose Earthsea Trilogy rests on the concept of the Real Name – the power we acquire over a person, or a thing, when we discover the word which perfectly describes its essential nature. It’s a concept which stretches back into folklore, and in exploring that history, I encountered “Spells of My Name” by the poet IS Jones, who was entirely new to me and who blew me away.

“Spells of My Name” explores naming as an act of reclamation. Jones is constantly on the search for a better language for the body and for their own multiple selves. They write into trauma and desire and uncertainty – and their first collection comes out this year. I love what they say in this interview:

“ I mostly write poems at night, and I remember being up at 2:00 a.m. writing a new poem and I thought to myself, “This is a part of the work that I love the most, when it’s dark and it’s quiet and nobody cares what I’m doing and I’m playing and I’m exploring and I’m reading poems and I’m dreaming about what I want them to look like.” I thought to myself, “I don’t ever want this good magic to end.

As Black artists, I don’t think we talk often enough about pleasure for the creator of the work. I definitely have been guilty of contributing to this pervasive notion that artmaking has to come from pain and trauma as opposed to coming from pleasure and joy and wanting to share a vision that you have with other people”.

As someone who often engages in trauma in my poetry and in my working life, I could not agree more. Writing does not have to hurt or harm us – and even giving words to our trauma can be an act of community, validation, and comfort.

Clare Shaw, Naming It

The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy.

And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open.

Breaking alive.

It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.

Ellen Bass reckons with all of this in her splendid poem “Any Common Desolation,” originally published in The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day newsletter and later included in James Crews’s lifeline of an anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (public library), shared here with Ellen’s blessing.

Maria Popova, Any Common Desolation

Police close ranks and bodies form a shield
but not a weapon clicks in place. His rights
are read to him, unlike the thousands

he ordered shot because “Human rights,
son of a bitch.” A milky fog, a kind of gauze
bandage, drapes over this ordinary day. A dog

limps down the alley. A partly disemboweled
squirrel’s plastered on the road, syrupy
rot beneath the traffic stop.

Luisa A. Igloria, Elegy for the Human, with Extradition Standoff

Here’s the face of a very young poet. 

Found this in the archives yesterday digging around for an old Dazed article for a project. Funny how I used to keep all my newspaper pages and magazine cuttings in files. I kept press clippings in folders with the article or review cut out and the date and name of the publication all glued and set there. Even the mean ones. Even the derogatory ones or silly things: I once did a feature testing toothbrushes. I used to keep every scrap of press, every flyer and ticket, memories from all my gigs. That’s thousands of shows since 1994. I kept a paper trail of good times and big nights. No photos, no phones back then. Just the paper trail. The electronic world has erased a lot of this behaviour. We take photos on phones and upload to sites that are electronic scrapbooks and social media. I think I am going to get back on it again. Be a better archivist, keep my paper trail alive, scrapbook my things, because all of sudden it will be 25 years in the future and that means it will be 2050? All of these existential notes and blogs won’t even exist and none of this will be here and nobody will see this page, and all of this work and writing and thought will be erased and gone, like the way we left MySpace and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, all gone now, our poems and posts, our notes and stories, songs and art, like rusting abandoned shopping trolleys in the lake of the lost forest of time covered in moss and frogs spawn. We won’t be here and nobody will be here to see or feel or remember what we were thinking and how we got here or what we did with our spirit and our minds and our bodies and our words and our short time on earth. I guess that’s why I love books, I love making books, writing longhand, I love writing diaries, I love reading books, books stay put, you can rely on a book, a book on your bedside table, a book in your hand, your notebook in your bag, your novel in your suitcase, it’s all coming with you, it’s real, its yours, it cannot be deleted, it’s all yours, it is your own paper trail.

Salena Godden, Women’s History Month, March 2025

I’ve talked about vertical time here before but I thought it might be a good thing to think about at this time. And how do we now as humans, some of us who happen to be creators — maintain our mental health and also our desire and ability to create. (All of which go hand in hand). It helps me to try to find my way into, and to think about how vertical time is created, made. Why do we need art? What does art give us?

From my book of the year, The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart — “Usually we think of time as a sequence of events that happened in the past or that we want to happen in the future,” says Bogart, referring to horizontal time. She says that art helps us experience another kind of time: vertical time. It feels like “plunging a stake or dropping an anchor into the endless flow of time, thereby creating a sense of eternity in the human body.” It is a real feeling of “nowness” and being present. We feel outside time, part of a continuous present. […]

I have a copy of Another Beauty by [Adam] Zagajewski but the spine has cracked and I need to repair it. I don’t want to delve into it too much until I’ve done so but it does open at a story about looking at the Vermeers in the National Gallery in Washington. A man, about forty, an American, says to him with joy: “I’ve been looking at reproductions of this paintings since I was twenty, and today I’m seeing it with my own eyes for the first time. I’m sorry to bother you but I had to tell someone.” Zagajewski writes, “I can take such lack of culture any day.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Vertical Time, Comedy, Joy

The glass-smooth pond waits
for the return of its winged tenants.
Spring has called them north,
back across the imaginary border
recognized only by us,
discomfited as we are
by the idea of freedom.

Jason Crane, POEM: Glass House

escape is the timeless lie :: my path never strays from its crow

Grant Hackett [no title]

あたたかし粘土が息をしはじめて　堀田季何

atatakashi nendo ga iki o shihajimete

            spring warmth

            a piece of clay

            begins to breathe

                                                            Kika Hotta

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), March 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 14, 2025)

the morning rain
a pen in her purse

marrowbone of an inkwell
to bury in the light

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 4 November 1661. An homage to erasure poet Sarah J. Sloat, whose long-running blog on Blogspot was called The Rain in Her Purse.

The first digest of 2024 is a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short. (And yes, I know that expression dates me. I am an old.) Ten inches of snow fell and then were partly washed away again as I compiled this post today, which is quite Janus-faced: half looking back and half looking forward, half summarizing and half summoning. Let’s begin.

Whether we feel like we’re gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It’s hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation – not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I’m hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it’s more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I’m trying to do is think about what’s real, and that’s probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here — a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year’s Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year – we’ve had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself — its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance — remains very real and very much itself.

I’m still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I’m comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don’t have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say “look at me!,” with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

Beth Adams, What is Real?

All we need is a list, a
table: who will do what, when — names,
places, actions, dates — all adding up to
less than 1.5^oC. And maybe one more
grid: who will pay how much, when —
names, places, actions, dates — all adding
up to the billions required for loss and
damage, for mitigation, for adaptation,
sorted by historical burden. Now, that
would become a poem. But what do we
do with pages of unmetered language? With
unwieldly metaphors and no rhyme? Without
totals? Without a safety net?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Phase-out/Phase-down

The sunflower
tore off its petals,
the rainbow
slumped,
the pink and purple
cut to white,
the morning sun
melted
and when night came
the stars
had lost their reflections.

Sue Ibrahim, Sea star mass mortality event

To answer my question about how poets write about literal and existential risks to life on Earth, I started collecting “apocalypse poems,” a term I used broadly. My list is below. Many of its poems address end times head on. Others are less explicit but have (in my assessment) apocalypse vibes. They are “end-of-the-world adjacent,” using apocalyptic or dystopian settings as a backdrop or simply gesturing at demise and so I’ve allowed their metaphors to work within this list of apocalypse poems.

In these poems, poets speak to what may be coming and flirt with a kind of inevitability fueled by our complicity and impotence. They issue warnings that beg questions: Can we be saved? Do we want to be saved? Who’s driving the bus? What’s worth saving? Are we willing? What does it mean to survive?

Carolee Bennett, The One With 50+ Poems for the End of the World

The too-short truce was all the time
they had to bury the dead boy lying

in their rubbled apartment. Already
they’d waited four days, the body

of their 10-year-old wrapped in
a blanket providing no warmth,

his last rites un-mouthed, never
to be heard amid the later bombings.

Maureen E. Doallas, Gaza Funeral (Poem)

I haven’t been writing much—not enough mental energy—but I do think about the idea of “wintering,” or that we need to sort of make our way through winter gingerly, at least making some awareness of the need for warmth and hibernation. I’ve been sleeping at off hours—awake at 3 in the morning, asleep at 5 pm—which means I’m only watching weird stuff on television and reading in stray catches of awake time. “Winter just wasn’t my season,” as the song “Breathe (2 AM)” says. […]

I was thinking of two great writers we recently lost, Louise Gluck and Colleen McElroy, how both had disabilities they rarely talked about (Gluck had epilepsy, Colleen had RA), both were fiercely devoted to their work. Gluck was born into a lot of privilege; Colleen had to struggle more against a world less friendly to women, especially women of color, as a young person. I feel Colleen didn’t get enough recognition for her gifts as a teacher and writer and was the kind of person you instantly trusted—she radiated energy and warmth. Gluck wasn’t warm—even her obituaries seem prickly. I wonder about the value of our writing and our personhood after we pass away—how will we be remembered? Will time be kinder to one than the other? I wonder about the value of work versus the value of relationships, how often women are forced to choose in a way men are not. I am lucky I had a husband who was just as supportive when I was working ninety-hour weeks at Microsoft as when I now spend hours submitting poems to journals that don’t pay enough to cover the cost of submission. I never had to choose between a marriage and work, or a child and work (since I couldn’t have kids in the first place). As I get older, in the cold January months, I think harder about the choices I’ve made in my life. It will be later in life that I’ll be able to see if I made the right ones.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Wintering: The New Year So Far, Honoring the Season, and the Choices We Make

We’re browsing because I want a new jumper, distracted by Shetland, cable knits, elaborate nordic and traditional patterns which women once knew as a matter of course. And then distracted by Stitchcraft and taking phone pics, until I go off on one about the New Look and Jane disagrees with me saying some women found it offensive in its excess. No, Jackie, she says, it was celebrating a way out of poverty, wartime. And yes, of course that’s right. I’m a little on my high horse with the champagne and tired, and maybe too attached to the old dichotomy, the masses v the rich. 

So we carry on reading the box that is reminding us of a fraction of what women did, the stitch counting, fair isle, arran, bonnets, shawls, evening dresses and skirts, kids’ coats, darts, gathers, ruches, smocking, pleats…

I began my blue coat on Boxing Day and will finish it a few days into 2024. It’s been a good use of the limbo time at the turn of the year when my notebook remains untouched. That and the odd walk with Bambi, reminding me of what matters – those waves battering the sea wall at Saltdean, and this, Noah’s Ark, beached there, police tape fluttering in another gale, a warning of sorts. 

Jackie Wills, The Poetry of Domestic Arts and Sciences

I don’t mean isolation is necessary in a physical sense, although pottering about doing jobs on our smallholding, looking after hens, pigs, woodland and a four-acre field can mean spending hours alone in whatever the weather might throw at us.

I don’t mean isolation from the news either. I want to know about Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, what’s happening with the state of the planet. I want to know what the ‘leaders’ of the world are saying, even though I understand they’re just performers on a stage, mostly anxious to protect their own power. The reality of the misery of the victims of their actions or in-action is of little consequence to them, unless it causes their wealth to be de-stabilised. The world is as mad as it always was.

Politically, the older I get, the more radical I get, the more intolerant I get of the lies or half-truths (the half that suits them) politicians tell as a daily routine.

No, the isolation I’m interested in is the healthy isolation of being a writer. With a very few exceptions, I have no friends who write – anything, let alone poetry, or something close to it – and seek out none. It’s not a case of banishing people to the fringes of life as it rolls along, just an increased need to write free from the influence and society of others.

Yes, there are occasional, welcome email conversations that are a result of what is published here, or what others publish on their blogs, but these days that’s about the limit of it.

Bob Mee, THE OLDER I GET, THE MORE I PREFER ISOLATION

2024 has entered with wet, wild winds. Ice everywhere underfoot. The world is slippery and precarious. This kind of weather isn’t unheard of on Kachemak Bay at this time of year, but it is unwanted. It tarnishes all the brightness of snowy landscapes and makes getting around outside difficult.

And so I turn inward. Spend evenings in a pool of lamp light near the woodstove. Consumed already this year: two books of poetry, Some of the Things I’ve Seen by Sara Berkeley and Earth House by Matthew Hollis, as well as Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and Stag Cult by Martin Shaw. Last year, I read fewer books that I usually do, and I am wondering at the reason.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Welcome 2024 – Whatcha reading?

In my annual tradition since 2012, I share my self-audit of what I read and favourite reads. Throughout the year at instagram I have posted all the reads and some of the quotes from books I liked.

I aimed to read more fiction proportionally this year, setting aside some obsession with poetry. Intention didn’t translate. 57% of titles were poetry, so all systems stable, with 1% more poetry than last year. A fifth of reads were chapbooks (56 of them). I read 20 fewer titles than 2022. This year I reread 15 instead of 24 titles. […]

The source hierarchy for 2023 was Amazon, small press fair, free online, used book store, review copy, then library at 8%, with direct from author 6%, and direct from publisher another 6%.

I persisted through diminishing returns more often, valuing 4% at one star out of 5, instead of 1% the year before,  but for that I blame the cat sitting on me more, with nothing else in reach.

Pearl Pirie, 2023 Reading

I was delighted that the Englewood Review of Books invited me to contribute to their year-end Favorite Books of 2023 podcast! A link to listen and a complete list of recommended books is available at this link.

I gave a shoutout to These Walls are Starting to Glow by Karen Bjork Kubin and Box Office Gospel: Poems by Marissa Glover.

Katie Manning, ERB Year-End Episode

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. […]

I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar ‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction, or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I remember that this list takes a full day to compile and post, so there you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that, I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting work being produced right now?

rob mclennan, A ‘best of’ list of 2023 Canadian poetry books

In 2023, I read 100 books. That’s according to Beanstack, where I track my reading now. I read all kinds of things, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, murder mystery, young adult, and even a children’s book, the marvelous Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, which I had heard about for many years. And I gave some books as Christmas presents, favorites from the year or from the recent months spent escaping, slothlike, on the couch, covered in fleece blankets. Speaking of sloths, I have already earned a sloth as a “completion prize” in the library’s winter reading challenge, set up as a bingo card, where I have scored a Bingo from slothliness. […]

All my poems these days are about my mother, even if they are ekphrastic or written on poscards. “Grief deranges,” says Gish Jen in The Resisters, a book I read in January, actually. “Healing is slow.” It sure is. I am participating in a solstice-to-solstice poetry postcard project and have sent 8 postcards and received 3. (Maybe that will pick up after the holiday mail…) Some have gone to Santa Cruz, CA and Portland, OR, where I have family, and one went to Japan! I love the random coincidii…

Kathleen Kirk, 100 Books

Lushly, thickly
a polar bear hibernates
under our infinite skies, 

in our midst:
bristling white 
visiting behemoth.

From my tiny pane,
I see its heavy
lugubrious

breathing 
see its lungs, and fir
rise and fall

in branch 
and mind
and rise again.

Jill Pearlman, Winter’s Other

I’ve been trying to make a summary of last year without slipping into the negative, so I’d like to single out a wonderful thing that happened in 2023: my second book of visual poetry was accepted by Sarabande. Boy, I started that sentence on a down note but typing to the end made me happy.

For the past three years or so I’ve been working with “Classic Crimes” by William Roughead, considered one of the first books of the true crime genre. This is a hefty NYRB book of around 600 pages about murders in Scotland more than 100 years ago. They are base and grisly murders, though the writing can be staid and sticks with the facts. I hope my erasures and collages give the pages a good airing.

Sarah J. Sloat, Crime of Passion

On a personal level, 2024 was a very busy year, which largely explains the sparse posting! In addition to writing and teaching, I served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Fraser Valley in the winter, and then returned to campus to coordinate the Fraser Valley Writers Festival in the Fall. I also wrapped up edits on my next book, Weather, a companion piece to my 2016 collection The News, which will be published this Spring from Gaspereau Press.

Rob Taylor, the 2023 roll of nickels year in review

Whatever You Do, Just Don’t has been chosen by The Yorkshire Times as one of their Books of the Year 2023. Thanks to Steve Whitaker, the literary editor, for his selection. Here’s a quick quote from the article… “…Whatever You Do, Just Don’t is as warming and as compelling as the fine Spanish wine that Stewart blends…” And you can read the feature in full via this link.

Matthew Stewart, The Yorkshire Times’ Books of the Year

As I usually do at the start of the year, I look back on the data of a calendar year of writing. 16 poems in 12 paper copy journals or anthologies. Humbled that one of my poems landed in an anthology not too many pages away from poems by the writer Sheila Bender and Joseph Powell, one of my creative writing professors at Central Washington University. In 1993, he published his collection of poems, Winter Insomnia. I attended that launch and in the copy of the book I purchased after, his inscription encouraged me to “keep up the fine writing and send me a copy of your first book.” I made true on that in 2017 when I mailed him a copy of Something Yet to Be Named. I still have the letter he wrote in return.

Additionally, I published 18 poems in online journals. I am so very grateful for all editors who take a chance on writing and move it from a page in a writer’s hand to a greater reading world. 

And because I’m an absolute believer in seeing the whole picture, 2023 landed me 23 rejections and 15 still-waiting-for-confirmations, or in the words of Submittable, “Received” or “In Progress.” And that’s all bundled up in the beauty of writing as well. 

Kersten Christianson, Rolling in 2024

In reference to a recent post, I’m coming to my poetry in 2024 with a great deal of curiosity and openness. I’ve been rather myopic in the past–out of necessity, as we’ve gone through some difficult times–but now I’m wondering these things:
1. Who is my ideal reader?
2. Where does this ideal reader, read? What literary magazines, which presses?
3. Who is my ideal reader already reading? Which writers and poets?
4. These writers and poets–what contests are they winning? What conferences are they attending?
5. Which poets can I look to as career role models–both those who are far ahead (60+ years of writing), those who are a little ahead, those who are my peers?

I think this could give me some direction as to where to focus my efforts this year. What questions are you pondering in 2024?

Renee Emerson, 5 Questions I’m Asking

In December, I participated in an annual poem-a-day challenge. This is my happy place. It is also my anxiety. What if I can’t think of anything to write about? How, or with what, do I start? That concern begins on the first day–even when I come equipped with prompts and a project, an idea for a series. It’s the fear of facing the blank page.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Paul McCartney. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the documentary The Beatles: Get Back, Part 1. The footage includes a lot of bickering, but one moment stands out in my memory. While other musicians are arguing about, probably, everything, Paul is working on a little riff, maybe eight or ten notes. He plays it, then he plays a slightly different version, and again, and again, and again. He keeps playing with it, refining it. He didn’t come up with a genius phrase; he came up with a starting point and kept experimenting with it.

The word that comes to mind is noodle, to noodle around with something. The idea that you don’t have to come up with the right image or line or phrase on your first try. Get something, anything, down on the page or the screen, and then keep playing with it, keep noodling. See? Much less pressure.

If we’re going to revise through multiple drafts anyway, why should the starting point contain so much importance? Instead of the starting point, it’s just a starting point.

Joannie Stangeland, Not just the fresh start

It’s Monday, the first day of the new semester and I am on sabbatical: sitting in a sweet café down the hill from my house–a place I have intended and failed to visit for the last year– having a slow, intentional, delicious coffee, listening to jazz music from the speakers and car music from Second Avenue, and staring into the wide open space that has opened up in front of my exhausted body, brain and spirit.

This is precious.

What will I do with my one wild and precious sabbatical? Well, Mary Oliver, let me tell you: I am going to savor it like I’m savoring this cup of coffee. I don’t precisely know what that savoring will look like, though. I am not traveling much outside of some events to promote my new book in March, and while I did propose a specific project in my sabbatical application, it’s been three years since that application and the project I proposed has morphed into something very different.

Sheila Squillante, A Wide Open Space

There’s a physiotherapist on Instagram who specializes in breast cancer “survivors”. She says that technically, in Australia at any rate, a person is a cancer survivor from the moment they are diagnosed until they die. She points out that a lot of “cancer survivors” don’t like that designation. It sounds like some kind of loud rally slogan. I feel that way, too. I would really like these 8 months to fade into the wallpaper. It’s there, but I don’t want cancer to be a part of my identity, as much as it has been conspicuous in every aspect of my life for a while.

I know there are many women who have managed this.

I have changed. But not as significantly as being a mother changed me. Probably not as much as any of or all the mistakes I’ve made in my life have changed me. As travel has changed me. As having lost a friend has. As love – so many loves. As so many things I don’t want to write about here.

If I let myself carry these new changes forward as I return to my “real life”, I believe I can find a different kind of peace than I had before. My ambitions are softer. While I used to believe that my writing was about the doing, about the in-the-moment flow, I don’t think I was honest with myself. I was still whipping myself more than I was allowing myself to just enjoy what comes or doesn’t come. I was still looking for approval as much as I was wanting communication. this applies to me teaching, too. Even some of my relationships.

It’s not that I’ve lowered the bar of “good enough”, really. I’m doing away with the bar.

Ren Powell, The End of Active Treatment

I am a tumble down mess red in tooth and claw like the tumbling tumbleweed of yore my body a ghost town with dust and saloon doors flapping open and closed and my neck feels funny and I need to drink more water don’t we all just need to drink more and more and more water until they have to cut a hole in our guts to let it stream out at our end. But I am PRESENT I am inside my body. I am notating Jerusalem it is lovely inside my face a red sky sloop down weepweepweepweep stained beyond anything that might occur in the bathtub.

Jupiter sits on my chest and begs me to stay I will stay because she is the Magiker sleek black we are dizzy with mustard pricks. When my phone rings I fling it out of my hand. My throat is a yellow eyeglass. My lungs are wasps but in spite of all this I baked a goddamn gorgeous cake feral in its chocolately gnashy truffle goodness.

Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report king tides & A High Wind In Jamaica edition

When I first re-visited the video so that I could write this blog, I have to admit I cringed a little. It’s tempting to apologise for my double-chin & jowls, thick torso, my awkwardness and kind of arty-posiness. But I won’t apologise, because making these things visible is the point. By showing the cracks, the fat, the visceral textures & racing sky I believe Patrick has captured something far greater than me in this video poem, so much so that I recede as protagonist and become just one of the textures woven into time and space. I really think he’s made a video poem that could read as a meditation (in the same way that Pamela Boutros did in the video poem LOST)

FUN FACT:

We filmed in Patrick’s bedroom in an old house in Melbourne, Australia. But first we had to prop his bed up against one of the walls so we had enough room to film.

Caroline Reid, VIDEO POEM: To Touch & Taste a Comet, featuring Caroline Reid in a bedroom in Melbourne

This little beauty is a sneak peek at the GRANATA project now in the final stages of proofing that will be topside near the end of February. The series of text pieces were written (the bulk of them) in the summer of 2022, so there is definitely a lot of summer about them, as is fitting for a book about everyone’s favorite goddess. But it’s also a book about the Furies, which many believe were the punished friends of Persephone who failed to save her from abduction (or conversely, were gifted with wings and a craving for vengeance to help find her.) It’s a book about lost innocence on all fronts, about sensuality and sexuality, about the girl world and all its monsters and ghosts. 

The art pieces that appeared were actually created a year later and mostly over the course of a single week, sometimes several a day. While I initially had planned the book to be a text-only cover, this summer’s spurt of visual work prolificness had other things in mind. Once I started I could not stop, until there were around 20 collages that accompanied the text pieces perfectly. 

Kristy Bowen, cover reveal

This January’s first round up of PoetryRx is for treating the winter blues.

Now, as you know, I don’t believe in plastering joy over sorrow or spring poems over winter ones. To paraphrase what I said about poetry in a previous post, poems offer solace by inviting us to feel our humanity activated and witnessed. They share truths that resonate with our experiences and make us feel less alone. They articulate a present reality that, through the luminous clarity of its wording, provides relief.

I hope these poems will deepen your curiosity in the season and in your own feelings about it. My own relationship to winter is a work in progress, but it’s a relationship I’m infinitely grateful to have the chance to cultivate and nurture each year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The poems in Maya C Popa’s book, Wound is the Origin of Wonder, ask big questions: what can we learn about ourselves from the religious systems  and mythologies we created in the past? (Whether they’re believable or not isn’t the point here – Popa is looking for patterns and archetypes). What’s the world like when we’re not looking at it? What would it be like to be inside someone elses head? It’s risky territory. Poets must ‘go in fear of abstractions’, as Ezra Pound put it. But then all artists who create successful art take risks. Does Maya C Popa pull it off and, if so, how? Yes, she does – but it’s just that here and there, I found myself wondering. Then again, one thing I learned from reading the book was that the joy is in the wondering. You can read my review of it here at Stride Magazine.

Dominic Rivron, Wound is the Origin of Wonder

“Indeterminate Inflorescence” is a series of aphorisms from Lee Seong-bok’s creative writing lectures and collected by his students. Lee Seong-bok has published eight collections of poetry, academic and mainstream literary criticism, books on creative writing drawn from his career at Keimyung University, interrupted by a period of living in Paris studying the post-structuralists and tenets of Seon Buddhism.

Books on creative writing seem to largely fall in two camps, they’re either laden with academic and theoretical jargon so as to be borderline unreadable or engaging, questioning pieces that illuminate and make writers (whether professional or hobbyists) think about their practice. George Sander’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is an example of the latter. This is is also the camp Lee’s work falls in. […]

From “Writing”,

“A poet’s notebook is often better than their poems. Some do say to write poetry as if writing in one’s notes. Once there’s an awareness that ‘writing’ is being done, a kind of stiffness goes to the shoulders and the language becomes unnatural. The back of a pianist often reveals what they playing will sound like. Just like in golf or tennis, it’s only through relaxing the shoulders the ball can really be hit hard.”

Emma Lee, “Indeterminate Inflorescence” Lee Seong-Bok translated by Anton Hur (Sublunary Editions) – book review

I take comfort from this poem, which may seem strange. I love the time sweep of it, and yet its timelessness, how it wings out dizzyingly and then settles beside us in life’s tedious waiting room. How it gathers dust and whatnots — shells, poems, quotes, bits of intellectual and scientific history, an ever hopeful dog (itself having a strained [straining at the leash?] and estranged relationship with “time”). I love how the poem takes its time meandering through thought, picking things up, putting them down, souls and corpses.

Marilyn McCabe, That’s My Bag

‘Happiness writes white,’ said Larkin, abbreviating Henry de Montherlant’s maxim, ‘Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches’ [‘Happiness writes in white ink on white pages’], but there are exceptions to all generalisations. The end of 2023 saw the publication, by Vole Books, of My Family and Other Birds, Rod Whitworth’s long-overdue first collection, full of poems which largely, though not exclusively, celebrate life and its myriad joys. Hats off to Janice and Dónall Dempsey at Vole for recognising that it needed to be out in the world. It’s available from them, here, or from Rod, here.

Rod asked me to write one of the two endorsements for the collection, which I very gladly did, but here’s a sentence from the other one, by Peter Sansom, which truly nails the book’s qualities: ‘The work of a skilful but unshowy writer, it is imaginative, open, honest and shrewd, and many other things besides, like funny and angry and loving – a chronicle in fully realised individual poems of lives and times.’

Matthew Paul, On Rod Whitworth’s ‘Mr Knowles’

I know, I know – not that Julian of Norwich quote again, I hear you say. But it’s the start of the year, I’m looking out at blue sky, and this is the first day since November 8th that I’ve felt properly well, and that the three colds I’ve had back-to-back since then are finally wearing off. Life is good and all shall be well.

Julian of Norwich was really just a name to me until poet friend Antony lent me his copy of I, Julian by Clare Gilbert, (Hachette) which is a fictionalised autobiography of the medieval anchoress who wrote ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. I was interested in finding out more about Julian’s life, and actually I found it un-put-downable.

At the other end of the spectrum I’ve been converted to the Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths which I’ve been hoovering up on my kindle. They’re great fun, perfect for long waiting times in airports and hospitals, and a good example of (ahem) how to write not a single novel but a series.

On the poetry front, Janet Sutherland’s The Messenger House (Shearsman) has risen to the top of the TBR pile and I’ve made tentative progress through it. The book is a hybrid of prose, poetry, memoir, travelogue. So far I’ve found it intriguing and exciting. Janet likes to push the boundaries and her work is never predictable.

Robin Houghton, All shall be well

I was up early this morning, listening to the precipitation, trying to determine if it was rain or ice or sleet.  I thought of Epiphany, read T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” remembered a poem I had written in response (go here to read it), did some internet wandering, came across an idea in a blog post of mine, and wrote a few lines in response.

Two years ago, I wrote, “I am thinking of the angel warning Joseph in a dream to flee to Egypt, and he does. Did other parents in Bethlehem that night dream of angels with strange messages about their infant boys? Did they remember their dreams? Were they haunted by the memory?”

This morning I wrote about being frozen in place, unable to escape what’s coming.  Part of me wants to turn it into a poem that references Gaza; part of me thinks it will be stronger if it’s more universal. 

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Epiphany Ponderings

Last year, my January challenge was to do a post a day on the blog. It was hard, but it went reasonably well and I did manage to complete it. I thought I might try to do the same this year, although I wondered if this might be setting myself up to fail. So, I’ll just aim to post more frequently! In the meantime, I’ll leave you with those ghostly mute swans, those ethereal snow clouds, the movement of feathers and snow flakes, and all the entrancing sounds Polona Oblak’s haiku contains.

Julie Mellor, The Haiku Calendar

My current slow-read is K. Setiya’s book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. While there are many aspects of this philosophical book that interest me and pertain to current or recent experiences in my life, something that gained my attention regarding writing is the author’s suggestion that the concept of failure as a loss is bound up with cultural narratives. If we imagine our lives as arcs with the aim of goals, journeys’ ends, attainment of heart’s desires, finding true love, and the like, Setiya argues, it is too easy to feel that we are failures, and to despair or grieve. Maybe we should not be so caught up in narratives, he suggests.

Hmm. As a poet who writes a good deal of what may be termed “lyrical narrative” work and as a human who loves a good story, I’m more drawn to theories of story-as-essential-to-humans; I’m thinking here of Daniel Dennett and Brian Boyd, about whom I’ve blogged in the past (I will place those links at the end of this post). Nonetheless, poetry is often writing about what is NOT a story; some of my favorite poems have no story per se to tell, yet they move me to reflection and/or to emotional resonance. Hence they feel deeply significant.

And if you have happened to click on the links to the right of this page that lead to my poetry online, or purchased and read my books (thank you, dear readers!), you are sure to find several pieces that are not even remotely narrative. As someone who has struggled with self esteem and ambition, and often felt myself a failure, Setiya’s philosophical undoing of the concept that a well-lived or meaningful life entails having “successes” comes as a relief. Whether one decides to accept his idea–I guess that’s up to you. It’s a book worth reading given how anxious contemporary American citizens seem to be and how powerless and despairing we often feel.

Ann E. Michael, Life story

making a living takes so much time
three acres of colour
galloping after us

the Coventry Carol
packed away
and left in the dark

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2024

I started this last year with the intention of posting once a week. That didn’t last long, as evidenced by the fact that I don’t think I’ve posted anything since September. I could feel badly about this, but honestly I don’t. No one is paying to read this, and there’s no law that says I have to be consistent. But it’s good for me to take the time to write something that doesn’t hold the tension or pressure of writing a poem. So here I am, starting up again with the same intention as last year – one post a week – and I will do my best to follow through.

When I was a teen playing on the high school basketball team (until the rest of the team grew and I stayed five foot three and mostly useful as someone who would go in and foul people), my coach always encouraged us to “follow through” on our jump shots, to maintain the arc and momentum, to give ourselves a better chance at scoring. My father and mother were always insistent about following through on commitments as well, which is probably why I still find it so difficult to cancel plans, even if I’m ill.

So what does follow-through look like in a creative life? For my writing, I am still working at not self-rejecting, not holding back on submissions or opportunities. Once I write the work and feel it is ready to be public, I need to follow through by putting it out into the world if I want others to read it. (I have started the year well in that regard – five days into the new year, I have submitted to four journals, one book prize, and one residency. Gulp.) As a newbie visual artist, I have even more impostor syndrome, but 14 pieces of my work are currently adorning the walls of my beloved local library for the month of January, a step that I wouldn’t have taken a year ago.

Donna Vorreyer, In Which I Humbly Resolve…

It is a week today since we lost him. Last night I dreamt that he is on the bed and I was telling him how beautiful he is. I keep catching him out of the corner of my eye, entering the living room, or in his bed in the kitchen. I have yet to venture down the lanes that we walked for fifteen years, it doesn’t feel right. I hadn’t realised how much I constantly chatted to him – about our day, about our plans, about him – and I miss his attentive face, always ready to engage. I miss loving him, and I miss being loved by him because he had huge capacity to love, his whole being was about love, and joy and innocence. He was the most loving dog I have ever know. You all think you have the best dog, but you’re wrong, I had him. He was mine. I was his.

I would have him back. But I can’t, he was on loan to us, and has now gone back to wherever it is he came from. I hope it is this: a field with filthy ditches, and dead pheasants to roll in and rabbits to chase and an endless blue sky to run under. Or a wide, flat beach of yellow sand, rock pools to dip in and out of, some cliffs to run up and down, other dogs to roll and run with. This is how I will imagine him.

Wendy Pratt, For Toby – the best worst dog that ever lived

Last night we ate a dish of green.
Basil and spinach, a pesto. Citrus
zest binding the grains of orzo.
The kitchen window overlooks
the yard, where the persimmon
and fig are still wintering. Sometimes
we crave a cleansing. But keep the fire
alive in the grate, the quiet smolder
inside, honey softening in the comb.

Luisa A. Igloria, Correspondence

What do you want your future to taste like?

I rather like the idea of my future tasting of jam doughnuts and candy floss. Mixing in a tinged of chip shop chips, hot chocolate and garlic butter would be good too. And then my future would taste of satisfaction with the welcome twang and tang of vivacity.

I definitely don’t want it to taste like elastic bands, but I do have an interesting passion for them which will continue into my future!

Here is one of my favourite #ElasticBandPhotos. It has now become the cover art for a ‘coffee table’ book I have worked on which puts together a year’s worth of full moon poems alongside a selection of my elastic band photographs. I loved being able to work with Jason Conway to bring this book, Vortex Over Wave, into the world.

Meet The Poet: Sue Finch (Annick Yerem)

When MoonPath’s Lana Hechtman Ayres told me Patricia Fargnoli had been her teacher and mentor, I went looking for her. Winter, the sixth volume in the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, was the first to arrive, and is now on sale for $9 at Hobblebush Books (use this link: https://www.hobblebush.com/product-page/winter).

I have fallen hard for this book, and this poet. In “The Horse,” she begins:

I let the horse into my apartment,
pushed back chairs,
shoved the rattan chest
up against the tall bookcases…

Horses abound in this book. What’s not to love?

In addition to any other praise I might dish out, it’s a perfect book to read on a cold and rainy January day. Yes, New Hampshire, snow, but it works its spell here in the Pacific Northwest, too: “[I] found a sad music in the fork of an ash tree, / a music made of wind and the tuning forks of stars” (“Glosa”). As Meg Kearney tells us on the back cover, Fargnoli has “listened deeply to the silence of winter.”

Many of the poems in Winter are about dreams.

Bethany Reid, Patricia Fargnoli (1937-2021)

i am so hungry for goodness
that sometimes i read the “good news” website.
a little girl becomes a pilot. a man
eats his weight in teeth. there is a scientist
who turns tears into fossil fuels.
hope is a thing with no feathers
but tells you “i will be a swan.” i do not
want hope. i want a jar of nutella.
i want a burning police car.

Robin Gow, 1/8

Joni Mitchell sang into
an open piano

when she recorded
her first album

because David Crosby
thought it would

enhance her voice —
and it did,

but it also magnified
the other sounds in the room

so they were forced to
strip away the high frequencies,

leaving a flatter beauty,
and this is why

I am careful when I
look at you

because the universe
has limits.

Jason Crane, POEM: The Many Worlds Hypothesis & Song To A Seagull

When I’m asleep, my books venture out into the world.

They sneak into other people’s homes, trade amongst one another—a Jim Carroll for an Anne Waldman, a Joy Harjo for a Juan Felipe Herrera.

Some books run off on their own: Bob Kaufman stays out all night, composes love poetry to the cosmos. Bukowski visits his old Hollywood place on DeLongpre, cracks open a beer, sits by the window, watches all the women walk by.

Patti Smith and Rimbaud wander downtown streets, creating the dreamiest of mandalas from memories, while Claudia Rankine and Wanda Coleman don’t take any crap from the cops.

Come morning, most of my books are back on their shelves, along with a few new ones.

Rich Ferguson, Independent Books

open up
peel back your ribs
expose what’s inside
see the child
crying

feel
start with pity
or compassion, then
become responsible
if you can bear it

if he is like you
if (you think)
he is not like you
this is how
the journey begins

Rachel Barenblat, Open

We were so lucky to have some rain yesterday, first a scattering in the early afternoon, which returned with increased seriousness around 530 pm, while I was getting a hair cut. I could see the rain in the long mirror reflecting the street behind me. It was falling on the cobblestones and between the rails of the tram tracks and my annoyance at the hair cutter who kept me waiting 45 minutes dissolved there.

Before midnight it rained again, and into the small hours. This morning is fresh and in the 70s — absolutely lovely. It is a relief to forget about the apocalypse for an hour or two.

Which puts me in mind of a poem! Many poems, actually. But also a visual poem of mine that recently came out in Ballast, “My Darling,” which I mean with all my heart: [Click through to view]

the best of wives
is fresh air

Sarah J Sloat, the best of wives is fresh air

We’re in the middle of summer and shattering records for heat, both in the water and on land.  I am so glad I have a house in the mountains.  I thought about Cassandra, who made predictions that no one believed.  How does Cassandra feel when predictions come true?

It’s not a new subject for me, but this morning, I returned to it, as I created some lines that are building into a coherent poem.  Here’s a taste:
I cannot save you from the sea,
but I understand how it has bewitched
you, leading you on with false
hopes, thinking maybe you will be spared,
one of the lucky ones to emerge
with your habitat sustained
while others bleach and burn.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Cassandra in the Mountains

The collection begins with poems that convey the transience of life and the inevitability of death. A Scene Outside the Window of a Country Church is typical. The preciousness of existence is conveyed through the beauty of the natural images: ‘Shocks of green/ flutter/ and shimmer-’, ‘dewy butterfly wings’, ‘emerald and jade’. The vibrancy of the scene outside penetrates the sanctity of the church, yet so does the presence of something ominous: the sky is described as a ‘mourning’ sky and the horizon is ‘grey’.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Blind Turns in the Kitchen Sink’ by David Estringel

The raw, unblemished
landscape claws the back of your eyes. Even
the air is like parchment, brittle, crumbles in
your hands, turning white. This place asks you
if you can be honest in the presence of so much
beauty. It asks about your truth. The perimeter
of your conviction. What is the difference
between life and cloud? What is the distance
between death and rain?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 55

I liked last year’s conference so much that I went again this year, seeing many people I’ve met before. When I set off at 5.30 on Saturday morning for Bristol, I saw a snail on the car roof – an omen of weather to come. After a useful day of workshops I slept in my tent while a storm raged, waking in a puddle, finding enough dry space to battle on. On Sunday I went to more workshops that showed me how much I need to improve my close reading. I read at the launch of “51 and a half games and ideas for writers with example responses”.

Tim Love, Flash Fiction Festival, 2023

When I pick the beetroot, I think of my Dad.
When I pick the green beans, I think of my Dad.

I will think of my Mam when I cook them,
the conversation we could have had about

how long I sautéed the chopped stems
of the beet leaves, before adding the leaves,

how much garlic I added, and how the beans
didn’t need any salt. So tender. So fresh.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Harvest

And it takes friends who’ve heard your self-doubt, excuses, attempts to change the subject. If writing is like gardening, if the garden is a place for working it all out, for being in a place without words, or naming things, a place you’ve made, planting tomatoes outside and hoping there won’t be blight, risking seedlings to slugs, wondering why this year there are so many opium poppies, friends offer a view of hills, all the different greys and a dawn sky, reminding you that after midnight in the dark woods you heard a nightingale three nights running, and then the wind shook everything up. 

Jackie Wills, Friends and a view of hills

People suffer and throw themselves 
into the Seine. The buildings have scars 
which grow lighter like our skins. 
Shop women roll their cat eyes jealously,
hearing we’re American.  

But what provocateurs they’d be, 
their loving presentation of breast
set like cake batter inside a bodice,
the body as curse or chalice.  
So frank, so chalice the flesh in Paris. 

Jill Pearlman, How to Break the Ice in Paris

My weird summer virus coincides, weirdly, with a huge heat wave—temps of 90 (and humidity levels at 30) meant an almost desert-like feeling to Seattle in the last couple of days. We were watering the hummingbirds, two bird baths and fountains, our poor flowers and baby trees – and ourselves. We have air conditioning, but it struggles to catch up with temps over 80. A common Seattleite’s summer retreat to a cooler area, Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast, had to close today because a mountain lion went to the beach to cool down!

On my sick days, I had a chance to catch up on movies—and I watched Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret (which was cute, and very true to the book, except for I remember the mother worked in the book?) and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, which felt like a mashup of many of my own poetic obsessions—apocalypse, the Cold War era’s paranoia, mistrust of the government, aliens, nuclear testing anxiety, quarantine and its reverberations, and of course, death, Shakespeare, and witches. Some of my friends really did not like this movie, which highlights artificiality in a sort of odd black and white narrated Rod Serling juxtaposed with a tableau of the American West in color and admittedly does not have a linear plot. But I loved it—and more than that, it was the first movie I’ve seen that made me want to make a movie. (I have a friend with a fancy Ivy League degree in film and I suddenly had the urge to ask to borrow all her books from the program.) This film almost felt like a visual poem—a pastiche of Wasteland-like fragments. The other thing I noticed was influences from my generation—from Futurama episodes (I recommend watching “The Series Has Landed” and “Roswell That Ends Well” for shot-to-shot comparisons) and MST3K fifties apocalypse anxiety films. Wes is four years older than me, so we probably watched and read a lot of the same things growing up. I loved Moonlight Kingdom, but I strongly identified with this film—it’s practically set in my childhood home of Oak Ridge with its massive government buildings and kooky genius children in nearby schools, called “Atomic City.”

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Anniversaries, Birthdays, Heatwaves, and Thoughts on Asteroid City and the Poetry World

These are the ghosts of cities we loved
                    and lived in: perfect, scaled-down houses,

rooms now vined with glossy overgrowth.
                   Landmarks loosened from the horizon bond

closer to their ruined shadows. Which bird, which god, 
                  delivers these triumphs of otherworldly scale? 

The universe: nothing but a battered suitcase, its insides 
                 carpeted with remembered skies and glowing 

mycelia. Maps of the world,  speckled with fruiting spores.

Luisa A. Igloria, Terminal

My second full-length poetry collection is finally available. Whew! It took a good bit of patience, some frustration, and considerable persistence to get here, but I believed that this was a manuscript worth plugging away on. And thank you to Highland Park Poetry and to judge Cynthia Gallaher for choosing RQH as a prizewinner.

Persistence doesn’t always pay off, but when it does, we tend to focus on how important it is to keep on keeping on. However, I’m not sure I wholly believe in the process of sticking-to-it no matter what; there are times when you do need to let go of an unattainable goal or the pursuit of a not-terrific idea, and just–well, fail. I have let go of quite a few goals, plans, and previous manuscripts when I honestly evaluated my feelings about them and their possibilities for becoming realized. It’s okay to fail. You learn more from failure than from success. I have gained quite an education that way myself.

But I wanted this book to get into print. I like the poems in it. I like the things I learned as I played with meter and form and (mostly slant) rhyme. It was fun to find a range of topics that managed, one way or another, to work together. Mostly, I wanted an audience, to find out whether readers find it thought-provoking or entertaining or interesting. Also, I was starting to sense that it was getting in the way of my next manuscript. Yes, of course I have the next manuscript…

Ann E. Michael, Aloft at last

Once a week I would knock on the door of Madeline’s office with a copy of my typed-out poem. Madeline would invite me in, her red ballpoint in hand. Each week I fervently hoped that she wouldn’t find a word to circle or a phrase to underline. I prayed for a mistake-free poem. One day she explained to me that “the poem was only as good as the weakest link in the chain.” Once the weak chink was excised from the work, a new issue would take its place. In other words, my wish was impossible.

But it didn’t matter! Through Madeline’s teaching I was first introduced to the poetry of Carolyn Forche, Sharon Olds, and Richard Hugo. Through Madeline I learned the art of revision—whether I wanted to learn it or not. Without that tough and (at the time) tedious lesson, I never could have become a published poet.

And as tough as Madeline was with me, she was also kind. For our last class together she invited me to her home for lunch; the first and only time this happened to me as an undergraduate. After the meal, we took my poems and laid them out underneath the dining room table. Here was my teacher on her hands and knees peering at my mess of a manuscript.

I think this was the first time I ever saw anyone care about my work, anyone take it seriously. Underneath her table! Thank you, Madeline.

This would have been enough but she also came to my small graduation party at my group house. She modeled for me what a professor, a mentor, could be. When I moved to Seattle, several decades after graduation, Madeline had moved here, too. And at each of my book launches, Madeline was there, sitting in the front row.

For Madeline’s 90th birthday, I worked with her literary executrix, Anne McDuffie to try and make the event memorable. We had a broadside done of one of her poems by local poet and printmaker, Joe Green, and there was lots of cake. Anne had asked me to speak to Madeline’s time in Massachusetts and I was both honored and terrified. And once again, there was Madeline in the front row, watching.

Susan Rich, Madeline DeFrees: a poet you really should know; I’m very thankful that I did…

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I tend to write in many different styles, depending on the needs of the work, and my mood. One day, as a student, I went to Sharon Olds’s office, and she had my poems spread across her desk in a grid. She showed me how different styles I was practicing worked (or didn’t work) in relationship to one another. She told me where she thought my strengths were. I cherish that advice. It helps me remember the ways of writing that feel natural for me, so I can challenge myself by writing in other ways too. […]

David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Visual art has always been an inspiration. When I was in grad school in NY, I would take the subway to the Met and spend all day walking and observing, or sitting in front of a sculpture and free writing.

However, in the past decade, I’ve swung the other direction. My book banana [ ] was very research-based, and I loved coming home from work and reading history books, writing down any fact about the fruit that struck me. Right now, I’m writing poems that begin with cardiac studies that I perform at the hospital where I work. I’m very interested in what happens when we combine language that is supposedly “poetic” or “beautiful” with scientific or academic language that intends to serve a different purpose.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Hlava Ceballos (rob mclennan)

This morning I saw a piece by one of those pedants who declare that writers must write every day. Or what? I thought, and of course the answer came immediately – if you don’t write at least something every day, you can’t call yourself a writer. […]

[I]t occurred to me that for the last couple of weeks I haven’t written a thing. A new, confusing, incredibly annoying laptop hasn’t helped. Why are the people who make these things seemingly so intent on ‘upgrading’ them? I suppose they get paid to think of new stuff a laptop can do but I suspect they forget that most of us just want something that’s simple to operate and quick to fathom out. In my case I’m far too thick to adapt to a new and complex system of icons and symbols. I even had to be showed where the on-off button was hiding… Mostly this has driven me away from technology to the point where I’ve hardly even used my phone, let alone the internet. Please don’t get me started on the vile idea of closing physical ticket offices at train stations. I have no interest whatsoever in buying a ticket online and downloading some App or other.

I’ve taken to transcribing old poems stored forgotten in some ethereal hole (like this site) back into longhand. I’ve been busy looking after hens, arranging for new middle white pigs to come at the beginning of August, watching Test cricket, working on bits and pieces on our smallholding. I’ve also read a fine book about the West Bromwich Albion championship-winning season of 1919-20, part of a novel that bored me so much I tried reading it from last chapter to first. (No improvement.) I also read about a protest march by London’s wig-makers in 1764 when, it seemed, wigs were going out of fashion and ‘wearing your own hair, if you have any’ was becoming so popular they faced ruin.

Writing poetry? Nah. Though I did dig a book from 20 years ago off the shelf, Rain On The River, by a Californian poet, Jim Dodge, which reminded me why I kept it. Take his poem The Banker, which begins: His smile is like a cold toilet seat. [Mind you, that’s sometimes preferable to a very warm toilet seat – Ed.] He shakes my hand as if he’s found it floating two weeks dead in a slough. These are poems of madness, fun and impulse but also of domesticity, of a family and working life full of ordinary, extraordinary, passionately respected events, of a life shaped by memories passed and recorded through generations where you strive to live what you’re given as well as you can. It’s one of those books where the writing feels relaxed almost to the point of diffidence but is anything but. I think from what I read about him, Dodge has concentrated on novels since Rain On The River was published, which would seem the novel’s gain and poetry’s loss. If you can pick up a copy somewhere, I’d heartily recommend it.

Bob Mee, TOO BUSY TO WRITE? DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Recently I realized I’ve begun marking the passing of time through words and growing things. When I wake up in the morning, that day of the week begins with my thinking about what I will be reading, writing, or editing. I have a schedule I follow because I like order (or routine) in my life and I have other people depending on me. And yet, the “order” the hours take are not strict and unbending. Sometimes, I’ll wait to edit an essay 3 or 4 days before it’s due to publish, thereby spending several hours doing that one thing, or I’ll begin writing down a story a week before the submission deadline. Sometimes, often actually, the urgency lights a fire under my ass, makes me accountable.

I keep a journal, of sorts, that includes gardening notes – when I planted seeds or bought a plant, what seeds took and what didn’t, dates of first blooms, dates I fed or cut something back, all sorts of notes. I can look back for several years and see what grew well and what bombed. Although I keep great notes, the garden itself is wild and somewhat overgrown. Plants that shouldn’t be together end up in the same pots or seeds get planted past the “plant by” dates because I don’t always follow traditional gardening advice. Freedom. I want to see what will happen and, more often than not, everything gets along just fine as long as I tend to watering and feeding. Accountability.

There is order, accountability, and freedom in my approach to writing. Order doesn’t have to be limiting at all when you mold it into what works for you. Something I’ve realized recently is that I’ve been fighting against the “write every day” blueprint because I thought that meant you sit down at a desk every day at a certain time and write at least 1000 words, no matter what. Google “write every day” and you’ll get a plethora of advice, workshops, and classes and yet, I believe you will be happier and more prolific when you design a practice that works for you as an individual.

Charlotte Hamrick, Order, Accountability, Freedom

I exercised my way into a knee injury, and turned my writing life upside-down. That’s because I do a lot of dictating into my phone while walking. And now I’m not walking much. I also use stair-climbing as part of my thinking process. Doing chores in our house means stairs, and that’s some of my best thinking time. Though now I have more stair-thinking time, as I take it one step — good foot, bad foot — at a time.

I’m doing more of my thinking seated. Poetry and editing, however, seem to benefit from my staying seated. Fiction, not as much, because thinking of those plot twists requires me to be in motion.

Many of my poems were composed while walking and dictating, but yesterday I started a new practice of sitting poems. Even better if I’m sitting in an unusual places, such as a hot car while waiting for my husband to come out of the store, or on my deck while watering plants while sitting down. Instead of walking through it, sitting in a lovely field. Under a giant oak that tells me it loves me by dropping twigs on my head.

Rachel Dacus, The Benefits of a Writing with a Knee Injury

Perhaps we should talk more about formulas and genres. A romance novel has a formula, as do most chart-topping songs. The content creators are usually adhering to some sort of formula based on what they are drawn to themselves or the styles of other creators. But then so does literature sometimes–even poetry.  Insta poets are an obvious example. New Yorker poems are another. I would also say certain avant-schools of poetry also have a style you see again and again. 

And ultimately, unless you are one of those rare exotic birds who doesn’t want to share your work, your work eventually becomes content, whether you read it at a reading, post it on FB, or submit it to a literary magazine. At the point where it meets a consumer, no matter how lofty its aims. So this at least makes me feel less weird about calling my art content. 

But I will confess that doing so, at least in the past year or so, has made things like promotion and social media little more fun. I used to see them as separate, the art-making and the content creation, one the meat and potatoes, the other the flavorless broccoli, or the necessary evil of getting your work out there and enticing readers/viewers to look at the art. But much of what I do now I see holistically as part of the same process. I used to focus so much on the end product of book sales and gaining attention, but now I try to focus more on sharing things–whether it’s poems or images or video. The sharing is the point (though if it leads to book sales or website visits all the better.) But I’ve used the analogy before of the museum gift shop. Nice if you stop in, but absolutely not necessary. You can still enjoy the museum. This shift in thinking has taken a lot of pressure off me to see myself as failing if I don’t get enough likes or hits or sales in the shop. The content and the sharing/consuming is the point, not these other markers. 

Kristy Bowen, art and content | the dirty c-word

This week has been a wild, adrenalin and caffeine driven power march through my own edits on The Ghost Lake, galloping towards the deadline and swinging between elation and something like dread. But I am loving it. I am living a life that I began working towards ten years ago. Most days I’m up by 6.00am. I brew my coffee, I sit in the office space I created for myself, I listen to the jackdaws and the wood pigeons outside my office window and feel the sun creeping up behind the blinds to greet me. I can hear people getting in their cars and heading out to work and I feel utterly lucky to be able to do the thing that I do – writing, workshops, facilitating, mentoring. Because I’m an early riser I generally have a couple of hours of some sort of writing related activity (more on that later) in the bag before the day really begins. […]

Last week someone I know from the poetry community commented on one of my many morning pics (the taking of the morning pics is an act of accountability that gets me to my desk) and asked if I had any blogs about managing time as a freelancer and writer. I do…somewhere in the mists of time on my website… but I realised my process has changed so much over the years that it probably wouldn’t be relevant now.

Not everyone has money to sit on while they write. It’s one of the biggest blocks to people from non traditional backgrounds, from non affluent backgrounds, to getting into the arts. I’ve literally just been writing about this in my book so I’m a bit riled up about it. If you’re like me and from a working class background, without the nest egg, you will need to first accept this, accept that the aesthetic of the writer doing nothing but writing, of being an (unpaid) intern for a year building contacts and learning publishing skills or media skills while you plan your novel, fresh out of university…that’s not for you. That wasn’t for me. Though I hold onto the dream that at some point I will be successful enough to make writing my priority all the time, I am realistic enough to know that that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. But if you want it, and ‘it’ is different to all writers – you will find a way of working for it, kicking down the doors and making it happen.

Wendy Pratt, Manage Your Freelance Time, Protect Your Writing Time

Fake Math by ryan fitzpatrick (Snare, 2007/ Model, 2022) in the copy I have, is reissued, with some of the 2007 edition culled, and the whole somewhat expanded with a section “Fake Math (20xx)” which written in the same spirit in the intervening 15 years. 

It is extremely dense. The poems examine inside the urban over-stimulus of capitalism. It is not narrative but changing sentence to sentence like Lisa Robertson’s Boat (Coach House, 2022). Boat uses repetition of the idea of imaginary doors as portals to create touchstones between non-sequitur lists. fitzpatrick’s has no such device acting as a connector except a hyperglossia speed. In Robertson’s

Every angel is fucking the seven arts.

Each leaf had achieved its vastness.

A young woman is seated on a kitchen chair, black wings spread out as if drying.

It was August and the night was hot.

What we were proposing already exists. 

Lisa Robertson’s Boat

Whereas in Fake Math, fitzpatrick’s non sequitur leaps cluster physically tighter with “less breathing room” as they say, even stand alone phrases rather than “full sentences”. 

Just because we screw doesn’t mean.
Just because we assume swoosh pants. 
Tradition and the tattooed cerebellum. 
Sweat and swoon of commodity fetishism. 
Totemic icon of commodity, and test drive. 
Art is a dirty word.
A heart of purina.
In the sun on the beach.
Loving the V-8’s hum.
Bud of calm, blossom of hysteria.
Why gold confronts the linen as money. 

ryan fitzpatrick’s Fake Math

The stress against capitalism and “jinglistic” noise (“ a heart of purina”) is rolled out frenetically as it was rolled into the head but with a twist. Academia and intellectual spin is in both poets, and a critical posture rather than self-reveal.

Yet, there’s beauty that stops you in your tack to fill your sails in each work, whether a leaf achieving its vastness or bud of calm, blossom of hysteria. 

Pearl Pirie, Fake Math

If you turn the stereo down low enough, you can hear the downtrodden aching for an antidote to oppression.

You can understand how hard it is to change horses mid-breath when the final breath is being choked from your body.

On the streets, I hear rumblings that the gun has taken a shot at writing poetry.

Perhaps it can teach bullets how to sing Ave Maria.

Rich Ferguson, Season of Goodbyes

Sarah Bakewell writes books on people who have ideas, which does not on its face sound interesting, but they are. The books are less about the ideas per se than about the people, their influences, their time period, who they were, and who they influenced, and she tells it all in a wonderfully breezy way, making links and telling sidebar tales. I just love her work.

What I’m reading now is called Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope. It’s not what you might call riveting, but it’s been a good read. Humanism, in broad brush, is the idea that humans are capable of great moral acts, great artistic and technical achievements right here in this life on this Earth, and our lives should be dedicated to joy and radical understanding of all things. The idea that maybe was best captured in Rodney King’s plaintive, “Can’t we all get along?” and in the nonjudgmental “don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t want done unto you, cuz hey, if you’re into that other stuff, whatever.”

They might believe in a god or gods, these humanists, but they think worrying about the afterlife is not the best way to make living in this life the best it can be. Some were perhaps overly humanocentric, but many had made the connection between humans and, well, everything else. Humanists over time may have disagreed on some stuff, but essentially they all believe that human beings have the power to not be dickheads, and we should use that power.

All kinds of interesting people have thought this but their voices have been drowned out by louder voices of intolerance, greed, war, stupidity. She mentions, for example, J. M. Dent, who in 1916 in England founded the Everyman’s Library. Which put me in mind of those encyclopedias peddled door to door. It was with enormous sadness I chucked our family’s World Book…but only because I couldn’t see my friend Helen’s family’s slightly newer edition get chucked, and I still have it hoarding valuable shelf space. How many out of date encyclopedias does one household need? One, certainly.

Marilyn McCabe, It’s gonna take a miracle; or, On Reading Bakewell’s Humanly Possible

I’ve been a fan of Gaia Holmes’s poetry since the publication of her third (and most recent) collection, Where the Road Runs Out, available from Comma Press here, which is among my very favourites of the last five years, if not all time. I’m pretty sure that it I bought on the recommendation of a typically warm-hearted review by John Foggin on his blog, here. I subsequently bought Gaia’s two earlier collections, which are both very good too. To paraphrase Orwell, all poets’ voices are unique, but some, like Gaia’s, are more unique than others’.

So I was really pleased to see today from Gaia’s blog that she’s uploaded a recording of her short story, ‘Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep’, to her Soundcloud page, here. It’s a terrific listen.

Even better is the fact that there are also loads of other atmospheric recordings, interspersed by music, which she made two/three years ago, of her (and other poets’) poems. I particularly like how, each time, Gaia paired one of her own lovely poems with somebody else’s to provide intriguing comparisons and contrasts.

Matthew Paul, On Gaia Holmes

Peter Kenny and I have just wrapped up the last episode of Season 3 of Planet Poetry. Our guest was Richard Skinner, a fitting ‘finale’ as he led us through a fascinating poetry landscape in which OuLiPo, curtal sonnets, Caedmon and cutups all made an appearance. Then Peter and I had a chat and a beer in the potting shed. It’s been an exciting but exhausting season and we can hardly believe the poddy is still going strong! […]

Yep, last week I got some new photos done (in readiness for all that Booker Prize publicity – tee hee!) Nothing makes you feel more confident (in my humble opinion) than a professional photoshoot. I’ve rubbed along with selfies and ancient headshots for a number of years, but as Nick needed photos too we asked photographer Sarah Weal for help. I can only describe her as an absolute magician, making us look like we mean business, but still very much us. I couldn’t help myself but use one of the shots she took as a featured image to this post. Forgive me! Anyway, even if the book deals never happen, I will love looking at these photos in ten or twenty years’ time (fingers crossed) and say  “look how amazing and young we were!”

Robin Houghton, Round up: poems, podcast, garden, new photos…

David King is an award-winning experimental filmmaker, video and photo artist whose works have screened at the Australian National Museum, the Museum of Experimental Art in Mexico City, the BFI Theatre in London, the Nova Cinema in Melbourne, Affero Gallery in USA, and many international film and video festivals. He also curates screenings of experimental films and videos, with works collected from around the world. I’ve been delighted to have some of my videos in his curations.

Earlier this year, David contacted me asking if I’d like to write a poem for a new experimental video he was working on. David’s visual style is very different from mine, so I thought it would be really interesting to collaborate with him on this project. The subject of the video is loosely about the ocean, which is close to the hearts of both of us.

So I wrote a poem called King Tide to fit the video. David liked the text and we decided that I should record it, and make a matching sound design. I wanted to have the audio closely linked to the video, so I used a program, Photosounder, that converts images to audio to generate a base set of audio samples. This program encodes parameters in the image, such as intensity, colour and location, into pitch and duration of the audio, which can then be altered by a wide range of filtering, re-sampling and play-back options. I selected a single frame from each scene in the video and from each of them made a sample set of audio files. These were then taken into Logic Pro for further processing, such as re-timing, re-pitching, filtering, and looping. There are over 85 of these samples in the final mix. Each set of samples is introduced when the corresponding source scene begins in the video, although most of them re-appear, or continue on later in the video.

The voice is mine, but it has been re-pitched, re-timed and had various filters applied in five layers. The little melody that appears under and around the vocal is also my voice, feeding a sample of the text into two separate vocoders.

Ian Gibbins, Topography of an Imaginary Ocean – video poetry collaboration with David King

Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs is a long overdue study of the impact and role of concrete poetry on the turn away from the Movement and towards the modernist legacy that stimulated an explosion of interesting British poetry 1950s, 60s and 70s. Thomas takes four of the most interesting of the poets involved as the spine of his narrative, two of them Scottish, two English: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing. From this grouping it is clear that one of the blurred borders is the English/Scottish one, but the title refers just at much to the blurring of boundaries across genres that typifies the work of the four.

Thomas opens with an introduction and background chapter on the early development of concrete poetry, focusing on the Brazilian Noigandres group and the German Constructivists including Eugen Gomringer. These early concrete poets were, he argues, rejecting Dadaist chaos and looking to create work that was both experimental and supportive of the new post-WWII ideals of social order. This is an important counterpoint to the narrative arc of the British adoption of the genre, which can be traced as a move back towards Dadaist disruption. They were also influenced by developments in the area of information theory, which seemed to point towards a potential universal language; for the early exponents of concrete, this reinforced the idea that they could produce work that evaded the communicative limitations of language as it is and create work that could be understood by anyone, anywhere.

Billy Mills, Border Blurs by Greg Thomas: A review

More advice, although tongue-in-cheek this time, is offered in “How to be a Proper Poet”, where amateurs have to sit at a reading

“far away from the proper poet pack, to hang over the side of the pew to give you any kind of view because’s there’s another proper poet in front of you with big hair that’s soooo debonair, extraordinaire, laissez-faire, spectaculaire, yeah big, big hair that blocks your field of vision, resulting in a gale-force, full-frontal eye flicking big-hair collision – barn – move on, move on – oh dea, leaving you to strain to see and hear and wonder at the thunder rumbling in your head that says just smile and clap and nod, poor sod, even though the punchlines drowned by those with seats saved at the front you can’t expect any different, you’re only a pretend poet after all, small, insignificant, slightly deaf, lacking the intellectual heft to rarefy your silly rhymes but next time, next time… so if you want to be a proper poet and show it at another gig, bring wine, wear scarves, wear heels, oh just wear a wig.”

Advice that finds the right balance between letting the rhymes run on yet the poem is still readable. The breathy rhythm catching the sense of a ideas floating out from the annoyance at having your view blocked, sitting further than back you’d planned so hearing is a strain, yet it retains its focus and never feels as if it’s drifted out of control or let the sounds drive the poem at the expense of sense.

Emma Lee, “Devon Maid Walking” Clare Morris (Jawbone) – book review

A few years ago, a young poet was caught plagiarizing another poet’s work. They were not just called out and asked to be accountable, they were brutally made fun of, and to this day the occasional cruel reminder will be posted online about them as if they are not even a real person. You could tell it was never really about accountability to many of the people who went after them as, when this person accepted full responsibility for their transgression, and apologized personally to the poet whose work they had plagiarized from, no one cared. It wasn’t what they had really wanted. They wanted someone to make fun of. They wanted someone to take their anger out on. A person who is trying to be accountable is just spoiling the fun.

I reached out to this person, as had been done for me, and found that they were actually handling it much better than I had. I admired the tenacity, perseverance, grace and maturity with which someone so young was handling such a hard life event. We both had recently lost grandparents we were close with, and this person shared with me a poem that they had written for their grandparent, a beautiful poem, in their own beautiful and unique words, and I couldn’t help but feel so sad for this immensely talented young person who had made, and genuinely sought to atone for a mistake, and who told me “I will always keep writing, but just for me. I will probably never publish again.” It sounded like both a deeply personal choice and an inevitability of the current culture we live in, where redemption is not as desirable as cruelty.

I hope this person does one day publish again, but oh the hard difficult work we’d have to do to make such a thing a possibility. It was cruel enough to have gone through what they went through, but to have to go through it when they lost both of their grandparents, and to have to see the online vitriol, must have been even more painful. I know as I too lost a grandparent that I cared for on hospice during my “cancellation.” In my case, people used it as an opportunity to make fun of my “dead Grandma.” I want to think that these deeper stories would matter to those who often refuse to see the hurting and human face of the other, but for whatever reason we live in a time in which we just do not take the time to really see and hear each other in these deeper, more thoughtful ways.

Two other poets I know were “canceled” for personal conflicts with their ex-partners. They both permanently deleted their social media and quit publishing in addition to having much of their work removed from magazines. While I didn’t know them as well as I did the poet described earlier, I can only imagine their solitary journeys of exile were very similar and just as painful. The events surrounding their cancellations were very confusing, as personal conflicts tend to be, and it wasn’t obvious to me why it was a community concern.

Many of the same people were involved in their cancellation (if it isn’t obvious by now when I use the term “cancellation” it is used as a placeholder for what is more accurately bullying, scapegoating and dogpiling group behavior, which often leads to removal of a writer’s published work and/or a writer’s own decision to quit.) Once again it seemed obvious that accountability was not the goal, whatever that even would have been in such a personal situation, an apology and making amends to one’s ex I would imagine. Why that should translate into never being allowed to publish again eludes me. How sad that we have made a world for these young people in which redemption is derided and held in contempt, that they should feel they have to abandon their creative passions publicly rather than find pathways towards repair and reconciliation.

James Diaz, It’s Time to Confront Conflict in the Poetry Community

The facebook algorithm is interesting. Since I began cross posting from this “cancer blog”, my feed suddenly started showing posts from people whose posts never show up – and all of them working through cancer or other serious illnesses. One the one hand, this is good because I feel less alone – and it is humbling in a healthy way (as in “yeah, so, you and everyone else…”) – but on the other hand, I think: wow – I am putting a lot of “ick” out there that may be showing up in people’s feeds who don’t need to see it.

But then, isn’t that true of everything we put out there. Sometimes I am astonished by the amount of social regulating that we do online: Don’t whine/winge, Don’t flaunt, Don’t crow, Don’t overshare, Don’t be needy, Don’t be prescriptive.

“It’s not a good look” is my least favorite comment now. The irony of people using this to censure and censor other people: appearance being the gateway to authentic… anything? I don’t know if the phrase is “not a good look”, but I think it is a window into the authentic concerns of person who typed those words. I have even seen this phrase used by journalists on major news outlets. (Do we even call them that now? “Media outlets”.)

I am thinking that life is too short to spend so much of it sneering. And yep, I see that I am sneering when I write about the sneering. Vicious circle of social interactions?

I saw something this morning that (really) made me smile. In a video clip about the light beer controversy in Nashville, a woman with a sequined American flag cowboy hat said something to the effect of who cares what other people do. I have to admit, I saw that hat and expected something completely different from that woman’s mouth. There is one of my prejudices laid bare for me to look at and work to let go of.

Ren Powell, No More Number 2 Pencils

These plants springing from cracked pavement remind me of nature’s beautiful impulse for life. It restores my hope everywhere I find it. A handful of dry lentils taken from my cupboard, after a few days of soaking and draining, grow into cheery little sprouts I can use in salads, or feed to the chickens, or plant to grow into another generation of lentils. Seeds brought from Cyprus decades ago, shared by a friend, grow each year into giant hardy winter squash that keeps well until late winter –providing nourishing meals along with more seeds to save and share. Organic potatoes in my pantry wrinkle around tiny rosettes and from them, pale tendrils fragile with new life reach out in search of sunlight. I plant these eyes two or three times each season, from late March to late August, for fresh harvests of tender heirloom potatoes.

Life’s impulse can’t always survive what we humans are doing to this planet. As a direct result of human activity, the rate of species extinction is up to 10,000 times higher than the natural, historical rate. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows ocean heating is equivalent to between three and six 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. The UN says “climate change is out of control” and experts in Earth’s climate history are convinced this current decade of warming is more extreme than any time since the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago. It’s exhausting to think about, let alone act on, this spiraling disaster.

We need new stories that reawaken us to the lived wisdom of this planet’s First Peoples and lead us to the most ethical, scientifically grounded regenerative lifeways going forward. It helps when we recognize nature isn’t just what sprouts from cracked pavement. It isn’t confined to wild places we long to visit. We are nature, right down to the life processes of every cell. It helps when our new stories speak to our descendants. It helps when they answer our ancestors.

Laura Grace Weldon, Honoring The Impulse To Thrive

“You are dreaming for humanity,” is what Jean Valentine once said to Hafizah Geter in a Paris Review interview on poetry.

If you’re a poet interested in line breaks, Valentine is the place to learn. Geter says of Valentine’s:

“It makes you trust yourself to the gap. Using everything you’ve ever known and forgotten, your mind and your imagination construct a bridge beneath you in real time. Suddenly, instead of “minding the gap,” you cross it. Studying her poems, I learned I could build a bridge between anything I loved—a poet, a song.”

And so when people are asking why they should read poetry, there, that. THAT.

Because we need to know how to bridge gaps. We need to get one thing talking to another through a gaping space, over a vastness, a chasm. Poetry can do this. We can.

Shawna Lemay, Reading Jean Valentine with C.D. Wright

The poem describes walks I’d take with Violet every day, strapping her into the baby carrier and walking her around the historic German Village neighborhood where we lived the first year of her life. We’d walk through Schiller Park—yes, there is a bronze statue of the German poet Friedrich von Schiller there—and I’d point out things to her as we passed, as if I were a tour guide. That’s sort of what early parenthood felt like: being the tour guide for someone new to the world.

I wanted my daughter to love this place I brought her to, and I wanted the world to deserve her. This theme comes up in other poems of mine. “Porthole” from Goldenrod opens like this:

I was hoping the world would earn you,
but it rains and rains, too busy raining
to win you over.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “First Fall”

I said in my last blog that I had started writing some different, fresher material. This has coincided with me going through all my poems and retiring poems that I didn’t feel were strong or good enough. Most of these poems were not in one of the two or three collections I have in progress, so it was easy to just pack them away in a Retired Poems folder. I might go back in the future and have a look at them to try and refresh or reuse some of the material and I know they’re still there if I want to use one or two, but it feels good to shift them out of sight. 

I write a lot, see note about having three collections going, but many of the poems I write are good enough on their own, but don’t work well with others or my style has changed and I just don’t find them as appealing anymore. I then went through the collections and had a cull as well. I didn’t take out as many poems, but I changed the direction of one book, so I did need to take about a third away. It feels liberating to pare things down, to turn towards this new direction. 

I have one of those collections with a publisher, but it’s been stalled for four years. In the meantime, I’ve rearranged and edited it over and over. It’s better, certainly, but it doesn’t make the wait feel any better. It’s just so frustrating, not knowing when or if it will happen. I don’t know if I’d be happier to have the collection the way it is, basically better, or to have it earlier, so I can move on. I sometimes feel like I’m still stuck in that place where the collection inhabits until it’s published as I keep revisiting the poems as I edit. It will be nice to be free of them, in a sense. Until then it’s a waiting game. A wading game as I move through the poems, just up to my ankles, occasionally plashing about.

My writing group is having its third annual retreat in two weeks. I’m looking forward to it. I have to drive, but besides that it will be just hanging out with people I like, writing, talking writing, eating and drinking, jumping in the hottub. It’s a blast and I always manage to write a poem or two while I’m there. The day after we come back, I’m off to work. So that will be the end of summer, a proper send off. 

Gerry Stewart, Rewriting Memories and Poetry Collections

The day before my birthday storm Poly (Beaufort 11) raged at speeds of 140 kms an hour: overhead lines and trees came down. The day after my birthday the Dutch government fell.

On my birthday I treated family to lunch. It was a joyous occasion. My uncle (born 17 years after my mother) turned 85 in June. He has only recently given up playing volleyball: too much for his shoulders. He’s taken up Jeu de Boules instead.

Here are two verses from an extended sequence titled Briefly a small brown eye.

Primary school demolished,
protestant church a community centre.
Our old house extended.
Forty years on no reason to visit
this town other than the old uncle.

Lunchtime, my aunt brings out
the special table cloth.
She has embroidered signatures,
some in Arabic, some in Cyrillic.
I’m looking for mine.

Fokkina McDonnell, The special table cloth

Those mornings when you realise there is no plan for the day; no thing. Yet knowing it will unwind like a clock’s chime. A pal to call upon; a decision of direction to be made. An adventure to be had that has not thought itself through yet. It’s early. A deep breath turns to the window lightening slowly; everything is slowly today. The mind curtains the breeze, the light as still as a deep breath turning a stretch into a swing of legs. The length of a smile about nothing, the thought of nothing to do. Out of the window a gaze is held in perpetuity, in deliberate incomprehension turning. Slowly. Breakfast spoons time in the milk of childhood. A determined plan to do nothing with determination. To reduce adventure to the unraveling of a day’s indecision.

Jim Young, So much about nothing to do

After some time, the light

extends a long leg, a dark root,
bending toward me, a giant
curious about small things.

Lopsided butterfly
slowly opens and closes
torn white wings.

PF Anderson, Fixed & Floating

on which side of my skin is sky

have all suns held inside a dawn that never arrives

Grant Hackett [no title]

This past week, I was saddened to learn of the death of John Foggin, a one-of-a-kind poet from Yorkshire who I sense will be very, very missed in that part of the world. I loved his down-to-earth but always thoroughly researched and insightful blog, full of generosity and humility toward other poets, and I thought the poetry in his final collection, Pressed for Time—the only one of his I’ve read so far—was absolutely stunning, one of my favorite reads of 2022.

For those able to attend the celebration of his life on July 14, family members have blogged the details. For the rest of us, here’s a celebration of life, poetry, and embodied wisdom from poets around the world. Rest in peace, John, and thanks for all the light you brought into the world.

I remember a young woman dressed in velvet burgundy that I only saw from behind. The dress came off her shoulders in a deep V; she was bent close to hear what the not- yet-anointed Nobel prize-winning poet was saying. I still remember her exquisite skin: airbrushed before airbrushing existed. I watched as if through bulletproof glass.

Whomever I was with that night, told me Heaney was the most famous living Irish poet and that he came to Cambridge every spring. It was 1989, Seeing Things was not yet published; The Spirit Level, still a few years off.

After that party, I would see Heaney in his oversized tweeds hurrying along Plimpton Street quite regularly. Usually, he’d be carrying his dry cleaning in a plastic cover, his arm straight out in front of him as if the suit were leading him down the sidewalk and not the other way around.

I learned he lived at Adams House on Bow Street directly across from my first apartment (an over-the-top economic divide existing from one side of the street to the other). I found it funny and rather embarrassing that across the street from this white-haired, world-famous poet, I was staying up into the early hours writing my first real poems.

Susan Rich, Seamus Heaney: Dry Cleaning and a Nearly Unknown Poem

I keep thinking about all the way we humans meet and how often we squander these meetings. Whether it’s inviting folks into a public space, at a dinner party, a coffee with friends, a presentation, a poetry reading. I mean, I have totally squandered these moments throughout my life. But how can I change that? If you have read the book The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker (mentioned on this blog before if you recall) you will have received many great tools to turn a gathering or a meeting into a beauty shock, really.

She talks about how we need to avoid having “housekeeping” details as our opening. She says instead, “your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy.” She says, “It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honour them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.”

And then, and I love this, she talks about the giant vases of flowers at the Four Seasons. (In Edmonton, you might think about the Hotel MacDonald, or in Banff at the Banff Springs Hotel). She says these flowers are “honour-awing.” These flowers are “stunning and maybe taller than you, and that awes you, intimidates you, makes you remember that you don’t live like this back home. But of course the flowers are there for you, to honour you.”

I actually think having a giant painting of flowers in your home, or one by your door, can do the same thing. But you know that I am ENTIRELY BIASED WHEN I SAY THAT.

And you know what, I’m okay with that :)

What are other ways that we can honour and awe each other when we meet?

All I know is that I want to be part of that beauty shock therapy stuff. I want to honour-awe you. And then I want you to pass it on.

It’s something we can do.

Shawna Lemay, Flowers to Honour and Awe

Summer flashes its shiny switchblade of long light, pries spring from its hinges, and slips boldly into its celebrated season.

Summer sings a radio-friendly popsong of let’s get it on. It rocks the mic with sugar-sweet honeysuckle harmonies.

Waves its freak flag of feeling good. Bonfires and festivals, Indigenous sun dancers and pagan revelers decked out in flower wreaths.

Rich Ferguson, Summer 2023

School is finally done and the sun is shining. The weather has been amazing, so hot and clear. Not great for the garden or the forests to go so long without rain, but the long days of light and heat are a relief. Beach weather, park weather, proper summer weather while we off to enjoy it. […]

I’m enjoying what I’m writing now. My style has changed a bit over the past year. My poetic style is always changing, but I sometimes get caught in a loop of subjects or styles, writing very similar poems for a period and when something comes along to shake me up, I find it refreshing. 

I use prompts to push me out of my rut. Writing from different points of view, occasionally trying a structured form (I’m currently trying to write a palindrome) and looking into unusual events for inspiration. I’ve even managed to put a bit of humour, sometimes black humour in my poems, playing with ideas that often aren’t found together. 

Gerry Stewart, Slowing Down into the Summer, Summer, Summertime

We’ve reached the point of tilt, when the earth falls towards the dark. Happy solstice. Yesterday I rose at 4am to drive down to the beach at Filey. I took my place on a memorial bench and sat, bleary eyed at first, then slowly coming alive in the light and warmth of the rising sun. I felt a genuine, primal sense of awe, as if I was connected to all the summer solstice sunrises that have ever been. The sun rose over Carr Naze, laying itself across the sea. I’d made a promise to myself that I would witness the solstice sunrise, rather than watching footage of Stonehenge, this year. I had promised myself the experience of magic – the early start, the silent streets, of being awake when other people are fast asleep and of seeing something utterly beautiful. I wanted to place myself before the sun in a ritual of my own making.

There were a few of us down there, a scattering of people taking their places to see the sun arrive on the longest day of the year. Afterwards I came home to the miracle of coffee and a purring cat, my husband softly sleeping, and I set to work and wrote until seven, after which I read and listened to the radio. It was the perfect way to see the longest day in. I like the idea of creating my own rituals.

Summer is a time when I revert to my child self. How I value not overthinking clothes; throwing on shorts and T-shirt and sandals and feeling bare skin against grasses and plants, feeling the soft shush of moving through long grass, the squeal of swifts overhead. Early summer mornings, when the world is fresh and dewy, the air filled only with birdsong and rose scent, there is such joy in the variety of green.

Wendy Pratt, A Square Metre of Summer

I can hardly believe it’s summer. That’s a strange thing to say considering I’m a stalker when it comes to warm weather. I obsess over temps and hours of daylight on the weather apps all winter, a season I loosely define as “the months I need a heavy coat.” Living in Upstate NY, this means (to me personally) early November through late April or early May. So roughly half the year I’m dismayed by the cold and lack of light — and constantly monitoring for glimmers of hope.

And yet every year, when summer is finally here, I manage to be surprised. Not by the calendar. I understand how that works. What surprises me, always, is the extent of my relief. Well, relief and belonging, which I greet with both awe and gratitude, as when you’ve found something you thought you’d lost, something you knew may not be guaranteed.

Hello, sunshine.

*

The arrival of summer this year coincides with finishing my Gertie manuscript, which means I successfully immersed myself in (and stuck to!) the revision schedule I’d created for March, April and May. That type of discipline and focus was made possible, I believe, by a habit I’d established through work (January through April) with D. Colin on what she calls a 365 Journey. I ended up bowing out of that 365 accountability group because I was so deep in the revisions that I didn’t even want to talk about the process. However, I’m grateful for the experience and energy of that approach and will absolutely tap it again in the future.

For now, I’m reading, resting, keeping up with Morning Pages (now over 230 days) and doing some generative writing prompts to shift my brain back into the world in which I write new things.

Carolee Bennett, hello, sunshine

The skies bend
their hammocks of rain.

Summer is a flag that unfurls slow and fast,
just as uncertain as we are.

A parent wheels
a chair-bound child through the clinic doors.

Luisa A. Igloria, Oasis

In terms of cancer diary facts:
1. My eyelashes are falling out now. Entering turtle-territory.
2. Hemorrhoids. No one mentioned hemorrhoids. Please.
Who benefits from decorum when talking about chemotherapy?
3. The most recent biopsy came back.
The second lump in the left breast is also cancerous.
4. Still waiting on the BCRA results.
5. I wake with headaches every single morning.
Sometimes at 2 a.m., again at 5 a.m.

I take pain relievers around the clock – staggering the different prescriptions. I take a nap when I need to. I take a walk with the dog when he won’t stop laying his snout over the keyboard to get my attention.

And I give everything I have to metaphors.

But I am grateful to have the play to work on now. B. is whispering in my ear that it is just a matter of “getting it done”. No excuses. Meet the deadline.

*

It’s almost 9 am. I’ve walked Leonard and clipped his nails. On my third cup of coffee now, I can settle down with the adaptation. I am honestly happy that I don’t make my living writing, because it makes the work that much more joyful. It’s a little revelation to myself after all these years. My motives are clear – if I ever had any doubts.

I can hear the rain coming down outside the window. Leonard is breathing heavily in his sleep.

Lear says, “When the mind’s free,/The body’s delicate.” I think there may be something to the idea that it is also true that the delicate body can free the mind.

Ren Powell, Catching Up

‘In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called windswept spirit for lack of a better name …‘ So said Basho in the opening to The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, one of the travel sketches that preceded the more famous The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Basho acknowledges the odd fact that whatever we might pursue (in his case poetry) it’s never enough to truly satisfy the spirit.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a second hand bike – the mortal frame of my old one was beyond repair and I hadn’t used it in years. I’m now, very slowly, trying to get back into it. I took the above photo up at Dunford Bridge on the Trans Pennine Trail. I’ve been up there a few times now, seen a hare crouched in the grass, heard a cuckoo twice, watched endless curlews circling the moor, and come home tired but refreshed. I’m not intending going very far on my journey and won’t be kitting myself out in lycra, but I’m enjoying the weather, the peacefulness of the trail, and the sense of freedom that comes with getting out into open countryside under your own steam. To compliment that, here’s a lovely haiku from Penny Harter, whose book of haibun, ‘Keeping Time: haibun for the journey’ I’m reviewing at the moment. Apologies for taking the haiku out of context, but I liked the calm sense of purpose in it:

fog shrouds
the field’s edge
we keep walking

Julie Mellor, this mortal frame …

This is the first really long road trip I’ve taken since I was 14. It’s feeling a bit revelatory.

The most striking thing about the miles we’ve covered so far is how empty of humans and the detritus of our civilizations they are. Miles and miles of nothing but open land. The highlight for me was a small group of horses living their best life somewhere in western Wyoming, running free, eating grass, no fences in sight.

The low point was a small town that used to be the home of a state penitentiary, which was operational until 1981. The main drag of the town was pocked with shuttered motels and empty restaurants. There was a neighborhood of what might have been charming homes. We’d hoped to eat there, but we couldn’t find any place we wanted to enter, and, honestly, the whole town felt creepy AF (even before we stumbled upon the penitentiary, which is two blocks off the main street) and we got the hell out of Dodge right after filling up our tank. (Later, I googled the penitentiary, and it IS creepy AF. Operational until 1981, with a grisly history. Now it’s a tourist attraction? And apparently haunted?) It was clear that the town was once thriving, but whatever it had was probably built on the misery of that prison. The whole thing left me feeling sad and icky and unsettled.

Driving through miles and miles (and miles) of land so different from what I know, I had a lot of thoughts about our country and its divisions. I won’t share them, as I know I don’t really know anything about what life is like in the places we’ve driven past, and they are all just speculation. I can say that I found myself having an easier time understanding why so many of us have such different world views; we are living vastly different lives. I knew that before Friday, but in a more abstract way. Something about driving through all these places makes it more concrete.

Rita Ott Ramstad, On the road

Last week seemed to be a week of farewells.

There was the sad death of John Foggin, I didn’t know John, but his work was excellent and his website, The Cobweb, was an absolute trove and gift to beginners and old lags alike. His last full post from 2022 is just such a trove. Go, go read it. I’ll wait.

This week saw the final OPOI reviews from Sphinx. We knew it was coming, and it’s very much case of don’t be sad it’s over, just be glad you were there at the time. It will live on as an archive and as a way of approaching things.

Mat Riches, For years I shrunk weekends

I want to believe
that heaven is down on Earth
—here—where the light shaft
shoots through a downpour,
the rainbow, the charcoal sketched
rain cloud, the snowbell piercing ice
to make way for the grape hyacinth,
the snowflake, the whiteout
that in the hours we spent on our bellies
in the sun on the front lawn
when we were six and seven
searching for four leaves
among the clover blooms, how
we weren’t looking for luck,
but the Heaven we always believed in.

Cathy Wittmeyer, A Poem for My Sister, Listening in Heaven

Yesterday, these two lines came to me.  Those of you not steeped in feast days or prophets or the early parts of New Testament Gospels may not recognize John the Baptist, whose feast day was on Saturday–shorthand for saying that I wasn’t surprised when these lines floated up through my brain late yesterday as I took a walk: I have eaten your locusts and wild honey / and I am not impressed.  

This morning, I got rid of the second line, and now the stanza looks like this:

I have eaten your locusts and wild honey

And created a new menu with the bones

Of all the deer killed by carelessness.

And then I wanted to write a bit more, but I wasn’t sure what.  I peered into my dirty coffee cup and the next stanza emerged:

I drink my wine out of a dirty

coffee mug and bathe in the creek

that comes from the cooling

ponds at the nuclear plant.

I have no idea where this poem is heading or if it is going anywhere.  I’ll keep the document open in case anything else bubbles up.   I’m composing on the computer instead of by hand, and for the past few months, I haven’t written by hand.  Hmmm–is this change permanent?

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, John the Baptist Inspired Stanzas

submersible 
the tip of the iceberg 
of our anxiety

Jim Young [no title]

The solstice came this year gently – a little overcast, temperatures in the 70s, and the sunset lasted til almost past 9 PM. We celebrated more simply this year, a trip to 21 Acres, a local farmer’s market, where we bought local honey, cherries, peas, and carrots, and a sunset spent at the lavender farm down the street, where the blooms have just started on the oldest lavender plants. It was lovely to feel the grass, smell the lavender, feel the sun – not too hot or punishing – and welcome in this fraught season. (Fraught because of the wildfire risk and because MS patients tend to [fare] worse in the heat.) […]

I am grateful to WICN and Mark Lynch for interviewing me for their station about my new book, Flare, Corona. It was a pleasure – we talked about a shared love of 50’s sci-fi movies, health crises, and more. We actually went on talking after we were off the air, and it was so fun, It felt like talking to a friend, which means that guy is really good at his job!

Here’s the link to listen to the whole thing: Jeannine Hall Gailey – 90.5 WICN Public Radio

Anyway, I hope you enjoy and it gives you some insight into the book, writing during a pandemic, and killer shrews.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Welcome Summer! Celebrating the Solstice and a New England Radio Interview about Flare, Corona

I’m drinking tea and watching the sunrise and I feel like writing a blog post and taking a moment to process and share some poetry and thoughts and photos here on my blog from the amazing Windrush 75 concert at The Royal Albert Hall before it fades into memory, and before I jump into the next shiny thing. You will find more clips on my insta and tiktok and twitter but I have always liked to treat this blog like a scrap book, keeping an archive of highlights and my adventures in making books and poetry and gigs over the decades. Thank you to anyone following this page, hello to any new people who find me here. Welcome. 

Firstly, thank you for all of your comments and messages about this one gig and poem. I was blown away by your messages, thank you. I was so honoured and so excited to be invited by Trevor Nelson to perform and write a piece for the Windrush 75 Concert. I was also nervous about it as I knew I wanted to write something new for it. I was not sure where to begin to try to capture this moment in history and experience, and my own feelings about Windrush and heritage and ancestry and migration and colonialism and empire in a poem to be broadcast on the BBC and perform to peers and elders on such a big stage. 

I left London and headed south to perform two lovely shows in Exeter and Totnes and stayed down there for a while with dear friends on the coast. I looked at the Devon skies and seas and sun rises and went deep into the themes of this poem and the process. I knew right away that I wanted to fill the Royal Albert Hall with the ocean, with timelessness and the weight of ocean water and our conversation with it. 

I wanted to share in that united feeling that we are not all in the same boat, and that so many of us came here by boat, and that many are still arriving by boat, and how we are all connected in blood and saltwater. I wanted to celebrate that we share the same time in history, that we share an ancient resilience and courage. As some of you know I am currently working on the second Mrs Death Misses Death novel and so this was setting the tone for me and leaking into my writing, I was visualising and dreaming of Mrs Death filling the Albert Hall with ocean, with ancestors and ghosts, with loss and grief, and with BIGlove, ONE Love. 

Salena Godden, Poem: My Heart Is A Boat | Windrush 75 | The Royal Albert Hall

“Genetic memory” was inspired by the theory that memories may be inherited, and that perhaps we “remember” our ancestors’ formative experiences. The details in the poem are pulled from my grandparents’ lives. For example, my father’s father, Raymond Edward Smith, was the first Columbus, Ohio, resident reported killed in action at Pearl Harbor. On Christmas Eve, his parents were informed that it was a mistake—their son was alive. My grandfather never spoke about Pearl Harbor, but reading about genetic memory, I wondered: Could I be carrying traces of experiences like this one? What if?

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Genetic memory”

This is a poem about me – the poetic I is also the actual I in this poem – listening to a particular song by one of my favourite bands. It’s my thoughts on the song itself, and what it meant to me in 2019 when I listened to it and had a moment of clarity. I wrote it for myself, not publication, but when I decided to share some of my work, this was included. There’s a lot more to it than that, obviously…

Firstly the song I was listening to. William’s Last Words is the final track on the Manic Street Preachers 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers and is sung not by James Dean Bradfield – lead singer, huge rasping soul voice – but by Nicky Wire, the bass player with a softer, less confident delivery. The lyrics to the song, and all the songs on this album, were recovered from notebooks left by the band’s former guitarist and childhood friend, Richey James Edwards, who had gone missing fifteen years earlier.

The lyrics read like a goodbye message, a break-up letter, a suicide note: given the context of the album, it feels like a final note from Richey himself. But it’s actually a great example of editing, as the original typewritten notes for the song show something very different – lines and phrases have been taking from what seems to be a vignette with allusions to Launce Olivier’s film The Entertainer, about a music-hall star. And when you find that out, it does seem a little artificial, but the words that remain, the poignancy, the fact they got Nicky to sing it, it all makes for a song that is a beautiful as it is sad, as natural as it is manufactured.

Why was this important to me? Why did I write a poem about it, and not an essay?

In August 2019 I was hospitalized in Cardiff with Acute Promyelocytic Leukaemia – an incredibly rare and easily fatal form of blood cancer. And the drugs weren’t working. My mental health was suppressed by Lorazepam, Diazepam, and Prozac. I refused to get angry. I couldn’t be happy, but I couldn’t cry. And my god I needed to cry so bad.

Drop-in by Jamie Woods [Nigel Kent]

I’ve got five visual poems from the ‘Classic Crimes’ series in the new Seneca Review. These were accepted last year and it’s great to see them out. I got to see them in the issue, my mother having forwarded one I had sent to her house. Generally when a print magazine sends me a copy in Germany I end up paying customs on it, so not to seem ungrateful but I ask that no one do it anymore.

I like the batch Seneca took! The poems are: Without Speaking, Side-Wisps(pictured), I Shook My Head, To Be Deplored and Spell. They’ll go up in color online. In the print issue they are in b/w, which I thought they might not come off well. But they look fine.

(I’ve always wondered, on that note, what Hotel Almighty looks like on Kindle. I realized well after publication that it’s all in b/w.)

I put them all up on Instagram over the past few days if you visit there. If you don’t mind the explosion of ads. If they are ads? It seems more like being force-fed cat and baby videos.

Sarah J Sloat, The Mustaches of Scoundrels

A funny thing did happen the other day, I suddenly wrote four poems – a sort of sequence I suppose – out of nowhere. But I haven’t really given poetry writing a lot of headspace lately. The ‘sudden burst’ actually came after listening to an online book launch by Pindrop Press. I was enjoying poems by Lydia Harris, and was inspired enough to buy her collection, Objects of Private Devotion. I haven’t started it yet though, mainly because I’ve been ploughing though historical novels to try to gauge where mine sits. But also, I have two poetry books to review for the Frogmore Papers, plus Jill Abram‘s debut collection Forgetting My Father (Broken Sleep) waiting to be read. Patience!

Another project I’m involved with at the moment is an anthology that the Hastings Stanza is putting together, to be published in October under the Telltale Press imprint. There are four of us on the editorial “committee” and at the moment I’m busy on the typesetting. I think the standard of poems is pretty high, though I say so myself, so it’s a pleasure to work on.

Robin Houghton, Midsummer update: poetry projects, novel stuff, podcast…

Catherine Truman and I have been working together on projects bridging art and science since 2006. Here is a glimpse of our current project, The Taken Path. This is a speculative, durational project that hangs of a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and filmed the journey? […]

Together, the two videos attempt to illustrate the largely unsolvable problem of representing the uniqueness, the ephemerality and perceptual uncertainty of lived experience. We cannot attend to everything that happens around us and we cannot fully portray those elements of our experience that do take our attention, form memories, generate lasting significance.

Ian Gibbins, The Taken Path: a durational project with Catherine Truman

I’m intrigued by Quietly Between (Fort Collins CO: A Viewing Space, 2022), a quartet of solicited poem sequences and photography by American poets Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green that each respond to the same very particular prompt. As the original prompt, included at the back of the collection, opens:

15-25 images/cards (combination of text and image).

Begin with place and time.

Place(s): where you are/were. Both text and photos could be of your present place. Or one element is, and the other draws from something else.

Time: some element of time is incorporated into the project. In the film All the Days of the Year, Walter Ungerer returns to the same place in Mount Battie, Camden, Maine every day for one year. He sets up his camera, and takes thirteen, ten second shots while turning the camera clockwise. […]

Via the poetic sequence, each of these four poets offer their variation on the stretched-out lyric sketch, allowing this collection to emerge into a book about being present in temporal and physical space, each poet blending lyric and photographic attention from their own particular American corners, across a quartet of American states moving straight west from the Midwest to the Coast.

rob mclennan, Quietly Between: Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green

First up is a shout-out to Goran Gatalica who was kind enough to share his haiku collection, Night Jasmine (Stajer Graf) with me. This multilingual translation collection (the haiku are translated from the original Croatian into English, French, Italian, Czech, Hindi, and Japanese) is filled with vivid examples of contemporary haiku navigating traditional themes with a contemporary sensibility.

The book is framed within the cycle of seasons, starting with spring and ending in winter. Here is a selection of four haiku, one from each season:

empty commuter train –
listening to spring drizzle
through an open window
–
August flood –
a softened meadow
reflects the stars
–
mother’s death –
I fold the first autumn rain
in my handkerchief
–
family reunion –
the half-frozen pond
flickering

Across these four haiku, one can get a sense of the sensibility Gatalica works with throughout Night Jasmine. There’s the haiku that frames an immediate sensation, as in the first one here which lingers over a moment of rain.

One sees the theme of rain come up again in the “August flood” and “first autumn rain” of the second and third haiku above. Rain continues to change life, but not suppress it; even in the grief of the third haiku, there is the animation of the folding handkerchief.

No rain in the last one here, but water is present in the “half-frozen pond.” What I love in this last one is the way the animation and presence is implied in the reflections on the pond, of fire, of the reunion itself.

To read more haiku by Gatalica go here. To learn more about Night Jasmine as well as to check out a reading of the collection, go here and here, respectively. Lastly, if you’re interested in a copy [of] the book, reach out to me via my contact form and I’ll put you in touch with the poet.

José Angel Araguz, shout-outs: haiku, flight, & opportunity

Patricia Smith has collected over 200 cabinet cards, cartes de visite, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes and tintypes from garage and vintage sales, online markets and estate sales. However, only a few images had names, and often just a first name. A studio address might offer a location. “They are wraiths, their stories growing dim”. Smith’s mother moved from Alabama to Chicago. Ashamed of her impoverished roots, her mother severed her past, refusing to put names to the people in photos. Actions that also severed her daughter from history. These poems put imaginary voices to the photos, sometimes drawing on the location to incorporate a historical event such as a yellow fever outbreak in Memphis or lynching in Virginia. […]

Publishing the images alongside the poems gives readers the opportunity to see how they complement each other. Each poem gives voice to the silent images, left without name and without family connections. The collection is about more than the featured photographs. It’s a reminder of how families were cut from their roots and exploited. How, in an effort to fit in with a white community, people purposely lost their origins and sometimes their names. The difficulty of tracing family trees when names are lost or changed, means most give up. It can also cause friction between generations as younger generations research a past older generations deliberately discarded. Patricia Smith empathically gives the people in the photographs voices, succinctly conveying what might have been their stories.

Emma Lee, “Unshuttered” Patricia Smith (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press) – book review

The eponymous figure from Grünbein’s sequence’s 11th poem,‘Hans im Glück’, draws on one of the stories in The Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1812). In the original, Hans has anything of value taken from him, bit by bit, yet he remains optimistic, refusing to acknowledge reality. Within the context of Porcelain, Grunbein treats this is as an additional image of the myth of the city of Dresden as undeserving victim. Interestingly, the same figure appears in Ulrike Almut Sandig’s collection, but her presentation of Hans is more poignant, less ironic, as even the boy’s language is stripped from him and he tries to write a letter to a loved one: “what are you up to? // + esp: where r u? / ru ru // ru”. In the context of I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed… , the boy might be thought of as a refugee, forcibly having his culture and language stripped from him, though one of the strengths of the poem is that it also works as an updated fairy tale, a little myth of loss and diminished presence with more universal application. Such re-purposing of several of Grimm’s tales is one of the most striking things about this collection. Sandig announces in another poem, “we find ourselves deep in the future of fairy tale” (‘the sweet porridge’) and she, like Angela Carter before her, redeploys the fairy tale’s surreal narratives, bold characterisation, its humour and violence, its symbolism and moral intensity for her own purposes.

Martyn Crucefix, Greedy alpha-creatures: the poetry of Ulrike Almut Sandig

Through her erstwhile directorship of Malika’s Kitchen, staging of the highly successful ‘Stablemates’ series of readings and ever-supportive presence at many poets’ launch events and other readings, Jill Abram, as much as anyone in the UK poetry community, has championed, and continues to champion, its happily increasing diversity of outstanding voices.

As an exceptional poet in her own right, Jill’s poems have been appearing with increasing frequency in high-quality journals in the last few years. It’s therefore excellent news that Jill’s debut publication, Forgetting my Father, has recently appeared from Broken Sleep Books. It’s available here, with an attractive cover designed by Broken Sleep’s owner and principal editor, Aaron Kent. It consists of 23 tremendous poems about family, Jewishness, bereavement, the passage of time and much besides; above all, how memories, and their jewel-like details, still colour the present.

Matthew Paul, On Jill Abram’s ‘Inheritance’

A year ago this month, Gina Wilson died. The two of us met just over a decade ago on the Writing School run by Ann and Peter Sansom of The Poetry Business. We were both psychotherapists, working in private practice.

Gina was published first as a children’s writer – novels (Faber), poetry (Cape), picture books (Walker Books). Her adult poems are ‘complex, though deceptively simple’ and ‘tough and compelling, no verbiage, no sentimentality’ (Kate Clanchy).

Gina’s poems ‘lure you into thinking you’re on safe, possibly domestic territory. Then they catch you unawares, taking off at an unexpected, often surreal tangent.’

I am grateful to her family for permission to share three poems from Gina’s poetry pamphlets (Scissors Paper Stone, HappenStance, 2010; It Was And It Wasn’t, Mariscat Press, 2017.) [Click through to read.]

Fokkina McDonnell, Photograph with a Very Small Moon

Like jokes, poems have finely tuned relationships to time. They are, like music, unfolding in a culture of time, of kinds of time and their corresponding effects. They are, like heartbeats, rhythmic or arrhythmic. In her research into medieval wonder, medievalist Carol Walker Bynum argued that the wonder reaction is a significance reaction—our experience of wonder is an instinctive recognition of meaning. Our experience of that meaning, as I’ve argued elsewhere, would be different were the eventual end of all feeling not guaranteed (more on mortality and wonder here).

But, we’re alive for now—so, the issue gets crafty. Since wonder is fundamentally a question of vision in its widest sense, we are left to ponder “the zodiac of [our] own wit” (Sir Philip Sidney). Whatever mental constellations we report, we must also be able to recognize a sky beyond them.

Maya C. Popa, Wonder Wednesday

So look, I’m not going to try to bullshit you into saying that either one of these poems is good. I don’t usually do the good-bad dichotomy with poems to begin with. The reason this newsletter is called “Another Poem to Love” instead of something like “Great Poems You Should Read” is that I figured out a long time ago that there are a lot of poems out there that just aren’t for me, and that doesn’t make them bad. It just makes them not for me. Like I said earlier, people are wired differently.

But when it comes to the question of which poem is more interesting, I think the one done by the Vogon Poetry Generator wins easily. I mean at least it’s weird, and the closing line, “Corrupt, corrupt brilliance? That’s what a slug’s life is about? Really.” is jarring and funny. And if you’re high, it’s probably hilarious. Somebody do that and report back, would you?

Whereas the ChatGPT one is predictable. The most fun line in there is “When Vogons come, plug up your holes” but only if you read it with a dirty mind. Which you should. That’s my definitive poetry statement here. If you can read lines of a poem with a dirty mind, you should. Discourse!

Brian Spears, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish

Back in 2014, a reply-all unsubscribe outbreak on the Malahat Review listserv brought such joy to my heart that I wrote a found poem compiled from the various replies. You can read that poem here.

One might have thought that in the intervening nine years, the Malahat Review would have addressed this flaw in their listserv system but, bless them, it appears they did not. We’re back at it, and the replies are even more confused, angry and conspiratorial this time around (this is Pierre Poilievre’s Canada we’re living in, after all).

Rhonda Ganz has stepped up to write a found poem for this year’s meltdown. I present it below. If you’d like to contribute your own Malahat Review listserv found poem, please email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com and I will post it here. And most importantly, enjoy the madness while it lasts. It will be another nine years before we get to do it again!

[Five more found poems have come in since this post. Visit Rob’s blog Roll of Nickles to read them all.]

Rob Taylor, this makes me nervous

For all my time with others, I still feel I move about in the world alone–this is true when it comes to writing, to social things, to work, to love. Even in love, I am resistant to giving up parts of myself–my peace and privacy that only usually exists when no one else is in the room. It’s never really loneliness, not in the moment, though I have been lonely. Acutely so after the death of my mother especially. Like a gaping hole of loneliness. Cosmologically lonely, if that makes sense. Absolutely lonely, though I was surrounded by family and friends and partners. It was like someone had torn a hole in the universe and all the air was bleeding out. Time closed it, but it still yawns and gapes every once in a while, though just as often in a group as alone. Sometimes more so in a group of people, especially ones where she should have been. My dad is different..a more acute and situation-specific kind of lonely, but still with sharp edges. 

I frighten myself sometimes, with my love of being alone, which feels enjoyable yet wrong somehow. Articles crop up in my feed occasionally about the importance of being social animals. How much I relish my days alone and uninterrupted with nothing but cats for company. I enjoy the company of people, some exquisitely, some more than others, but I am most myself when alone. It’s the baseline. The blank state to be returned to necessary for creativity and productivity. Which may be why introverts love midnights so much when it seems the entire world is sleeping but them.

Kristy Bowen, aloneness vs. lonely | the introvert heart

Haven’t I lived at
different distances from myself? Alone and

young and afraid, I didn’t let myself too close.
Who would want the mirage to unravel? When
I could bear to say it aloud, to myself, find
words for estrangement, abandonment, apathy,

find words to console those words, I began to
tolerate myself, in small doses. Before the sink
holes opened again. What is the antonym of
father? Of mother? What is the colour of

disaffection? The man is smiling at me, watching
my experiments. I wonder what he sees. How far
away he is. How far away I am. What is the perfect
distance for the surreal to sharpen into truth?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 52

夏空へ両手あげ脱皮する少女　  酒井弘司

natsuzora e morote age dappi suru shôjo

            raising both arms

            to the summer sky

            a girl casts off her skin

                                                Hiroshi Sakai

from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, August 2022 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (June 24, 2023)

I do not want to speak its grammar of hammers, its sick syntax of power and profit.

But I will honor the war dead with prayer, song and flowers.

I’ll clean away the relic heaps of angelic weeping strewn across battlefields.

Rusted dreams will be unearthed. Pulsings of peace will be reshined into shimmer.

Rich Ferguson, I do not want to be a tongue in the mouth of war

And from out of
the shade of
the cypress, the blue
shirt drops each boule
behind the coche,
completing a triangular
wall. “Once”, he says,
still stooping, his hands
on his knees. “There was
a time once”. The red
shirt lights a second
cigarette, shakes out
the match, steps up
to throw. “There’s always
a time once”, he says
and he looses a boule.

Dick Jones, PETANQUE PLAYERS AT ST. ENOGART

Happy Memorial Day Weekend, a time when Seattle usually has a lot of rain, but we’re going to have beach weather instead. I had to snap the picture of my typewriter on the one day the cherry blossoms had fallen but before they were blown away by storm. It went straight from a cold rainy spring to bright hot summer, nothing in between. Lilacs and rhodies bloomed and died under the heat.

I’ve been a little down health-wise this week, but feeling grateful for news about Flare, Corona – a new essay out in Adroit, guest blog posts, really kind thoughtful reviews.  One of my readings and interviews is up on YouTube in case you missed it in real time – and I have two readings coming up next week. It seems like I am either responding to e-mails about book-related things or thinking about book-related things. I forgot how much work this whole “new book coming out” thing is!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Feeling Busy and Grateful: Two Upcoming Events for Flare, Corona, Interviews, Reviews, and Articles, Writers & Books Interview Online and More!

I have always heard the conventional wisdom that when one’s writer self feels uninspired, one should read poems, and/or return to the writing that made one want to be a writer.  That wisdom can work for me, but it runs the risk that I’ll feel even worse about my own failures to launch.

Happily, this week I had the best kind of inspiration.  On Sunday, I read all of Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona straight through, instead of a poem here and there, the way I read the book before I had time to consume it in one gulp.  My brain returned to the poem “This Is the Darkest Timeline” (you can read it here, and you can hear Jeannine Hall Gailey read it here).

She includes an explanatory note in the book:  “‘This is the Darkest Timeline’ refers to a common phrase in comic books and pop culture in which any multiverses and string theory result in one timeline that is the best and one that is the worst” (p. 101).

That comment, too, inspired me.  And so, this week, I wrote this poem, which might be finished, or it might need a last stanza to tie everything together.  I do realize I tend to overexplain in my creative writing.  So I am still letting it all percolate.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Timelines and Poems

I saw that timelessness which doesn’t
keep to one name, its old-young face
wrinkled and wizened as if already
spackled with a biography of years.
We held out our arms to receive
you. We trembled from the joy
and terror of what we pledged.

Luisa A. Igloria, Born

Judaism is a religion of the book and Siddurs are often central to a congregation’s identity. Unlike the Torah, everyone handles them week-in week-out. You use them at home. There was a lot of contention when the Reform one was updated a few years ago.

As well as various services, blessings and songs, contemporary Siddurs act as an anthology of readings – passages for reflection grouped around individual themes. I loved these, as I love all anthologies. And I was always struck by how diverse the Reform selections were – there were passages from Rabbis but also secular Jews – philosophers and writers, extracts from Anne Frank’s diaries. There were also poems – usually English translations of Hebrew or Yiddish originals. The selections seemed – and seem – an important way into a rich culture. I was always much more interested in them than the regular prayers.

The Liberal Siddur has readings of this kind too – they are integrated into the service and read aloud together. There is another difference, too: some of the passages are taken from texts not written by Jews.

Last week, for instance, we read the reflections on the theme of loneliness, which included two poems I am very familiar with from the secular world: Robert Frost’s ‘Acquainted with the Night’ and John Clare’s ‘I Am’. The poems were unattributed – you would have to go to the back to know who they were by.

All of which felt very right to me, even revelatory. These are very special poems. Robert Frost’s poem, in particular, has meant a great deal to me, so I’m glad it might be finding others. And service creates a moment in which poetry like this can be heard. When we talk about the declining role that poetry plays in our everyday lives, I think we have to talk about the loss of regular spaces in which people are in the right frame of mind to take it in.

For so much of our history, this has meant religion. It is why poetry is read at weddings and at funerals. I say this as someone who has very little faith in the traditional sense of the word – and who has very mixed feelings about the role of religion in public life.

Jeremy Wikeley, How Robert Frost and John Clare made their way into a Jewish prayer book

Happy bank holiday. I’m sure everyone is gathered around a BBQ waiting for this, or are you gathered round a radio listening to the last knockings of the football season? NB this post is being brought to you with half an eye on Arseblog live and the football coverage at the Grauniad. Also NB…other ways of amusing yourself/passing the time are available.

I can’t exactly remember why, but I think it may have something to do with a Mouthful of Air or The Verb podcast a while back where someone (possibly Paul Farley in the latter) mentioned John Clare, but it set me off thinking about how little I know about Clare or of his work. I’ve been wondering about him ever since I first read Brian Patten’s ‘A Fallible Lecture‘ from his collection, ‘Storm Damage‘.

Mat Riches, Butchers: A Clare and Present Danger.

May was a quick month, wasn’t it? The return of sunshine. Possibilities. Beginnings and endings. Petals everywhere.

I started two different posts in the last month, but I didn’t finish either of them. They were angry rants that I suspected no one would care much about. I hardly did, even though I care very much about the issues they addressed. (Hence, the anger.) I didn’t care about my rants, though. I found myself wanting to do other things with my time. So I did them.

I signed up for and began a poetry class with Bethany Reid. I first met Bethany nearly 40 years ago, when we were both students in Nelson Bentley‘s poetry workshop at the University of Washington. In our first session, she shared words her sister-in-law gave her when she was a young mother struggling to finish her dissertation and thinking about putting it aside until her children were in school:

“‘Nobody cares if you don’t finish your dissertation. But you will care.’”

Bethany continued: “Nobody will care if you don’t write your poems. But you will care.”

As I sat with those words, they opened up something in me that I didn’t fully realize I’d been keeping closed. […]

When I retired and people asked if I were going to do more writing, I was non-committal. I didn’t know if I wanted to. I didn’t know if that would be a good use of my time. I still don’t, but my thinking is shifting, and Bethany’s words are providing some kind of catalyst. “No one cares” is so freeing. If no one really cares about the poems I don’t write, I’m free to create whatever I want, however I want, just because I want to. I don’t have to justify the resources I give to it by thinking that the work will really matter to the larger world. I can write poems simply because I will care if I don’t. That’s reason enough when I have the resources I need to make writing a higher priority.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Come what May

Paul Simon’s hit, ‘The Boy in the Bubble’, has been playing in my head, partly because I watched a great documentary on him and the South African musicians he collaborated with on Graceland, and partly because of how May is panning out. It’s that refrain, “These are the days of miracle and wonder…” that sits in the allotment trees, that follows the big dog fox as it checks out my polytunnel, that questions the insane number of tomato seedlings I have. […]

While it’s hard not to be brought down by all that’s happening – old woman with dementia tasered by police, teenagers chased to their deaths, waiting lists, no GPs, no dentists, one in two young South Africans out of work, war in Sudan, I’m inclined to hope art is cleverer than money, politicians and warmongers and will continue to make its point with a photo, a poem, a drawing, a soaring tune or a lyric that won’t leave your head because it’s there, in the trees by the path, with the blackbird’s own miraculous sequence of notes.

Jackie Wills, A month of wonder

The hawk-and-girl poems from Good Bones had their own soundtrack, which I might call “Sad Americana” if I had to title it. I steeped my mind in songs from Bon Iver’s first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, Iron & Wine’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, and Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey. I remember listening to a specific playlist on my iPod when I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on a residency in November 2011, singing along quietly to “Creature Fear” and “Over the Mountain” and “Miss Ohio” as I walked the grounds, watching the horses graze, and found a secluded spot to write. These songs make up the weather of Good Bones, the light and season of them—golden, but turning. Rusting the way autumn rusts.

Maggie Smith, On Writing & Music

The first time I heard Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 was at a dance performance at Rutgers University in the late 1980s. A woman in a red velvet dress danced & tumbled through a large patch of grass laid out on stage.

Afterwards, the choreographer, whose name I’ve forgotten, said she wanted to combine a very plush natural thing (thick green grass) with a very plush man-made thing (velvet). I loved that idea. The dance and music were enthralling. I’ve been a Villa-Lobos fan ever since.

I thought of that performance while making this little box which uses red velvet curtains from a magazine photo shoot. I added leaves from an old apple-a-day calendar. The insect is a fishing fly, and I don’t know where the other scraps come from.That’s part of the fun of collage, minding your fair use of course.

I like that this box was a box of aspirin, which like music, helps with pain.

Sarah J Sloat, I empty my chest of the faraway

I don’t know how long I will be singing, but I know how much I missed it, and that it means a great deal to me to be able to do it again. Of all the things I’ve done, singing is one that keeps me firmly attentive to the present moment, and is perhaps one of the best ways of finding the joy that being fully in that moment can provide. And it still seems miraculous to me that, with only our bodies, we can take a collective breath in silence, and, the next moment, bring forth the extraordinary music that only a choir of human voices can create.

Beth Adams, I Couldn’t Keep from Singing

You will have just got off the train from London Bridge. It’s 1976. The end of a day studying Medicine which you begin to hate. And now back to Eltham Park, to digs you’ve loathed since you arrived (the well-meaning landlady is no substitute for your mother). Probably you walked past that little music shop somewhere near the station, spending minutes gazing at the red sunburst acoustic guitar in the window. If it doesn’t sound too weird, I can tell you – you’ll buy it and strum on it for 10 years or more. I can also confirm your fear: you fail your first-year exams. The Medical School allows you to leave . . . But listen, that sense of failure and lostness, it will pass.

Keep on with the music, though your playing is not up to much and your singing … well, the less said. But writing songs will eventually lead somewhere. And the illicit books! You are supposed to be reading the monumental Gray’s Anatomy, textbooks on Pharmacology, Biochemistry, all emptying like sand out of your head. You’ve yet to go into that charity shop and pick up a book called The Manifold and the One by Agnes Arber. You’ll be attracted by the philosophical-sounding title; in your growing unhappiness at Medical School you have a sense of becoming deep. The questions you ask don’t have easy answers. You have a notion this is called philosophy. Amidst the dissections, test tubes and bunsens, you’ll find consolation in Arber’s idea that life is an imperfect struggle of “the awry and the fragmentary”.

And those mawkish song lyrics you are writing? They will become more dense, exchanging singer-songwriting clichés for clichés you clumsily pick up from reading Wordsworth (you love the countryside), Sartre’s Nausea (you know you’re depressed) and Allan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity (you are unsure of who you are). Up ahead, you take a year out to study English A level at an FE College. Your newly chosen philosophy degree gradually morphs into a literature one and with a good dose of Sartrean self-creativity (life being malleable, existence rather than essence) you edit the university’s poetry magazine, write stories, write plays, even act a little (fallen amongst theatricals!).

Martyn Crucefix, ‘Letter to my Younger Self’ – a third brief Royal Literary Fund talk

In the United States, literary journals are often the first to go when institutions cut budgets. That’s where my ire flows, not at vulnerable literary publications charging a nominal fee, fearing every issue might be their last. Here’s a partial list of lit journals—university and indie publications—that have recently closed or are on shaky ground:

• Catapult (Funded by a daughter of one of the Koch brothers, the decision comes as part of an effort to “focus all resources on its core business of book publishing and its three imprints: Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press.”)

• The Believer (This link takes you to a VICE article about how the new owners created a backdated page on The Believer directing readers to the best hook-up sites—and sex toys. That’s one way to make money. Happily, the original publisher, McSweeney’s, is in negotiations to buy back The Believer.)

• Alaska Quarterly Review (“COVID-19 and Alaska’s Budget deficit forced the cut of Alaska Quarterly Review’s funding from the University of Alaska Anchorage.”)

• The Antioch Review (The magazine remains on a “thoughtful” pause.)

• Tin House (Tin House has shifted “resources to Tin House’s other two divisions: Tin House Books and Tin House Workshop.)

• ASTRA Magazine (Done and done.)

Some journals, like the United Kingdom’s Granta, have wealthy and influential benefactors. According to Glassdoor, a Granta Publications Assistant Editor makes about $50,000 annually. I couldn’t find Granta’s annual budget but they have a robust masthead. This is ideal. If I were a wealthy philanthropist, I would do my civic duty by throwing a few hundred grand at the literary journal of my choice. I mean, editors absolutely deserve to be paid for their expertise. Most literary journals would welcome a generous benefactor’s support. I know Hypertext would.

Christine Maul Rice, Why We Charge Submission Fees

The tension between ideals and money is acute in U.S. higher ed. Where I work, as in many other places, we’re struggling to keep up humanities enrollments, although creative writing courses remain in demand. Partly that’s due to misinformation about credentialing. Even though W&L is a rare hybrid–a liberal arts college with a business school–English majors do slightly better getting jobs and places in grad school than the university average (96% for English majors!). Yet our majors are ribbed constantly for their apparently impractical choice. The stereotype drives me crazy. Studying literature in small, writing-intensive classes like the ones I have the pleasure of teaching–including analyzing the apparently arcane and useless art of poetry–gives students skills employers prize. That’s far from the only reason to study literature; the main one, for me, is that thinking about any kind of art makes life far richer and fulfilling. But actual riches? A relevant consideration, especially now that higher ed is a huge financial investment. (Bigglebottom costs $60K per year, my students decided.) And we don’t even know yet how AI writing tools are going to change the educational landscape. Teachers’ lives may well get much worse.

Beyond credentials: one reason creative writing is attractive to students is that they’re making things. Creation feels magical. English-paper-writing is creation, too, but not of a kind students particularly want to share with others or keep practicing after graduation. That’s a real problem for the field. Co-creating websites isn’t always going to be the answer to that problem–much less websites for fictional magical liberal arts colleges–but my students’ delight in the process is a lesson to me.

Lesley Wheeler, The magic of making things

I’m absolutely delighted to have Poetry as Spellcasting in my hands! I’m so grateful to editors Tamiko Beyer, Lisbeth White, and Destiny Hemphill for including me in this gorgeous anthology, and for helping my essay become more fully realized, more deeply itself.

And while I haven’t finished the book yet, I think the power of the writing is enabling precisely that sort of transformation, helping us perceive potential and cast off constraints so that we can all be more gloriously ourselves and make the world a more beautiful and just place to exist. Just take a look at the opening of the first poem of the collection, “Awakening of Stones: Hypothesis/Central Argument” by Lisbeth White:

In the new mythology, you are always whole.
If and when you fracture, it is not apart.
Apart does not exist here.

You will know that upon entry.
You will know each fissure as it breaks open your life.
You will know the cracked edges of your splendor.

I hope you will consider buying (or borrowing!) a copy and also joining us for the virtual launch on Wednesday, May 24th, 8 PM ET, featuring Destiny Hemphill, Lisbeth White, Tamiko Beyer, Amir Rabiyah, Ching-In Chen, Lou Flores, yours truly, Sun Yung Shin, and Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

Out into primordial: fairy mounds submerged and fern overtaking. Ghosts here, but good ones. Except for the ticks it’s oasis.

Dumuzi writes me all the time, though I told him not to when Kurgarra and Galatur dragged him away. It didn’t have to go down that way. Fruits of choice and all that.

Gmail doesn’t let you block people, you know? Just mark as trash.

A swallow dives. Yeah, yeah, I say. A thrush calls, then a daylight owl. Obviously, I answer.

JJS, Inanna Gets Letters

At the moment I’ve been working on a number of poems. This first one was prompted by a visit to some friends who have foxes living in their garden. They live in London. As I was leaving the phrase the fox garden came into my head and I spent the next seven days ruminating on it. When I sat down to write I got the bare bones down but it took another two weeks to get this serviceable draft right.

Paul Tobin, THE FOX GARDEN

Sometimes, from here, you can see the Isle of Man on the horizon. When you can, it’s a mirage: if the conditions are just right, the atmosphere refracts the light, making the distant island (which lies way beyond the visible horizon) appear surprisingly close. You can see its principal hills spread out from left to right. I’ve never caught it in the act of appearing or vanishing, though, although, the other evening, conditions were such that you could only see the tops of its hills poking above the milky obscurity. One can see how myths arose of magic islands that appear and vanish and, scanning the horizon to see if you can see Man from Silecroft, it’s easy to start doubting the science that tells you that what you’re witnessing is no more than an atmospheric effect.

Dominic Rivron, Silecroft

summer sea
all that glitters
is not cold

Jim Young [no title]

Because my workplace office is now in the library, however, I have been picking up the occasional, usually contemporary, novel that appears on the library’s New Acquisitions display. This is where I found R.F. Kuang’s book Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution. Imagine an alternative Dickensian-era Britain, with the underlying power struggles between education and political power as per Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and the almost-believable otherworldliness (and creative footnotes) of Susanna Clarke’s fiction…with the late-adolescent outsiders who bond over knowledge that cements the Harry Potter books…and add some genuinely academic background on linguistics and etymology.

That’s about as close as I can describe Babel by means of other books, but what I really enjoyed about the novel is the way it got me thinking about how dismayingly interconnected education and scholarly pursuits are with power structures such as governments, politics, wealth, and colonialism. Kuang deftly shows her readers how the focus on knowledge that her characters love and possess talent for inevitably leads to a narrowness in their perspectives that differs almost dangerously from an uneducated ignorance. They are good young people, but they operate as elites in a fundamentally callous system. The system either corrupts or smothers. The “fun” part of her world construct is that power operates on the use of words: on languages and their etymologies, which are magical enhancements.

But of course, power does hinge on the use of words, doesn’t it?

Ann E. Michael, Novels & words

For a while now, I’ve been lamenting that I haven’t had the chance to incorporate poems into my classes. My AP Language and Composition classes and Humanities class both suffered this year with a dearth of poems. Poetry isn’t assessed and is marginalized in many of our schools’ curricula. I suspect that this may be the case for others out there, and maybe not just English or Humanities teachers alone. If you’re a teacher of science, maths, computer science, social studies, English, business, and you want to include more poems but are not sure how to do it or where to start, what can you do?

Well, thinking about next year and changes I’d like to make to my English and Humanities classes, I recently had an idea: what if I get generative AI to show me poems that all make arguments? That way, my AP Language and Composition students can get what they need & can read more poems. What if I can get generative AI to curate poems based on units of study around the history of the U.S. and the struggle for equality? That way, my Humanities students can integrate their learning with a study of poetry. If generative AI can be used to intentionally create curricular windows into the genre I love and which is marginalized, I can also then intentionally embed poetry-reading pedagogies as I go throughout the year!

Scot Slaby, AI + Curriculum + Poems = A Powerful Combo

I thought I’d share the process of creating a poem, the draft of which is below. 

I came across John Masefield’s poem Cargo (which is below, also) and, as I sometimes do, ran it through a number of languages in Google Translate. I imagined it was something like how story or language is transmuted through various cultures as a cultural meme travels.

Then I took the raw data translation (below, 2nd) and revised it, mixing in some local and contemporary language (the Starbucks’ drink) and thought about a comment I’d made to a friend about poems as being connection machines, how in “the dance of connection, who leads?” so then I added that in, then abstracted that line a bit, making it more oblique. 

Gary Barwin, On Poem Writing with Google Translate and One Eye Closed

Don’t write just
the good ones —
write them all,
the old monk told
the poet.

Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (483)

For every raised voice that claims to have read a Wordsworth or a Rumi (no, these days is it Darwish and Rupi), there are a hundred that cannot name two contemporary poets. Not even one from their own country. What those wasting, shrivelling, screaming poets need, as they talk with the moon and measure the rhyme of a sea they have never seen, are cheerleaders. People who aren’t poets. People who don’t care if anyone else reads a poem or cares. People who will hype a poem, a verse, a line, a poet. Did I say that in the plural? No, a poet who thinks she is a metaphor for something yet to be known, who shuffles reality and shade, dealing cards with no hope to win or lose, that poet needs just one cheerleader. Just one. So that the morning starts with kindness. So that the afternoon sky stays up where it should be, bearing its sun. So that the night will fill itself with words like fireflies, a suggestion of light and motion that rejects being bound to a page. Think of it. A poet somewhere. A poem somewhere. Both birthed in anonymity. Both complete just from being. Just from writing. Still needing to be read. Still hoping to be read. The idea of a fruit, still waiting on a bee.

unwrapping its sky —
                                 one by one
the night shows off its stars

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Poets being poets

Rather than go back to writing, I thought I’d check emails and twitter for messages. No emails – excellent. No messages on twitter either – excellent again.

Then suddenly I saw a thread about new literary awards sponsored by a coffee shop chain. OK, So-What Stuff. Anyone who has read this blog for long knows I think the benefits of these things tend to be, in most cases, over-rated.

Then I noticed that poets were getting wonderfully grumpy because the new awards had excluded poetry. Apparently, according to the organisers, who would presumably be involved in the handing out of the money and therefore could be said to be entitled to an opinion, poetry wasn’t worth bothering with. This had provoked a river, a veritable torrent, as Frankie Howerd once might have said, of abuse from slighted poets.

It turned into the best bit of a varied morning. One poet I’d never heard of but who seemed to be assuming some kind of authority on the matter, claimed the decision of the organisers had undermined his entire art form. Marvellous.

Another called for all poets everywhere to block the coffee shop chain until the organisers changed their minds. Even more marvellous. I imagined marching protests in the street, poets holding placards maybe emblazoned with haiku, poets wearing T-shirts with angry slogans, poets shouting cross poems at anyone trying to go through the door, opening GoFundMe pages to cover legal costs, printing costs, and the price of coffees purchased at rival chains. The protests could spread across the country town by town, city by city, year by year.

Bob Mee, A MARVELLOUS MORNING: CROSS POETS, WINDOW CLEANERS AND JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES

Been late on sharing news of some of my former students: First, there’s N.K. Bailey, a PNW poet, who published a chapbook, A Collection of Homes with Bottlecap Press. Bailey is a dynamic poet whose work is intimate and imaginative. Also, I’m proud to have worked with Sarianna Quarne last fall on her honors creative thesis, the poems of which are featured in her self-published chapbook, Church Confessional Booth, which can be read for free on her site. Quarne’s work often uses the image as a jumping off point for charged, lyric meditations. Also, also: I’m happy to share that I recently had an essay of mine published in Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master which is part of The Unsung Masters Series from Pleiades Press. I’ve written about Bert Meyers for a number of years on the Influence. Glad to have worked out this memory and experience with Meyers’ work! Thank you to Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams for the opportunity and for being great to work with!

José Angel Araguz, poet as instagram photo dump

I was interested to see these poems because I firmly believe it is wrong for anyone to be stateless. [Mona] Kareem’s family belongs to an Arab minority denied citizenship when Kuwait became independent. Her family is classed as illegal, and therefore denied employment, education, and welfare. Despite this, her father is an erudite man. In her early twenties, Kareem went to America to study. She was not allowed back into Kuwait, so she was forced to take asylum in the USA, where she eventually gained citizenship. The suffering her family have endured is appalling. Out of this suffering, she writes. However, these poems are life-affirming, and perhaps a way for her to be present in Kuwait with her family, if only in her imagination.

Her poems are strongly visual and metaphorical. Everything is precarious and temporary. In ‘Perdition’, a series of images conjures up different losses. These images often yoke together beauty and pain: ‘the night is strangled / by a choker of stars’ is one example. The images are often surreal: Roses jump to their death/ from the rails of my bed/ as my mother/ tries to tuck me into the desert of life’. This poem is a strong opening to the book.

Angela Topping, I Will Not Fold These Maps

The joys of reviewing translations from languages one less-than-half knows are boundless. This is especially the case when the originals are by a poet I’d never heard of before; but in the case of Ivano Fermini I expect I won’t be alone in that ignorance. In fact, so little is known about Fermini that I had a moment wondering if he might be an obscure member of Robert Sheppard’s European Union of Imagined Authors, but no, he’s real enough.

On the plus side, my sketchy Italian and the lack of biographical information meant that I approached The River Which Sleep Has Told Me with an open mind. Ian Seed includes a helpful interview with Milo de Angelis, Fermini’s one-time friend and editor as a kind of preface. I was taken particularly by the statement that for Fermini, poetry was ‘a question of naming things and each time finding the right word, which is to treat each individual thing with its own unique name, that which entreats us and lies beneath dozens of other banal words, and which demands to be said with millimetric precision.’

This drive away from treating things as members of classes and towards avoiding the predictable goes some way towards making sense of the formidable disjunction that typifies Fermini’s use of language. This is easier to trace thanks to the facing-page Italian/English text, which Seed consistently mirrors in his translations. This formal procedure allows for disjunction within and across lines, with each line a gnomic utterance within a set of similar riddles.

Billy Mills, Three Translations: A Review

Oh lover, what a word,
what a world, this gray waiting.
I kept your photo in a bottle of mezcal,
touched my eyes until they blistered,
the dark liquid waking me up
in a stolen cup, white sand in my mouth

Charlotte Hamrick, You lied to me

I’m both struck and charmed by the slow progressions of lyric observation and philosophical inquiry throughout “Canadian-born poet based in Scotland” Alycia Pirmohamed’s full-length poetry debut, Another Way to Split Water (Portland OR: YesYes Books/Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 2022). “I see the wind pull down the tautness / of trees and the swans at the lagoon part / through the wreckage.” she writes, as part of the poem “MEDITATION WHILE PLAITING MY HAIR,” “Each one is another translation for love / if love was more vessel than loose thread.” There is such a tone and tenor to each word; her craft is obvious, but managed in a way that simultaneously suggest an ease, even as the poems themselves are constantly seeking answers, seeking ground, across great distances of uncertainty and difficulty. “Yes, I desire knowledge,” she writes, as part of “AFTER THE HOUSE OF WISDOM,” “whether physical or moral or spiritual. / This kind of longing is a pattern embossed / on my skin.” It is these same patterns, perhaps, that stretch out across the page into her lyric, attempting to articulate what is otherwise unspoken.

rob mclennan, Alycia Pirmohamed, Another Way to Split Water

Anthony Wilson’s sixth collection, The Wind and the Rain, is due out from Blue Diode Press next month. I was delighted to be asked to provide an endorsement for this excellent book. It reads as follows…

Throughout The Wind and The Rain, Anthony Wilson walks the tightrope of simplicity. He peels off layers of language, paring it back to its core, searching for the means to express the intensity of grief. In his skilled hands, less becomes more.

Matthew Stewart, Anthony Wilson’s The Wind and the Rain.

“Survived By” is subtitled “A Memoir in Verse and Other Poems” and dedicated to the poet’s father Terry R Wells (1945-2020). It’s a personal journey through a daughter’s reactions to her father being diagnosed with terminal cancer and what she learnt by surviving her father’s death, written with the aim of helping others. […]

Thankfully it’s not a self-help manual. […] The vocabulary is conversational, there are no attempts to dress up what’s happening in pretty metaphors or oblique messaging. “Survived By” is direct and concerned with authenticity, a human seeking compassion.

Emma Lee, “Survived By” Anne Marie Wells (Curious Corvid Publishing) – book review

I recently delivered a writing workshop at The Adelaide City Library aimed at generating new material and drafting a piece of writing using an object or piece of clothing as a prompt. I really love presenting this workshop, and am always amazed at the diversity of work produced.

Afterwards, someone asked me how they might develop their work and get better at writing poetry. They were new to poetry, didn’t plan on going to university to study but wanted to work at writing and editing poetry. I realised that I didn’t have a clear answer, so went away, thought about it and emailed them my suggestions few days later […]

After I wrote this list I was clearing out some papers when I came across an old printout from Writers SA titled Six Top Tips for Writers. The tips were almost identical to the list I’d come up with: Read, Join (a group), Learn, Practise, Enter (writing comps), Connect (with the writing community).

Caroline Reid, Want to get better at writing poetry?

I’ve always been an artist and writer who embraced and grew within the online community. There was a before time, when I scribbled and banged out bad poems on a word processor and sometimes submitted to journals via snail mail and mostly was rejected. But after 2001 or so, my identity as a creative developed entirely in the virtual world. First in online journals and listservs, later in blogs and journals like this one. It all existed long before facebook (and way long before Instagram, which I did not even join until 2017). Sure I did readings, and took MFA classes, and occasionally published in print, but the center of my creative existence was still overwhelmingly online. 

And it was good for a while. I felt like people saw the fruits of my work and I saw theirs (even this feels like its harder..I see the same posts and lots of ads, but not even a 10th of the people I follow.). Now the silence that meets dumb facebook posts about pop culture or randomness, my cat photos and lunch photos, also meets creative work. Resoundingly and absolutely. And yet, my generation knows better than everyone that the internet is not the real world, and yet it’s hard not to feel like it is… I’ve noticed a disconnect going back to the pandemic, and granted, it may have had much to do with that. I felt its undertow in 2021 and 2022. I feel it more now. Or it bothers me more now.

Weirder ad-heavy algorithms, general disengagement from the internet and social media?  Who knows..but it’s rough and I am trying to untangle my feelings of validity from it nevertheless…

Kristy Bowen, creativity and invisibility

I’ve been thinking about how poets end their poems, and particularly about poems that end in ways that delight, surprise, and lead us to deeper questions.

Here’s Charles Olson on finding the end of a poem: “You wave the first word. And the whole thing follows. But—You follow it. With a dog at your heels, a crocodile about to eat you at the end, and you with your pack on your back trying to catch a butterfly.”

And now, a selection of poems with surprising, striking endings.

Maya C. Popa, Wonder Wednesday: Poetic Endings

In a small diversion that isn’t as devious as it first appeared, I’ve been reading this essay from my friend and fellow geopoetician, the ethnologist and activist Mairi McFadye, https://www.mairimcfadyen.scot/fragile-correspondence/2023/essay dealing with the clearances and the consequences of the community buyout of Abriachan Forest. She talks about how the loss of language leads to the loss of local knowledge, the exploitation and degradation of the land, and in this case, the removal of the local people. It’s a wonderful essay, raising many of the issues and preoccupations that inform my poetry, and I can’t recommend it warmly enough.

But the point I’m working towards is that the Lang Toon doesn’t really have those problems. On the contrary, throughout its very long history, people have been brought here to serve whatever needs the ruling classes felt were important at the time, and abandoned. These houses were built for the managers of the mines, all gone, and later of the electrical industry, all gone, and now we are mostly a commuter town with people living here and working in Glasgow or East Kilbride. This too has consequences for land use, local knowledge, and community building, and though I feel there are grounds for optimism, I realise there are a lot assumptions I’m going to have to unpick as I go into the next poems, the next book.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Light and Airy

The Quote of the Week:

“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it”

Hilary Mantel.

Every week when I set my planner up, I try to find myself a motivational quote to look at; something to keep me going when I feel panicked and anxious, which always happens at some point during the week. I turn to HM quite often. This one, especially so because, while I’m writing I am weaving the story of myself, my land ancestors, the voices of people who are long gone, into the work. I want to know that the path is there, that I am finding the path for them, as much as for me. The bad things that happened to us, the bad things we did, the disasters that befell us, there was a path in there. I looked for it, and I found it.

Wendy Pratt, Never regret anything, because at one time it was exactly what you wanted.

Maybe an anonymous text taking root in the reader’s imagination is an even greater form of validation when it comes to expressive writing? Maybe the participants know this instinctively, when they hand over their texts thinking they’ve done a good job of conveying their experience to another human being? Or maybe not thinking this – not processing the actions on a conscious level – just given the opportunity to use words to communicate the way we use a knife to whittle as stick into a shape and then hold it up, without ambition, and say: do you see a horse, too?

There’s a strange Norwegian children’s song: (what follows is a trot, not an attempt at translation)

Look at my dress
It’s as red as the rose
Everything I own is as red as this
It’s because I love all that is red
And because the postman is my friend

Then we are told to look at the blue dress, because the seamen is her friend. And so it goes.

And I say: Look! This thing I am doing, jumping from a thought, to a symbol, to another person, to you – it binds everything together.

So very like a dance we can do together, even when we are physically so far apart.

Today is the first day of the new everyday. I am not and will not be dancing by myself.

Ren Powell, Look at My Dress

Someone snapped the light switch, and suddenly it’s summer.  Suddenly people are having fun.  

The question mark of an existential figure that walked the streets alone, toting laptop and phone — he’s been replaced by friends and families walking in public and laughing with glee, spilling onto streets eating and drinking.  

They’re living plush as the young grass, right now.  Something we always knew but forgot, and had to go back to origins to retrieve.  

Maybe this bright green exuberance will become parched, and our wandering techie will go back to being malcontent –  “I hate the sun!”  

But for a moment on Memorial Day weekend, Ezekiel has his day, in all his doubleness: All flesh is grass, all its goodness like flowers of the field.  

Dead soldiers had lives as frail as grass.  At the same time, all that grass – all that goodness – what splendor!

Jill Pearlman, Ezekiel Does Memorial Day

Most days
I forget.
Mind busied
with counting
how many meetings
are scheduled.

Did I make room
in the car
for my son’s double bass,
is there milk
in the house
for tomorrow’s cereal?

But then
your voice knocks
and my heart wakes,
remembering —
being alive
is revelation.

Rachel Barenblat, Revelation

To bite down on the very thing itself
that gives shape to our sounds, voice
to our breath? Holding the idiom close
one would think what we’d say was so
powerful, it required warding off in a
deliberate act of self-harm—and yet
the bite is most often accidental. O
Friend, my wish: please let it shape
every syllable, every blessing and chant […]

Lori Witzel, Biting one’s tongue / Che le sa

This is a time of writing. I wonder how I will look back on this time of early mornings at my desk, moving through the book at pace, pouring myself into it as if I was trying to fill a well with myself. This is how it was with my last poetry collection too: an unstoppering of myself, a release of all the animal thoughts in my head that have been sitting caged for years, waiting for their freedom. It is both exhilarating and exhausting. So much of memoir writing, and this is a memoir of sorts, is about excavation of self and I find myself in a strange position of actively grieving my dad whilst capturing that grief on the page and linking it in and in and in to a sense of belonging, or a lack of a sense of belonging. I once visited Wharram Percy, an abandoned medieval village near Malton. The place had a magical feel about it, and by that I don’t mean Disney magic, I mean something earthy and unseen, as if the lives of the people who had lived there flickered under the ground, a turf fire never quite going out. It was beautiful: the little lake with ducks bobbing, the roofless church, the little graveyard and the footprints of houses, the paths you could walk where the last inhabitants had walked. Seen from above, on google earth, it’s easy to see the village laid out. But up close it is raised mounds, fields with those typical medieval plough lines still embedded in the ground, trees, water. It doesn’t really look like a village. You have to bring it back with your imagination, you have to rise above the ground to see the impressions. This is what it feels like to write this book. This is how it feels right now to walk through the chapters, placing a house here, a field here, a lake here, a bog, a fen, a marsh here. I place wolves at on end and the sea at the other. If the landscape is an archive of ourselves and itself, then these are the scars we leave on it and in it.

Wendy Pratt, The Shells of Ourselves Left Behind

Last night, I considered how solo walking, especially at night (again I’m aware of my positional privilege in this) is not like being in a bell jar but a diving bell, carrying your own environment with you yet having a connection to the outside—the air tube. It’s ultimately about the self and our connection and individuation from the world. Is it “I am because my little world knows me?” or “I know the world and so I know myself?” Mark Strand: “In a field/I am the absence/of field./…/ We all have reasons/for moving./I move/to keep things whole.” We send out feelers, signals. We echolocate. It’s psy(e)chogeography. We sense the shape of our inner landscape by travelling through the one surrounding us. 

Walking with my dog expands this landscape. I think about how he echolocates, what sense of the world and himself he might experience, how we experience each other—a kind of conceptual leash between us, a dog-human umbilical cord. At night, I walk Happy without a leash so our connection, like Philip Pullman’s daemons in The Golden Compass, is entirely relational, an invisible attractive force between us. We walk in parallel yet always with one eye on the other.  

I quoted Mary Ruefle’s line about the creation of the lyric poem, “the moon was witness to the event and…the event was witness to the moon.” That’s like my dog and me. The world and me. And, walking while wearing headphones, the beginning and end of a Möbius strip made of music, story and imagination. A strange loupe. 

Gary Barwin, The Selected Walks

I was flicking once again through the Down At The Santa Fe Depot anthology of more than fifty years ago when I settled to read the calm, confident poems provided by DeWayne Rail, who was then a young teacher in his mid-twenties. […]

He creates/ recreates the sense of place, or more accurately, of an isolated farming family battling to scrape some kind of living against the odds. It made me think of how much our upbringing roots our poetry, of how far we really travel. Although I have lived all my life in the English Midlands, as have most of my ancestors these last three or four hundred years, my working life was carried out on the move, which offered another perspective, of what it is like for those whose life consists of leaving, of going, of shifting landscapes, of life among strangers with their own histories.

For many years it was this life on the move that seemed to dominate my work but as I get older I find the sense of a home, of the ghosts of childhood and of a more distant past before I was here, comes to the surface more often, if only to provide a balance. Perhaps this is why renewing my acquaintance with the poems I have by DeWayne Rail has been so fulfilling – and has led me to find out more about him.

He remained in Fresno, teaching at the city college for thirty years, writing stories, poems, non-fiction, enjoying his family, with interesting in birding, gardening, chess, and playing the guitar. It sounds like a life quietly, honestly, fulfilled.

Bob Mee, OF DeWAYNE RAIL (1944-2021)

Taking care of myself is taking care of the writer in me. And as I talk to friends, walk, run, even watch TV, I’m thinking and experiencing. I’m making connections. I’m not at my computer and I may not even write anything down (in my notebook or my phone), but thinking is part of the writing process. Yes, thinking counts. Inspiration can strike at the unlikeliest of times.

Earlier this year I moderated a book event for Lee Martin in support of his beautiful new novel, The Glassmaker’s Wife. He said something about research tricking you into thinking that you’re actually writing, when really all of that work is “pre-writing.” But I’m all about the pre-writing. It’s an essential part of the writing process. It counts. We’re all filling the tank with gas, then revving the engine a little, before we speed off.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

I’ve had some publications out over the past months. One I’d like to mention is Bluestem, which published some of my little box poems this month. I make these with small pharma, cosmetic, cough drop and light bulb boxes. And whatever else is at hand. With these, I like working with the idea of the interior landscape. A kind of revelation. It remains hard for me to give up language and do pure wordless collage. Have I done it? I don’t think so.

I was lucky to have someone ask to buy the one pictured, as well as another one with the same short text:

the window was open
and the poem left slightly ajar

This text is one of my favorites because I like the idea of the poem being left slightly ajar for something beyond words to come in, i.e. visual poetry. At the same time, a poem left ajar also makes me think of the reader entering with her own memories, associations and point of view. I will make more of these.

Sarah J. Sloat, Interior Landscapes

In retrospect, what felt best: thoughtful reviews such as those quoted here, and private notes that affirmed the book’s success at reaching people. Riding the small press bestsellers list for months was awesome. Holding the book in my hands and knowing I did well by its ambitions. I didn’t achieve everything I fantasized about–no top venue reviews, and many of my applications for events and post-publication prizes struck out–but so it goes for everyone. There will be a next time. I’m very slowly building toward a book in a similar hybrid mode with the working title Haunted Modernism (that’s the concept, anyway–the title is probably too common). I’m revising a second novel. And my sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic, is already contracted for publication with Tupelo in winter 2025. Meanwhile, it feels good to be heading into a summer of writing and revision–challenging activities but quiet ones.

Yet I’m aware that I still owe plenty to Poetry’s Possible Worlds. Publishing industry energy is all about the three months after a book appears, but the whole point of a book, I think, is that it lasts, and with some luck holds up over time. A slow burn is exciting in its own way. I will keep stoking its little fire, because what I want more than anything is for the book to appear on the radar of people who might enjoy it.

Lesley Wheeler, Voyaging to and through Poetry’s Possible Worlds

The Taste of Steel / The Smell of Snow, containing poems by Pia Tafdrup originally published in 2014 and 2016 and translated by David McDuff, was published by Bloodaxe Books last year. The Tafdrup/McDuff/Bloodaxe collaboration goes back more than 10 years now. The Danish poet’s work inclines to themed series of collections – The Salamander Quartet appeared between 2002 and 2012. The current volume presents in English the first two collections of another planned quartet of books, this time focusing on the human senses. In fact, the ‘taste’ book here feels much less conscious of its own thematic focus than the ‘smell’ one, not necessarily to the latter’s advantage. There is often something willed, rather laboured, about some of the work included here, which is most disappointing given Tafdrup’s earlier books. But her curiosity about the world remains engaging, her poems are observant of others, often self-deprecating, her concerns are admirable (environmental, the world’s violence), plus there are several fine pieces on desire and female sexuality. […]

In both collections, Tafdrup gathers poems into brief, titled sections of about half a dozen poems each and the ‘War’ section extrapolates the sense of personal conflict and loss to more global/political concerns. ‘The darkness machine’ opens plainly, if irrefutably, with the sentiment that a child “should be playing, not / struck in the back by a bullet”. The point is made more powerfully (because less directly) in ‘Spring’s grave’ with its repeated pleas to “send small coffins”. ‘View from space’ adopts the even more remote perspective of the Cassini space probe’s view of the planet, but also ends with plainspoken directness: “that’s where we ceaselessly produce / more weapons, practise battle tactics, / turn our everyday lives into a night of hell”. The concluding genitive phrase makes me wonder about the quality of the translation; I have neither Danish, nor the original in front of me, but does Tafdrup really use such a cliché?

Martyn Crucefix, Pia Tafdrup: recent poems from Bloodaxe Books

I was going to write about metaphors. And the language of cancer. About cancer that is an inside job. Radical little cells just wanting to live.

When I touch my breast, I know this knot of cells isn’t the fault of something I ate, or inhaled, or thought. It’s not a manifestation of unresolved anger. It’s a slip-up in cell division. This, too, is nature. And nature is not our romantic notions of symmetry and dividing lines between the good and the evil. Trees are uprooted in gale winds. Bacteria hitch a ride in a flea, on a rodent, on a boat to land on a pier and ultimately all-but wipe out a human culture. Life happens. Sometimes it is not to our advantage. That isn’t the same thing as evil. That – this – is nature.

B. told me last Christmas that she didn’t believe in silver linings. I understood that to mean she didn’t believe we’re handed something nice in a kind of yin-yang balancing of good and bad as comfort or recompense. She did believe in the “this, too” and in choosing to hold everything – and not in spite.

My junior high art teacher told me that there are no true lines in nature. We impose those in our imaginations.

And I see now that painting is just another form of storytelling.

I am not sure how I want to talk about cancer. But I am not going to offended by anyone using language and imagery that differs from mine. Understanding other people’s perspectives is everyone’s responsibility. Discussions should be everyone’s little sandbox for joyful exploring. Build a castle. Knock it down. Start again.

Life is not a book that comes with an answer key in the back.

Ren Powell, How to Metaphor

The beautiful thing about keeping a searchable blog or journal, either online or offline, is that I not only rediscover my past poems, but I also see how cyclical my despair is.  I came across a post from 2013 with this nugget:  “I can’t remember when I last wrote a poem, although I could easily look it up. It’s probably not as long as I think.

But more importantly, I can’t remember when I last felt like a poet. When did I last make interesting connections of unusual links that would make a good poem?”

It is good to remember that my brain has been making those links, even when I am not conscious of the process.  It is good to remember that I’ve felt like a failed poet before, often just before the times when I would go on to have creative bursts.

I shouldn’t be surprised that I haven’t written many poems lately.  I want to remember the writing that I have been doing:  blogging almost every day and doing a variety of writing tasks for the 6 graduate classes I’ve been taking–not 6 hours of graduate classes, but 6 classes.

I have a bit of a break this summer, so let me do some strategizing to reclaim my poet self, to let the poems in my brain make the ascension from my brain onto the page.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Letting Our Poems Ascend from Our Brains

I have two poems from my new chapbook Love and Stones on New Writing, an online project showcasing new writing from alumni, staff and students from the University of East Anglia (where I completed my MA in Creative Writing in 1997). I’d recommend that you read the poems on a laptop or similar, if possible, rather than a mobile phone in order to see my intended line breaks, particularly of my sunflower poem.

My first poem ‘In Lockdown, Solitude Becomes a Flying Lover’ was inspired by a postcard of the painting ‘Over the Town’ by Marc Chagall, and refers to the first lockdown in 2020 when my solitary writing life was interrupted by my family returning home.

The second poem ‘sunflowers exist, sunflowers exist’ was written during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when I saw a widely shared clip of a Ukrainian woman telling Russian soldiers to leave her country and offering them sunflower seeds “so that sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.” This poem is after the book-length poem Alphabet by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied.

Josephine Corcoran, Two poems from ‘Love and Stones’ at New Writing (UEA)

The class begins Friday, May 26 — two classes, sort of — one on-ground, 3:30-5:00 (at my house; there are a couple seats left), and one on-line, 11:30-1:00 (plenty of room).

The title is “Your Memorable Poem.” My theme is inspired by a friend who, looking at a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, said, “I could never write a poem like that.” Of course it’s not easy (if it were, then we wouldn’t need NSN), but I think you could. The way to begin is to look very closely at how the poem is made, not to “slice and dice it,” or “master it,” but to sit with the poem, as if interviewing it, or sharing a meal. What did this poet do, in order to create this poem’s effect on us? We’ll have a little time to write, and time to offer feedback to each other.

Bethany Reid, Upcoming Poetry Class

The cover image of Harry Clifton’s Gone Self Storm is Mark Tracey’s beautiful black and white photograph of Howe Strand, which shows a ruined building silhouetted between the running sea and the sky. The poems themselves are haunted by death. Parts One and Three are dedicated to the memory of dead women, the first being the speaker’s mother or stepmother. Part Two begins with a short sequence set in the Glasnevin cemetery, and most of its poems are elegies or addresses to the dead. What’s really distinctive, though, is not this elegiac subject matter but the way ideas of change and disintegration have been absorbed into its style and expressive procedures.  Many of the poems slide like dreams between poles of fragmentary but extremely sharply focused distinctness on the one hand and uncertainty on the other. This is clearly deliberate, suggesting how ungraspable things become as they slip into the past. Moreover, the speaker’s uncertainty about things surrounding him extends to uncertainty about himself.

Edmund Prestwich, Harry Clifton, Gone Self Storm – review

the trumpet player
leans in and whispers
into my ear
a poem about death

Jason Crane, poem: (untitled)

My debut essay collection is coming out in November, and when I began writing it, it was to be a memoir about my relationship to the loss of my father through the lens of food. It has morphed and changed many times in the intervening years (and I will write about that process, too), and now it also includes my life as a mother to my children, as well as my relationship to my mother and her death. I didn’t expect that when I started, just like I didn’t, for a long time, expect that I would miss my mother when she died. That sounds horrible, I know. But she’d want me to tell you that, too. She was big on honesty and acceptance and done hiding behind alcohol or shame. We had a rough time for a long time. I understand now, in a way that I couldn’t when I was younger, that she had a much rougher time inside her addiction–a place where you are ultimately very much alone.

Sheila Squillante, Our Lady of the Artichoke

The book is marked by a “mollusk dawn” of self-awareness, a tectonic paradigm shift, a reevaluating and resetting the axis of meaning or towards gelling into meaning. And (spoiler alert) a finding of core truths in the value of family and of love.

We are witness to [Diana Hope] Tegenkamp as she realizes the other side of the binaries as on p. 14—

Her mother mouthing the words in a choir as instructed is recast wider, “mouth moving,/making its own silence” with “Song, and cries/held in”, meditating on the implications of not being heard, at an individual level or the level of Highway of Tears. A mandated silence numbs. If you are closed to your grief, you are also closed to your joy and your history.

Pearl Pirie, Girl Running review

In the old days, the dead were not 
            immediately escorted to a final 
resting place in the earth, nor lifted
            onto a funeral pyre. Their hair
was oiled and dipped in the fragrance 
            of orange groves, their faces
turned toward the high-shelved
            mountains where they would perch
in rows like figured birds— No longer on 
            the ground terraced by the farmer’s 
plow but not yet in the canopy of the gods, 
            wreathed with smoke they presided  
at the house-front wrapped in blankets. 
            Coming and going, you’d feel 
it was you they held vigil for; you 
            they couldn’t yet bear to leave. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Vigil

It just happened that this week I have been editing and laying out three chapbooks that are appropriative in nature. One is Catharine Bramkamp’s Unconscious Words, poems plucked and molded from bestselling novels from the past decade or so like Game of Thrones and Gone Girl. The other is Colleen Alles’ collection of poems found in Jane Eyre, Reader to Tell You All.  The third is Erika Lutzner’s chapbook of centos Think of a Have Made of Glass, All the Bees, Theoretically At Least, amazing centos created from the lines of older and newer contemporary poets like Plath and Sexton and, blushing, even me. I am a fan of these kinds of poems–centos and blackouts and related forms.  Appropriated and re-worked texts. I have written my own (from Plath) and published quite a lot of chapbooks through the dgp series that include them. Obviously, as a collage artist, most art feels like appropriation in some way (though you should always credit your sources and be honest about your process, especially in writing.)

And of course, AI springs to mind, especially as I embark on training for the project I’ve recently signed on to that is supposedly supposed to help AI be a better poet. Exciting and slightly horrifying. Because AI is all appropriation (the bad kind with no credit, which complicates things.)  The very worst a bot could do would be to go off and start penning centos, stealing lines of poetry, but I am not sure even this is something a bot could do well without dissolving into chaos.

Kristy Bowen, plunder and reveal

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?

It’s very weird to care deeply about scribbling in notebooks and blackening pages and reading all the time and buying too many books and hosting a podcast about writing and being interested in what your friends are reading and writing and sending actual letters and postcards to people and agreeing with Morrissey when he sings “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more” and then finding yourself talking to some guy in an airport bar and the guy says, “Why read books? I haven’t read a book since high school” and he’s proud of it. I’m all for whatever gets you through the night—and for me it’s books, it’s always been books—but for most people, and more and more, it seems to be other stuff. If people want to spend their time playing Shiny Bubblegum Princess games on their phone that’s up to them, but it doesn’t give me any pleasure. The writer’s role is clearly much diminished. But all that really means is that if you still feel compelled to write, knowing nobody gives a shit, it means you’re really a writer. It also means you’re free to write whatever the hell you want. Not having a role, or having a role so small it amounts to the same thing, means spirit is free to play where it will. And maybe that then becomes the role. The more people who are free, on whatever level, to do what they love, creatively, the more energy must be injected into the larger culture. In any case it’s very pretty to think so.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jason Emde (rob mclennan)

To say that poems are prayers is now so common as to be somewhat hackneyed. (A poet I know Tweeted an attempt to update this with the pithy but somewhat unconvincing edit that poems aren’t prayers, but rather why we pray.) If poets can bend religious imagery toward secular texts in this way, then I think it’s not too bold to think of literary criticism as a type of sacrament, a ceremony or ritual one does in order to connect more fully with the divine.

In the Quaker tradition, they do not speak so much of sacraments as of disciplines, such as fasting, meditation, prayer, and quiet. I think of writing criticism in this way. With a discipline, it isn’t necessary for us to be in a completely perfect mindset before we start. The point of a discipline is to do it, and in the process, the right mindset will sometimes come. Do the disciplines enough, and eventually you’ll be in the right mindset more often. Wrestle with sloth and envy through criticism, and maybe, one day, you’ll have just a little bit more control over these things all the time.

Jacob R. Weber, Literary Criticism as a Secular Spiritual Discipline

May I recognize my hilly landscape
and not expect to live in the plain.
Know that I am the hills and ravines,
the sun-drenched fields and deep shadows, 

gulleys, mustard fields, yellows,
veils of light that drape like silk slips […]

Jill Pearlman, Confused Spring Prayer

It was a day of record-breaking heat (and no air conditioning), so I doubly appreciated the people that came out, and the store putting out several fans. I also packed a cooler with water bottles (and sparkling rose) and boxes of macarons—because people need sustenance during a book signing.

The reading itself went okay—you can see the whole thing here on my YouTube channel—did you know I had one? Minus Martha Silano’s excellent introduction. (Hey, you have to be there in person for some parts!) […]

Any reading where I can walk out with new books and a borrowed recording of Sylvia Plath readings is a good reading in my book, and it was a really good venue, especially the “Parlor” for afterwards visiting.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Open Books Flare, Corona Reading, Interviews and Podcasts, Things Breaking Down, Heat Waves with Goldfinch and Hummingbirds

When I reached the Cliffs of Moher, a
thick fog covered everything. Cold, damp, not
a glimpse of rock or sea or sky, as if something
had bitten off one edge of the world. Isn’t a
lot of life just like that? Opaque? Ill-timed? A
function of disconsolate variables? Like us.
Ordinary. Incomplete. There are no reasons to
wake up. There are no reasons to continue.
There are no prizes for winning. You find a
level that is just enough. That works as long
as the tea is warm. That is good for a couple of
verses. That is as short as a long sigh. Enough.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 47

that garden moment
when the only thing moving
is the music

Jim Young [no title]

I’ve been thinking of enchanted forests.  I’ve been thinking of a cottage in the woods and what happens to wicked witches who mellow.  I’ve been thinking about herb gardens and ovens that bake bread, not little boys.

This morning I thought of the Bruno Bettelheim text, once classic not discredited, The Uses of Enchantment.  I thought of all those children using fairy tales to process the scary, incomprehensible stuff going on in their lives.  Am I doing the same thing for my mid-life fears?

Yesterday I took my daily walk by the tidal lake, as I do each day.  For the past several weeks, the lake has been jumping–or more precisely, the fish have been jumping.  I’ve seen a dolphin here and there.  I’ve seen lots of little fish skittering out, as if they were members of a water ballet company.  Yesterday, the word “enchanted” came to mind.

If we grew up hearing stories about enchanted lakes instead of enchanted forests, would our imaginations function differently?  Would we do more to protect bodies of water?  Probably not.

I think of the orchid on my office windowsill, the one that has bloomed continuously since July of 2020 when I got it from colleagues at work.  

Orchids are not supposed to bloom continuously for 15 months, but this one has: [photo]

People come into my office and stop at the sight of the orchid.  They ask me my secret.  I say, “Every day I pour the dregs of my cups of tea into it.  Maybe it likes the tannins.”  I try to beam my best swamp witch radiance when I say things like this.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Uses of Enchantment: the Mid-Life Edition

and so yes the jaguars still make me work, they are not gentle teachers you know, not always, not jaguars,

this isn’t self-help-soft-focus-someone-else’s-stolen-story this is my own bone and muscle and blood and death and dream,

and so when I wrap my body around his so determined to protect him fully this time, even from death,

I am quadruped and black as he, low bunched muscle and claw and teeth, and I will bite through the temporal bones of any who try for him and cast them off neck-broken into underbrush

JJS, the search

For much of the year, I’ve been breaking poems–trying different forms, writing into and out of different tensions. Not just deleting my darlings, but investigating them. Trying to play, knowing that I can always go back.

And then this past week, I read Tony Hoagland’s essay “Tis Backed Like a Weasel”: The Slipperiness of Metaphor, and the part about some people just not having the gift of metaphor made me sad, because I suspect that I might be one of those people. So I decided to pair play with the idea of deliberate practice. Maybe, despite what Aristotle says, I could become stronger at writing metaphors. I can play at what I’m trying to improve. And it was fun. To really practice, I should probably have written a full page of them, every day. But I don’t like the word should, and it doesn’t sound like play.

Joannie Stangeland, Spelling Bee and poetry

experiments with iron
liberating the colours
a mad book of masks

Penelope Circe Ariadne
alive in spite of everything
my missing grandmother

the word was made song
wayfaring lines
stop and look

a tidal island
dark brown and ancient
the pink elephant moth

weeding and mulching
preparing the ground
everything changes

Ama Bolton, ABCD October 2021

It has also been a long time since I gave anything resembling a public reading. But last Sunday afternoon I travelled with poet, Hilary Davies, out of London to Kimbolton School, north of Bedford for an actual in person book launch! The book was the sumptuous new anthology, Hollow Palaces, published by Liverpool University press and edited by John Greening and Kevin Gardner from Baylor University in the USA. The book is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, including over 160 poets from Yeats and Betjeman to Heaney, Boland, Armitage and Evaristo.

The venue was fittingly grand. Kimbolton Castle is a country house in the little town of Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire and it was the final home of King Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Originally a medieval castle, it was later converted into a stately palace and was the family seat of the Dukes of Manchester from 1615 until 1950. It now houses Kimbolton School and this is where John Greening taught for a number of years (alongside Stuart Henson, another poet represented in the anthology).

With the declining sun streaming in through the opened French windows, looking out across the school playing fields, after an introduction from Kevin Gardner, we each read a couple of poems from the anthology. So – amongst others – John Greening read ‘A Huntingdonshire Nocturne’ about the very room we were assembled in, a subtle take on English history and education, Ulster and Drogheda. Hilary Davies’s poem rooted in Old Gwernyfed Manor in Wales, was a fantasy of lust, sacrifice, murder and hauntings. Stuart Henson’s compressed novelistic piece mysteriously described the murder or suicide of a Fourteenth Earl. Anne Berkeley remembered childhood isolation and bullying at a dilapidated Revesby Abbey. Rory Waterman re-visited the ruins of an old, tied lodge-house his grandmother once lived in. Lisa Kelly’s chewy foregrounded language (‘O drear, o dreary dreary dirge for this deer’) shaped itself into a sonnet. Rebecca Watts looked slant and briefly at Ickworth House, a glimpse of bees in lavender. Robert Selby was at Chevening, considering the clash of perspectives between the tourist’s casual gaze and the realities of tombs, time and history.

Martyn Crucefix, We’ll Meet Again/Well Met Again: my first public reading since lockdown

The full moon was rising, casting a shine on the water, casting a spell on me. Cypress trees hulked in their super power, long gnarled fingers sunken into the briny bottom, waiting patiently, so patiently. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? 

It felt like entering a womb; warm, languid, swaddling. Your white dress ballooning like a ghostly Datura, your hair a raft of floating silk, my fingers woven in its strands, my lips mouthing your secret, tender name…

Charlotte Hamrick, Those Dead Shrimp Blues

Patrick Dougherty makes large-scale sculptures from sticks, twigs, stripped saplings. You can enter into the worlds of these structures like a creature, like wind. He said this about his medium, “I feel that materials have rules, they tend to have sets of possibilities….Sticks snag and entangle easily…so they have an inherent method of joining….For me sticks are not only the material of my structures, but are lines with which to draw.”

I love thinking about language in this way, words and syntax as tangling elements, sentences as lines drawn across and down the page. Multimedia artist Tara Rebele said to me once, “Everything is text.” This idea both confounds and opens me. It’s the possibilities inherent in half-heard conversations, street signs, the way shadows stripe the winter woods into zebra, the several zebras that have been at large for weeks in some Maryland suburb.

Marilyn McCabe, Isn’t it good; or, On Word as Material

It’s been a dreary week with record cold days (with the records of cold going back to the 1800’s!) and record rain. To cheer ourselves up, we visited the local farm stands, so we had fresh corn to make salads with and sweet baby peppers and apples and squashes of all sorts. We made pear soup (don’t know if I’d recommend) and baked cranberry apply bread and generally tried to stay warm. Glenn also had a physical on Monday and his third Pfizer booster shot. By the end of the week, not just Pfizer, but all the boosters had been approved.

After our weekend plans to visit my little brother and a friend over the water were ruined by problems with the ferries, we decided to make the most of the warmer day and partial sunlight and visited a brand new but beautiful pumpkin farm near our house, JB’s Pumpkins in Redmond, and Kirkland’s Carillon Point to find roses on the water still blooming, and went grocery shopping in person (something we rarely do) at Metropolitan Market. Plentiful produce and flowers, but other shelves – frozen aisle, dry goods, paper goods – were empty. A little unnerving, like we were having a hurricane that we didn’t know about. But everyone was in a kind mood – even friendly – which seems like people responding to lowering covid levels and, of course, the nicer weather after a very dark cold week.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Harvests (with Record Cold and Rain,) A Poem in Bellevue Literary Review, A Meditation on Boosters, Ferry Snafus and Shortages

It’s been a crazy week, but then, I expected it.  One deadline was moved forward a couple weeks, which offered a little reprieve, but the end of this one found me hanging an exhibit over the span of two floors, meeting with the college paper for an in-depth interview about it, and  giving an hour long academic talk about zines (thankfully, even paid!).  All the while trying to do, you know, my regular duties in the library, so things felt a little sideways as the week wore on.  Yet still, this morning, I was awake early with coffee and a delicious raspberry danish, making plans for the coming week and settling into a day of chapbook making on new titles. It was so chilly, I had to close all the open windows–a first this season–so it does seem we have moved fully into autumn. It’s two weeks til Halloween. Three weeks until that weird first week of November anniversary that plagues me even four years later. My dreams get weirder as we move through fall, sometimes involving my mother, sometimes not.  Last night, I dreamed I was harboring a small horse as a pet in my apartment.  Shit gets strange.

Sometimes,  I feel like the day to day vacillates between dead ends and possibility. Ways in and ways out.  I don’t have a plan any more than I have a possible trajectory over the next few months. A way of traveling I hope will lead to better things. It’s scary to be working without a safety net, and yet, if you rely too much on the safety net, you never learn to balance.  I’ve been on a break from poems, a little bit to work on the fiction I’ve been dallying with, also just because my head is full of so much, there is less room for words.  I am also hovering between larger projects, so there is a moment of pause as I choose where to go next.  I feel like I am missing the motivation I used to have for certain things but gaining in others. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/16/2021

[Dobby] Gibson shows how our routines distract us from pending disaster, how — instead of compelling us toward action — our daily routines compel us to repeat our daily routines. The poem even mimics this uninterrupted cycle: We’re with the speaker as he consumes reminders of the crisis then goes about his day as planned. We claim to be awake to the danger (the poem opens, “Once awake”), but then we go about our business. We get on with the sameness. Its repetition is a sedative: “When I asked you what day it was, / you said the day after yesterday.” Our inability to stop mutes our response to climate crisis. Awareness is a dull weapon. Our habits are stronger than our fears, more reliable than our desire.

I think immediately of Rachel Zucker’s book the pedestrians and jump up to grab it off the shelf. I’ve written before about the power of that book, which evokes the experience of how painful it can be when things (relationships, life, etc.) become humdrum, how lack of feeling, or maybe appropriate feeling, can be extremely painful. Inattention is gut-wrenching. Indifference is unendurable. For example, Zucker writes, “Many days passed. Many nights. The same number of days and nights. They slept in the smoke-drenched bed or rather the husband snored and sputtered and she lay awake and unseeing under her chilled eye mask.” In its willfulness, the word unseeing gets me every time. And this, as well: “They were sitting on the deck having that same difficult conversation they had every few months no matter where they were or what else was happening.” Zucker captures the harm in doing what we’ve always done just because it’s what we’ve always done. Do we know how to make space for change?

Gibson’s poem evokes in me that same question, along with some others: Do we deserve to hope? Do we care, really? What does it say that we see what comes next and then let it happen anyway? The poem strongly implicates all of us. Take a look at the vase near the end of the poem: “No matter where we move the glass vase, / it leaves a ring.” We’re marked by evidence of our coveting, but instead of interrogating it, we’re distracted by what’s inconsequential: the ring vs. the container or what the container holds. The language Gibson uses throughout the poem builds up to this moment of profound distraction. He makes the objects in the poem far sexier than “survival.” He describes his smartphone as a “terrible orb” and animates the barbershop’s combs, which are “swimming in little blue aquariums.”

Carolee Bennett, poetry prompt about climate crisis

‘Awful but cheerful’ is the final phrase and line of ‘The Bight‘, by Elizabeth Bishop. I’ve always felt that the poem was like the lesser-played song on a double A-side single. ‘At the Fishhouses‘, its sister-poem of coastal life, seems so much more elemental, necessary, and, well, likeable. […]

And yet, in these strange and troubling times, it is to ‘The Bight’ that I find myself turning more often, and to its ending in particular, with its dying fall cadences, its note of things going on because they have to and in spite of. Isn’t this where a lot of our lives are lived, in ‘awful but cheerful’? From queuing at the supermarket (or for petrol) to waiting for chemotherapy drugs which may or may not arrive; from hoping for a climate miracle or just for a good night’s sleep: awful but cheerful is where I am at right now. I sit with it and watch the tide going out, knowing it will be back again soon. As Peter Carpenter once said about a goal being scored, the music of the line feels both inevitable and a complete surprise. This is why I read poetry.

Anthony Wilson, Awful but cheerful

I call myself agnostic mainly, atheist occasionally, but I pray sometimes. I don’t discuss it much: saying you talk to the underworld is likely to concern religious friends on behalf of your soul and skeptical friends on behalf of your brain. But while praying the way I was taught in Sunday school felt terrible–addressing formal words to a pale and distant father in the sky who never answered–connecting imaginatively to soil and rock settles me. I even get good advice sometimes. Yep, what’s returning my calls may be a deeper part of myself rather than an outside force, yet I have an inkling that the inside-outside distinction is wrong-headed anyway, so I don’t worry about it. I’ll take whatever help the universe is offering.

Lesley Wheeler, Currents and circuits

Reasons to weep
are as numerous as the stars.

Every bodyworker knows
the muscle that cries out

is the victim: something else
has tightened into immobility.

But when it’s the heart
that cries out —

how can I delaminate
years of fused-together sorrows?

Rachel Barenblat, Tight

All the small hells beneath our tongue crumble. To no one in particular, we say how we are grateful for this shining breath and our next one.

Night whispers back how we are not alone. The skin of its voice soft to the touch as it tells us it will not leave us.

Rich Ferguson, Once Upon a Coyote Night

I’ve also long had an interest in the poetry of work, and so when I saw that Krista Tippett shared an interview from 2010 with Mike Rose, it got me thinking again in old ways (by which I mean independent of the pandemic). Sure ordinary life is different, but it’s still ordinary life, we still work, and we need to look for the joy in that. From On Being: “I grew up a witness,” Mike Rose wrote, “to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This then is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.”

Isn’t it uplifting when you run into someone who does the thing they do with an enthusiasm, a precision, a care? And when they do it with delight, it IS a delight. Wow!

There is a book of conversations I love between Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber where MCG talks about the vulnerability one needs to write, and “the fact that it takes a lot of love to write.” And I think, it’s like that with everything, really, whatever work you do. HC says, “In the end, love is very easy. When you love, it’s easy; all that is difficult is easy. Because you are continually paying yourself…” I’m sure some people wonder why the heck I do this blog for little fanfare or acclaim or cash damn dollars. I always come back to this answer, that I love it and so I am constantly paying myself. Don’t get me wrong I also love dollars, but I can’t think about them, I just have to think about what I love. I rather foolishly and brilliantly put most of my faith in doing what I love. I am continually paying myself.

Shawna Lemay, Life I love You

When the book gets accepted, everything is awesome.

THEN, you start editing it and realize the book is awful, actually awful. There are so many mistakes and also so much just pure awfulness.

THEN you have to ask for blurbs.
Oh Lord Have Mercy.

There are some really wonderful people who say Yes!, but there are some that say No (for various good reasons, but still. NO.).

THEN when the book comes out, some people read it and review it (Oh again Lord have Mercy!) and some offer Critique and not just nice-things (the nice things though are really, really nice to hear).

OR no one really reads it, and that is probably even worse.

All that to say, it is still totally worth pursuing publication. I’m not one of the three poets that America is interested in (Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Whoever Is Big on Instagram), so I don’t expect to reach more than a Poetry audience.

And I write religious poetry. From the perspective of a woman. So that just slashed readership in halves and halves.

(and I don’t really like it when people who know me read my books. If you know me, and you haven’t read my books–GOOD. Let’s keep it that way. I’ll maybe write more on this some other post.)

But sometimes I have people who read my book and really like it, and that is really nice.

Kinda makes it all worth it nice.

Renee Emerson, if you think publishing a book will make you feel super validated and great, then you are in for a surprise!

It’s good to crawl out from under the thin and watery blues with some good news. Hotel Almighty has been chosen as having one of the best-designed covers of 2020 by AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Artists! This is really a thrill. Back when I used to sojourn over to the Frankfurt Book Fair to do book-cover slide shows for one of my company’s publications, I used to pore over this very list swooning over good design.

The cover of Hotel Almighty was designed by Danika Isdahl and Kristen Miller at Sarabande, who suggested the cut-out method I use with various collages in the book. I made the cover collage in a dank basement in the Austrian Alps two summers ago. I mocked up three ideas and they liked this one. And I did too. I couldn’t be happier. It’s a good cover and a good ambassador for the book.

Sarah J Sloat, A Design Winner

It [is] very moving to receive a Jewish award for a novel about the Holocaust, particularly one that draws deeply on the story and experiences of my family and their history in Lithuania.

Literature can offer connection, empathy, understanding and consolation between those of vastly different experiences. It explains ourselves to ourselves but also to others. 

And my book makes connections between the Shoah and Indigenous genocide. Once, the remarkable Metis writer, Cherie Dimaline said to me that “we’re genocide buddies.” Jews and Indigenous peoples. That’s brutally true. And important.

Since I first encountered them as a teenager, I often think of these lines from Marvin Bell’s poem “Gemwood.” “Now it seems to me the heart /must enlarge to hold the losses /we have ahead of us.”

 To me this means that while we must be ready for what the future brings, we must be also be ready for the extent of the losses of the past and present as we continue to learn. Like the universe itself, both past and present never stop expanding. That’s one function of writing. To expand but also to encounter that expansion, those stories.

Gary Barwin, Canadian Jewish Literary Award and new paperback cover for NOTHING THE SAME, EVERYTHING HAUNTED

Although I’m on a year’s leave of absence from the University of York, I’m actually still plugged in to Dante and also Chaucer these days, and find myself referring to notes I was making on my core course module last year. I’m loving Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Purgatorio, incorporating characters and language from the present day, although I suspect it might be sniffed at in some scholarly circles!

As regards submissions to magazines, I’ve decided to step away from them for bit. I have half a dozen poems out at the moment, but I’m not sending any more for now. I have a few reasons for this.

Firstly, I don’t need to, in the sense that I have a track record of publication now, and I’ve nothing to prove to myself or anyone else. I think I’ve found my level. It would have been nice to be have published in The Poetry Review or Granta, but it’s OK to accept that it’s not going to happen. I could kill myself trying to write the ‘right’ sort of stuff, or I could write what I want to write, and enjoy honing it as best I can.

Secondly (related to the first point), I have a publisher for my first collection. I don’t have the collection yet, but I have the freedom to complete it, knowing it will have a home. This is a very privileged position to be in and I want to enjoy the moment, not fret about why Publication A, B or C don’t want any of the individual poems. Plenty of high profile poets have told about how the individual poems in their (successful) collections were consistently rejected by magazines. Or even that they never submitted them to magazines.

I can’t swear that I won’t submit the odd poem here and there, but I’ll be very happy not to be constantly putting my work up for possible rejection. I think the course at York has opened my eyes/mind to a lot of things. Perhaps a leave of absence makes the heart grow fonder – I’m starting to look forward to going back, which is quite a turnaround.

Robin Houghton, Readings, decisions, fresh starts

Now, in the wake of Covid, doing something only because it’s the way we used to do it feels like a thing of the past. We are reminded frequently of all that our students have been through and of what they are still enduring, and many things seem up for reconsideration.

Now, I strive to ground all of my practices in authentic purpose and true care. When I could see that some students were submitting assignments in the middle of the night, I told them that I never want to see that they’ve turned an assignment in after 11:00 pm. I’d rather they sleep and turn it in late. It doesn’t mean I don’t have due dates. I do. Every time, many students meet them, and some don’t. When they don’t, though, our conversations are not about the points they’ll lose. They are instead about what barriers are keeping them from getting their work done and what strategies we might use to remove them. No one seems to care that someone who turned the assignment in late gets the same full credit as someone who turned it in on time. Maybe it’s because we’ve talked about how grades should reflect what we know and can do with regard to our learning standards (rather than our behaviors), or maybe it’s because they like knowing that, should they need it, they will be given some grace when they can’t meet a deadline. (Because things happen to all of us, eventually.)

To be honest, I don’t know why they’re responding differently. I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter.

It is so freeing to teach this way, to be this way. It feels so much more humane. There are some natural consequences when deadlines are missed (say, when progress report grades are due), but I am driven much less by plans and deadlines that I’ve created and much more by what all of us need. The grace I extend comes back to me; when I explained to my students that some assignments wouldn’t be reflected in the progress report grades because I hadn’t had time to grade them yet, no one grumbled. It’s just how we are now, it seems. We trust that the soup will get made eventually, and some nights we eat take-out pizza because that’s all we can manage if we want to be OK. We’ll all live.

As I rest from this week and begin turning toward the next one, I’m wondering what more I can let go of, in order to free my hands for other things to hold on to. This week, the more I let go of ideas about some days being for work and others for the things I want to do, the more work became a fulfilling thing I wanted to do, and the more peace I felt about whatever I could and couldn’t accomplish in any given day, either in my school life or my home life.

All of this pondering about plans sent me back to the Burns poem alluded to in the title of this post, and re-reading it I focused on things I never have before, such as its line about Man’s dominion breaking social union. I realized how much our pandemic has been like his farmer’s plow, and how much I’m coming to think, like the farmer, that in spite of the sudden and unwanted destruction we’ve lived through (those of us who are still alive), it might be better to be the mouse than him, who looks back at prospects drear and forward to fears. Even though I know it could be upturned at any moment, I’m much preferring the honest nest I’m building now than the one that gave me false security before.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Best laid plans

Four Loblolly Pines—also called Sea Pines, Frankincense Pines, Southern Pines—send their straight trunks through the North Carolina humidity. In a tangle of pine boughs, two hawks have built a nest you might mistake—as I have—for a squirrel’s. Under these pines, under the weep-like hawk cries circling their nest, is my house. In a back room on the first floor, the door closed against the sounds of my children’s play, is my desk. I think of the pines above me as I write, needles brushing the house, pinecones falling with a thunk against the roof. When the wind blows, you can hear the needles blow with it. I welcome the pines’ presence, even when I imagine one falling in a storm’s high winds, as one did through my neighbor Waverly’s kitchen, a few years back. If a pine wants in, it comes in—that pine made a skylight out of Waverly’s kitchen ceiling. Waverly says it took months to fix properly, and several contractors. The tree removal service for a single a large pine like a Loblolly can run you upwards and above a thousand dollars—one lesson here is that it costs to lower something, to haul something pine-sized away, to mulch the evidence of branches.

That the pines do not fall on our house I consider a daily mercy, and the hawks nesting in the pines a grace—especially since I own no chickens, unlike my mother and her grandparents, the majority of our Southern family tree filled with squawking fowl.

Han VanderHart, Learn from the Pine

He had finally stopped sweating. For once
Nixon didn’t look like he was trying to sell
us a ’65 Ford Galaxy with an off-color
hood. His body jerked and flipped as
wolves, in winter, tore long, dry strips of
flesh from Nixon’s carcass, chewing on
sinew under the moonless sky. Nixon’s
internal organs were already gone and
his bones hung like sugar skeletons inside
his skin. When the grizzly meal was finished
the wolves trotted off, their almost silent
footsteps fading into the trees.

James Lee Jobe, Nixon’s Body, Dug Up By Wolves

In New Jersey, 2021 was the Summer of Love — for the 17-year cicada. ;- )

My wife Nancy Fischer Waters and I collaborated on a prose / poem piece that captures a moment from that crazy-short time when the air was abuzz with cicadas. Talk about speed dating! […]

nothing to lose!
the way we danced
when we were 17

Bill Waters, Seventeen

The latest project translated by Montreal poet, editor, translator and critic Erín Moure is Uxío Novoneyra’s The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems, a bilingual edition with Moure’s English translation alongside Novoneyra’s original Galician “with an Erín Moure poem from Little Theatres, a dictionary, an essay, an introduction, and dreams” (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2020). As the back cover offers on the work and life of the late Galician poet Uxí oNovoneyra (1930-1999): “He was an eco-poet before the concept existed. Maybe he even invented it. He wrote and rewrote one great book all his life, Os Eidos[The Uplands], from which most of these poems are drawn.” […]

It has been interested to watch Erín Moure’s ongoing explorations through translation over the past two decades-plus, and it would appear that for Moure, translation isn’t purely a singular project or trajectory, but an extension and continuation of conversations that run throughout her work as a whole. One could point to the use of multiple languages and stitched-in materials throughout her own poetry collection to her early book-length translations of poetry from French into English (Nicole Brossard, for example), before eventually extending further, to engage with Portuguese and  Spanish, and Galician texts, beginning with the work of poet Chus Pato. Moure has long been attentive to both translation and what she calls transelation, attending to shifts not simply between and amid language but the possibilities themselves, of which there are so often more than a simple, single one. Her overlay across and into the work of Pessoa, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001), was a particular high point in her evolution as and through translation, and the ways through which she seems to approach the work of Uxío Novoneyra furthers the possibilities of what might be possible. Her notion of translation appears to be one of polyphonic conversation, writing out not but a singular definitive thread or perspective. It is her openness that allow for multiple elements in the original text, interacting with her own approaches and considerations, their equal weight.

rob mclennan, Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems, trans. Erín Moure

[Rob Taylor]: You’ve translated the poetry of Wacław Iwaniuk and Andrzej Busza, Polish poets who, like yourself, immigrated to Canada soon after the war. Could you talk a little about how translation and, more broadly, Polish poetry and the Polish language, have influenced your own writing style?

[Lillian Boraks-Nemetz]: Translation influenced my English writing hugely. J. Michael Yates, an American poet teaching a creative writing course at UBC, noticed that I had a knack for translation and encouraged me. I was also encouraged by a British Poet at UBC , Michael Bullock, also known worldwide for his German translations.

I come from a broken language. I wrote in Polish as a little girl, then I was told when we came here that my past did not exist, only my English future. When I saw a Polish poem translated into English, I saw the possibility of my own writing. Here no one understood my harsh imagery, nor anything else I wrote about, and my work was rejected. A Polish scholar and a German poet told me once that when two animals fight with each other a third emerges. That was my version of English poetry.

Rob Taylor, A Third Animal Emerges: An Interview with Lillian Boraks-Nemetz

As I said, I’ve chosen to concentrate on poems that place themselves where the sky is enormous and isolating and where the landscape inevitably ends in a shadow line like the numinous dividing ‘lines’ in Rothko’s great canvasses. The collection is in six sections, or chapters, and each one contains a tidal river, or a sea shore, or saltings or estuaries reedbed and marsh and the dangerous unstable effulgent light off such places. As though you find yourself in a Turner that’s suddenly become live and cold and dangerous. This first poem is the opening poem of the first section, and and contains whole millennia of refugees. […]

I found it next to impossible to clear my mind of the appalling image of the fleeing being dragged down by all that had gone before, drowned by the clawing hands of history. Who can tell if they escaped in that wild boat, or who may plunge down with the cormorants ‘folding themselves like paper‘ into the detritus of the jettisoned and abandoned and wrecked.

John Foggin, My kind of poetry: Ruth Valentine’s “If you want thunder”

There you are in the garden, amazed
at how the time moved so quickly, a stone
that finally learned to lightly graze

each watery crest
instead of sinking with the weight
of its own resistance—

The crepe myrtle trees shed
their tattered tissue but you don’t know
if they’re entering or leaving their grief.

You yourself pull at threads: weft
and weave, your soul still anxious
about stitches and holes—

A thimbleful of seed,
a mouthful of feathers, a box
filled with all the words you remember—

Luisa A. Igloria, Weaving

Even when you cross it out
that doesn’t mean it’s gone,
the old monk told the poet.

Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (36)

Stop doing something, then start again to incur wonder. I.e., travel! You give your suitcase to strangers and pick it up on a Mediterranean island? You fly in the belly of a mechanical bird? Suddenly you’re above the clouds where the sun streaks pink, you look out the window again and you’re in darkness. You fly over a sepia city, small beads sewn into a warm fabric, a ground. There is a sinuous line dividing dark ocean from coast, dark wash of the Atlantic to urbanscape. This is night, do they never turn off the lights? It could be any city, but this is Lisbon, the first stop out of three. It’s 5am. Men shine in their fluorescent green vests, joking as they unload bags from the belly of the bird.Up and away to Rome, descending towards Rome. How stunned the ships, becalmed toys in the Mediterranean. What is that jagged shark…if not our plane’s trailing shadow. Flying over land, that cluster of reddish structures has the brush of the antique. Get closer, there’s a Roman amphitheater in the middle of weeds and industrial blocks. Made it to stop three. Welcome to Palermo, Sicily!

Jill Pearlman, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…Travel Again

shiny rock
many silent feet
before me

Jim Young [no title]