This week: fists of will-be-blooms, a delicate crepuscular pinky grey, parrots nesting in the rain tree, the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue, and much more. Enjoy.

A word drops off my fingers,
hits the floor, shatters. Words
shatter not into letters
and sounds, but into sharp shards
of reflection and color,
memory and movements, dance,
hollows where meaning was home.

PF Anderson, Wordless (#NaPoWriMo 29)

I have begun to teach myself to draw with my left hand.

I have started what I hope will be a book. I haven’t written much prose in a long long time. I learned a lot writing my novel, CLICK, and by learning a lot I mean a lot of what not to do.

I haven’t been hearing poems lately and when that happens I tend not to force myself to write them. I do write them when I’m in poetry circles where we get to write and share with each other but other than that I really haven’t felt like writing poetry. It will come back when it comes back. I think I need a lot of quiet space to let my brain run across the pastures and go wild. Then the poems will come.

Rebecca Cook, Life Update

We had a beautiful full moon right on my birthday, too, and we had lovely sunny weather, so we got out and gardened and Glenn power-washed the deck, so we were ready to entertain. The full moon always gives me insomnia, and this one was no different. I was thinking about an interview with Meryl Streep about the first Devil Wear Prada and how she was thinking of retiring from acting when she was offered the job at 56. I am 53, so it made me think about when we retire as artists. I’m not making the kind of money Meryl is, and I’m much less in demand. If I retired, there probably wouldn’t be as much of an outcry as there would be over Meryl (who was not only great in Devil Wears Prada 2, but if you’ve seen her, she’s terrific in Only Murderers in the Building). It’s surprising to me that she was thinking of retiring but then spoke openly that she did the movie that was so beloved because of the large paycheck it afforded.

I’m also thinking about retirement because Microsoft is offering early retirement packages next week. Glenn still loves his job and enjoys working, so it’s not very attractive to him yet. They’re doing it to invest more in AI and less in humanity, which seems depressing. I guess poets can work until they die or decide to do something else, and we definitely won’t be offered a nice paycheck to quit, and AI may try to take our jobs anyway.

This week EcoTheo re-ran a photo I took for them a while ago, and Rattle re-ran an older poem in their newsletter. So it was nice to be remembered in these ways on a week I was feeling discouraged and thinking about quitting.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Week, Full Flower Moon, Open Books, Seattle’s Japanese Garden, and More

I’ve been observing my mind lately. It’s been such a gadfly. In five minutes I’ll have searched five things on the internet, gotten up and splashed some paint on paper, written my little 100-word daily challenge (more on that in another post), sat back down and picked up a book, put it down to look something else up, started one thing only to interrupt myself with another. Is it spring that’s making me so flighty? Life in these times? Yes and yes? I’ve been busy in spurts and listless the rest of the time, aspiring to grand ideas but too scattered to think them up, or I think them up and immediately reject them. It’s spring and not-quite-spring, some trees are dangly with their bright catkins and some are well into their leaves. My lilacs are just showing their fists of will-be-blooms but someone’s three blocks away are in full purple. On my walk up on the ridge, no jacks in no pulpits, but flocks of marsh marigold in their fancy dress. A tiny speck of eagle high in the sky circling; in a field the very earthly dark mound of a turkey vulture, its terrible red head bent to its meal. I tried to write a poemish thing based on the crazyass mix of headlines in the Guardian, the whiplash of turning to witness democracy’s demise in one article, the ridiculousness gravity lent to some fashion “controversy” in another. But Rilke said poetry was no place for irony. I disagree. Except when I agree entirely. There’s my mind again, changing, changing. But here is the venerable Don McKay, with a poem from his book Another Gravity. I’m not sure I entirely follow the line of thought of the poem. But given the state of my mind, I think it’s okay.

Marilyn McCabe, there must be a door — a door

nothing grows here, the sanctioned and expatriated seed, scoured from yr latitudes, yr gravel hemispheres. flowers: pacified fixtures, bracketed to buildings. tree: hi-vis bros administer enjambment. i bring with me only this body, idealised and desperate. it is the weed and the worm, dankly questing prole, the writhing of its reach, opaque with strain. fungus. assemble myself inside the open sprawl of it: worklife, yr city. the empire is setting. like aspic.

Fran Lock, THE MUSHROOM IS NOT A PLANT

You may be lucky enough to not feel stress or anxiety before a reading or public performance. In general, I usually get excited nerves, rather than debilitating nerves. Yesterday however felt very different. I spent the whole day in a state of extreme anxiety, worrying about everything. I knew I was being illogical because I was worrying about nobody turning up (even though ninety tickets had been sold). I was also worrying about people turning up and being bored. I spent a full hour thinking about my book and regretting writing any of the poems and publishing it in the first place.

On Saturday night, we had a power cut at midnight which lasted till midday on Sunday morning. This meant we couldn’t make lunch so we all went down into town for lunch on Sunday, which now I write it, sounds like a relatively simple thing to do, even a pleasant one! However, by this point, my ADHD symptoms were in overdrive, making simple decisions and even eating something feel completely overwhelming.

Because I usually don’t get like this before a reading, it took me a while to identify what I needed which was some time on my own to relax and work out what I was reading. I went and had a very long bath, made a list of the poems I was going to read and then left for the venue with my sister.

As Jody and I pulled up to the venue, my friends E and S were also getting out of their cars. They’d come early because E knew I was anxious about nobody turning up! When I got to the green room, my colleague Reuben from work was there with Malika – he’d met her at the train station to make sure she got up the hill ok. Carola was already there, Amanda was in mid-flow organising everyone and then Clare strode through the doors with a box full of The Book of Bogs to sell and I felt instantly calmer.

I silently thanked past Kim for the genius idea of filling this event with my best friends and my sister, of surrounding myself with friendship and laughter.

Kim Moore, HOW TO HAVE A MAGICAL BOOK LAUNCH

My poem Interior with a Table has been awarded equal Fourth Prize in the Kent & Sussex 2026 Open Poetry Competition. I was delighted, especially as the competition was judged by Mimi Khalvati. She describes the poem as a ‘sensitive example of ekphrastic poetry’. You can read her Judge’s Report here.

The poem was inspired by the 2021 painting of the same title by Vanessa Bell. The date put me in mind of WWI which enters the frame.

You can read the poem here.

Fokkina McDonnell, Interior with a Table – poem

Earlier today, as I made adjustments in the galley for GRAVEYARDS OF CHICAGO, I was thinking about my acquaintance with this particular urban legend and source materials. In particular, Resurrection Mary has been an obsession that took root when I was 12 and checking out stacks of ghost story and paranormal books from the tiny Cherry Valley public storefront library with its rickety floors, precariously leaning stacks, and questionable green shag carpet in the children’s area. It’s probably natural that I would become obsessed with ghosts given my love of horror and gothic leanings. This one seems particularly interesting from a regional standpoint (not Rockford necessarily, but suburban Chicago, though another spooky urban legend from my hometown makes an appearance in the play).

When I was taking a class back in the MFA program way back in 2005 that was devoted to writing Chicago poems, it seemed like a no-brainer, to take my obsession with this urban legend and see what bloomed. There were also great ways to bring in history and class in the city in interesting ways. The result of course was Archer Avenue. Initially, it was a small print edition that I mostly gave away and traded in the year leading up to my first book’s release. Later, those poems would fit nicely in the context of IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, my second book. 

Certain things informed that project, and by extension, the play i just wrote two decades later. In addition to in-depth research on sightings and lore, I did things like go on ghost tours and wandered around the historic State St. Marshall Fields (which was on the verge of becoming a Macy’s soon after.) Class and the idea of pauper/unmarked graves was at the forefront of my mind, as was Depression-era economics. 

While the poems wander in their p-o-v and thematic directions, the play places Mary’s story as I imagine it alongside a cab driver decades later, using music to mark the shifts in time and weaving their stories together, including one scene I really hope works that changes decades mid-scene.

Kristy Bowen, roadside ghosts and writing your obsessions

Between Marshal Pétain’s capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, and the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the French wrote over three million letters of denunciation to the authorities. After the war, some denunciations were deemed, retroactively, criminal acts: the crime of “indignité nationale.” Fascinated by their surface and their substance, I set out to write a poem based on those letters. While I admit to an interest in the more standard heroic possibilities of iambic pentameter, here my aims were Frostian. The letters are a fascinating mixture of “tones.” Rarely were the writers trying simply to convey information. They were just as keen to signal things about themselves, to the agents of the Vichy state: patriotism; sophistication; alignment with its (sick) values. They wanted to denounce “traitors,” but they wanted to sound appropriately bureaucratic in doing so. Bureaucratic tones are underrepresented in metric poetry—I’m not aware even of Robert Frost trying—but poetic they can be, when they contain an undercurrent of terror. Also poetic, in this case, is the fact that these writers’ mixed goals did not mix well: because virtue and vice do not mix well. Nor, and this is no coincidence, could the writers quite carry it all off. Their sophistication is often sour and out of tune.

That’s how it struck me, anyway. This may be serendipity, but I have leaned into it. For I should say, the letters were written in French (of course), and discussions of them referred me to a compliation titled La Délation sous l’Occupation, of which no English translation has been published. Unable to pay a real live French person to produce one, I have relied on machines to do it, machines which are, despite recent advances you may have read about, not entirely reliable. But their unreliability was, in this case, poetic, in a way worth explaining. It’s familiar enough that modern English is a mixture of German and French. Because French was, in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, the language of England’s ruling elite, French words that came to English tend to have a “fancier” meaning in English, than their originals have in French. For example, “travail” in French means (simply) “work,” but in English it means “painful or laborious effort.” Computer translations from French tend to “transliterate” French words, rather than replace them with simpler non-French words that are closer in meaning: “travails” may remain “travails,” and not be translated as “labors.” The denunciations, therefore, in my eyes, appeared to try quite hard to use the fanciest—and so, Frenchest—English words they could, even when those words were not well-suited to their intended meaning. This was, sometimes, quite amusing, as was the contrast between these elevated stylistic aims, and the sometime pettiness of the “infractions” being reported. And then, here and there, through this curtain of administrative and euphemistic malaprops, some plain and brutal language would protrude. In a poem, this could be magnified into something grotesque.

One story about World War II, is that its great evils should not be wholly blamed on a few monstrous men; shares should also be distributed to the masses of collaborators, each of whom perpetrated his or her own microdose of evil. These letters are among them, and they smell of it.

Brad Skow, The Spirit of a Broken People: French Letters of Denunciation

I was absolutely delighted yesterday to receive my contributors copy of a new poetry anthology, The New Sentience: Reimagining Animal Poetry, which is just released from Trinity University Press with a Foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It’s a beautiful book! The editors, Ashley Capps and Allison Titus did a wonderful job putting it together, and I’m marveling at the Table of Contents, which is full of such greats as Mary Oliver, Linda Gregg, Mary Ruefle, Mary Oliver, Nikole Brown, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Camille Dungy, Ross Gay, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Ada Limon, as well as yours truly.

The poem of mine that they’ve selected to include is “Dr. Harry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory,” from my book Darwin’s Mother, which takes the perspective of a monkey forced to participate in Harlow’s famous (and chilling) wire mother and cloth mother experiments from the 1950s. Thinking about those experiments and what it must have been like for the baby rhesus monkeys who were deprived of maternal care and familial connection still makes my heart feel as heavy as stone.

But the anthology is also rich with hope—poems of connection and kinship, of observation, odes to interspecies friendships, to entanglement, wildness, and mystery.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Reimagining Animal Poetry

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. She writes about motherhood, shifts in identity, and love in many forms, frequently finding wonder in the seemingly everyday. Her work has appeared in publications including Magma, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar and her debut pamphlet Tiny Bright Thorns was published in 2024. And in news very hot off the press, Jen has just been announced as the winner of the 2026 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition.

A Dress with Deep Pockets is a book that takes us in its confidence, and talks to us candidly over the kitchen table about friendship, motherhood and ageing. Jen writes with a quiet confidence – the poems are not fussy, preferring to leave a deep imprint through their frankness and vitality.

Here is a poet who is able to bring us the essence of a character and a stage of life in swift, bright sketches – like her teenage friend, in Hare Girl, “tawny and watchful in corners, / boys staring owl-eyed from across the room.” Or the speaker of the poems, caught mid-realisation in Boxing Day Swimmers, of her own ongoing process of transformation;

It’s the strangest thing, lately,
I open my mouth and my mother falls out –
a mournful clockwork woodpigeon on the kitchen table.

Boxing Day Swimmers

What I enjoy about these poems is how lightly they wear their ‘poem-ness’. They are full of craft – clever little turns, pin-sharp images, genius line breaks – yet they are carried along with an immense warmth and wit, a voice that feels so natural and completely itself.

Victoria Spires, Fictional bats, stolen vodka and bobble hats

There are periods when I’m reading for work, others when I’m reading for pleasure. Sometimes, they overlap. At the moment, I can firmly say that my reading life feels expansive and enriching in a way that lands firmly in the realm of pleasure.

Last week, I reread Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, which is one of my favorite collections. This week, I’m reading two extraordinary books, ’s forthcoming Middle Slope and Karen Solie’s T.S. Eliot-prize winning Wellwater. I wake up excited to read, which is a wonderful feeling.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The private detective is closing the file, dusting the mirror to move on but the woman at the heart of the case is living rent free in his mind. It suggests how experience shapes us and some memories can never be left behind.

Polly Clark has a skill for taking apparently ordinary moments, working on a piece of art, attending a funeral, finishing a job, and invests them with layered depths, showing how these micro connections shape individuals. She asks readers to look again, challenge their knowledge of how they might think this scene pans out and asks what if you focus on the less obvious, what if you were less complacent? It’s a fine balance between a relaxed, colloquial tone and a thoughtful, darker undertone and invites a reader to re-read the poem. If you’re not familiar with Clark’s work, “Afterlife” is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “Afterlife” Polly Clark (Bloodaxe) – book review

A couple of years after I met this poem, I met its author at the Dodge Poetry Festival. He gave a reading and I queued up to have On Love signed, and told him that “For the Sleepwalkers” was perhaps the first contemporary poem I had loved, and that I had read it in Fifty Years, and he looked at me very seriously and said yes, he remembered that anthology, and he was very glad to know it, and thanked me for telling him, and then he signed my book “We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.”

“For the Sleepwalkers” is a simple poem is another funny thing I almost wrote in the spirit of earnest classification. Is it simple? It leapt off the page and into a seventeen-year-old, so make of that what you will. I suppose I continue to feel guarded about my beloveds after such a long estrangement from Poetry at large: the sneaking suspicion that I do not like the right things remains hard to shake, especially when I make the mistake of picking up the latest issue of whatever. But, Dear Readers, I’ve so far only gained more of you here, so perhaps that’s a kind of empirical argument for not being all that wrong.

What’s to like? Tercets! The load-bearing stanza form: I like to imagine Hirsch, inevitably, thinking Dante, maybe even making a stab at terza rima early on—wonderful / invisible, faith / path—but that may be autobiography; I can’t count the number of times I’ve set out to write terza rima and abandoned it after line five. It’s handsomely constructed, repeated phrases and constructions weaving a subtle net of sound and sense: “so much faith . . . so much faith” in the first stanza, “stairs instead of the window . . . doorway instead of seamless mirror”in the second.

Alongside, and in conjunction with, these syntactic pairings, I love the strangeness of some of the figures, how the poet doesn’t quite ask us to rethink our assumptions as much as declare them rethought. Sleepwalking is most often employed pejoratively; one who sleepwalks through life misses things, but Hirsch’s sleepwalker is the one who truly sees. Stairs in the context of somnolence denote danger, yet here they are a preferable path to a window, a safe way down, and also out; the gaping door is not a symbol of vulnerability, but preferable to the mirror’s endless echo chamber. I love the night-soaked beauty of hearts flying off and returning, the clipped percussive music of “thick black fists,” the solid sound and sense of “glove of our chests.”

Most importantly, and I think most like Hirsch—the poet laureate of insomnia—is this notion of generative dark, of insight arriving not on a beam of light, but in the wild darkness: in shedding the self and actively seeking the unknown, even though we are so often told, and so often tell ourselves, it’s dangerous.

Vanessa Stauffer, “For the Sleepwalkers” by Edward Hirsch

James Matthew Wilson has noted Ransom’s prosody in these late poems:

the falling, slant-rhymed, rhythms . . . which Ransom borrows with so much else from Mother Goose, are coupled with the mundane and the parenthetical, rhetorical, Latinate grandeur, and these all conspire to create poems immediately amusing to the ear; grotesquely jerry-rigged so as to compel us to ponder their inner-workings; and finally insistent that life in this world is a long defeat, where what is most precious, beautiful, and humane merits our reverence and study even though it will, in God’s time, fail us.

In “Blue Girls,” a number of pentameter lines, specifically the internal b-rhymed lines of stanzas 1 and 3, do contain these falling rhythms, ending on such multi-unstressed-syllabic words as “seminary” and “contrary,” which casts the short concluding lines in those quatrains, with their final stressed syllables, in higher relief. The effect, then, is something like rolling down a hill and hitting a fatal wall.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Blue Girls

Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative Anatomy”, describing a hawk moth, is an ethereally thinned version of a reversed sonnet (one in which the sestet precedes the octave): it’s written in short, irregular lines, and has only a few highly attenuated rhymes. The irregularity and attenuation both suit the idea of the moth’s fragility and erratic flight (itself brilliantly captured by the line end pause in ‘cleverly / erratic’). I think they have another important effect. The whole poem is brought delicately to rest by the way the last two lines move to the iambic pulse of the dominant tradition in English metrics and of the traditional sonnet in English. However, the unpredictable rhythms before that point seem to contribute to its lightness of imaginative touch and the consequent extremely open way in which its suggestiveness works. This gives it a vast imaginative reach with many overlapping circles of suggestion. Short lines isolate images and phrases, letting each resonate in the pause or blank space at the line ending. Shimmering between overwhelming extremes of light and darkness, between poles of miniaturist empathy and geographical or even cosmic vastness, and between anthropomorphic and naturalistic imaginings of moth and bat, glancing in its imagery at archaic and modern industrial techniques, at marine, submarine and aerial navigation and at the mechanics of making music, vividly evoking both the cruelty and the marvellous intricacy of the natural order, it doesn’t push the reader towards a conclusion but opens multiple vistas of reflection that he’s free to follow or not as he wills. The whole poem gives a beautiful sense of completeness, but this is entirely a matter of artistic shaping, not of the expression of an idea, and it seems to me that the abstention from any kind of intellectual conclusion that would have limited the reader’s freedom of response is as much a beauty of the poem as its shaping is.

Edmund Prestwich, Jamie McKendrick and sonnet form. Comments on “Alternative Anatomy”.

[Edwin] Muir was a Scottish poet who died in 1959. According to my note on the flyleaf, I bought my Faber edition of his Collected Poems as a student in 2000. I’m not sure how much read Muir is these days but his poems seem to me to have stood the test of time particularly well. He assumes some scriptural and classical knowledge in a way that is less common now, but his poems are never ‘learned’. You always feel that he is putting his gifts at the service of the reader — that he writes to be understood.

In this poem, for instance, there’s an obvious allusion to the story in Genesis, and also to two Gospel parables — of the wheat and the tares (in Matthew 13) and of the workers in the vineyard (in Matthew 20). ‘Tares’ is a now largely obsolete word for vetch, a kind of weed that grows easily in wheatfields. Recent translations of the Bible tend to use ‘weeds’, but ‘tares’ is the word in the King James Bible, and I would guess that for most mid-20th century readers — for whom it was no longer in common currency — the word itself was strongly associated with this particular parable. But even if you have never read the New Testament, and don’t know what ‘tares’ are, I don’t think you would have any difficulty following this poem.

Muir uses scripture (and also some parts of classical mythology) in a natural way, to clarify his meaning rather than hedge it around. This is much harder to do than it looks, and the apparent straightforwardness of Muir’s style is perhaps his greatest achievement. It is very difficult indeed to write lyric poetry which is both beautiful and straightforward to understand, and which also has something to say — a clear and specific message or argument. These seem like they ought to be the basic virtues of verse but it is a rare poet who can put all three together as consistently as Muir.

The clarity and (for want of a better word) ‘accessibility’ of Muir’s style derives to a large extent, I think, from how deeply rooted his poetry is in what we might call roughly ‘popular’ verse, including songs and hymns — the kind of verse that is shaped by use for maximum clarity. 

Victoria Moul, When will all come home?

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I’ve been reading this one for several months. Did you know Leaves of Grass is quite long? The first (self-published) book wasn’t so bad, but the one I have, one of the later editions after he had added and added to it, is a bulky 400 poems.

Some parts are great! But some not so much. For example, should anyone, poet or otherwise, use the word “promulges” this much?

“Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
And the dark hush promulges as much as any.”
(from Song of Myself, 45)

Not to hate on Whitman – his work is obviously inspired by the cadences and repetitions of Biblical poetry, notably Ecclesiastes (which I was also reading at the time – interesting pairing) and the psalms. However, instead of centering around God, he centers around himself, in a universalistic way. What a tiresome subject.

Often a famous poet will be known for one or two of their very good poems, but there is a treasury of much better poetry that no one ever reads – but in Whitman’s case, I think the well-known poems are the poems you should read.

Renee Emerson, Does anyone ever finish Whitman?

Simone Weil was, to all who knew her, intense. Over the course of her shortened life, she gave herself up to an evolving sequence of political, ethical and mystical philosophies, and pushed herself and her body to great physical extremes in order to live them fully. This was her praxis, her public self.

Tom Pow’s new collection of poems has grown out of several years of immersion in Simone’s writing, augmented with visits to places which advanced her thinking in some way, or were the site of revelation, of a sudden clarity. By deepening his concept of her by encountering her in these places, he invests his poems with a directness and intimacy that comes from working with primary source material, including the places in which it was formed – the sounds of the building, the light on the walls. We encounter her in these places. It is this sense of presence, of being with, that charge these poems with such authenticity, that makes them ring true.

Lesley Harrison, The Vulnerability of Precious Things

There is no single reading of a poem. We cannot be done with it in a single pass as we might with a novel. (I don’t mean later re-reading, but the initial or single encounter.) Even a joke poem, a limerick, a short form, a couplet, requires more than a single read: it lingers and echoes in memory. Something about itself is always drawing our attention. Most verse is dross because it lacks this quality, not for any merely formal reason. When I first read ‘Filling Station’ I did not understand it in a literal sense. Some barrier existed because it is American and the lingo was obscure; some words needed looking up; some of it is simply difficult, not the sense that it is hard but in the sense that you must mull it before you “get” it. Not all difficulty makes itself known on the surface.

Late James is poetry in this sense. There is this sort of poetry in the heart of Austen, too, whose sentences roll in our minds. Not poetry in the way Dickens drops into pentameter, but in the lilt of her prose that becomes almost like the long lines of the Psalms. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in the country of Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property… We might hear Cowper behind this as well as Addison. We might have to read the novel several times before we think to ask why it matters that the residence is in the centre of their property.

Austen can be read as an easy novelist or as a difficult one, not difficult in the way Joyce is difficult, but not easy in the way Wodehouse is easy. Some novels have their difficulty submerged, like Brideshead, which I read three times through on first encounter. Just as the first time we read a great poem and it will require lots of attention, so we might need to read a novel that looks easy. But the “standard” way of reading a novel is straight through, maybe going back a little, but mostly linear. If we rate literature according to pleasure, the more linear the better. Zing! So when people discuss difficulty, a lot of their arguments might depend on how “poetic” they like their literature.

For some poets, like A.R. Ammons and Wallace Stevens, keeping you in the state of difficulty is almost the point. To reach a full explanation is almost to miss the point—these poets are trying to put something into words that cannot, fully, be expressed. The sense of difficulty should be where we understand that. We will only ever be able to get so close to reality through words.

Henry Oliver, Out of all the indifferences

Whenever people ask, “Which poets inspired your own work?” I end up saying that my poetry is largely influenced by prose writers—maybe even more so than the poets. Clarice Lispector is part of my holy trifecta (others include Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras, whose work I also practiced bibliomancy with).

Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose family origins trace back to war-torn Ukraine, lost her mother as a child (I am always interested in writers whose childhoods asked them to raise themselves, in a way—writers who operate through and within a kind of lack). I’m also married to a Brazilian person, so there’s one slightly familiar doorway through which I enter her work.

Despite genre classifications, her work is a poetics of nonlinearity and interiority. On the line level, it is positively delicious. Água Viva—a “meditation on the nature of life and time”—asks you to surrender to a sea of questions, desires, prayers, thoughts, to the very mysteries that make up our world, to the spaces in between. And I fucking love that. If there’s anything I hate in literature, it’s being hand-fed.

Água Viva is an exercise in constructing meaning, but it’s collaborative between author and writer; it feels as though the author is whispering directly to you. Or that you’re watching a prayer as it’s being transmitted to the heavens.

Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Clarice Lispector

A poetry prize that we are lucky to have in the UK is the Michael Marks Awards. Founded in 2009, it now has four categories recognising small-press excellence: Poetry Pamphlet; Publisher; Illustrator; Environmental Poetry Pamphlet. This year’s shortlists have just been published, with the winners to be announced in June.

The only shortlisted title that I currently have on my shelves is Hugh Foley’s Recent Poems (The Fair Organ), which is a pamphlet in the tradition of small, simple printed objects that I particularly enjoy as a way of reading poetry: a paper-wrapped, pocket-notebook of 28 pages, stapled and hand-stamped on the back with the publisher’s logo (I wrote about my own small-press experiment with this format here).

Of course, the downside of reading this way is that wafer-thin publications easily get lost at the bottom of the book-shelf food chain, pressed flat by the paperbacks and hardbacks they can sometimes end up tucked inside. […]

In a statement about “The Importance of Poetry Pamphlets”, the Michael Marks Awards observe:

Traditionally, pamphlets have provided a vehicle for new writers to emerge, as well as offering established poets a focused, short structure that is ideal for exploring themes […] Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet.

This got me thinking about which pamphlets on my shelves I value not only as short and portable early gatherings of poems that later have ended up in “full” books, but specifically those which are themselves my preferred (and sometimes only) way of reading a particular work.  [Click through for Jeremy’s selection of a half-dozen memorable pamphlets (AKA chapbooks).]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #42: An Outside to Language

8 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has been a natural state for me to move among poetry, translation, critical work, and fiction. I may spend months or years focused on one or two, toggling between them, and then find myself drained. Other genres rush in to fill the space left and reinvigorate me. Translation, especially, recharges the mind for my own poems. There, you are both creating and kneeling at the mercy of existing language, balancing between fidelity and estrangement, mimicry and imagination, domestication and foreignization, to mold a poem in English that does to an English speaker what the original did to readers of that language. Switching modes feels like stepping out of an airport in the tropics and taking off your parka. So I never have writers’ block per se. There’s always some other kind of writing I could be doing if one type is coming up dry. And the genres necessarily challenge one another. Is this really a narrative poem or a story that hasn’t been completed? What form best serves this idea? What can this form do that the others cannot?

9 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

With a “9-5” job, I write when I can: a snippet in the early morning, something after dinner, a few hours on the weekend. The trick for me has been to keep the mind engaged with the literary, with the way a poet attends to the world, at least for a few dedicated moments every day; that may not be actual writing, but it keeps the writer in my mind alive.

10 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to international writers to pull me out of the milieu and habits of U.S. literature.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Moysaenko

like any poet, i am always
fighting the moon. i want to have her
over for dinner. i want to use
my phone flashlight to find her face.
in a dream, the house catches fire &
i turn into a diamond in the heat.

Robin Gow, battery life

According to #FemkuMag, “In September 2017 Rowan Beckett Minor coined the term “femku” in the subtitle of their first book Radical Women: A Book of Femku. Since then, the term has resonated throughout the Haiku community, thus pioneering a movement and this journal, the safe space Rowan created for women, trans, and gender-expansive Haijin to share their work.” I’d like to learn more about your first book, Radical Women: A Book of Femku. What are the main subjects and topics that you focus on in this book and what inspired you to write it?

I didn’t yet realize I was non-binary when I wrote Radical Women: A Book of Femku, so many of the poems are about navigating the expectations of gender roles in society, the sexual pressures women face, and my love-hate relationship with my body. These poems are raw, gritty, and very underdeveloped in traditional technique, so I’m not sure you can truly call them “haiku,” but they certainly have a senryu spirit and laid the groundwork for my entire poetic career.

I’m also interested in learning more about #FemkuMag. What do you enjoy the most about serving as the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of #FemkuMag?

Oh, that’s easy. I most enjoy the community I’ve built. There are many poets who tell me their submitted work was written specifically with #FemkuMag in mind, or that they would only trust me with certain topics. Unfortunately, women and transgender folks are often scrutinized for speaking their truth and most people just want someone, anyone, who will listen to their unique stories. I think it’s important, crucial even, for underrepresented voices to have a platform; all I do is secure the space and hand them a microphone.

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

My haiku journey began shortly after moving to Detroit, Michigan in 2017. I discovered the Evergreen Haiku Study Group at Michigan State University, run by Michele Root-Bernstein, and attended several meetings. Mike Rehling of Failed Haiku regularly attended the meetings and was kind enough to give me a few haiku history lessons over some delicious Japanese cuisine. Failed Haiku was my first haiku publication credit, the H. Gene Murtha contest was my first placement, and I had a haiga featured in the 2017 Michigan State University “Haiga Around the World Exhibition,” so I owe a lot to Mike and the Evergreen Haiku Study Group.

Jacob D. Salzer, Rowan Beckett Minor

Zoeglossia is a literary organization seeking to pioneer a new, inclusive space for poets with disabilities.  Launched in 2017, Zoeglossia is the first such organization in the poetry landscape. The idea is to provide an intersectional community open to a wide range of disability poetics, encouraging conversation and support.  This link leads to a wide variety of poems that explore the experiences and consequences of illnesses and disabilities . .. and I offer a the opening portion of a sample from that collection below.

Number Twenty by Jonathan Mack

This, the story that brings me to you, is one story in twenty. In the other nineteen I am dead. In five stories I’m dead of AIDS, having suffered every possible infection and died at home, in a variety of hospitals, and in the toilet of a theater. There are seven suicides between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. There are two terrible car accidents — one involving a drunk driver and one that is entirely my fault. In one story I live only three days and  . . .

Jonathan Mack’s poem is from This New Breed. Copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Mack.

JoAnne Growney, Resisting Disability with Poetry and Math

Over the past few years, I have interviewed over one hundred journal editors. Some lit mags want work related to specific themes such as war, social justice or the environment. Some focus on showcasing certain writers, such as women over sixty or Canadian poets. And, of course, many have specific genre parameters: creative nonfiction only, or prose poetry only, flash fiction, long fiction, hybrid works…

Yet if there is one commonality among what a majority of editors look for in submissions, it is related to voice.

Stephen Beeber of Conduit: His magazine is a “venue for voices that aren’t ready to be recognized by the mainstream.”

Cherry Lou Sy of Adroit: “A strong voice gives a story its soul.”

Michelle Lyn King of Joyland: Her magazine “is most interested in a distinctive voice.”

Jennifer Acker of The Common: The editors are “looking for really strong voice.”

Courtney Harler of CRAFT: “Does [the work] express and capture a truly authentic voice?”

Anthony Varallo of Swamp Pink (formerly Crazyhorse): He is interested in “the voice and energy of the piece.”

Sheila Squillante of Fourth River: Regardless of the genre, it is “incredibly important that the voice of the piece is strong and idiosyncratic and fresh.”

What exactly does all this mean?

In fact, the more I think about the concept of “voice,” the more fascinated I find it as a literary element. On YouTube, the question “What is voice in writing?” yields many results, ranging from the obvious to the nuanced and enlightening.

However, these videos and most other queries related to voice tend to clump together two strands of the concept. One strand is The Author’s Voice. This is your unique stamp as a writer, the singular thing that you and you alone do. This is the Hemingway story you can spot immediately; the Anne Sexton poem you recognize in an instant. This may just be another way of referring to an author’s style. Yet “voice” encompasses more. It’s bigger than style—it’s the author’s worldview, their vision, recurring themes, favored images, vantage point, social position, the very wellspring of ideas that could only come from them.

The second strand is The Voice of the Work. Many writers are admirably consistent in their works. They write about the same sorts of things in more or less the same way. I, perhaps like many of you, am not one of these writers. Some of my stories lean lyrical and are deeply serious. Others are bright and wacky. Some are violent; some are light-hearted. If there is a unifying quality that connects all these works to one another, a larger Author Voice umbrella under which my stories gather, someone else might recognize it, but I’m not sure I can.

So, in talking about voice as a literary element, it would seem important to tease out these two strands. Invariably, writers would want to know whether voice is something that can be learned. Can you strengthen your writing voice? Can you sharpen it? If so, how? What does it take to shape the voice of a particular work? What does it take to shape your own voice, as a writer?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are editors talking about when they talk about “voice”?

I’ve been moved by the sound of mourning doves, their plaintive call. Plangent, but somehow unsentimental. A kind of straightforward sound of mourning. How does the resonant coo evoke our human sorrow or mourning. Of course, for the bird, that’s just the sound they make. They are not more mournful, despite the delicate crepuscular pinky grey of their feathers and this hollow and hollowing song.

We often read the natural world assuming its signs signify our signified, as if these signifiers were human. A pathetic fallacy, but also a deeply felt cultural interconnection. Our human world has evolved in dialogue with these signs. Dark skies, brooding clouds, joyful birdsong, joyous brooks. Here we find voice for our feelings.

Gary Barwin, Bird=flute, egg=stone: Mourning and pathetic fallacy

He said, writer’s block is a myth, look around, the city will provide words for your poem

And the city spoke to me in red.
All instructions and warnings.
Private Property. No Entry.
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
Do not urinate here.
Right Arrow. Left Arrow. Straight and Right.
U-Turn. No Free Left.
Vote for __ . Or maybe for __.
Residents Only. Beware of Dog.
No Parking. Tow Zone.
Speedbump ahead.

And I imagined these signs instead:
Shhh. Parrots Nesting in the Rain Tree.
Take Left. Jacaranda tree in bloom.
Look up – full moon tonight. (And Venus!)
Free books: Take one. Take two.
Pin your poem to this board. (Poets, This Way!)
Hang your art here.
We are not busking. Sing with us.
Feel the grass. Take off your shoes.
No swimming from 2 to 4 PM. The fish are napping.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -5

There is a poem written by Frank O’Hara in April 1954 titled after Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” In Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff refers to O’Hara’s poem as a “loose adaptation” of Rilke’s. David Lehman has called it a “deliberate mistranslation.”

Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘translation’ has to do with O’Hara’s poem at all.

If I had to find words for it, I’d say O’Hara borrowed the structure of Rilke’s poem and cast it into the shape of Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” The title acknowledges this Aus-Einem-April mode; there is no epigraph pointing to Rilke because the pleasure of an O’Hara poem (much like the pleasure of an Ashbery) comes from reaching the reader who recognizes the source. Even the way O’Hara closes this poem — “and out there everything is turbulent and green” — shares almost no bones with Rilke’s quiet glistenings and “still” details ordered by awe.

Alina Stefanescu, “Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded…”

I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me to translate classical Persian poetry if an Iranian friend hadn’t asked me in the early 2000s if I’d be interested in working with a now-defunct organization called the International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC). ISIC, he said, was looking for someone to write the text for a website that would help counter the axis-of-evil caricature of Iranian culture and history that had been current here in the United States since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The focus of the website would be classical Persian literature. My job would be to make that literature and its place in Iranian and world culture accessible to an online American audience.

I was immediately interested. Since my wife is from Iran and my son is therefore Iranian-American, I had a real stake in the cultural awareness about Iran that ISIC wanted to engender; and, as a college professor and a writer, not only did I think the educational value of the project was self-evident; I also saw it as an opportunity to learn about a literature I knew next to nothing about. When I asked my friend if ISIC might see that ignorance as disqualifying, he told me not to worry. They actually wanted someone who would approach the literature from well outside the specialized and scholarly contexts in which those texts were usually read and studied.

My friend put me in touch with the man who was pre-screening those people who’d been identified as viable candidates for the project, and then he, after a long conversation of which I remember very little, told me I would hear within the next week or so from ISIC’s executive director, Mehdi Faridzadeh. When I met with Mr. Faridzadeh, however, the project he described to me was not only radically different from the one my friend had told me about; it was one I knew right away that I was not qualified to take on.

“We want you to produce,” he said, “book-length literary translations of selections from masterpieces of classical Persian literature. All told there are ten. We’re asking you to do five at a time.”

I did not hesitate. I immediately rejected his offer. While I spoke some Persian, I did not read it. How could I possibly presume to translate from it? Surely, I asked, there were bilingual poets and writers capable of doing this work. Why wasn’t he talking to them? He’d reached out to them first, he said, but, with very few exceptions, none were interested in working on classical texts, and the ones who did had either not responded to his query or had told him outright that they had other commitments. Since he wanted work to start on the project as soon as possible, he’d decided not to wait for them.

I pushed back. Given my lack of the obvious minimum qualifications, I said, I did not see how I could accept his commission or do the work with any integrity. Mr. Faridzadeh responded by pointing out to me something that I already knew, the long history of poets translating works from languages in which they were not literate by relying on informants and what are known in the field of translation as “trots” or “ponies.” These are literal or near-literal versions done by native speakers that the poets then use as a basis for the literary translations they produce. ISIC would provide me, he said, with English-language versions of the original texts that were widely recognized as valid, as well as access to scholars who could answer my questions and help me with any difficulties. Moreover, he went on, since he wanted the translations to stand on their own as contemporary American literature, as something a general readership might actually enjoy reading, he preferred the idea of working with someone like me, a native English-speaking poet, to working with someone who was bilingual but had neither a poet’s ear nor a poet’s way with words.

I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of earning myself a footnote in American literary history by producing these translations did not appeal to me. What ultimately persuaded me to accept ISIC’s commission, however, was a point Mr. Faridzadeh made about the generations of Iranian Americans who did not read Persian and for whom translations like the ones ISIC wanted to publish would be their only access to the classical literature that was part of their heritage. I thought about my son and others like him. They deserved, I thought, access to a version of that heritage that would “sing” in their dominant tongue the way the original “sang” in Persian. So, I agreed to produce a sample couple of pages from Saadi’s Gulistan, and when Mr. Faridzadeh called me a week or so later to tell me the project was mine if I wanted it, I accepted, though I was not at all prepared for the politics of the terrain I was entering.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tale – Part Four: How I Came to Play a Very Small Role in Saadi’s Travels Through the World

There were times I wished
I’d apprenticed to a sushi chef and learned
to wield a sharp, clean blade, and times I wanted
only to walk the marbled length of museum galleries,
opening window after window on the centuries.
What I know now came mostly from learning
to sit still, opening books and letting language
take me out of myself and back again until I
could find my way to some shore resembling
knowledge, and there at last make my own fire.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Labor

Bezos, Musk and Branson strapping the rich to rockets and shooting them at the moon is, in theory, quite appealing. They won’t send poets up there even though poets and astronauts are the same – it’s just the pay-grade that differs. Both reach out into the vast nothingness, return from the overwhelming emptiness with similar sentiment: the world is fragile. And beautiful. And insignificant.

Most poets prefer to stay grounded, don’t stretch to such perilous missions, play it safe, take what earthly succor they can. It seems the further out you are prepared to go the harder it is to attach value to your assignment. I could put on a vest, jog a few laps around the local park, say that I was doing it to save the barn owl or a rare breed of newt and I’d easily raise a few quid. If I told you I was taking a journey, a voyage into the great unknown of a poem, that this odyssey was taking place inside my head, a venture into the unmeasured depths of the imagination but for a similar cause you’d be far less inclined to part with your hard earned.

The first few times I got paid for my writing taught me a lot about how we calculate the value of such work. It was a lesson that came in three stages. I understand it’s a common experience. On the first occasion I didn’t feel worthy of the fee, I felt a little shame and embarrassment. The second time the money felt about right, I was comfortable, confident, assured but by the third time I realised that no matter what you paid me it would never be enough. This is not to say that I thought that my work was astonishingly brilliant just that there was a spectacular randomness about putting a price on it. There was an absurdity to it. It couldn’t be done with any sensible measure. I mean what do you pay for a poem?

Footballers earn more in a week than nurses do in a year and there aren’t riots in the streets. A diamond is just a see-through stone and poets go to places astronauts wouldn’t think to visit. In a parallel universe, somewhere beyond the moon, kids are tossing jewels into mill ponds as wealthy wives string common rocks around their necks.

Jan Noble, Nº62 Diamonds are (not) forever

It’s been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

–In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn’t remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn’t remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

–I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

–As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had reviewed a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven’t circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

–On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80’s, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It’s not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

I know the unseen work behind my writing, my learning, my community building—but I also know that my “score” does not necessarily matter in a subjective field. I might have the same “stats” on paper as an award-winning, widely-published writer, yet feel invisible. And someone else might be looking the same way at me, though that’s harder for me to imagine, of course.

But I also know for a FACT that I do not do a fraction of what other writers do to seek those opportunities and awards. I spent 36 years of my life working as a public school educator, often putting the needs of others before my own. As a retiree, I get to decide how I spend my time. And though that freedom has indeed given me the gift of ample time to focus on my writing and literary endeavors, it has also given me other freedoms.

Most importantly, I have the freedom to spend more time with people I love—my family, my friends—for laughs and meals and concerts and movies and general ridiculousness. To move my body and spend time in nature. To explore new creative outlets with visual art. To travel outside the timeframe of a school year’s constraints. (TL/DR: The way I choose the spend my time is not always devoted to my writing life, but to my LIFE life.)

I may not get the accolades I see my peers receiving, and maybe I have a little pity party every now & then. It feels good to be acknowledged, after all, but that isn’t why I write. So I’m good. I will celebrate my writing wins. And I will celebrate yours.

But I will also celebrate the heron returning to the local lake. The little boy racing his mom down the hill at the forest preserve. I will sing with my husband at a concert or yell at the contestants who annoy us on Top Chef or Survivor. I will talk on the phone with my son to discuss movies, or his upcoming wedding and new home. I will celebrate a friend finishing chemo, a sunny March day after a week of gray and snow. I will celebrate the beauties of the wider world through traveling while I am still able. I will celebrate each small kindness shown to me and try to show the same in return.

This is kind of keeping score that matters.

Donna Vorreyer, Keeping Score

Frankly, it’s all too easy to find metaphors for life in the garden. Nurturing seeds with a sense of hope, even expectation, sure. Endeavoring to control outcomes though one cannot control the weather? Yep, that too. Culling, thinning, weeding in an effort to produce abundance, clarity, or beauty? Yes; and waiting and working under hot sun or in the pouring rain and being surprised by hail or hurricane or drought. (You can pop any of those words into the “search” bar on this blog page and find times I have written about said weather events.) In the thousands of poems I’ve drafted during the past 45 years, garden topics and metaphors abound. Lately, though, I’ve been dwelling on how change–inevitable in the garden–presents problems to solve but also lovely surprises. And yeah, there’s metaphor in that as well. Though people tend to avoid change, change brings a wealth of education in its wake.

It’s true that education is often humbling. We work our butts off only to discover we’ve been doing things wrong, or ineffectively, all along. That’s one of the things I learned when I began trying to grow things in earnest, and it is also true of my experience writing poems. You have to be willing to make mistakes and accept that you made them if you are going to improve; it doesn’t mean you have to solve each difficulty in a prescribed way. You can invent! As long as you know that invention sometimes fails, you can learn from it. Create a nonce form for a poem, for example. Or an improvised trellis for a squash vine that got a lot larger than you’d planned.

Every year in late winter, I devise a garden plan and order seeds. Every year in early spring, I revise the plan in some way. Every year in mid- to late-spring, the garden looks very different from those designs…it helps to have a flexible nature, since nature hates rigidity and thrives in its own way. Often unexpected. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes quite a charming surprise to which I’m more than happy to adapt–I welcome the variation! It’s a process that reminds me of writing. No wonder my gardening and my poems are so connected: the processes are so similar.

Ann E. Michael, Process & metaphor

Above the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue,
a chalk-white smudge of contrail arcs
across a sky by Watteau. Everything stills.
For now,

driver-attention holds, and brakes are firm and good.
Ducks cross in danger and care, those ancient, storied laws.
Early light spangles the cottonwood.
A flowering crab confettis its applause.

Maryann Corbett, Mayday

I just roughed out an early draft of my next poetry manuscript (and finally figured out how to automate the Table of Contents in Word—ha!). It’s a long way from done: a little short, so I have more writing underway; there’s a section that might be relatively weak, we’ll see what I think later; and I will just generally need to revise individual poems and think about the flow within sections. I’ll take my time with all of it. But the basic structure makes sense, hitting the beats and ideas I have in mind. Plus I’ve been drafting new poems toward the gaps and, at least for the moment, feel good about most of them. The working title is Spiral Hum.

It’s Friday here and I fly out on Tuesday, so I’m in the home stretch on the Storyknife residency. I’ve had a couple of down days for a variety of reasons, all of which seem inevitable. It rains a lot here in April and gray skies wear on me. Social anxiety in the company of people I’m just getting to know: for sure. The ms contains tough material and spending time with it can be hard emotionally as well as in craft terms. Sometimes drafting a poem is a total joy, an episode of absorption that leaves me exhilarated. Other days it’s a grind to haul the stanzas up the hill. It’s certainly demanding intellectual work to analyze a sheaf of poems and figure out how they could be better versions of themselves. A stretch of two or three hours can burn me out. On a larger scale, I periodically question poetry’s whole enterprise. A question from Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” always haunts me: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” I’m still tracking world news as well as the struggles of my loved ones. What gave me the notion that writing is a good idea, in the face of all that?

Well, the fellowship itself suggests that I should be writing–that at least a few people in the universe want me to. This interval is a rare gift, so gratitude picks me up and set me on my poetic feet again.

I’ve also been reflecting on what about my residency has nourished my desire to write, because in general, it has. For the first time in ages, I have utter privacy to calm down and focus. I know for sure that no one will disturb me all day, though I can wander out and talk to whoever’s around, if I feel like it. Mostly I don’t, until five, when we gather for dinner. We do the dishes after and almost always go out for a walk. Then I’m back to my cabin to write and read. It’s a nice rhythm. And I would like an excellent lunch delivered to my doorstep every day for the rest of my life, please. (I have eaten very well generally, both here and in town—special shout-out to Maura’s salmon, chicken soup, and bison meatloaf; Katie’s baked goods; and the oyster restaurant on the spit.)

An equally important factor is Alaska itself. Awe is some of my most powerful poetry fuel. I crack my door and hear owls and eagles. Scary moose are marching around (don’t even talk to me about bears, who are waking up all over the state and feeling hungry). Yesterday I jumped on one of the staff’s twice-weekly errands to town so I could walk along Beluga Slough and Bishop Beach. I was hoping to find a hag stone, which I did. I filled my pockets with a variety of other pretty rocks and shells, too. I watched sandhill cranes, newly arrived. I found a mysterious feather, now on my windowsill, although I’ll leave it here, especially after learning it could be from a juvenile eagle (illegal to transport). The long stretch of sand and tide pools, distant rollers, and the Aleutian mountains beyond were gorgeous, even on a cold, cloudy day. Once, when my head was down, a raptor’s cry caught my attention. I looked up to see a bald eagle—they’re huge—perched on a carcass only several yards away. It was a dead otter and the eagle was plucking out his eye. Jesus, this is a stark, fierce, awe-inspiring place.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 4 (awe and otters)

Grief has chiseled its name in me
like a bored kid with a penknife.

Then again so has love, and
I yield willingly to that inscription.

My heart is a lacework of runnels
etched by a million attempts

at gratitude, even when
I am a canyon flooded with tears.

[…]

I haven’t posted a Torah poem here in a while, so here’s one that I’m working on this week, arising out of the second part of this week’s double Torah portion, Behar-Behukkotai.

The Hebrew word חָקַק means engraved. Hukkim are the mitzvot that don’t make intellectual sense (as opposed to mishpatim, justice-commandments.) Sometimes these mitzvot are literally “inscribed” on or in us, as in brit milah.

I started thinking about inscriptions, carving, the ways in which we do or don’t yield to being changed. The grooves we carve on ourselves through habit, and the grooves life carves on and in us. That’s what sparked this poem.

Rachel Barenblat, Carved

Have you ever done something genuinely kind and beautiful and then chose to deliberately keep it to yourself?

Is there anything soft, gentle that is kept inside — not necessarily hidden, nor embarrassingly put aside, but rather something to be proud of, and yet untold?

And what about a day when we do not reach for the phone, for the camera, not even for the pen. A day when we see, feel, touch, taste and do not have the need to tell, when the experience and its briefness (however long it may last) shall be enough.

Luciana Francis, The Anonymous Life

On the first day, the woman making my reading pass had warned me, “the days will start blending into each other” and so they have, to the point that I am only half sure that I am writing this from my bed, with Rastafarian music and weed smoke from the pavement below wafting into my room through the window, and not the reading room of the British Library because how can I be really certain that, like Alice, I hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole, in another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again the rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next, 

What happened next was that as I was reading the manuscript, the almost endless repetition of the cursive letters made me wonder if I was not hallucinating all of it, the letters, the writer of those letters, myself, my life, the people around me, the building, the garden house of 19th century Calcutta, or the screeching ambulances of 21st century London, and if I did not exist at all, then who was it that I sometimes saw in mirrors or windows, and who was the I seeing it? Was I really in London in 2026 because if I were, how could I simultaneously be in the suburbs of Calcutta in 1873, and if I were somehow here and there, could I walk out into the garden in Chitpore with cobras, mangoes, litchies, and cats named Baguette, how she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

At exactly 5 pm, the reading rooms of the library close. Outside the archives, the world seems strange, less and less itself. The bitter pint of Guinness in the Irish pub outside the archives taste like mangoes of a long gone Indian summer. 

Saudamini Deo, Mal d’archives

                      my heart is broken
it is worn out at the knees
                       ~ Suzanne Vega 

I have forgotten how 
     to do this. 

How to sit with myself
     on a Wednesday morning 
     and pay attention. 

How to resist
     the Breaking News. 

How to resist.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot poem 29 April 2026

This week: a murdered poet, a wild god, the silence of pine forests, squawks, trills, and yodels, and much more. Enjoy.

The book knows that, just like humans, it’s destined to be born and die alone. But it also knows (again, just like humans) that it would far prefer to be accompanied in the meantime.

The book trembles with anticipation when the poet finally places it in an envelope and heads for the post office, launching it on a journey to its reader, though that’s nothing in comparison to the feeling of being held at last, its pages caressed and maybe even folded back if one or two of the poems really hit home… 

Matthew Stewart, The book knows…

Listen, we say, and I try
but fail without knowing it,
layers of sounds untangling
in a mind chaotic with
shattered mirrors. Only later,
in the dark, I hear water,
wind, a single clear tone. One.

PF Anderson, untitled

Do you remember my plan to take January as a retreat month?

Well, that didn’t happen. But I did try and take December as a retreat month and also that didn’t happen. I was being slightly over ambitious. But I have found that being over ambitious often means you end up with something half way to what you were aiming for. I managed to set some firm boundaries around the Christmas break, and I took two weeks off. This is unheard of for me. I even made the decision not to post on substack, which made me feel sick with anxiety. I don’t think I have missed posting on substack in the very nearly three years since I began posting weekly.

I did not write. Not even my diary.

On Christmas Day afternoon, once the guests had left, I crawled under a blanket and barely emerged again for a week. I read. I dived fully into book after book, the deep, deliciousness of disappearing into another world. I did not post on social media. I mostly didn’t check my accounts at all.

The world didn’t end.

I lost subscribers, plenty of them, (waves sadly at their retreating backs) but I was willing to sacrifice that loss for pure rest and the nourishment of being a reader rather than a writer. I did not plug my books, I did not formulate social media plans, or apply for anything, or answer emails, or submit anything or plan a new-year new me. I just drifted. No To Do list, no alarm, nothing but nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, or rarely.

When I began to prepare myself to come back to work I began to check into social media and interact more. Lots of people, lots of writers, had already gone back to work and jumped on the posting treadmill and my immediate feelings were of dread, of missing out, of being left behind of being not good enough because I was still in my blanket fort with my books and not running with the pack. Interspersed with all of the new courses on offer, workshops, events, subscription plans, posts and book news was the actual news in which it seems the world is already on fire.

Truth, emerge from your well and chastise us with your whip. I can’t cope with the corruption in the world right now, the lies and the greed and hatred and fear.

Wendy Pratt, Truth emerging from her well: on creativity and accountability

When I was 19 or 20, I checked out a public library copy of James Michener’s chronicle of the Kent State tragedy. I was at an age where I was pretty sure I was going to keep studying English Lit and planning loosely on a teaching career, though I would change my mind later when I realized I didn’t have the patience and nurturing temperament that teaching (well GOOD teaching) required. For a moment, though, in the summer of 1993, things opened a little, granting some much needed optimism after the Gulf War and a sense of hope and progress. Clinton had just been elected and the world seemed to be righting itself, even though I hadn’t been all that cognizant of the Reagan/Bush eras of my childhood and teen years. […]

The Michener book formed my ideas of what I surely thought we’d never, as a country regress to. For one, the sort of violence that occurred should not happen when the world was watching far more, be it the availability of news coverage, the internet, social media. People would not be prone to propaganda and state messaging as they were when there were less news outlet to cover things and more incentive to toe the line. I was wrong, In fact, it seems almost miraculous that I could BE so wrong. 

Kristy Bowen, the decline of democracy doomscroll

I have been working on a draft of a new poem this morning, “Who Gets to Speak,” which concerns the murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, of Renee Nicole Good, who was at the wheel of her vehicle, her wife in the passenger seat, when an ICE officer fired into the car’s windshield. Good, shot in the head, died that same day, January 7, 2026.

Since the killing, more and more mayors and governors, elected representatives, celebrities, common citizens of these (un)United States of America have come out to raise their voices in both protest and outrage.

Since the killing, more and more of our so-called executive branch leaders, including our worst president, his lying Wild West sidekick Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security, the know-nothing Kash Patel of the FBI, among others, none of whom dare utter the name Renee Nicole Good, offer up fodder of the day to explain away the wholly unnecessary death of a woman a mother a wife a citizen in her Honda SUV. The truth of how the killing unfolded is not known but many in the government, at all levels, have posited their truths. Everyone has the story. No one has all the facts of the story.

Maureen Doallas, Who Gets to Speak

I care
that this is the story
we teach to our children:
because we know

what it is to be
dehumanized, we will never.
Raise a cup to freedom.
Because we know the heart
of the stranger.

Rachel Barenblat, Our story

This post may seem a little bit unbalanced, but I have to describe the good times as well as the bad this week. Let me start with the birthday celebration with my good friend poet Kelli Agodon, in which we had a lot of laughs, some cupcakes, some libations, and some good talk about poetry. I had been feeling a bit discouraged on the poetry front, and Kelli is always good at helping me see the bigger picture on that front. […]

It is impossible to keep my blog apolitical these days. And why try? Not to quote Harry Potter, but as Minerva McGonagal said in the Deathly Hallows, “And his name is Voldemort, Filius. You might as well use it, he’s going to try and kill you either way.” There’s no point in trying to be nice, to not speak up in public, because at this point, they will try and kill us either way, and they proved it this week, murdering a young mother and award-winning poet, Renee Good, in cold blood by shooting her in the face when she was no threat, then lying about it and saying she was a ‘domestic terrorist.’ This evening they were breaking into people’s houses in Minneapolis, where I have many friends, without warrants, brandishing guns in front of children. If anyone is the terrorist at this point, it is the Gestapo-like ICE agents, who seem to face no consequences, unlike our military and police force, for murder. We’ll see if the murderer is brought to justice. There is plenty of video evidence to show that the woman was no terrorist, and the ice agent videotaping his encounter and when she says “I’m not mad at you” he growls “fucking bitch” as he shoots her three times in the head, with her wife and dog in the car. A white, innocent, American citizen – not a criminal, not an “illegal immigrant” but a local, mother of three, Christian housewife. None of those privileges protects us anymore from Trump’s evil personal secret enforcers. We must act to protect our country’s freedoms, or we must leave. It feels very much like the history books, reading about Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s. I remember reading about friends sneaking Jewish Dr. Freud out, and I remember asking myself why he didn’t leave sooner – but now I see, leaving isn’t easy, and a lot of people want to stay and fight to make their country a better place – though I am feeling unsure that that is even possible at this point.

With Trump kidnapping Venezuela’s President and First Lady, installing a puppet President and taking over the country’s oil, and now threatening our NATO ally Denmark by threatening to use military force to take Greenland, well, it sure does look like Hitler’s playbook, doesn’t it? And we know from history that appeasing bullies and dictators – as people and countries did in the 30s – did not protect them. Not being willing to speak the evil’s name does not protect us.

These are serious times, and serious topics. It is easy to feel frightened and helpless and angry, all at once. I am a poet, and so, as we witness these moments, we will write poetry, maybe no one will read it, but we will write it all the same.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Visit with a Poet Friend in the New Year, and Then, Grappling with the ICE Murder of a Poet and an Unhinged President

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
—Carl Sandburg

January 6^th, formerly known as the Epiphany, now known as Insurrection Day, is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. Sandburg has been one of my favorite humans for most of my life. He was a Democratic Socialist and believed in the strength of America’s diversity. In other words, he was a good moral role model—good enough for the likes of Pete Seeger to admire.

When my child, Serena, was born on that day in 1998, I used the quote on a birth announcement, despite my being a devout atheist who believes the kitchen ceiling fan is a higher power.

Their birthday this year was a great reminder of how many true friends they have, people who called and texted and posted about them, brought them thoughtful gifts and gave them thoughtful cards.

It was the most temporary of panaceas. The next evening, they were crying about this headline from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Humane Security: “Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans.” The article is worth reading.

Of course, trans people are not the only Americans being targeted for “mass atrocity.” First, they came for the immigrants. And now, every day, they are coming for regular people who are terrified of a masked militia disappearing them and their neighbors.

Renee Nicole Good was murdered yesterday by an untrained ICEhole with anger issues—because who would take a job as a paid kidnapper and murderer?

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Anger Issues

Not long ago, I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It’s one of those books you hear about so often that you think you’ve read it. (Maybe I had?) It seems brand new at the moment in the age of book banning. And that first sentence: “It was a pleasure to burn.”

From page 79 of the 50th Anniversary edition:

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality.”

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, powerless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”

*

Have you read Bradbury’s essay (included in the back of my edition) titled “Investing Dimes”? He talks about writing the book in the “typing room in the basement of the library at the University of California at Lost Angeles.” He says, “There, in neat rows, were a score or more of old Remington or Underwood typewriters which rented out a a dime a half hour. You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour was out.” He goes on to talk about how writing the book changed him. “Have I changed my mind about much that it said to me, when I was a younger writer? Only if by change you mean has my love of libraries widened and deepened, to which the answer is a yes that ricochets off the stacks and dusts talcum off the librarian’s cheek.”

I cannot tell you how much I love the whole idea of putting a dime into a typewriter, forcing the writer to type madly.

Shawna Lemay, Delicious Books, Beauty Shocks

The shades have no names, so delicate, 
merged, chilled.  Darkly brooding,  
wading into my poor mind.

I’d understand if there were 
only darkness.  But that gray shines 
bright, perfect for cloud bathing.

Jill Pearlman, Bowl of Mysteries

I find myself in a position where I have met my goals. The logical next step is to work in a full collection, and this is where I’ve stumbled. For a while I’ve noticed a nag at the back of my brain that maybe I don’t love poetry enough anymore. I’ve struggled to feel motivated to take the leap into joining a poetry group, I‘ve noticed I’m reading fewer poetry books and whilst I have a lot of ideas for poetry projects, I’m reluctant to begin any of them. Planning my hopes for the year, I began to write the usual poetry related goals and noticed a flicker of that Sunday night/ Monday morning feeling. Something had shifted and 2026 feels like a time to swerve away from poetry – for a while at least.

Some poetry related things will remain. I’ve started a Facebook group for poetry prompts and feedback, a gentle space with no pressure and no competition – just love of playing with words, and I have a Poetry School course that begins next week as well as ongoing commissions for bespoke wedding poetry. Poetry will shift back to being a creative outlet rather than something that drives me and creates the feeling of desperately trying to be as good as all the poets that have numerous magnificent collections out in the world. I’m moving back towards long form writing, winnowing out ideas for short fiction and dare I, dare I say it taking tentative steps to explore ideas for a novel.

Am I just giving up on poetry? No. What I’m doing is allowing myself to be proud of what I’ve achieved and to allow myself to tread a different path and, in a world, where everything is becoming more terrible and terrifying each day, this feels like freedom.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I learned from the snow

snowmelt puddle
while it can
holding a tree

reflection by tom clausen

Brandon Kilbourne has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and over twenty years of experience as a research biologist at natural history museums. His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Obsidian, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Well, this is my first book, so I can’t compare it to my more recent work, unless I compare it to research articles in biology and paleontology… In that vein though, I would say that Natural History, and the associated award, represent my ability to incorporate my scientific knowledge, expertise, and training into art. While the book, and my poetry more broadly, probably has something of a science influence in the fact that it’s narrative and prosy, it’s a big departure from my science writing in that it brings in human and geopolitical history in a way that my research articles simply can’t. I would say that the ability to probe the links of science and museums to colonialism and slavery—and the uncomfortable questions this entails—is something available to me solely through art. Likewise, using poetry, I can explore perspectives that you would not find in a scientific research article. Of course, the point of view of a near-extinct sea cow would not be found in a research article, but I’m also able to include the subjective experience of field biologists and paleontologists, which usually are not found in research articles but more in field notes or diaries, if anywhere. Ultimately poetry gives me a lens to reflect upon science and museums and my place in these worlds, including in the context of being a Black person in these historically (very) white spaces.

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

Good question. I think poetry appeals to me because of its compact form and the challenge of encapsulating in a relatively limited space a deeper reflection or what strikes me as a profound experience. Though some of my poems are admittedly quite long! Beyond this, I’m drawn to poetry given its room for acoustic play (e.g., alliteration, rhythm, rhyme) and the brief mis-directions of meaning or fleeting associations that are available through enjambments.

Another point of appeal is that poetry can generate wonder by renewing and reframing (human) experience, and this might easily go hand-in-hand with natural history museums, which are something of houses of wonder for the natural world. Fostering this wonder is largely a function of their exhibitions as well as their collections—of which usually less than 5% are on display in exhibitions in the larger museums. While I think much, if not all, nature/science writing is geared towards creating wonder toward and appreciation of the natural world, in some ways perhaps poetry is predisposed towards this? Another thing to consider is that science starts from a curiosity manifested as questions (which are then developed into hypotheses). Likewise, poems are often anchored in a curiosity which then begets a question. Though science is pursued with the hope of a clear answer/result, the questions raised in poetry may not have a such an answer (though it’s worth noting that scientific studies also do not always reach a definitive answer or result). Perhaps it’s also that, like science, poetry employs image, comparison, and surprise to develop its insights.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandon Kilbourne

It may be hibernation season, but I can feel the literary world heating up again–professors building syllabi, organizational emails flying. I’m participating in some of that planning energy toward two local events in the next month: “Writing from the Underworld” at Rockbridge Regional Library branch three blocks from me (1/29, 5:30-7:00, a short reading followed by a free workshop), and, an hour’s drive away in Charlottesville, a panel discussion called “Guardians of Wonder: Writing What We Must Not Lose,” sponsored by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont (2/6, live music starting at 6:30 pm). Thanks to an NEA grant (what a miracle to win one this year!), the garden is giving away copies of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World to the first 125 people who register to attend. Both were invitations rather than events I pitched or applied for. A nice effect of my 2025 travel seems to be that people think of me for events more often.

“Writing from the underworld”–not just mycocosms but whatever lurks below our visible lives–certainly fits my January mood. I want to be writing, and I feel intensely introspective, but it’s hard to warm myself up into language. To get started after a break, I often circle around like a dog seeking a comfortable position, chasing whatever dim sparks distract me. I had trouble even doing that this week because I’m so upset by escalating political horrors. I’d promised myself to check the news less often–surely morning and evening is enough–but then what’s happened by 5 pm so thoroughly knocks the wind out of me, maybe that’s not the right strategy. It’s almost as if contemporary media is ingeniously designed to bait and hook a person at the neurological level. Consumer, stay in your phone-cave!

At least I’m reading. I’ve spent this week with some terrific recent poetry collections I picked up at the Punch Bucket Lit Fest in Asheville in September, including Sara Moore Wagner’s daring poems about Annie Oakley in Lady Wing Shot and Han VanderHart’s spare and heartbreaking Larks.

Lesley Wheeler, At the lip of the cave

As I head back to a more regular work schedule, let me capture a few last snippets that I haven’t so far.

–As we traveled, we saw a lot of wildlife.  Of course, we often see a lot of wildlife, a lot of dead wildlife by the side of the road.  But Christmas Eve, as we drove back across the mountain from Bristol (TN) to Arden (NC), we saw a wolf.  You might ask how we knew it was a wolf and not a dog/coyote/fox.  It was a large animal, with a face that wasn’t like a fox or a coyote.  It was far from any house where a dog might have gotten out of a fenced yard.  We also saw an eagle on our trip back from Williamsburg.  At first I thought it was your average vulture, but it had white wings and a white head as it swooped up away from the road kill he had been eating. […]

–Before yesterday, I might have written about how I didn’t do much poetry writing, but Tuesday, I came up with a pretty good rough draft.  I saw the foggy weather and thought about the early December forecast for freezing fog, and came up with an interesting Epiphany poem.

–Even if I haven’t done a lot of writing, I’ve done a lot of quilting.  My spouse and I made 4 quilt tops for the local Lutheran group that creates quilts for Lutheran World Relief.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Few More Snippets from Winter Break

I think of shadows —
shadows of fixed length
people shrinking and expanding with the light
and disappearing altogether at the end of the day
to a place where the disappeared gather
you and I at opposite ends
unable to move in the darkness.
What should I call it?

What should I call the reading
of the last word of the poem
and the inability to go back to the beginning
to go anywhere
because that devastating silence that follows
is the poem.
And that is the reading.
That being rooted in the debris for as long as it takes
for the universe to stop shuddering.
What should I call it?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Nomenclature

What are we to say when we encounter the line “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”? This was what struck the public ear when Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) published “Hurt Hawks” in his 1928 collection Cawdor and Other Poems — the memorable line, opening the second part of the poem, declaring that a fierce, alien view of the world was the deep, true way to see the human relation to nature.

It was also the line that, for some years, kept me from fuller appreciation of Jeffers. The poem is certainly widely known. Anthologies of American poetry typically choose “Hurt Hawks” as a selection from Jeffers, setting it beside “Shine, Perishing Republic” and (slightly less commonly) “Be Angry at the Sun.” But something in the poem’s most striking line always put my back up, seeming a cheap pose: tough-guy Nietzscheanism, as Nietzsche was understood in those days. “I’d sooner . . . kill a man than a hawk,” really? No sense of hesitation for the human? And that I’m-a-no-nonsense-man interpolation, “except the penalties”?

But in recent years, I’ve found myself coming back to Jeffers and the long rhythmic lines, often nine or ten stresses, that became his trademark. And that has meant facing up to “Hurt Hawks,” trying to understand the interaction of the poem’s two parts: seventeen and fifteen lines of uneven verse.

In the first part, Jeffers shows us a red-tail hawk with a shattered wing that trails the bird “like a banner in defeat.” Even were he to survive, the hawk will never again be able to fly — never again deploy the freedom of the sky and the deadly power of its talons. Death would be “salvation,” of a kind.

That picture leads the poem to a meditation on Nature and the “wild God of the world.” Like, say, Robert Frost in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Jeffers rejects the pathetic fallacy, the ordinary human reading of human emotions into animals. But where Frost rejects all human projection, Jeffers suggests that extraordinary men — ah, Nietzsche! — or those in such extraordinary circumstances as “men that are dying” can perceive the god of nature that has been forgotten by “you communal people.” That god can sometimes be merciful to animals but “not often to the arrogant,” which in the context of the first part of the poem seems another sneer at the comfortable “communal people” so distant from the “beautiful and wild” — from the natural state to which they must return in the moments of their dying.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Hurt Hawks

In the monotheistic traditions, the created world emerged from a single, self-contained and self-sufficient, perfectly unified, divine source; and everything those traditions teach us about how to live in the world follows from the belief in that unity. What would change, I asked myself, if we started instead from the belief that the creative act itself requires the tension inherent in a preceding disunity, in the differences between two forces that need to come together for creation to occur?

As the list of all the different “manifestations of attraction” given by the Kāma Sūtra commentator shows, that tension need not be understood as sexual by definition, though it can of course be that as well. Instead, to me, it feels akin to what Audre Lorde talks about in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:”

[T]he first [way] in which the erotic [functions for me] is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding…and lessens the threat of…difference.

Lorde, of course, was writing out of a Black lesbian feminist sensibility, not the desire to achieve mystical enlightenment. Her essay was specifically about the need for women to reclaim the erotic within themselves over and against patriarchy’s pornographic narrowing of that capacity. Nonetheless, her position has in common with the Hindu thought I quoted above the notion that there is no such thing as a relationship that does not involve the negotiation of power—that all relationships, in other words, whether between people or between humans and the divine, are in that sense political.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 2

i reject the idea that any of us are here
for some heroic reason. i think at most i was put here
by the soil to be a headstone carver. to find the skull
& perfect it. there is always a need for
more dead inside the dead. no ending is complete.
even the headstones are licked by rain. fade until
the names are whispered in the stone.

Robin Gow, nail in the coffin

This morning a light wind tickles the leaves and drops of rain, held there temporarily, fall. No bird song yet in the faintly herbed air.

Alt Text says this week’s photo is a moon in the sky, and this makes me chuckle because I wondered if this might be the suggestion. I say it is actually a photograph of a balloon flying freely in the sky back in 2014, and when I photographed it I was loving its flight and its brief moonlike quality.

I did a happy poet dance this week in celebration of the publication of My Sister Went to Live on the Moon. It was wonderful to see this poem on the Atrium site and to remember the joy of writing it. It was one of those intense writing experiences where the thoughts come tumbling out like a waterfall into a fast flowing river. The kind that has me eager to see what has been created when I can finally pause the writing. The kind that when that pause comes I feel as though I have been a conduit for the words and their journey onto the page.

My recent reflection that this might be the year I howl at full moons rather than include them in my poetry isn’t quite accurate now! I have opened the year with a moon poem and followed this up by writing another where the moon is centre stage during Kim Moore and Clare Shaw’s January Writing Hours! The one currently in the notebook is a little rough round the edges, but I reckon some tender editing and a few visits to Poetry Corner will have it seeing the light of day.

Sue Finch, THE MOON POEMS ARE WAXING LYRICAL

In November, I went to London to take part in a showcase for my publisher. It was a really lovely night, which I was extremely nervous about before I went and then when I was there I really enjoyed it. I met my publicist for the first time, hung out with my publisher and various authors under the Little/Brown imprint, including the always lovely Hollie McNish.

I’ve never taken part in a publisher’s showcase and was struck by the different requirements and expectations for poets versus novelists. Poets read one or two poems – novelists either gave a kind of speed pitch about their novel or took part in a quick fire Q & A about their work. It made me feel very relieved as a poet that I could hide behind my poetry! I was struck by how much more novelists have to rely on their personality to promote their work, and quick wits to come up with answers…

Kim Moore, A late November and December Reads Post

Everything about starting Red Hen was a risk, and I often ask myself whether the risk was worth it.

There is no complete answer to that question, but when I think about strategy for the press, I think that we wouldn’t have started Red Hen if I were not the kind of person who leaned into risk. Red Hen Press got to thirty years on a wave of risk-taking. There is a dream that goes into building a press, and then a lot of hard work and labor gets you to the first twenty-five or thirty years. But to sustain a press, you must do a lot of planning, marketing, team-building. The phrase “what got you here won’t get you there” certainly applies to us.

I can still enjoy the occasional risk: a high dive, a long swim, a cold swim, a drive with no gas, arriving in a city with no place to stay, going for a week with no food. I can experiment with degrees of risk personally, but Red Hen is going for the building blocks of sustainability. Our next thirty years are going to center on strategic thinking, planning, inviting more thought partners and fundraising partners to the table.

In the risk of starting a press, there are going to be a lot of hard parts that you aren’t ready for, and you will want to throw in the towel. You are often working largely unpaid during the time you could be writing or making biscuits. But the risk leads to moments of joyful work—finding a great author, editing a brilliant book. This is why I started the press.

The swim this morning reminded me that, in my own life, I will always have the joy of risk. When I swim out a long way, because I believe in risk, I have never kept anything for the swim back. I give it my all; I keep moving forward.

In 2026, as Red Hen Press turns thirty-two, we are entering our next level of success. Our team has a plan for sales, marketing, and publicity. Risk to strategy is a leap from the top of one building to the next, but we have been practicing our jumps for years, and for us, with the ground far below, the leap feels like flying.

Kate Gale, Leaving the Shore: On the Cold Plunge of Risk

These impediments to moving books, this idea of small press as part of the real commodities economy jostles me about.

It reinvigorates in me the idea of poetry as shared life process, not saleable goods. Is poetry 50% hustle? Sholn or share alike?

Conceive hook and impact of a poem or work to place it in “the market”, as a frame, makes a poem an interchangeable widget. This is problematic. It objectifies something tender, careful, playful, vulnerable, ephemeral. An auction block doesn’t honour the spirit of poetry. 

Saw an ad for how art is not the main act if one is to “succeed” as a gallery — it has also taken the kool-aid of capitalism. Capitalism, which is to say to siphon money from working class to the rich, to accept hierarchies as is, to be isolated, specialized, part of the amused, obedient masses. 

Poetry isn’t always sticking it to the man. It is grown within systems. Selling and buying it seems shamefaced somehow.

So many conundrums to solve. 

Pearl Pirie, Digital Chapbooks

It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.

So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”

Ann E. Michael, Small, refreshing

Sanskrit poetry uses quantitative metres based on the patterned alternation of long and short syllables, similar to those of classical Latin and Ancient Greek. This particular poem is in the metre known as Śārdūlavikrīḍita, which is by far the single most common metre in the collection. In this case, the poem consists of four metrically-identical sequences of nineteen syllables each, arranged in two couplets. These are sometimes printed as two long lines, and in Sanskrit poetics each of the four metrical sequences is in fact conceived of as a ‘quarter-line’, meaning that the whole poem, though consisting of four repetitions of the same metrical sequence, is understood to be a single unit.

As the poem is in a metre which would be familiar to any experienced reader of Sanskrit lyric, I thought it was important that the style and form of the translation should be readily accessible to an Anglophone reader. For this reason, I made no attempt in this instance to reproduce or even suggest the original metre in my translation, as this would be likely to produce quite an unusual-sounding poem – the opposite of my aim. On the other hand, a free verse translation would set aside entirely the considerable formal constraints of the Sanskrit poem, which are a considerable part of its beauty, memorability and, for Sanskrit readers, its familiarity. Instead, I tried to combine ordinary English diction and word order – to create a sense of accessibility – with stanzas, end-rhyme, half-rhyme and also quite a high degree of assonance to suggest a formal structure: in the first stanza, for example, there is a concentration of words containing similar vowel sounds (first, is, this, evening, nights, I, filled, moonlight, Vindhya, hills, thick, jasmine, first time). Here is my translation of the poem:

The first man I lay with is my husband now
And this evening is just the same
As those nights when I felt filled
By moonlight, and the breeze came
Down from the Vindhya hills thick
With the scent of jasmine opening for the first time.

And I too am the same. So why
Does my heart so yearn again to lie
Behind a screen of reeds, in pleasure
So tender and so long to take
On the slope of the bank, on the rise of my waist.

In my translation each couplet has become a whole stanza, one slightly longer than the other. Within the stanzas, I have attempted to reproduce the order of thought of the Sanskrit and something of its effect. In the original, for example, the first half-line refers to the husband and the next line-and a half to the nights they spent together when courting: so in my version only the first line of the first stanza describes the speaker’s husband, and the rest of the stanza deals with the nights.

Sanskrit poetry of this type achieves particular density and concision in various ways all of which create a challenge for the translator. One of these is by assuming knowledge in the reader of the wider cultural and literary tradition to which it belongs. Sanskrit lyric is particularly rich in erotic verse, which is divided into many different types and typical scenarios: there is no real parallel for this in any Western literary tradition. Similarly, several elements of the poem assume specific cultural knowledge. There are, for instance, many different Sanskrit words for different types of jasmine, each of which has its own cultural and literary connotations. The type mentioned here, mālatī, is known for its strong scent, abundance of flowers, its use as a woman’s hair decoration, and for flowering in the evening. The Anglophone reader is very unlikely to be aware of different types of jasmine, let alone their different possible associations, so to introduce a qualifying adjective here would risk alienating the reader. On the other hand, jasmine is, I think, familiar enough even to an Anglophone reader – and its strong scent sufficiently obvious and evocative – that I was not tempted to replace it with a more familiar flower with broadly similar connotations, such as honeysuckle.

Victoria Moul, In the translator’s workshop: a poem from the “Subhāsitaratnakosha”

I am honoured and delighted to have taken part in the BBC Radio 4 programme Artworks celebrating 40 years of Poems on the Underground.

You can listen to the episode here.

With thanks to producer Mair Bosworth for inviting me to talk about my encounter with Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Words, Wide Night’ somewhere between Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood.

Anthony Wilson, Poems on the Underground is 40!

I was happy to appear this week on David Bauman’s poetry podcast In Three Poems. I love the format which focuses on (as the name implies) three poems. One of mine chosen and read by Dave, one of mine read by me, and one I select by another poet–Tom Hennen’s “From a Country Overlooked.” We talk about birding (Dave’s an expert, I’m a hack), hiking, the silence of pine forests, and what all that has to do with poetry and my new book Temporary Shelters. You can listen to it at this link or find it on Spotify or Apple.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Grant Reads Tom Hennen and Talks About Birds on In Three Poems Podcast

Today I’m happy to share with you an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, which was just published on AGNI’s blog. It’s from the first chapter of the book, “A World Bewildered,” which explores how creative writers and artists can lean into their negative capability—their capacity to be with uncertainty and contradiction without grasping after clear answers—as an approach to both our lives and our work during these bewildering and tenuous times. This particular section reminds us that the writing process is not just about expressing feelings and ideas or causing transformation in the minds and hearts of the audience, but also—if we let it—a process of self-transformation: an opportunity to change our own minds and see previously-hidden truths and connections.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, You Are Not the Choir – or, Seeing the Matrix

I wrote “Document” last spring at a cabin in the woods in southern Ohio. I call it my happy place, and at least part of every book I’ve ever published has been written there. I remember sitting in a chair by the fire, looking out the window, and noticing sunlight coming down through the leaves. (The word in Japanese is komorebi, meaning “sunlight filtering through trees.”) I’d been thinking—and writing—a lot about memory and the way the self is revised over time. These are themes that come up again and again in A Suit or a Suitcase.

I’ve been going to that cabin, or one neighboring it, for 22 years. I’ve been watching sunlight (or rain, or snow, or high winds) through those trees for 22 years. It’s a repeated experience and yet a new experience every single time. Even if the trees and the view are exactly the same, the light is not, and the season is not, and the time of day is not, and I am not. The perspective changes because the viewer changes.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Document”

When Elizabeth Bishop sat down on her bed to put on her shoes on the 6th October 1979, she was preparing to go out for dinner and due to be picked up within the hour. She certainly wasn’t expecting to have a cerebral aneurysm and die. She was only sixty-eight.

If her death hadn’t come so early and so suddenly, I very much doubt that Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke Box, Alice Quinn’s controversial book of Bishop’s uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, would have seen the light of day. The book is entirely out of step with Bishop’s meticulous quality control: Bishop published only 101 poems and translations in her lifetime. I feel miserable that her legacy has been forced to carry this book of failed poems, private fragments and early drafts that go nowhere. Although the book was published twenty years ago, I’m writing about it now because I only read it for the first time while preparing my recent North Sea Poets class on Bishop. I’d known of its existence, but had been – wisely, it turns out – avoiding it. And I can’t believe there wasn’t more sustained outrage on her behalf.

At least there was some. At the time, Helen Vendler, in a scathing review in The New Republic, called it a book of ‘repudiated’ poems. I would argue that they aren’t poems at all. The most charitable interpretation is ‘raw material’: ideas that didn’t work or go anywhere, and were rightly abandoned. A poem isn’t a poem until it’s ready to make its own way in the world as a finished, polished piece of art; its publication represents its formal gift to the reader. Before then, it’s the – often very – private property of the poet in whose notebook it took root and grew (and indeed often died). Surely this rule especially applies to Bishop, a poet not only with a track record of award-winning books, but also famous for her astonishing rigour – someone who could wait for years to find the right word or phrase, and finally deem a poem ready for publication. Bishop is the opposite of a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness writer; there is something even more violating and upsetting not just in seeing her process on display, but in the false claims for its ‘finishedness’ made to justify the act. Increasingly it feels to me like an act of vandalism.

Lisa Brockwell, Burn Your Notebooks

I’ve tried to understand what makes ‘angels’ and ‘rain’ seem so radio-actively evocative in their context. Of course there’s sheer surprise at the sudden entry of a Judaeo-Christian metaphor, and the incongruous fusion of the bright, sunlit idea of angels with that of rain. However, I think it’s above all a matter of sound and rhythm. The ‘a’ sound stands out phonetically because it’s much more heavily stressed than the only previous occurrence in ‘decaying’. It’s also emphasised by the way the speaking voice moves into it. It seems to me to drop on the unstressed second syllable of ‘Ocean’, at what might well have been the end of a sentence; to gather itself in the following line and stanza break; then to explode into the marvellous ‘ANGels of rain and lightning’. Meter emphasises how ‘An-gels’ divides into two syllables, making us register the n and the soft g as separate consonant sounds, so that the voice seems to hang suspended for the fraction of a second in the middle of the word. This greatly heightens its sonic force and so underlines the leaping way in which disparate ideas come together or explode out of each other in the metaphor.

Edmund Prestwich, Such dazzling genius

This poem appears in Tzara’s 1946 collection le Signe de vie (Sign of Life), but was written between 1938 and 1945. During that time, Tzara stayed in occupied France and participated in the resistance. As he was both Jewish and an active communist, his life was very much in danger, and at one point a hostile newspaper doxxed him to the gestapo. You can read more about Tzara’s war-time activity here.

Before on this blog, I’ve translated sections of Tzara’s epic poem of 1931, L’Homme approximatif—a work that itself shows an evolution into Surrealism from his earlier Dadaist style. Where that early style was absurdist and almost nihilistic, his more surrealist approach introduced something akin to sustained dreaming on the page. A very wide range of emotions, thoughts, and imagery courses through that work. Here, in the poem of 1946, his style has tempered quite a bit stylistically, as he moves from epic to something more or less lyric. Instead of lines that pile up with images and fragments, here he uses stanzas and, at times, relatively straight-ahead prosody. But as in the poem of 1931, he never uses punctuation, he deploys fragments and discontinuities—even if they make the poem awkward—and his imagery and diction are, thankfully, still volatile.

Above the style itself, what captures me in the following poem is the complexity of Tzara’s reaction to the war’s end and the Allied victory. Tzara gives us a blend of gratitude, irony, anger, dread, despair, belief, trauma, longing—a complete disorganization of values and affects, all threaded together in a single imaginative gesture. 

R.M. Haines, Four Poems of Petty War

What about this poem reached out to me? Which part of my existence felt apprehended in (or by) its being?

An elegance in the stanzaic construction. An intertextual friskiness in the speaker’s engagement of motifs and phrases hatched while marveling over the work of another. An alluring ghost-presence of images from Yeats’ poem, “The Sorrow of Love”, with its repeated conjunctions:

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears
And all the trouble of her labouring ships,
And all the trouble of her myriad years.

Or maybe a gist of Yeats’ “Broken Dreams” — though it seems too dedicated, too intent on cherishing what has aged rather than what was empty.

I can’t remember.

The way I imagine it has nothing to do with its reality, or with Tate’s realization. And I like that in a poem. I value being being strung out on a line, trying to locate my affective response on a range between disappointment and fascination. Two friends chew over edits in their overly-meaningful poems. They go out for drinks and leave each other with words. Riddling words that want definition. Poems excel at riddling the definitive parts of language, and — in my imagination — Tate writes “Two for Charles Simic” in dialogue with the possibility of defining the sky or nothing.

Alina Stefanescu, James Tate

You come in from your early walk, tell me you saw a dead swan frozen in reeds at the edge of the iced-up river. Bird flu’s here again. I drive to our land. Black ice on the hill road. A car coming the other way skids and swerves. I pull on to the verge to avoid it. The look of panic on the driver’s face stays with me as I drive on to our track. It takes a minute or two to free two frozen locks on gates. Our smallholding’s three hundred yards up the track, which is white with snow and frost. I park the truck, haul water from the back. The woods are quiet in the freezing fog. Frosted leaves, grass. I know even now carbon is moving, tree to tree, as each one rests. Roots are exchanging nutrients. We are clearing ground for a new pig-barn. The bonfire from the dug-out debris smoulders. Smoke blends with fog.

Bob Mee, EARLY MORNING, JANUARY 8, 2026

The squawks, trills, and yodels of alarm and demand come from the bare branches when us bipedals walk about. Continuously we siphon seed into the feeders, toss the peanuts, slide cakes of suet into their holders.

We know about those deceptive, bullying jays, tantalizing us with their false blues. We can imagine every shade of red that met the hawk’s beak. We know about the House Sparrow’s vandalism and murder within bluebird boxes. We monitor. We maintain. We press roots into the soil. We raise worms. We let the grasses grow. We raise abundant flowers. Everything for you, my friends and yet the birds blow up into the sky like a bomb when we step outside. Donna retreats. The squirrels climb their cursive up the trees and jump their serifs from bough to bough, all the while trilling their loud song. The chipmunks dive into the earth like it is water.

And here we stand, hands on our hips on the patio, scanning the barren canopies where birds huddle like hooded monks on the high branches.

Sarah Lada, Come to This Place Where Only We Are Violent

My daughter and I were walking in the forest in early November. Hamilton, Ontario, just below the Niagara Escarpment. Light was filtered amber through the yellow leaves. The way it reflects bright off snow, it reflected from the leaves fallen on the forest floor. We were walking through a woods suffused by golden light, a continuous late afternoon honeying, as if walking through a leaf itself, some kind of Magic School Bus science trip.

If I believed in heaven, I said, it wouldn’t be the bright green technicolour spring of the Christian right. it wouldn’t be Webern’s boundless, directionless, infinite twelve-tone heaven. It would be this fall. The end of an age. Elves leaving. The mortal forest. The peat smell. No gaudy bursting of flower buds or impetuous birds. This lager-coloured light in a shuffling forest.

I don’t understand those who don’t like all the seasons, my daughter said.

Then we wondered about borders. Where are the borders of colours, when does red become orange, and when does grey darken into blue?

Other places, there are only two seasons. Rainy and dry. And why four? What about the metric system. Maybe there should be five.

We could invent another season, try to find its source in our memory, associations, hopes.

What would we call it? When would it be?

A before-fall, an after-spring. A season of in-between days.

Perhaps it is there already like a silent letter, inexpressible and unspoken. A subtext between father and daughter. The dry season between drops of rain.

Gary Barwin, The Metric Season: walking with my daughter in 2011

What was the question that nudged
me awake, that I know still
has no answer?

I have a memory of pork
smoked over embers, the mumbled
prayers of mambunong, rice

wine scattered on the ground
for blessing; knives slicing meat
to dress in a bowl with lime and pepper.

My tongue is always bathed
with longing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Hunger Wakes Me

rain falls without clouds. without sky. without judgment. timber
by timber the old structures are brought down. a poet of white flowers,
lying near death, discovers salt in the depths of heaven.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

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

Sarah Lada, Donna

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

Dale Favier, Fetch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, football tv

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

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

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

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

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

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

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

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

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

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

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

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

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

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

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

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

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

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

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

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

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

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

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

*

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

james mcconachie, Flickering Flags

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

Sue Finch, MANDALAS AND THE JOY OF THINKING

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

[…]

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

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

Kati Mohr, Makoto

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Adventuring

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

Robin Houghton, Readings, writing, reviews & general catchup

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

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

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

John Glenday, North Sea Line Caught #1

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Rilke’s testament.

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, THE PERFECT POEM?

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass

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

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

Here is a taste of the article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Voices in my head

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

Clare Shaw, Celebrating New Books

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

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

Edmund Prestwich, Michelene Wandor, Ergo – review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Gina Myers, Works & Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Middle-distance death

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

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

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

This one by Robin Fulton in The Great Enigma:

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Overwintering

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

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

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

–The next morning, you are a bird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Deep Time

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

Robin Gow, orchid keeper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, To have the sky on speed dial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above it all, lovers are parked along Mulholland.

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

Rich Ferguson, Along the Boulevard

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Eventually

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

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

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Time

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Every day

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

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

Gary Barwin, typewriter rituals in the ICU

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

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

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

Jem Wikeley, The Long Trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

distant thunder
white curtains billow
in the dusk

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’25

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

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

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

Jon Stone, Taper #14 / The Whisky Shop

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

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

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

That energy of togetherness. YES.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Waxing Poetic

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Fontanel

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Coast-to-Coast: Day 4

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

[…]

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

Annette Makino, Sizzling summer haiku

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, A Chicken in the lighthouse

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Visual Literacy

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Heaven, hell, & halos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wendy Pratt, August Mantra: Be Not Afraid of Greatness

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Before the Fire, Dusk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Night of the Following Day

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

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

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

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

into air—
the scent of a violet sings!

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

serene as the mountains—
thy love

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, July reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

PF Anderson, Once upon a time there was a promise

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, Telling It Slant

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Marshall, ‘Poetry is about community.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View no Fiery Night        by Marian Christie 

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

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

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

JoAnne Growney, Celebrating Poetry at 2025 BRIDGES Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch – August 2025 | Mysite

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

GOING TO THE CAVES

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

Sue Finch, EVENING SUN

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

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

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

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

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

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

I trust these voices.

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

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

Rita Ott Ramstad, Letting the salty flood wash over me

seagulls laughing all day long
two smooth stones in my pocket

Kati Mohr, A Touch of Teal, No, Blue

This week: industrious bees, birds made of text, the rhizodont, International Pineapple Day, and much more. Enjoy.

Despite being long removed from my teenage years, I still think of summer as a time of transition or growth. You return to school in the fall to find out who got taller, weirder, or cooler; what new experiences people had, or friends they made or lost. This summer, I’ve decided instead of discovering something new, I would reclaim something lost. And so, after 28 years, since I first left home for college, I have picked up my flute again.

Through high school, despite knowing that I had no long-term musical ambitions, I was quite serious about it and performed with the local college flute choir until I graduated. (I even have a flute performance to thank for connecting me with my now husband.) I am not sure exactly why I stopped playing, other than my singular focus and obsession with becoming a writer. But, as I remember it, I put my flute away after my senior year ended, and it sat in its case, moving with me from city to city and home to home for decades. Ocassionally, my parents or in-laws would ask if I ever planned to play again, and I have always thought that I would, perhaps in some old lady orchestra. Yet still, my flute sat on the bottom shelf in the basement.

And then, earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to see contemporary dance legend Twyla Tharp’s newest work, which is set to music from Philip Glass that features the flute extensively. I left the performance wondering—what did my middle-aged brain remember, and could I be nearing a tipping point where, if I don’t start to reclaim what it remembers, I might lose it completely?

And so, a few weeks later, on a night when I had the house completely to myself and thus could embarrass myself privately, I went down to the basement and dug out my flute and all the sheet music I could find. Nervously, I assembled my flute and brought it to my lips, which to my great surprise instinctively formed an embouchure. I then gathered my yoga breath and put my fingers where I thought they might go to play a D. And what do you know? It made the sound I remembered, vibrato and all.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Who will you be at the end of the summer?

I’m trying out my boundaries and saying yes to more opportunities. Who knows, maybe I’ll even teach again? I don’t want to live my life in fear anymore, especially when the world is so uncertain around us. I can’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, but I can stop letting fear make my decisions.

So, I am starting a new class on essay writing, and I may try to put together a manuscript of essays. I may even try my hand at YA fiction after many years of avoiding it.

It starts inside us. If we are afraid of everything, we will not act in the way that’s probably the best for our lives. And our lives are so short! If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been talking about the deaths of two friends in the last year. It made me realize that no matter how safe, how good, how many right things you do, you really can’t protect yourself, and in that case, why not: write the authentic truth about your life? Venture further out into areas that might not be exactly the best for your disability or food allergies but might be an excellent way to connect with a new community of writers? Why not try walking a little further every day in the lavender farm (or your local trail,) because maybe right now is the best my body will ever be? Why not stand up to bullies in politics, or befriend someone who is a little different form you, or read whatever books you like no matter who says they’re okay/appropriate? If I am a poet, why can’t I also write essays or fiction? Lots of my writer friends do this already. This made me think about the cages we put ourselves into, the prisons that are our routines or relationships that hurt us or a country that doesn’t value us, or people that don’t treat us with respect. Why not reach farther, try a little bit harder, face more risk?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New poems in Flare, Upcoming Appearances: Nature Writing Conference, Not Being Fearful, More Lavender and Hummingbirds

i tell my doctor that i don’t want him
recording any more information about me
being trans. i think of a running bible of
my body. what kinds of notes has he taken
over the years? did he note
when i first grew a full beard? did he record
the times i came in a dress & the times
i did not. i look up diy hormones.
one website has a list of rituals.
go out to the forest & perform one & feel
nothing has changed. what level of belief
do you need for a gender ritual to take?

Robin Gow, 6/29

Michigan “writer, editor, educator, dancer, and, more importantly, learner” Leigh Sugar’s full-length poetry debut is Freeland (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), a collection that opens with the information that “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.” Framed as “an impossible love story,” Freeland “examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.” As the press release continues: “Drawing critical connections between personal and family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the racial imaginary of whiteness, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.”

I’m intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay, writing on loss, love, grief and language, wrapping in threads of family story, poetics and how best one might articulate across such potentially vast distances. As she writes as part of the extended sequence “FREELAND: AN ERASURE”: “Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon oof the punitive form. // In profile, I separate from this justice. // Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter. // Dear anyone.” Freeland exists as an interesting counterpoint to other contemporary literary titles that have explored the prison system, whether Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng writing her father through the poetry collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2017), or the collaborative study between photographer Deborah Luster and the late American poet C.D. Wright, One Big Self: an investigation (Lost Roads, 2003; Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007) [see my review of such here]. Sugar centres her specifics around the abstract of human space and interaction, connection and disconnection, composing a lyric of deeply-crafted lines that braid lived experience, whether by the narrator or her “beloved,” across a poetics around human connection, even and especially amid such punitive disruption. “A smile,” she writes, to open the poem “REPRESSION,” “when the officer commands I stop // touching you. The space between shame // and pleasure shorter than the scythe- // shaped stretch of shoulder // revealed when my shirtsleeve slips off // the me whose swift hands leave your neck to right the slip // then return to my own lap. I sag, // guilty, still, still under the camera.”

rob mclennan, Leigh Sugar, Freeland

I can’t think of two busy places that are more different. Even in the crowded, electric areas of Tokyo, even in Shibuya with its famous scramble, there was a sort of order, a vibe that was polite and even hushed in the train stations and on the streets. Nashville, on the other hand, was a cacophony. Neon signs announcing celebrity bars flanked both sides of Broadway. Each one had a band playing and, although I’m sure the bands could be distinctly heard inside the bars, outside on the sidewalk, it was an assault of drums and chords. Every inch of real estate around the Country Hall of Fame and the Ryman was filled with restaurants and retail stores, and there were apartment complexes with more retail spaces under construction everywhere we turned.

It made me consider how some words embody different meanings. Both of these places are tourist destinations and therefore are busy. Synonyms for busy fall into both negative and positive connotations. Negative? Strenuous, hectic, tiring, swarming, teeming. More positive? Energetic, active, lively, bustling, vibrant, buzzy. A few that could be either?Astir, thronging, eventful, crowded. (I just re-read what I wrote up above, and —order, vibe and hushed versus cacophony and assault — it’s pretty clear which experience of busy I preferred.) But even the most accurate words sometimes aren’t enough.

This is part of the difficulty of writing about a place that you do not claim as your own. Your biases come through in language, even when you are trying to simply convey, perhaps, a narrative or a description that struck you in your travels. I have traveled a lot, and well-meaning people always say, “It must give you so much to write about!” Not really. I find that I struggle to write in a meaningful way about travel much of the time. I started three pieces of writing while in Japan and decided to do what I do at home—let something in my surroundings serve as an entry point to a bigger idea or theme rather than to write directly about the experience of traveling. We’ll see how it works.

Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part 2

A couple of weeks ago I did a reading with Peter Kenny at at Arundel Arts Junction, a lovely eclectic event which also included a comic improv act, jazz for keyboard and sax, a photography presentation and more – it’s all happening in Arundel, people!

Peter and I are doing another joint reading at In-Words this coming Tuesday 24th June from 7.30 at West Greenwich Library, together with fellow Telltale Poet Sarah Barnsley. As well as reading our poems we’ll also be chatting & taking questions about Telltale Press. It’s free, and there are refreshments – come if you can!

Yesterday I was reading in the home of a very good friend. She basically asked me to come and talk about the book, and read a few poems, for a group of her friends. Susan’s enthusiasm and unwavering support for my work are both astonishing. So there I was with a small group of women, telling them a bit about the book, reading some of the poems and answering questions. It was a lovely intimate event. And I sold ten books! Much gratitude to Susan.

Robin Houghton, Book promo: readings, reviews, articles… plus other stuff

Bradford Literature Festival is my favourite festival. It’s immense – massive enough to have its own road signs – but at the same time it makes Bradford into a friendly literature village, where everyone knows everyone, including some of the biggest brightest stars in literature. Plus they have the best Green Room with the best buffet, and a free-to-passholders restaurant with the greatest curry and jugs of lassi.

The first time I worked at the festival, I sat in that restaurant filling my face and chatting to a lovely friendly woman. Eventually, I asked her name, and what she was doing at the festival – to my mortification she turned out to be the festival founder and director, Syima Aslam. Hundreds of events across the city, and an education and outreach programme running throughout the year – but she still has the time and grace to chat.

All of which is to say, that when they invite me to run discussion panels, I always agree.

Clare Shaw, Did The Great Gatsby change your life?

Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing. […]

On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures.

Matthew Paul, May and June reading

Sarah Imrisek and I exhibited an interactive video work (BIRD FICTION) at the recent Hamilton Arts Week. I wrote music and poems and Sarah worked her visual and programming wizardry and made a very cool and beautiful projection that responded to the audience’s hand movements.

Our installation also included the video that I’m sharing here. It takes a text about Hamilton, Ontario that I’ve posted below and turns it into the flight of flying birds—the birds are made of text. If you don’t want to watch the entire thing, you can watch a bit and then skip forward to past halfway where the way the birds are made of text changes.

Gary Barwin, THE SKY ABOVE HAMILTON, ONTARIO WAS EMPTY

Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.

I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.

It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.

Beverley Bie Brahic, California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025

All lines of the poem arrive, perfect in itself
except that it needs to be written. The gestalt
in a swift and complete vision. Start. Where.
So many words crowd the mouth. Also tongue-tied.

Jill Pearlman, USHA

All poets/writers periodically hit a moment where things stall: you finish something, a poem, a novel, a piece of writing that’s taken as much energy as you can give it, and you sit back and it feels as if there’s no more to be done, nothing else to be dragged out of the mind and body and put into words.

When it happens to me, as it just has, I tend to read, explore the work of others more than usual, or just get on with life – the stuff without which I couldn’t write anything useful anyway. […]

The meadow is full of wild flowers, so I’ve kept the mowing to a minimum, just a strip by the blackberry hedge bordering the woods where the family can put their tents when they want to camp there. We also have a young male deer who has taken to using the cover as a suitable place to rest. Unfortunately, his self-preservation instincts mean if he spots us he jumps up and tears off in, it seems, any old direction, bounding through the pens where the bees and hens live. Still, he’s welcome for as long as he chooses to stay. As usual, there are always a host of jobs to do in the woods now the bluebells and orchids are over. The hide/ tree house needs to be repaired after some stray miscreants had fun trying to wreck it but I need one of my son-in-laws’ help with that. So much to do!

Apart from that, oh yes, poetry. I read a couple of dull books by what the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski called, in his poem Potato Thief, ‘cardboard cut-out poets’. Saarikoski interests me because he made enough noise to be famous young, was both a radical, political participant and a chameleon-like figure who played both the hero and anti-hero as he drank and partied his way through four marriages, and perhaps inevitably, died young. I suppose I admire poets who are confident enough socially to try to make a difference. I can only attempt to make a small difference, through the writing of poetry, given that I struggle more and more these days to speak when faced by groups of people (football excepted, but the vocal stuff I indulge in then is more often than not confined to howls of blue-and-white-striped dismay at the latest crazy, wrong, anti-Albion decision by an official…)

I also enjoyed a short poem called Temptation by the Romanian poet Nina Cassian in my ‘anthology of the moment’ from 2010, The Ecco Anthology Of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders. It’s fulfilling to explore its 500-plus pages and follow up on the poets I like. I have an anthology of Romanian poetry but Cassian isn’t in there, so I shall go off in search of more of her work.

Writing poems will come again, but not yet.

Bob Mee, OK, SO WHAT NOW?

I’ve had a mighty struggle this past few weeks to do even a minimum of writing (determined to catch up this week…we will see, and, after that, to begin blogging again). Reading obsessively about dementia, getting lost in political news…these things do not seem especially helpful to me.

On the other hand, reading poetry, and reading and listening to poets and creatives about their work is one of my go-to solaces. So here are two things. The first was shared by my good friend Francine, and I’m amazed at the prescience of this 2011 interview with Bill Moyers, who died last week at age 91. Though the news is dire, it’s good to know that such people have been walking this trail before us. It gives me hope.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/27/rip_bill_moyers

I’m also reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön — given to me by my friend Therese — and I highly recommend it.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. (p. 7)

By “concretize,” I think the author means, don’t grasp, don’t turn it into thoughts or anything you can hold on to. Let it be as amorphous as it is. Just be with all of it.

The third source is the incomparable PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA from Poetry Unbound. Clicking on his name should take you straight to his most recent substack. Here are a few lines toward the end of Dunya Mikhail’s poem, which Padraig shares in full:

I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm…

I don’t know why either, but when I’m outside, walking, at 6 a.m., I listen for them just the same.

Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading

This morning, I was walking and texting a friend who has been mostly homebound recovering from hip replacement surgery.  We talked about 19th century writers who wrote in bed and wondered how they could do that.  We talked about 19th century approaches to dental care.

But most important, we talked about the best ways to remain human in an age of AI and how to create projects for students that keep them embodied–and to create assignments that are more cheating resistant.  I talked about Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and got the idea of having students compare them to Thoreau’s Walden Pond journal.  I want them also to keep a journal to see what it’s like and then write about it all.

It was a good text exchange.  Of course, we’re looking forward to a time when we can meet face to face, but that’s not this summer.  I think it’s funny that we were texting about 19th century writers who kept painstaking journals.  There might be a seed of a poem there.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sunrise Walks and Texts and Teaching Ideas

The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. […]

The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).

Martyn Crucefix, Katrina Porteous’ most recent Bloodaxe collection, ‘Rhizodont’, reviewed.

I think sometimes about how every “period” we perceive in history was a bunch of people’s present. How this period we are in will be parsed by some future historians who will be able to see a larger trajectory of time and circumstance that we cannot see, we here, inside this moving vessel of the present-that-will-be-history. Already people are positing just how we ended up here, in these situations we find ourselves in. But we cannot see what happens next, so can only understand the story up until now. Some of us will die without seeing how the next bit transpires — whenever it is, that next bit. We may not even understand it’s happening until afterward. When we look around and think wow, that was a wild ride. But we’ll, of course, also be caught up in the present of that present, unable to see how that unfolds. Here in this present, it scares me to read about other period in history and how long it takes them to shift to something else. Or I suppose it depends on the nature of the “something else.” Things could get worse. Things could get better. Only that bastard, time, will tell.

The thing is: we’re all in this together, we present-dwellers. I have a photo of my mother in Africa. The tour bus has gotten mired in mud or something, and she and the guides and some of the other old ladies on the trip are all muscling the bus, trying to rock it from its spot. It cracks me up, this photo. But it’s spot on. One minute we’re sitting all faced forward, stewing in our juices, and the next we’ve tumbled out to shove, we strangers and friends and enemies and fellow travelers. I wish we were all shoving in the same direction, though. That’s what I wish.

I found this wonderful poem on the recent issue of 2 Rivers. I love its quirky perspective, how the poem plays with the situation it describes, and enlarges it to encompass the whole world of life.

Marilyn McCabe, into a bottomless future, a cold ocean of absolute unknowing.

The opening anaphora — “Always” — commits the poem to a time beyond time, a claim of futurity. In the second stanza, the “But” seems to undo this commitment by suggesting we can never really speak to anyone except ourselves. Words, as Bachmann sees them, are useless communicative vessels. Or else: they are things which taste doubly, as sound itself does a thing to the mind.

Reading this poem for sound rather than meaning, I thought of the Greek word diaspon, which is short for diapason chordon (“through all the strings”). Diaspon refers to harmony, or a harmonious combination of notes, and it draws meaning from the Pythagorean system, which holds that the world is a piece of harmony in which man is the full chord.

John Dryden used this word in the first stanza of “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”:

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

After providing his song with seven stanzas, Dryden concludes it with a “Grand Chorus” that binds heaven and earth, or the visible and invisible, through chorale. The poem dresses up as religiosity but I think what it does is closer to the spiritual, or that metaphysical plane Dryden occupied. The “Grand Chorus” allows sounds to interpenetrate one another, diluting the sensed distance between one and “an other” in that “last and dreadful hour,” when time itself (that “hour”) “shall devour” “this crumbling pageant”:

The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

Italic mine. How are we “tuned” towards making music that separates the seen from the felt? How is a poem “tuned”, so to speak, in order to articulate particular images or structure its desires through the deployment of rhetoric?

Alina Stefanescu, “It tastes of both.”

In Odes 4.2, Horace contrasts his small-scale, precise literary style with the grandeur of Pindar — one version of many similar statements in Latin literature of this period (also in Virgil and Propertius, for instance) about the choice between the grand style of epic and panegyric and the smaller or narrower style of elegy, lyric and epigram, associated particularly with Callimachus.

In the middle of Odes 4.2, Horace describes himself as a ‘Matine bee’:

Multa Dircaeum levat aura cycnum,
tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
nubium tractus; ego apis Matinae
more modoque

grata carpentis thyma per laborem
plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
carmina fingo.
(25-32)

A great gale lifts up the Dircean swan,
O Antonius, whenever he makes for the lofty
tracts of clouds: but I, after the custom and manner
of the Matine bee,

gathering the welcome thyme by constant
labour about the grove and the banks
of the watery Tiber, though small, I craft
highly-wrought songs.

Horace’s meticulous bee is contrasted with the ‘full-flood’ style of Pindar — and of Iulus Antonius, the younger poet he’s addressing. (Although because the poem opens with a famously impressive imitation of the grand Pindaric style, Horace’s supposed disavowal is really an example of having your cake and eating it too: showing that he could do Pindaric style if he wanted to.)

Odes 4.2 was one of the single best-known Horatian odes in the seventeenth century, printed in every edition of Pindar as well as of Horace, and it is cited in pretty much every discussion, no matter how basic, of literary style. Marvell’s Garden and Hortus date probably from the mid-1650s, just exactly the time at which Cowley was writing his Pindariques and Pindaric form in both English and Latin was the height of fashion. Indeed, Cowley’s Pindaric Odes contains a partial translation of Odes 4.2. Here is Cowley’s version of the relevant passage of Odes 4.2, which he — like Marvell — makes the end of his poem (though in Horace it comes in the middle):

How th’obsequious Wind, and swelling Ayr
The Theban Swan [i.e. Pindar] does upwards bear
Into the walks of Clouds, where he does play,
And with extended Wings opens his liquid way.
Whilst, alas, my tim’erous Muse
Unambitious tracts pursues;
Does with weak unballast wings,
About the mossy Brooks and Springs;
About the Trees new-blossom’ed Heads,
About the Gardens painted Beds,
About the Fields and flowery Meads,
And all inferior beauteous theings
Like the laborious Bee,
For little drops of Honey flee,
And there with Humble Sweets contents her Industrie.

This is such a famous passage that any poem ending with the ‘industrious bee’, as Marvell’s does — a phrase in fact very close to Cowley’s ‘laborious’ — immediately recalls Horace’s poem. This matters I think for two reasons that are often underplayed in discussions of Marvell’s poem. First, because the bee stands for the poet, and a poet adopting one particular style over another; and secondly, because Horace’s poem is specifically and explicitly about how to choose a style for political praise.

Victoria Moul, Who planted Marvell’s garden?

Last week I attended a candelight memorial for slain legislative leader, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, at the Minnesota State Capitol, in St. Paul. The next day I started working on an elegy in her honor, and began thinking about the etymologies of her first and last names : “honeybee” and “gardener”. Which reminded me of one of Osip Mandelstam’s most famous poems, written in 1920… and so my elegy grew into a kind of widderruf of Mandelstam echoes.

Henry Gould, Melissa Hortman : in Memoriam

The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve 
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
        thickets sweat poisons
        as well as fruits.

Ann E. Michael, Blackberries

Sometimes the world seems like a dark circle within a dark circle within a dark circle forever and ever, amen. I think I have a story hunger. Stories that will make sense of the things I know.

Saturday I ran on the beach. Every beach run is a memento mori. I don’t know how to explain why it makes me feel calm. The beating of the waves. The screaming birds. The dead jellyfish, birds, crabs, fish.

And the absurdity! Saturday, a pineapple was left by the tide.

Funny that being that close to all the death, brings me back to life.

Ren Powell, Story Hunger

I had no idea it was International Pineapple Day until Kate mentioned it in her LinkedIn post and I loved the serendipity of the fact there was a poem on my desk with pineapples in it. I took this along to share, and I must say that being described as “The Perfect Guest”, was a wonderful comment to tuck safely in my confidence pocket. If I hadn’t had a poem I would have taken a tin of pineapple from the cupboard and celebrated that, but the poem was just the thing for a poet coach to take along. Kate and I had a wonderful chat about poetry and coaching and it put an extra sparkle into my Friday.

The poem was on my desk because Louise Longson had invited me to be one of her guests for her poetry event ‘Last Saturday’. This invite also widened my knowledge of celebration/commemoration days and I chose to follow up on the following themes that Louise mentioned when writing to me: World Sand Dune Day, Insect Week, Armed Forces Celebration Day and Pride. It felt good to put together poems to match the different themes and try them out together in a zoom room.

Sue Finch, A GREEN CARNATION

The main activity of the day was a game of Musical Inks. We had brought our brushes from last month, various inks and large sheets of paper. We splotched and doodled (and danced) until the music stopped. We passed our sheet to the person on our left, and began again. A wonderful exercise in spontaneity and non-attachment. I love making rhythmical marks to music. When twelve large sheets had been passed around the table we had a break for lunch, which was sumptuous and exotic as usual. […]

Then the inks and brushes were packed away and we went to work with white emulsion, blanking out parts of our own and other people’s sheets. Lastly we added to our own sheets a few more marks made with sticks, grass, feathers and so on. We’ll bring books made from these sheets to our next meeting, on July 19th.

On the way home, Jane and I stopped at the Somerset Rural Life Museum to see the current exhibition, entitled Tractored by Beetles: six artists display works inspired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Fugitives’ dedicated to the National Landscapes of the UK. It’s on until Sept 14th; do see it if you can. I love Fiona Hingston‘s work Petiole, a response to a particular woodland close to her home. I’d seen this work before, in her studio during Art Weeks. The way it was displayed in the SRLM, the archive boxes covering a table isolated in the middle of the room, gave the work the space it needed.

Ama Bolton, ABCD June 2025

What are we trying to capture in our writing? A snapshot of the moment or something of the feeling connected to an event? I ask because on finishing the piece on peat-gathering I remembered an early comment from the poet Robert Minhinnick. ‘Even in your bad poems, there’s still the grit in the wash.’ It was kind, forgiving criticism to three underwhelming poems that I proffered to him on a writing retreat in the north of Scotland. A poem potentially having grit in the wash seems a lovely idea. The expression comes from the time of handwashing clothes, when you added grit to the water and lather so that its abrasiveness would help the removal of mud or stubborn grime. The phrase taps into something else a poet might capture or preserve: not the snapshot or the view or the observable but, instead, the texture of the moment. Writing, in this gesture, becomes an attempt to make some past world touchable again.

Niall Campbell, On Writing for the Hands

Many journals, even those that charge submission fees, have fee-free (and even deadline-free) options for reviews. Quite a few will send you a selection from their list of books they’d like to have reviewed. Once you’ve proven yourself to a journal, you might become one of their regular review-writers, a position that definitely improves your visibility. In my experience, journals will respond sooner to a review submission, since they want to secure a review of a new book ahead of others. Some journals even pay for reviews.

Believe it or not, writing reviews is – yes – fun. Or, it should be. To keep it fun for me, I choose books that I enjoy. I want my review to convey that enjoyment to the reader, not turn them off from reading the book. I look at reviewing as a way to open the book for people who might enjoy it, not turn them off. I avoid the negative review whenever possible. […]

The type of review I usually write is one I call “the exploratory review.” As I wrote in “Erica Goss’s Guide to Writing Poetry Book Reviews,” this type of review “combines elements of narrative, description, and exposition. In the exploratory review, the book leads the way instead of the reviewer.” (You can get the guide free with a subscription to Sticks & Stones, which is also free.)

As critic David Ulin puts it, “In the best reviews, the book is just a starting point, which is not an argument for self-indulgence but for its opposite: the deep dive, the conversation on which all literature (and yes, book reviews are a form of literature, or should be) depends.” 

For more on these topics, see my blog post, How I Review a Poetry Collection.

I also wrote an article for the 2/3/24 issue of Funds for Writers: Expand Your Writing Practice With Book Reviews.

Happy reviewing!

Erica Goss, How to Become a Poetry Book Reviewer

I come to you on the other side of frantic and chaotic wedding planning. On the other side of a few weeks of daily poem writing feverishly to deal with the stresses of that, on a micro level, and the world around us on a macro level. While both the poems and the wedding celebration worked out well (even despite the extreme heat that forced us, very last minute, inside a bar/banquet hall for our woodland whimsigoth vibe picnic) this week has been about resetting, cleaning a chaotic apartment, and trying to get my ducks forever in a row on projects and layouts, as well as charting a path forward through the rest of the summer in terms of timelines.

And since it’s summer officially now, that only means that spooky season, the high holy months of September-November, are right around the corner. which I have many delights planned in the form of New Orleans vampire brides and dystopian robot women. But there is still some spooky left for summer in the form of cursed coastal towns and sideshow horrors in some upcoming e-zine action, so watch for those…

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I’m hoping to get a load of new drafts out of this break – it does seem to be a time when I get lots done, so fingers-crossed the notes, and scraps turn into something. I’d like 10 -15 new ideas drafted, but let’s see. Writing has to sit alongside just relaxing, reading, consuming Efes, swimming, snoozing, eating, consuming Efes, etc.

I saw Robin Houghton, Sarah Barnsley and Peter Kenny read at West Greenwich Library on Tuesday. All were excellent. it was lovely to see Robin again, and to put bodies to the voices and emails of Peter and Sarah (Thanks again to Sarah for her kind words about CtD in The Frogmore Papers).

I have to say a massive thank you to Kevin Scully and the crowd at Cowden Pound for having me three to read on Thursday just gone. It was a joy to read in such a lovely pub, with such a lovely crowd. The open mic part of the ending was exceptionally strong, and Kevin is a wonderful host. Note to self, if you want to sell books please remember to tell the audience you’ve brought some with you before the end of the reading…**Slaps forehead**

Mat Riches, I could do with an OOO (out of office)

I’m happy to (tentatively) report that my writing mojo has (shakily) returned. Maybe I needed the fallow time during the week I was bed-bound with my back to think, just think, without writing it all down. In the past week I’ve started reading and writing from Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy and started participating in Kathy Fish’s Flash Extravaganza workshop. So far, I’ve done one or the other every day.

June has been a month of changes and challenges for me, not all on the positive side, either. Reading, music, and, yes, TV have pushed me through it.

Charlotte Hamrick, June Listopia 2025

I realise I’ve not been posting many haiku recently, although I’m just about to submit some of mine to the British Haiku Society’s journal, Blithe Spirit. Contributors have also been asked to select a summer poem from the journal’s archive and I’ve chosen this one by by Matthew Paul:

BHS vol 63, Aug 1996

almost anonymous
yellow ladybird
in sun-dried grass

I love the quiet simplicity of this poem, especially the word ‘anonymous’, which seems to suggest, both ‘unnamed’ and ‘overlooked’ – as insects often are, unless we come into direct contact with them.

Around five years ago, reading Matthew Paul’s collection, The Lammas Lands (Snapshot Press, 2015) inspired me to keep having a go at haiku (they were a diversion from writing more mainstream poetry at the time). Then Presence published a haiku of mine and I was bitten by the bug. Haiku took over, or rather my way of living altered slightly, and haiku became a big part of that.

My way of living has recently altered again. After Easter I took what seemed to be the momentous decision to retire. I handed in my notice – one month was the requirement – and suddenly, freedom. More time for dog walks, banjo practice, reading, writing, drawing, gardening, yoga etc. These are all things I was doing while I was working, so really there’s not much change, but I have more time now, and can do stuff in greater depth. That’s what’s been so satisfying, being able to take my time and do things properly. We’ve even fitted a couple of camping weekends in.

Julie Mellor, Summer poems

What does a “metabolically literate” poetics look like in this time of deforestation, of plastic islands, of melting ice caps and wayward storms? How can we, as writers, readers, breathers, enlist the help of the four winds, which seem, at times, to have turned against us with their tornados and hurricanes, raging at our immaturity, our hubris, our willful illiteracy? This is a question I want to conspire around with you, with other poets, with the trees themselves. A question to breathe with rather than to answer. But from my explorations, I suspect this poetry is a poetry tuned into the breath, a poetry that moves like a steady wave, that doesn’t rush to declare itself, but that listens, and speaks, and then listens again. It is a poetry that may happen further from the click of the keyboard and the glow of the screen, and closer to the lungs, the trees, our shared body. A brave and humble poetics that–like the young heroes who find themselves at the house of the North Wind—is willing to offer itself in order to receive.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tree Conspiracy

i will know it
    outside the dream
when it comes
    behind the calm
because it breathes

Grant Hackett [no title]

When my dad was entering what we now know, but didn’t then, were the last months of his life, we spent much time travelling between Scarborough and Hull for chemo appointments. I’d drive, my dad would talk. The further down the cancer route we got, the more his memories returned to the family farm, the route to the town, stories of what it was to live on the land and off the land and with the land. Stories from his own childhood. He himself, though he had run a small holding of his own, had not farmed since his mid teens when he’d left the family farm to become a Rington’s tea van driver. The narrative was so strong though, the stories like tethers that brought him back; the pull to place like the magnetic forces that bring geese back to their home grounds.

When the operation that he had ran into complications, and he was intubated and unconscious and we talked to him in the hope of calling him back, it was to the land and the work that still needed to be done – the apples ripening, the chicken houses in need of fixing, the sun pooling on the stone bench next to his fish pond awaiting his return there for his morning coffee. But we couldn’t bring him back.

When I wrote about it, later, in my poetry collection, I wrote of him being called back to a childhood in which he had to bring the cows in. I created a version of him that was too busy with farm chores to leave off and return to us. My mum, when she talked of him in the beginning of that most long and dark road through grief, talked of him as the tawny owl in the field that called and called and received no answer.

I wonder if he heard us, through the fog of induced coma, if he knew we were there, holding his hands, when the life support was switched off and he drifted away from us to wherever it was. When I think of those moments now, it is as an observer. As if I was taking notes on my own life experience, ready to create this new narrative, this continuation of a family narrative so attached to place. In fact, here I am, creating the narrative of this time, shaping and re-shaping and feeling the pull of something like home, but a home that has never really been.

When we came back from Thirsk and I dropped my mum off to their small holding and my dad’s grave in the field; the grave that he had specifically asked for, and which had been a nightmare of logistics, the last crazy dad request of his life, the last risk taken, the last fuck you to any sense of normalcy, I returned with a sense of peace and with a sense of gratitude for the stories, the history I get to travel on with.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: My Dad’s Last Days Spent Dreaming of the Family Farm

“The people of Israel, Gaza, and Iran are human beings. No one deserves to live under constant rocket, missile, and drone fire.” These are words from Standing Together / עומדים ביחד / نقف معًا that landed deeply in my heart. “This is not a football game. This is real life, and entire worlds are being shattered day after day.” How much more can our hearts take? And what can we do?

Standing Together is raising funds to bring bomb shelters to underserved Bedouin communities in the south of Israel. NATAL provides trauma support in Israel. The PCRF feeds and supports children in Gaza, and the Sameer Project provides food, shelter, and medical aid. And United4Iran has a fund for survivors of the Iran-Israel war, and their work is well-respected.

Giving tzedakah is meaningful, and in Jewish tradition all are commanded to give tzedakah, even we who receive tzedakah ourselves. But I know what I can afford to donate barely touches the ocean of need. Primarily what I feel able to do is internal. I pray for peace. I extend support to the human beings I know, and I try to extend compassion to the ones I don’t know. […]

I keep coming back to the Amichai poem about turning the swords not only into plowshares but into musical instruments, which I have on a poster on the wall in my office. As difficult as it might be to hammer an instrument of war into an instrument of music, I think it might be more difficult to hammer and reshape the human heart into one that truly beats for justice and for peace. 

Rachel Barenblat, The Best We Can Be: Korah 5785 / 2025

On the eve of his execution in 1896,
he wrote a long poem which his sisters smuggled
out of his cell in a cocinilla: fourteen stanzas,
each with five lines. He called it his last
farewell— Mi último adiós. We had to memorize
at least half of it. It was so hot, and we
were tired of memorizing, so we thought
of going to the corner store to buy more
snacks. With a dramatic flourish, I called out, “Mi
último adiós!”— which made my mother and aunt,
making dinner in the kitchen, drop whatever they
were holding and shriek— Take that back,
take it back, don’t you ever say that again!

Luisa A. Igloria, Very Superstitious

my favourite dream
blossoms falling and falling 
on our riverboat 

Jim Young [no title]

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, A Glorious Shade of Purple

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

Henry Gould, One Year in Poetry

Ventriloquism
a boxing match
of beings and voices 

sharpened by a whiff of the abyss

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

Jill Pearlman, MEMO TO SELF

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

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

Ruth Lexton, He’s Looking At You, Kid

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

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

Wendy Pratt, How to Get Published

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

Katie Manning, My Bad Poetry Podcast

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

Mine

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Mine

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

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

Sarah Lada, Virga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, plane full of geese

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Dacus, Self-Publishing a Poetry Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie Olivia Adams, Let’s Talk About Books

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

A Dickinsonian cascade of variations on a theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Stuck on a call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, cloven, or revisiting the Greeks

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

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

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

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

Kate Gale, Venice, Who Will Tell Your Story?

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Plan B (reading)

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

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

rob mclennan, Laura Moriarty, Which Walks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JoAnne Growney, An AMS Presentation by Sarah Hart

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Rosanna McGlone (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Events: It all works

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Wanting

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

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

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

Kathleen Jamie, On Not Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, RAINBOWS AND CHICKPEAS

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

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

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

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

Ew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Houghton, Free Verse, book launch & readings

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

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

Clare Shaw, Making Our Own Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Everlasting Universe of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Perigee, Apogee

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

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

Niall Campbell, On Silence, Cinema, and Hemingway

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

Kati Mohr, an attempt

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

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

Kim Moore, What the Trumpet Taught Me (1)

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

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Yellow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donna Vorrreyer, Time

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

The book is open . . . [image]

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Burning lines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Lexton, Creatively critical/critically creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lada, Matrescence

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

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

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

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

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

the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive gifting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s rhymes – friction and harmony

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Across the Hellespont

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dark Matter’

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

Jon Stone, “Low-gravity Fever”

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

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

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

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

JoAnne Growney, Power Grows with Numbers

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

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

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

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

Annette Makino, In the room where it happens

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan Tweney, Into the labyrinth

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

Ann E. Michael, Changes & alterations

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

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

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

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Pauline Scott-Garrett

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

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

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

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

Han VanderHart, New Chapbook! Hawk & Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, April Listopia

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

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

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

Maria Popova, Ocean Vuong on Anger

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

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

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

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

This approach has consequences –

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

Tim Love, Floods and trickles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Gale, Do We Allow Ourselves to Breathe?

The future should be on everyone’s lips.

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for

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

Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project

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

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Summer Poetry Workshop

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, National Poetry Month, Pontiac

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

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

Facing my shadows whilst in the bright sunlight of being human feels refreshing. It’s not always easy to acknowledge these aspects, but leaving them in the darkness or keeping them buried them doesn’t improve things whereas thinking about their origin and how they are currently showing up becomes interesting and allows them to be talkable to.

Sue Finch, EMBRACING MY SHADOW

When Big Writer closed her Substack publication, she walked away from at least $50,000 in annual income. (Given her more than 200,000 subscribers, it was probably more.) The ability to walk away from that kind of money is a form of abundance I don’t have. It is one that most of the writers I follow or subscribe to here don’t have—even the ones who are, themselves, making that kind of money.

We each have only so much of it, don’t we? I wish I could pay for subscriptions for all the writers I read. I wish everyone who reads my words could pay me for the labor I put into them. I’d like to pay everyone, out of principle and kindness, but it’s part of my economic reality that I can’t. I don’t have that kind of abundance. This is the main reason I figure I will never put anything I write here behind a paywall. I hope keeping the fruits of my own labor free is some kind of compensation for all the valuable writing I consume but don’t pay for.

Choosing to never put my writing behind a paywall is a kind of abundance that’s available to me, in part, because I’ve chosen to live a small life. […]

I will not pretend that I don’t, in some ways, envy what Big Writer has—her wealth and the peace of mind it can buy about a lot of things, mostly—but there are so many other parts of her life I would hate if they were part of mine. I’m so glad I will never, ever have to make a podcast. Or tolerate commentary about my personal life from people who don’t personally know me. Or be unable to go out for ice cream without being stared at or wondering if I’m being stared at or if someone is taking my photo to post in a TikTok. That is some of what her money and fame and success and all that they can buy costs her. I don’t know that I would trade places, even if I could.

There is a kind of abundance that comes from being an unknown. From living a private life. From not needing to care what lots of others think about us. From being free in the ways that matter to us.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What kind of abundance do you want?

i am not speaking
to the paper shredder systems you worship.
instead, i am plucking a dandelion.
i am basking in what cannot be taken.
my gender, a shovel. my words, spilled
so far & so deep that even the birds repeat them.

Robin Gow, a letter to my senator

Why do we say that trivial, worthless things are for the birds? Sounds like a lot of horseshit to me. And that’s sort of where it comes from. Some etymologists attribute the phrase to the shit left in the street from horse-drawn carriages, fit only for birds to peck at. Others find its origins in the Bible.

Well, call me trivial; I’m for the birds. I like to sit outside in the mornings with my coffee and Merlin, trying to spot the birds it hears, especially the piliated woodpecker that lives around here, the goldfinches that are finicky about staying where there’s nothing good to eat, the sweet dark-eyed juncos, and the elusive red-eyed vireos. One morning, I heard more than a dozen different birds, though I feel certain about six of them were a single mockingbird!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Happy Bird-Day

birdsong
so much birdsong

a truck engine
on the busy road nearby

one slowly descending maple leaf

a sense of anticipation

oh, and a hawk

Jason Crane, POEM: in the air (Wed 1:23 PM)

What can I wish on?
My heart is a candle,
flickering in the rain.

Hope, be
as unquenchable
as chives —

as effervescent
as dandelions gleaming
in a bed of green.

Rachel Barenblat, Perennial

This week: 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: synapses on fire, cryptic colonial zooids, a hearth of spiders, open secrets, a big smashing life, and more. Enjoy.

I’m thrilled that spring is finally here and with it, the National/Global Poetry Month. I’m particularly excited to be writing ekphrastic poems this year. Many thanks to Maureen Thorson for gathering the NaPoWriMo community around another poetry feast and for setting our synapses on fire with each of her wonderful prompts.

Like in previous years, the first draft of each poem written this month will expire when the next day’s draft is posted.

Romana Iorga, NaPoWriMo 2025

Welcome to my *fifth* annual installment of poetry prompts for NAPOWRIMO! You can find past editions here:

• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2024
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2023
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2022
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2021

As you write to the poetry prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025 (or any of the writing prompts published here), please be mindful of these important rules:

• Follow these prompts *wherever* they take you. Don’t get hung up on the details.
• Never, never, never, never, never, never copy the sample poems. They’re for inspiration only! If you borrow style or quote excerpts in your drafts, please be sure to credit the original and the poet.

Carolee Bennett, All new Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025!

In my own current writing journey I am pleased to say I have made a small breakthrough: the daily exercises are helping. In short, I have allowed myself to play with the writing exercises, sometimes using them specifically on the project, sometimes just writing for fun. Reader, I should really take my own advice more often because I’m writing now. I’m writing well and writing with joy and not dreading my desk on a morning. I’m back in the writing flow that I enjoy and it’s because I stopped taking it too seriously and started enjoying it. A mix of less pressure, more joy.

This is the power that a daily external structure can bring to your work and while there is always a danger of becoming over reliant on prompts and exercises, a dedicated practice for a short amount of time is such a good way to boost your motivation and put the determination and JOY back into your work.

Wendy Pratt, April Write-A-Thon

Yesterday I graded the daily writing that I had students do on Monday, the day of the quilting bee.  I had decided to have a quilting bee because we were doing a module on Susan Glaspell’s one act play, “Trifles” and her short story that she created after the play, “A Jury of Her Peers.”  We watched this presentation created by The Edge Ensemble Theater Company, which was filmed in a historic farm house.

Ideas of putting a quilt together by quilting or knotting are integral to the play, and even when I first taught the play in the 90’s, students had little to no experience with quilts.  I thought it would be fun to do a quilting bee for the entire Spartanburg Methodist College community, along with my students.  I hoped that students would make connections to the play, but I wasn’t sure that they would, so we had continued discussion on Wednesday.

As I graded their daily writings, I was impressed with the connections they made without my insight.  Most of them made the connections about the wrung neck of the bird, the noose, and the knotting done on a quilt, connections that I hoped would be obvious but often aren’t.  Several students said that working on the quilts helped them appreciate what a lonely life the farm women in the play had had.   Some of them talked about the stories that quilts show.  Their writing reassured me that the effort to do it was worth it.

I’m at a school where the medieval lit professor has her students make chain mail and illuminated manuscripts, and her efforts made me want to do something similar.  Almost all of the English faculty do more with their classes than have writing assignments, and I’m impressed with the kinds of posters and presentations that they create.  I’m so grateful to be at a place where we all know that there are more ways to assess student learning than in written papers that we keep on file until the next accreditation review.  I’ve worked in places that discouraged genre-stretching assignments for fear that the accreditors would see them as suspicious.  It is so wonderful to be at a liberal arts college.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee

I’ve never read Homer’s Odyssey, so it was a surprise to me to find out that the word mentor is derived from Mentōr, an old man and an incarnation of the Goddess Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Fitting, Mentor offered Odysseus and his son Telemachus advice – and these days, of course, “mentor” describes someone who guides a less experienced colleague.

I’m not sure I had even heard of the term before I was lucky enough to be given my own mentor. For six months, as part of my Arvon/ Jerwood Young Poets Prize, George Szirtes and I communicated by email where he shared his wisdom and insights with me. George is a prolific writer of incredible skill, grace and wisdom, and his role as my teacher is hard-wired into my brain – to the extent that I still ask myself “What will George think?” when I share poetry news or opinions on social media.

George set the bar high: becoming a mentor myself was a scary business. But over the last fifteen years it’s been one of the most rewarding parts of my career. A mentoring relationship is intimate and committed – like Anegla Chevaux says, “Mentoring involves much more than careers advice and feedback on poems, it is an intimate relationship of sharing and listening, of support and trust”.

For the last year, I’ve been a pastoral mentor for four writers on the Writing Chance programme; a New Writing North scheme which supports new writers from working class and lower-income backgrounds. Instead of focusing on their written work, I’ve spent time discussing self-care and wellbeing, helping writers to develop writing routines and to explore career possibilities. It’s left me with an even keener sense of how various and complex our writing lives are; how the writing we produce is just the tip of the iceberg, just the quickest glimpse into personal, emotional and professional world of the writer.

Clare Shaw, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”

I was recently reminded of the poet June Jordan (1936-2002) by the stellar human and 2024 National Book Award winning poet, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Ms. Khalaf Tuffaha was visiting Highline College, where I teach, to read her work to over a hundred students, most of them, who had never heard a poet read before. It was an alchemical afternoon of poetry, politics, and much-needed community.

But things didn’t end there. Before Lena read her spectacular poem, “Dear June Jordan,” she told the students of finding a copy of Jordan’s book in a shop when she was a college student herself. She told my students in a teacherly voice that they heard, “Go home and Google her tonight.” And to my delight, many of them did.

I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.

To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote poetry about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for”(Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.

She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”

Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).

Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now

One hundred daffodils have opened in my yard, and the rocket arugula is ready to pluck for salads. The blueberry bush survived its first winter, though last year’s berries were all eaten by the catbirds, and there’s new growth on the hydrangeas.

It wasn’t so long ago—last spring, in fact—that enjoying these things came without remorse and regret. This spring, though, watching the doves do it in the redbud tree can sometimes make you feel a little guilty for enjoying nature’s spectacle while fascism rises. You can concentrate on lining up the rusty glider’s heaves and hos with the grackles’ squawks for only so long before it hits you that democracy is dying in bright sunshine, too. […]

I’ve been making lots of signs and flyers and even t-shirts for my daily walks around the neighborhood. My first was a test to see how Indivisible Baltimore’s logo would look on apparel. For me, Indivisible is the point at which creativity meets activism. Here’s another: A Torch for the Long Night: Voices Against Fascism. Poets, please consider contributing to this journal, which I am coediting with the phenomenal Ren Powell.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, pièce de ré·sis·tance

Physalia is highly successful organism, widespread across the world’s oceans. Nevertheless, its environment is under increasing threat from pollution and climate change. Its potent armoury of highly toxic stings is no match for this type of attack. Perhaps new forms of cryptic colonial zooids may evolve to reverse the damage… If they had the words, what would they tell us? […]

I have used invented or code-based languages before on my videos, eg The Ferrovores. They have all followed their own internally consistent grammatical rules and meanings. But in Physalia, the “language” is purely phonetic and has no underlying structure or meaning, other than what was in the source sentence.

The biomorphic creatures in the video are not real Physalia, not least because I didn’t have any footage I could use. Instead, the Physalia biomorphs were variously constructed from Particle Illusion (Boris FX), coralline red algae, Muntrie flowers and Eucalypt flowers. Very few people have seen Physalia out at sea (I have a few times!) so using imaginary shapes seemed fitting.

Ian Gibbins, Physalia

In the beam black scraps of stealth
strobe in and out of existence
it hurts to chart their orbits

and I question my eyes
all the way to the car

Paul Tobin, BLACK SCRAPS OF STEALTH

I’m excited to share that I have a new poem published! Check out “Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” which is currently featured as part of Split This Rock‘s Poem of the Week series. It’s always meaningful to see my work find a home, and I’m grateful to everyone at Split This Rock for featuring this poem. This poem will also be included in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which, for those unfamiliar, is an amazing resource for general readers and educators alike.

“Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” is a poem that comes out of my history with speech therapy as a child. The first draft came from a writing exercise I did alongside my students in the poetry workshop I taught last year. The exercise in question is Rita Dove’s “Ten-Minute Spill” from The Practice of Poetry.

José Angel Araguz, new poem up at Split This Rock!

On Monday, we were with the above group in front of the U.S. Consulate in Montreal, standing up for Canada’s sovereignty. Similar demonstrations took place all across Canada, at consulates in every province. I met some good people. One woman had come in from the Eastern Townships, motivated by the controversy over the small library in her community that straddles the border. As of Oct. 1, US officials will prohibit direct Canadian access to the main entrance of the Haskell Library and Opera House, which has been used cooperatively by local residents of both countries for over a hundred years. The border is marked on the floor of the library, but library patrons have always come from both sides, with patrols making sure everybody goes back where they came from and nobody unknown goes out the wrong door. Soon, Canadians wishing to use the library will be required to go through U.S. customs first. […]

I think of the remarkable city of Montreal where I am privileged to live, and how most of us view diversity as one of its strongest aspects. I live in the very mixed-ethnic neighborhood of Cote-de-Neiges. When I enter a metro car, I am always — as a white person — in the minority. This is, frankly, a good experience, and if more white people had it, the world would be different. Around me are people from all over the world, speaking many languages, wearing all sorts of clothing, from elderly to newborns. As we observe each other going about our daily lives, we see our similarities and commonalities: everybody’s cold, tired of winter, bundled up, sniffling — in another month, we’ll all be smiling because it will be spring. We’re tolerant and accepting, as a city; we eat each other’s food and love it, we learn languages as a hobby, we travel a lot, we all share the parks, the river, our bike paths and transit system, our crazy northern climate. In the very rare events when there is a racist incident such as an attack on a mosque or a synagogue, the reaction from our city leaders and population has always been, “This is not who we are in Montreal, we won’t tolerate this kind of hatred.” This ideal of tolerance and protection includes all oppressed groups, from women to indigenous people to those of various sexual orientations and genders. When accusations of racial profiling by police arise, citizens push back. Of course racism and prejudice exist here. However, we do pretty well as a city, living together.

How I wish that more of the world could be this way — and how worried I am that it could so easily be lost! All we have to do is read the news to see what’s at stake. Last night’s video of a Tufts University graduate student being arrested on a Boston street and abducted in under four minutes by a swarm of masked, black-clothed ICE agents was absolutely terrifying. Her crime, so far as we know? Co-authoring, with three other students, a letter to the Tufts administration criticizing its position on Palestine/Israel and calling for the university to divest. She and other students and professors across the U.S. have been doxxed by Canary Mission, an organization targeting pro-Palestinian (they use the term “pro-Hamas”) activists on college campuses. This likely led to her arrest. Canary Mission also has a website in Canada, which exposes the names and faces of 431 Canadian professors, university staff, and students that the group similarly accuses.

Free speech is the bedrock of our human rights; when it’s gone, our humanity goes with it.

Beth Adams, Speech Must Remain Free

ten-word salad
no more sewage-talk
nothing wrong with cardboard

from ebay
from my fridge
from a rubber plantation

Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2025

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been going through my days with half a mind grasping toward prayer, and mostly coming up empty. None of the ones from my childhood make sense for me—I’m not a Christian—and many of the Sanskrit mantras feel both too short and a little too distant, not being in my own language. In the early morning hours when I’m driving my child to school and the beauty of the sunrise awes us both to silence, when a giant hawk watches us drive by from his brief perch on a neighbor’s mailbox, when I’m overwhelmed by the “muzzle velocity” of illegal and inhumane actions coming out of the White House, or when my Telegram chat thread is full of new photos and videos of the dead coming out of Gaza, what words can my mind hold to?

What language to honor the heart-rending generosity of Spring in North Carolina alongside the mechanized death machine?

So, last week I finally sat down and wrote my own prayer—the one I need right now. I’ve been repeating it to myself multiple times a day, honing the language of it as I do, and have also shared it with my son. It feels too intimate to share it here (maybe I will some time in the future). However, part of my inspiration was The Emerald Podcast, in which the host Joshua Michael Schrei often intersperses beautiful prayerful passages amidst the larger experience of each episode. The most recent one of these episodes, “Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis,” arrived right when I needed it, as it is devoted to this ancient yearning I’ve been feeling to hail the Sacred when the everythingness of the world has been turned up to eleven.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Staying with the Trouble

i see a video on tiktok about ways
to leave the united states. you can pour yourself
into water bottles & throw them into the ocean.
you can bury yourself in a time capsule.
hope that when they dig you up
that the world is softer & less terrifying.

Robin Gow, what does not grow legs

So. I’m back in Los Angeles, my old stomping grounds (writing grounds, eating grounds, loving grounds) for AWP and I’m suddenly flooded with emotions. To me, these hills are haunted with the ghosts of my past selves. Failures. Triumphs. Men who dumped me. The one who didn’t. The friends I’ve made and lost. The poems I’ve had published and the many, many, many projects I’ve abandoned, given-up on, or failed to get accepted. They’re all up there in those barely-green hills. Or they’re waving at me when I drive by the sea. All of them mocking me for what I’ve failed to accomplish.

I’m used to that, but then I saw on the calendar of events that a poet who was very mean to me ten years ago (won’t start rumors about who it is), is headlining at a big event. Worse, she’s headlining with some of my favorite poets who I want to headline with. […]

It reminds me again how challenging it is to be an artist. 90% of the time we’re failing. The 10% of the time that we “succeed” we still have to ask, “is this good enough?” And then you throw into it a situation like AWP. This is where all of the “great” writers go. Some of them are your age. Some are much younger. All of them are amazing and you look up at the luminaries on the stage and ask “Why isn’t that me with that book deal, major prize, panel position and group of adoring fans?”

I was feeling really bummed the other day, and got on the phone with a long-time poetry pal. This is one of the writers I most admire and look-up to and wish I could emulate. Instead of flicking me away like the little piece of dried up hair dander that I feel I am these days, she told me that she too is feeling less-than at AWP. Her latest book isn’t ready. She didn’t get the deal she wanted. And at the age she is, she isn’t yet a household name.

I was so glad she told me this. It’s not that I want to see a fellow writer struggling, but at the same time, it reminds me that none of us are alone in this struggle. This poet is one of my favorite people to read, learn from, and most importantly, spend time with. If neither of us ever get to become household names, I’m still so glad I get to/got to spend my time sharing poems with this one true audience member.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Pep Talk for Those Going (and Not Going) to AWP. With advice from Danusha Lameris and Elizabeth Gilbert

Yesterday evening Peter Kenny and I stood in the doorway of the wood-panelled hall at the Art Workers’ Guild in London and surveyed the throng: who were all these very tall, young people? I’ve no idea who gets invited to these shebangs, but it was a mystery to me – ten years ago the event would have stuffed full of the grandees of the poetry world. Now it’s all become a very youthful. Which I’m not complaining about, just observing!

So on to the ceremonies, and we were given readings of all the seven commended poems and then the top three. All poets did a good job, and the judges too, particularly the smiling Romalyn Ante. I particularly enjoyed Kit Buchan’s ‘Hallow’een Ghazal’, read very confidently from memory, and Matt Barnard’s second-prize ‘Two Boys at Midnight’. And then who should be announced as the winning poet but Fiona Larkin –  out of the Pindrop stable no less! –  and someone I feel actually know, with a lovely poem ‘Absence has a grammar’ – actually the title alone is prize-worthy.

I asked Fiona afterwards – what was it like getting the call? “It was back in January,” she said, ” I had a message to call the Poetry Society, and I assumed my direct debit hadn’t gone through or something…” Haha! An anecdote to dine out on for some time I think. How wonderful!

Robin Houghton, At the National Poetry Competition awards night

VerseFest runs March 25-29. The kickoff was at Saw Gallery, Ottawa. It runs every day. We are so lucky to have access to this and some events are even offered for free.

What a strange thing for this rural hermit to be in a city, teeming like an anthill. More pedestrians per block than I’ve seen in months and months. And in a low-ceilinged room, so many tables and familiar faces. (I was too gobsmacked to be social but a few people hallooed me.) […]

I wasn’t going to take the mantle of thankful posting for the privilege of witnessing the poets this year but this process gives me a chance to reflect.

I’m not going to be obsessive like some years, going to every event, livetweeting, taking hundreds of photos, even with fresh concussion, migraine, meds and hiding in hoodie, cap and sunglasses. That was a mad caper.

Pearl Pirie, VerseFest is now on

J and M made me laugh like the monocle de mon oncle in the Gopher alcove. We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns. This is how friendship works between writers: we converse through various texts while wrangling quotations and interpretations as if the world depended on it. As if we, too, depend on it. The as-if is our solace and our shared joy. We refuse the world we are given. We argue over the other ways it could be. We blow up the given to realize the otherwise. We entreat our readers to imagine more— and urgently. We fear dying before the book that escapes us, the book that will free us, the text that will loosen the compulsion or obsession to write. We covet the pure products of pears and apricots. We ode them for blowing our minds. When we leave each other, we return to the world where literature, art, philosophy, humanities, and words don’t ‘really matter’ — or matter instrumentally. But these moments are called upon in nights of despair, and we remember that we are not alone. Not entirely alone. Not utterly so.

Alina Stefanescu, Notes on what the programs called “AWP 2025”.

This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin, wren, blackbird, an extremely jazzy thrush, and somewhere at the back of it all, like Ringo Starr making his presence known in the corners of Abbey Road, a woodpecker, his knocking persistent and timeless. Two dipper came out of nowhere, trailing each other’s twists and turns like Spitfires in an aerial display of astonishing dexterity. Apparently exhausted, they came to land on separate rocks in the stream, their white bibs bobbing. Take away their markings, give them a black beak, and you could be looking at a blackbird. Their song is not a million miles away, either. Then they were away again, lost in their spirals. Leaving the wood for the road back to the car, a wren, briefly at eye level on a fence post, glared at me for a second, then treated me to a solo of distilled purity and scorn.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my blog post from last year on Tom Paulin’s great poem of anger and healing, ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. Again without going into details, it has been in my mind again recently, as we negotiate the slow-slow-slow-slow-quickquickquick of our beloved NHS as it limps to put right that damage. Not the closing of the poem this time, but the first line of its final stanza: ‘the vicious trapped crying of a wren’. As fulfilment of the lyric utterance promised in the poem’s title, this is worth the admission fee (sorry kids) on its own. Everything you can possibly know about wrens and wren-ness is in those six words. I can’t prove this; I just know it to be true.

This led me, by way of faulty memory, to the much unhappier reading experience of being given 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson for my birthday several years ago. It’s not just a book I was unable to finish, it joins a select group of books I have actually thrown across the room.

Anthony Wilson, Birdsong

Let me here jump on the Ada Limón bandwagon. I have not read her work in a while. Here’s one. It’s this line that sticks with me: “I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.” Isn’t it great? A hearth of spiders! I see a flat stone spread before the gape of a fireplace, see the detritus of insect leavings on the slab and the dusty crisscross of webbing, frayed and swaying in a breeze down the chimney. But the fire is just there too, the heat of it also, the spiders warm and hungry, wound in the corner watching, waiting. In an early hour they dart out at a floundering in the lines, something tiny and caught. It breaks free. Something else causes the web to sway, the spider to dart, but it’s a cinder, dry, useless.

But also I love then the quotidian: the ritual garbage rolling. The idle chitchat.

I love that the poem then stops short. I bump into it as it says, “Look, we are not unspectacular things.” Yes, I say. That is true. So true!

This poem billows out into the world just like the stars are fabric-spread across the sky, and we, we too billow in our possibilities. You. Me. All of us. Our hunger, our burning, our wonder, our promise.

Marilyn McCabe, what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Blueprint produce a series of elegant pamphlets wrapped in a distinctive, iridescent blue cover. “Year of the Rat” has a central sequence about a large family of rats who’d moved into the woodshed, but it doesn’t start the collection. […]

Most of these poems would have been written during Covid lockdowns, pushing the idea of survival and what family connections mean to the fore. Covid is not explicitly mentioned, these are not lockdown poems, but it lurks. These poems are an unsentimental, compassionate look at family, how blood connections and inheritances survival and can either strengthen or weaken familial bonds.

Emma Lee, “Year of the Rat” Charles G Lauder Jr (Blueprint) – book review

In the curtains are still we see [M.C.] Gardner’s talent: it is a characteristically vivid depiction of a scene which has a powerful emotional resonance. Not a word is wasted. Each line strives to convey as much as possible, in as few words as possible. As her drop-in revealed, Gardner deploys these skills to explore the nature of male-female relationships. Many of the poems in the collection explore the frustrations, the anticipation, the hopes, the joys, the disappointments, and the memories of love affairs. There are, however, other themes too. For example, melted in cubes examines the transience of life; a walk in the woods explores the palliative effects of nature during Lockdown; the project the unreliability of appearances; the wedding canvas, and the summer exhibition the nature of visual art and the life of the artist; and all rules are suspended and manipulation the nature of freedom.

There are also poems that are informed by Gardner’s Romanian heritage. I found remember the locusts particularly interesting. Here the style is significantly different: ‘we are trapped- / mile long Sovrom train with Cyrillic labels/ locked freight trains with a message of friendship…/ Sovrom wood, Sovrom meat,/ Sovrom grain, Sovrom cement,/ Sovrom pipes…/ we are trapped.’ The cumulative effect of repetition and listing conveys the repressive nature of the regime. Furthermore, it is the directness in these lines and in lines such as: ‘I must watch over my shoulder/ there are informers everywhere’ that makes the reality so authentic and imaginable. Its debilitating effect, however, is left to Gardner’s characteristic imagery of: ‘broken pavements, bare poplar trees,/ silent streets of decaying villas/ with blue paper at the windows…/the old and the young walk shrivelled…/ ghosts of long queues’ and to the symbol that concludes the poem: of ‘the silhouette of the street beggar/ rummaging into the street refuse bins.’

I have always been an admirer of M.C. Gardner’s poetry and consequently had high expectations of this collection. I hope it is clear from what I have written above that those expectations were realised in full. Lovers of imagist poetry will find much to enjoy in discarded objects of a love affair.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘discarded objects of a love affair’ by M.C. Gardner

Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge [by MC Hyland] exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight.”

With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next.

rob mclennan, MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge

I was very happy this week to learn that one of my favourite writers, Anthony V. Capildeo, has been awarded a prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for their poetry. Twenty years ago — when they were writing as Vahni Capildeo and I had a small poetry press called Landfill — I published their prose poem Person Animal Figure (2005), a sequence for three voices expressed through three typefaces. Typesetting a text is one way to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and my ongoing interest in the nature and history of the prose poem began with the making of this pamphlet.

Capildeo has since published many more books and pamphlets of poetry in both prose and verse, and this is the achievement that the Windham Campbell Prize recognises. Something that doesn’t yet exist, though, is a collection of their critical prose, which I admire just as highly. Their gift for fluent reflection on writing as a kind of thought woven into the wider business of living seems to me comparable to that of Virginia Woolf (who once wrote “the peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other”). So this Pinks is a selection of passages that I find particularly illuminating of their own poetry.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #30: A Poetics of Reverberation

The bit of Latin immediately preceding the Shakespeare quotation is from Erasmus’s Lingua. Pointing out how Erasmian Shakespeare is seems to have gone out of fashion — probably just because not many people read Erasmus any more — but in my (unoriginal, if dated) opinion he is much more like Erasmus than anyone else, and I suppose the anonymous compiler of this collection thought so too. (For the avoidance of doubt, being like Erasmus is a good thing.)

Scholars trying to build an academic career have to reserve any such “discoveries” for a big splash in the Review of English Studies, ideally with a linked piece in the Times Literary Supplement. But one of the fun things about not being a career academic any more is putting this sort of thing on substack instead. I’ve done this a few times already — pretty much all my posts in the “from the archives” section on the contents page contain original research. Many of the manuscripts I’ve written about here haven’t been studied by anyone else, and that’s even more true at the level of individual Latin poems: I’ve written before about a tiny bit of Latin that might possibly be one of John Donne’s lost Latin epigrams, for instance.

But today I thought I’d try to write a slightly more systematic account of what you do, as a scholar, when you make what might be a “new find” — when you come across in manuscript what might be a “new” (i.e. previously lost or overlooked) poem by a reasonably well-known author. In this case, a Latin poem that looks plausibly as if it may be by Robert Southwell, the English Catholic poet and Jesuit martyr, hanged at Tyburn in 1595, but which is not any of the relatively small number of his Latin poems that have previously been known, and — more interestingly — is also not at all like them.

Victoria Moul, A possible new poem by Robert Southwell (with a bonus smidgen of Shakespeare and Erasmus)

For Auden and his fellow social realists, the world was to be understood, to a greater or lesser degree, through the lens of a particular kind of Marxist thought, with its essentially Victorian view of history as linear, the arrow of time pointing on to inevitable progress. This was married to a relatively unproblematic view of language and its relationship with the world the poet wished to evoke and the ideas he (invariably a he) wanted to expound. In the 30s at least, the MacSpaunday poets had something to say and every confidence in poetry as a vehicle through which they could say it. The result was a body of work, much of it very powerful, that was ironic in tone, impersonal, favouring (in theory at least) the communal over the individual, suspicious of the profound; what their Irish contemporary Brian Coffey described as the poetry of the audenary.

Of course, decades are not impermeable containers of the homogenous, and not all 30s poets were the same. Indeed, there was a strong counter-current of writing that moved to a different rhythm, or set of rhythms to the mainstream. Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne and the small group of English Surrealists associated with him forged their own individual styles during this time, and that most individual of all 20^th century British poets, David Jones, published his Arthurian epic of WWI, In Parenthesis in 1937. This poem, in which history is absorbed into the mythic, appeared just a year after TS Eliot published Burnt Norton, whose opening lines are an implicit rejection of linear time:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Barker and Gascoyne were to discover their voices in the decade that followed, while Thomas and Eliot, the Eliot of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, along with Yeats, were major influences on the younger poets who came after them. And many of these poets were beginning to publish before the end of the 30s, in student magazines out of Oxford and Cambridge and the anthology The New Apocalypse, which appeared in 1939.

Something had clearly happened to cause this shift, and that something was the imminence, and then the actuality, of a second World War. In the face of such a definite instance of history repeating itself, it must have been difficult to accept the idea that time was a steady march towards a Socialist utopia, and ironic indifference to the difficulties of expression through language may well have seemed an unaffordable luxury. Auden himself tacitly acknowledged this shift by sailing for America as a prelude to more or less abandoning his left-wing politics.

Billy Mills, The Collected Poems of Terence Tiller

You stir the substance of memory:
start and stop and start again, not knowing

what you’ll turn up, where it will lead—
you know it goes deep, down to the water table.
That’s where you seek the roots of conversation.

When you stand at the lip of the well and call,
only your voice bounces back and echoes. Do it again,
start and stop and start again, not knowing but knowing:
in conversation you’d talk with someone besides yourself.

Luisa A. Igloria, In Conversation

Many writers were stunned to learn last week that Meta, the tech conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been using their books to train its AI assistant, Llama 3. In a major story for The Atlantic, Alex Reisner outlines how Meta wished to circumnavigate time and financial costs, and so turned to LibGen.

What is LibGen? According to one site, “Library Genesis is a Shadow Library, and a useful and comprehensive online portal that offers free access to millions of ebooks, articles and pdf files in a range of languages.”

But what exactly is a “Shadow Library?” According to Wikipedia, “Shadow libraries are part of the open access and open knowledge movements. They seek to more freely disseminate academic scholarship and other media, often citing a moral imperative to make knowledge freely available.^”

Fully-flowing information? Open access to knowledge? Free books for everyone in the world? Sounds pretty good. Except, according to Reisner, “Over the years, the collection has ballooned as contributors piled in more and more pirated work.” Now, that pirated work is being used to train Llama 3 and ultimately enrich Meta rather than the authors themselves, many of whom were unaware their works were even available.

The Author’s Guild has initiated legal action “against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using pirated books. If your book was used by Meta, you’re automatically included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action…”

To see if your own work, which includes pieces published in literary magazines, appears in LibGen, you can search the database here or use Reisner’s “cleaned-up version” here.

Becky Tuch, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By Lit Mags!

Today, as I walked across the L.A. Convention Center at this year’s AWP conference, someone asked me, “Are you important?”

“No,” I said, “absolutely not. Are you? I’m nobody.”

She seemed to give it some thought as I continued on my way. She watched me like she might know me, despite my explanation: I’m nobody.

I think of Emily Dickinson’s follow-up line, “Are you nobody too?”

Being nobody has always been a comfort to me. No parents. No expectations. Writing Nobody to contact in case of emergency in my young years. If I’d become a drifter or a grifter, it would have been par for the course. “I figured you’d steal your way across America,” Charity said to me once. Charity, my biological mother.

“Making enough money to support one person isn’t that hard,” I said. I was still in college then. “I suppose if I want to build a big smashing life, that might be something.”

In many of the stories I read, women are not presented as reliable or valuable narrators. You can’t quite believe the woman’s version of the tale.

A man’s story is another matter. In literature, a man’s story is a great thing, a revered thing. A big stomping thing in the world.

When I have a conversation with a man, their words stomp all over God’s world, and mine walk around the edges of the room. A man and his story stare at the sun, the whole face of the sun.

A woman’s story is a small, smudged thing, a stepped-on thing, a hard-to-see thing, a crowded back thing.

In my childhood, adults were not reliable. Other kids were not reliable. God was not reliable.

I always knew my mother was an unreliable narrator. Nothing she said was true. She said I was evil.

I’m not really evil, I thought. Evil is relative.

Now that I’m an adult, evil feels real, not relative.

Kate Gale, Are Women Reliable Narrators?

A lawyer sends me a pdf of my mother’s handwritten will. I’m not in it. I have a legal right to contest it. I think it’s funny that contest as a noun is defined as a competition to obtain something, as a verb it means to oppose something as wrong.

It’s funny in that kind of laugh or it will kill you kind of way. Who wins? And what does anyone get out of calling out the monsters under the bed. In the bed.

I print the will, rip it into strips, put it in a blender with this mossy Norwegian water, and I make new paper out of it. Then I make collages in the shapes of wasps.

And only then do I write to the lawyer, removing myself from her obituary.

Ren Powell, Estranged

I’m still thinking about what Rebecca Solnit says in Hope in the Dark: “Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.”

This past week, I found joy in a March snowfall — out like a lion and all that. I was also working so just had to do quick little clicks on my way there. I would have liked more, but also, I did get a few okay ones! Joy! And there was a lamp in the window, with books. This seemed to symbolize so much for me at that moment. All this weather. So. Much. Weather. But also, a light in a window, steadfast. It feels like we’re all living in a snow squall, in a spring storm. Still, there is hope, there are those making of themselves a light, offering light, keeping a light on.

Shawna Lemay, A Lamp in the Window and Other Joys

There are still wars raging, crying for
attention. There are still pictures of blood
and rubble, renewing grief. There is still a
world falling apart, demanding correction.
There is still a lopsided reality begging
for the weight to shift. The language of
being has bent itself into errors: we
debate in the wrong tense, our curt
apostrophes are in faulty places forcing
mistaken belonging, an unequal grammar
is purging all meaning, leaving untethered
words: words that fall like fire into the
stubborn mouth of disbelief. The moon
hangs like a sword over us. How should
we deliver ourselves to the clouds?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The unravelling

beneath a sky that may or may not answer
i bring out my heart
i begin to read

Grant Hackett [no title]