A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, fall in the northern hemisphere prompts reflections on childhood and attachment to place. Halloween nears. Once again we apprentice ourselves to the dead.
It’s time to bring the potted plants indoors.
It’s time to find the wooden crate of socks
and figure out which ones are pairs. To use
the bundt pan Mona handed down to me
for apple cake; to look up how I roasted
delicata squash last year. It’s time
to pause the New York Times again, to frame
the tweet from Kelli Agodon that says,
“Write poetry instead of doomscrolling.”
Rachel Barenblat, Time
I am honored to have my poem “A Woman on 22nd and Killingsworth” published in the 8th edition of the North Coast Squid.
Please check out the link above for where to purchase this journal doing great work on the north Oregon coast. Isn’t the cover just lovely? I can’t wait to settle down with my morning coffee and check it out.
I have fond memories of my time as a child living on the north Oregon coast at the Tillamook Bay Coast Guard Station where my father was Chief. I learned to swim at the Nehalem Pool, had my tonsils and adenoids taken out in Wheeler, met my first best friend Marla, in Mrs. Jones first grade class at Garibaldi Grade School.
I can still remember my father pulling our car onto Highway 101 and heading south after yet another Coast Guard transfer. As I looked back at the base, and then out to the boathouse, I began to cry. It was the first time I had a feeling that I would only understand later. How a heart can attach to place.
To come back to this place through my words is both an honor and a reminder that we can go home, because any home we have been loved in, embeds itself into the core of our being.
Carey Taylor, North Coast Squid
launching a leaf boat
down the river for my son
i call it daddy
Jim Young [no title]
If you were a child broken by a sudden family move, then you might have a strong attachment to place. In other words: what writers and artists sometimes spend their lives looking for (or trying to get right), you already have: you have carried it with you.
Cornfields by the house, green ribbons and tassels. The bike shed with the flat roof you played house on. Stream (more rightly a crick) where you dumped your organic yogurt, so your mother didn’t find out you hadn’t eaten it. Where you hunted for crayfish under rocks. Bridge to the garden. The garden. The house painted pale apricot with deep peach shutters, repainted a crisp white with green shutters when your family moved. The iron railing they added to the concrete front steps, for safety. You had never needed safety. Orange Tupperware pitcher you watered the front beds with. Front yard swings. Woods where you roamed, found a passable cedar tree for Christmas. Mayapples and Jack-in-the-pulpits, violets and ferns. Burrs. Milkweed pods, fox berries, trumpet vines, pokeberries, dandelions, clover. Swimming in the Rappahannock, the deep cool of the wide, green riverbank. The rocks only half-submerged in the shallows. Swimming there with your friend Celia. Celia’s house for fourth of July: small fireworks spinning on a glass front door, laid down on the grass. Hostas and orchard: peach, plum, apple, dwarf cherry and pear. Pears falling to the ground. Eating pears all afternoon. Celia’s old white horse: Sweet Chariot. Old Bud, the Billy goat that butted you over the moment you turned your child back. The indignity of it. And still you played near Old Bud and the junked cars, wasp nests in their vinyl, heated hollows. Dug for plastic shotgun shells on the red dirt hill. Once: threw eggs in the hen house. Uncle Al, upset about his eggs. Played in the barn with the kittens, the sweet hay. The red and black oaks towering thinly above. Sycamore, tulip poplar, hickory, elm. Summer like a yard stick of good play.
Can we always live here? asks my child. Our house sits on a quarter acre, in town. Fenced backyard. Loblolly pines creaking above us. I grew up on five, then ten acres. Not enough room to wander here, to be outside, away from the sound and sight of neighbors. But still, that attachment to place.
Han VanderHart, A Child of Place
Under the clothes-
line, you strung two blankets to make
a tent. We sat underneath it, shelling
peas or snapping winged beans
in two—ink-edged and ruffled,
a thing that grew in the hot
sun as if from nothing. Bitter
gourd and spongy gourd,
armored squash and spears
of okra—out of hardscrabble
soil insisting on the truth of life.
Luisa A. Igloria, Living Proof
It’s late September, harvest in progress. I think I mean that metaphorically as well as literally. These are images of my dad climbing into and out of the red and green harvesting machines. Our neighbor is a farmer, the grandson of the farmer who lived there till he was 101. I say “our,” but I haven’t lived there for a long time. It was my childhood home. […]
These pictures are out of order. In the one just above, he’s grabbing the sides of the ladder of the steps to go up. With their arms open, this looks like a gorgeous greeting. Up I go, into the harvesting machine. Hello, hello! What a beautiful blue sky behind it all.
When he came down, my dad said it was sort of scary in the machines. Way up there, very loud. It reminded me of when my son was a toddler, and Gus (still alive!) invited him up into the combine. We almost did it, but I imagined my son up in the cab, the noise beginning, the terror, my son wailing, reaching out for me, unable to exit. I couldn’t put any of us through that. Ah, I have a poem about this.
It’s almost October. Later in the month, my kids are coming for a visit. I hope they’ll be able to spend some time with their grandparents, looking over photo albums; if it’s warm enough still, sitting in the yard, gazing over the fields at the windfarm horizon, the setting sun.
If you look closely, you can see my dad on the steps of the machine.
Kathleen Kirk, Harvest in Progress
Listening to the terrible
murmurings of my imagination,
which comes for us nightly,
I hear small assurances
of living: turns, irregular
breathing, half-awake mumblings
But mostly the silence
of their separate
rooms, and how far
away from me they are now.
Renee Emerson, Our Sleeping Children
‘Then came the dead streetlamp’. The poor streetlamp has to do its shining all on its own (as it were), without the help of other sentences starting with then to prop it up. It’s a kind of one-line list poem (within a list poem?) with no safety net. My (faulty) memory has stored it as one Then after another, but there it is glaring up at me in black and white, no extra thens and no endless listyness of listing lists (or are there). It’s a great line. It moves me. And it’s not even the greatest line in the (great) book!
I had not thought about it in years till yesterday, doing other things, when memory of it took me back to the book and got me rereading at speed for the list-that-wasn’t-there, a pleasurable twenty minutes in an otherwise long day (do I put the heating on yet?) of talking and sitting and thinking and rereading things, a line that took me back years (thank you, Naomi, for the recommendation!), to a simpler time but nevertheless one where I had misread the original cargo of the magnificent container ship of the poem while still holding onto the essence of that missing something, something passing (or passed?) of the poem’s original words in my mind and yet still recognisable to me as poetry, having survived.
Anthony Wilson, The dead streetlamp
sing, bird of prey
revisiting the music
of my youth
Jason Crane, haiku: 30 September 2021
Our gardens are lasting longer here in Edmonton than is often the norm. My Facebook page has been filled with photo-memories of past years with snow and frost but we’ve yet to experience either so far.
One day this past week, I was sitting, then, in our backyard and it really did hit me in a “sudden rush of the world,” that “it isn’t nothing / to know even one moment alive.” And yes, our hearts by now are broken, but maybe that’s the prerequisite for knowing those moments when they come. Let them come. Let the leaves come, let them go. Let’s believe the leaves, as [Lucille] Clifton says.
Shawna Lemay, Agreeing with the Leaves
When fall arrives here it’s easy to let the suddenly shorter days and lack of sun (we did need the rain) affect your mood, and I’m not immune to that. One thing my friends and I do to counteract a lack of motivation is give ourselves a month when we write a poem a day (um, not always great at that) and another month where we do a submission a day. It’s a reminder that summer is indeed over and writing season has begun, and always helps us actually get some work done. Those book deadlines can creep up on you if you don’t pay attention!
It is submission season, after all, that rare time when most poetry journals are open (and you’ll probably get some rejections you’ve been waiting a year for – and hopefully some acceptances as well!) […]
I was very happy this week to see Don Mee Choi – whose work I truly have admired for years – win a MacArthur Genius grant – something that can truly alter the quality and nature of a poets’ life. Money, time, and a room of one’s own – as Virginia Woolf wrote a long time ago – go a long way towards making a writer’s life possible. But writers that are overlooked, denied grants, awards, prizes – what happens to them? How do they persevere, or even get in the public’s view? It is so easy to give up, to get lost.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Fall Trips to the Arboretum and Open Books, Talking about Taboos: Money in Poetry, Poets and Self-Destruction, and the Importance of Community, and Submission Season
I’m chuffed and honored and gobsmacked to announce that TWELVE, my short collection of prose poetry, has placed second in the Elgin Awards. I’m so grateful the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) for giving my strange little collection of prose poetry some love.
When I started writing the poem “The First Sister,” I had no idea that this would turn into a series of poems — but each of the women in “Twelve Dancing Princesses” called out to me with their own stories to be told.
As I continued returning to these women over the years, with their words taking on the shape of prose poetry, I had no idea that this collection would ever find a home. And I’m so grateful to Holly Walrath and Interstellar Flight Press for taking a chance and publishing this little book (of which I’m so proud).
Andrea Blythe, TWELVE Honored with an Elgin Award
When I set about seriously writing poems in my mid-20’s, the bedrock was there. Though I wrote poems about many things, there was definitely a darkness to even the lightest subject matter. It was how I moved in the world and all my points of reference. I wrote a lot about mythology and history, but my best poems were about witch trials and Bloody Mary. After a reading in the mid-aughts, someone told me they loved my work because it seemed like a melding of Sylvia Plath and David Lynch, which seemed like the highest compliment I would ever receive.
They say, as we grow older, we don’t really change, but really only become more and more of what we already are. The great thing about releasing DARK COUNTRY a month or so back was launching a book so well suited for my teenage girl self (the one who devoured King and Christopher Pike and loved horror that it was pretty much the only thing she wanted to rent from the video store every Friday night.) So maybe, inadvertently, I’ve become a horror poet somehow. Not only a horror poet, surely, but somehow more than I am any other kind of poet I suppose. I can live with that.
Kristy Bowen, becoming who you are
Many years ago, at a concert in Rambagh in Jaipur, the famous Indian singer Hemant Kumar finally got tired of audience requests and announced defiantly to everyone who had bought a ticket, “Hey! You will listen to whatever I sing.”
Not too long ago, however not too far from Rambagh in Jaipur, the unknown devil’s daughter finally got tired of everyone and whispered to everyone who could not hear her, “Hey! You will read whatever I write.”
The dying god wrote in gold an invisible will that read:
“The devil is dead, long live the devil.”
Saudamini Deo, Devil’s Daughter VI
This morning the AC cut off, and I wondered if it had sprung some sort of leak. No–what I was hearing was rain. I usually don’t hear the rain in the well-protected 6th floor condo where we live now. October is off to a rainy start down here in South Florida. If we can’t have leaves scuttling across the pavement, at least the rain will keep the temperature less hot. Can I write a whole blog post about the weather? A poem? I’m sure that I can, but it seems so tiresome. Once you’ve read the autumn poems of Keats and Yeats, why bother?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, “Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness”: October Arrives
The very brief rehearsal of The Rime was an object-lesson in how to coax surprisingly good results from non-performers and improved results from seasoned performers. Our official understudy stepped into the space left by one who was at short notice unable to come. The performance itself was far from perfect; how could it be? But I hope we were convincing, and I certainly enjoyed taking part. All twelve of us will be better performers for having done it, thanks to Graeme. He is an inspirational drama coach. It was great to have a few spare minutes for a Q&A afterwards. We learned that The Rime had started life as a collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth. William wrote one line, scrapped it and left the job to Samuel. Coleridge revised the text many times over the years. […]
The version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that we performed last week was pruned by me to give a running time of 25 minutes and to omit the more sentimental or repetitive passages. For no particular reason I have continued the pruning, revealing four sonnet-like poems hidden in The Rime’s more than 600 lines. My rule is to use words or part-words in the same order in which they occur in the original. On this occasion I abandoned my other rule of erasure, which is that it should tell a different story from that in the original.
Ama Bolton, After The Rime
Rachel Fenton’s Charlotte Brontë is the best friend anyone could want: someone who is there, who doesn’t judge and understands the drive to write and love of books. She’s a sounding board, someone you can run seemingly-daft ideas past and get useful replies. Someone to share a beer with. The poems explore the nature of friendships, how we make family when our actual relatives aren’t available (for whatever reason) and the need to communicate and share stories to make sense of our worlds. The poems are engaging and hold their charm.
Emma Lee, “Beerstorming with Charlotte Bronte in New York” Rachel J Fenton (Ethel Zine and Micro Press) – book review
I’ve already spent half the day resisting the writing of this, but Edmonton poet, editor, publisher, critic and general literary enthusiast Douglas Barbour passed away this week, after an extended illness. He was an accomplished and easily underappreciated poet, and one of the finest literary critics that Canada has produced, something that was also less appreciated over the years than it should have been. As part of editing the feature “Douglas Barbour at 70” for Jacket Magazine in 2009, I wrote a bit about Doug’s work, and my own frustration with seeing how his work should have garnered far more appreciation than it did. He was well-known, well-loved and well-read in the Canadian prairies, but seemingly not much beyond that (although he had a number of conversations and engagements with New Zealand and Australian poets). His enthusiasm for poetry, jazz, science fiction and speculative fiction, as Andy Weaver suggested over Twitter yesterday, was unwavering over the years, and it took very little to get him talking excitedly about any of those subjects. There was always a kindness, an openness and an enthusiasm with Doug, and an involvement in the literary culture around him, even through his involvement over the past decade or so with Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series, or returning to being more involved with NeWest Press a decade or so back, due to some unexpected staffing changes. He showed up to do the work that so many writers and readers tend not to think about, and take for granted. […]
It was Doug who taught me the real value in exchanging books with other writers: the ability to connect with writers outside of Canada. It was far cheaper to get a copy of a book by an American, Australian or New Zealand poet, he suggested, by offering to exchange books through the mail. Apparently he’d been doing this for years, which had, in part, allowed his work to garner more appreciation, one might think, outside of Canada than from within. And consider how it was only through his enthusiastic and communal engagement as a reader that he was able to push any sort of self-promotion. Literature for him was very much the conversation that Robert Kroetsch had offered it, so many years prior. And I, along with many others, I know, am very much going to miss his voice.
rob mclennan, Douglas Barbour (March 21, 1940-September 25, 2021)
[Joanne M.] Clarkson’s poem is a time-machine. Typing those words, I’m struck by how many poems are precisely that. But here it’s not just that the poem woos the past back but that the particular moment we’re invited to visit is one in which the poet steps into an enchanted circle and…goes…somewhere. Is it just that the poet has entered a “thin place,” where the past, present, and future all whirl together? In the fall of the year, it seems to me, we are especially susceptible to such places. Everything is changing. We can struggle to hang onto what we know, or we can, as someone wise once told me, “embrace the changing.”
So that’s what I’m tasking myself with. What are those slippery places in my own life where time has stopped rushing forward and held me in place to look? Or catapulted me backwards, “the clockwise spin / and then…”? When have I felt “such stillness /and radiance, abandoned…”?
Bethany Reid, What I’m Falling For
Last night I found myself in a nightclub crowded with déjà vus.
It was a scene of the already seen, which made the occasion all the stranger, being elbow-to-elbow with so many strangers who suddenly seemed so familiar.
Transient beings feeling like friends with whom I’ve already danced beneath a glittery disco ball.
The music was pumping and the drinks were strong.
Maybe it was all an anomaly of memory, wish fulfillment or a recollection of steps already taken.
Rich Ferguson, A Club Called Déjà Vu
There has very much been a layoff from this condensery of late, but I can feel the snuffling of ideas coming, and perhaps more importantly, the desire to sit down and capture them.
I felt an idea come out of the ether last weekend when I was at the launch for Neil Elder’s pamphlet, Like This. It was during Lorraine Mariner’s excellent first set of poems. Please note that I waited for the reading to finish before writing it down. I’m not a monster.
Perhaps, it really is about what you put in. I’ve been reading, but maybe just being in a room again with excellent words flying around me was/is the catalyst I needed.
I was also reading at this event, and with it being the first reading in public for sometime it got me thinking about constructing a set list of my work. I noted to the audience last week after Lorraine had read a set of new poems that all mine were technically new poems when you don’t have a book out yet.
Both Neil and Lorraine were a joy to watch in full flight and it was an honour to read with them both, and to see them both reaching beyond their current collections to read new stuff, and at least, unlike at music gigs, the audience didn’t head to the bar/loos when the words “this is a new one” came out. There were a surprising amount of references to petrol. I’d even inadvertently included a poem that mentions it as my starting poem. That said, it’s my standard opener – if I can be said to have such a thing
I also read ‘Riches’ (a poem based on cars, sort of) and called it my “big hit” because of the New Statesman, but do poets have “big hits”, or poems they have to read every time? Do you have such a poem that you read every time? I wonder if there’s a Setlist fm for poets.
Mat Riches, Get set, go….
Ah, these poems,
the old monk says,
like a hundred birds
flying together
seeking their roost.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (17)
My dream-life has been off-the-scale intense, populated by strangers demanding I change my life. The tarot spreads of my daily meditations keep saying so, too–that I’m feeling a call and soon to walk away from something but resisting change so far. I must have carried that energy to Harpers Ferry this weekend, when my spouse and I met our kids for a pseudo-Parents Weekend at a rented house. They all seem much more balanced at life cruxes than I am: my husband unbalanced by midlife transitions; my college-aged son, just turned 21, trying to divine what he wants to do with his life; my 24-year-old daughter recovering from a tough summer and pondering grad school. Me, I’m just a postmenopausal writer struggling to straddle different obligations, a bunch of books behind me and more in development, although in general I’m trying to treat myself more kindly. I’m not exactly sure what the big transformation is although my unconscious keeps insisting it’s coming.
It was the perfect landscape for wondering about it, where the Shenandoah and Potomac converge in sparkling streams. Perhaps because we were VRBOing in a Civil War-era house, different histories seemed to be streaming together, too. Union and Confederate troops battled furiously over this bit of land and water; for a while it was something like an international border. Perhaps that was why I kept hearing ghost-men sobbing and moaning during the night, although there’s also a brutal history of enslavement to consider. The river is now lined by ruined mills among which we walked as the morning fog burned off.
Lesley Wheeler, Dream, river, poetic convergences
we leave the porchlight on at night
but I am not sure why
no one is coming
this light weakens at sunrise
as if the lamp itself is tired
from its long hours of labor
and something in the air at dawn tastes of change
whatever this is doesn’t require my permission
i turn the light off and put on some coffee
all the while the entire planet has been spinning
as it does throughout all the years of our lives
think of that
James Lee Jobe, whatever this is doesn’t require my permission
There was more wind than we would have liked, but it felt good to move in the fresh air – with the fresh air – outside of the little black box where we all spend the majority of our days. With another group of students, I would have had them let the wind push them around. I would have had them risk the judgemental looks from people passing by. I would have reminded them to commit, to challenge the onlookers’ projections of insecurity, to confuse them. Forget them. Forget the swan. But these students have been affected by the Covid restrictions for most of their theatre studies. There’s little trust in each other, little trust in in their own bodies… little trust in me.
The sunshine barely grazed my skin, but felt good on my retinas. Since the morning and evening walks are in the dark now, it felt like a flicker of past already. Everything is softer now, during this transition. Winter’s sharpness will come, but right now there is a bluntness to the days.
The afternoon is a oversized, red rubber ball that smells like the dark side of childhood.
Everything in its time, returning in its time with a surprising perspective. I am in a holding pattern. Holding so very much.
Ren Powell, Where the Green Grows
