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 at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: the seeds of books, glamour and poverty, a gull funeral, the green of geckos, and more. Enjoy.
It’s summertime and the writing is all the sweeter. In fact, new poems, reading, and all the writing endeavors are pushing up fireweed.
When I last blogged, it was February. Really? Really. How can that be? I had just submitted then an application for a Jenni House Residency. I hit send on Valentine’s Day evening, about a minute before deadline. I had my nose in bell hooks’ book, All About Love, and I hit send. It was dark, snowy, and even though there were still a few months left in the dumpster fire of a school year (and it was a doozy), I clearly was dreaming of warmer times ahead.
Fast forward to July, and I’m waking up in a sublet apartment in an old Cold War DEW-line station, rattling around in a kitchen that’s not mine to boil water in a pot (no kettle to be found) for Yukon blend coffee. When finished, I’ll drive into Whitehorse to Shipyards Park and open up the Chambers House for the day, first the door, then windows, and the shutters. I’ll switch on the twinkle lights, add mint and orange essential oils to the stink pot, and write. Yes, this is the Jenni House Residency that I applied for in February and was granted, and I am so grateful and giddy to be here for the month of July.
Kersten Christianson, Writing from Yukon
Hello from Ann Arbor. I’ve been here for eight weeks and have four more to go. Unlike last summer, a heat wave sent temperatures well into the 90s and taxed the window unit AC in my apartment. That coupled with storms and power outages has made it seem more like Atlanta weather.
I’ve been doing the day job, exploring Ann Arbor, making forays into Detroit (including the beautifully restored Michigan Central Station, pictured), and also quietly starting to work on the fourth Venus novel, expanding the trilogy into a tetralogy. I’ve got a rough outline of the novel, more detailed outlines of specific chapters, and I’ve started going back through the first four chapters I’ve already written.
While preparing more material for my archive at the Georgia State University Library, I came across my original treatment for Remain In Light. This dates back to the late 1990s or 00s when my then-agent Roslyn Targ told me to get cracking on a sequel because she was certain Conquering Venus was going to be a big hit. Then 9/11 happened. You can actually read more about this in a new interview I did with ShoutOut Atlanta last month to celebrate the publication of Wonder & Wreckage.
The original treatment for Remain In Light is vastly different than the book that was published, but there are some tasty ideas and scenes in there that I’m going to bring over into the fourth novel. Poet/Assassin Juliette Lacombe (introduced in Leaving Paris) is the main protagonist, but Diane is there and you’ll see what has become of Irene, Martin, and Christian, too.
Collin Kelley, Hot Michigan Summer
This was the place where everything really started for me. I came on a course here in 2007. The tutors were Nigel Jenkins and Sarah Kennedy. In those days, participants worked to create an anthology to take home at the end of the week. I’ve just dug mine out to have a look at what I was working on.
I’ve got four poems in the anthology – three I can see now are sketches for what would become All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) nearly fifteen years later. A love poem, a poem about a terrible ex-boyfriend and an elegy for a male friend who’d died that year. The fourth poem is an attempt at a sonnet called “Trumpet”. In that poem, I’m trying to write about the complicated process I was going through of leaving my trumpet behind, of wrestling with performance anxiety, of realising being a musician was not something I wanted to dedicate my life to anymore. The poem fails in its attempt to capture all of this – but what I was trying to write about became, fifteen years later a whole book What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop, 2022).
The seeds of whole books were in those poems – and that both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me. To go on a residential course for a week, to take a week out of your life, to commit the finances to do that – magic can happen during those weeks – but sometimes the magic doesn’t show itself for years, or if you’re lucky, the magic does show itself and then keeps growing for years afterwards.
Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. a poem by Olivia Tuck
What a whirlwind week or two. The last time I spoke to you I was just getting ready to head to London for the Harper Collins Author Party at the V&A. It did not disappoint. It was beautiful, full of light and cocktails and speeches and writers, so many authors gathered to celebrate. I met my agent for the first time in person, and my team at Borough Press who have brought The Ghost Lake into the world. These are the moments that MUST be celebrated, the moments of making it, when all the lonely hours and isolation and compromise finally pay off.
On my return, a box had arrived. The books themselves. I placed them on my kitchen table and left them there, wondering how to approach the anxiety. Then a photo came up on my iPhone that showed me, four years ago, tentatively setting out and up to Seamer Beacon, and a bronze age cemetery complex near my home, finding my connection points and the idea for The Ghost Lake forming, the idea for the pilgrimage to self, forming.
Here it is then, the next journey marker, the next gateway through which the book has passed. Next stop: launch day.
In stark contrast to the excitement and glamour of the last couple of weeks, this has been my worst month work wise as I’ve needed to devote time to work I won’t be paid for for a while. The eternal circle of being freelance, of being an author is that some months you will get paid for two or three jobs at once, and some months you will get paid for none. I made less than £4 an hour this month. I’m hoping that as an average it will work out a little better, but I’m not sure I’m quite making minimum wage this year.
Wendy Pratt, Two Sides to the Author Life
Because of my daughters, I completely restructured my Ph.D. I chose advisors who were parents (two of them women who had children while in graduate school). I was in 19th century American literature studies; the centerpiece of my dissertation was Nathaniel Hawthorne, but other chapters included two women authors who remained childless, a woman author who abandoned her children, and a woman author whose only child died young. Realizing this, I added an introductory chapter on Anne Bradstreet — if AB could get up early in the morning, given her eight children, “stealing the hours from household duties,” and write, then surely I, with my paltry two, could get up early and write. For years a version of “shehad8” was my computer password.
When did I write? I have a vivid memory of sitting in an outdoor cafe with two babies asleep in the stroller beside me while I worked on my Bradstreet chapter. I discovered that if I took them for a drive they would fall asleep and I could pull the car over and write.
Bethany Reid, Random thoughts about daughters
As a nearly 70 year old daughter of a 90 year old woman is there a time when I might stop feeling like a daughter? And what would that imply? In between long days on the allotment when the sun’s out, one of them a 10 hour stretch, which was a stretch and re-set, I began to respond to Girl, a prose poem by Jamaica Kincaid.
It shocked me when I first read it, but then I re-read and re-read and began to understand its rhythms, the depths it reaches in the relationship between a mother and daughter, the mother’s fear, the daughter’s rebellions, the information a mother must pass on, the necessary bluntness.
Jackie Wills, Girl, daughter, Uncertain Futures
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.
The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Art in the Light of Conscience (public library) — the wonderful essay collection that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to ideas.
Living in a political atmosphere that banished the divine from human life — the same state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria — Tsvetaeva writes with an eye to the prayerful poems of her beloved Rilke:
What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays (except Rilke’s… I know of none), it is not because we don’t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to — there is something and there is someone — but because we haven’t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we’ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.
A century later, in the atmosphere of Western consumer capitalism with its cult of the self, it is even more countercultural to speak about the soul — perhaps the last human holdout against commodification, too private and furtive to be turned into a marketable data point. And yet if art is what we make to save ourselves, to cotton the shock of living, then the soul is the only studio we have.
Maria Popova, Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine
You could say the sunflower
Luisa A. Igloria, Maps
is one of my emblems—for how it tracks
a brighter beacon across the skies
through the day, for how it angles its head
toward some hidden aspiration.
There is another, smaller flower:
bright yellow and orange, but broom-
brittle. Women string them into garlands
and sell them as a kind of amulet
against time. Their name, the echo
of promises made by lovers. Or a life
sentence—how faithfulness ordained
can become the fate the flower
petals into, that roots it to the ground.
Sometimes a single word is hard to separate from the context in which we first encountered it. In our private linguistic landscape, a word can remain linked all our lives to a particular book, or person, or place. Perhaps this is most common in a second (or third, or fourth) language: we tend to feel differently about words we have consciously acquired, which happens more often in a second language. Whenever someone says zut! — quite a common if perhaps slightly dated French expression for damn! — I still think, every time, of the character Zoot (so named because this was the only bit of French he every mastered) in a sad and excellent children’s book called One Green Leaf published in the 1980s by Jean Ure. And because I read almost nothing but Proust for the best part of a year not long after we moved to France, I associate an awful lot of actually perfectly ordinary French words and expressions with his distinctive style and atmosphere, which lends a strange and rather intoxicating effect to everyday conversation. (Though if anyone else is tempted to learn-French-from-Proust I can report that it also tends to lard your vocabulary with some pretty obsolete items, leading to baffled expressions in the boulangerie.)
Victoria Moul, On a single word
the ocean has always been just
Robin Gow, 7/10
a mania away for me. i remember
parking my car in jersey once just
to look for jellyfish, i found none
but i did find a funeral the gulls were having.
in my religion, a parking lot is always
a holy space. a shrine to longing.
& waiting. a stolen mouth.
This morning herring gulls are calling in the scent of salt on a sea breeze. It is fresh with floral elements and the sun promises heat.
Alt text provides an accurate description of this week’s photo: A red clock with white numbers. I say it is the actual clock that played a part in inspiring one of my recent poems.
The poem is called ‘The Clock Ticks Louder Now’ and it was selected by Alan Parry for the inaugural episode of The Coffeehouse Podcast. I do love being on a podcast. Alan reads the poem beautifully and it was wonderful to listen to it featured there as one of the ten poems. I loved the fact that the episode made the perfect accompaniment to a lazy breakfast of tea and toast.
Sue Finch, The Clock Ticks Louder Now
Monsoon is summer’s coming of age story:
how June becomes December. Rain is its
thoroughfare, its river Styx, its parched
desert, which you cross because somethingwaits on the other side. Rain is the solid
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Except one July, at dawn
form of memory.
Some might see the Azores, islands aboriginal and tending back to pasture green, as a perfect chance to return to the garden. The undeniable lushness, the backing track of cooing doves, the garden both arid for grapes and tropical for papayas.
But green is so restrictive! Here in Terceira, there is an excess of what human eye, ear and skin can take in. A more updated model would be a collage of a garden in constant becoming, where nothing is excluded from the party.
For what of porous black lava, off-black and red and gray as open sockets; what of the wandering mist in interior moonscapes, the headlike blooms on slim tall stalks? What of the green of geckos that rush through time like toy dinosaurs? What about white-washed cottages that speed behind us like white notes on a black page?
Jill Pearlman, Beyond the Green Azores Garden
I like walking barefoot on the beach
Paul Tobin, PERFECT IMPERFECTION
even though the sky is always out of reach
the seals stay in the blue green below
and never whisper what they know
as the tide gives then takes away
the transient land on which you cannot stay
To kick off E.’s vacation, I took him to the wellness center at the nearby beach hotel. There are saunas and a cold pool, a swimming pool and jacuzzi. The space is warm. When you lounge in a chair with your eyes closed, you can image it’s evening, somewhere in the Canaries, with the white noise of the pool rather than the softly grumbling sea.
The wall facing the sea is glass from pool to ceiling. It’s a kind of triptych: tall panes of glass. To the left is a bucolic and nautical scene, far enough in the distance to look more like a painting than reality.
The center window frames the granite that juts out of the dunes to block the view of the sea. Between the granite and the window are the moss-covered remains of a Nazi fortification. I’m not certain, but it seems to be some kind of gun turret—maybe 3 meters in diameter.
The window that we “read” last—to the right—is a view of the shore. People are walking their dogs. Kids are running. Someone is kitesurfing. I know that, out of sight, there are a few surfers in wetsuits, and joggers like we had been just a few minutes earlier, dodging dead, orange jellyfish rimmed with white foam.
The triptych struck me as ways to view the world, with even attention to idealism, past hurts, and the complex present.
I just wish the complex present was more than 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ren Powell, Vacation
It was super-hot for our holidays, so we mostly hid indoors and ate homemade cherry frozen yogurt, but we went to the Willows Lodge for our anniversary (blessedly well-air-conditioned) and had cocktails and salads (too hot for anything but that and ice cream!) We walked in the small garden only after it got dark, checking out the blooms and visiting their cute pair of pot-bellied pigs. […]
I don’t usually do much political blogging here—I try to stick to the writing life and living with disability and chronic illness, as well as pictures of my (mostly Pacific Northwest) surroundings. I can understand how people feel confusion, anger, frustration, and disenfranchisement with America and its systems right now. I try not to give into despair even in seemingly endless lists of end-times events.
Perhaps focusing on small beauties in the best thing to do. Not to squeeze our eyes and ears shut, but to open them wider – to the wider world around us, not just the news that social media and television scream at us in increasingly alarming tones. To the person who lives across from us, to the birds and flowers, to the cherries at the farm stand or the friend who needs a visit who’s been in the hospital, or the relative across the country who’s been fighting with cancer. Because we are not powerless, though at times we can feel that way. We can do small kindnesses, donate to charities we believe in, treat each other with understanding. Hug our cats and our loved ones. Tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us, but in the waiting, we get to decide what we focus on, what we spend our energy on, what we place into timelines or gardens.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, 30th Anniversaries, Birthday Celebrations, Small Beauties, Losses, and American Troubles
After The Swimmers, I read Grief is for People, by Sloane Crosley, checked out from the library at the same time, and also the right book for the right moment. She’s writing about randomly connecting the loss (by theft via home invasion) of some jewelry and the loss (by suicide) of a dear friend. “Grief is for people, not things,” she says early on in the book, but the connection remains understandable all the way through. She does some risky things–her own detective work, going to Australia to jump off a cliff–but they make perfect sense, too. I really liked her prose style, and will seek out her fiction and essays.
Did these two books suddenly release me? I haven’t been writing much lately, nor submitting poems, but this weekend I finished revising a short play and submitted it and also sent 4 poems to a contest. By chance, these submissions both had deadlines days away. Maybe not by chance? Have I become a procrastinator, motivated mainly by deadlines? Or was I inspired by Spenser Davis, who gave a lively, funny, and informative talk about playwriting at Heartland Theatre on Thursday night?
Kathleen Kirk, Grief is for People
The wooden chimes clatter
like a child hitting sticks, then stop.They’ve tangled, as if pulling arms to chest,
leave the wind itself to alert the house.Wind more powerful than chimes can sing
Ellen Roberts Young, Poem
blows the watering bucket past my window.
How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, The Transparent Body, came out in the Wesleyan New Poets series in 1989, while my second, God in Her Ruffled Dress, came out from the L.A.-based publishing collective What Books Press in late 2023. That 34-year gap made the two books feel significantly different. I went from young poet to way older, indie singer-poet-songwriter who still wrote poetry for the page. My first gave me joy, jitters, and relief at a stamp of legitimacy as poet. And satisfaction that what I envisioned, after what felt like a long slog of submitting the manuscript, came to pass. As it turns out, I had no idea what a long slog really was. Though I kept writing poems and seeing them published in journals and anthologies, and submitting my evolving poetry manuscripts, by the time my second book came out, my focus had shifted a great deal to the music world, as I had released seven full-length albums since 1999 while the music scene itself kept shifting (indies pouring into the music marketplace, CDs, mp3s, streaming, pandemic) and I had practically given up hope of publishing a second poetry book. With the new book, I feel as if I’ve parachuted back into a poetry scene that sure looks different in 2024 – essentially, much more academic, more award-focused, and with many more poets. But I appreciate the relative collegiality of poetry publishing and its focus on art versus commerce. It’s easier than the music scene to navigate, at least for me. As for my work, it’s wider-ranging, newly including inspiration from music and vocalizing and newly reflecting the interests and revelations from studying clairvoyant reading and healing and then launching a career in 1993 as a professional psychic reader. […]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?
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa B (rob mclennan)
I dislike poetry that wears on its sleeve a concern with theory of any kind. I’ve been a socialist feminist lefty since I was a young teen, and that was many decades ago, so I find myself rather bored by the repetition of political theoretical concerns that I’ve been reading and thinking about for so long. By all means be faithful to your journey in all its dimensions, but make it new, concrete, and musical, and not self-indulgently intellectual even when you’re thinking through it. My current questions seem to be remarkably of a piece with my initial questions, having to do with how to be both a body and a spirit and how to keep growing as myself. But that sounds so reductive and simple. I guess I still follow William Carlos Williams’ “no idea but in things,” meaning honor the concrete image, to which I would add, “Does it sing?”
Is our job seeing? Is it seeing how others see? How do you as an artist see? How is your seeing unique? What are the limitations and constraints? How could you see better? What is your relationship with clarity? with blur? What is your night vision like? Your day vision? How will you get others to see what you see or want them to see? How do you leave room for others to see?
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking About Seeing
‘inspiration has to find you working’
the ideas would not have come
if I had not first made the bookit works from the middle outwards
Ama Bolton, ABCD July 2024
square works better than narrow
we’re still inspiring each other
All the world belongs to this cat, as it does too to the cardinal, who flings itself from tree to bush and off across the neighbor’s roof. Poor human me must stick to sidewalks, so aware am I of trespass. When the cat darts catty corner across the yard to hop the fence, the dark between the forsythia and the house hides its progress; I pace the square of the block in slant light of early morning for all the eyes to see.
Imagine if of a morning a neighbor found me lolling on her deck eyeing the undergrowth. Or what they would think if I suddenly took off in flight right over the roof.
The possibility of ordinary miracles is what I’m thinking about, of the everyday magic of a cat’s bum in the morning. The daily flight of imagination. Can you imagine not imagining? Unimaginable. I probably imagine something every day but day after day don’t realize it.
Marilyn McCabe, As I step past a wall of blue
The ugly thing is winging its way to a laboratory somewhere for inspection & definition. I’ve always been solidly in the “expect the best” camp so I am expecting it to be benign. I’m putting this out into the universe because….well, I don’t know why except maybe there’s a little tiny smidge of “the worst” hanging around I need to kick out of my head.
Lately, I’ve been reading a poem from 3 books of poetry every morning. (More on that in a later post.) This morning I read the poem “Life on Earth” from the book Life on Earth by the great Dorianne Laux. It begins:
The odds are we should never have been born. Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be exact. Only one among the 250 million released in a flood of semen that glides like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles of possible people, one of whom may or may not be you…
And it ends:
When you think you might be through with this body and soul, look down at an anthill or up at the stars, remember your gambler chances, the bounty of good luck you were born for.
And I think I was meant to read this poem on this day-after. Doesn’t it put everything in perspective?
Charlotte Hamrick, Ugly Things & Beautiful Things
Tico/Tica is a Spanish language suffix that denotes affection. It basically means, affectionately, “little one,” or “sweetie pie.” The way in English we sometimes add y at the ends of words to make them more precious, so mom becomes Mommy, and dog becomes doggy. In Spanish the way you do this is by adding the suffix Tico or Tica. Native Costa Ricans add the suffix “tica” and “tico” to everything, including themselves. And so the name stuck. […]
It’s the kind of thing that a language nerd or a poet like me would glom onto. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
I know it sounds silly – calling everything by its diminutive, affectionate name, but in a world that is so dehumanizing and distancing, I find it charming, restorative even. It puts me in mind of what I’ve been reading from Robin Wall Kimmer who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. (You can listen to a talk with her about the book here.)
How people of various Native American tribes never used to refer to the plants or animals as “it,” but instead referred to them as “he,” and “she.” It shows respect for the elements of the world. […]
I’d imagine that like with any other idiom, people eventually start to gloss over it. They forget what it means or why they use it. But I’d like to think the intention behind the word remains. Maybe on some less than conscious level people feel more affectionate towards one another, like they belong to one another, like they are family. Not just the people, but also the plants and animals too. […]
To try to live a more Pura Vida life, I try it on for size myself. I go for walks down the sweet little road, look at the sweet little birds, sit at the restaurant and look over that sweet little ocean, which is becoming more and more familiar to me each week. I ask the sweet little waiter if I can have a sweet little cup of coffee and when he brings it to me I drink it slowly. Sweet mother coffee, nourishing me and waking me up to this adorable, adorable world.
Tresha Faye Haefner, How Costa Ricans Make Everyone Feel at Home
a walk seaward
Jim Young [no title]
caught in a repeating loop
everlasting life