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: a side course of flutter, spiny dry isolation, enormous compound words, dancing with dragonflies, naked meditation and more.
One housekeeping note: You may notice a couple of posts more than a week a week old in this week’s digest. I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the sporadic manner in which many WordPress sites’ RSS feeds are being updated, causing me to miss some great posts in recent weeks, so I’ve decided to be more flexible about the time-range from now on. (If you have a WordPress site, I’m afraid I don’t have a whole lot of advice; I’ve yet to find a solution that really works, aside from creating and advertising a JSON feed and/or switching to a more reliable platform, such as Substack.) Anyway, enjoy the digest.
My body never tells me “it’s a full moon,” but I have a strong sense for the wheel of the year. Something shifts in me, an internal reorientation, and I think oh, August 1st, Lughnasadh, Lammas, midpoint between summer solstice and fall equinox. First fruits of the harvest, here we are!
Of course, the US academic calendar is also in my bones by now, so an occasional yellow leaf below the green trees triggers another kind of knowing. In early August, I’m still writing and revising, this year an essay on Bob Dylan and a more lyric piece on H.D. Yet omens of academic fall are piling up. […] It’s now #sealeychallenge month, so there’s lots of poetry in the mix from my to-be-read tower, although I’m not strict about the book-a-day rule (it’s good to celebrate poetry but not if it becomes a chore I rush through). […]
I sometimes write blog posts as a way of revealing to myself what’s in my heart, and right now I see it’s change with a side course of flutter.
Lesley Wheeler, Calendaring, with palpitations
It looks like a vintage photograph but it was taken this morning.
Bob Mee, I CAN’T SAY ANY MORE
The grainy texture is dust from the explosion, the shadows are people running.
Mothers clutching babies has become such a cliche, says the woman, yawning.
I’m dying oh sugar I’m drowning in meetings twelvestepping through America slap me sugar I have done violence unto myself I ate the grape the priest the host oh sugar I have done violence unto myself slap me awake I’m dying under your strap your heel I have done violence unto myself this little war of mine I’m gonna let it shine
let it shine let it shine let it shine
Rebecca Loudon, The butcher
these rough sketches of our lives,
lives in which we grit & grind
& grieve through the currentsthat sweep past us dragging all
the longings that didn’t hold
us, that didn’t hold us back,that we didn’t hold onto …
PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 36
at least, not long enough, not
strongly enough, not enough
Yes, reading a poetry book all in one go IS a different experience, opposed to reading a poem here and a poem there, or even reading a book straight through but only a few poems at a time. I promise you, the difference is interesting, and will teach you different lessons.
Most years, as I read a poetry book (and review it) each day during April, National Poetry Month, I don’t do the August marathon. This year, I’m tackling it, and I invite you to read along with me.
For more details, check out the challenge at this site: https://www.thesealeychallenge.com/.
You can post your results on social media (a picture, a title, a line), or you can keep track all on your own.
Bethany Reid, Join the Sealey Challenge
Sometime back in the spring, my image generating experiments led me to pull together a fun little series of Alice in Wonderland inspired fauxtographs. At the time, I intended they be just that, some fun visuals I could share on IG and the blog. While I was never that into the Dineyfied version of Alice, and came to the Lewis Carrol original as an adult, not a child, I was fascinated by the actual Alice Liddel and the world that Carrol created for her. I did a deeper dive a couple years back for a lesson I was writing and made notes for a project that took quite a while to happen and kept getting shoved aside for more pressing things.
This April, as NAPOWRIMO dawned, I decided to finally take my notes and scribbles and see if I could shake out some Alice pieces to go with the images for a zine. At first it was harder, then it was easier, and while I did not devote the entire month to writing them (another series took my attention the latter half of the month) but I wound up with 15 or so pieces I was happy with and have spent the past couple months tweaking them and working on a version for this latest zine.
It was serendipitous that we were planning on seeing another Alice adaptation on stage at the end of July, so I held off on the final design to see if that inspired me further, and it no doubt did. In that case, Alice is a teen caught in the middle of war who sees Carrol’s strange world as a refuge from adulthood and reality. My version moves back and forth and back again from child to adult Alice echoing themes that are true to the original and superimposing other themes like body image and domesticity on top of them, with a slightly more macabre take on magical world. […]
You can real my little Alice project , SPILL, here...
Kristy Bowen, spill
Heartfelt thanks to all who came to the Fountain Poets’ meeting on July 1st and contributed to such a successful launch for Sara Butler’s newly-published collection, Waiting for a Change, available from bookshops and (if you must) Amazon, ISBN 978-1-914398-15-5. Sara was a regular reader at Fountain Poets. This was an emotional occasion for her friends and family, including her sister over from New Zealand. The book was a labour of love for Bob, who retrieved lost poems from forgotten digital and paper files, and for Mo whose long and patient struggle with recalcitrant publishing software (designed for prose) paid off in the end. Mo and I selected and edited the 104 poems in this collection. Poems were read for Sara by some of us who know her and remember fondly her performing at our meetings until ill-health prevented her early in 2020. I can hear her voice clearly as I read this collection. What she leaves to the imagination is as effective as what she includes. She is a unique and wonderful poet.
Ama Bolton, Waiting for a change
I’m writing this whilst riots and violence are erupting in various cities and towns in the UK. I feel sickened by what I’ve seen on social media, repulsed by the way that mainly white men are behaving on these videos, not just the violence, but the way they enjoy it, the way they seek out opportunities for it. I can’t stop thinking about my friends who live in those cities who might be scared to leave their homes, to go to work.
It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m writing this tonight then, finding a way of retreating away from social media and into poetry land, which I think is perhaps both a form of cowardice, and necessary survival. […]
I took part in the Northern Poetry Cabaret in July in Haworth, reading alongside Michael Stewart, Steve Ely and Clare Shaw. It was a lovely gig – a few of my friends who I’ve met via Ally’s new school came to listen, as well as a member of staff from Trafford Hospital where I was a Writer in Residence last year. Clare and I went to the pub for a quick pint afterwards, and managed to leave without talking each other into running a festival or any other equally mad idea so we were quite pleased with ourselves.
Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. a poem by David Tait
In the recent Harper’s, poet Christian Wiman has written a review the letters of Seamus Heaney. Normally, I would not pay attention to this, but I got tricked into reading it via a somewhat misleading tweet. The essay is mostly unremarkable, and there is nothing truly egregious about it. Wiman represents a very conservative tendency in poetry, but he is a sensitive thinker who proceeds with humility and evenhandedness. Still, it’s partly these inoffensive qualities that make it such a powerful distillation of American literary ideology: for many, Wiman is speaking common sense in a respectful way, and this makes his essay highly revealing of norms and values. But it goes deeper than that. Yes, Wiman thinks in terms of prestige and “greatness”—he sees Heaney as a quasi-mythical “great poet” who is quoted by US presidents, as if this were something to aspire to—but he also inadvertently shows the limits of a spiritualizing tendency in poetry and the politics that come out of this. Wiman thinks in terms of a dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, and in examining and questioning this, I want to redirect attention to psyche and imagination as world-shaping forces not reducible to either side of his binary. Further, I want to show what this has to do with fascism.
RM Haines, Poetry, Fascism, and Imagination
yesterday i woke up
Robin Gow, 7/31
& was hunted by wolves. the next day
i was the wolves. i wept when
i saw my face in a darkened dead television
on the side of the road.
I wrote in my journal last night: Made it to August, no thanks to July. It’s been tough. If this is you and your situation as well, please know you’re not alone.
This week, I’m sharing some quick news as well as two new additions and an update to the Debate series of erasures I’ve been doing. […]
A few updates to the project:
José Angel Araguz, news + new Debate erasures
- First, I’d like to recognize that the presidential election (and the whole world it feels like) has changed since the first debate.
- That said, both sides continue to place emphasis on the border in their campaign speeches and talk.
- For that reason, I plan on continuing with the project and eventually have a series that includes the 38 times the word “border” was said during the debate.
Monasteries and hermitages, a faint silhouette in a shimmering light. As we arrive by car, then foot, or by tortuous road, the outline thickens against the ochre stone and cliffs. They loom as minor fortresses, angled like a prism, slim windows for spying enemies or contemplating empty skies. Such extremes, oh monks, for what? Why load your donkeys with marble and limestone, why live in spiny dry isolation far from your fellow humans? What lay on the other side of the extreme – what wretchedness, what bitterness.
What closed door to a human garden?
Then again, I’m climbing these roads for what — To stay in a renovated monastery, to sit on your stone bench by the small window, to escape what chaos, to rest in what calm.
Even as I carry my backpack dotted with buttons: “all is chaos” and “restless recalcitrant.”
Jill Pearlman, Silence of the Monks
This morning, I’ve been a writing a poem, just for the joy of it. The joy is part of my poetry process, but I’m usually looking for a poem to have some deeper meaning. This morning, I’ve been remembering how intriguing it is to collect images that go together, without straining to put them into a larger context with a deeper meaning. […]
Now I’m taking a break. The poem could talk about climate change. Those surprise snows seem a feature of a different geologic age, but perhaps surprise snows are the future in a climate that is increasingly unpredictable.
But maybe a poem doesn’t need to have that kind of exploration weighing it down. I do see one of my flaws as a poet is to try to make the symbolism carry more than it can sustain.
I’ll keep thinking about the poem, but for this morning, I wanted to record my joy in having memories that prompted other memories and my happiness that I remembered to start a new Word document, just to see what might happen.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Memories, Summer Poems
Here is a handful of sentences, stripped of the line-breaks, from poems in ‘Lanyard’ (Carcanet, 2022), which book we considered in the Finding Poetry book club. I’ll say a few words about each sentence, but it’s what they have in common that I’m keenest to display. Each is rather long, and somewhat grammatically complex, with embedded clauses and asides. Yet each is extremely efficient, conveying more, it seems to me, than is typical for the word- or phrase-count. By modelling speech and inner speech, with their momentary digressions, the sentences give us, at the same time, a lot of interesting information and Sansom’s mood, his own response or attitude to the information. It’s one of the tricks that makes the poems so touching. You could say that the writing tells as well as shows, but it does so, in my book, subtly and attractively. […]
“Who’d have thought that suddenly it’s this year and here we are with the youngest, the teacher, by the pigeon cotes at Sky Edge.”
(‘Pigeons’)Every part of the sentence works together to emphasise the mystery of time’s quick passing.
“Footpaths go off in all directions, up through history and geology, keeping fit, walking from friendship or grief, or just instead.”
(‘Kiosk at Ladybower’)As it happens, the footpaths and walks work as a metaphor for Sansom’s poetry, its movements through places and times and emotions.
Stephen Payne, Finding Peter Sansom: sentences from ‘Lanyard’
I know the dried necks
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Like whispers
will be impossible
to tie again, they will
flake to nothing
between my fingers
and for as long as
they hang there
I can conjure my father
in his garden, his own
plaits of onions
in the dark hold
of the coalbunker
or the lean-to shed
their papery skins
loosening
and floating
to the floor
like whispers
like memories.
A clerihew is a quatrain with rhyme scheme AABB and which typically has irregular line length and metre. The first line features the name of a famous individual. The challenge is to find a rhyme for the second line to match the person’s name in the first line – the more comical or absurd, the better.
You can read a fine selection of clerihews at the website Brief Poems, including examples by G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Auden, George Szirtes, Derek Mahon and of course Edmund Clerihew Bentley himself.
The July 2024 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (Volume 14, Issue 2) includes a portfolio of clerihews by contemporary mathematician-poets, curated by E.R. Lutken. It’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek guide to the history of mathematics, that includes a couple of contributions by me. Here’s one of them:
Pythagoras
alas
had no clue what to do
with the square root of two.Limericks and clerihews are great fun to create. In their own way, they can also be healing and cathartic. Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can…”, which is a sentiment I relate to more and more.
Marian Christie, A Little Light Relief
The title is from an Emily Dickinson poem that starts, “Because I could not stop for Death —” and ends “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads/ Were toward Eternity —”. It’s apt because this taut but discursive novel, initially set in the near future, is a dialogue about language and translation as well as a story about a medical discovery which resulted in the development of nanites, small machines that replace diseased human cells so curing illnesses such as cancer which were previously terminal. A side effect is that recipients of nanite technology are prevented from ageing, becoming sick and gain immortality. An early section of dialogue has Ellen, a world-class cellist, and Youghun, a poetics researcher, discuss how Ellen sees her body and cello combined as a machine that translates musical notes into moods and modes of communication. Youghun is training an AI he has named Panit in classical poetry. Panit introduces themself as “a computational heuristic utility for literary analysis, an artificial intelligence project first instantiated at the South African University of Science and Technology’s Singularity Lab.”
Emma Lee, “Toward Eternity” Anton Hur (HarperVia) – book review
I write a few more stories for The Daily, but “I Was an Undercover Bunny” is the beginning of the end of my work as a journalist. After that, I admit to myself how much I dislike cold-calling people or asking questions that make them uncomfortable. I admit that it bothers me that I covered an entire season of the crew team without ever attending a race. I admit how much I hate that, for my editors, the Playboy piece was mostly an attention-getting gimmick, and that my “victory” of getting double-pay feels like defeat. But what puts me off most is feeling I didn’t have enough time to get an important story right. That is the deal-breaker.
I switch my writing focus from non-fiction to poetry (no deadlines there!) and get a different job that pays more. I also, finally, break up with my boyfriend who took me to the strip club.
Rita Ott Ramstad, It Took 39 Years to Write This
マネキンの手足抜かれて夏の果 藤森ひろみ
manekin no teashi nukarete natsu no hate
mannequins
their limbs taken out
at the summer’s end
Hiromi Fujimori
from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 31, 2024)
In “The Park,” [David] St. John offers an ekphrasis of Klimt’s painting—one that refuses the separation of landscape and portrait. Like many of us, he reads his affective landscape into the painting. He figurates.
Each line begins in the majuscule: there is a formal presence that undercuts itself by resorting to ampersands. How do you capitalize an ampersand? What is the majuscule of a shortcut?
We are reminded that the poet is looking at the postcard rather than the painting. I don’t see St. John’s “solitary figure”?
The poet keeps this image on his wall: he preserves it.
Moyra Davey has written about single images and fragments, how they possess “miniaturization”, the “possibility of possessing the thing.” Images locked to the wall in her room form a “psychic landscape”.
Alina Stefanescu, Parks.
Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark
This book of poems, largely formal, has at the center of the collection poems about the loss of his stillborn son, a twin to a son who survived. The poem that touched me the most was “Ultrasound: Your Urn,” where the poet compares the misbehavior of the living twin, Peter—who is “teething / on your mom’s Bluetooth” and “found the scissors / to derange his hair,” to “the tame and quiet twin / the easy one” “who never cries, or fights,/ or takes a breath.”As a mother of an infant that died, I know precisely how your parenting is changed in that way. When our youngest was born, I couldn’t help but look at his wild shrieking and think that I wish Kit had had the lung power to blow all our eardrums like that. How I wish she could bite her sister or pull my hair.
If you are a reader of formal poetry interested in modern formal poetry, I recommend picking this book up. The sound and style of this collection is reminiscent of our formal great poets, so it would be a nice homey jumping-off place before entering the wilds of today’s modern free verse.
Renee Emerson, Stolen Moons, Stolen Buttons, Stolen Hearts
[W]hat do you say to the birds
Rajani Radhakrishnan, What do you say to yet another morning
whose voices are unchanging even as
October spills into August; what do you
say to real life that spins in and out for
a few minutes, a few hours, a cold cameo
player, pirouetting between headlines,
who brings grocery lists and doctor’s bills
and things to do and books to read and
doesn’t care about what you’re not saying?
One of the best experiences I have yet had as a creative person was a videopoem I made interlacing a poem of mine that mused about the landscapes of war, and the words of four war veterans I interviewed about their recollections of the landscapes of the war they were in: Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. They detailed for me the peculiar beauties of war, the strange mix of emotions, the bewilderments. They were so thoughtful, with a hard-won insight into what they had experienced, still shaking their heads about it all, that they were there. One active duty soldier may have been sent out again. She reflected on the great privilege of comradeship. That too is a part of war. As well as, of course, the opposite of comradeship, whatever form that takes.
What I appreciate about this poem by [John] Balaban is that he shows the sharpness of senses that someone in wartime evolves — one of my respondents said he felt like he saw everything through a wide lens, and continued to do so well after he returned from war. The poem also shows the heightened fears that affect the senses — are the shores bristling with guns? Is that a bomb floating in the water? The poem details the quotidian moments, the dew dripping down a gun, the local woman pausing to wash her face. And it details the boredom. The terrible dailiness of the possibility of violence and the terrible dailiness of its absence — the endlessness of that tension. Then the final chiasmus of the word “idly”: the movement of the river, which could carry a bomb or blood or bodies, but in this moment does not, and the idle aiming of the gun, which could kill but in this moment does not. But it is no relief, that final moment.
A richness of consonants moves this poem along and carries it lively in my mouth as I read it aloud. I’m alert to its rolling vowels. And yet it moves slow as the river, this poem, with its tidy couplets, its sight moving, idly, from mist to bridge to bank to barrel, but it carries as much dark possibility. I am the watcher, the guard, the woman, the river.
I appreciate this way in which poetry can show us the world anew and starkly, and can remind us of the gift of our humanity. And its loss.
Marilyn McCabe, The boring dry
Another significant problem for the translator is that formal literary Sanskrit of this period has a particular tendency to form enormous compound words, which is unlike anything in Latin or Greek (or any modern literary language that I know). Such a long compound may include a complex series of implied case relationships within it, a sort of little sentence of its own, though treated grammatically as a single word, with a single grammatical ending. There is no very challenging example of this in this poem, but the second line starts with a modest instance of it: tarucchidraprotān. This means, literally, something like “sewn (or inset) into the lattice of the tree”. It’s in the accusative plural, agreeing with the moonbeams of the first line: seeing moonbeams woven amid the branches of the tree, the elephant takes them to be lotus stems.
This is a very minor example. In more elaborate Sanskrit poetry, compounds can be extremely long, complex and often ambiguous with multiple possible ways of resolving their constituent parts. Antonia Ruppel, in her excellent recent Sanskrit textbook, gives the example of a single compound from the Aryāsaptaśatī (a collection of 700 short poems from twelfth-century Bengal) which means: ‘Whether I get up, sit down, lie on my bed, turn around, twist my body, or walk about.’ A. A. Macdonell in his Sanskrit Grammar for Students pithily remarks: ‘Thus Kālidāsa describes a river as ‘wave-agitation-loquacious-bird-row-girdle-string-ed’, while we should say: ‘her girdle-string is a row of birds loquacious because of the agitation of the waves.’
I’m not sure how to describe it, but there is a specific intellectual and aesthetic pleasure in encountering such complex, but grammatically unmarked sequences — in most compounds, only the final element has an ordinary grammatical ending — in a language which is so highly inflected. It creates a pleasing oscillation between inflected and uninflected forms, and also a space for interpretation, a sort of parallel grammar supplied by the reader or commentator. (There is an enormous tradition of Sanskrit commentary, quite a lot of which, you may not be surprised to hear, is devoted to helping you puzzle out compounds). At the same time, there is another kind of counterpoint created between the ordinary syntax of the Sanskrit sentence — with subjects, objects, verbs and so on — and the alternative syntax of a long compound, which is held fixed, syntactically speaking, as a single noun or adjective. There’s nothing really like this in any European literature that I have encountered.
Victoria Moul, Translating Sanskrit poetry
This poem comes from the MT Vallarta’s book What You Refuse to Remember, published by Small Harbour Editions. As the title suggests, and as Vallarta told me in our interview, the book is about what the speaker does not want to remember or discuss. The title of this poem is 10 Confessions, and yet a person who gives the poem a cursory read may walk away asking, what are they confessing?
The poem directs the reader’s attention to imagery that might seem mundane. The speaker has a sweater that smells like sun, they watch a neighbor create a hammock out of a tarp, they get their sister to eat a violet. But there are three lines inside these little vignets that point to something darker going on for the speaker.
They say in the beginning “I dreamed of being a girl who walks into a grave.” Later they say their mother calls them every evening to make sure they haven’t killed themself. The last line is “I draw plans about jumping into a frozen river. I burn them later.”
The speaker does not say directly what makes them have such ideation, nor do they say what makes their mother worry about them and call them every evening. This is part of what remains unspoken. This is what they write around. It is left to the reader to decide what might be at the root of this ideation. At the same time, maybe the fact that the speaker never pin-points it is part of the experience of the poem. It’s clear that the speaker does not want to discuss the issue directly. Maybe the reason is not something that can be boiled down to a thesis statment, and hence why it demands expression in poetry.
An essay asks you to say things more directly, to explain your point, to reveal your sources and to bring the receipts. If what you want to express is also something you want to hide, it’s impossible to do this in an essay. It makes poetry a much more appropriate vehicle, which is why MT Vallarta may have needed to write this poem, and the full book in poetic form while writing about the more “sayable” things in their academic work.
Tresha Faye Haefner, “10 Confessions” by MT Vallarta
high summer
Jim Young [no title]
a fly comes in one door
goes out the other
Earlier this month I was invited to speak about my books at ALSO Festival and I loved both of my shows. The With Love, Grief and Fury poetry set was on a stage in the forest, it was such a magical sunset gig, we were surrounded by ancient trees, the leaves whispering poetry back to us. Then for my memoir event the next day, we sat together on the lake stage on a gloriously warm and sunny Sunday morning and talked about Springfield Road and the process of writing this memoir and the women in the heart this book.
Thank you so much to Ben Pester who asked all the right questions and gave such a brilliant and generous interview. I’m so grateful for the opportunity and space to share my book in this way and to speak about the inspirational women in my life. To be honest, in almost every interview I have ever done with this memoir, the focus has been on the darkness and loss and the males in my family. So I was delighted that Ben and I talked about the women. The story of my mother and grandmother taking a boat from Jamaica to arrive at Dover to start a new life in strange country, the story of my father’s mother Edith adopting my father aged thirty-five and alone and unwed.
I know now that these women are the reason I wrote the book, the heart of the story. I felt like my grandmothers spirits were there with us on that stage, dancing in the soft July light, with the dragonflies and butterflies.
Salena Godden, The Heart Of The Story
Because of the timing of my travels this summer, today was my last Early Bird lap swim, peaceful, meditative, and smooth, with country music and Carole King on the pool loudspeakers in the background (and louder in the locker room). I continued with naked meditation, today being the Throat Chakra, about communication, a troublesome spot for many women, given…all of known history. And now. The mantra for that meditation stone is “I speak my truth freely and positively,” which is pretty much true for me. I am not afraid to say what I think, modified in certain situations by politeness, professionalism, and compassion. There is also a time to be quiet.
But once again I am glad to be reading the right book at the right time. After sitting peacefully with the throat chakra, I read these words in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz: “the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton.” Wow! I’m still scared of my own bruja feelings when they take the form of dreams or premonitions, but when they come “singing out of my bones” as poems, I am more than grateful! And that narrator is Oscar’s sister, Lola, the name of my grandbaby, the one I am going to see!
Kathleen Kirk, Last Swim
August is great for gardens – lots of sunshine – but the heat and haze have taken a toll on my body, already run down from a couple of weeks of poor sleep. On the plus side, have watched so much Olympics coverage. LOL.
On the poetry side, I was briefly interviewed on the Slowdown this week as they chose my poetry pick, Kelli Russell Agodon’s “Hunger,” for their audience choice show. Here’s the link – you can hear me say a couple of things about the poem before Major Jackson reads the poem (what a great voice for radio, am I right?) 1175: Hunger by Kelli Russell Agodon | The Slowdown (slowdownshow.org)
Another thing our area has during August is amazing views around our home – this week, we followed a sinking hot air balloon from our house to the lavender farm, and we caught a particularly lucky shot, with the balloon, Mt Rainier at sunset, the lavender garden, and a v of geese! Woodinville just has some above average chances to catch beautiful things. So even if I’m not at my peak right now (and rarely am in August,) the world is still beautiful. Just got to get through a couple of weeks of heat waves and smoke and make it to September!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Welcome to August, on The Slowdown, Hot Air Balloons
“I’m prone to forgetting,” Calgary-based poet Tonya Lailey writes to close the opening poem, “Farms and Poems,” of her full-length debut, Farm: Lot 23 (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), “the purpose / of a farm / of a poem / has always been / the living in it.” According to her author biography on the back of the collection, Lailey “spent her childhood on a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake. She started a winery there in 2000 with her family and winemaker Derek Barnet. Certified as a sommelier, she worked in the wine trade until 2020.” The length and breadth of the poems within Farm: Lot 23 explore and examine her relationship with that plot of family land, from the days of her grandfather and a history of that particular corner of Ontario to her own experiences growing up and eventually working within those particular boundaries. “I think about the new reaches of peaches,” she writes, to close the poem “Peaches,” “the cultivars we’ve bred and breed for travel. / And that year, after the war supports ended, // when my grandfather still farmed peaches / and Wentworth Canners closed, unable to compete / with plantation agriculture to the south, // all around the township peaches ripened / then rotted in piles.” She writes poems from the Niagara Peninsula—wine country, for those unaware—managing the music and rhythms of daily activity on a working farm, offering these as both documentary and as a way to speak to the human elements of familial life, such as the poem “The Give in Inches,” as she offers: “My parents sum / up the farm in twenty acres; the survey says / eighteen-point-five. They never do agree // on boundaries.” These are sharp poems, composed with enormous thought and care, composed as both portrait and a love letter to an eroding space.
rob mclennan, Tonya Lailey, Farm: Lot 23
One of my favourite songs of the last few years is a song called Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it here before. It’s been about three years since that song and it’s parent album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature came out.
So it was very pleasing to see she’d put out a new record in the last couple of weeks, called ‘My Light, My Destroyer‘. It is excellent (Other reviews available) and I commend it to thee, but I also enjoyed this recent interview with her, and in particular this passage.
There’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask all day, about all these distractions and detours for which we spend our life apologising, that magic that can only be found in the interstices of daily life. I read a little from Half Waif’s recent substack entry called The Mind is the Candle, in which she describes being “so immersed in a project that I tune into a new frequency, and every element around me begins to resonate in one magnificent chord,” accessing a new lens on the world in which “everything is connected” and the incidental details – that which might otherwise be out of focus, blurry, discarded – becomes the focus itself. Isn’t that kind of what it is to be an artist?
“Exactly. It’s both that you’re constantly distracted, but you’re also in a constant state of wonder about everything that’s around you,” she says, sitting up, in her element now. “It is about noticing. It’s about slowing down enough to be able to notice, getting out of your head enough to notice. It’s a very beneficial mind state, to be an observer.”
It resonates as someone that is struggling to slow down and notice. To “notice I have the time to notice” to paraphrase one of my own poems (buy the book to find out which one, yeah?). I’m not going to start grumbling about not writing though. Instead, in the week the Forward shortlist came out, I will link to this article by Brenda Hillman called ‘Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets’. The cynical part of me thinks it’s a bit too much like a self-help book, but a larger and more positive part is finding it instructive and helpful, so I’m going with that. The article ends with a reminder to celebrate good work by other people, so let’s do that.
Mat Riches, Astronomy For Bees
Stonehaven may well be my new favourite Scottish town. In spite of the nightmare of cancelled trains, the journey turned out to be lovely – I must admit, Scotrail staff are enormously kind and helpful if you get caught up in this kind of thing. I was only just thinking how much I missed the open fields at harvest time, but going up through the East coast big sky country, there were fields of wheat, packed heavy and still in the gentle morning sun – how good the weather was! – hayfields all harvested and open to the sparrows and finches, cows and sheep, white houses knee deep in the hedgerows and little green wooded river valleys. […]
The Festival is brilliant. It is very well-organised – communications from the organisers have been uniformly timely and helpful, and the venue Number 44 Hotel was very generous and hospitable. I hope they made a packet from all the poets and friends who came, because they deserved it. The contributors are a rewardingly diverse bunch – different levels of experience, different genres, different backgrounds – and the audience was the warmest and most receptive I’ve seen in a long time. I sold a book, and bought three – that’s how these things go – and we swapped books and news and met and made friends as happens at all the best festivals. And heard some great poetry.
Elizabeth Rimmer, The Wee Gaitherin
My summer break is almost over, I return to work in a few days. I feel like I’ve barely done any writing which is frustrating when I think how much time I have off from school in the summer. Finland’s had an amazing summer this year, really warm and sunny, but I haven’t taken advantage of it either. Having a week teaching summer school in the middle of the summer broke the time up weirdly. […]
I then brought the kids back to Scotland to visit friends and family and that turned a little difficult, I hover between the words traumatic and miserable, but that seems a bit dramatic. All three who came, went into surly teenager mode, even the pre-teen. They didn’t want to do anything, even eat and I felt stressed and put out. It left me wishing I had travelled alone as no one seemed to enjoy it.
I remember a similar disastrous cross-country trip when I was a teen, my headphones on the entire time, not wanting to do anything but wander about alone, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it did put a damper on the summer. […]
I’ve written a couple of new poems over the past two days which is more than I’ve written most of the summer. I’m still in the first flush of love with them, but I will let them mellow and see if I can live with them. I have no focus just now, no collection I’m trying to round off or theme stuck in my head. Random words or ideas set me off and I just let my writing flow from there. Hopefully, the fallow writing summer will allow for some more growth later on.
Gerry Stewart, A Fallow Summer
Do you recall mornings when fog or mist
rested low on the ground, so the world looked both
hurt and tender? Nâzim, I have always taken to heartwhat you say about living and how it is no laughing matter.
Even as a chorus of raucous gulls will circle tourists
basking in a haze of sunscreen at the ocean front,I can never forget what it is that should be my whole
Luisa A. Igloria, Letter, with Lines from Nâzim Hikmet
occupation; how much work it requires, in these times
of sorrow, to concentrate on breath after breath like belief.
Grief says
the poem ends here.And still
Rachel Barenblat, Chord
there are cornflowers
amidst the froth
of Queen Anne’s Lace,
the moon peeking
through cotton candy clouds,
your voice in my ear.