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: little bits of deformed plastic, the work of imagining the impossible, a postcard from Mars, the names of things on the verge of disappearing, and much more. Enjoy.
During my vacation this summer, I slogged through several bogs, and I hiked (remarkably slowly) several peaks. I gave a lot of thought to the distinction between beauty and awe on the afternoon I’d broken my fingernails, trying to cling to a rock face that leaned out over a scree. What is craggy and difficult and ugly, is also fascinating and frightening: awesome.
If there is a hierarchy of emotions that make you aware of your place in the world, I believe awesome outranks beauty, outranks even grief, because it contains both, and everything.
My friend B.’s favorite word was awesome. I used to tease her about it. But this summer I realised that it was probably because she was a mountaineer. She saw the elements of her world as awesome. She had an awesome perspective.
Now, when I think about the little bits of deformed plastic my mother brought home, I see their awesome quality. They were worthless in the context of the factory’s purpose, but slipped from her pocket, into my hand, something changed. Something changes again, when I considered the whole of the grief and the love and the struggles my mother must have been experiencing then.
And it changes again, now, seen in the context of what came after, after all the years that followed.
Forgiveness is so much easier when you embrace the awesomeness of the world.
I’m ready to return to the manuscript now. To the wasps and the memories. I won’t be ready to publish on the timetable I had laid out, but I will get there eventually. No shortcuts. This also means no villains, no heroes, no lessons.
Ren Powell, It is What it is. it IS What it IS What IT IS
The festivals are on in Edinburgh, the grandchildren are back to school (oldest for the last time, good grief!) there are apples ripening on the tree and my social media is full of posts about blackberries and fungi. Swifts are gone, the first wasps and house spiders are beginning to show themselves, and we have three (3!) tomatoes in the greenhouse. I’m going to have to find some form of heating for the late springs and cold wet pretendy summers we are probably going to see from now on. […]
As people who have met me in real life may know, I came to a complete standstill earlier this year, following last year’s turbulence, and I have being doing a lot of rethinking and rediscovery. I got very discouraged about my writing, and indeed about almost everything, and most of this year has been about sorting myself out.
I’ve had a lot of help and support from many of my fellow poets, and The Midsummer Foxes has had an injection of enthusiasm and inspiration. The non-fiction book I have been planning actually has a structure now and I have hauled myself out of the habit of rampaging in all directions and trying to get everything in (bit of a theme developing here, no?). I’ve learned to acknowledge the amount of time I put into my caring responsibilities, and the impact this has on what I’m able to do, and also the amount of experience I’ve built up in other fields, which gives me strengths I didn’t know I had.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Halfway Through August already?
I’ve been saying Tom Paulin’s line about ‘uniformed comedians’ a lot this summer. I don’t really want to go into the details, except to say that we had need of them. ‘We’ as in not me directly, but those who are dearest to me.
I’ve blogged about the poem here before. A poem that’s been in my life for almost 40 years and which I’m finally beginning to understand.
In the words of Mark Halliday, this is what the ‘cool flash of the serious’ feels like. There you are in a meeting, the phone goes and before you know it you are stuck in traffic looking at blue lights on a hill which can mean only one thing.
I’ve grown accustomed (perhaps overly so) to using the word ‘trauma’ recently, but for once I don’t think this overestimates it.
Uniformed comedians. Paulin has it spot on. I can remember the jokes now, even as the Oramorph came out.
It’s a poem of great anger, but also tenderness. He is a terrific maker of phrases: ‘uselessly intricate’; ‘taught blue silence’; ‘a style/ of being perfect in despair’; and the concluding ‘this great kindness everywhere:/ now in the grace of the world and always’. I’ve never been more glad for a redemptive ending to a poem.
Anthony Wilson, Uniformed comedians
My old friend died last week. I don’t claim exclusivity. He had other friends, two or three for even longer than I knew him, which was more than fifty years. Fifty-two, if I have to count.
His death was not unexpected, in that he had been dangerously ill this past month. Yet, when the email came through that the end had come, a few hours earlier on Friday morning, there was a sense of disbelief, of time being suspended as my brain struggled to take in the reality of it. I walked around as if the world existed half-an-inch away, was a place to which I couldn’t relate. It passed, but it was odd.
He had known for a few days at least that he was not going to recover. There was some strange consolation to be had that he spent his final full day on earth drinking a little beer with visitors and getting slightly drunk. It was also comforting to know his daughter was with him at the end.
And so I sat in our woods and thought about his life, our friendship, the times we had. The wind blew a little in the trees. A hare pottered about. A muntjac barked. Another one answered. A man began to mend a fence a few hundred yards away. He was using a mechanical post rammer attached to his tractor which made the sound monotonous, repetitive, a chant or mantra.
I thought about how all those years ago we wrote together, and performed, along with his partner of their youth, and a person who sang and played guitar, a raw and probably pretty dreadful performance show under the name Heresy And Beer. And then later I had a lesser role but still got to read my poems in an altogether more accomplished small community that came together as The Godfrey Grubshow. The springtime of our lives, as another friend and member of that small group said a while back when a photo emerged on social media of us all sitting on the battered Bedford van that took us to wherever we were to perform.
He and I supported each other’s writing then and continued to do that – criticising, arguing, pointing out oddities and failures, even praising sometimes – through half a century of years. We were still doing it when in our dotage we each took to writing very different types of novels.
My eldest daughter, when she heard, got in touch to say her enduring memory of when he came to stay was the two of us laughing.
Bob Mee, MY FRIEND HAS DIED
I got my latest manuscript more or less under control. It took eight months of wrestling, tweaking, cutting, revising; I’m still not certain it is “there,” but I’m going to start submitting it at last. The process of submitting to publishers tends to be lengthy, but just doing it keeps my mind engaged with the poems as a collection. After I send the manuscript out, and especially once it is returned to me, I feel more agile about further editing. This is assuming it won’t be picked up right away, but that isn’t a bad assumption, based upon my experience.
Furthermore, thinking about the book and where to send it keeps my mind occupied, keeps me in a place in my life where I can take action, where what I decide to do might matter a little bit. That’s a frame of mind I can use at the moment, when my mother has begun to decline rather more rapidly (and there’s not much I can do to stop a 91-year-old from dying, however long it takes). When a former student is recuperating from major accident trauma in the neurology unit of a nearby rehabilitation center. When a long-time friend has suffered a brain bleed and hip fracture–and now, dementia–and will likely live out her days in assisted living or a nursing-care institution. Not to mention the broader concerns and tragedies I hear about in the media, which affect me and those I love less (for the moment), but which have long-range consequences that few of us can avoid.
Ann E. Michael, Action, observation
I’ve talked before about endings, about when a project feels like it’s complete and whole. I was aiming for something around 40 in that last series, but with some of the poems/prose fragments I’ve cut along the way, it wound up more like 30, but it did feel like the last couple pieces put a lid on it. I’ve been working on it over the course of the summer, so I suppose August is as good a time to wrap it up as necessary. There will still need to be some edits when I return to it, probably later in the fall, but probably not any major trimming by then.
Starting out, there is always the excitement of not really knowing the destination, even if you think you do. But even then, that is part of the fear. The worry that the horses will tire or the engine will run out of gas, and maybe you’ll abandon the project by the side of the road. A road that is, in fact, dotted with a number of half-conceived manuscripts and zine projects that go back more than a decade. I think only once have I been successful in picking something up once it idled for too long. And that project (unusual creatures) had many elements, the written text, but also collages and an installation piece at the library, all of which occurred over a decade before the written segments were wrapped up. I really only finished it because I needed those poems for a longer project manuscript that was coming to a close where they were too perfect NOT to include.
Kristy Bowen, beginnings
I am thrilled to announce my second collection is now available for pre-order at Bookshop, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Thank you, MoonPath Press editor Lana Hechtman Ayers for including my poetry in this amazing collective of Pacific Northwest Poets. I am honored to be included into this poetry family.
This is a book that seeks to understand and explore a personal origin story. It is a book that excavates life beneath the surface of daily existence in the search to understand how people, places, and events of a life shape us […]
And oh yeah, that book cover! Isn’t it gorgeous. Thank you Mary O’Shaughnessy for giving permission for your work of art titled “Portal to Time and Tide” to be used for this cover. And for those of you who don’t know, the lighthouse is Pt. Wilson Lighthouse in Port Townsend, Washington. The first lighthouse I lived at as a child.
Carey Taylor, New Book!
Last night I held a little zoom celebration/launch for my paid subscribers, and it was a joyous occasion. I got to bed into some of the themes in The Ghost Lake, read a little out loud and take questions, in a safe space full of engage, interested people. Thank you to those who came along.
I couldn’t decide what to post today. Readers of this newsletter have watched my journey to getting the book published, and today, there is not much I can say except, we got there, and it is in part thanks to you. You have taken an interest in my work, paid subscribers have even supported me financially, and that small steady income has meant that I had more time to write, more time to work on my book. I was so pleased to see the first copy out in the wild in a photo from subscriber and friend – your post made my day. Thank you. […]
I began my writing career in my thirties, drawn to poetry during a very difficult time. I began my reading career much earlier, when my mum first passed me a Read It Yourself book and told me to have a go. All creative writing comes first from reading and the realisation that books do not magically appear, that someone is writing the books you read. It takes courage to put yourself forward and be that writer, especially if you come from a background or community that cannot easily access or experience the creative arts; a background in which the creative arts are not part of your community experience. To the writers who came before me, thank you. You were the people I could see that encouraged me to be.
Wendy Pratt, It’s Publication Day for The Ghost lake!
One of the truths in the world of poetry publishing is that Hedgehog Poetry can always be relied upon to give a platform to new and powerful voices. In its latest tranche of publications, I was particularly drawn to Lesley Curwen’s Rescue Lines, a pamphlet that courageously tackles the subject of destructive personal relationships.
Its poems vividly evoke what it is like to have a coercive partner. None do this more powerfully than Sister with Bees. Significantly the poem opens with the statement: ‘She did not ask the bees to come.’ Any sense of blame that society might wish to attribute to women, who find themselves in a similar situation, is immediately refuted. Her attractiveness and her passivity, qualities often used by the perpetrators of abuse to justify their behaviour, are tackled head on by the poet and dismissed. The poet characterises the nature of this relationship through the stunning visual metaphor of being covered from head to toes in a swarm of bees: ‘sewn/ in a venomed sheath’. The verb ‘sewn’ and the noun ‘sheath’, explain the woman’s passivity. She is unable to escape this claustrophobic relationship with its threat of violence (‘venomed’): she is powerless to act. ‘Though her legs ache to run,/ she has become used to holding herself in’ . So she ‘stands perfectly still beneath the hum, muscles cramped/…She does not move.’ She cannot even raise the alarm and seek help, for his pernicious presence robs her of her voice. She is ‘speechless at being chosen.’ Note the word ‘chosen’; choice in this relationship is his, all choices have been taken away from her.
These ideas are developed further, primarily through Curwen’s skilful development of the symbol of the sea that we find in many of the collection’s poems. In To a Lifeboatman, the opening poem, the experience of a coercive relationship is likened to drowning (‘a heap, head crowned with salt, lungs/ blown like bellows, eyes blurred wet’). Similarly, in A View of Plymouth Breakwater, the narrator of the poem reflects upon the actions of the sea on the breakwater and conveys her sense of being overwhelmed (‘Some mornings it drowns in spring tide,/ its heft of Dartmoor rock subsumed). At other times she finds in its raging waters an expression of her resentment at her situation (‘I suck breath through storm and lull,/ reading your words on the water’s face// finding anger, my endless rage/ in the pummelling of waves on stone.’). Later in the collection, The Seas Between Us Grow Every Day compares the road to recovery from such a relationship to a ‘long sail at a snail’s pace’ as the sailor in the poem slowly puts the past behind her (‘a thousand miles of/ wetness/ boredom/ danger’). The resulting sense of freedom is captured in Unmoored, the penultimate poem in the pamphlet. The narrator’s life is now described as ‘un/ tethered’, ‘lines’ have been ‘slipped’. To her it is like floating in the sea with arms and legs outstretched, and as she does so she feels herself healing physically and emotionally: ‘a skin of salt/ healing/ bitterest sores.’
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Rescue Lines’ by Lesley Curwen
I Published My First “Childless Cat Lady Poem”
Here, on Instagram and later on Facebook a few weeks ago, after JD Vance’s comments surfaced. The poem got a fair amount of likes. A number of my friends posted that though they aren’t actually “childless cat ladies” they felt Vance was insulting them too. Some identify as childless dog ladies, some are ladies who don’t have children, but do have lizards, or birds or snakes, or just difficult jobs, or jobs that keep them on the road, or aging parents they need to care for, or ambitions that prevent them from becoming parents, or debts to pay off or. . . or… or… the list goes on. It made me think of all the different kinds of ladies there are, and all the different kinds of lives we are allowed to live in this country.
I wrote this poem for us, for them, for everyone.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Poem for Childless Cat Ladies, Dog Ladies, Ladies with Lizards and Everyone Else Out There.
The US government funds a genocide and arrests student protestors for refusing to go along with it. The problem is that the protestors can imagine a world without genocide, and this is unbearable to the national-security statists. […]
Poetry also does this work of imagining the impossible. Poetry carries protest beneath its skirt, tucked into its back pocket, buried beneath the closed eyes of an elegy.
Poetry imagines the impossible because the world that we have been given remains intolerable.
Intolerable: this neoliberal air-conditioned nightmare run by the cynical billionaires whose dark money determines US electoral outcomes.
Intolerable: this pageant of cowards in business attire, engorged bylines dripping from their mouths, and resumes so rich that ones needs an antacid to even glance at them.
Intolerable: the paucity of thought in the lives of these ‘thought leaders,’ and the absence of self-consciousness, an awareness of their own thoughtlessness, and a conscience that makes getting things wrong more important than defending their over-published egos.
The intolerables stack and no think-piece can touch the mess in my head; no directive or slogan can settle the ghosts of Gaza’s children, whose lives have been torn from them as the Western superpowers watch and mumble platitudes about “well, if Hamas hadn’t done it what it did, then all these innocent children would haven’t to be dead. . .”
Alina Stefanescu, On the politics of poetry.
I don’t do well with uncertainty. Well, who does, I guess. But I was recently on the precipice of a big decision and was flapping around crazily. But some small part of me was watching me flap around. That part said, “Hm. Well. Look at you, flapping around.” I didn’t feel judged or judgey, particularly, just that there was this observing corner. And maybe it’s out of that observe-y corner that we write poems. We writers of poems.
The poem for this week is one of my own. I wrote it a couple of years ago, and it’s a political poem, of sorts. And because of the state of the world, well, it’s still relevant. And I wrote it out of an attempt to stand for a moment in the eye of the storm. To observe the flapping world and say, “Hm. Well. Look at you, flapping.” And to capture a bit of what I could see and hear in the whirling maelstrom. […]
You say “my flag”
Marilyn McCabe, I hear a hundred silences
I see the loose weave of gauze
placed over a wound.
See the worm circling
tightly a woman’s body.
The backs of girls and women
over looms, the deafening clatter.
See a widow’s hump.
Warp and weft of chessboard.
Set up the kings.
Knock them down.
To Whom,
That air you have about you! Such immeasurable glow. You carry it well, a blush, a fresh coif. And your body—so inhabited? I call out from my desert(ed!) soul, warred by wind and sand. Oh, the memories, thinned, erased!
If I could tell you what I once knew—
If my grief could save you—
M.
Rosemary Starace, Postcard from Mars
The poem starts with ‘They say’ – but who are the ‘they’? The poem never tells us – but the ‘they’ say what they say with their words and their actions – they say that ‘some lives are worth less than other lives’. It is too easy to say the ‘they’ are the government, the ‘they’ are also society, the people we live and work with, the people we overhear talking on the bus or in the pub and pretend we don’t hear them. This is a ‘they’ that perhaps many of us are complicit in somehow.
There is also a wonderful trick in the language here – we read over and over ‘worth less’ but our brains and our hearts hear and feel ‘worthless’. It is not just that some lives are worth less, some lives are worthless. But this transformation doesn’t really happen until the final stanza, and when it does, it feels like a key slotting into a lock. It feels almost like relief, as obscene as it is, because that is what we have been hearing and thinking all this time.
The second stanza starts to unpack how this might be so with the strange logic of power and government – that if a life arrives ‘hungry, soaked to the bone’ then of course they are worth less. In this poem, in the logic of this power structure, fleeing barbed wire fences, being born into iron chains, who speak with a tongue from afar, those with calloused hand, those who walk barefoot, those who have been traumatised by what they see are all worth less. Are all worthless, despite these things being things they cannot control.
This is a blistering poem that is full of controlled anger and deserves a place in future anthologies of war, of refuge, anthologies of political poetry, anthologies about love, because what act of love is more radical than to truly believe that all lives are worth the same, that a stranger’s life is worth the same as the person you love most in the world? And if we could believe this, then what radical acts of love and care could we let loose in the world, what changes could we make?
Abeer is writing and recording poems on her Youtube channel at the moment which seek to document the horrors of the war and terror in Gaza. You can find her channel here.
Kim Moore, Poetry Diary featuring a poem by Abeer Ameer
Once more I feel inclined to write something about recovering time, focus and agency for ourselves. The very act of writing, and of writing something here, is a key part of that need. Writing, not an email, not a text message, not work notes, not a post or comment on other social media, but taking the time to write, just because, as an attempt to make time and reconsider things. This kind of writing ends up being recursive and self-reflective, and it’s no suprise that, from its early days, blogging implied a lot of blogging about blogging. Indeed writing about writing is, should we say, “a thing”. My guess is that it is “a thing” because unavoidably (perhaps?) non-instrumental writing (should we call it like that) reflects on itself as practice even when the subject matter may be something else.
The best writers, in my mind, are ‘writerly writers’, or those conscious of form and process, often to the point of fastidiousness. This is because this kind of writing, that often deserves the term of “literature”, is not merely phatic communication, fulfilling a ‘social function’ in pragmatic terms. I’d also say that writing that reflects on itself is also much more than an aesthetic practice. It is not merely about storytelling, pedagogy or distraction (“entertainment”). It is the result of an attempt to regain individual agency over one’s time and space, and over one’s ideas or should we even say “brain activity”. When you are writing, really writing, you are not doing anything else.
Contemporary working cultures, often also described as “industries”, are the result of direct and indirect disciplining and punishment- both literal and symbolic (discoursive) in nature. The goal needs to be clear, and almost always it needs to lead to “conversion”- writing as “content” needs to produce “engagement” which needs to “convert” into money in someone’s account somehow. This requires timetabling, scheduling, measurements. “The Quantified Self” concept extends itself to the counting of words per minute (as a teenager, I learned typing in huge, grey, cold metal mechanical typewriters- we had rulers to measure the number of characters we typed per minute). One must not only count the words, but publicise them- a competition with ourselves and against others. This has become zeitgeist: more is always better, but it needs to be announced; otherwise there is no participation in the public arena of fierce public competition as a mode of existence.
Ernesto Priego, The Practice of Writing for Self-Reflection and Agency
Calvin implicitly acknowledges the seductive power of Virgil’s verse only to repudiate it. His somewhat embattled evocation and denial of Virgil suggests a real complexity of experience: he allows Virgil to speak at length, and indeed his quotations of complete verse paragraphs from the Aeneid and the Georgics emphasise the remarkable flexibility, strength and coherence of Virgil’s poetry at the unit of the paragraph or sequences of paragraphs (as distinct from the clause or line). Secondly, the theme of the quotations reminds us of the central place of the natural world in the Virgilian poetic and religious imagination. But ultimately Calvin’s response unmistakably conveys dissatisfaction or disappointment: there is a hint of real pain, as well as anger, in that ieiuna speculatio, a beauty that offers no real nourishment.
Not all of the great readers of Virgil have expressed or implied such disillusion; but Calvin’s reproach represents one version of a common response. We recognize the germ of feeling which, at its harshest, becomes Ezra Pound’s provocative assessment of Virgil as ‘a second-rater, a Tennysonianized version of Homer’, or Pope’s memorable comment that Virgil wrote only one honest line. Virgil’s Latin is unsurpassably beautiful and moving (for me, most of all in the Georgics), and I have several times tried to write about his distinctive style — most recently in a chapter for the revised Cambridge Companion to Virgil, available here. But the older I get, the more I have a sneaking sympathy for Calvin.
Victoria Moul, Starveling speculation?
I’m fascinated by Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia poet Clare Goulet’s full-length poetry debut, Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), a collection of poems approaching language as the means through which to articulate a detailed study. “So pretty it shocks: pink smarties / shaken out of the box,” she writes, to open the poem “Icmadophilia ericetorum / candy,” “picked on a whim / for the green-room rider, pleasure spreading / its plush blue blanket every which way / over moss.” There is a curious way that Goulet’s language propels, composed as field guide, scripting a detail through language that suggests hers is a somewhat slippery subject matter: is this a collection around the collection and study of lichen, or a means through which to discuss something else entirely? Possibly both, honestly. Goulet’s poems provide a kind of layering, of waves and sweeps, writing around and through the subject of lichen, multifaceted enough to ply meaning upon meaning. “Lichen as armour is truth inverted: / a bullet-hole flowers,” she writes, as part of “Parmelia sulcata / hammered shield,” “cancer / takes root, a wound is blessé.”
There is something comparable, obviously, to Goulet’s explorations through the minutae of plants, language and Latin to the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of her latest here], although Goulet seems to offer her explorations not as an end but as a means through it, such as the poem “Zaubreyus supralittoralis / dreaming,” that offers: “I have not been honest, not told you / years collecting lichen made a river of forgetting / which meant not thinking / about him.” Akin to Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” or Monty Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer Press, 1985), the poems emerge out of the prompt of the original study of lichen, but instead wrap that research around other considerations, other functions, across the length and breadth of her lyric. She writes of the Greeks, intelligence reports, Shirley Jackson, Mae West, Plato, Mad Men, cartoon gestures and other touchstones, utilizing her research as both core and writing prompt, offering a solid line of meaning thick with context.
rob mclennan, Clare Goulet, Graphis scripta / writing lichen
The names of things are most beautiful on the verge
Luisa A. Igloria, Catalogue for the Aftertime
of disappearing. We don’t sound them out only in
our mouths—they rise up from the salt flats
in our chests, the dusty villages at the far reaches
of our feet, the humid rainforests in our lungs.
The silver leaf mouse, the dwarf cloud rat,
the emerald fly-catcher, the shy brown deer.
Today the street has few trees and the front yards of the newer residents have nearly no trees. (I say “newer residents” as the oldest resident on the street now.) I can only guess as to why they were cut down and not replaced. Too busy? Too messy? Too many leaves to rake or blow? There’s a lack of shade on these concrete-surrounded homes and the front yards look alien to me, like they belong on another planet, one where there are only hot, green squares. Trees are a beautiful and easy remedy for mitigating hot days and carbon footprints. Just sayin’.
That’s the end of the lecture section.
Trees, like every living thing, eventually meet their end through the hand of humans, disease, natural disaster, or other unknowable circumstances. A memoir I’m reading (You Could Make this Place Beautiful), about the dissolution of a marriage and a life as the writer knew it, started me thinking about the parallels between the life of a tree and the life of a human. Both are planted, grow, weather stresses, grow stronger or weaker from the stresses, persevere or give up, sometimes multiply, sometimes grow older (hopefully), and eventually die.
So here I sit on a Friday afternoon under the shade of my backyard Magnolia feeling grateful for her shade in today’s 94 degrees as I bring this post to an end. This turned into quite a long post, for me, so I hope I didn’t bore you too much. It’s just that I get attached to trees and I keep being momentarily shocked when I walk out the front door and one is missing.
Charlotte Hamrick, The Trouble with Trees
She’s climbed these rocks enough times.
This time is to stay. She crawlsinto the volcano’s mouth,
with lamentations in herjean’s pockets, vest, and backpack.
PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 37
All stuffed full, overflowing.
Have I been submitting poems? Sometimes. I’ve submitted seven packets of poems in the last three months. That’s not awesome (my goal is one packet per week), but is also not a dismal nothing. Have I been writing? Not as much as I’d like. Not as much at all.
I knew this was coming. From my last entry, “But I feel myself stretching thin and I know that I need to give myself some grace. I know that sometimes I have to back burner my own poetry to get other things done, especially this time of year.”
So, here I am giving myself grace.
I did however want to pop in and recommend some very good poetry adjacent books.
First one is Carl Phillips’s My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing. So good. This book is not just full of excellent writing advice; it’s full of good living advice as well. And Carl is the master at writing in a personable and yet exacting style. I’ve been savoring these beautiful essays each night when the work of the day is accomplished.
Second book I haven’t read yet, but if you’re like me, you read everything that Dan Beachy-Quick writes. So, don’t miss How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing (part of the Poets On Poetry series). I hadn’t know this gem was out there, but the lovely Annie Wenstrup learned about during her time at the Bread Loaf Conference last week and shared. Dan’s essays and poetry always push me out of what comes easily into what is authentically transcending the ordinary.
Finally, a giant book that I’m slowly working my way through, The Work of Art by Adam Moss. This book isn’t solely about writing, but I feel like these meanders through artists’, musicians’, writers’, and creators of all stripes’ work process has really helped me envision different ways of writing poems. Not only that, it’s a beautifully designed book whose very layout and structure has made me think about how text works on a page.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Checking in with some book suggestions…
Although Planet Poetry is now on its holidays, we’ve already got some exciting poets lined up for October onwards when we start Season Five. One interview in the bag and a couple more on the way.
Meanwhile, a wee sonnet of mine which was published in June by Ink Sweat & Tears was voted its ‘poem of the month’ – possibly down to the fact that I petitioned my entire mailing list of poets to place their votes – although I did not ask them to vote for my poem of course! Anyway, if you’d like to read it and hear me reading it, the poem and a recording is here on the I S & T website. I was very touched indeed by the comments the poem received.
Other poetry-related stuff I’ve been up to: writing a review of a collection by Simon Alderwick for the Frogmore Papers, re-reading Ovid’s Heroides for a project I’m working on, and contacting poetry groups and Stanzas to ask if anyone will have me give a reading in early 2025, when I’m hoping my book will be out with Pindrop Press. So far I’m reading at Seaford next month and at the Poets’ Cafe Reading in March, with dates at Chichester and Eastbourne yet to be fixed. Hopefully more to come, if I’m to sell some books!
Now back to some lovely box-filling and wordcount checking. Wish me luck!
Robin Houghton, A finale, a winning poem and some forthcoming readings
Perhaps some of you remember the Magician poems from February’s Stray Bulletin? Well, here’s one more to add to the collection: ‘Magicians Trick With Scissors’. This has just been published in Magma Poetry 89, and I read it at the issue’s launch at Limehouse Town Hall earlier in the month. After a long break from reading in London, it felt good to be — briefly — back in the thick of it, on a hot night, among many interesting and talented poets. A suitable setting for the Magician’s live debut, since this and other poems see him struggling to reclaim his once-formidable powers. […]
I’m currently dipping in and out of many books — including two audio books (I’ve paused Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost to take in M. John Harrison’s shorter and zippier Light). It’s been a particularly notable experience to absorb Julia Bird’s pamphlet is, thinks Pearl in the middle of making my way through Richard Berengarten (aka Richard Burns)’ The Manager. Both are poetry books with protagonists, named after their protagonists, and in both cases the protagonist seems adrift in the midst of their own life. Pearl hovers semi-transparently at the edge of the events she observes; the poems are named (or so I thought at first) after types of pearl, and in each there is the pleasure of finding out how the title will come to make sense in the context of the unfolding observations (‘Red Pearl’, for example, turns out to be to do with carnivorous instincts). The Manager’s one hundred poem-parts are almost like chapters (they are named ‘ONE’, ‘TWO’, ‘THREE’ and so on) and toward the middle seem like they could be referring to the Manager’s advancing age as he flits between women and lunches, hotels and airports. The long lines in this book, which Berengarten calls ‘verse-paragraphs’, embody both the runaway thought and the runaway mouth, while the neat columns of Pearl’s single-stanza poems speak to Pearl’s softer tucked-away-ness, of being confined by a more intrusive sense of what is proper. The contrast is rather sad and beautiful.
Other poetry books I own which have protagonists: Matthew Caley’s Rake; Jen Hadfield’s Almanacs; Ben Borek’s Donjong Heights.
Jon Stone, “Cool, sure, swish”
So this week I got a little good news (which I can’t announce yet, but will soon!) I have to say, it’s amazing how these things can make so much difference to a poetry small press author. Very few of us get any real reach, the big prizes, any real recognition, so when you get good news, we better celebrate, right?
In other literary news, Calyx put up their poetry contest winners (I judged that contest) and I’m getting ready to read for another literary magazine’s contest. It’s nice to contribute in this way, especially because a big contest win early in my writing career meant so much to me. (You never know when someone needs that little push to stay a writer!)
I hope that as September approaches I will be doing more reading, writing, submitting, catching up on writer things. In the meantime though, some pink roses, a house finch, the blue Supermoon, and hummingbird. Wishing you stars and supermoons and poems.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Blue Supermoons, Thunderstorm, a Little Good News I Can’t Announce Yet and Other Literary News, Kirkland and Sunflower Sunsets
That lover of bird call and freefall.
That red Styrofoam packing material keeping the body intact as it travels through time.
That one-horse town of a thousand nights of kick-ass open mics.
That verbal tic of sweet hellos.
That heart of mine: knock, knock, knocking at the door.
Rich Ferguson, Of Bird Call and Freefall
when you find me again,
Robin Gow, train station
i will be inside a bottle.
rinse me out in the sink.
stick a flower in my mouth.
talk to me then. you can
tell me anything.