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: community with the dead, peyote in the cornfield, a cursed seaside town, wasps as good fairies, god’s forked tongue, and more. Enjoy!
My friend Kathleen Kummer recently had her 95th birthday. We have had a weekly telephone call since the start of the first lockdown in March 2020. Kathleen’s poems from her collection Living below sea level have featured here before.
Flying a kite refers to the ‘90s, as the grandson is now in his thirties. He lives abroad, but regularly visits. A variation on the villanelle form, the poem successfully blends the personal and the universal. […]
Fokkina McDonnell, Flying a kiteThese skies are empty, but for the flight
of buzzards and invisible larks on the wing.
The skies they will show on the news tonightwill be apocalyptic, eerily bright
with the clever ways of destroying and killing
to which the whole world claims the right.
I am watching my grandson wind in his kite.
I’ve been trying to make that line into a poem. It came to me on the morning after the Democratic Convention, but I’m in no mood to write a political poem. It seems much better as a poem about a woman at the far edge of midlife (the edge that is closer to old age), and yet, I don’t really feel like exploring that either, at least not yet. It could be your basic nature poem, but the world has so many of those, and I’m not sure I can contribute a new angle–although that writing prompt appeals to me: write a nature poem that says something about the passing of the seasons and the phase of the moon, but in a brand new way.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, How Quickly We Go from Waxing to Waning, from Flourishing to Fading
Now the long
Luisa A. Igloria, Prescience
rains come, and the body knows
how shadows pool like grief
in the throats of anemones, press
down the length of reeds. The body
fears how much it feels, even as light
shapes a film like armor around
each object in the world.
Aug 10th was the annual authors’ market at the Wakefield Farmer’s Market. A few people asked, as usual, wow, is this every week? Sadly no, but gladly no, because sometimes it’s a feature of glassworks, or woodworking, ceramics, or community services, such as death duelas, or forest replanting, or kids crafts.
It was perfectly sunny and cool so it made for great amount of foot traffic. […] The author Georgia Katz-Rosene is 12. She home-printed her novels, put them into signatures, bound them, hand-coloured the covers, and sold out of all 4 titles. (With a takehome of over $200. And without a typo, bad margin, poorly placed page number anywhere unlike some professional presses I’ve seen.) […]
It was windy at day’s start so I gathered rocks to hold things down. As a young buyer commented, “I know it’s your books I am supposed to pay attention to, but your rocks are distracting.” I got a decent amount of sales, $75 or so, plus they gave us tickets for free drink or snack so that ups it to something like $85 for the morning.
It’s good to get a chance to talk with writers, compare notes on printing, research, distribution, pitches, news, whether the writers had other booths or were from those walking around with big ole produce baskets and newborns.
Pearl Pirie, Authors’ Market, Wakefield
I’m lucky enough not to have to teach in the summer, so this is my “productive” season as a writer, to be academic-capitalist about it, but my ability to concentrate has ebbed and flowed (an anxiety symptom). That’s okay, I keep reminding myself; I’m not in a publish-or-perish crisis. But I’m also seeking artist residencies and funding because of another job-related gift: I’m eligible for a sabbatical in Fall 2025 and I’m hoping to find a few extra resources to stretch it to a year. Listing achievements, pitching projects, asking for references (the Guggenheim requires four!!!)–it’s all about shouting, I am worthy! while repressing ferocious self-doubt. A hard trick when you’re trying to right an anxiety tailspin. Yet in this case there are real deadlines, and I owe it to the work I’ve been doing to put myself in the running.
The project that has crystallized in my occasionally clear brain, during the last year or so, is sort of a prequel to Poetry’s Possible Worlds. Community with the Dead: Reading Modernism Strangely will consist of experiments in literary criticism that honor the weirdness of modernism itself: each essay, as in Poetry’s Possible Worlds, blends scholarship with storytelling, but in this case each adapts a different structure to the material. Think of hermit crab essays, if you’re a nonfiction person. I’m finishing an essay mimicking a ten-card Tarot spread, discussing H.D.’s use of Tarot. Last year I published “Ghost Tours” in The Hopkins Review, an essay about poetry and walking that relegates repressed experience and histories to a footnote underworld. I’m planning to adapt other published pieces and produce new work, too. It’s serious fun in the mode of creative scholarship I’ve been advocating for as fiercely as I’m able. Someone should fund it, right?
I specialized in modernist poetry in graduate school and have taught it for decades, over the years I was also strengthening my own literary skills, so in a way I’ve been spiraling around this project for my whole career. My latest bit of modernist scholarship, of a more traditional kind, appears in collection Eliot Now, edited by Megan Quigley and David E. Chinitz, just published by Bloomsbury. The collection looks rich and up-to-date, full of good provocations. My short piece, “Glossing The Waste Land,” addresses how two women poets, Jeannine Hall Gailey and Paisley Rekdal, invoke The Waste Land in work about sexual violence.
Lesley Wheeler, Beginning a hybrid project, anxiously
I ate peyote in the cornfield watched the sun explode gore crow in the owl’s talon pressed red the rabbit morning moved through gold pushed into its thick meniscus corn grew in blood fields pig blood mule blood wives’ blood children’s blood the blood of Olympus the blood of Jesus on my last day of chemotherapy I rang the brass bell wandered off to die having eaten all the corn having swallowed cup after cup of American gold sugar a Dekalb ministry hallelujah knocking in blood heaving in blood my head a sectioned orange my head shucked open into August my head an exploded rind the end of everything
Rebecca Loudon, August
I hold
Rajani Radhakrishnan, I hold August up like a wall
August up like a wall. Can I stay here
another day, another hour, another
lifetime? Can I pretend the silhouettes
in the silver light, sing? Can I hold the
darkness warm and tight against my skin?
Stay so still that reeds can see themselves
in my eyes and hear the music deep inside
their hollows? The month prepares to moult.
Under my feet, a river changes course.
On July 23 at 5:56 PM, I received an email from Broadstone Books which began:
“Dear Erica,
On behalf of the Broadstone Books acquisitions team, thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript Landscape with Womb and Paradox, and for your patience with the time it has taken for us to respond to the great many submissions we received during our open reading period.”
And then those magic words: “I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted for publication.”
The next day, I tested positive for Covid for the first time. It was, to say the least, quite a week.
The news of my book’s acceptance is a bright spot in what’s been, so far, a challenging year. In late December, my mother fell and broke her hip, which landed her in the hospital and then a post-acute facility, where she spent almost five months recovering. During those months, my family tried to figure out the best alternative for her. Still dealing with the effects of the stroke she’d had two years earlier and showing signs of dementia, she couldn’t move back to the apartment where she’d lived for the last twenty-four years.
Through a friend, I found an assisted living home for her near me. This necessitated moving my mother from California to Oregon, a complicated process involving finances, insurance, social workers, and wheelchair-assisted travel. We moved her safely to her new place in early May. On August 19, we celebrated her 87th birthday with cake, presents, and her loved ones in person and on Zoom. She couldn’t stop smiling.
Arranging all of this has sapped my energy, both physical and creative. It’s been difficult to focus on writing, and too often, I find myself staring at my screen, waiting for something, anything, to appear. That easy flow of words I’ve taken for granted has slowed, like a car stuck in traffic. To quote Georgia O’Keeffe, “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
And yet, the book! When I think about it, I get that giddy, excited feeling.
Erica Goss, My New Book, Landscape with Womb and Paradox, to be published in 2025
For my latest project, I got the opportunity to work with a handful of artists that I love.
I recorded some poems for the flipside of a 7inch vinyl record. The San Francisco band Sweat Lodge has two songs on their side.
Songwriter/musician Robbie Cohen recorded my poems, so he also added some brilliant soundscapes behind them. We even got an amazing cover from Bay Area artist John Vochatzer so the whole thing turned out great. Much thanks for Related Records for putting all the pieces in place in the best way possible.
Shawnte Orion, split 7inch vinyl record
My poetry collection, The Sessions was an experiment in bringing together my different hats as poet and therapist. The book took shape over the space of a year or so, emerging from what I came to think of as my “sand tray” document – basically, pages and pages of notes, quotes, lines and drafts. Early poems focused on my experience as a therapist; later, I started writing about memories of being in therapy myself.
There are fifty poems in total – reflecting the traditional “fifty minute hour” of a therapy session – all sonnets (of sorts!). As I found my way into the writing, the sonnet became a kind of container, its formal constraints mirroring the boundaries of a session. Much like therapy though, sometimes the rhymes and revelations don’t follow the pattern. Sometimes the reality is messier than the model. Alongside poems that speak to the power and potential of therapy are poems that interrogate its limitations and contradictions – and mine. There was a particular kind of vulnerability in the writing of these poems. They occupy an uncertain and arguably quite “non-professional” territory; anxious, unruly, flawed.
Whilst caution around self-disclosure in therapy is necessary, I do think there can often be an element of reticence – stigma even – within professional contexts when it comes to talking about our vulnerabilities as therapists. Organisational pressures, performance-driven services and the influence of the medical model can, I think, drive a retreat into an “us-them” framework which makes certain things difficult to talk about. For me, poetry can be a space to move towards the unspoken, towards uncertainty and vulnerability, the elusive and unreliable poem as guide.
Jonathan Totman, On Therapist Self-Disclosure
I appreciated this poem in how it tells its story simply, but lets a chilling dark truth sit not directly spoken, but still central. The elephant in the room is in the room, and she sees it clearly. Where she lives will no longer be livable in some not too distant future. She’s polite to her friends, who live elsewhere, and who don’t yet realize, who are not yet checking the maps, measuring the distances, understanding the scenarios, figuring the costs. And with her final line she nods to the cost to herself, the weight of that elephant, its large shadow.
This poem manages to be both subtle and unsubtle, and plays out in just a short scene. A host, her guests, a tree dropping leaves, a conversation. But the line that really tells the tale is an internal one to the narrator, telling to us, the readers, what she politely withheld from her guests.
Marilyn McCabe, our coral chairs on the bottom of the sea
I like Muir’s poem very much, and it shares with the Hardy a tang of reality that the others do not: his persistent breakfast wasp is as immediately present to us as the insects clustering around Hardy’s lamp and slipping in his ink. Muir was surely well aware of the long tradition to which he was contributing (as he himself put it, ‘Into thirty centuries born, / At home in them all but the very last, / We meet ourselves at every turn / In the long country of the past’). All the same, I can’t share his wasp’s despair: I’m positively looking forward to a bit of a chill.
Victoria Moul, Late summer’s drone
Niamh is sitting by a gravestone, writing in her shiny notebook. It’s a sunny day in Heptonstall, and we’re both attending at a Jodie Hollander poetry workshop in the museum. Jackie Hagan died yesterday. There are two churches here: one in ruins. Everything is Jackie, the sunshine, the gravestones, the ants.
Jodie Hollander is originally from Wisconsin. She was raised in a family of classical musicians, and her childhood was not happy. You learn these things very quickly in her second collection, Nocturne, which was published with Liverpool & Oxford University Press in 2023. You also learn that she has an extraordinary ability to give voice to the impact of childhood trauma, and to find meaning and form for those experiences:
Though the green coconuts seem safe
in the trees, as the winds pick up, I wonder,
perhaps something is coming once again(from Storm)
It’s Niamh’s first poetry workshop, and she’s relieved that almost everyone is older than me, and therefore unintimidating. Jodie holds the workshop with care – and with all of my full sacks of grief, I’m deeply grateful. Before we came outside to write, we read together – House by Richard Wilbur, Horse by Louise Glück, and in accordance with the frustrating (imho) etiquette of writing workshops, nothing by Jodie. But here are the images and the techniques we’ll find throughout Nocturne – the horses, of course, and the houses; the troubling uncertainty, the constant sense of threat, the losses, the dreams.
Kim Moore and Clare Shaw, Storm-damaged: me, my daughter and Jodie Hollander’s Nocturne
Using these rainy, sleepless nights to catch up on work – making a tutorial, judging a poetry contest – and working on my seventh book manuscript, which I thought was done two years ago, but then I added a lot more to it, and now I’m looking at an unwieldy hundred page monster that I need to edit down and somehow make into a unified thing. Knowing when and if a poetry manuscript is ready is an art, not a science – sometimes they’ll need a tweak, like a title change and a shifting of first poem – and sometimes they’ll need an overhaul, which is what I’m doing right now – before they’re ready to send to a publisher, and it’s difficult sometimes to make that judgement. Especially when one is sleep deprived and half-sick. I usually write a good solid collection of poems around a single theme, but because pandemic happened in middle of writing the poems in the book, it’s been tough to reign it in. Anyway, I hope to have it in somewhat finished form by October.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, August Rain, the Last Days of Lavender and Bobcats, Considering the Female Midlife Crisis Novel, and When You Know a Manuscript is Ready
Went on holiday, had a lovely time. It was very, very hot; perhaps too hot for pale old me, and too busy to be able to read (my ideal holiday). I’ve written 4 new poems, including my first ever proper commission. Unpaid, but who cares. It was written to celebrate a 55th wedding anniversary for my dear friends Brenda and Ron. The other three poems may make it out some day. Not bad for having a week off work (not the holiday). Mind you, I don’t want to have to use annual leave up to write…
Mat Riches, Who doesn’t love a tracker
The process of writing my book really changed my life. I grew up in a lot of upheaval and poverty. We moved frequently—including large moves from Airdrie, Alberta to Water’s Lake, Florida (moves too numerous to list). Like my mother, I dropped out of high school and worked.
As an adult, I went back to school to get away from working minimum wage at Subway as a single mom. I had just left an abusive marriage and felt lost. I woke up each day and did what was in front of me, placing one foot in front of the other—making moves myself from Moscow, Idaho to Kelowna, British Columbia.
In Kelowna, I had no furniture and made a bed for my son out of my clothes and some blankets on the floor. I slept on the bare floor. I eventually got some furniture through the help of a women’s shelter. I kept going to class and kept going no matter what. Each day, one after the other.
I never thought someone like me could be a writer. Practical concerns and the practically oriented world told me I shouldn’t bet on art for liberation from poverty. However, I signed up for a creative writing class on a whim and then I got introduced to the world of writing by Matt Rader, Michael V. Smith, Nancy Holmes, Anne Flemming, and Margo Tamez. My life clicked into place when I spent my energy on writing creative nonfiction and poetry. Lyrical experimentation allowed me the intellectual and artistic freedom I needed so desperately. I applied to the MFA at UBC Okanagan and I wrote under the supervision of Matt Rader.
My MFA manuscript became my book. The process made me learn that I could be an artist. It was life changing to go from being cloistered in silence to solidified in lyrical expression.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cristalle Smith (rob mclennan)
We made this time capsule of a show ‘Telling Tales’ for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. It is a deep dive into my work and my worlds, Ali Gardiner and I talk about poetry, memoir, music, fiction, performance and some of the recurring themes in my dreams and in my work, life and death, courage and resistance, light and dark, hope and love. […]
Gigging monster is back in her box and Writing monster is the boss of me again. I’m working on the next novel set in the Mrs Death universe. The working title of my second novel is ‘The Life Of Life’ – here’s a joyful picture of a perfect moment on an August afternoon editing, writing, whilst watching my tomatoes ripen. If only it would stay this summer warm and delicious for the whole process…
Listening back to this 2019 radio programme reminded me what it feels like to be inside the heart of the Life and Death and Time universe, it reminds me how brave I was, how brave we all have to be. How one is always trying to seek glimmers of hope and beauty and truth, always finding ways to say the big things, the difficult things, finding words to made sense of all of this mad man-made tragedy and loss, above all it is reminding me where I came from so I can find my way forwards to where I want to be. That’s one of the magic things that books do, take you home, take you elsewhere, take you to where you feel you belong, not just when you read them, but when you write them too.
Salena Godden, BBC R4 Archive ‘Telling Tales’
I’ve been fiddling away with the mariana fragments this past week since my rather auspicious start last weekend and am liking them so far. I initially thought they might be footnote-ish in style, but they are feeling more whole. As a writer who has probably written a hundred mermaid poems in her lifetime (including shipwrecks of lake michigan, which was a more modern interpretation of the lore, plus the entire segments of siren poems in GRANATA (though they were the winged, non-tailed, version of the original myths) it’s a subject I return to often, despite living many, many miles from any sea beyond the vast expanse of Lake Michigan at my doorstep.
I was telling J about my fascination with sea creatures that initially spawned my desire to study marine bio when I was 17–a complicated mix of low-key peer pressure, charismatic AP bio teachers, a desire to save the world, and endless environmental editorials in my high school newspaper. I quickly learned I was not cut out for science due to what I suspect, in hindsight, is a serious learning disability when it comes to math and numbers, however, I lived briefly along the Carolina coast taking marine science classes and loved it. Science’s loss was ultimately poetry’s gain.
This project is, of course, a little different. Inspired by that series of images I generated just on a lark, but now, as I progress through text fragments, is becoming an eerie story of a cursed seaside town whose houses keep collapsing into the surf and whose women become monstrous hybrids–not mermaids at all, but slimy, slithery, darker things.. If I manage to progress smoothly, I may even have it done in time to share during the lead-up to Halloween, when I have quite a few other surprises in store both here, IG, and in the shop.
Kristy Bowen, in which the poet returns to the sea
Fairy wasps are a group of tiny, parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs inside the eggs of other invertebrates. Moths, in this instance. The parasitic eggs may outnumber the host egg by 100 to 1. And maybe that’s why journalists write about these wasps with such bias: “dastardly”, “devious”, “malignant life”…3 (What does “malignant life” even mean? Isn’t anything with a metabolism malignant to something?)
Maybe we gravitate towards nature’s underdogs because we mistakenly view ourselves as one. The moth, as the unwilling host, is the underdog. The fairy wasp, the antagonist in the story we write.
But the article Richard sent me explains that one species of fairy wasp is going to be sold in small sachets to be set out in cupboards and closets. The insects will hatch and leave the sachet looking for moths. This is how they’ll protect the inventory of some museums. Until now, these museums relied on poisons.
Wasps as good fairies.
There is a poetry here that I am trying to unravel, or weave, or both. While moths work to deconstruct the past that we have so carefully archived, people are attempting to conscript wasps to serve as guardians of our past. More accurately, they’ll be the guardians of our constructed past. Neither of these things has anything to do with the truth, by the way.
If moths are the harbingers of entropy, fairy wasps, with their grotesque nature, conjure ghosts of our future.
That is, the future’s perspective of what was.
Ren Powell, Writing with the Fairy Wasps
I am one of the people thanked in the acknowledgments in Bearings, and I know this book well. Even so, sitting down and reading it all at once, cover-to-cover, wholly engaged me. [John] Egbert is someone who understands the importance of getting one’s bearings in unfamiliar territory, and he helps his readers get their bearings. The poems are—mostly—set in Bellingham and the southwest United States, but he shares [Robert] Macfarlane’s dizzy romance with exploration, and with precise words, populating his lines with yellow-breasted meadowlarks, river trout, plant names both Latin and common, a carillon of finches, the great horned owl. All the way through—even when the territory is wholly unfamiliar—the reader is in the hands of a sure-footed guide.
Consider this stanza from a poem set in South America, in Brazil, where I’ve never been:
A yellow-breasted flycatcher
sallies from the bridge,
snags a big black beetle.
Crook-necked egrets,
like white-tied Brazilian buskers,
cruise by on hyacinth islets
ripped loose from the Pantanal.—from “Barge Fishing”
Reading these lines, I’m immersed in the scene. The words themselves (as Macfarlane insists) are poems.
Bethany Reid, John Egbert, BEARINGS
LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s Apprenticed to the Night is primarily a set of poems on themes of family, love, ageing and death set against a backdrop of being born into a New York Italian American community somewhat on the margins of society. At its centre is a (possibly autobiographical) female figure whose ‘truths remain green. Stuck between my teeth.’
LoSchiavo’s characteristic play with language is apparent in this opening stanza from ‘Invitation to a Kiss’:
Some kisses are consumer errors. You’d
Try taking them back if you could. I’m hooked
On kisses warming me like cognac, poured
On my lips, heat transferring. I expect
Machines pre-loaded with kiss silver. I
Might gamble – costumed as the Queen of HeartsThe cross-fertilisation of multiple registers creates and suspends readerly expectations adroitly while illuminating the narrator’s views on love and relationships as transactions wanting to be more.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading August 2024: A Review
The Ink Cloud Reader is prefaced by an anecdote which imagines a famous Fourth Century AD Chinese calligrapher as a student trying to ‘read’ the clouds of ink in the pond in which he’s made to wash his brush. So the title suggests both the book’s difficulty and its concern with finding meaning and creating beauty in the teeth of the world’s confusion and violence and the inevitability of death. Difficulty comes both from its forms and the nature of its content: straddling public and private experience, it presents both in fragmentary terms and the latter in oblique and reticent ones as well. For the right reader it’s an impressively skilful, dazzlingly inventive and sometimes moving book that speaks strongly to the confusions of contemporary life.
The first poem, ‘Cumulonimbus’, develops from the idea that the calligrapher might ‘read’ cumulonimbus clouds in the inky pond. Moving easily in terms of syntax and metre, it’s full of quiet redirections that make its tone and overall bearing elusive. It begins
Halfway through my life
the reeds by Meguro River
where the ducks made love
stop whistling. I fear I’ve over-
inked, or the linseed oil
soured the sky. The wind
tastes of oysters grilled
over autumn soil.Allusions both enrich this and set the reader’s compass spinning.
Edmund Prestwich, Kit Fan, The Ink Cloud Reader – review
“New Uses for a Wand” looks at change, taking the law that energy is not destroyed but transformed and hence how old knowledge of myth and old wives’ tales can become reinforced by scientific knowledge and regraded into contemporary knowledge. A grandparent might have known that sprinkling salt on a path melts the frost, a science reader will know that the salt acts as an impurity, lowering the freezing point of the ice so it will stay in liquid form as the ambient temperature hovers around zero degrees celcius. “Eutectic” looks at a treasure cupboard,
Malleable as clay, I unwrap myself
offer you my wares, my stories’
glinting wit of iridescence.
The cracks and dunts are part of this too,
twice-fired by life, and scared by it all,
brittle as biscuit.”Yet, despite the scars and cracks the speaker is still willing to take a leap of faith with the person being addressed. Perhaps the previous knocks and heuristic knowledge gained make this new journey not quite a leap into the dark, but a leap tempered by experience.
Emma Lee, “New Uses for a Wand” Fiona Theokritoff (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
This poem is a cadae. It is structured by the mathematical constant pi in two distinct ways: it possesses five stanzas of 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 lines (in that order), and the poem’s 14 lines consist of 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 7 syllables (in that order). The name cadae comes from selection of letters in the pi-digit positions of 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 in the alphabet.
JoAnne Growney, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
Sometimes we need a friendly reminder that a writer’s work is play: playing with language, with form, with the reader’s expectations. There are so many ways to use wordplay not only in a new piece of writing, but also to generate a new piece: translations, predictive text, word banks, mishearings, autocorrect fails, and even typos can help crack something open that you might not have accessed otherwise.
I recently read a new poem that knocked my socks off, and I immediately wanted to share it with you along with a prompt. This poem is by Martha Silano, and it was recently published online in the Missouri Review: “When I learn Catastrophically.” […]
The author’s note explains the genesis of the poem:
Way back when, my dear friend and fellow poet Kelli Russell Agodon introduced me to an anagram generator website. How cool is that? When I was diagnosed with ALS in November of 2023, I wondered what the anagrams of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were. A few days later, I visited Anagrammer and typed it in. Once I had a list of words to work with, this poem just kind of wrote itself.
Martha Silano is a poet I’ve read and admired for years—and she’s a kind, generous, and funny human to boot. (I love when I meet someone who makes wonderful art, and they’re also a wonderful person.) Reading this new poem and author’s note, I immediately started thinking about how anagrams might be a way into a new piece of writing for me…and for you.
Maggie Smith, A Spectacular Poem & a Writing Prompt
I’m inclined to believe that texts find us when we need them most. Our questions draw them forward, and they act as willing magnets to our curiosities. At least that’s how I felt reading “The Gender of Sound,” Anne Carson’s essay from Glass, Irony and God (1995) earlier this month.
Like many women, I’ve been walking around in a state of dispirited exasperation over the current political discourse. Is a Vice Presidential candidate really disparaging “childless cat ladies,” sowing division between those with biological offspring and those without?
Maya C. Popa, We’re Not Going Back
My father died in an election year
Ann E. Michael, Poem-ish thing
77 days before he could have
cast his vote. I’m reminded of that now,
how distracted I was and how,
though the election mattered,
my father mattered more.
For most of us, what’s near the heart
obscures other concerns. Look:
there is dew on the grass,
barn swallows have
already left the garden.
Enrique Vila-Matas concludes Montano’s Malady with a description of Robert Musil on a mountain. As the coat, the hat, and the expression on Musil’s face emerge from words, I recognize them immediately from the photo Vila-Matas used to write this. A photograph taken of Musil on a mountain. When I inform my dog that book ends with a photograph of Musil rather than the ghost invoked by the author to meditate, briefly, on the city of Prague, he barks three times.
The author doesn’t acknowledge the photograph at any point in the text. In this, Vila-Matas resembles Samuel Beckett, who rarely ever names the paintings by the Old Dutch Masters that figure prominently in his descriptions of landscapes and interiors.
Alone in his cottage, Beckett stared at those paintings, described what he saw, and then placed the images in the frame we call fiction. Perhaps he was trying to exorcise them from his imagination. Obsessive relationships are tiresome. There are times when the only way out requires us to reproduce the thing we can’t stop remembering. Reproduction can be read as a rite of exorcism. My dog barks again, this time for no reason. One bark seems more like a question than a response. The paintings in question feature dark backgrounds altered by shafts of light that invoke the metaphysical, a word Beckett avoided using since being kicked out of his mother’s womb.
In the past year, I’ve watched over 118 videos of pilots debriefing the circumstances of various airplane crashes across the world. But only at night. Only when the house is sleeping do I return to my obsession and loop its possibilities.
The plane crashes are familiar to me. The shape of the horror engorged by the instant of realization that death is inevitable: this is already present when I begin watching the videos. Thus, each viewing offers a sense of recognition wherein the speaker reveals how the thing I imagined did actually happen, as confirmed by the evidence. The videos involving crashes relax me. They affirm my own experiences. They help me let go of the worrisome world and drift off to sleep like most imbeciles.
Only during those secret moments near midnight when my family sleeps and my dog snores am I permitted to live in the real world of airplanes. Unlike the world inhabited by most upright 21th century humans, the airplane world of minor writers and single barks knows that numbers exist to keep us from thinking about what numbers exist to avoid saying. The odds are not comets but the horizon is saturated with them.
Alina Stefanescu, A clime that could have arrived . . .
i stand in the front yard
Robin Gow, brutalist love poem
& i cannot believe the house is standing.
it is built of haphazard yearning
& a lot of folds. corridors that snake.
god’s forked tongue. do you remember
the egg? how smooth it was? my fingers
across the surface. i don’t know anymore
if it was real or if it was just what i invented
to keep myself alive. the earth gets rounder.
another door grows like a scab
from the ceiling.
Hot damn. Thank you for this amazing round up.
My pleasure.