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: Amanda Gorman’s hollow place, a zone of ambiguous meaning, the next life like a footfall in the heart, a day without birdsong, the music of ghosts, and more. Enjoy!
My best poem of last summer…a winsome stranger.
When then friends asked about a line, I confided
its secret. I was so tuned. Now Greece is far away,
another September song come. I lean in.As I stand by the window slicing tomatoes and bread,
the inside of the chant gives….No shade between us then. Pure radiance.
Jill Pearlman, Inside the Summer Chant
Voicing summer’s depth. To carry into go-go fall.
I have made it through the Sealey Challenge, through 32 total books and out the other side of August (34 if you count Ravenna Press’s Triple as 3 chapbooks). I posted a photograph on Instagram of each cover with the day’s number, with the exception of this book. (For day 13, I posted another cover a second time.)
Let us admit that I got a bit lost at times. What book did I read yesterday? What book am I reading today? But, as these things go, each day brought stand-out poems, and — by the end — certain books loomed. Not necessarily that they were better or worse than others, but their impact on me, at the particular time (and mood) I found myself in, created a greater impact.
A literature professor once said to me, and to her class of graduate students. “I know it’s a lot of reading, but when the wave recedes I hope you’ll be able to tell what flecks of foam have stuck to you and left the greatest impression.” That’s how it feels this morning.
So.
Carol Frost’s Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010) was one of those impactful books. The poems in this, her ninth collection, address her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a journey I’ve also undergone. It’s hard not to quote the description on the cover, because it’s true: she writes “with unflinching sincerity and courage.”
Her mother’s memory loss is only one theme. The other, woven throughout every poem, is the decline in the bee population. Flying insects of all kinds are growing endangered, and the loss of our native pollinators is a disaster that really can’t be countenanced or compensated.
As is the loss of one’s mother. The poems are a perfect marriage of spirit and humanity and nature.
Bethany Reid, HONEYCOMB, poems by Carol Frost
Last week Cane returned to school, and I was reminded that for me, September will likely always be the start of a new year, one of my favorite seasons. I love new beginnings, the return to milder weather, and the lack of formal holidays. It is the time of year I feel most energized and hopeful. For me, it’s a much better time than January for new routines and intentions. I need them this year more than ever, as we’re forging a new normal. It’s the first time since I retired from full-time education work three years ago that we haven’t had one of my children living with us.
As I’ve been pondering what I want to bring in and let go of, two recent reads have been so useful.
Diana Strinati Bauer, in “The beauty that is aging,” suggests that the important question to ask ourselves isn’t how we can somehow hang onto youth (because we can’t) but is instead, “Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” She writes about wanting to be her “best me,” and doesn’t that sound like a great thing for all of us to be?
“Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” doesn’t feel morbid or gloomy to me, but clarifying. The more death becomes a concrete reality than a fuzzy, some-day abstraction, the more purposeful I get about living.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Spring cleaning and new year’s intentions
Lots of poets and literary types have been dismissive on social media about the poem Amanda Gorman wrote for the Democratic National Convention in the States. You can read the text of her poem here (you need to scroll down), but this is a piece of writing designed to be heard, so it’s probably better to watch or listen to her performance of it: [YouTube link]
I didn’t love Gorman’s poem — and I am certainly not its target audience — but I don’t think it’s terrible, and in lots of ways it seemed well suited to its occasion. It certainly seems silly to suggest that it’s not a poem at all (as some people have). It’s no more clichéd than a lot of published poems I see in top journals and winning prizes, even if the clichés it is dealing in — and the rhetorical tradition on which it draws — are quite different. This made me wonder what was so alienating or annoying about Gorman’s piece for many discerning readers of poetry, including many who are vastly more tolerant than me of the sort of prosy-introspection-with-a-couple-of-OK-metaphors that often passes for a prize-winning contemporary poem?
Victoria Moul, Amanda Gorman’s hollow place and the Carmen Saeculare
The marvelous chutzpah of Le Guin, to finish her career by writing a novel celebrating piety for an audience teeming with libertarian tech bros and lefty utopians! My delight in Lavinia grows and grows.
And having just got as far as Book VII in rereading the Aeneid, I’m staggered by a) how faithful she is to Virgil and b) how faithful she is to Ursula Le Guin. Her conversation with Virgil is a conversation between equals.
The model of the book, maybe, is the intimate conversations in the sacred grove between Lavinia and the sending of Virgil: a girl speaking on equal terms with the incarnate Western Tradition. Just a conversation, between a girl and a dying poet.
Le Guin is aware, no one better, that he is dying, and that we need to bring his lares and penates to a new shore.
Dale Favier, But What Is Piety?“But what is piety?” asked Aeneas.
That brought a thoughtful silence.
I don’t have as much time for writing this morning–I spent some of my writing time making a peach chutney for dinner tonight. I am remembering the first time I made a chutney–there was a recipe for a complete Indian meal in Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest Cookbook, and I tried the whole thing. It was a revelation, the way different flavors combined in a way I had never tasted and would never have thought to put together. It was long ago, and we didn’t have Indian restaurants in Knoxville, Tennessee where I lived. The most exotic food we had was Chinese, and it wasn’t exactly authentic.
This morning’s chutney making has led to an interesting poem that I’m in the process of writing: peaches that cling, a woman who has dropped her youngest off at college, the passing of the seasons, the growing up of children. It may be done, but there may be more, so I’ll let it rest and see.
I am amazed: two solid poem ideas in two days. I have spent much of the summer wondering if I can even call myself a poet anymore. I have written down a line or two each week, but that hardly makes me a poet.
Let me lace up my walking shoes and let this poem continue to percolate.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Peach Chutney and Poems
Listening to a Giles Peterson podcast the other day I was catapaulted back to a night upstairs in a London pub listening to saxophonist Lol Coxhill and poet Bob Cobbing. I didn’t know anything about either of them, although I’d heard Cobbing’s name from a lecturer on my degree course. But the point of this is that Peterson’s podcast and the experimental jazz he was playing could have been from the early 1980s. Except we didn’t have podcasts. We went to the pub. I’d been going to the pub to hear music in fact since I was 14. It was allowed in those days. I started with a folk club in Crondall, where I also saw Alexis Korner.
I couldn’t tell you the name of either pub but those gigs of Coxhill, Cobbing and Korner have stuck in my mind for decades. Experimental jazz takes listening and concentration. As does sound poetry like Cobbing did. And I was led to Peterson because I’d been listening to an improvised session my son did and it was brilliant.
I’m creating very little right now. The demands of caring overtake everything. I earmark pockets of time when I might squeeze out a poem. I compensate with time travel. And a reminder to be open to the new, which may not actually be that new, but is experiment, improvisation and keeping going. Which is what I witnessed in that upstairs room. An absolute belief in just getting on with it.
Jackie Wills, The mirror of the present and getting on with it
My thesis is this: there is value in broadening how you define your craft. Every new genre or form can school us in what we see as our “true” calling, and enrich it. When I joined my MA program for Creative Writing, I was a staunch anti-poet. Couldn’t see the point in it; all that spare, high-minded opacity. I was a Short Story Writer dammit, could spare no time for stanzas. But I needed to complete the poetry semester to pass. Spoiler alert, I now adore the form. It’s taught me to be brutal with word choice and concrete imagery, hammered home the value of understatement. Reading about William Carlos Williams’ “plums that were in the icebox […] / so sweet and so cold” was a revelation. Here was a rich tableaux of yearning and place, short as a tweet but achingly powerful.
In the job market there’s a phrase beloved by suits: transferable skills. It applies to the arts too. The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became. I have since written 200 poems, whole megabytes of them complete garbage fires, but each one a stepping stone. For better or worse, poems come quickly to me, which means I can look back at things penned just months ago and say, I am better now.
The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became.
Daniel Seifert, Swim Another Lane: Why You Should Write Outside Your Comfort Zone
Nothing is as relaxing as sustained concentration. Work is its own company. Unlike face to face conversations where responses are interpreted, weighed, collated and applied to new information, in poetry, reading or writing, you can just be while the poetry is. It’s like covert mind-melding. Intimate yet clinical or casual. Did I mention freeing?
Every book has a bit of that feeling of meeting in the equalizing blank face of font. Sure, typography is a clue, justification gives a read or cover aesthetic, paper weights, thickness, margins, gloss, sentence shapes, but largely it’s plugging into a brain through text. That’s freeing. That decluttering of identity to what is typed, that reach past circumstances of geography. That invisibility of reception so you can take your time absorbing, rereading, reflecting. It’s cut off from some of the complexity.
We can live in the time-sensitive, instant everything. You can research every node, build context from each thing mentioned into tangents to extract meaning. It can be a slow delve or intense as you want. Like people you meet once or twice a year for decades, building a picture in time lapse. And you can just not respond. Take it in, tuck it away or discard it. It can exist in a zone of ambiguous meaning, simultaneously in parallel mutually cancelling categories without being called out for not judging decisively in adjectives.
Pearl Pirie, Community
Drumroll, please…after four finalist nods, one runner-up designation, and many rejections, my manuscript Unrivered was accepted at Sundress Publications for a late 2025 release! This one is important to me. Stay tuned for lots of information as we roll things out. We are currently beginning the editorial process and I’m dreaming big for sharing this book—my last collection came out during lockdown, and I’m ready to support this one as well as I can.
What did I learn from this? To persevere if I believe the work is worth sharing. To not give up on myself, even in a publishing landscape that is PACKED with writers who all believe just as firmly in their work. To celebrate my successes. To keep going.
Donna Vorreyer, It’s Been A Summer
This was a magic night. I’m so happy it was captured, recorded and broadcast on the BBC this weekend. Tune in on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds to hear this wonderful and uplifting poetry gig.
I performed some pieces I haven’t performed before: two ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ poems, a rousing version of ‘Tell Good People Good Things’. Plus the gentle and surreal ‘Umbilical’ and a glorious sharing of ‘My Heart Is A Boat’ with a united and soft singing chorus at the end, singing in solidarity.
I felt very emotional, vulnerable and privileged to share my new work and these particular pieces on this stage and in this space and time. I also think this is the first time that I have had a whole set aired on BBC radio – it isn’t often as a poet you have much time, let alone a whole set, if you listen to this you can really get a sense of the performance energy, the beautiful human connection in the heart of the room. My lovely mum, sister, friends and family are in the audience at The Purcell Room on the Southbank — So I particularly love this gig memory. Thank you to Ian McMillan and Joelle Taylor for the stunning introductions and my fellow star poets Imtiaz Dharker and Rachael Allen, thank you to all the brilliant Verb and Outspoken crew and the generous Southbank audience.
Salena Godden, ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ LIVE on The Adverb at Outspoken
When I could see the publication whirlwind approaching, I was a bit worried I’d go into overdrive and burn myself out, which has, previously, been a way of being in control of the anxiety. It’s taken a while to work out that it is much more beneficial to find moments of existence, of peace and ‘being’ in the whirlwind. It’s those small pools of connecting to the world that really help and allow me to regain my energy levels and be the best I can be.
- Walking. I’ve made time to walk and made sure that I saw that as equally important to my promotion work around the book. Yesterday I got caught in a light, late summer rain shower and stood under the trees listening to the water running over the leaves. Those ten minutes did so much for my sense of peace and belonging.
- Reading. Not just stuff that I know I should be reading for events, research etc, but joy reading, comfort reading. Currently I’m re reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. There is something gloriously peaceful and nourishing about stacking yourself up with pillows and sitting on the bed reading while the world turns.
- Gardening. My garden is out of hand. But just taking a few minutes daily to deadhead the roses, or trim the ivy, this is also a place of peace, of making sure my hands are in the earth, on the green leaves, in direct physical contact with the seasons.
This is success.
Wendy Pratt, How I’m defining success this week
We have salt from sieving sea water
through singed husks, charcoal, and ash.We have stars because a woman took off
her adornments to pound rice in the mortar.We have pineapples because a child
couldn’t find anything she was asked to find.What of the origins of fire or flood, drought or war?
Luisa A. Igloria, Fables
Centuries ago, boats with cannons landed on our shores.
Earlier, I wrote a draft of a general post that encapsulated the past week, but I lost it when blogger glitched out on me before saving. In it, there were awesomely disturbing movies, new tattoos, and the usual ramblings about weather. But I don’t want to write it all out again, so instead I thought I’d write about books and seasons. How mariana feels like the perfect project to be working on now, with all its sea and salt-drenched monsters. How my final edits on ruinporn, which will be coming as soon as September arrives, is a very fall project filled with decay and crumbling houses, just as much as the carnival poems I just finished earlier this month felt very summery and swampy.
Looking back, the fever almanac, though it was published in the fall was always a summer book, while in the bird museum was very winterish. girl show and major characters… were definitely summer, but shared properties…was more spring. salvage, with all its mermaids was summer, while sex & violence and little apocalypse were definitely autumnal. In newer titles I would say dark country, collapsologies, and granata are pure summer, while feed, automagic and animal, vegetable, monster are definitely winter or fall.
Sometimes it’s about subject matter and imagery (Victorian inspired books def have a colder weather vibe while things like the Persephone book are more sunlit and Mediterranean.) It doesn’t necessarily have to do with when it was written, but I suppose timing also may have some impact, since I tend to like to work on summer-ish projects during warm weather months. This fall, I have plans for a couple things that may be winterish in nature, so will probably wait til November to start them.
Kristy Bowen, books and seasons
The last few years have led to a substantial backlog of poems and manuscripts for me, and I’ve wondered about the best way to handle these. While I’ve released my work through Dead Mall Press in the past, I’ve decided that further cluttering up the catalogue with the editor’s books would do a disservice to the other writers published there. After some reflection, I’ve decided to launch a new “Bookstore” feature here on the blog. There, you’ll see approx. half a dozen chapbooks of my own appear for sale across the next several months (unless I lose my mind in the process). All books will be $10 flat, shipping included. And if you pledge a paid subscription, the books will be heavily discounted (you’ll just pay a portion of the shipping).
RM Haines, A Dark Address (Redux)
Just like chess, sports and the arts can become our refuge from reality too. When we ware caught up with the Olympics spectacle, we could stop watching the massacres in Gaza and Sudan. The inclusion of Myanmar in the Games normalized junta rule in that country. Sporting rivalry could potentially defuse political and military conflict—fight on the soccer field, not on the battlefield—but it doesn’t.
Poetry, which is the form of art I know best, could be deployed to socio-political ends, and it is. Our press Gaudy Boy has published some of the best political poetry in Jeddie Sophronius’ Interrogation Records, Jhani Randhawa’s Time Regime, and Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left By a Snail Overnight. But as a practitioner of the dark art myself, I know intimately that writing about the thing is not the thing itself. When writing, I’m paying attention to, and enjoying, the sound and shape of words. I’m undisturbed at home, and not out on the streets, protesting.
The best political poetry, I think, betrays this guilty consciousness. Like all poetry, it is double-minded. It is an existential lesson underlined by Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. The novel never gives us the actual chess defensive strategy, and Luzhin finds it in the end only by—. You will have to read the book to find out.
Jee Leong Koh, The Luzhin Defense
John Burnside’s swansong Ruin, Blossom was too full of Catholic theology for my taste, but did also include some memorable poems, chief among them ‘The Night Ferry’, which reads now like a death poem, in the Japanese tradition, with this ending:
Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to bow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.The repetition of ‘done’ and the mention of ‘the compass’ in the same breath must be a nod to Donne’s great poem ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’.
Matthew Paul, July–August reading
But There’s So Much DIY to IVF That We Can’t Be Sure by Toby Goostree
Renee Emerson, Who Eats What?, the Borrowers, Works of Mercy & more
This collection of poems is an up-close look at what it is like going through IVF to conceive a child. Many of the poems directly connect Old Testament characters with the writer and his wife’s personal journey through IVF (one of my favorites was “Moses,” which you can hear the author read aloud on his website). Another of my favorites was “The Blessing,” which recounts in brief the story of Jacob wrestling, connecting it to how one may wrestle through prayer, and ending on the question “Why did we close our eyes if / not to be vulnerable?”. I’m going to be honest, sometimes the poems told me MORE than I wanted to know about IVF, but, as someone who has read Sharon Olds, nothing shocks me anymore.
“Ox and Mandarin | Wayfaring Strangers” is subtitled “A Counterfeit Zodiac” and uses two characters, Ox and Mandarin (and here the latter is the fruit, not the language or bureaucrat) […] The poems follow a reliable, hard-working character and his opposite, a story-teller, go-with-the-flow ball of sunshine. The poems meander across the page as both try to find their way through life, dancing around each other, circling but not quite meeting, leaving plenty of space for readers to complete the blanks.
Emma Lee, “Ox and Mandarin | Wayfaring Strangers” Milla van der Have (Hareific) – book review
Clare Goulet has apparently written a whole volume of poems devoted to lichen. I love this. I’ve ordered the book on the strength of encountering this lovely poem. It’s not grand in its ambitions, rather it gives an ear to the ear-like “elf-ear” lichen to hear what it’s hearing down there on the wood shelf.
I’ve been charging around mumbling about the meaning of life of late, wandering the roads of my rooms and neighborhood blind to my step. I’ve stopped short of flinging my arms about, but only just. Thanks heavens I was stopped in my tracks, however briefly, by the moment held in this poem.
The poem reads nicely in the mouth — full of r’s and hard and soft ch’s with some flicks of k. Read it aloud yourself, you’ll see. The poem asks us to slow the hell down, to look down, to crouch down, take a breath, give an eye, lend an ear. Wondrous things are everywhere around us.
Marilyn McCabe, You must reshape yourself
The latest from San Diego poet Rae Armantrout [see my review of her prior collection here] is Go Figure (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), adding a further heft to an already heft of multiple award-winning poetry collections going back decades. There is something intriguing about how the poems in Go Figure cluster, offering Armantrout as less a poet of single, self-contained poems than sequences of gestural sweeps that cohere into this meditative book-length suite, threading through numerous ebbs and flows as she goes. Her poems interact with each other, including poems that end sans punctuation, suggesting a kind of ongoingness, beyond the scope of the single page. As the opening of the poem “SHRINK WRAP” reads: “An idea is / an arrangement // of pictures / of things // shrunken / to fit // in the brain / of a human.” Armantrout’s poems are constructed through extended lines of precise, abstract thinking, providing specifics that accumulate into something far larger, and far more coherent, than the sum of their parts. Armantrout’s poems throughout Go Figure offer points on a grid progressing a single extended sequence of thought, as the author addresses culture, climate and financial crises, as well as echoes and influence from her grandchildren. At the core, Armantrout’s poems articulate how our experiences are held by and solidified through words, the very foundation of language that allow shape and coherence, meaning and context to those very same experiences. As the poem “DOTS” opens:
Poems elongate moments.
“My pee is hot,” she said,
dreamily, mildly
surprisedThere is something, too, about the openness of her lyric: if you haven’t read Armantrout’s work before, one might say that any book of hers might be a good place to start, but I’ll say this: if you haven’t read her work before, Go Figure is a good place to start.
rob mclennan, Rae Armantrout, Go Figure
For the last week I’ve been away in Scotland with my husband and daughter – it has been a week filled with rain and un-forecast sunshine, and lots of driving on narrow roads that wind along the side of lochs and past mountains with tops covered in mist and green everywhere – thick vegetation and ancient woodland.
We’ve been staying in a house in the Highlands, courtesy of a friend. I was very excited to find a copy of My Name is Abilene (Salt, 2023) by Elisabeth Sennit Clough, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I met Elisabeth on a residential voice coaching course that Ledbury Poetry Festival ran – this was many years ago. More recently, I saw her from afar reading from the collection at the Forward Prizes, as the collection was shortlisted for Best Collection last year.
On the back of the book, John Greening says that the collection is ‘almost a verse novel’ and I agree with this – both because of it’s page-turning qualities – I read it all in one go, cover to cover as if I was reading a novel, but also because of the way Elisabeth uses characters to hold what is a fragmented narrative together.
Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. poem by Elisabeth Sennit Clough
We went to see the Grit Orchestra this week and they played a piece called Karabach. It came out of Martyn Bennett’s experience working in refugee camps in Armenia, and before the orchestra played, they ran the actual recording which inspired the piece. A little girl is singing to herself, very beautifully, very unselfconsciously, while in the background you can hear the sound of bombs falling continuously in the distance.
This recording is not just poignant and moving. It doesn’t just inspire outrage that we can do this to people. There is no moral to be drawn about resistance to evil, or the beauty of the human spirit. It simply tells us that art is survival. We don’t just need it, it isn’t just therapy – though it can be therapeutic and consoling and inspiring, of course. It is simply the expression of who we are. Creativity cannot be regarded as a luxury to be indulged in when the real important stuff is done. Once human beings are physically safe, creativity – music, stories, visual arts, drama – is their next most vital need. It’s how we build community. It’s how we access spirituality. The self-righteous who complain about unemployed people having television, refugees going to poetry classes, the provision of music classes rather than job ready training see other people as less than human.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Between the Human Places
Where the tenth elegy ends, another
Rajani Radhakrishnan, After the elegies
grief begins. How many times, have we,
unknowing, cried out to Rilke’s angel? How
many times has she called but we have
not heard? Have not understood? What
if that epiphany in which the visible
universe unscrambles into meaning,
never comes […]
My family is in the thick of carline mornings, both parents working, cusp of fall. I find myself so grateful for the access to books, texts, reading recommendations—especially digital and audio, especially via library apps like Libby. I’m always listening to a novel on audiobook, now (Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie at the moment, Piranesi by Susannah Clarke and Witch King by Martha Wells before that, and all The Murderbot Diaries this summer!), and podcasts accompany me when I walk or do the dishes, laundry. I love reading something just before bed—James Tate, lately (highly recommend his Selected Poems), but that quiet time solely with a book is rather rare. Of course there’s the kind of neurodivergent attention which does WELL doing multiple things (hello folks who knit and sew during tv, lectures, audiobooking), so I’m happy to accommodate my busy life with audio.
Although my job right now is writing faculty tutor at Wake Tech Community College here in North Carolina, I have a kind and supportive boss who secured grant money for me to lead a (free for students!) Friday creative writing workshop, and that begins today. I’m really grateful for this—the job, the workshop. Community-making. Academia is a mess right now, and it’s hard inside and outside traditional professor jobs. I think I’m—well, really happy working at Wake, and having time for Of Poetry Podcast (Fall guests & episodes include Sebastian Paramo, Nicholas Molbert, Molly Peacock and Dana Delibovi, Carolyn Oliver, Abbie Kiefer, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, and Sarah Carey!) and Moist Poetry Journal. We’re just wrapping up our Deep Summer publishing period at Moist, and you should check out these lovely poems, including three new visual poems by poet and collagist Sarah J. Sloat, whose work I love!
Han VanderHart, The When and Where of Reading & Generosity as a Practice
This was my second festival leading the poetry workshops as a disabled artiste. I was lucky to have an accessible venue and a really lovely group of people attending, some of them regulars, others new people. Most attendees returned to all four sessions. Each session comprises a ‘hot penning’ warm up from a prompt line, followed by two detailed exercises, which often include notes and a range of stimuli. Some are especially appropriate to Whitby Folk Week, others more general. We have some silent writing time and some sharing time with feedback. Every year I am impressed by the quality of work produced. Our last session is always one exercise preceded by a hot penning, then the last hour is a readaround where every participant reads two poems (if they wish) and I conclude with a short reading of my own work. This gives a satisfying close to the four sessions. I had some fabulous attendees this year and I hope they will return in future.
Angela Topping, Whitby Folk Week 2024
I’m sharing the following poem because it’s breathtaking. It’s haunting. It’s complex. In the middle of it, “a woman slaughtered for wonder.” So, it’s devastating. I keep hearing the voice in my head, “are we not of interest to each other” from the Elizabeth Alexander poem and yes, this voice in this poem, this writer, yes, you are of interest.
Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – When People Say
A Facebook “memory” brought up something that caused me to do a brief life assessment—it was a blog post from about six years ago, when I was 45. The post was angry, frustrated, obviously a person who was struggling with many things in her life. Now six years later, I wonder why I was so angry. Of course, I had had a terminal liver cancer diagnosis the year before, and then an MS diagnosis—two things so devastating, and complicated by the fact that I have friends that still to this day have not called me since those two events (losing friends is tough, but I guess those weren’t real friends, as my mother would have said to me in eighth grade). The terminal diagnosis was wrong, at least a little premature, though I still have a liver full of tumors, and the MS diagnosis was wrenching, though years of physical, vestibular, speech therapies have helped a lot of the symptoms. I was frustrated by what I felt like was a stagnant writing career, full of frustrated ambition. (It could also have been the beginning of perimenopause, often punctuated by mood swings.) One good thing about blogs is that they capture a certain moment in time, in your life. Was I feeling lucky that we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, that I could go to the movies or dentist relatively freely? No, I was not. Ah, hindsight. […]
At 51, I wish I could tell my previous self about what was to come: the pandemic and all it would change, the fact that I would make new friends (and renew old friendships unexpectedly), that my marriage would improve, that my writing career might not be rocketing towards stardom but feels like enough to me these days. (I did have a book come out to some success, some good reviews, appearances in Poetry Magazine and Poetry Daily that bolstered my confidence, among other things. But also, a shift in mindset about what constitutes “enough” success?) That I would build connections to my community (and a pretty decent garden) during the covid years. That though things aren’t perfect, I no long feel as frustrated in my daily life. My health isn’t perfect, but my dental hygienist commented on how much better I was doing physically than five years ago, which caused me to wonder—what is she noticing that I haven’t about improvements in my overall well-being? I’m no longer in a wheelchair all the time, many of my MS symptoms are less acute, I’ve been getting treatment for more of my weirdo stuff. I lost weight during the last four years and increased my bone density, not usual at 51! I feel grateful for these positive changes, though sometimes they’re so gradual you might not remark on them.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, September Begins: Changing Seasons and Life Assessments, Reunions with Old Friends, and Back to Work
Today, August 29, is the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the New Orleans levee system. It’s an event that residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf coast who experienced it will never forget. There have been essays, memoirs, books, songs, and all kinds of art made from this disaster. Today I’m sharing an essay I wrote that was published in Atticus Review in 2021. There are many more eloquent accounts than this but this is my story.
[…]
Days passed. The whine of patrolling helicopters and the growl of chainsaws were our only company. Have you ever experienced a day without birdsong? There were no birds. Or traffic noise? There were no buses, no moms driving kids to school, no one going to work. Or a city in total darkness at night? There were no streetlights. All but two homes on our block sat as empty as a politician’s promise. We were under curfew, but it didn’t matter. There was no place to go.
So, I blogged. I coped by writing about beauty, wonder, love—while bubbled in a suspended life. I researched and wrote about local history, about space and astronomy. Armchair visited other countries and cultures. I discovered other local bloggers who were sharing disaster relief information, dispelling wild myths circulating about what was happening, and raining hell on people saying New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt. These bloggers were the first writers—grassroots writers—I came to know in real life.
They wrote about the strange lives we were living, the collapse of the city infrastructure, the incompetent response of the government. They wrote about the growing piles of garbage, the stink, the coffin flies, nails in your tires, how to clean out rotting food from freezers and refrigerators or how to duct-tape them closed and haul them to the curb. They wrote about dozens of fires from leaking gas lines, the heroics of the NOFD who worked beyond exhaustion. They wrote about rich men planning to move our beloved football team to another city. They wrote about the lack of healthcare and the growing number of suicides and deaths by stress and grief. They tried to hold insurance companies and politicians accountable, swapped info about blue tarps, Red Cross stations, food lines, medication shortages. They gave me something to hold on to and kept me company in that long dark autumn. Despite the tragedy that spawned this network of bloggers, it was a golden era in the New Orleans online writing community.
*
Dreams can be warnings but also opportunities. Someone dreamed of an invisible superhighway, accessible to all, connecting all, creating community across time and space. In that way, the Internet is like a dream we are all having, a déjà rêvé of time and space and memory.
Charlotte Hamrick, DÉJÀ RÊVÉ IN THE GULF
earlier this year
Robin Gow, instructions on finding a place to scream &/or being a sibling
there was a small earthquake
& books fell from all the shelves
in my house. you called me after
& said, “are you still alive?” you had been
in the woods & felt the ground tremble.
there are these little moments that
teach us urgency.
Now that school’s back in—first year of middle school for my son, sophomore year of high school for my daughter—I have my days to myself again. I’m deep into a new writing project, which means some mornings I sit down with my laptop and then look up to realize it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, I forgot to eat lunch, and the kids will be out of school in an hour. I love that sense of flow, when you’re really in it. […]
I do want to heartily recommend Susan Rich’s latest book of poems, Blue Atlas. If you know her work, you’re one of the lucky ones—and if you don’t, you’re about to become one of the lucky ones. The opening poem, “This Could Happen,” is the perfect invitation, pulling the reader inside.
Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff
It has been one year since I started this blog and my new relationship with Mondays. This time a year ago I decided to start a blog as a way of documenting my year and holding myself accountable whilst I started a new journey in life. I had handed back the keys to the primary school I had been head of for seventeen years, and I wasn’t buying new shoes for a new term or planning my first assembly of the school year. I decided to see what the air smelt like each Monday morning as each new week began.
I see now why I focus on providing time for people to ‘think, breathe and be’ when I work as a coach. I definitely needed time for those three things at that period of immense change. This is wonderfully illustrated by the fact that when I started this blog I didn’t immediately record it as a podcast. This came a few weeks later when I had begun to land in my new space and find the voice that went with it.
The title of the podcast, ‘Singing as the Darkness Lifts’, comes from my love of and gratitude for three things:
- the sound of birds welcoming the dawn,
- the feeling of darkness lifting,
- the moments of joy that make my heart sing
Start and keep going. That’s been a useful motto for me. I know that small things repeated will make a difference and I know that it is better to get started than wait to be fully ready. I think it would have taken me a very long time to feel fully ready for blogging or podcasting. In fact there is a distinct possibility that neither would have happened if I had waited for that kind of feeling. And, I knew that at the very least I would have a pretty impressive diary for my year even if nothing else came from putting my words into the world.
Sue Finch, A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH MONDAYS
This morning, waiting for the dog to do his thing in the front yard, I saw a bee and two species of wasps hovering over the goldfinger blossoms. I realise how much I have changed in a year. In little ways like this. I’m calmer now when I meet them. […]
Earlier this week a woman struck up a conversation, telling me about how important it is for us to take care of nature. When I told her that I was currently learning a lot about wasps for a book I am working on, and that I had a new appreciation for them, she told me that they need to be eradicated from the suburbs where people live because they were too dangerous. I started to counter but stopped. I stopped because only the night before, I’d seen a theater production where the monologist talked about nature. Nature as a balm for all the stress we have in our lives. You know the trope: clouds, flowers, the sound of winds in the trees. That kind of nature. The kind of idealised version of things worth protecting because it is useful to us. Nature as kitsch. The idea of nature.
I’ve learned that there is a time and a place for real discussions, and it was not the time nor the place to try to scratch into something covered with so much varnish. Let her save the nature she holds at arm’s-length.
That matters, too.
During the 1800s, the Romantics created present nostalgia, with their soft monsters, and softer comforts. Ibsen went from Peer Gynt to Ghosts, riding the pendulum of contemporary art we saw in the 1900s. Naturalism: Antoine projected films of maggots in rotting meat onto bodies on the stage in order to “get real”. But it was the idea of real.
This week I’ve been thinking about “getting real” and what that means in art. Is it even something to aspire to? Anything filmed, photographed, staged, framed, is removed from what is real. Denis Dutton argued that this kind of special focus is what defines art as discrete from real life.
A wasp pinned on a specimen board is not—not really—a wasp anymore. Neither is a single memory, a real life.
At this point, I’m finding this thought freeing.
Ren Powell, The Illusion of Real
I belong nowhere.
Not in a fierce wind.
Nor in a month’s rain
in one dark day.The music of ghosts,
Bob Mee, SMALL POEMS IN AUGUST
their laughter,
the impression left
on the shroud.
天高くなんにもなく青く 山本素竹
ten takaku nannimo naku aoku
high autumn sky
nothing there
and blue
Sochiku Yamamoto
from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), December 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 27, 2024)