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: topophilia, lagniappe, proboscises, diaspora, harvests, syllabi, and much more. Enjoy!
The days have been rich for me in beauty — sun flicking through leaves aflutter with winds, clouds fleet some days, bumbling others. A languid afternoon paddling a green pond circuited by kingfishers. A bike ride past a wetlands reddening with autumn. Change is in the air. I’m restless as the geese. I’m standing in the middle of the road, one nervous eye on the future, one looking back at the past. Another friend has lost another parent. Another friend is on another scary medical journey. I feel like I’m trying to hold time in my hand like water.
I was recalling the time my little mom showed up at the house, “mis-hearing” when we’d be there and when she’d been invited to come, so eager was she for the visit. We weren’t there, but had, uncharacteristically, left the side door to the screened porch open. She figured, oh, well, I’ll just get comfortable and see what happens. That’s how she was. She had a jacket, a blanket, a little bottle of water, and some packets of those cheese-and-cracker things. So she settled in, set up her bed on the couch on the porch, had her little supper of water and crackers when we showed up at almost 9 p.m. (not expecting her until the next day). I was both irritated and in awe — as only a child can be. “But, Mother, I TOLD you…” To this day, though, I’m so proud of how prepared she was, how intrepid, how eager she was for joy. Is it autumn that is making me so nostalgic?
Anyway, I saw this poem a few weeks ago and it moved me greatly. Its specificity, the love woven into that specificity. The journey of the poem, how it weaves the “her” from the first line with the “he” and his path, and how we too are woven, when we see her seeing him in the things of his absence, what is left behind. Beautifully, painfully, how much is embodied in the things left behind.
Marilyn McCabe, At the ford untrustworthy
I walked into a stained glass
window, a wood, a shadow.I walked into warm sunlight,
cascading between white pines.I walked over the soft sponge
of fir needles, planks, pavement,asphalt, slivers of flat stones,
the surface of a star’s pointsshaped by craftsmen burning with
PF Anderson, Seek (#BlogElul 2)
perfection.
Topophilia is the love of place – it might be described as a sense of place, or your mental, emotional, and cognitive ties to a place. I can’t know exactly how other people experience the world, but I know I love places with the same warm, aching depth that I love people. For all of us gathered in that room, and all the people gathered in packed meetings in Hebden Bridge and Old Town, articulating our opposition to the wind farm is a huge task. But it begins with peat.
Peat is black gold. It is formed where rainfall exceeds drainage, and where water-loving plants like sphagnum moss grow. These waterlogged conditions prevent the decomposition of dead vegetation – and, as the dead plants settle, peat forms – rich, spongy, black. This is why peat bogs are vital. Like unburnt coal, unrotted vegetation does not release its carbon – and UK peatlands store 3 billion tonnes of carbon – over twenty times more than forests. In terms of carbon and climate change, they are the UK’s equivalent of the Amazon rain forest.
The MP for Keighley and Ilkley asks the audience if they are from Haworth; around two thirds of the room raise their hands. The rest are from Calderdale, like me, with a few hands from Sheffield and even further beyond. Fittingly, because at 200m tall, the wind turbines will be visible from Sheffield and the Peak District.
I have loved the moors all of my life, But it’s only in recent years that I became aware of their immense ecological importance. It’s too easy to romanticise them as windswept wilderness, or dismiss them as barren wasteland. But they are crucial habitats. The watery, acidic conditions give rise to specially adapted species, like cottongrass and the carnivorous sundew, and they are a home to endangered ground breeding birds like curlew and skylark, plover and merlin. If that isn’t enough, sphagnum can hold up to 26 times its weight in water, and can offer crucial protection against the floods which hit this area over and over.
I, like most of the people in this room, support renewable energy. I do not support the destruction of peat bogs – not here, not anywhere. There are other, much more appropriate places to site a wind farm: some of them local. The proposed wind farm will destroy peat which has taken over 5000 years to form. Like every wind farm, it will be decommissioned in 25-30 years; peat forms at a rate of 1mm a year.
This is not a local issue. Peat should be protected, and where it is damaged, it should be restored. And the multiple legal protections of the moor and its fragile, vital ecology should stand. If they fall, if this wind farm goes ahead, there are few places in the UK which are safe from development.
This is a campaign which brings together across every political divide and distance, and which focusses not just on Walshaw Moor but on all peat moors. Stronger Together against Calderdale Wind Farm is a federation of seven different groups, including The Boggarts, a collective of artists and writers which I initiated last year – because, with its power to articulate and shape how we view ourselves and the world we live in, art is powerful part of every campaign. As visual artists, novelists, playwrights, film-makers and poets, Boggarts support the wider campaign, whilst we work on our own group projects.
I’m currently working with poet and novelist Anna Chilvers to curate an anthology of inspired by Walshaw Moor – including established writers and emerging writers like Pascal Petit, David Morley, Michael Malay, Polly Atkin, Ian Humphreys and Amy Liptrot. There will be peat, birds, archaeology, folklore and foraging; social science and access; right-to-roam and personal histories; perspectives on marginal lives lived in overlooked places. Whilst the anthology begins with Walshaw Moor, it is a wider invitation to recognise the mycorrhizal networks of ecology, community and history which bind us all; and to position art as a peculiarly powerful way of experiencing the world.
Kim Moore, Loving Place
I had just returned from touring with my new book Blue Atlas and I was searching for something brand new to work on. I think of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds, Raven Chronicles Press, 2025 as the love child between these very different books.
So sitting on my couch over 4th of July, I started a spreadsheet (which is already out of my comfort zone) asking who would I like to have as part of my flock? Which birds were going to represent Washington State? Little did I know that there are over 500 species on the Official Washington State Bird List.
Martha Silano was the poet that I thought of first. Marty has been writing about birds as long as I’ve known her. She wrote me back right away and wondered if she could write on the bald eagle? Her excitement for the natural world is contagious and generous. Then came a yes from Linda Bierds to use her poem on “The Swifts,” then came a sassy hummingbird poem by Anya Kirshbaum. The collection will include sonnets as well as twitter poetry. This is not your grandmother’s bird book —although I so hope to include Elizabeth Bishop’s, the Sandpiper.
I have so many dreams for this project. Mainly that it brings birders to poetry and poetry to birders. I remember so clearly purchasing my first bird book at the local hardware store, Birds of the Puget Sound Region by Morse, Aversa, and Opperman. I didn’t know anything about birds but on the bottom of each page was a place to write the date and location of the first sighting. It’s still my favorite bird book. There’s a new edition with some cool ideas on birdfeeders and where to go birding but the birds remain much the same.
I love poetry. I’ve been reading and studying it since I was 8 years old in Miss Schiavo’s third grade classroom but studying birds is a much newer pursuit. Living where I do in Seattle I am privileged to have so many different birds come visit my backyard from the hummingbird to the Stellar’s jay, the great blue heron to the junco. It’s a very modest backyard but it’s close to the Puget Sound. How can I not pay attention to my neighbors?
Susan Rich, Birdbrains! Or What I Did On My Summer Vacation.
I like the in-between times, the verging of seasons, aspects of change. Change means life, even though the onset of autumn traditionally signals the dying of the year. On my walk this morning, I took photos and made a mental list of changes that are flags of the coming season: acorns on the bough; morning glory still open at noon (in Japanese literature, the morning glory is a signal of autumn’s approach); burning bush shrub going pink; pennants of yellow walnut leaves; ripe wild grapes–deep navy blue, quite sour, and full of seeds; sweet autumn clematis (terniflora) in its whirly seed state, swarming over the hedges; oak leaves, five-leaf vines, and sassafras starting to color; winterberries already red; acorn detritus on the tractor path; pin oak galls (probably thanks to the wasp Callirhytis furva) on a leaf. All of these are mid-September features in eastern PA.
If I were feeling more poetically creative, I might try writing haiku using each of these as the image word. But my current state is fretful. Pulling weeds and taking walks ease my mind a bit. Sitting down to write, not so much. However, reader, I encourage you to try the exercise.
Ann E. Michael, báilù
No trees or flowers or garden ornaments, no colours or
moods, no birds or animals, no stars, no moon, no
textures of light were used in the making of this poem.No words either.
It is day three hundred and thirty-three
of a war in which thousands of children
are dead.There are no words.
Not for a poem.
Even so, like renga masters of yore, let us craft verse.
Without words. Me, then they, then them, then we,
then us, then I, again.Like empty bowls held out to the sky by monks in
a drought, waiting for the first drops of redeeming rain.Let us write poems without words.
It’s your turn, now.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Untitled -26
last year we woke on that awful day
to the news of Hamas attacks
and now it’s Elul again, when“The King is in the Field,” but
this year God walks with usin endless mourning, paying
shiva call after shiva call, andthere are still hostages, though
six fewer living ones than last weeknot to mention whole neighborhoods
razed to rubble, resurgence of polio,forty thousand Palestinian souls
dead, an endless abyss of grief?I can’t write an Elul poem this year
when my heart stopped beating properlyon Shemini Atzeret and may never
Rachel Barenblat, I can’t
feel entirely unbroken again.
The mathematics of bullets leads to heartbreak. Bullet plus body equals blood. Body minus blood equals gone.
Our tears and loss become so overgrown we can barely make our way from one moment to the next.
Wounds become the compass we use to find our way to new wounds or collective healing.
Rich Ferguson, In gardens of apocalypse
Right now there’s a little gold finch out my window picking at a cone flower and it’s already derailed me from focusing on this essay.
Also, I might invent my own story about tarantulas while I’m zoning out on the beauty of nature. I might pick up a mango and begin to peel it and let all the skins drop to the tile floor until a butterfly is seduced by their sweetness to come over and uncurl its proboscis and start to suck up the nectar. Then I’ll think of the word proboscis, what a fun word! Pro-bos-cis! What would it be like to be a butterfly with a proboscis fluttering around, unrolling my tongue and sucking up nectar and not even able to read any books at all?
All of these things feel so much more alive than whatever might be happening in between the pages of the books. So much more vital and colorful and full of flavor. They engage all five senses instead of just one.
Needless to say, this is part of why I became a poet and not a novelist. It’s because my attention span is short. And it’s because I’m too busy looking closely at butterflies to pay attention to other things like who is murdering whom, or what clothes they are wearing while they do it, or why. I’d much rather just take a basket of plums down to the river and eat them, and feel the cold water on my feet and the hot juice of the fruit burning down my throat as I finish them up, and then write a short little poem before I walk to the market to buy some more.
Tresha Faye Haefner, My Greatest Embarrassment as a Writer
Seasons are important to me and it feels good to share the following poem in September to mark the start of Autumn. I have shared it before, but to me it stands the test of time. It was originally drafted during a workshop with Caroline Bird in September 2021, and was published by Ink, Sweat and Tears a month later in celebration of National Poetry Day when the theme was ‘Choice’. I can’t wait to tell you about another poem of mine (a prose poem) that I wrote two years ago which will be published soon, but for now here’s my ten line autumnal poem:
This Was Once a Good Poem
but it has eaten cheese and pickle rolls for a week now
and it can’t work out why the vitamins aren’t working.
It rocks in the chair until its eyes are too tired to see
and has scared itself with thoughts of Autumn spiders
under glasses in the hallway.
It is wondering if it is true that conkers in corners
keep arachnids at bay
and is now standing in the dark
sniffing last year’s horse chestnuts
desperate to find their scent.
Sue Finch, Onion Rings and Other Joyful Things
Among my favorite emails are those that come from Innisfree, an online journal (at this link) edited by poet Greg McBride, with new issues emerging each six months. A wonderful discovery in the most recent issue is the mathy poem “Lagniappe” by Michigan poet Lynn Domina.
Domina’s poem relates to some of my delightful childhood experiences: I often was asked to help a great aunt with her shopping and, for both of us, one of our favorite stops was a family-owned bakery which supplied an extra pastry to any dozen purchased — in case one of the dozen was a bit small or otherwise inferior — and my aunt always rewarded me with the extra. Today, no pastries — but a great poem […]
JoAnne Growney, Favorite Number — a Baker’s Dozen
My huge thanks to Tom [Weir] for the permission to share this. Aside from the connection it triggered in my head, and the strange gravitational feeling in the pit of my stomach that came flooding back to me when I read it, I love that this poem travels so far—given a swing by it’s very nature has to remain rooted in the ground to allow the movement of the seat and chains.
I love the way (and sound the pretentiousness klaxon) that the couplets echo the rise and fall of a swing. When I first read it I had the theory that the couplets towards the end got longer syllabically, and to a degree they do in the second lines 4 couplets from the end, but is this deliberate? I don’t know, not sure it matters, but I like the in and out of the lines, and the mimicry of a swing. But enough of the form, what of the content…?
How can you not love a cold open like ‘I do it because I want to know how waterfalls feel”? The rhythms of that also seem to echo the rise and fall of a swing, as does the repetition of phrases like “I do it because” or “I want/wanted” they come back in and out with a pleasing regularity.
Mat Riches, Sounding like a Fiat Strada
A poem of mine (34 years old) is due out in Acumen and 2 poems (24 and 28 years old) will be in the final issue of South. The success of these ancient pieces has made me look through my other old, rejected poems. I’ve already converted one into Flash.
Every few years I send a story to “The Stinging Fly”. I got another rejection yesterday – one of over 1,400 they sent out for this window.
A story (only 2 years old!) was long-listed in the Leicester Writes competition. Unplaced, but in the anthology.
I’m hoping to attend a few poetry readings. Last Sunday I heard Steve Logan (new to me).
For the first time in months I’ve started writing a story (not Flash!). There’s a phase in my story writing when a piece becomes easier to write, the main issues resolved. I feel content then, completion in sight, the remaining challenges superable rather than daunting.
Suddenly I’ve written a poem. It’s only my 4th this year – none of them even sent off let alone accepted. Maybe I’ll send off a pamphlet this year – it’s been a while.
Tim Love, Busy September
This short poem had a long and difficult birth, perhaps because it’s about the day my mum died. I felt a strong wish to write about that precious twenty minutes when I was allowed to sit with her, at the height of the first Covid 19 lockdown. But, as I wrote, I found I was trying to hold our whole long life together as if in my hands, and it took a long time to focus in on what was really important.
The first stanza was relatively straightforward and describes my impressions, in particular the unnatural space and silence, which I tried to capture in quite stark language and the ‘s’ sounds that continue into the second stanza. Mum’s nursing home was usually a buzz of lively noise and activity but lockdown had transformed it into a series of hushed, isolated spaces.
The second stanza tries to capture that feeling of being poised between two worlds – both for her and for me: she, coming to the end of a long life, well-lived; me, knowing that my life would never be the same with the empty space she would leave. Long familiar things were slipping before my eyes.
The third stanza was the one that took longest. I spent weeks searching for the right simile – something from mum’s life that those hollows reflected. Now, my mum had a very full life and I could have chosen from rock pools, mountain corries and highland glens, among other things. But in the end I felt I wanted something of home and of my childhood, something we had shared one to one and that I still do now. Those Sunday afternoons, with me standing on a chair at the kitchen table as she taught me to bake, were what I chose.
Drop-in by Karen Macfarlane (Nigel Kent)
When I was a child of ten or eleven, I would lie awake in my bed at night and force myself to imagine the death of my parents. It wouldn’t take much time or thought to obliterate myself into a thousand ragged shards of despair. I’d get myself into such a state of hyperventilation, sobbing so hard into my pillow, that I was sure they’d hear me from their room down the hall. I connect the memory of these sessions with an image that I’ve written about in poetry before: I see my parents hover above my bed, then begin floating away from me, silently as astronauts “in the drift from ship.” I can still see them in this state if I close my eyes and recall, if not in a visceral way anymore, at least intellectually, the monstrous, continuous grief that would always follow. How would I ever live on the earth, in my body, in time or space without them? It couldn’t be possible. If they died, I would die. I loved them both that much. Of course I did. They, and my sister, were my entire world. There was no real reason for these flights of self-flagellation. My parents were, at least as far as I knew, healthy. Then again, I’ve always had a morbid streak. Just look at my poetry and you’ll see.
I’ve always focused the memory on their movement, the slow-motion loss of them. But it occurs to me now with some surprise that the more interesting part of this metaphor is that I, their child, am the ship. It never occurred to me that rather than (or at least in addition to) being the force acted upon by loss and grief (even imagined), I was actually the engine, the moving, maneuvering vehicle, the base camp.
I was the safety away from which they drifted.
Sheila Squillante, Just Like Heaven
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have various things I’m thinking about in different projects. Not Akhmatova is about nationalism and diaspora identity in large part. My family’s from Russia originally, and so Akhmatova is sort of part of my poetic heritage, or would be if my Russian Jewish ancestors hadn’t fled Russia for the reasons that Jewish people generally fled Russia. So the book is thinking about who gets to lay claim to language and history, how translations connect you to tradition and alienate you, whether poetry needs to be rooted in tradition or what that expectation means.7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Writers have a range of roles I think. Since I write for a living, I’m very aware of writing as just another kind of work, producing things that people pay for (or don’t.) Writing is also art, and art is a complicated thing; people look to it for meaning, distraction, entertainment, status, political validation, self-recognition. With my poetry, I’m generally trying to write things that seem truthful/meaningful to me and that might amuse the small number of people who read my poems. Not sure I can claim much more for it than that.8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It depends. I work with editors all the time in freelancing. Working with the editor at Ben Yehuda Press was helpful; they were very respectful and it was good to get a read on how alienating some of the more experimental poems in the collection were or weren’t.On the other hand, I just had a miserable experience with a press that accepted my ms and then the editor made a bunch of changes without telling me?! Like, cutting out words and changing line breaks, I guess because they felt readers of poetry would be put off by long lines?! Anyway, when I pushed back and said they did in fact have to at least mark any changes so I could sign off on them, they cancelled the contract. Which was for the best, but also wtf?
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Noah Berlatsky (rob mclennan)
A few months ago, I saw Sasha Dugdale talking to Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre for the launch of her latest collection The Strong Box (which I reviewed here). It was a fascinating conversation (which you can watch here) for many reasons, but I was particularly interested to hear their comments on the fact that Dugdale, in a collection extremely rich in allusion, chose not to provide an explanatory Notes section. Maitreyabandhu was, I think, surprised that there were no notes and said he did not get the impression Dugdale was using allusion “for intellectual reasons”. I agree, and I had recently read the collection for my review and found it very refreshing that notes were not included. It is not that notes are not helpful – they really are, but I have often felt like there is both something limiting about them (‘this is what I’m getting at’ the poet sometimes seems to be saying) and in some cases something just a little ‘showy-offy’ going on. I don’t object to them being there, I get pleasure out of reading them and find it useful to apply them to my reading of the poems, and yet there is something about them that makes me feel like they shouldn’t be there; it is a sensation that I will return to later in this essay, one which could be described (rather grandly taking the term from the lexicon of psychology) as cognitive dissonance.
In fact, Dugdale later explained a little further to me in an email that her intention in The Strong Box was to “make a new and integrated language from disintegrating canons”, implying I think that notes pointing directly to the allusions would have made such a language less natural and detracted from the overall effect she was seeking. This approach seems to me one which is fundamentally respectful of the readers’ role in generating a text’s meaning – as I put it in my review “The Strongbox is like the TARDIS, it is an immensely rich poetic world which, when you enter, you find is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. You, reader, must discover; you must curate.” The poet puts her trust in her readers to read the language she is creating from those “disintegrating canons” and she allows them to curate her collection with whatever interpretive tools and poetic knowledge they happen to bring.
Chris Edgoose, Intimacy and Integrity
After the ceremony for my naming, my father plucked
the tongue out of the mouth of the roasted pig and held itclose to my own mouth. Of course my instinct was to suck
on it, unable to tell how this rough skin differed from thatof the woman who took me to her breast after I was born.
He was exultant—believing my capacity to so eagerly root,seek salt from flesh, sustenance from a leathery form, a story
from something pierced and singed and shorn then turned on a spit,meant I would command not only language but circumstance.
Luisa A. Igloria, Anointing
When my mind was occupied by work/teaching concerns, I had very little time to think about anything other than my job. Now I do have time to spend on other intellectual pursuits – reading, working puzzles, deep reading for writing reviews, taking courses, and taking notes. But being retired also leaves a lot of room for my mind to wander, and when it wanders, it often reruns things I’d rather not dwell on. The last months with my parents instead of all the happy times with them. Situations with family and friends that worry me though I have no control over their outcomes. I need to retrain how my mind is occupied during quiet moments of the day—when I’m walking or lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I want to approach my mind’s engagement as purposefully as my body’s.
Here’s a new green vein, another
Dora Malech from “Each year”
clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.Whether it’s trying a new poetic form (a Markov sonnet is next on my list) or continuing to make visual art in an attempt to develop a personal style, being a continuous learner is crucial. Getting older doesn’t have to be about endings. Each day, each week, each year, each risk, each attempt can be a beginning. A new experience. A chance to reinvent yourself. In my new collection, there is a line in one of the poems that says, “Discard. Discard. Begin again.” Turn the page. Get rid of the cards that don’t serve a purpose. Pull from the deck and see what happens.
Donna Vorreyer, Always Starting Over
Saturday night we went to the opening show for Dewi Plass and Hallie Packard at Roq La Rue, my favorite Seattle art gallery. My little brother and sister-in-law were also in attendance, and we had a great time catching up with them. Plus, we talked to the artists and Kerstin, the gallery owner. A gorgeous show (it’s up ’til Sept 28th if you want to see it!) And I purchased a great book of sci-fi and steampunk art. (Roq La Rue has some terrific and hard-to-find art books, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
It made me think about how art inspires me and how making friends with artists is always so rewarding. It’s good to give your life a little space for music, visual art, theater, anything that makes you feel more creative. Visual art has a way of making you see the world a little differently. […]
Sunday, I visited with my writer friend Kelli Russell Agodon and her family, which was wonderful. I don’t get to see my writer friends often enough, especially this year, it seems. We got to catch up and celebrate good news, commiserate, enjoy brunch. One of the things about the pandemic is how much many of us got used to not socializing, even with family and close friends. Even now, Glenn and I probably go and about less than we used to. But there’s such a benefit to getting together with actual humans.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Flare, Corona is a Washington State Book Award Finalist! And Art Gallery Openings, Visiting with Friends and Family
“You Worry Too Much” is an engaging debut. [Nathan] Fidler writes with a knowledge of craft but keeps the vocabulary conversational, which pushes the reader to focus both on what’s being said and what’s being implied and hinted at. If there’s a theme it’s the missed communications and resulting lack of connection driven by a worry of saying the wrong thing or being mis-interpreted. The act of speaking can make the speaker vulnerable but can also be the opening to a connection, a relationship. Not being open to that vulnerability can result in prized possessions becoming someone else’s refuse.
Emma Lee, “You Worry Too Much” Nathan Fidler (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
And then there is the other side of all this. When you read someone else’s poem and you love it. Which of the positive responses above are you going to go for? Go safe with ‘love it’? Can’t go wrong that way. Or try to say why – and risk doing exactly what you don’t want others to do to you – and end up upsetting the person you’re trying to praise. Because you haven’t got what they were trying to say, or express it badly… So you’ve failed, again.
And you don’t do negative responses. But then what do you say if you feel obliged to respond to a poem you don’t like – quote a line?
Should you be worrying so much? Unless you’re super-confident or super-not-bothered, chances are you’re going to worry a bit.
Sue Ibrahim, That’s not what I meant
Ah, but those glorious, if less frequent moments, when someone loves your poem and tells you why, and they’ve seen it how you intended it – and joy abounds! And likewise, when you can do the same for someone else. And because of those moments, you keep trying – both ways. (With the tissues handy for when it all goes wrong.)
If a writer has crafted something delightful, something they wish to share with their community and friends immediately, should they really be penalized by lit mags who will not accept this material, now that it’s been shared?
On the other hand, I can see how editors might feel that this work has already been marketed and consumed. To whom will the writer promote this work, if their community on social media has already read it?
On the other other hand, is that why editors seek to publish certain works in the first place? Do they actually care about tapping into a writer’s audience? If that were the case, editors would be constantly trying to publish writers with the biggest platforms. We’d be encouraged to include in our cover letters how many Twitter followers we have and where we intend to promote the finished product.
This isn’t the case, and thank goodness for that. Editors collect work for their magazines because they love it, intrinsically, because it reflects the magazine’s vision, because they want it in a visceral way, for themselves. That’s certainly how I feel whenever someone sends me a column for Lit Mag News that fits just right. Me want. Let me have this!
As Tim Green wrote in Uncurated: The Case for a New Term of Art,
I’ve come to realize that what I’ve been providing for my entire career isn’t publication at all: it’s curation, from the Latin “curare,” which means to take care of. I’m not a publisher; I’m a curator. My job is to sift through thousands of submissions each week and highlight, in a respectful and meaningful way, those poems that others might enjoy reading.
It’s about nothing more, nothing less. Whether a writer has a zillion followers or none, the editor’s job is simply to find the work that fits best for their journal at a particular time. With this line of thinking, the fact that it has been already partly consumed on social media should not matter at all.
Becky Tuch, Should Facebook posts count as “previously published”?
Sometimes the images of these poems are anchored in literal-seeming scenarios and sometimes, as in ‘Old Testament, New Testament’, they’re of a more fantastical kind, dissolving and reforming like pictures in a dream. Some work as momentarily living, camera flash glimpses into imagined situations. Some have a wider but more indefinite resonance, like the beautiful single line ‘The silence of the sirens’ songs’ forming the final section of ‘Margins’, six micropoems about Ulysses’ return. Most of the poems in this book work very well on this imagistic level. Admittedly they sometimes fail to come as fully alive as wholes as the vitality of individual phrases suggests they should. Whatever may be the case in the original, in translation these less successful poems seem to me to lack expressive life in their rhythms and syntax. Fortunately, and it’s to the translators’ credit that this should be so, there are others in which parts and even whole poems do achieve rhythmical beauty and expressiveness.
Edmund Prestwich, Hasan Alizadeh, House Arrest, translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould – review
Late summer dinner:
Ripeness collides with early night.I slice tomatoes, each a mini sun,
as crickets lay their sound bed down.Corn percolates in the boiling pot –
Outside, velvet dark.To stay good with the powers beyond,
I notice the once-only moment,though its sisters spin in repetition
Jill Pearlman, Harvest in the Dark
each New England September.
I just began a new term with thirty years at W&L in the review mirror. I looked up 1994: aside from the leaders and wars I remembered, Wikipedia reminded me that was the year Munch’s The Scream was stolen, Kurt Cobain died, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president, the Chunnel opened, and Pulp Fiction premiered (we saw it in a Pittsburgh theater on Christmas Eve). […]
For this apparently antique person, September 2024 feels a little surreal. I prepped the syllabi and course websites midsummer, when I was procrastinating on something else, and I didn’t start additional class prep until a couple of days before kick-off, so I’m wandering around saying, “What? Students, already?” But I met my first year writing seminar Friday–they seemed bright and eager–and will convene my Advanced Poetry Workshop Monday. (Theme: “Haunted & Strange.” The featured image on this post is of cryptid stickers I’ll give out as a first day present.) I had some frustrations about last winter’s entry-level poetry workshop and received good advice on a Facebook thread, which I presumed was now buried forever, all those clever strategies lost. However, Former Lesley was good to me: turns out she pasted the thread into her lesson plan file. Hurrah for Former Lesley!
Otherwise, these past two weeks I’ve been working at things that tend to get shoved aside as the term heats up. I submitted a big grant proposal and labored over edits to the interior design of my next poetry book.
Lesley Wheeler, Small college English, ’90s style
For much of my adult life, in coastal South Carolina and coastal Florida, September has meant hurricanes. Even the ones that had greater impact elsewhere had disruption and upheaval where I lived. Some of it was my fault, my needing to pay attention just in case. And when there weren’t hurricanes, there was unrelenting heat and humidity. September has not been lovely in coastal regions.
In the mountains, at least this year, I’m having a wonderful September. I got out of the car yesterday and thought, someone is grilling something wonderful. And then I realized I was smelling woodsmoke, even though it’s not very cold yet. […]
These days, most of my walks take place in the pre-dawn dark, through roads at this church camp that houses my small neighborhood, with just a few streetlights. The other morning, I watched the mist curling with literal curves I could see in the air, and I thought of Keats’ poem “To Autumn,” its first line “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” I’ve tried to capture that mist in a photo, but so far, with limited success.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, September, Season of Mists and Gnome Cuteness
At the get-together before the get-together, we sit in the little back garden, drinking wine. In my case, a non-alcoholic juniper brew. The host passes around fly swatters, because a few wasps are hovering—mistaking us for flowers. Or for something that harbors aphids, more likely.
I shake my head slightly to pass on the offer. And I watch the wasp near me land on the lip of my glass. At first, I’m relieved. No one is going to swat it when it is so close to me. If I knew any of these people, I would shower them with wasp facts and hope they’d let this one go. Let all of them go, since they’re not being aggressive. Not likely to sting.
But I don’t know anyone here except my husband, and I figure that I’ll do better socially by hiding my pedantic side for a while.
Ren Powell, In the Context of Community
i have covered one eye to watch for cicada killers.
Robin Gow, peephole
protect your hum at all costs.
i slept for sixteen years
& awoke to find everyone without windows.
made mine from ant wings.
Monday was la rentrée here in France, the moment when the entire country returns to school and to work pretty much simultaneously. At the end of last week, even on Saturday, most of our favourite shops and market stalls were still shut; first thing on Monday morning, everything was back to normal, the summer over. […]
This Monday, the first day of term, my second son came home, just as my eldest did three years ago, with the same carefully copied-out poem in the first page of his “poésies” exercise book, of which he had to learn the first two verses by today and the rest by sometime next week. The children then take turns to stand at the front of the class and recite it (if you muck it up, you have to try again a few days later). The poem is by Maurice Carême — a Belgian poet who is clearly a stalwart of French primary school poetry lessons, as we’ve had quite a few by him. Appropriately enough for la rentrée, it’s called ‘L’école’ (‘The School’), though how many of the children who’ve had to learn it can identify with its particular brand of nostalgia I am not so sure […]
The school was at the verge of the world,
Victoria Moul, Anticipating nostalgia: back to school
The school was at the verge of time.
Oh if only I were still inside:
To see, beyond the glass, the doves.
Your poetry club challenge this week is to read a poem in translation, any poem, and compare it to its original. Better yet, read it outdoors! It’s fall where I live, and there’s nothing better than sitting outside with a book of poetry in the golden light…
For example, you might start with this poem translated by a friend of mine. “Only Yesterday” by Liliana Ursu is translated from the Romanian by Adriana Onițǎ here.But okay, I lied, I’d like to end with a poem by Patrizia Cavalli. I’d like to encourage you to read a poem and then sit there and be wonderfully bored. Like this.
“The more bored you are, the more attached you get.
I’m so bored, I no longer want to die.”(translated by Gini Alhadeff)
“Più ci si annoia e più ci si affeziona.
Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – Italian Poetry in Translation
M’annoio tanto, non voglio più morire.”
I no longer bemoan a messy garden. No longer judge myself for my failure to keep up with standard gardening practices. Perhaps my lazy-forward methods mean I gather a little less produce. (Or maybe not.) But I gather more peace from our feral gardens than I ever did in years of trying to keep up. The appearances-at-all-costs thing feels oppressive to me, whether it refers to our bodies or our possessions or our social status. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the beauty of a fashionably dressed person or a perfectly tended garden, it’s just never been for me.
As autumn folds into winter each year, the weeds remain. It feels right to learn what I can from our plant elders. All winter, I notice birds and other creatures feed on seedheads and dried fruits. I see them find shelter in the dry stalks. I pay attention to the patterns snow and wind make in this gone-wild space. I take heart in the way these plants bend, then lie down as they give what’s left of themselves back to the dirt.
Weed I Won’t Pull
Some hardship curved it into
a green ampersand. Tendrils sprout
along a resolute stem.I want to lean close, ask
for some photoautotrophic wisdom.Listen to the soil’s bacterial choir.
Convert to the worship
Laura Grace Weldon, Making Peace With Weeds
plants have practiced since the Beginning.
quiet afternoon
and a riot
of tickseed sunflowersin the attic
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August & September ’24
an antique scale
weighing dust