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: summer’s last tiny plum, the veins of the rational world, silences as important as words, horses married to the wind, a cricket orchestra, and much more. Enjoy!
I have been going out each day to observe this creature and wish it well. I have even proudly shown the postman. I love the fact that most years I get to see one of these elephant hawk moth caterpillars in the front garden, and this one has been sticking around in the same bush these past few days. This year I learned that they like to feed on fuchsia and I feel glad that I left the largest bush in the garden relatively untamed. I did wonder if I would be able to see it cocoon, but I read that they bury themselves in the soil to do this.
When I was young I loved Autumn for the exciting new term at school and the joy of being one year older and ready to learn different things, I enjoyed the change of colour on the trees and the way fallen leaves piled up. I fell out of love with it for a while as an adult and had to remind myself to see it as a season of its own again and not a period of time that led to Winter. Now I take time to listen to the echo of the passing of time and immerse myself in the essence of Autumn as it unfolds around me. I have been extending my walks when the sun is out to make the most of feeling the heat on my skin, and readying my favourite jumper because I sense the end of t-shirt walks soon.
Sue Finch, ELEPHANT HAWK MOTH NOT SHOELACE
Despite the warm days this week, autumn is here. The berries along the trail are overripe, and the mushrooms’ reds, oranges, and whites somehow make the woods more ominous, and more alive. On today’s hike, a man in our group found a viper and held it by the tail, for everyone to see. A Hoggorm can’t climb up from this position. […]
Writing is still difficult. I’m still feeling weepy. Not sad exactly, but soft, and exposed. When I began this memoir, began looking closely at my mother whom I lived longer estranged from than entangled with, I was trying to find ways to forgive her. I couldn’t imagine that now I would be trying to find ways to forgive myself. Maybe moving away from the concept of forgiveness entirely? A wasp needs no forgiveness. We are who we are and we do our best. I believe that. At least I believe that regarding the women in my family. To say that we are broken women would be to beg the question that there is such a thing as a woman who is not broken in some way. Or a man who is not. Isn’t hurt a requisite for life?
Ren Powell, The Queen Sleeps
The burning bush
outside my window
blazes scarlet.My crispers teem
with ombre leeks,
with wax peppers
in yellows and oranges
bright as tree-tips.If I hold my breath
Rachel Barenblat, Equinox
will time stop
on this hinge
between seasons?
They say the things you’re supposed to do to celebrate the fall equinox include getting into nature, celebrating the harvest, lighting a candle, cleaning and practicing gratitude. I’m grateful for seeing so many friends in the last few weeks, and though I’m still trying to find an endodontist who will do a root canal without Novocain, I’m grateful for the flowers and sunshine and local beauty of fall. I am also waiting for the results of the Washington State Book Award, which will be announced tomorrow. And I’m grateful that Flare, Corona is in such good company with the other finalists (like Rena Priest and Gabrielle Bates.) I’m also grateful (but also a little nervous) about possibly getting the new covid monoclonal antibody (maybe I should wait til after dental work?) And I’ve got a writing residency and an ADA bathroom remodel coming up soon! Busy times!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Fall Equinox, Hanging Out with Artist Friends, Pumpkin Farms and Sunflower Walks, Zoom Classes and Prizes and more
full stop
Jim Young [no title]
summer’s last tiny plum
on a white plate
My two fall classes are a first-year writing seminar called “Other Worlds” and an advanced poetry class called “Haunted & Strange,” so as autumn starts, I’m feeling weird in a good way. I’m also reading Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, full of meditations on poetry’s magic and modernism’s intersections with the occult, and wow, I can’t believe I’m coming to this book so late! Born in 1919 in California and adopted by theosophist parents, Duncan briefly attended Black Mountain College but is most associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. I’ve taught bits of his poetry alongside work by other Beat and antiwar writers. I’d also read fragments of The H.D. Book as I wrote a dissertation chapter that became a book chapter on H.D., but Duncan’s constantly-revised, long-privately-circulated opus wasn’t widely available then. The 2011 edition of The H.D. Book edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman divides into two large sections totaling nearly 700 pages, so although I bought the book a dozen years ago, I was intimidated by its length.
Yet Duncan’s tome is the kind of idiosyncratic project I love, and a book I’ve perhaps been needing for a while. It intertwines thoughts on poetry, women writers who got sidelined, Madame Blavatsky and the Order of the Golden Dawn, and much more. In blending criticism with personal stories, it’s very much in the spirit of my Poetry’s Possible Worlds. A ghost I didn’t recognize was haunting me.
Lesley Wheeler, Magic reciprocity
If you have, or have ever had, a baby then you will probably have picture books. Picture books these days are often very beautiful and increasingly intricate. Our baby is seven, almost eight months. He likes to turn the chunky cardboard pages. He also likes to gnaw at their spines. Some of the best ‘books’ for babies aren’t really books at all but collections of fabric swatches, though this too is a reminder that books are objects before they are anything else. All this is, it turns out, a relatively recent phenomenon: large picture books, Sam Leith notes, “now represent the average child’s first reading experience” but they are a result of new technology and “the increasing ease… of printing”.
My review of Leith’s recent, very enjoyable and very perceptive “history of childhood reading” is up on Engelsberg Ideas here. I could have gone and on, but my editor was already being generous and I wanted to focus on the question of what makes a book a children’s book in the first place.
So, for instance, I didn’t mention Leith’s brilliant reading of the horror of Beatrix Potter. Horror might seem a strong word but I think it’s the right one, for Potter particularly, but also for the experience of being a child in general. How terrible it must be to be so small. I’ve been wondering recently whether “horror”, the genre, isn’t itself partly a hangover from infancy. Do adults get a perverse pleasure out of books and films that set out to scare or disgust them because it reminds them of being young? Maybe Freud had something to say about that.
In Potter, as in a lot of children’s books, the horror lies in precisely what makes them childish: their attention on food and animals. These are the safest thing in the world—if you have or have had a baby, you will also be surrounded by animals—and yet the child must learn, pretty early on, that her animals eat each other and that she eats them. As Leith shows, Potter’s creations skip between the human and the animal world with disturbing ease. Potter has a “doubleness of eye”: she was a botanist before she was an author and illustrator. Sometimes her badgers eat wasps, frogs and worms, but they will eat rabbit pie “when other food is scarce”. The fox wants to eat Jemima Puddleduck, “but he makes her fetch herbs and onion so that he can eat her in the manner a human would eat her.” Later on, some puppies eat her eggs, “leaving her in tears”.
Perhaps all horror is bound up with eating and being eaten. As a child, I remember identifying very strongly with Jeremy Fisher, the rather hapless frog from The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. I also had a recurring nightmare in which I was suspended in a murky pond, about to be swallowed by a very big fish. I knew that whatever it was, it would be the end. Then I woke up.
Jeremy Wikeley, Why children eat books up
I am not brave enough to write about the frightening part under the part I have been tiptoeing around for so many years I am reading Tia Levings’ brilliant and heartbreaking memoir A Well-Trained Wife and it’s opened a hot needle of fear and bravery inside me I want to write about him but when I try I really want to lock all my doors and pull my blanket over my head all these years later and it makes me angry that he still affects me this way and I know I have to write it in order to gain my power back Levings’ book has unlocked a powerful key inside me […]
I am mindless no belief in angels barely sentient immobile and singular it’s Sunday I can hear the veins of the rational world everyone in a dream is also dreaming the milk hour the gaunt hour the children’s hour I need to dream around the planetary tides here on the border everything is exposed malignant blind without direction you walk in the river measuring my attention the contrails of dreams the complicated earth instead of the one I love
Rebecca Loudon, Equinox, Henry Darger, and the bad man
But I am wrong – there is another harvest to come
between August and October. There is still
another chance to be ready, to be bold, for eachjewelled fruit to fall into the hands of pickers,
like these two I found at the end of one row.Some of us take our time. Some of us take
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Coming second
our own sweet time to be a beautiful second.
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, I began writing because I was bullied and silenced as a young child. There was a real danger in opening my mouth back then, there would be physical repercussions, so I took to laying down what I was experiencing in a notebook. Then when I started reading out of those notebooks at open mics on the slam circuit I felt a kind of liberation. Writing and performing poetry was the option that made itself available to me for inexplicable reasons. I suppose part of that has to do with class. My one true artistic love is music, but there was no money in my family for expensive instruments and private lessons. A pen and notebook is the cheapest set of materials for any artistic discipline. Anyone can take it up. That is why it is such a powerful agent for personal and social change. Believe me, if I had had access to the resources that could have made me a singer or a guitarist, I would have jumped on that. It’s always been about sound and language for me.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vincent Toro
We were two horses married to the wind.
You should have seen us: our
manes, our hooves, our powerful chests.Our teeth, biting the light,
that heavenly hay spun into gold.
Our wild tails, erasing all hoofprints.There was no end to our earth.
Romana Iorga, The Runaway
Earth was an eyeball we circled, nose to rump.
My reluctance to write regularly on the blog through this period seems both to be a direct result of all that’s happened to me, and is happening in the world. When I see how many people let everything in their lives hang out in public, it makes me want to be silent and private. My little dip into FB this week, because of birthday messages the day after my surgery, reinforces this aversion, but it’s also the news and the media in general, not just social media. The media’s relentless invasiveness in their search for attention and detail, the more salacious or anxiety-producing the better, seems to encourage individuals to do the same thing — “surely there’s something about me that I can use to get attention…and more attention…which will alleviate my own sense of anxiety, insecurity, insignificance, and helplessness about the future.” At the bottom of this, of course, is our fear of our own mortality. But of course the attention-seeking only works temporarily, and it is all ego-driven; it doesn’t help anyone else — in fact, it has the opposite effect. This is often true even when the person who is writing or posting does so in the guise of “helping” — leaving aside the blatancy of “influencer” culture and its proven deleterious effect not only on adolescents but many of us, there are many self-styled gurus out there, in every “wellness” field from therapy to spirituality to nutrition, exercise, health and beauty.
Even in my own field of creativity and the arts, where it’s quieter, there are plenty of people clamouring for attention. The mediums are made for this, and with every click our preferences and data are used to direct more ads and content into our feeds and inboxes. Most of the time we don’t even think about it. But, if Parker Palmer’s insight is true: “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality,” then the clear message to me is that it’s time to get back on the cushion, literally or not. Too much has happened to me personally, at the same time as the escalating din of war and politics in our world, for me to want to add to it except with a calm word or image now and then. Having some tools for dealing with times of personal and collective upheaval, developed through a lifetime of reading, artistic and spiritual practice, loving others, and observing and thinking about life, helps me to know when I need to step back and take care of myself. Only then can I have any hope of offering anything genuinely useful or helpful to others, which is and should be the goal.
Beth Adams, Reality and Illusion
A while back, in one of our final conversations before he died, an old friend and fellow writer paid me a rare compliment. ‘You’ve always been the ball-bearing that rolls free from the machine.’
We probably laughed and exchanged friendly insults and poured more wine, but it came back to me this week when I was reading again bits of the Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive from 2002. (That long ago?) I saw the quote from Seamus Heaney on one of the section headings that ended: ‘Although they must feel answerable to the world they inhabit, poets, if they are to do their proper work, must also feel free.’
This seems to me as wise an analysis of the ‘job’ of the poet as you could wish to read.
In the same book, heading another section, Ted Hughes is quoted. ‘What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.’
Again, true and wise. Without being conscious of it, I have followed these guides more closely the older I’ve got.
We must each choose our way, of course. It’s not for one writer to tell another how to go about their craft.
However, to achieve anything like the feeling of freedom and the possession of the reality of life, I have to separate myself from the general run of things – to roll free from the machine, as my friend put it.
Fortunately, as dedicated as I was to the commitment of earning a living through various strands of journalism, I was able to compartmentalise life. Time for family, time to write other things, broadly within the reach of poetry, time for friends. Along with having five children around, for fourteen years Janet and I also founded and ran a poetry press that broke even and also edited a poetry magazine.
Yet as much as we tried to fit in, somehow we never felt comfortable in the poetry world. Too much ego, too much noise, too many false smiles, too much futile ambition.
And eventually even life on the edge of it seemed a distraction from what we should really be doing. Since then we’ve both written novels, I’ve gone on even further with the exploration of writing what some say is poetry, some say isn’t. The adventure, now I’ve stopped scratching around on the surface of the poetry world (I almost called it a dungheap, but that’s over-dramatic… perhaps) has become increasingly interesting. Time inevitably changes who you are as a writer but is, I believe, or certainly in my case, a constant inspiration to understand, to do better, to feel free.
Bob Mee, IF I WANT TO WRITE, I CAN’T ALLOW MYSELF TO GET CAUGHT UP IN THE POETRY WORLD
I’m going to share poems, stories, essays, photos. I’m going to write about being disabled. I’m going to write about healing from generational trauma. I’m going to write about things in the world that are unjust. I am a work in progress. I want to be real. I want to write about things that I’ve been too afraid to write about. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do a subscription for folks who are interested in reading more of my work.
I’m also currently working on a book of poems & a few other projects as my body allows me.
Jennifer E. Hudgens, It’s been a while.
It sometimes goes like this, that we want a chance to say something to the one we miss unbearably, the one who is no longer there to hear it. We wish to repeat what we knew and said in his lifetime, or what we were too shy to say, or didn’t even realise we had to say.
At a memorial celebration of Geoff’s life at Shrewsbury Town’s football ground a couple of days after the reading, many of us wrote a poem together. We did it like this – each writing a line of memory, or emotion, or observation at the beginning of the event. The poet part of me then wove the lines together, finding as I did so that what the community knows about Geoff rings both particular and communal – we knew him individually, we knew him collectively.
The poem is epic – long – a bit unwieldy. It breaks the line limits for competitions, magazine entries – steps outside the bounds of convention. Geoff would have liked that about it, and, as Fred said, he would have liked its call and response nature, the chance for voice.
Liz Lefroy, We Write A Poem
I don’t know how the lines would sound in Dugdale’s voice, but as they fall on my inner ear they’re given a solemn, foreboding tread by their frequent clustering of heavy stresses: ‘Morning light crazed like a delft tile’, ‘three blue figures’, ‘Heavy shears clatter’ and so on. In a more elusive way, the sheer, hard definiteness of the sounds seems to hold the images at a distance, giving them a kind of numinous weight, a feeling that what’s being evoked isn’t something localized and incidental but something solemnly ordained the enactment of a ritual, as if to represent a fundamental feature of existence. This impression is strengthened by other elements of patterning – hints of archaic or heightened syntax throughout and the repeated line in the italicised paragraph. However, it’s modified by an opposing pull towards the mundane and temporal. This comes above all, I think, from the words ‘telly’ and ‘poking’, the one bringing a touch of slangy familiarity, the other making the women seem clumsy-fingered and short-sighted. One of the fine things about the passage is the way it brings these opposing impressions together, making the fateful and numinous shine through the mundane and transient or be shone through by it, most vividly in the phrase ‘in the shapeshifting beam of the telly’, where the line’s beginning brings a flood of associations with folktale and myth and its end earths us in the familiar world.
Edmund Prestwich, Opening Sasha Dugdale’s The Strongbox
Some small part of me wonders if it’s fair of me to force my students to have this closer experience with nature–just because I think it’s important, why should I foist that on my students? But the larger part of me knows that it’s an important experience, and they’re not likely to get it in their other classes. I am astonished as I walk on campus; I am often the only one walking who is not staring at a phone. I get to class, and everyone is looking at their phones.
Yesterday my students were outside doing a close observation of a tree, and while some of them were doing their best not to look at a tree, many of them were nose to bark with the trunk or staring up into the canopy of leaves. Some of them are writing blissful accounts of how happy they are to have a favorite tree, and I do realize that some of them may be writing that way figuring it’s what I want them to say. Most, however, seem sincere.
I gave them a worksheet to fill out as they observed the tree, and some of them used factual language, while others had a more poetic approach. Maybe they would have had a poetic approach even without the work we did in class. But it’s been fun to watch them experiment with language, even if they didn’t realize they were experimenting with language.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Field Work Report
I’m in the midst of a fall book tour for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, my creative nonfiction (visual, hybrid) book about gender, nature, and feather fashion, and it seems to me that I’m enjoying it more than I have enjoyed events for my previous books.
Perhaps as I get older, I simply have more appreciation for these opportunities to travel and see new and old friends, engage in conversation about poetry, writing, art, and the world, and share material that is so intimately part of who I am and what I care about. Perhaps it’s because I’m using slides to show images from this highly visual book in my readings, and the novelty of this is fun. Perhaps it’s because since leaving academia four years ago and founding The School for Living Futures, I feel my writer, artist, teacher, activist, and personal selves more fully aligned, leading to more conversations about things that matter–things beyond my own work, with tendrils stretching out from poetry and writing into community, ecology, the wild world of being.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Thinking with the Climate Crisis
Between the world we left
when we passed throughthe doors, and the world
beginning to unreel before us,there is a vastness I can’t
fathom or cross. Caps of rustbrown and golden yellow
tether the edges,darkening with time,
Luisa A. Igloria, Velvet Foot
clustered on wood.
Princeton, N.J., is home to a genuine haiku treasure! Mayumi Ito is a prolific poet/scholar/translator who, among her many haiku-related projects, created an anthology of local haiku poetry that showcases more than a hundred poems in English and Japanese. Thirty-four of mine were included, and I’m posting a few to give a taste of what the book is like.
Thanks to Mayumi’s sensitive and insightful translations, my Japanese-speaking poet-friends can finally see some of my work in their own language!
Bill Waters, Haikus of Four Seasons in Princeton II
For the month of September (2024), five of my video poems (as well as full, wall-sized art piece poems) will be on display at Gagné Contemporary, 401 Richmond in Toronto. Artists in the show include Kunel Gaur (Delhi, Toronto) and Justin Neely (NYC).
Read about HALLUCINATIONS project: https://www.hallucinations.me
Read about Gagné Contemporary: https://www.instagram.com/gagnecontemporary/?hl=en
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, HALLUCINATIONS video poems gallery show
I felt like sharing this particular poem with you today. Here’s a photo of my mum before I was born, a little inspiration for this piece. Sharing an audio excerpt of a performance of ‘Umbilical’ as it was read as part of my ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ set at Out-Spoken on stage at the Southbank and broadcast on BBC’s The Verb and their exciting series of LIVE poetry and spoken word, The Adverb.
I am so delighted to discover ‘Umbilical’ was chosen by Nihal Arthanayake for ‘Pick of the Week’ also on BBC Radio 4, here’s the audio of that poem with an introduction by Nihal. Thank you so much to Ian McMillan and The Verb and to Nihal Arthanayake for getting poetry on the airwaves.
Salena Godden, Umbilical
- You can hear the full show here at The Verb, BBC Radio 4
- Check out to Nihal’s episode of Pick of The Week, BBC Radio 4
We had Rob Selby, Ruth Beddow, Lorraine Mariner, John McCullough, Matthew and me as readers. I think everyone read amazingly well with a mix of the new and the old, or is it published an unpublished given it’s all new to someone that hasn’t seen you before? Does that matter? Probably not.
I’ve seen/read with most of the folks on that list before, but seeing Ruth was a new experience, and one I want to repeat again. I knew her pamphlet (which is why we invited her to read), but I think the newer work she read will be a great signpost for where she goes next. She said something interesting about having some sense of disconnection withy the poems in her pamphlet that I can get behind. I’m obviously still promoting CtD, and still love it, but almost a year down the line I’m finding myself wanting to read poems from it that haven’t been done as much over the more obvious ones, and to introduce some newer work into my sets (Hark at me!!!). We’ll come back to newer work thing in a bit…Rob’s new poems sat nicely with the selection he read from his two books. The newer work being a nice mix of one from a. Passion project and another about home videos (that’s not about home video at all) that really hit home. Both, I hope, find a life in a new collection. Lorraine read new work in among older work, and gave us a masterclass in making the audience come with you as they laughed and cried. John was as excellent as he’d been the week before when I saw him read in Crystal Palace. His new work sits comfortably along his older work, and the theme of class that he seems to be exploring is a gold mine. I want the giraffe poem out there very soon. Matthew mixed it up and read his football poems, and as we know they aren’t just football poems, but more about masculinity, desire, community, bad decisions, etc.
Mat Riches, Buridan’s Folktronica Boxset
Today’s featured poet, Britt Kaufmann, is not only a writer but also a graphic designer, a playwright, and “a lifelong reader and learner.” And a math tutor! Out this month (from Press 53) is her mathy collection, Midlife Calculus — a thoughtful and fun-to-read collection that links math ideas to a variety of life’s experiences.
Last February, I was introduced to Kaufmann’s work when her book-title-poem, “Midlife Calculus,” appeared in Scientific American. I was delighted to also find her poem, “Z-score of Zero” here in the April-May edition of MAA Focus and I was drawn to include it in this April, 2024 blog-posting. Visit and enjoy!
JoAnne Growney, Midlife Calculus — poems by Britt Kaufmann
“Always Haunted” is split into sections, “Samhain”, “Bewitchment”, “Graveyard”, “Day of the Dead”, “Haunting”, “A Lighter Shade”, and poems contain references to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, “Bell, Book and Candle”, Dracula, why “Macbeth” (the play) is cursed with the poem warning, “Mark my words: women have always fought back”, and “Emily Post’s ‘Etiquette Book for Ghosts’” in a mix of forms including sonnets, haibun, an abecedarian and free verse. The sections are a handy way to find a poems for another reading and the collection can be read in one sitting or dipped into.
“Samhain” sets the mood, starting, “I’ve fallen through a rip in time tonight.”, and later,
“I’m not alone, detect sweet fragrances,
Lush nectar of forbidden grapes above.
A cricket orchestra replays nocturnes.I flutter like a trapped bird, then something
Or someone draws me in with secret steps.
A brittle leaf is plucked from my red hair.Glass-blown interiors invite me there,
Strange iridescent skies pontilled with stars.”It plays with all the senses, not just the visual and audio, but brings in taste and textures. There are suggestions of temptation and invitation alongside foreboding. Like the best ghost stories, it’s spookily suggestive, not explicit horror.
Emma Lee, “Always Haunted” LindaAnn LoSchiavo (Wild Ink Publishing) – book review
On the verge of a voyage, I am steeling myself for the — I am trying not to use the word “ordeal” — various delights and challenges of the unknown: confusing streets, crabby waiters, unhelpful fellow travelers in this life, and the beauties: the altered horizon lines, the shared laughs, the flowers, in all their forms. I’ve done my usual research, but in the face of the unknown, I can only retain so much and must leave the rest to chance. Like every other one of us must do. Always. Everywhere.
I like this little poem by Eric Kocher because of the dreamlike way it echoes that time-out-of-time sense that travel provides — not the departure, not the arrival, but all those hours in between. And that sense I always get in an airplane, hyperaware of all the bodies around me, all encased in this strange vessel, helpless to the play of wind, weather, pilot, and the behaviors, advertent and inadvertent, of each other. And that moment when the doors open, sometimes right onto the tarmac, sometimes into the liminal world of the terminal and then into the inevitable chaos of five lanes of vehicles taking and dropping off fellow travelers. That first breath of strange air, and how it births us each anew into whoever we will be in this new world. Or is it whomever? Even when that new world is “home,” it has changed. We have changed. The planet has turned. What’s new? Oh, everything.
I see disappearing into the parking garage the stranger with the funny hair who sat three seats ahead of me. Hello, I think. Goodbye. I loved you briefly. But isn’t that always the way?
Marilyn McCabe, There’s only night now, and a hundred of us
[I]t seems to me that without occasional poems — without a culture of writing poems, sometimes off-the-cuff, for the pleasure of their addressee, or the satisfaction of the moment; without the concept of the functional poem with a place in our daily lives — we barely have a poetic culture at all. Great literature just doesn’t appear without an everyday counterpart in ordinary life. […]
Herbert’s Temple is a rare and perhaps unique example of a whole verse collection from the seventeenth century which is still not merely honoured but loved by countless readers. But Herbert could not have found his way to the unforgettable, domestic rhetorical intimacy of The Temple if he hadn’t been immersed in the Latin poetry of his day, if this kind of thing hadn’t already been part of the everyday verse culture of the truly occasional poem — of the polite (if heartfelt) verse bashed out quickly (subitus) for a new friend or an old acquaintance before he continues on his way.
Victoria Moul, A dolphin for the Dutch; or, is there any verse culture without occasional poems?
Another August Poetry Postcard Fest is done and in the books. This was my 12th year doing the Fest, a 31-day marathon where you write a poem on a postcard each day in August and send it to someone else participating in the Fest. […]
To be honest, I’d been wondering for a couple of years whether I wanted to continue doing this postcard marathon. As writing marathons go, I feel like I get more out of April’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). There’s no line limit to NaPoWriMo, so I use that April marathon every year to woodshed new poetry ideas, dig deep, and write longer forms. In contrast, the August Postcard Fest feels easier (short poems! that only one stranger will read!), and I feel less pressure about the writing. But the Postcard Fest’s one rule—your poem has to fit on a postcard, so a max of about 12 lines—can feel constricting. After a week or two, those little postcard poems feel like I’m writing puzzles. Sometimes I’m in the mood for that, sometimes not.
But the challenge, of course, is to make the Postcard Fest an exercise that actually produces decent short poems, or at least poems that I enjoy writing, or sections of longer poems. I often find that writing postcard poems as series or sequences works well, exploring obsessions or writing several different takes on an experience I’ve recently had, or something that I can’t get out of my mind.
This year I wrote a series of poems on the Olympics, which was really fun—that’s not something I’d normally try to write a really short poem about, so I had to keep the images and concepts compact and punchy. I wrote most of those around 3am, when I was up watching the Paris events live—so I could see how long the pole vaulters had to wait around for other events to get out of their way on the field; or how the skeet shooters patiently waited in line, one behind the other, watching the person at the front of the line doing their nerve-wracking shooting. I was fascinated by how strangely the table tennis players treat the ball just before they serve it, each with their own ritualistic, slightly kinky relationship with it.
Amy Miller, Poetry Postcard Fest 2024: The Obsessions
Writers anguish over finding their “voice.” What they really mean is, do I sound authentic in this work? Do I sound like the “me” I’m trying to develop, and not like someone who influenced me or who I might be unconsciously imitating? And, most importantly, did I create a speaker who communicates successfully through this poem?
Some of this confusion comes from comparing poetry to fiction or memoir. In fiction, we expect to have a narrator or series of narrators, whether in first or third person, who tells us a story. In memoir, it’s almost always the voice of the writer describing a time in her life. But poetry isn’t fiction or memoir. It’s an entirely different genre. As Denise Levertov put it in “The Nature of Poetry:” “Poetry is a way of constructing autonomous existences out of words and silences” and “Most poetry is more directly derived from the unconscious than most prose.”
I love how she mentions silences as being as important as words.
When writing early drafts of a poem, I don’t consciously create a speaker. The speaker emerges through subsequent drafts. The voice that ends up narrating the poem is often a surprise to me, and quite different from the voice I started with. This is one of the reasons I love writing poems: when I start one, I honestly never know where I will end up. The journey is just as important as the destination. Or maybe more important.
Erica Goss, Excuse me, I’m speaking: the role of the speaker in poetry
I once met an old, elegant, Russian woman who had immigrated to Wellesley, Massachusetts. It was a summer party, a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing. Perhaps I told her I wrote poetry, perhaps not. But somehow the subject of Edna St. Vincent Millay had come up. Thirty-plus years later I can still see her eyes, piercing with the force of her diamond and gold rings.
“You cannot compare her to anyone writing today. Think Madonna,” she’d said. A poet as big as Madonna in the late 1980’s? Today it would be: Think Taylor Swift or, Think Beyoncé.
It wasn’t until the biography Savage Beauty The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay came out, that the average human (reader, that’s me) came to know anything of Millay’’s life: her steel ambition, her family’s poverty, or her queerness. Of course, even in 2001, bisexuality was not yet mentioned, although as a young woman living in New York, she dated men and women, the biography makes no mention of it.
But none of that mattered to me. Her poems were openly feminist for their time and the sense of a different kind of life was evident in everything she wrote. When, later I discovered that she was a political activist writing a poem openly against the death penalty. She was a self-proclaimed Anarchist and her collected letters show her behind the scenes work to try and save Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant workers that were charged with murder and robbery, but were widely believed to be innocent. Later, “Vincent” would be an active pacifist during World War 1 and World War II — some believe leading to the demise of her career.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The first writers residency I ever attended was her Sears Roebuck barn in Austerlitz, New York in the winter of 99 inches of snow. (This is also where Mary Oliver worked for Vincent’s sister Norma just after Oliver left high school.)
She remains one of my poetry foremothers although best pal to go partying with might describe her more accurately.
Susan Rich, Back and Forth on the Ferry-Keeping It Real
The victory march of our particularity against probability comes alive in a short, dazzling poem by Ruth Stone (June 8, 1915–November 19, 2011).
Stone was six and enchanted by her grandmother’s dictionary when she began writing poetry. She was eight-four and the grandmother of seven when she received major recognition as a poet. By the time she died, having lived nearly a century and survived her husband’s suicide, she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award with her singular poems bridging the domestic and the cosmic, lensing the world of love and loss, of rapture and regret, through the world of galaxies and particles — poems shimmering with the spirit of The Universe in Verse (which is now a book).
This poem, found in What Love Comes To (public library) — Stone’s final poetry collection, published just before her death at age 96 — was read at the seventh annual Universe in Verse by David Byrne.
Maria Popova, The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne
I’m think of archives, photographs, and what is altered in the reading of the ordinary. Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives deploys the chance encounter and temporal to place archives in conversation with one another. In these telepathic archives, the image serves as a sort of communicative interlocutor who instructs the reader on what to make of it. Howe locates a “visionary spirit, a deposit from a future yet to come,” in the domain of research libraries and special collections. This “mystic documentary telepathy” arrives suddenly, pressing “things-in-themselves” against “things-as-they-were-for-us.”
Here, the poet centers the “insignificant” material details: “quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-out.” Howe rewrote William Carlos Williams’ Paterson — an archival study of the scholar’s relationship to the text.
This playful engagement of archives lends itself to poesis. But archives are more complicated where I come from. . . archives are expected to provide a sort of justice. I should begin with a word, lustration, that hangs over European history as well as art.
Alina Stefanescu, Richter’s lustrated photographs.
bitter love
Charlotte Hamrick, undreaming
rusting through sky
pounding shine
to shadow
I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative and purpose when it comes to the writing I do, whether it is more prose or verse-like in formatting and appearance. So often narrative seems to be talked about as either/or. Either your verse poetry has a narrative line, or your prose has a poeticness to it, but no one really talks about the kind of thing I like to do, which is narrative, but prose, but also fragmented and written with “poetic” things in mind. The result is it’s harder to find people who write the same kinds of things or are doing similar work, who have the same goals in common. One foot in one sphere and the other in another. But then again, as someone who also uses visual art, it’s a feeling I am used to, though the boundaries seem much clearer (though with book arts, text installations, etc, maybe it’s similarly brackish water.)
I am a story writer more and more, but I use poetry as that vehicle instead of prose. But the poems rarely look poem-ish or maybe even work the same way the poets I see around me do. They do not have a consistent sense of voice or structure. They are serpentine, unreliable, fragmented. They would like frustrate the casual fiction writer, as well as the poet who expects poetry to be other things entirely. And yet I feel I have more in common with fiction writers than I ever have with poets somehow, a fact that becomes more and more clear to me every year. The good thing is in feeling a little isolated I’ve also been granted a better view of the science and alchemy that goes into how and why I am writing, which is something.
Kristy Bowen, poetry and narrative
It happened again last night. As I was lying in some sort of half sleep, a sequence of poetry lines came to me, a sequence I was enamored with and surely would remember. Today, I remember that lines were there, but for the life of me, I cannot remember what they are. Or even what they were about. I do remember they built on one another, like an if/then sequence. That is all I remember.
You might ask, Why don’t you keep a bedside journal in which to jot these thoughts? (I’ve tried this before – after weeks of not using it, I put it away to clear space and that’s usually when something comes up. Go figure.) Why don’t you just get up and go write them down wherever you keep your things? (Dear reader, when you are 62 years old and already have trouble falling asleep, you will not consider this an option, either.) Why don’t you put them in the notes app on your phone? ( I have a good answer for this last one – I refuse to keep my phone in my bedroom.)
Donna Vorreyer, the one(s) that get away
1. Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell: for a reader, in a space-time so far removed from the poet, the elegies become a tunnel through which they must pass, strange, dark, eyes slowly adapting, the opaque dissolving into disconnected parts, as if trying to paste together strips from a shredder, as if trying to find perfect polygons among the clouds, all the while, breath held tight, tense, excited, afraid.
2. And yet, with one translation, maybe two, with notes and searches and shrugs and shakes of the head, the reader consumes the elegies. But is this what the poet would have wanted? To be studied thus? Rilke wrote the poems over a decade, he wrote about things he felt would make his life meaningful to him, referencing all that he had learnt and experienced: the myths, the places he had travelled to, the books he had read, religion as he understood it and the human condition as he hoped it would be, so that being would make sense, as would dying. He wrote for himself, the readers now, inexplicably, have to read it and find meaning, for themselves.
3. That famous opening line of the first elegy, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” expands into a discourse on how everything around us needs to be internalized, so we and the physical world, are transformed across dimensions of life and death, both being part of one vast unity. His angel, who will enable this, is not easy to please: “Don’t think that I am wooing, / Angel, and even if I were, you would not come. For my call is always filled with / departure; against such a powerful current you cannot move.” (Seventh)
4. By the eighth elegy, he has worked his way through childhood, passion, transience, love and glory. Yet, he wonders if we are capable of transformation. “And we: spectators, always, everywhere, / turned toward the world of objects, never outward. / It fills us. We arrange it / It breaks down. / We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.” The beauty of complex thought, imagery, language and absolute conviction are breathtaking.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Reading list update -31
A center comes into view
when feted by friends, flutes, champagne:
a hot, smart feeling of being where I am,having managed forks and multiple roads,
having gladly passed through angsting!In the winey glow and afterglow,
Jill Pearlman, Hey, Post-Birthday
nothing was scrawled on a napkin,
my new/old self could hold that wisdom.
i wanted to talk but little stones
Robin Gow, the rock at garvey’s point
kept coming out. they filled my pockets.
you had headlights for eyes.
all the rich people houses
glowed as if harboring angels.
we did not make it home until
everyone else in the world
was asleep.