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: a voice the size of an acorn, a seahorse on a dander, dancing foxes, singing earthworms, and much more. Enjoy.
The breath scent of mother fig
under the chuppah of life
time got sucked up into a late-summer straw
fully enjoyed, fortunately, but fast fast fast
leaving us reeling – never ready, breathless
standing under canopies of scarlet leaves,
in wind faster than the mind, among unheard cries,
before doors of the open ark
leaning face to face with All That Is
Jill Pearlman, Shanah Tovah
The autumn rain last night
left the earth boggy, trees dripping,sky fog-murky and chill. My dog
Sarah Russell, Sharing October
doesn’t brood over this. He sets off […]
It’s peak leaf-peeping season in Maine, where I’m spending a week visiting my eldest at university, taking in all of the crisp autumn air and the morning sunlight through the pines. There’s something about being in the land of Hawthorne and Longfellow and more that moves me to write. I’ve missed this weather and this work — focusing on my writing life, committing the time to the writing habit, to the “peace of the writing desk” as David Huddle calls it in his book, The Writing Habit.
Perhaps I am also writing out of sadness, for recently I learned of Lewis Putnam Turco’s passing. I had thought about visiting him during this most recent trip to Maine, yet I learned a day after his funeral that he had passed before I arrived in the area.
Lew was a force in the poetry world and a meaningful part of my writing life — I knew him mainly through one chance meeting at the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative around 2008 and via correspondence afterwards. He was witty, playful, irreverent, and at times cantankerous, but generous and kind and willing to accept me into his world of formalist poets. I’ll be ever grateful to Lew for corresponding with me over the years, and for including my work in the fourth edition of The Book of Forms when I had only had a few publication credits under my belt. In fact, it was at our first encounter, washing our hands in the mens restroom at the West Chester Poetry Conference, that we struck up a conversation about textspeak and how it was being used to write novels in Japan.
Scot Slaby, A Maine Post: Remembering Lewis Turco
I want to be autumn’s secretary in soft
corduroy and velvet, shades of russet,
saffron and auburn. I am burnt caramel,
warmed chocolate in a tight toffee skirt
and heels.
[…]It is pouring with rain as I type this, the sky is grey porridge. I’m at my desk and racing to finish the new draft of the new novel this month, it’s so close now.
I’m at the stage of writing where I have no idea why I am doing this and who cares, but I know I care and therefore must keep going so I will be where I want to be with this story, and say what I mean to say, which is a very big and scary thing. Right now writing hurts, it is a bit like stirring a risotto, you think you made a mistake and you have pot of weird raw rice soup, but you keep slowly stirring, and very slowly adding the stock, and then all of a sudden the risotto thickens and comes together and the rice is cooked perfectly and it is the right consistency and so delicious and creamy and you cannot believe you made it.
Salena Godden, Autumn’s Secretary
I started this blog post almost two months ago. I’ve always admired people who can write dispatches from life when it’s moving at high speed, and for that matter, I’ve always admired diarists. That’s never been my way. I can move and think fast, but I write slow when it comes to my personal creative work. In less than 24 months, I have had to try on several lives for size. One was too small; one was too big. The good news is that I’m working at a nonprofit that feels humane and sustainable, with room to grow, and the skills I’ve used in teaching for much of the last decade are also a great match for being a director of communications. But still, it’s a lot of change! Bruce Feiler is just one of the thought leaders in talking about “lifequakes,” and his work has helped distill what I’ve been processing. And will need to keep processing.
Sandra Beasley, Goldilocks, and Beyond
I do miss the ease of working for copywriting agencies, but times have changed and I’m hopeful that for now at least AI cannot write bespoke wedding poetry! The privilege of helping people express their love, sorrow and joy is beyond measure, and the fact that people trust me with such milestone events is a wonderful thing. This year my poetry prints have helped celebrate numerous weddings, milestone birthdays, anniversaries and two new jobs! It means the world to have my words as part of so many occasions knowing the prints are on people’s wall is an honour. As I move into writing poems that will be gifts for Christmas, this feeling of being part of significant moments in people’s lives continues to grow.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Autumn – a time to prepare for renewal
The only scary hurricane I’ve never ridden out was Wilma. This was the same year as Katrina, which in Fort Lauderdale came through as a category one that did plenty but was a baby compared to what it became. Wilma was a fading category two when it hit us, but the eye was 70 miles wide and the storm bands pretty much covered the state. We lived in an old Florida apartment, low to the ground, walls made of cinder blocks and rebar, with hurricane shutters and strong doors. We thought about leaving, but where would we go? With regular traffic, it’s a ten hour drive to Georgia and we didn’t know anyone there we could have stayed with. We didn’t have the money for an extended hotel stay, not for three humans and two cats at gale force wind prices.
We hunkered down, got supplies, put blankets on the floor of the most secure interior closet we had in case we actually were going to try to sleep. The rains came and the winds picked up. Every once in a while I’d ease the door open to see what it was like outside. The wind bowed the palm trees and I thought about Victor Hernandez Cruz’s poem “Problems With Hurricanes” and the lines “How would your family / feel if they had to tell / The generations that you / got killed by a flying / Banana.” I shut the door. I thought about the one person killed during Hurricane Charley, a guy who stepped outside while in the calming eye of the storm to have a smoke only to have a tree fall on him. The winds calmed and I looked out. The table on our porch had come over the fence and wedged itself between my car and Amy’s truck. The winds picked up, blew directly at us, and then the water was coming in under the door, and we were mopping it up with towels and trying to push it back.
Brian Spears, Running from a storm
It has been a day, no, several
Luisa A. Igloria, Eye of the Storm
days now. The animals have fled through
the torn brambles. People watch as houses
topple: their chicken legs bow in the swell
of water, and windows fold like postcards
on a revolving rack. A voice the size of an acorn
comes out of the dark. What will you surrender—
your comb, your pillow, your blue thread and needle?
As I’ve thought about all the hurricane poems I’ve written, I’ve gone to the blog to see how often I’ve posted them. So, rather than repeat one, let me offer a new one here.
In the Asheville area, we’re in a time period where lots of folks are applying for FEMA assistance. I will likely not apply; we haven’t had any damage, after all.
But in part, I won’t apply because of how past hurricanes have shaped me. We’ve had damage that wasn’t covered by insurance, so I applied for FEMA money. Each time, each hurricane, we were turned down because we had insurance. Different administrations, same result.
In 2017, after Hurricane Irma, we applied for assistance, and even though we were turned down, I still had an exit interview. My memory is that it was a phone interview. Did I know it was an exit interview? Did I complete it hoping there was a chance of some money? Probably.
It was later, after seeing how the poet Oliver de la Paz transformed screening questions for autism into a poem, that I thought about doing the same with the FEMA exit interview. I probably gave a simple answer to the question that begins the poem, the lack of money and supplies answer.
I have other hurricane poems that I like better. But this one might be one of the more honest hurricane poems I’ve ever written.
FEMA Exit Interview
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, FEMA Exit Interview
“What factor has been most important
In your inability
To fully recover?”
a. Lack of money
b. Lack of supplies
c. Your inability to find a contractor or other workers
d. Your insurance company has been non-responsive
e. Your mortgage company is a cosigner and has unreasonable requirements before they will release the funds from the insurance company
f. Not wanting to invest any more resources in this house that has betrayed you
g. Your exhaustion
h. Your irrational fear of the phone
i. All of your friends have decided to move and you cannot make any decisions because of your mournful state
j. You realize you have made a dreadful mistake by moving to the coast in a time of sea level rise
k. This house was the cornerstone of your retirement plans, and the storm has made you realize that these plans are untenable and you don’t want to invest more into this sunk cost, but if you don’t invest the money, you will never sell the house, and your sunk cost will be lost forever
“shore-bound by force ten gales we dream about the ones that got away… far from any dimly recollected grasp… a compass misplaced forever…”
I’m very pleased that my video Preening will be streamed on-line as part of the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival on 15th October. I’ve had work there before and they are always really good programs, covering a diverse range of topics and styles.
Preening is a strange, slow meditative piece, using a single sequence of seabirds (Crested Terns, Thalasseus bergii cristatus) waiting out a storm on a beach at Marion Bay, South Australia. As they quietly preen, they wonder about their increasingly imperilled future in the face of climate change.
The footage has been slowed down using a frame-blending algorithm that occasionally creates interesting distortions. The sequence was then overlaid on itself with a time shift of several seconds using a complex composting procedure so the birds appear to be interacting with themselves.
The text adapted is from Lessons in Neuroscience, Lesson 1: Phantom Limb, originally published in my 2012 collection urban biology.
Ian Gibbins, “Preening”
Something to think about . . . do some of us still cling? . . . obediently and thoughtlessly . . . to beliefs such as
I can’t / poets can’t understand mathematics
or
I can’t / math people can’t understand poetryCurrent interactive teaching/learning processes are helping to revise those negative attitudes — and my thoughts on the subject were brought to mind by a poem that showed up recently in my email. It is Poem 15 in the Poetry 180 project, an activity initiated in 2002 by Poet Laureate Billy Collins in 2002 — a project that provides a poem for students for each day of the traditional school year. (Each Sunday subscribers get an email that provides a link to a poem for each day of the coming week.)
Poem 15 is by poet Tom Wayman and entitled “The Poet.” Here are several of its lines — not words I agree with but related to the ideas expressed above and possibly useful for provoking classroom discussion!
Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the nextTom Weyman’s complete poem, “The Poet,” is available here. Another Weyman poem, “Stacking Chairs,” was featured in this 2021 blog posting.
JoAnne Growney, Classroom Difficulties with Mathematics
Happy National Poetry Day to all those who worship at the altar of words. This year’s theme is ‘counting’.
In November my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, will be published by Nine Arches Press. I can’t wait to share it with you.
Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt is a bold exploration of place within nature through themes of rural working-class identity and the female body, alongside explorations of loss and the repetitive nature of time.
Today I want to share with you one of the poems from the collection.
As the theme of the day is ‘counting’ I’m sharing a poem called ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Blackbird’.
My intention with this particular poem was to embed myself within a group of poetic observers, poets in particular, who had written ‘thirteen…blackbird’ poems, and other series of polaroid-like observations of nature. Poets such as Wallace Stevens, who wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which influenced RS Thomas’s ‘Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man’, which used to be available to view online but doesn’t seem to be there anymore.
There’s an interesting article here, if you can access it, about that connection between Wallace and Thomas: An Abstraction Blooded. I’d be interested in your thoughts around that connection, and other poems that you think fit into this observed, short poem canon.
Both the poems play with the idea of observation and perception. Both of the poems play with haiku style poems rooted perhaps in the Japanese artist Hokusai’s ‘Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji’. Hokusai was influenced by other artists viewing landscape from different perspectives, and he in turn influenced future artists to do the same. I wanted to be influenced by these artists and in a very small way take up space in that lineage. I wanted to add to the observed stances around nature and landscape. The beginning of that process was looking back through my life to times both significant (the blackbird at the hospital window) and seemingly insignificant, to build a picture of the blackbirds existing, living, dying, singing around me oblivious to whether I was experiencing a significant life moment or not. I wanted to capture these tiny moments of interconnectedness, of noticing. And to recognise that the lives of animals are not significant because they are attached to our lives. They are significant in their own right.
Wendy Pratt, For National Poetry Day: A poem from my new collection
The poem I’m posting here, in English and Spanish, refers to a news report from June 2018 about a Salvadoran single father and undocumented migrant who was deported back to El Salvador while his six-year-old daughter remained in US custody. The poem incorporates details from the news story and text from Catholic liturgy. I’m sharing ‘Six’ today because it’s National Poetry Day here in the UK and this year the theme is ‘counting’. My thanks to Lorena Pino Montilla for translating my poem into Spanish – her translation is published below. Lorena and I will be reading poems from my zine, in English and Spanish, on Saturday, 2 November at Walcot Chapel, Bath, at 5pm.
Six
Papá, when
are you getting me
out of here?
asks the small voice
on the telephone
¿Cuándo?I am counting the days
How old are you now?
holds up six fingers
Where is my beating heart?
¿Dónde?
Silence repliesHer little bed
Josephine Corcoran, A poem for National Poetry Day
a small country of songs
now a lonely place
Where are you, Papá?
¿Dónde?
Is my voice small?
[…]
Someone remembers the voices of the dead. / Remember the voices of the dead.
It is unacceptable to take a life.
Someone remembers the laughter of the dead. / Remember the laughter of the dead.
It is unacceptable to take a life.
The smiles of the dead. The joy of the dead. / The smiles of the dead. The joy of the dead.
It is unacceptable to take a life.
The dead are dead are dead are dead. / The dead are dead are dead are dead
It is unacceptable to take a life.
War spreads/ Wars spread.
It is unacceptable to take a life.
Bob Mee, A LITURGY FOR GOVERNMENTS EVERYWHERE
Academic and artistic life have been a whirlwind, as is usual this time of year, but luckily there’s been lots of art in the mix. On Tuesday Rena Priest gave an inspiring reading on campus. Wednesday my spouse and his collaborator talked about their new book, Revising Reality. On Thursday a colleague, Emma Steinkraus, delivered a fascinating artist’s talk about a new campus exhibit of women botanical artists, “Impossible Gardens,” and we drove to Charlottesville on Friday to see another exhibit by a friend, painter Carolyn Capps: “The Ocean: Vastly Empty, Infinitely Full.” A LOT, but I wouldn’t have missed any of it.
This weekend was mostly grading, but I also went to a panel put together by a new local arts organization, MidMountain, about murder ballads and the southern gothic–there’s a linked concert on 10/12 that I’ll miss. I need to tip life balance back a few degrees toward resting-thinking-writing time, but teaching and art eruptions aside, when you’re closing in on a book launch, the to-do list is long. I did see a gorgeous cover design for Mycocosmic this week and spend many hours on the second round of interior proofs, so the big reveal and digital ARCs are coming soon. […]
The news is hard right now–war, election fear, catastrophic flooding not far from here–but as Rena said, poetry can be a “secret medicine,” reminding us that we’re all connected. I’m grateful that even in my small town, art is so abundant.
Lesley Wheeler, Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full
Foghorn
I blast my splintered words
into storm-tributaries
and
maybe
a seahorse on a dander
senses a faint splash.Karen Macfarlane
My own poem from the Wee Gatherin workshop in August. Inspired by the tiny foghorn at the foot of the lighthouse. You can read more about my poetry here.
Karen Macfarlane, Foghorn
This week I took the Eurostar to London for just 24 hours, to attend a few meetings and — of all things — a school reunion. Every time I go to England these days I find myself just a little farther removed from the country, just that tiniest bit more “French” (even though however fluent I become, I will never sound like a native speaker). […]
While in London I passed through Westminster Hall (part of the Houses of Parliament), where a plaque in the floor commemorates the trial of Thomas More, who was condemned to death in this room in 1535. Westminster Hall is also where Queen Elizabeth II lay in state following her death in September 2022.
That’s not to say that there isn’t English poetry of comparable sophistication at this period, but just that the great majority of it was still in Latin — Thomas More’s very popular Latin epigrams, for instance, were published as an appendix to Erasmus’s 1518 Basel edition of More’s Utopia.
Victoria Moul, Crossing the Channel in 1526 and today
I tried my best to get to grips with Kay Ryan’s Odd Blocks – Selected and New Poems (Carcanet, 2011), and liked her quirky, playful poetry to start with; but as the book wore on, it felt like I was reading a weird mixture of Lorine Niedecker, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the Martian Poets, Dr Seuss and the utterances of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
Ryan was one of the poets new to me in the truly excellent anthology, Women’s Work, subtitled ‘Modern Women Poets Writing in English’, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, published by Seren in 2016 and available here. It’s a chunky book, divided up by (loose) themes, and is as readable and enjoyable as any anthology I’ve ever read. Come to think of it, I’ve rarely read an anthology all the way through like I did with this one. Other poets featured whom I was aware of but had never really read before include Dorianne Lux, Ruth Fainlight, Sarah Hannah and Olive Senior. I’ve since bought collections by some of them to add to my TBR pile. It reminded me that the purpose of an anthology should never be an attempt to be fully representative of a cohort or period, because that would be impossible; but rather to shine spotlights, however brief, on poets and poems as little known as some of the others are well-known. It’s that rubbing of shoulders which provides the delights for seasoned readers. That’s not to say, though, that Women’s Work wouldn’t make an excellent introduction for readers who haven’t read much contemporary poetry because it most certainly would.
Matthew Paul, September reading
Verso de Medianoche is a pseudonym of a writer, now settled in Spain, who chose to publish these poems under a pen name because “some stories are better told at midnight”. There’s a content warning in the book for “dark and sensitive themes, including intense emotional distress and heartbreak”. The title is a mash-up. “Más” is Spanish for “more”, “cara” is Spanish for face or look (depending on context) but the second “a” has been struck out and the word becomes the English “caring” (“caring” in Spanish is “cariñosa/cariñoso”.) Readers are being asked to look beyond the surface, look beyond the brave face someone may put on their trauma or distress.
There are images drawn onto photographs interspersed with the poems (the images on their own pages so don’t interfere with reading the poems). A striking one shows a lounge in grey monochrome with a drawing of an elaborate birdcage in green with a woman’s figure sitting on the interior base, hunched with one arm hugged her knees pulled to her chest with the other holding her head. Long brown hair spills over her shoulders with red marks on her cheeks, possibly from crying, possibly from being slapped. She has a yellow top, yellow socks and blue jeans splattered with yellow. The implication is that life is grey, the cage is organic from herself and the yellow perhaps an attempt to brighten herself or bring some sunshine into her life. The poem that follows it, “The Essence of Unforgotten” is apt.
Emma Lee, “[Más] Caraing” Verso de Medianoche – book review
Today I turn my attention to the work of the well-known, prolific poet, Margaret Royall. 2024 has seen her author not one but two publications: Owl Fetish, (Dreich), and her full collection Toccata and Fugue with Harp, (Hedgehog Press). I intend to focus this review on the latter: almost a hundred pages of intensely personal poems that reflect on an engaging and varied life.
The collection is split into three parts: the poems in each part have a distinctive character and focus. In part one, Toccata, which makes up almost half of the collection , we find narrative and character driven poems that focus on Royall’s early life. We meet her parents and her extended family, featuring such unforgettable characters as Nanny Buttle, Grandma Browning, her great aunts in Louth, and Aunt Jessie. We also experience with her what it was like to be alive in a very different time to that now, when houses were heated with coal, when man first stepped on the moon and when London was swinging in the sixties. In these poems Royall demonstrates the ability to create a strong sense of place, time and person through well-selected sensory detail and imagery. Take for example, her characterisation of Nanny Buttle in her poem Nanny Buttle Sings a Hymn to the Tune Cwm Rhondda. She writes: ‘That all-pervading scent of Pears soap/ caught in her aura, the pungent kick of/ Amami setting lotion from Friday night’s/ shampoo and set; loose overalls baggy across/ shrivelled breasts that mourned the pert nipples/ of a lost youth…/ moulded from local clay/ from daisy chains from May Day revelries/ Harvest suppers first communion/ sunsets that gobbled up the sky.’ Royall describes her characters with such economy. Yet there is more than enough here to enable the reader to pick Nanny Buttle out of any crowd.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Toccata and Fugue with Harp’ by Margaret Royall
Movement by Suzanne Maxson
Renee Emerson, Maria Parr, Poor Bishop Hooper, and, my new hero, Suzanne Maxon
The poetry world tends to celebrate the emerging artist, the young promising writers who come into the writing world in a whirlwind. I have been finding, however, what an over-looked treasure older poets may be. Movement is Maxson’s debut collection, and, judging from the back cover, she has to be at least…well it would be rude for me to guess her age, but maybe as old as my grandma. And I’m no spring chicken. Age aside, there’s a depth of wisdom in these poems that you just don’t find in most debut collections. Much of her poetry asks questions concerning privilege, wealth, the brevity of life (she doesn’t have a website, but I found some of her poems HERE). A good example and one of her shorter poems is “The Shoes in My Closet,” where she utilizes rhyme to create almost a chant-like rhythm, culminating into asking “Is it right that I own these many shoes / for every possible weather, work / or celebration, while so many / have no shoes?” So if you want a collection that will make you slow down and consider life for a moment, I highly recommend Movement.
You just need to say this with feeling to feel its power. Phrase after phrase, line after line seems to nail intense feelings in a way that combines extreme concentration and focus with expansiveness. The metaphor of winter and the flatly relentless tread of the opening swallows you into the poet-lover’s present depression but ‘the pleasure of the fleeting year’ cuts through that gloomy stillness like a momentary flash of joy and light, simultaneously here and gone, like an afterimage on the retina. Gloom tightens its grip again in the next two lines, the images of freezing darkness reinforced by repetition of the ‘ee’ syllable. In the following quatrains, when images of summer’s abundance wrestle in vain with the poet’s sense of emptiness, it’s important that they do put up a real fight against it – the swelling syllables of ‘the teeming autumn, big with rich increase’ make one feel how much summer offers, if only the poet had been more receptive.
Edmund Prestwich, Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 and Nashe
I love the shapes of the two sentences that form this poem. I love that it’s stretched over two distinct sentences across ten 3 line, two feet per line (mostly) stanzas. The first sentence is all spiky shapes and angles akin to the “isosceles triangle” of the first stanza. It’s the “angles” that cause the issue, the possibilities pointing in many directions.
The second sentence is softer in some way, more rounded like the “protractor” mentioned at the end. The first stanza is pointing, the second is “flapping” with “bunting” – already more decorative than the practical elements of the first sentence (“backgammon boards, / boat sails, / the hands of a clock”. The degrees in the protractor speak of multiple possible jumping off points, more confusion, where as the triangle is pointing in three directions…(I’m making this up now).
Mat Riches, The Elbow of Barnsley
1 – How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Nearly every poem in Where Babies Come From, like Mr. Peanutbutter’s memoir in Bojack Horseman, “just fell out of me”: beginnings, parallel worlds, childhood (which is a parallel world), alternate realities, anxieties, and strange explanations for how we live in a time that’s simultaneously magical and mechanical. I’m still looking for explanations for how we live, but now rather than finding an unexpected feather to treasure, I get into the dirt and comb through it, like someone who has stopped dreaming of flying and instead falls asleep to burrowing.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The first words we understand must be a poem. It’s always been there. But then there were so many stories: Aesop Fables, Blueberries for Sal, and the tales of Chelm read to me by my parents, and Taran the Wander, read to me by my brother.
3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Some poets set themselves to write a crown of sonnets about how 14th century Slavic puppeteer Vladimir Richevski losing his leaf-stuffed kupalo in a fire foreshadowed the triumph of morality over superstition in itinerant minstrel shows, and each word and each day is a step towards completion. Every poem is a leaf caught falling from a tree: I tend not to be able to grab more than one at once, but I do like making a pile.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ori Fienberg
According to the critic Cyril Connolly, in the early years of the Second World War, newspaper columnists often asked, “Where are the war poets?” The idea of war poetry as a kind of public service had become established after the First World War, when Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other combatants sang of the new horror of trench warfare. Connolly’s answer to the question, given in the middle of the Blitz, was: “under your nose”. “War poets”, he wrote,
are not a new kind of being, they are only peace poets who have assimilated the material of war. As the war lasts, the poetry which is written becomes war poetry, just as inevitably as the lungs of Londoners grow black with soot.
The poetry of the Second World War, as Connolly saw, would be more diffused — like soot — among the population than that of the Great War, composed on the home front as well as overseas. It would also prove to be much more dispersed across time. In January 1945, the anthology War Poems from the Sunday Times returned to the question “Where are the war poets?” and suggested:
We still await the masterpieces of war poetry, and it may be a lifetime before some village Hardy finds his powers summoned forth by the events which we know only too well and he knew not at all.
Like browsing a bombed library, anthologising the poetry of the Second World War is a matter of digging out what survived.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Lincolnshire Carried Through London
The zipless portion of the old black suitcase, the most important space in my packing, is reserved for the selection of books that will accompany me. Clothes are the things forgotten, left behind—I don’t remember what I wore in Seattle, Burlington, Demopolis, New Orleans—- I recall what I read, the shape and feel of the words that accompanied me.
I dress in books as if each trip is another wedding, feet feeling their way down an aisle with the sounds of strangers rising from the space around me, the silence of not turning to them and saying: “We are here for different reasons. This means something different to each of us.”
The formula disciplines my tendency towards overlarge desirousness; it tames my book frenzy. After decades of travels, I limit myself to the bridal idiom: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And so I packed for the wedding of New Orleans with the following:
The old was Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
The new was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.
The borrowed was Kenneth Burke’s Counterstatement.
The blue was Osip Mandelstam’s Noises of Time.
Alina Stefanescu, A train, Ada, and recitations in New Orleans.
Now that the contract has been officially signed, I can announce that Megan Volpert and I are co-editing a Stevie Nicks poetry anthology for Madville Publishing. The call for poems will go out on Halloween (of course!) and the anthology will be published in 2026.
Many of you will be familiar with Madville, since they published the Mother Mary Comes to Me anthology that Karen Head and I co-edited back in 2020 and the Dolly Parton anthology Let Me Say This co-edited by Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke.
If you’re a Stevie fan, get busy! We can’t wait to read your work.
Collin Kelley, Stevie Nicks anthology coming in 2026
some in the water
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: October ’24
some in the boat:
falling leaves
I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).
I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do.
Bethany Reid, Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE
When I read Robbi Nester’s book, Narrow Bridge, I found so many poems that speculated on the creation of the world, that made out of everyday modern life a kind of mythology to explain our surroundings. I settled on discussing this poem because right now it is early morning as I write this, and this poem seems an appropriate companion for someone up early in the morning at the beginning of a new day and a new week in a new season. […]
Throughout the poem the speaker is making a mythology about the world, going back to the beginning of time, and showing how she connects with the origins of the world, but also how the world continues to change. There’s darkness and light sparing with each other. They are hot, and angry, and sizzle up close, as looking at the stars or sun would feel like witnessing a sizzle. Far away though, this sizzle become the stars. The clouds, says the speaker, are both solid and liquid and she is their kin.
Everything in this world seems to be in flux, holding the possibility of being gentle, or becoming violent and overwhelming. Everything in the world seems hungry, able to consume or be consumed. This might make the world feel frightening and unpredictable, a difficult place for a person to live in. Yet the speaker begins the poem by saying “Call me an optimist.”
Tresha Faye Haefner, Fried Egg as Philosopher
a poem gestates and names the boat dylan
Jim Young, the estuary at laugharne
it is willed to sail the oceans until it rests
amongst every like-minded smoke-wreathed breath
that drew the rising tide of some dark ire for
his penned finger pouted and pointing out
the damned words that dragged that tide
across the moon sea’s road to stay afloat
clinging to that broken-leaded pencil talk
In Seattle, I had the pleasure of being a featured poet at the Fall Convergence on Poetics, an annual symposium of experimental writing hosted by the University of Washington Bothell. There, I was grouped with the amazing Ronaldo Wilson and Mita Mahato—artists whom I’ve admired for a long time—for presentations and conversation. The theme of this year’s Convergence was Connection, and the greatest pleasure of participating in the event was the connections I made with artists whose work I already knew (Mahato, Wilson, Ching-In Chen) as well as those who were new to me and whose work I’m excited to delve into (Jeanne Hueving, Eleni Stecapoulos, Juan Carlos Reyes). Appearing alongside these writers also felt like a gift because although our work and backgrounds are very diverse, there seemed to be a shared language, a shared rangy approach to genre, a bravery about trial and error. It was a place where I didn’t feel the need to explain or justify the hybridity of Feathers (though I don’t mind talking about this with people who aren’t familiar with hybrid genre literature). The conversation could begin a couple of steps forward from the starting line.
And connections there were. In the conversation portion of my time on stage with Mahato and Williams, I asked Mahato—whose gorgeous new book Arctic Play comes out next week—how her imagination works: whether it usually begins with a linguistic, visual, or material spark. She answered that it’s not one of these, but rather her imagination engages as a result of a weaving between these elements, when she experiences the connections or overlaps between seemingly separate things, or, as she described it, “metaphor as hallucination.” For example, glaciers in Arctic Play are “played by” pieces of light blue plastic that indeed look, hauntingly, like glaciers.
This answer resonates deeply with how I approach my own work, and especially my composition process for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal which relied heavily on juxtaposition as a method of thinking/feeling my way through my enthrallment with bird hats. When asked about how I brought the different modes and forms together in the book, I’ve made analogies to collage, which uses spatial relationships to bring forward unexpected connections, and to musical composition, where a composer might bring in a certain instrument to create a particular effect.
Wilson, too, is so deeply tuned to the links between embodiment and language and the present and past that his “readings” are most often improvisatory performances. He seems to arrive on stage with a small menu of possibilities, or something on his mind/heart, but follows his intuition and body once he’s there, riffing, changing direction when needed. For example, at the Friday night reading at an art gallery, he pulled out his iPhone and played a recording of an “opera” he’d improvised that afternoon while walking through the airport. The song was about a tense interaction he’d had on the airplane with an older white couple who were behaving badly, and who he eventually decided to “read for filth.” While playing the recording from his phone over one mic, he improvised back up vocals on another mic, while also hanging a couple of rubber (“white face”) halloween masks around the stage. At Saturday’s performance, he showed a poetry video while dancing in front of the stage and wheeling around his roller bag suitcase on top of which he’d put one of the masks and around which he’d wrapped a jacket, creating an eerie dance partner.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, What Moves Us
Last night brought immersion in words and the company of good poets at a visit to Port Sunlight for the Wirral Poetry Festival. It was good to listen to some poems I had heard or read before and enjoyed as well as many that were new to me. Five poets at two events, time to talk with like-minded people, news of events I might enjoy, and a jar of honey. I loved hearing Martin Figura and Helen Ivory referred to as ‘the king and queen of poetry’. And I loved being there for their superb readings.
Sue Finch, BE MORE JAGUAR
Most of us don’t think of reading as a communal pastime, so much, but why is that? Yes, you still need to sit down with the book and read the pages, or listen to an audiobook version, and that is usually a solitary act — though I have one friend who has read books aloud with her husband every night for years and years, and loves to read this way. During the pandemic, I knew of transatlantic couples who read to each other daily, via phone or zoom. I was part of several memorable online events where the participants gathered to read a novella or a play aloud, taking turns and passing the text to each other over and over again, like a baton, over a period of hours. In our group, we often read passages aloud. I suspect there is something powerful and even primal in human beings about animating the word, and hearing it out loud.
Beth Adams, Reading Can Be Difficult
I’m uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We’re making them up. They’re for visiting, not for living in.
—
Meditating on that, I realize that I’m engaged in the same thing as my children. I’m holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He’s writing a poem, and he’s drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he’s not that arrogant. He’s a man writing a poem, that’s all. He’s not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he’s unsophisticated, It’s that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.
—
I have Milton’s Sonnet 19 by heart, so it’s not true that he’s never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I’m old enough in reading to know that its not Milton’s deficiency but mine that I’m dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I’ll leave the door ajar. You never know.
Dale Favier, Milton and World-Building
I love to travel, and I am lucky to have a husband who is the detail guy – finds the hotels, researches what to do, books the flights, etc. We plan our trips before we leave, but when we are engaged in the actual place, we try to be open to whatever adventures or sidebars or unexpected pleasures may arise. For example, a road closure in Iceland on the way to a waterfall in the west led us on a detour through one of the most gorgeous landscapes we’d ever seen. We eventually arrived at our destination and fulfilled our plan, but the sidebar was pretty astounding.
I tend to use both planning and intuition when I write. In drafting, I try to let the writing go wherever the language is leading, even if I’m not sure what it means. I still draft long-hand (I’m even typing this post from notes I already took in my journal), and I often don’t read back what I’m writing until I reach a stopping point. I find that this leads to more surprises. (It also leads to a lot of nonsense, no lie, but so be it.) It’s only then that I switch on my planning brain and tend to turn methodical in revision. Cut, add, change the order, tighten the language, hone the sound and diction. Even though this seems like an intellectual process, intuition is important here as well. A feeling about a word. An instinct to go against what seems logical. Both the head and the heart have their place, which is why my first draft of a piece is NEVER the way it ends up. Editing puts the head back in play, and then the heart needs to decide when a piece is “done.”
In making visual pieces, I find I lean more heavily on intuition. I almost never plan a piece of artwork beyond having materials at hand. I start and then go with whatever looks right to me at the time. I’ve found in the past that, when I make something I’m really pleased with, it almost never works when I try to recreate it. Whatever it was that was happening in that moment is gone. Maybe I can get close, but usually not.
Donna Vorreyer, Head Versus Heart
I’ve been working steadily on the vampire poems and a little on some flash fiction experiments. Also a little on plotting out and the first portions of the thrifting and writing book I’ve been saying I’m writing, though it’s much less writing and still more getting my ducks in a row (I guess I have “concepts of a plan” at this point, lol). Like all things, planning only takes me so far and really I should just dive in and see what happens.
I’ve been buried in freelance work otherwise, working this weekend steadily on what will likely be some of the last of the Halloween specific things I will be asked to write as we move further into the month. Thankfully, the few Christmas pieces I was assigned have paused. They were causing a whole lot of temporal whiplash, especially the days I was sitting working on them with the A/C humming behind me. I am also hung up again on some chaps that are a bit more difficult in layout, so have been working out the kinks on those and getting the final versions prepared to start printing. They’re a handful of last season’s books to get out, as well as the beginning of this year’s list. Plus submissions from the summer for the next round that will begin next fall. I’ve fallen behind on some content things I hoped to make for my own stuff, so will hopefully be able to chip away at them–including some reels I want to make for #31daysofHalloween.
I am trying not to let the more shortened days make me feel like I am rushing to get things done, but they always do. Meanwhile there are still little bits that are not work—quiet breakfasts, plays, lots of horror movies to get me through a busy month.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/6/2024
Thank goodness for writing residencies! I’d been in a bit of a funk lately, and what I really needed was a chance to change my focus (I almost wrote foxus, and you’ll see why later) and think about my project in a new way. The residency is at a marine wildlife center on Friday Harbor. There’s no television or radio (or guarantee of electricity all the time,) but it’s right on the harbor and perfect as a place to write. In fact, I wrote two new poems, sent out two submissions, and reconsidered my next manuscript in a way that I hope will make it much better. But it wasn’t really about productivity – it was about not listening to the news, but listening to the ocean – not looking at screens, but looking into fields for foxes – about paying attention to the light instead of listening to my anxieties.
Besides spending time in nature, I ended up talking to people on trails, nature photographer hobbyists like myself, grandmother-aged skinny dippers. Besides leaving me wishing for a better zoom on my camera (almost everyone there had a more expensive, better zoom lens than I did, which allowed them to get better fox pictures! Jealous!) I felt like I was part of a community. Loving nature is something I had in common with these people – all so joyous. And I got to witness the coolest thing ever – fox dancing! A black fox and a red fox both got up on their hind legs, put their paws together, and twirled around for about four minutes. My pic isn’t spectacular, but you have to realize it was so amazing to see.
So in the five days or so I was away, I took a look at my manuscript not poem by poem, but the big picture – how do the sections hang together? what’s the trajectory of the book? what’s the story behind the story? So it was time for some reshuffling, some deletions, some additions, and focusing on the story. And also, something about taking photographs – and waiting for the light – got me thinking about the right timing in books, the right light, so to speak. It takes time to see your own books – the shifts in tone, the difference in cadences – in the right light.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Away at a Writing Retreat on San Juan Island, Chance to Rethink My Manuscript and My State of Mind
失ひしものは戻らず蚯蚓鳴く 宮谷昌代
ushinaishi mono wa modorazu mimizu naku
a thing I lost
will not return
earthworm sings
Masayo Miyatani
from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), December 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay’s Note: “mimizu naku” (earthworm sings) is an autumn kigo. An earthworm doesn’t sing, but the ancient people believed it obtained a singing voice from a blind snake by giving up its eyes.
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (October 6, 2024)
I’ve just returned from the task for announcing the results of the competition to a hybrid audience which included nineteen of those longlisters. There was nothing like seeing the faces to bring home the responsibility of judging. It’s something I’ve felt keenly from the outset, and by time the results were announced, I’d developed a personal relationship with each of the longlisted poems. But that’s not true for every one of the 1956 entries – how can it be? It takes over 65 hours – around two working weeks – to spend just two minutes reading each poem. That’s excluding the time you spend consulting with organisers, and the hours you spend on the shortlist, let alone the awards ceremony, or feedback.
How to choose? Well, first of all – it is fairly obvious when a writer doesn’t go to workshops, or seek feedback, or is entirely unfamiliar with contemporary poetry – self-consciously poetic or archaic language, clunky rhymes, use of abstractions, an absence of imagery, for example. And whilst it’s true that with talent and aptitude, passion and dynamism, someone who has never read or studied contemporary poetry can write good poetry. But it’s going to be flawed. And with 1956 poems competing for 25 places, there’s almost no room for flaws. Poetry is a craft as a well as an art, and you need to learn it to be do it consistently well.
As I worked through the huge pile, I sifted out a pile of poetry which needed a slower, second reading. At this point, I had to say goodbye to lots of poems which showed real skill. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t see that the poem had another life beyond itself – a fluent or vivid description is not enough. Sometimes, it was because of the ending. A frustrating number of really strong poems were forced into a neat endings. Be cautious about logical, tidy endings. Try to leave some looseness: some space for the reader, and for chance and magic. Some poems just needed a little more editing. And some poems are just not born to stand on their own – they need the company of a sequence, or a themed collection, to be their brilliant selves.
Kim Moore, How to Pick a Winner
we find oyster mushrooms blooming
Robin Gow, (de)forest
like ancient ears on the shoulders
of an old tree. i like to point out to you
the smallest mushrooms. orange ones
& even blue ones. what i really want
is to walk until i become one.
until my gills stretch & my veil pulls back.
this is a fantasy of escape. instead,
i apologize to the forest for leaving.
I think I gave up on the idea of being famous a very long time ago. These days I’m grateful for that. Grateful for the previous failures that didn’t catapult me into Susan Sontag’s living room (as was vaguely promised to me so long ago—when I was “promising”). It all fades away, so I am glad I am trying to write in the present, not for posterity. I have little stories. But stories so deep that they will sink into the mud like stones under boots, and become a tiny part of the earth itself.
I’m amused by the arbitrary artefacts of humanity. Ancient Greece thrived for over a thousand years. And we have but 44 plays, written by a handful of men all living in the same few decades. Shakespeare, who is a marketing ploy (among other things). What of Fletcher, Marlowe, Jonson? My students know who Shakespeare is. But not Roswitha, not Aphra Behn. And any and all of it is nothing but artefacts, the stuff that dreams are made on, but not the dreams, not the dreamers. I believe I’ve lost all sense of reverence, and have found an enormous peace in doing so.
Today Egil and I walked with the hiking group. Two hours up past the tree-line, then over along the sheepback and the mires. Another two hours down, trying not to slip on the black lichen. I kept an eye out for lemmings, but didn’t see anything moving except the sheep. No eagles this weekend. No wasps. No insects at all.
There was only us, the sheep, the sedges, the bog cotton, and the spots of red lichen that sometimes look like blood.
I like walking with groups, but prefer to walk just the two of us. I want to go slowly, watching the wind pushing the heather. I want to take it all in.
Coming to the end of the trail, a gentler slope toward the parking lot, I had to step carefully to avoid a dead mountain pipit on the ground. I think I made a small gasp, or sigh of some sort because the woman next to me asked what it was and looked around. She’d nearly stepped on it. This perfect, recently dead bird.
Ren Powell, Writing in the Present
Matt Licata says in his book A Healing Space, the “healing will always surprise us.” He says falling apart is a “sacred process.” And this falling apart is “evidence” where in which “the known crumbles and disintegrates, revealing important and lesser-known dimensions of our experience not available during times of clear reflection and “holding it all together.”” Our old ways and ideas of who we thought we were “just can’t contain us any longer; they’re not subtle, nuanced, or magnificent enough.” Transformation is surprising he says, and I can’t disagree given all that I’ve witnessed these past years.
There’s a lot of rubble out there. From which you are required to make something beautiful. There you go — I worked in the tagline for my blog! I really have loved staring at wounds, yours, mine, the wounds of anyone who shows them to me. (I’ve seen so so many!) I think we’ve been changed, many of us, and haven’t we learned things we never would have otherwise? Good for writers, perhaps. Reminds me of the well-known poem by Rumi titled “The Guest House” […]
Shawna Lemay, Repair Shop – Staring at our Wounds
Sally Abed, a Palestinian who is one of the leaders of Standing Together, says, “We need a new story. Our mission is to build a new majority around peace, equality for all, and ending the occupation.” She acknowledges that, “peace right now is a very, very radical word. But it’s also the only option. I think in very deep crisis, you also have great clarity.”
I keep returning to this short poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “She said: when do we meet? I said: after a year and a war. She said: when does the war end? I said: after we meet.” Genuinely meeting may feel impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Not for Israelis and Palestinians on the ground there; and not for us.
It is easy to get caught up in where we feel different: one’s focusing on a ceasefire, the other’s focusing on the hostages, so we feel like we’re in opposition. We divide into camps based on where we place blame and with whom we feel kinship. I encourage us to go deeper and plumb the Jewish values at the heart of our yearnings. The one who’s grieving for this side and the one who’s grieving for that side actually have a lot in common, if we can let ourselves feel it. Trying to feel-with each one of you has been my profoundest spiritual practice this year.
Rachel Barenblat, Rosh Hashanah 5785: Many Views, One Community
what started as rapture
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The fifth poem is a prayer
may write itself as pain
what started as unbidden grief
could spell a simile for joy
the poem expands in all
directions like the mother void