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: what’s bothering the clouds, a mausoleum of flowers, slim needles of flow, the hitchhiking dead, and much more. Enjoy.
It is both now and never.
Apocalypse is unfolding alongside
Rajani Radhakrishnan, When the poem is the sixth side of a square
epiphany.
The world is falling apart while new
heavens are rising.
The poet is writing even as his silence
is burying the world under it.
The poem is alive even as it is
killed by the words it cannot contain.
In Hoboken, a lone woman boards a bus after a long workday. Her weary steps down the aisle cause an ear-gauged and tribal sleeve-tattooed hipster to step on a sea urchin while beaching in Ibiza.
The side of the bed a child wakes up on in Prague determines Ethiopia’s rainfall and grain production.
By sending a text to his mistress, a Chicago banker causes a fluctuation in the stock market, which makes a doctor yell at a nurse and mix up her patients’ meds.
The way lovers leave notes of good wishes to one another dictates the path of comets. Oddly shaped icy bodies wobbling slightly out of orbit.
Rich Ferguson, Wobble
I am currently sitting in companionable silence with my friend Amy. We are both writing. We stop to converse once in a while, but we are mostly relaxed, working, and quiet together in each other’s company. When I think about the phrase companionable silence, it makes me wonder who first coined this oxymoron. When I searched online, there was no clear origin but loads of examples of the phrase being used, and a multitude of articles (from Medium to Billy Graham’s website) about its benefits.
Donna Vorreyer, Oxymorons and Other Contradictions
I love the way when people read their poetry I receive the words almost as if I am hearing them and reading them at the same time. At a poetry reading this week I was reminded of this and of how wonderful it is when a poet reads their words and certain lines echo in your head long after they have stopped reading. The reading was a celebration of the launch of Kate Jenkinson’s new book, ‘Unbroken’ and I loved hearing the humanness of her poems as well as wonderful sets from the supporting poets. A full set from Jason Conway introduced me to more of his work which I really appreciated and it was good to hear Suzy Aspell for the first time. Cathy Carson’s sharing of ‘Jammie Dodgers’ had me fondly recalling the first time I heard it and I was, as always, beautifully emotionally awoken by her entire set. It’s good to be immersed in the sharing of words. When a poem resonates with me I feel the glow of awe and wonder and it makes me glad to be human.
There was visual awe this week when we got to see the Northern Lights for the first time ever. I am grateful to my friends on social media for posting their sitings which then led to me propelling myself off the settee to find out what I could see. In fact I thumbed a lift from Kath who was returning in the car at just after nine because I thought we would see something spectacular down the country roads. We saw a glorious segment of moon rising in the sky, but no lights. Luckily I decided I needed to check again from our back doorstep before we went to bed and we were fortunate enough to see the lights there. They were quite muted where we live, but definitely lighting the sky with a wonderful shade of red and a green hue. I haven’t written a poem to go with the moment yet, but I reckon there is one brewing.
Sue Finch, A GROUP OF FRUIT STACKED ON A GAME BOARD
I flew back to Los Angeles this morning on a 6:00 am flight and was on the morning call with the staff at 9:00 am. The Los Angeles heat thrashed around me, I fell from one meeting to the next, and in one Zoom, we talked about poetry, and there was a moment that I was like Francesca in an airport, paused from my mad swooping, remembering the slowest and most exquisite of art forms, remembering why I fell in love with writing in the first place, listening to Major Jackson’s voice thrum as he talked about poetry he loves and thinking that at the beginning of my writing life, like all of us sitting around the campfires at the beginning of the world, I was so excited by poetry, I couldn’t breathe.
I left that conversation, fell right out of the day, and read Harryette Mullen, who writes in “The Sky is Falling,”
It’s whether or not
you don’t need man
fingering prevailing wind bothering clouds
Ah, Harryette, none of us need a man for joy. But me? I could settle down and see what I’m really about. I could find my bearings. I could look up and see what’s bothering the clouds. I could take a breath.
Kate Gale, How We Travel is How We Care for Ourselves
I’m feeling a bit of hurricane brain fog. But I expected that. I’ve gone through hurricanes before. I expect that recovery will take a long time and years from now, I’ll find myself feeling weepy about the autumn I thought I would have and the autumn of 2024 that I actually had.
It puts me in mind of a poem I wrote. I’ve posted it before, but it’s worth reposting. Paper Nautilus published my poem “What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes,” but I’m fairly sure that this title is not my original creation. […]
You expected the ache in your lazy
muscles, as you hauled debris
to the curb, day after day.You expected your insurance
agent to treat
you like a lover spurned.You expected to curse
your bad luck,
but then feel grateful
when you met someone suffering
an even more devastating loss.You did not expect
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hurricane Lessons
that months, even years afterwards,
you would find yourself inexplicably
weeping in your car, parked
in a garage that overlooks
an industrial wasteland.
It was rarely quiet, but sometimes in the afternoon, through the open window I couldn’t see, I could hear the pat-pock of tennis balls, the laughter of parakeets and the flurry of ducks from the park below. Surreal, those moments.
Largely, the noise was that of health care and individual pain and self-pity. It went on and on and on.
It was too hot, too cold, too light, too dark.
For days I was eaten by an air mattress. I couldn’t eat myself so…
There was a man who came mostly in the early hours. His name was Ange. In the darkest times, I saw the angel of death. But when he smiled…
Some just talked and talked. Some told them to shut up. Some went quiet and cried. Some shouted their pain and frustration.
No-one left when they were supposed to.
Things happened too quickly or too slowly. Or not at all.
People came and went. I was still there.
Sue Ibrahim, Thoughts while in hospital
The path divides:
Ellen Roberts Young, Poem: word play
sympathy one way,
pathology the other.
Will illness, yours or
another’s, as you walk
the hospital corridor
bring you to empathy?
There’s a chance any
route is a dead end.
When you reach a wall
you’ll wish you’d brought
a ladder, to climb the way
ancient monks pictured
the path to perfection,
but if you’d carried
that weight you’d not
have come this far.
Sunday wears a beaky mask
stuffed with sweet herbs and flowers
meant to hide the smell of sickness
my son has the first apocalypse dream
we drive to the beach at dusk
and talk about ghosts
until I cry but I keep the tears
inside my eyelids
I dream a conga line of men
in my yard dancing their way into the ocean
dropping one by one
I am ripe and my blood is high*
Rebecca Loudon, Word is not responding
in truth I’m happy I love living here and things are going to start getting fixed next Tuesday though I wish they wouldn’t call it demo as in demolition happiness is sometimes fake mania with me so I have to be careful not to be too happy for instance is this happy deep Easter morning happy or is this happy floating on top of mania like a warm winter coat that is still a little too new to be comfortable happy
Glimmers are the opposite of triggers: they are “tiny micro moments of joy—fleeting, everyday moments that elicit a rush of happiness, gratitude, calm, peace, safety, or goodwill”. Like a squirrel storing nuts in the autumn, I am saving up glimmers in my mind, a bulwark against winter and its darkness. I find them in nature; in my teenager, Niamh; in language; in teaching. Yesterday’s glimmer happened at a group I facilitate for writers who are seeking refuge – we meet weekly at St Augustine’s Community Centre, Halifax. Exploring the impact of translation, each writer in the group spoke about the Centre – first in English, and then in their mother tongue. The glimmer was not just in hearing about the love, warmth and acceptance they find at St Augustine’s; it was also in the fascination of feeling the different languages in my body – English in my chest; Setswana and Creole, in my guts; Romanian, in the centre of my shoulders …. In the joy of hearing writers I’ve known for a year speaking from a deeper part of themselves; of feeling a stream of words become a river.
I love running workshops. When I’m teaching, my voice is steady; I’m calm and comfortable. I know what my role is; I know what to say and do. I know exactly where the boundaries lie; what’s going to happen and when; where the exit is. When I’m attend a workshop as a participant, my heart races; I’m hypersensitive to every sound and smell; every movement. The anxiety is painfully acute. But on the stage, I know the script. And when I’m alone and writing, or with trusted friends, I have all the words I want to say, all the time and space to say them. In the rest of the world, I am often at sea.
Kim Moore, Neurodivergence, Poetry and Me
I have no intention to quit social media. I rely on various platforms to gather intel for the bi-weekly newsletter. I also think the tools can be great for bringing writers together, helping you connect with like-minded people, and alerting writers to calls for submissions and other opportunities. For many who work at home and in isolation much of the time, interactions on these platforms can be essential morale boosters.
However, Deep Work has forced me to think more about the cost of spending time on the platforms. For every twenty minutes of joyful interaction, how much time is spent mindlessly absorbing random opinions from a stream of strangers? For every useful call for submissions, how much useless content has your brain consumed?
And, for every thought directed toward interactions on that platform (Should I have tweeted that? Should I re-tweet that? How should I respond to that comment? Should I leave a comment?…), are there that many fewer thoughts directed toward those longer, more difficult but often more rewarding projects we aim to complete?
Still, social media is also a great place, perhaps the best place, to promote one’s work. We know that most lit mags don’t have a huge subscriber base. When you publish a poem, essay or story, being able to share the link with your community on X or Facebook or wherever is one of the most gratifying parts of publication.
Lately I’ve seen some writers announce that they’re giving up submitting to lit mags altogether and will only post work on social media. […]
I understand these sentiments fully. I’ve had similar thoughts myself.
The challenge for any writer who chooses to focus exclusively on social media as a home for their work, then, will be cultivating an audience. This also takes time and may bring its own set of frustrations. The platforms are, as Newport states, designed to be both distracting and addictive. For some people this might not be a problem. For others, this can pose real damage to one’s creative work, not to mention one’s own mental health.
Becky Tuch, Q: Social media: Writer’s friend or foe?
אַ֡ךְ בֶּעָשׂ֣וֹר לַחֹ֩דֶשׁ֩ הַשְּׁבִיעִ֨י הַזֶּ֜ה י֧וֹם הַכִּפֻּרִ֣ים ה֗וּא מִֽקְרָא־קֹ֙דֶשׁ֙ יִהְיֶ֣ה לָכֶ֔ם וְעִנִּיתֶ֖ם אֶת־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶ֑ם
The tenth day of the seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be a sacred occasion for you, and you shall answer your souls. (Lev. 23:27)
Mine asks: why is social media so enthralling?
Rachel Barenblat, Answer your soul
Why do you keep opening new tabs to check in
on everyone we’ve ever known? Are you aware
that refreshing three different newspapers
gives you no control over anything?
Have you noticed how despair is just
below the surface, and do you think it has anything
to do with the questions I just asked
that you clearly don’t want to answer? I’m sorry,
did you think I was being rhetorical?
What’s so difficult about knowing you’re going to die
that you’d rather fritter away your precious days
in a haze of rage and indignation
than live them and love them before you
leave them at an undisclosed location and time?
Everything’s cranking up now it’s the autumn: the publicity machine for various Christmas concerts, book projects, the podcast starting its fifth season, the garden to be tidied up (though the tomatoes keep coming)…
A week or two ago I was in Seaford reading poems mostly from the new collection (still forthcoming!), plus a couple from Foot Wear. I took with me the last five copies of Foot Wear and sold four, which means there’s only one left of the limited edition run. Not sure if it’s a left or a right foot, teehee. Perhaps I should auction it?? […]
In submissions news, I’ve had a bit of a dry summer as regards writing new poems, but I’m very pleased to have one in the new Frogmore Papers and another forthcoming in Black Nore Review on October 17th.
Currently reading: Ellen Cranitch’s new collection Crystal, and Tony Hoagland’s final collection Turn up the Ocean – the latter I picked up in the Poetry Book Shop in Hay on Wye in the summer. Both books are from Bloodaxe.
Robin Houghton, On National Poetry Day: getting autumnal, Medieval women, currently reading
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I work full time. For the past five years I have had the privilege to be a poet in residence each summer for a few weeks but I use that to take things to the finish line. In my case I turn off the work laptop at around half time of the Celtics game with the sound off and start working on my poems. If the game is close I stop the poems and bleed green. If not I can go on very late sometimes or hit a wall and go to bed. […]
If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
NBA Basketball Baby! But that’s a joke, I’m five foot nine. That said one of my best friends’ grandma was the Red Auerbach’s secretary and I majored in Physical Therapy for a few semesters thinking I’d be the trainer for the Celtics. Poetry broke through.
I should say that part of the motivation for all this is a social justice. The poetry can go in one way, action in the other. In my day job I work as a political economist trying to get the institutions of global economic governance to align with the goals of financial stability, human wellbeing, and environmental sustainability.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Gallagher (rob mclennan)
Rob Taylor: In reading Ghosthawk (Nightwood Editions, 2021), I was reminded of your second collection, 2008’s Living Things, which opened with a poem whose form immediately grabs your attention, “The Great Leap Forward.” It’s still the only poem I’ve read modeled after the Fibonacci sequence! As Living Things’ title suggests, in that book you focused your attention on the natural world. Here you are thirteen years later with another bold formal choice: almost all of Ghosthawk is composed of haiku-like tercets, with the majority of the poems being exactly eleven tercets long. And the plants and animals of the Okanagan anchor many of them.
Formally and thematically, then, Ghosthawk feels like both a “leap forward” and a circling back to your enduring themes and concerns. Would you agree with that? How do you place this book in relation to those that came before it?
Matt Rader: I’ve lived most of my life outside of large urban centers. I come from families of European settlers. It’s challenging to write about where you are if you don’t have words for what’s around you. Mostly, what’s been around me have been plants, mountains, water, sky.
In 2014 I moved with my family to the Okanagan Valley, 400 kms from the sea. Semi-arid brush steppe. Grasslands and ponderosa pines. Prickly-pear cactus and sagebrush. I’d never lived that far away from the sea. I didn’t know where I was, not really.
Ghosthawk is a recapitulation of a method for poem-making and home-making that I first practiced most ardently in Living Things. In both books, the imposed structures of form, whether received or invented, helped focus my attention so my awareness might grow.
The naming of the natural world worked the same way: by learning names for plants I attended to them and became aware of the communities in which they lived. It’s important to know your neighbours and whose home you’ve come to live in.
Rob Taylor, The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader
All the world’s a sieve; knowledge its slim needles of flow. How it puddles in the cup of the world, and how it waters the ground. We have come to understand so much about how the world works. And so little. I love poetry for its unknowing, for its willingness to stand in wonder, in wondering. Its willingness to reside in confusion and in awe.
I ran into this brief poem in David Summerhill’s book Mausoleum of Flowers, and it sat with me. Here, now, the sun is duking it out with clouds but the leaves burn with inner embers, and the winds hold some bitterness in them, but I don’t hold it against them. A little bitter with the sweet. Balance. Balance. Little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that.
Marilyn McCabe, that is the bread i get on my knees for
impossible heels that
click click click towards youdressed to the nines
coats held over hairdosI should not be surprised
the bells have made announcementsand here on the cracked pavement
Paul Tobin, THE NEAR HORIZONS OF A SMALL TOWN
our lives intersect
and just like that diverge again
This week I found myself talking about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) with both Poetry MA students and undergraduate Modernism students. It’s a great levelling book to teach, because it defies you to paraphrase it, while hinting at meaning in fascinating ways. For the undergraduates, I also gave a lecture on “The Pleasures of Modernism”, which circled around Stein’s answer, in 1934, to an American journalist who doubted her ability “to speak intelligibly”:
Look here, being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have a habit of talking — putting it into other words. But I mean by understanding enjoyment… If you enjoy it you understand it… If you did not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it?
In my lecture, I try to square the circle of Stein’s argument by putting some of her writing “into other words”, while at the same time holding onto the idea that “if you enjoy it you understand it”. Every time I give this lecture I rewrite it, which partly reflects the way that Tender Buttons seems to rewrite itself before your very eyes (I once dreamed that I owned a pop-up version). A concluding discussion of the nature of custard, however, has been one of its constant features.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Mellow Real Mellow
Admittedly I have been among the scoffers when poetry is described with the overused term “luminescent”, but this collection has a quality of light like Mary Pratt, rooted in the every day mundane miracle of being alive. It is undeniably gorgeous, fiercely present.
A yellow tomato comes apart at the seam
my knife makes. This skin: how can it hold
so well so much? I salt the weeping flesh
that reflects this morning light.p.37 “The Gathered Made Ready.”
Despite this poem being an allegory for hope of heavenly healing of the broken, it is lovely, dwelling in the exquisite now. There can be a different world view and yet the poetry crosses the chasm.
Pearl Pirie, Review: The Long Invisible
The original decorations – the marble walls, the bronze and stone statues – are all long gone, so what’s left is a large, bare brick cylinder (you can see the sides, beneath the crenallations, from the river). In order to use the building for military purposes, the popes constructed a huge stone ramp right through the centre of the cylinder. As you climb this ramp, you are climbing through the space above the Treasury Room, deep in the heart of the building. This is where Hadrian’s urn was originally placed and where the urns of many subsequent emperors joined him. There are funeral niches for relatives in the walls, all empty now too. Like the decorations, Hadrian and the emperors are no longer there. The Visigoths probably scattered their ashes in 410, when Alaric sacked the city.
Instead, almost exactly halfway up the ramp (if I remember right) there is an information board, which includes a copy of a famous poem attributed to Hadrian, written as he was dying of a long and unpleasant illness. We know the poem because it was quoted in the Historia Augusta. Hadrian was particularly interested in the arts (the Historia says he used to pursue arguments with “philosophers and professors” through poetry) and I can’t see any reason not to think it was his. […]
So much of the appeal of the poem is in the pity Hadrian displays for his soul after death, right from that first line (animula is anima, soul or life force, in the diminuitive). W. S. Merwin’s translation, which is my favourite, makes a great deal of the pity. Merwin also plays with the lines:
Little soul little stray little drifter now where will you stay all pale and all alone after the way you used to make fun of thingsMerwin calls this translation ‘as literal as it could possibly be’, which strictly isn’t true – the second line of the original has gone missing! – but I think it captures the spirit of the original better than anything else I’ve read. It’s spare and austere, gentle and sad. Merwin also avoids the question mark.
Still, I also didn’t want to discard the possibility that Hadrian is describing something else. The poem lives in that ambiguity.
Jem Wikeley, Sweet soul travelling: translating Hadrian’s “death poem”
The poem has historical overtones, talking about the way we can find women’s stories in woven blankets and tapestries and pottery, which are things people made and used in earlier times. However the speaker also makes this poem personal by connecting it to her grandmother and granddaughter.
At firs the speaker says to look in the “box, where my grandmother kept her life’s work.” I think this has a double meaning. The box might imply the coffin, and the life’s work might mean her dead body. However, she says in the next line that after her grandmother died, her manuscripts vanished. It’s not clear how that happened, but we can tell that the grandmother was a creative woman who had written things down and those writings disappeared along with the grandmother when she died.
Later she calls her grandmother a canary in her throat. Traditionally canaries are used in coal mines to signal to the coal miners when the air is too poisonous to breathe. When the canary dies the coal miners know they are in danger. This parallels the way that women often sacrifice their voices to help the men in their lives do their work.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Missing History: What This Poem by Nancy Miller Gomez Means to Me.
Very honored that Flare, Corona won third prize in the SFPA’s 2024 Elgin Award for full-length collections. Congrats to all the winners! My previous book, Field Guide to the End of the World, won first prize, so I have to say they’ve been very supportive of my work.
This little piece of good news was so encouraging. Every little review, award, mention, and sale for a poetry book matters. So thank you to the SFPA voters. And thank you to everyone who has bought a copy of Flare, Corona, read it, reviewed it anywhere, said something nice about it to a stranger, etc.
When the editor of BOA Editions called me and told me they wanted to publish Flare, Corona, I was so happy. BOA is a dream press for me. So turning in my next book manuscript is a little fraught. You want the book to be perfect, to live up to expectations, to be funny and moving and exciting. I have been working on the manuscript for years, but I never felt it was close enough to be “done” before this.
The phenomenon that accompanies this is like…oh no! I should have done x, y and z to it too! But there is such a thing as over-editing a book before you get some feedback from your editor. (Yes, I have had poet friends read it over, which is an important step too.) And just like the hot air balloon over a field of sunflowers, you feel a little lighter once you turn in a book. Like, you can start a new project. Do I know exactly what the new project is yet? No. But I’ll keep writing poems, and eventually, a picture or story will emerge, and it will become the next book. Which is to say, this is all an exercise in hope. Hope that BOA likes my next book; hope that I will continue to write new poems; hope that there is an audience out there for my work. Not just hope, but maybe an exercise in faith.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spooky Season Zoom Class with Kelli Russell Agodon, Sunflower Festivals and Local Pumpkin Farms, An Elgin Award for Flare, Corona, and Turning in a New Book
My nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake has been out a few weeks now and I have had the absolute pleasure of getting in front of audiences at festivals, bookshops and bookclubs. There is something very special about having that live conversation with audience members.
Here are the author questions I most get asked at events. They tend to fall into two categories: questions about the themes in the book and questions about the writing of the book. […]
What advice would you give a young working class writer who wants to be successful?
Nobody will open the doors for you, you have to be ready to kick and kick. You will not be coming to the arts world with people who can slide you into roles, into positions, people who will be able to give you a foot up. You will not be coming to the arts world with the sort of nest egg that allows you to work for a year as an unpaid intern. You will not be coming to the arts world with the foreknowledge of how any of it works. Be prepared to be rejected. Do it anyway. Get noticed – competitions, magazine acceptances, blogs etc. If you are a poet, get into anything poetry related on offer – anything your school organises, anything your library organises, anything your community organises. There seem to be two different levels of poetry in the UK. The fantastic grass roots poetry – magazines, events, open mics etc and the academically led poetry world. The two cross over occasionally. There are poets that seem to inhabit both worlds with utter joy and an ability to just see poetry as poetry, wherever its roots are (Kim Moore is such a good example of this) but there is a bit of snobbery in the poetry world too. As a fiction or non fiction writer, the same rules apply. Remember, always, that the work comes first. Believe in your voice as valid.
Wendy Pratt, The Questions I’ve Most Been Asked at Author Events – and their answers
Every year, Scotstober celebrates the Scots language on social media by posting a Scots Wird o thi Day, a new Scots word every day that posters can use creatively, writing their own poems or sentences, finding famous or humorous uses of the word, just sharing the love of Scots. […]
I don’t speak Scots naturally. I lived in Scotland for about 17 years and I studied Scottish Literature. My ability to use Scots is like most of my languages, I can read better than I speak. But sometimes I can hear Scots in my head and that’s the voice that I want for a poem.
I’m way behind on my posting of the words, but here’s my start. I tend to write snippets of poems and then try to stitch a poem together at the end of the month.
#Scotstober Day 1 – tyne – to lose, to suffer the loss.
ah hae tint thi mune
Gerry Stewart, Scotstober 2024
deep in thi tangles
av thi epple trees
A message from Amnesty International informs me that today [10 October] is World Homelessness Day, and that the UK has the highest rate of homelessness in the sixteen highest-income countries.
I have a recurring dream of being without shelter in a hostile environment.
I wrote this poem eight years ago.Go home
Ama Bolton [no title]
What if there is no welcome in the hills of home
what if home is a mother whose cupboard is bare
what if home is a father all fists and shouting
what if home is a ruin you cannot return to
what if home is a coat and no place to hang it
what if home is burning rafters and broken glass
what if home is the last place on earth you can feel at home
what if home is a lost passport a door shut in your face
what if home is a gun in your back a knife at your throat
what if home is a leaking boat low in the water
what if home is the square foot of concrete under your feet
what if home is this street this sleeping-bag
what if home is a foreign word in the mouth of a stranger?
Gather stones.
Bob Mee, A MAN WHO WOULD BUILD A ROAD
Think of the next stone, and the next.
Let your hands, let water,
Let the heat of the earth mould them.
Let the sun bake them.
Fire, too, if it helps.
Lay them over fire,
Let ashes blown upwards
Make patterns upon them.
Find the pattern of the earth,
The pattern of air, of stone.
Lay stones upon the earth.
Let air dry stones, time
Bring each of them to one whole.
Hold them, mould them
If they will let you.
Stones will show you
All you need to know.
Last week I had the privilege of hearing Helen [Ivory] and Martin [Figura] read from their new, very different books, at Wirral Poetry Festival. They each did two fifteen minute sets, which only whetted my appetite for more. I acquired both books and want to offer a flavour to those who have not yet purchased copies.
Constructing a Witch has been coming together for some time. The theme can be traced back to Ivory’s earlier collections, but in this book all the research and previous work in this area comes to fruition. The collection was a PBS recommendation and also includes colour photos of Ivory’s fascinating art work. Ivory is a skilled manipulator of language to create both precision and music in her poems. She looks at all the different ways women have been called witches, othered by the patriarchy, silenced, murdered, persecuted. She traces a line from the past and the cruel treatment of supposed witches, but links all to the present day, where women remain unsafe. There are poems about particular women executed as witches, informed by visits to places notorious for witch trials. Historical themes such as how brewing was taken away from women, and how women’s hair is fetishised, resulting in shaven heads as punishment, and many more, such as the witch mark and the humiliation of the search for it. There are also spells of reclamation, such as ‘Spell to Take Back the Night’, and empowering poems about the menopause. Despite some of the dark themes, the collection is spiced with some pointed humour at times. Overall the poems come together to celebrate women in all our power and strength. It is an important book.
No less important but highly contrasting, Martin Figura’s collection dwells on what it means to be a man in today’s world. The moving title poem has Figura’s classic surreal quality. I read this poem to be about all the men who were laid off when the mines were closed, or factories shut down, and who could not get other jobs, and therefore lost all sense of purpose. They stood about in the deserted industrial towns and gradually turned into monuments. The poem is a lament for men like this, men of my father’s generation, who had worked hard all their lives only to be let down by politicians, and the shift away from industry. There are poems about former Prime Ministers and Presidents, seen through Figura’s pointed and satiric gaze.
Angela Topping, Helen Ivory Constructing a Witch (Bloodaxe 2024) and Martin Figura The Remaining Men (Cinnamon 2024)
“Emotion Industry” has a contemporary feel and a dry sense of humour, capturing that situation of trying to pretend everything’s fine despite trying to deal with a chronic condition. But under the humour, serious points are being made about doctors’ dismissals of women’s pain trying to keep a job because without a diagnosis you can’t access disability protections. Tracy Dimond tells it as it is without self-pity but with compassion.
Emma Lee, “Emotion Industry” Tracy Dimond (Barrelhouse Books) – book review
Mathematician Ursula Whitcher is an Associate Editor for the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematical Reviews and a poet — someone whom I first met at a conference, “Creative Writing in Mathematics,” at the Banff International Research Station in 2016. conferences. She is a versatile writer — with a long list of publications available here at her website.
Here is Whitcher’s mathematically-structured poem, “Tuesday,” first published in 2019 in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, at this link.
Tuesday by Ursula Whitcher
Sometimes it is not possible to mend
what’s broken, either if you meant
to prove something impossible, or else
to save someone. Your best friend has
not eaten for six days. Your brother loses things.
Your brother lies.
It’s Tuesday, so the week’s no longer new, and yet
nowhere near done.
All you can do is move
and keep on moving, trust
time changes shattered things
and lies once known are maps.Author’s Note. This poem’s form is taken from the structure of the field with seven elements: the meter, in iambs, follows a pattern based on 5, 4, 6, 2, 3, the nontrivial values taken by powers of 5 (mod 7) as it generates the group of units of the field.
JoAnne Growney, A Poem Structured by a Finite Field
Whenever I see a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, I always think of my friend Michael McCarthy, who won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for a book he mainly wrote on his sabbatical in Edmonton, titled Birds’ Nests and Other Poems. He talks about how we met, in his book, Like a Tree Cut Back, published by The Poetry Business.
The phrase “October-coloured weather” is one that evokes so much, so easily. I’m reminded of Michael so often lately — a phrase, a line of poetry, an accent, a bright eye. Most of our friendship until he died was by correspondence, though we’d talked of meeting up again. Then life got away. But I’d always expected it would happen.
Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – October-Coloured
With its dense array of overt literary and historical references, [Khaled] Hakim’s poem is obviously in the modernist (or, as a classicist might put it, the Callimachean) tradition. Its form, too, drawing on spoken word poetry, feels like a late (and rather accessible) kind of high modernism: this is a book-length poem written in a type of free verse which is delicious to say and which — like French verse libre and the verse style of a lot of Eliot — draws on many of the traditional sonic resources of English poetry. Just in this passage we encounter Augustine, the haeccitas of Duns Scotus (or perhaps of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who also used the term), and the arresting juxtaposition of the rape of the Sabine women — to provide wives for Rome — and the practice of sati (or suttee, in which an Indian widow sacrificed herself on her husband’s funeral pyre). Amidst all this we hear also an echo (“for I cannot marry you”) of a traditional song with a very insistent rhythm, ‘Soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me?’.
Unlike a lot of modernist poetry, To the Hitchhiking Dead is also very funny, but it’s religious, too, in the full sense of the word: I mean that its a poem about the whole of life experienced from a religious perspective. The poem draws on Sufi and Arabic literature as well as the Western tradition, and also upon Sufi devotional practice: there’s a great deal in it that I don’t fully understand or can only appreciate very approximately, by analogy. It’s not a devotional poem as such but it emerges from and conveys the sort of whole-hearted and whole-lifed immersion in a religious perspective which is now less common in contemporary Anglophone poetry, although historically, of course, characteristic of most literature. For all his stylistic idiosyncrasy and inventiveness, in this sense Hakim stands alongside writers I’ve written about here before as diverse as Clément Marot, George Herbert, C. H. Sisson, Horace and even the children’s author Antonia Forest.
Victoria Moul, Lost in Brent Cross: on variety in reading
I’ve always been fascinated by shadows: shadows of trees, of people, of birds; shadows of imaginary things. Shadow selves, alter egos, doppelgängers. Daemons, familiars. So many of them with wings. I believe I’ve been mapping a shadow world all my life, one poem at a time. Perhaps someday I will gather them into one collection–a book of shadows. A book of things I sometimes see from the corner of my eye, though more often than not I merely sense hovering nearby like questions demanding to be heard. So here’s one of them, a question with a heartbeat, determined to enter my life and make it its own.
Golem
I look up from the page and notice my shadow
watching me. Lately, she has been
sulking in corners, morose as a teenager
who finally realized just how
embarrassing I have been all her life.
She cannot wait to leave home.Soon, I tell her and light a thousand candles.
Romana Iorga, Golem
Soon, as I fill my evenings with words.
There’s a sizeable queue of them at my door,
all decked in their ratty plumage,
hungry for flight. […]
I have a couple new publications to share! First, Mothman Was Here: Tales of the Uncanny is a fantastic cryptid-themed anthology edited by William Woolfitt and published by Tenpenny Books. I would love this anthology even if my poem weren’t included, but I’m extra delighted that a reprint of my poem “Baba Yaga’s Answer” is in such excellent company.
Last week, my poem “When My Spouse Was Hot” was published in the first issue of Little Free Lit Mag, and I’m so happy to be part of this new journal’s launch! The idea is that you can read (and listen to) the issues online and also print out copies to leave in little free libraries near you. So clever! I’m especially honored that they wanted to share this poem, which blends some playfulness with some flashbacks to cancer/chemo.
Katie Manning, Mothman & Little Free Lit Mag
what kind of soup are you?
Robin Gow, 10/12
i am the folding chair tongue & the headlight prophet.
online i order something wonderful
that i do not need at all. it will be here
between blinks. catastrophic light. the dead cell phone
& her tower where all our questions live.
i brought lovers over. we kissed so long
that we forgot the light. burnt caramel glow.
a face in the window. the unfinished god
watching to see how we will survive.
I’ve been posting some poems from my imaginative autobiography written for Dorothea Lynde Dix, a mental health reformer in the 19th century. Then, as I am now with the wasp project, I was fixated on my own flaws and faults—as she often was. She was obsessed with her “usefulness”. I don’t know whether I was obsessed with my own before that, or became so during the time I was researching and writing the autobiography. Sharp-tongued Dorothea, who chided the young women with the wasp-waisted fashion, and who needed more than anything to be useful in the world. But, try as I might have, not to write her life as a tragedy, she lived to see all of her work disintegrate with new intellectual trends.
With Freud.
She died in one of her own hospitals, as the practice of moral therapy she’d worked so hard for, fell apart around her like a house of Usher. She meant well.
This is why I need to find the wasps worthy—regardless of their usefulness. Because things fall apart.
Ren Powell, The Jenga of Nature
Bread multiplying inside a locked
ciborium, a tree bearing a scar
in the shape of the Virgin—We want so badly to witness
miracles amid the distress of daily life.
More than these, for rooms to risefrom the rubble, and shelves of beautiful
books to reassemble from out of
libraries condemned to ash. If onlychildren could wake again in their beds
with no gash flowering down their sides;
if only lovers could lean over a bridgeto watch water softly stipple with fish,
Luisa A. Igloria, Miracles
the moon a lantern and not a warning flare.
Today [October 7] is a day of reflection for me. I am mourning every single life that has been lost or shattered because of the senseless, cruel violence of the past year, and I am reflecting on our part in it. I am thinking about the great frustration and helplessness that so many of us feel who have protested government policies, not just now, but going back thirty years and more. These policies have contributed to a war that now seems to be spiraling out of control, harming any chance for a lasting peace, making the entire world less safe, and harming the reputations and integrity of all the countries that are involved. What a complete tragedy. Although I have strong opinions, as well as fear for our own family members in Beirut, today is a day to reflect on man’s inhumanity to man, not to point fingers. Why are we the way we are? How do these same tendencies affect life here in Quebec – because they do? What can I, as an individual, do better? How can I amplify my power as an individual to encourage the institutions to which I belong to stand up and speak out for justice and peace, when so many are being silenced? And finally, in such a world, with so much suffering, fear and darkness, how can I be a person who gives hope? […]
Today, as I look out my studio window here in Montreal, the trees are beginning to turn to their fall colors, and the dark clouds to which we woke are giving way to sunshine and blue sky. A light wind ruffles the leaves of the plants on our balcony. I can hear faint sounds of construction in the distance, because here, homes are being built, not destroyed. For today, for right now, this moment, I am secure and aware of how fortunate I am. I can use this moment to become even more aware, to tune into all of my senses and consciously take in their input. I need to do this several times every day: otherwise I might miss the gifts that are still part of the reality and mystery of being alive.
Beth Adams, Mourning, remembering, and hoping
椋鳥の群混沌へかへりゆく 露草うづら
mukudori no mure konton e kaeriyuku
a flock of starlings
returning
to the chaos
Uzura Tsuyukusa
from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), December 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (October 9, 2024)