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: inhabiting dissonance, time’s ragged lace, the museum of a life, the sexiness of grammar, and much more. Enjoy.
I’m inhabiting dissonance, here in scary October. How can I plan roadtrips, hope for the little poetry world to pay my little book a little attention? I just booked tickets to New Orleans, where Chris has a conference this January and I’ll go along for the fun of it–then, before I hit “confirm,” really looked at the date. January 5th. I remember scrolling through Twitter nearly four years ago, before the news sites picked up the story, then texting my friends that a violent mob was storming the Capitol, and they answered with the “ha ha” reaction button. What will happen in January 2025?
Even when I’m not hopeful, though, it feels important to behave hopefully: to vote. To write spells for connection and peace and lucky turns of the wheel. To stay open to students and strangers, knowing that being your best self sometimes brings out the best in others. Yesterday, after grading, my spouse and I took a walk in the woods, tried a new brewery, and went out for Mexican food. This has been our ordinary Saturday thing since the kids moved out. It was lovely, even though I doomscrolled in the passenger seat all the way home.
Lesley Wheeler, Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)
Last Wednesday, October 16, 2024 wasn’t just a red letter day, it was a fully-colored-and illustrated-initial-with-flowers-and-animals-and-shining-gold-leaf day! I’m so incredibly lucky and honored to share “Dead Reckoning” was featured on Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets!
My most heartfelt gratitude to Sarah Gambito for inviting me to send work. It’s a grief poem, which feels right with everything happening now, the horrors in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, the escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula, the hurricanes that devastated communities here in the US. So much loss in the world. So much suffering. But also joy, and beauty, and light.
Hyejung Kook [no title]
What right does a poem have to fly? Isn’t
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Look! The ninth poem is airborne!
it the privilege of birds, of angels, of comets
that race through our visible sky? The poet
wants to hold the poem like a mirror. A
mirror that swallows the truth: every
depravity, every debasement, every sin.
The poem is overwhelmed. Its lines bleed.
It’s been less than a week since my mother left this earth at the age of 87. It’s new, this kind of grief, at times sharp and fresh, then dull and distant. It’s too early to think of seeking any sort of solace. Solace from what, I ask myself. How will I ever recover? Is recovery even possible? […]
I saw my mother a few bours before she died. She was still my mother then, even though I could plainly see that she was dying. Her breath came deep and slow. I touched her arm, which was warm, a little too warm, actually. I placed my hand on her forehead the way she’d done to me countless times when I was a child, checking for a fever. Her skin stretched across her skull in lines.
I saw my mother’s body a few hours after she died. Her wrinkles had vanished. Her olive skin was an unearthly pale green. Again, I placed my palm on her forehead. It was still warm. That broke me, that meager warmth, that diminishing sign of life. I held her hands. I waited for tears, which came briefly and then stopped. I felt an unreasonable anger at the sun, which shone brightly through the blinds hanging in front of the window over her bed. Tactless star, I thought. I wanted clouds, rain, fog, anything but this absurd light.
Erica Goss, Since my mother died
History as collective dream; memory as a story with you in a major role.
As a child, you couldn’t bear separation from mother. What did mother feel?
You were warned about leaving, felt guilt at leaving others behind.*
Such pain when the milk dries up, when mother changes out of nursing clothes.
The world is always warning about leaving. Who has not been left behind?
Let’s say only the whole have never been left, have never been cloven.*
But who has never been left behind, or even threatened with leaving?
Luisa A. Igloria, On Timelessness
Who can say they’ve always been whole, never been broken?
The seasons are always singing songs about return.
What would be crux. Lap maker, taker. Open
to flights of love, supple translucence,
tasty weightless all supple flesh. Open-leggedto deep creation, crowning heads of my babies.
Jill Pearlman, Dear Hip
Wandering poet, shooting from the hip.
I wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems about my children the past few years, trying to catch my breath. It isn’t the anniversary yet, but it’s close enough for me to feel it, so I’ll share one from the collection I’ve written about Kit, this poem about when I was still able to imagine that everything could be ok:
[…]
I would grip the steering wheel
Renee Emerson, (a departure from book reviews) thoughts on five years since she died
and drive as fast as I dared,
my child unaware of the death
that pursued her, and I pretending
it wasn’t with us even there.
W: Do you want to hear my evil laugh? Me: After you play the Bach. W and I discuss a lot of things during his violin lesson. We’ve talked about poetry, painting, dance, sculpture, (his favorite story is me getting thrown out of the museum for sticking my fingers in Balzac’s eyeholes) architecture, mathematics, history, science, running, swimming, and the ever looming OUTSIDE (he’s terrified of the OUTSIDE.) We talk about insects, books, composers, color, clouds, boats, snails and the fact that making a lanyard is never going to really be a fun thing to do. Today, W had this note for me: WRTING MAKES ME NRVS I had to agree.
Rebecca Loudon, Functioning as an adult
I am intrigued by this second collection (and the first I’ve seen) by Carlisle, Pennsylvania poet Jordan Windholz, The Sisters (Black Ocean, 2024), following on the heels of his full-length debut, Other Psalms (Denton TX: University of North Texas, 2015). The Sisters is an assemblage of short prose poems interspersed with illustrations, and includes this brief caveat in the author’s “Notes & Acknowledgments”: “Written first as bedtime stories for my daughters, these poems were largely private affairs until they weren’t. I owe almost everything to Erin Ryan for her attentive reading and care, and for her urging me to put them out in the world.” Across fifty-four prose poems, Windholz offers such fanciful titles such as “The Sisters in the Emperor’s Gardens,” “The Sisters as Points of Infinite Regression,” “The Sisters as Two among the Many,” “The Sisters as the History of Blue” and “The Sisters in the Dream of a Giant.”
These are charming, even delightful story-poems that play with children’s storytelling, and a way of narrative and character unfolding through a sequence of self-contained prose poems reminiscent of Toronto poet Shannon Bramer’s full-length debut, scarf (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2001), or even Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster’s Three Bloody Words (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1996, 2016)—one might also be reminded of Berkeley, California poet Laura Walker’s story (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Victoria, British Columbia poet Eve Joseph’s Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] or New York poet Katie Fowley’s The Supposed Huntsman (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) [see my review of such here]—through shared shades of fable, fairytale and the fantastical. As with any appropriate foray into fable, there are shadows that unfurl, unfold, through these pages, and hardly bloodless, echoing the best of what those Brothers Grimm might have salvaged. “It didn’t surprise them, exactly,” begins “The Sisters as Regicides,” “how cleanly the blade slipped between the bones of his neck, how, with just the slightest heft of their bodies on the hilt, his screaming—like a child’s, really—cratered into a singular whimper, then a wheeze. With his head off, the King—but was it right to call him that now?—was nothing more than what all corpses are: a heap of flesh, a sinewy mess, time’s ragged lace.”
rob mclennan, Jordan Windholz, The Sisters
You know that you’re in the presence of a special talent when you read a collection, and you realise that you have never experienced anything like it before. That was the case for me when I first read Welcome to The Museum of a Life by Sue Finch (Black Eyes Publishing UK, 2024). The collection is split into 7 parts: a foyer, 5 galleries and a gift shop. Each of the galleries contains exhibits, such as a blue apple, a pelican dancing on a patio, a blade of ice and a pound coin, which provide the subjects of anecdotes, sometimes fantastical and sometimes sharply authentic, but always providing the reader with a profound insight into the nature of the human condition.
As in a conventional museum, these exhibits are organised into themed galleries. In Gallery One, we meet exhibits on the subject of childhood. It is portrayed as a time of irrational fears, naivety, recklessness and unrestrained curiosity. Always written in the first-person, Finch allows us to see her world as a child. For example, in When I Saw Jesus in a Tomato she writes, ‘I ate him; he was a woody version of grass./ I swallowed him hard/ not wanting him to get stuck/ in my throat.’ This is so well observed with its naive fear of getting Jesus stuck in her throat and its description of the taste of a tomato that draws on a narrow frame of reference so appropriate to a child. Above all, Finch presents childhood as a period of infinite curiosity.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ by Sue Finch
Make-believe games go a long way toward helping kids develop self-regulation, including reduced aggression, ability to delay gratification, and advancing empathy. One form of make-believe, more common in children who have lots of minimally unsupervised free time, is called worldplay. This is considered the apex of childhood imagination and is linked with lifelong creativity,
Preliminary studies indicate the less structured time in a child’s day, the better their ability to set goals and reach those goals without pressure from adults. Childhood play is even correlated with high levels of social success in adulthood.
And, as if we didn’t already know this, free play generates sheer joy. The BBC series “Child of Our Time” studied play. They found the more children engaged in free play, the more they laughed, particularly when playing outside. The kids who played the most laughed up to 20 times more than kids who played less. This is surely the best reason of all to play.
Laura Grace Weldon, Not Enough Time To Play
The day after the hurricane, I noticed all the acorns and pine cones on the ground. I decided to pick them up. I made sure to pick up enough so that each student could have an object. When I picked them up, I had no idea it would be so long before I returned to my in-person classes. […]
The room was amazingly quiet. For the first chunk of class time, everyone concentrated on sketching. And here’s what really astonished me: no one reached for their phones. It is the only–and I mean the only–time in the class where no one even considered reaching for their phone.
We did a variety of sketches. My favorite was a variation on an exercise that we did in a seminary class (which I wrote about in a blog post). I had them divide the paper into 6 squares. We sketched for 30-40 seconds and then switched squares–quick, quick, quick.
And then I had them write a description of the object again. I had the students compare the two writings, and we discussed what they saw. Some of them said they wrote in more detail after sketching. Some did not.
We talked about the value of doing something else, like sketching, an activity that wasn’t going to be part of the grade. I talked about the value of taking a break from intense studying or writing.
In English 101 class, from October 21-Nov. 1, we’re doing a variety of these kinds of approaches, and then students will write an essay about what we did, what they experienced, and analyzing the effectiveness of these activities. I’ve done variations of this kind of writing project before, and the writing has been phenomenally better than more “standard” essays.
But more important, watching my students sketch and write helps me feel less exhausted. It helps me feel like we’re doing something post-hurricane to return to normalcy and to affirm the value of writing, sketching, and other endeavors.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing, Sketching, Writing
This will be my fourth full collection, my seventh collection in all, if I include my two short collections, and I feel it marks a change in how I write and where I write from. Though the collection is not about neurodivergence, and I should add the usual imposter syndrome led caveat that I am not officially diagnosed with anything and still awaiting an assessment (and will be for some years to come I imagine), admitting to myself my oddness, accepting myself as different actually freed me to write the way I wanted, or needed to write, it gave me a permission slip to explore creatively and shake up my writing habits. I was no longer writing with the purpose of being a poet, I was writing as art, as exploration and using poetry as the tool to dig. This sounds terribly pretentious, and if you know me you will know that I’m not, but perhaps we avoid talking about poetry or writing as an art form, as something a bit magical. I see a lot online about how to craft a poem, but less about the utterly ridiculous magic that is creativity. Why shouldn’t we admit to the strange, evolutionary trait that we as human beings have, that is to explore and express through a process that is, essentially, observing what are own brains are doing and putting that into a medium that can be shared and communally experienced.
Wendy Pratt, Lifting the Curtain on the Writing Process: Blackbird Singing at Dusk – Five Weeks to Launch Day
Every writer I know wants to improve their work, listen and learn from other writers, generate new work in community, and have time to focus on their practice away from their busy lives. This is easier said than done. Yes, reading helps. We can check out and read craft books and literary criticism from libraries, and we can read our peers widely to learn from them. And many writers have peers for workshopping or quiet writes, but sometimes it’s helpful to get inspired by people outside of your circle.
However, attending writing workshops/conferences/residencies is not necessarily an affordable or time-manageable option. Just a small sampling of popular conferences/workshops bears this out. […]
This is not an argument that everything should be free. Instructors and readers and organizations should be paid for their labor. It is a lot of work to plan and run a course or a workshop, even a generative one. I have spent money to attend conferences like AWP and have found them to be valuable. But unless one is granted a fellowship or a grant, this model is not one that can be accessed by many writers most of the time, especially those writers who are outside of academia and have no funding support for attendance, or those who cannot take two weeks or more away from family or work obligations.
Luckily, there is a veritable treasure trove of free/affordable resources online that can fill some of those needs. I have not even scratched the surface with the list below, but I will share just a few of my favorites.
Donna Vorreyer, An Embarrassment of Riches
You are particularly known for facilitating ginkō (haiku walks) and workshops at environmental and haiku conferences. I’m curious if you have a saijiki to aid in writing haiku? What books would you recommend for people to become better acquainted with the names of the diverse species of trees, plants, birds, etc.?
Haiku are little poems that showcase a moment in a season. Ginkos are a great way to run into those moments, face to face. As a naturalist, I have a deep sense of the local phenology, the timing and sequencing of these phenomena. I don’t consult a saijiki when writing haiku since I am writing from an outdoor experience in the moment. This autumn, the haiku journal seashores is publishing a saijiki issue which I look forward to reading. I would recommend Bill Higginson’s Haiku World which is a saijiki that offers haiku for each of the highlighted season words.
Climate change is clearly wreaking havoc on local phenology and timing of phenomena. Spring is arriving earlier and autumn later, thus the growing season is getting longer. The traditional saijiki is in constant need of rewriting.
rewriting
the saijiki
climate change
Mariposa 34
Spring/Summer 2016Truly, the best way to get acquainted with the local plant and animal species is to spend time attentively outdoors. Any naturalist, even with no knowledge of Basho, would advise you to go to the pine to learn from the pine. As I write this passage, the crimson leaves of my dogwood are falling on me in my hammock; Golden crowned and Ruby crowned kinglets are coursing through the remaining foliage of my trees and shrubs; a Blue Jay is calling out, perched on the freshly filled bird bath, alerting others of the presence of water during this big drought; and the paw paw patch is turning a brilliant gold.
While observational knowledge makes one richest, you can use any series of field guides to learn the names of what you are observing. I grew up with the tiny Golden Guide series in my earliest years and graduated later in elementary and middle school to the Peterson Field Guide series. These are typically taxonomically arranged, focusing on groups of organisms (insect, trees, wildflowers, etc.), but habitat guides are out there as well. If your goal is to identify an organism that is right in front of you, I would check out the iNaturalist app, which can be a great aid for identification and linking you to further knowledge about other beings that you meet.
What are a few of your favorite places where you’ve led a ginko walk so far? What made those particular ginko walks and places the most memorable? What are a few of your favorite haiku workshops that you’ve led?
Oh, I have led ginkos in so many locations for several different audiences – haiku poets, educators, and students. For the New York Metro group of the Haiku Society of America, I have led several ginkos in New York City. I think my favorites were on the High Line, an abandoned elevated rail line converted into a nature trail, and Stuyvesant Park. In the latter, we were creating and assembling a gallery of the haiku following our ginko. One of the maintenance staff of the park started removing them, and I confronted them, peacefully, telling them that my research showed that there were no rules against this. I was told it was trash and that her job was to simply clean up the park. We made a bargain on the spot – she let this activity continue, and I removed all the haiku at the end of the event. The poets left, and I was slowly removing these, when a flashy jogger stopped in her tracks to read two adjacent haiku, illuminated by the sun, while jogging in place. When she read the second haiku, she stopped jogging, reached into her back pocket, pulled out her cellphone and took a photo. I wished the other haiku poets had witnessed this.
Jacob D. Salzer, Jeff Hoagland
Helping Kath at a yarn show on Saturday helped me to get out of my own head this week. Before we set off, I drank water from my ‘There is Only Time’ glass. It holds just enough water to hydrate me before a trip and also carries a good message about time. Words on it include, “There is no such thing as down time/There is only time.” I like the design, and I always remember to wash it by hand so that I don’t wash the art and writing off. Having said that, I might once have learned that lesson the hard way.
After I had helped Kath to set up her patterns, I went for a walk and saw a beautiful heron. Two egrets first and then the grey majesty of a wading heron. The sight of a heron is always wonderful to me, but this felt particularly apt because Nigel Kent’s review of ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ had just been published, and one of the poems he mentioned was ‘I Hate You’ which features a talking heron.
I must admit that I returned to Nigel Kent’s blog to reread the review a couple of times because his words resonated with me, and I rather enjoyed the feeling of being proud. I am hugely grateful to Josephine and Peter from Black Eyes Publishing UK for putting my books into the world. It’s good to work with others and see your dreams become reality. Writing poetry is a pleasure for me and I enjoy setting things down, but there is another lovely tingly pleasure in being read.
Sue Finch, ONLY TIME
I read My Kindred in August. I was sprawled on the guest bed in my friend’s daughter’s house in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Everyone else was napping (baby, grandma, mama). I was basking in the light of Paulann Petersen’s poems claiming kinship with bees, plums, big-leaf maples, totems. Oh, and family.
I’m indebted to Petersen for such epigraphs as these:
—Surely our parents give birth to us twice, the second time when they die. —Anaïs Nin
and this:
—One pound of honey contains the essence of two million flowers.
The poems, too, are packed with honey, and surprise. A sister, “so full of yourself / when you’re rain” (“Her Sister Tells Water What’s What”). A poem titled, “Had the Matriarch Been Born a Bat.” A poem titled, “Where Is the Saint If Not in the Slightest of Things.” Everything is related, A poem titled, “Whitman, Me, Hermes.” Petersen (like the bat with its umbrella-spine fingers) encompasses worlds. “Mythic, voluptuous” worlds, in the words of Kathleen Flenniken.
Bethany Reid, Paulann Petersen’s MY KINDRED
Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.
Rob Taylor: Burning Sage is your debut poetry collection, written about the 2021 Lytton fire which destroyed your café, most of your neighbours’ houses, and almost your own. To say the least, it’s not your typical debut. Could you talk about the way this book came into being?
Meghan Fandrich: When the fire destroyed our little village, it wasn’t just the buildings that were gone. It was my community, the place of my childhood memories and my daughter’s, and the future I was building for us there. It was everything that was normal in my life, everything I trusted would always be there. Past, present, future. All gone.
About a year later, summer meant another fire was burning homes and farms near Lytton. Support and stability, and even a precarious “new normal,” were still impossible. I was living in fear and trauma and knew I had to focus on something, a distraction, so that I could be a present parent—a present person—again. I decided I would do an art project for a friend (a love), the “you” of the poems: I would write out some memories and musings from my life, things we hadn’t talked about yet, little pieces that make up who I am. I decided to start with a memory from the fire.
Up until that point, I think, I had just been focused on survival, on single-parenting, on adjusting to life in an isolated burned-out place that kept getting hit with natural disasters, even after the first fire. I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I probably couldn’t have. I couldn’t have acknowledged the depth of the experience when I was in the worst of it.
So I sat down at the typewriter on the living room floor, and memories came pouring out. They weren’t the memories I expected, but instead subconscious memories, scenes and feelings that I had never put words to before, even in thought. When I took the page out of the typewriter and read the words, I started crying—for almost the first time since the fire.
Rob Taylor, Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich
Cheng’s tattoos act as translator between the observer and the observed, the latter using tattoos to guide the former’s interpretation of the story told by the observed. “Master Narratives” observes, “I translate my flesh into empires, possessed/ by the thing that also reads as 東西 eastwest.” She uses Cantonese and Chinese phrases (there are notes) in primarily English poems, offering spaces where a reader may find themselves interpreting a phrase, an illustration of possibility and challenging assumption. There are a couple of poems that use a source text in a grey text with specific words in black text to form the poem, again offering a space for interpretation and understanding. This isn’t a black/white, good/bad world but one of nuance that appreciates well-intentioned people can do bad things and ill-intentioned people can do good. Cheng’s concerns are justice and cohesion, how language is used to shore up colonialism and silence dissent. Her poems show how those traditionally silenced might use their language and voices to retranslate their histories and understand themselves.
Emma Lee, “The Tattoo Collector” Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press) – book review
I read The Odyssey in University and it’s certainly a different experience in this translation by Emily Wilson. The first line in the Wilson translation is “Tell me about a complicated man.” There’s a great essay on Vox by Anna North, where she talks about why it matters that the epic poem is translated by a woman:
“It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.””
North talks about how Wilson embraced the fact that there are many uncomfortable parts in the text. She lays them bare rather than trying to tidy them up or wash over them.
*
There are any number of ways, and lenses, through which to read the poem, but I’ve been picking it up each morning and just sort of “speed reading” it, looking for the themes of xenia. It reads quickly I think because I’ve also been imagining it as an action / adventure movie. It careens along, you know?
Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – The Odyssey and Xenia
There are surely many reasons for the particular early modern enthusiasm for the Song of Songs — scholars have analysed, for instance, the way aspects of its allegory could easily be adapted for theological and political purposes, as well as devotional ones. (Theology and politics were, in any case, rarely very far apart in this period.) You can’t read material from the seventeenth century for very long before noticing this. But I wonder whether part of the explanation for the vogue is, as it were, grammatical. Any early modern learner of Hebrew already had Latin and Greek, and for anyone with that linguistic background what my first teacher would have called the “sexiness” of Hebrew grammar, its pervasive awareness of gender even in comparison to Latin and Greek (already much more ‘gendered’ than English), is one of the most immediately striking things about this new and different language.
The Song of Songs, probably originally an epithalamium (formal marriage poem), with its highly erotic series of exchanges between a man and a woman, is both a poem about sex, and one of the densest and most vivid examples of this feature of the language. Grammar has its own romance, and unfamiliar grammars most of all. The very rich interpretative tradition of this poem has allowed readers to hear in it many different versions of the erotics of difference — a call and response between the bride and the groom; the soul and the body; the individual and God; Christ and his Church — but also, perhaps, between the Semitic and the Indo-European.
Victoria Moul, When he is mine and I am his, what can I want beside?
Learning Spanish involved getting to grips with the subjunctive. For instance, cuando vas and cuando vayas are two very different animals. Both might well be translated into English as when you go, but the indicative would imply habitual action, whereas the subjunctive would suggest potential consequence, the former followed in English by the present tense, the latter by the future, as in when you go, I’m happy or when you go, I’ll be happy.
This understanding of the building blocks of another language then fed back into my view of English. Once I recognised that it’s a syntactic way of expressing what might happen or what might have happened, I also realised that the subjunctive mood is an integral part of any poem in any language, whether it’s invoked explicitly or not. And thus my view of poetry also shifted. The counterpoint of bilingualism is always enlightening.
Matthew Stewart, The subjunctive
For this poet, one of the most sanguine objects that traverses the span of transcendentalisms is the Aeolian harp.
“He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire,” Emerson said of his “beautiful enemy,” Henry David Thoreau. [Charles] Ives quotes Emerson on “the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his [Thoreau’s] poetry.” Of course, the lyre bears an an ancient association with poetry and Orphism, but Ives’ takes Thoreau’s writing as poetry for more immediate reasons, namely, genre-porousness and fluidity characterized Emersonian transcendentalism as well as Ives’ own compositional strategies.
Besides, it’s not as if Transcendentralists refused the existence of poems, as such. In his Collected Essays, for example, Emerson framed each essay with a poem that he did not bother to explicate within the text. The poems perch above the doorway of his prose like levitating address markers. What seems blurred is the idea of the poem as a holier form than the prose. Let’s go back to that. Let’s go back to how Ives’ gets seduced by Thoreau’s fascination with the Aeolian sounds of the telegraph wire in Walden. In Thoreau’s words:
“… like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by Gods.”
At one point in “Sounds,” Thoreau mourns the vanishment of background hum. “Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever,” he admits, while feeling his way towards a soundscape of place, and doing what many of us do when wandering through a city to map its soundscape for a poem. Sounds tell time; they are life’s beat, its rhythm-track.
Alina Stefanescu, Charles Ives in 33 notes.
I’m the other side of a flimsy partition
trying to camouflage my listening earI can’t pull out pen and paper
to record his every heartfelt wordCan I?
The poem wags a finger in my face
Paul Tobin, DECONSTRUCTION OF THE HEART
Whispers: this one’s not going to happen
Susan M. Schultz’s I and Eucalyptus is visually stunning; twenty prose texts each prefaced by a close-up photograph of the surface the titular tree taken by Schultz, with a 21st at the end and that have the appearance of organic abstractions. The exception is the photo before text 20, which is a full-length shot of the tree with the colours toned down. These photos are all printed on the verso pages, with the texts printed on the verso pages only. Text and blank pages are a kind of marbled paper featuring a grey horizontal pattern representing tree bark. It’s a visual feast.
The texts are a kind of conversation with Martin Buber’s I and Thou, a book I’ve never read, and some quotes from Buber are woven through them; the quiet I and You pun in Schultz’ title is an echo of his. Buber’s idea, as I understand it, is that for true relationships we need to move from a subject-object view of others (I-It) to a subject-subject one (I- Thou), where others include the non-human, and Schultz’ book is, amongst other things, a charting at an attempt at just such a relationship with a tree via the lens of her iPhone.
What emerges is, amongst other things, a complex set of meditations on the relationship between art and life, set against a backdrop of climate change and Trump’s America. There’s a kind of pivot moment at the end of the ninth text when the reality of this relationship is stated clearly:
We trust the camera, our teacher says, though increasingly we lie with it. To see is already to interpret, and to interpret is inevitably to lie.
Repeatedly we see the photographer at work, editing the images she has taken (‘I take photos of the tree, and note the verb.’) And this activity has the almost inevitable consequence of returning the tree to an ‘It’ state, the object of activity in which the photographer is the active subject. ‘The tree is not art, but photography is’’, the opening sentence from text 5, establishes the central paradox; the tree is the subject of the art in both photographs and texts, but its status as subject there makes it the grammatical and logical object of the artist’s activity; ‘I’ photograph/write about ‘it’. And so, the process of trying to record a Buber-like ‘I-Thou’ undermines itself. In fact, the photographs are not really of the tree at all, but of forms and colours that the tree happens to present.
There are moments throughout the book when art and reality beyond the eucalyptus intersect:
Let me tell you a story. Let the story enter your mind without a screen. You inhabit a French novel, one that insists that you become an adulterer. You do that in “real life,” then return to the pages of your book, replacing one fantasy with another. The novel tempts you to become pregnant by the handsome guy on the motorcycle. Your real pregnancy, terminated, results in your execution under a proposed law in South Carolina. History brought forward is a horror movie, both for its content and its form.
The quality of Schultz’ writing is such that the horror of contemporary life for women in the USA is contained, presented cooly, as if through a lens; as she writes just a few pages earlier, again using the vocabulary of the camera, ‘We think anger focuses us, but it only distracts us more violently.’
The eucalyptus is, she reminds us, an invasive species and one that is quick to ignite, it has an otherness that might be read as dangerous. Consequently, there is a risk that it comes to ‘stand for’, not just simply stand.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading October 2024: A Review
My trip to Fife was amazing, mainly because it was so laid back. I wandered the beaches when the weather was beautiful, the woods when it was a bit grayer and museums and churchyards when it was raining. I got to stand as close as I dared to the Forth Rain Bridge which I’m a bit obsessed with. None of these things would entertain my kids, so it was a good chance to entertain myself.
Here’s a few new Scotstober posts, some inspired by my recent holiday in Scotland. I’ve combined them to catch up on those words I missed, although I have been unable to come up with anything poetic for Day 6 – boak – to throw up, the feeling you’re going to throw up. That may be beyond my poetic ability. […]
Days 18, 21 and 22
tuim – empty
sook – to suck
heid – headahm tuim av thochts
Gerry Stewart, Back To Reality: Scotstober
staundin in thi wat leaves
thi wind sookin at mah skin
hair beelin around mah heid
One way of dealing with professional setbacks is to simply say that you’re better off without that press, or editor, or job, or agent, or whatever, and look to the next thing. I’ve never been laid off or fired from a job, but I sure do feel “fired” from the job of poet these days. I’m trying to get up the energy to pick myself up, dust myself off, and get back into it, but I’m also thinking, maybe it’s time to stop? Maybe it’s a sign? I’ve struggled with this thought many times since I started writing as a kid. In fact, I did give up creative writing for at least a dozen years or more. Turning 51 last April, I did think to myself that wow, am I STILL trying to get published in X journal, or get any professional recognition at all in terms of grants, awards, prizes, good review venues? Am I still trying to find the right publisher, the one who really believes in my work? After all the years of volunteering and AWPs and writing and submitting and getting degrees and even teaching for four years in an MFA program? What am I doing? Why do I feel like I need a mentor more than I ever have at my age? I do not expect you, dear readers, to have the answers to these questions. Just know that I’m struggling. I am visiting pumpkin farms, and eating kettle corn, and watching horror comedies, trying to keep up morale. But sometimes it’s just…hard. It’s maybe harder than it seems.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Halloween! A Rough Week, Election Sunday Scaries, When You Feel Like an Outsider (and How to Deal with Professional Setbacks)
Right now it’s sunny, but a fierce wind is beating against my studio windows. The weather is more volatile and violent than I ever remember. It scares me to think about the state of even the best-managed forest, fifty years from now. I feel privileged to have lived most of my life appreciating and being comfortable in nature, and hope I haven’t ever taken it for granted. This was a major factor in my voting, and may be in yours, too, although I have no illusions about either party’s commitment to the level of significant change that’s necessary.
Those of us who care should do everything we can to raise awareness of the natural world. I feel like a relic of some long-lost era, as someone who knows the names of ferns, mosses, flowering plants and trees as well as wild living creatures, who’s comfortable in the woods and mountains, able to walk and sit quietly without disturbing the inhabitants, and knows something about foraging as well as how to grow her own food. Our remoteness from the natural world, and our blithe subjugation and overuse of it, mirrors what we’ve done to indigenous people; if there’s anything that could be called “original sin,” surely this is it.
Beth Adams, Glorious Golden Days
Earth feeds and eats us. What we understand between
is nurtured on an invisible food: time.Earth soothes our painful unfolding with its cycles.
Walking in circles, we breathe in timeWith the beauty we have been busy fleeing.
Rachel Dacus, A New Anthology of Ghazals in English
I was thinking the other day about the last time I saw my Granny. I’d just awakened from a nap and was in that semi-groggy, semi-paralyzed state that didn’t used to happen to me but now happens all the time. At first, I was thinking about my mom. Maybe I’d been dreaming about her, I don’t know. Suddenly, I was in Granny’s hospital room with my mom and my aunt. The three of us were there when Granny took in her last long ragged breath. It didn’t come out again. It was a very strange moment seeing a person you love here one minute and gone the next. Just like that. […]
There’s no one left that shares that memory. Granny, my mom, my aunt – all gone. It’s just occurred to me that experience only lives in my head now.
Abigail Thomas recently wrote about memory in her Substack. I’ve been thinking about what she wrote which made me think about the memories I shared with my mom that no one knows. I think about things we did together and there are blanks I can’t fill no matter how hard I try. I’m the keeper of those memories and she’s not here to fill in the gaps. Write it down, people. Write it all down.
Charlotte Hamrick, Keeper of the Memories
Boot/reboot to ward off viruses and false idols.
Keyboard, monitor. The karma of a well-placed comma, a pause between thoughts, words, and actions.
Hack into the mainframe of you and me. Greed versus the God seed. Avarice versus the actions of love and uplift.
Double-click on the database, the breath and space between crib and cemetery. The vast open fields of a well-lived life.
Rich Ferguson, Earth Is My Computer
After I finished my last collection, I considered I wanted to spend the next three years obsessing about. It should be something that fascinated me, something rich in poetic and metaphorical potential, which would allow me to research and procrastinate to my heart’s content. I came up with three options – caves, ruins, and ghosts.
In the end, ghosts got my vote. Every house that I lived in as a child was haunted, and it seemed, every property we visited. It’s only in very recent years I’ve realised that not every childhood is coloured by floating lights in the attic and disembodied whispers.
There’s a common belief that poltergeist activity is associated with troubled teenage girls: we had plenty of them, and troubled boys too. Did we attract the bad spirits? Or did the creative and chaotic energy of our troubled minds manifest itself in the remote moving of objects, the unexplained noises and visions? And is poetry the right place to make sense of these experiences?
In our Catholic, working-class Burnley, belief in ghosts was not unusual – break into a good ghost story and people are almost certain to join in. It’s not so true in the secular, middle class world I now inhabit. Here, seeing ghosts marks you out as superstitious, uncultured – to be honest, a bit common.
But I’ve been told enough times in my life that my world view is mistaken or just plain mad – so a hierarchy of knowledge which dismisses millions of people’s accounts of their own lives as uncivilised nonsense is something I’m not just going to accept. Even more than that, I’m fascinated by the assumptions and processes which underpin of knowledge of the world. How do any of us know what we know?
Clare Shaw, Talking with ghosts: how my new collection leads me to unexpected places.
Several days before my father went into the hospital and never walked out, I wrote a single word down in a notebook in all caps as I was working on a home decor article.
“RUINPORN”
The piece was on beautiful abandoned homes intended to inspire your interior design. Mostly the images I found to accompany the piece were filled with delightfully chipping paint, lowly decaying wood, paneless windows, and beautiful light, sometimes filtering in through ceilings that no longer existed. Shrubs and vines encroached through windows and wound around stair banisters. They were the kind of places you imagined were inhabited by ghosts that shook the broken chandeliers and rattled the doors barely on the hinges. Sometimes there were relics–an old book on a shelf. A dingy bathrobe hanging in the closet. The spaces were far more vast than any house I’ve ever lived in, but appealed to me for their open and dilapidated spaces. Their vacancy and beauty. […]
Five years before, I had lost my mother, not as suddenly as my dad, and after a rough year. But still somehow just as much a shock.. A year later, I finished a book about our relationship called feed, dealing with the complexity of growing up in an environment that fraught relationship between a mother and daughter, both my own and through things like fairy tales and myths. Strangely, for my father, there didn’t seem to be a book on the horizon. That particular relationship being much less wrought with artmaking material. Or at least I thought at the time.
What emerged instead were poems that were modeled on decor writing headlines about haunted houses. About how we leave the ghosts of ourselves behind in the spaces we inhabit.
While I could not have told you at the time what I was writing them for or towards, later it became clear that that particular loss had its fingers all over them. I was already calling it ruinporn long before I compiled the manuscript.
Kristy Bowen, the houses we haunt
truthfully i’m not sure who is dead anymore.
Robin Gow, 10/28
the hot chocolate poured from
a wound in the cake. i licked my fingers.
you laughed. my brother used his fork
to plunder the whipped cream.
everything was easy & none of us had
to have a gender. in the dark you watch
your horror videos. all the tongues
like ribs. a paisley pattern knit across
the screen.
I have experienced two autumns this October: one in New Mexico, one in Pennsylvania. In the American Southwest, high up in the world, the cottonwood trees that hug every available water source were going a brilliant gold while I was there. Any view above a creek or river revealed a winding path of yellow–along the Chama, along the Rio Grande. The tiny-leaved oaks were turning brown-leaved and dropping scads of acorns along the paths. The oranges and reds are mostly there year-round, on the mesas and in the canyons.
It was wonderful to experience a poetry workshop with Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan and to learn how books are made by hand, wonderful to draft some poems using color imagery and ekphrasis, wonderful to meet some fascinating people with whom I enjoyed pushing past my/our comfort zones and into art forms we may have been a bit less comfortable with.
Ann E. Michael, Two falls
I drove home tonight at 6 o’clock, through the winter darkness already. I had to roll down the window to stay awake. I know we think of this kind of thing as winter depression, but I am trying to look at it from another perspective. Maybe the desire to be quiet, to lie wrapped in something soft, to listen to the wind, and maybe imagine the cracking of wood in a fire in a cabin somewhere, about an hour’s drive from here, where the real mountains begin and the snow comes early—maybe this introversion isn’t depression at all, just a close connection with the season.
Last week, walking Leonard in the early afternoon, I saw the first—and likely the last—hedgehog of the year. Not big, but likely big enough to survive. I said sweet dreams. Then looked around. Talking to Leonard is one thing. Talking to a hedgehog is another.
Ren Powell, Between Hedgehogs and Lapwings
Last night I was rehearsing with our Simhat Torah band. One of our hakafot (circle dances) will be to the song Bashanah Ha-ba’ah. “You will see, you will see, just how good it will be…” But sometimes it’s hard to hold fast to the faith, or the dream, that better days will come. Here, or there, or anywhere. The drumbeat of sorrow and loss and injustice feels relentless. Here, and there, and everywhere.
This path is a deep groove worn in my heart from a year of grieving. I step outside to mail my ballot and I’m startled by how warm the air is, how beautiful the sunlight filtering through yellow leaves. What if I stop trying to find the right words (as though there were right words) that would make meaning out of all of this — and just let myself be, breathing here, in the beauty of the broken world?
Rachel Barenblat, (Almost) A Year
will you visit is a thought in a corner
Jim Young, the studio with the arched window
high up beside the light glowing
from the cherry’s burning leaves
in the autumn of our regrets
the words lifting like motes to settle it
once and for all they are set in this story
of how a moment is forever just a moment
and a poem is a moment for eternity
sit you there a moment
let me explain
earl grey?
I had occasion to spend time in one of my favorite spaces of possibility recently, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA). A visit to a museum like this one is layered: initially, often, bewilderment, if not downright befuddlement, but sometimes slightly confused enchantment, or transport. Then I like to settle down on a bench with the curator’s or artist’s notes about what I’m looking at, and then return. Sometimes thusly armed, I’m still bewildered, or fairly unmoved, but often reawakened, seeing anew, reperceiving. After a while in this space, a campus of former factory buildings transformed, everything seems like art: the way paint has worn off a pillar to leave the labrynthine white tracks of wood grain, the way rust has made its cloth of metal, elaborate and multihued, a bright leaf caught in a net of bare gray branches. And I come away feeling like the very day is a creative act. My own created day is a creative act: how I pay attention, where I put my attention, what I say and how I say it, and with what wonder.
And inevitably I turn to the news of the day, which makes its own work on me, I am the metal to its rust, and not so beautifully done. But for a while anyway, this sense of art everywhere can linger.
So, reader, I offer that notion to you: the day is yours to create. You are yours to create. The hour is full of consternation, indeed, of fear, of lack, of struggle. And the hour is full of wonder. The steady tick of time itself a beat to dance to. If you can manage, make it a jelly roll.
Marilyn McCabe, to tease me in my bleak office
I’ll pass the hours remembering
Sarah Russell, What I Picked for the Journey
forsythia in April, the softness
of a baby’s skin, campfires, the smell
of bread fresh from the oven. I’ll sleep
where the milky way tumbles
through the night sky and trees whisper
to the wind.