Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 44

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 worms are eating, invisible dogs, fishing for Leviathan, the presence of birds, and much more. Enjoy.

Poems grow like rumours……a poem begins as a whisper, half-heard, changes from voice to ear, from ear to voice, until the poet can’t hear it at all.

Poems spread among the ghost rock formations of Madagascar,
the pink lagoon in Spain,
among mist and spray spread over the green reef in Taiwan.
The wind blows them in gusts
around the Callanish Stones on Lewis…

Poems leave Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Somalia, Sudan.
Reach out, gather them in.

Bob Mee, FIVE POEMS FOR THIS MORNING

It’s full-on fall here, and I love how everything is changing. The trees are all lit up now—red, pink, orange, yellow, burgundy—but they’ll dim soon enough, and we’ll have a better view of the sky through the bare branches until spring. I’ve lived in the same house for fifteen years, and I’m still awestruck by what I see from my windows and in my neighborhood each day. It never gets old—which is to say, it’s somehow always new.

I want to talk a little about novelty. Sometimes I hear from young writers that they can’t think of anything to write about because nothing exciting has happened to them, or they haven’t traveled much. They think they need more—or different—experiences in order to have something to say, as if their own lives aren’t enough material. But they’re plenty. Your life, whatever it looks like, is plenty. You don’t need to be someplace new to see—or hear, or taste, or smell, or feel—something new.  

The other day I walked outside, and the sky was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. (See cloud photo as evidence. I mean: wow.) Each day is a one-off. Each day’s sky, too. Thoreau, who walked almost every day for years in the same vicinity, wrote, “two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.”

Maggie Smith, On Writing Place

Oh, look, it’s the day before Election Day. THAT’s the sick feeling I keep waking up with.

Tired

Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two–
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

(Published in New Masses magazine, 1931)

Marilyn McCabe, Aren’t you

My book’s approaching its first birthday! It might have garnered great reviews and accolades, but the best reward has been seeing it reach over 200 pairs of hands so far. Poetry only comes alive once it enters a reader’s imagination! Thanks are due to all the editors at journals such as The Spectator, The Rialto, Acumen, Wild Court, Stand, Poetry Birmingham, Bad Lilies, The Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures, where some of these poems first appeared, but especially thanks to Helena Nelson for publishing the collection.

However, its journey’s only just begun. More readings from Whatever You Do, Just Don’t are coming up in the New Year. Chichester and Faversham are confirmed so far for late February, and I’d be delighted if any other events or festivals were able to offer me a slot…!

Matthew Stewart, My book’s first birthday

I did manage to finally get the ghost box artist book edition under wraps and release the e-zine version, which you can always read for free HERE. I am always torn between wanting to make work freely available (because, hell, in this economy) but also give people who want to get a physical thing the opportunity to get something tangible or collectible.  In terms of other soon-to-be shop offerings, I was able to get the final tweaks done in the layout and design for RUINPORN and am eagerly awaiting the proof copy. No word on when that is shipping, but I did get a notification that the finalized stack of Elizabeth Devlin’s chapbook Milk Spine I ordered a couple days before that one went out this morning, so it is sure to follow soon. Her book turned out lovely with the perfect binding and I plan to do more for unusually sized volumes in the future in addition to my own project and the handmade volumes. Since the color and image printing was so good with granata, I might also use it for books with a lot of art going forward, which while a little costlier, the difference is made less by the amount I end up spending on color toner for those books.  I plan to just charge a little more to offset the printing cost difference. The covers and interior paper were glorious on Devlin’s book and all the ones I’ve done so far on my own. 

As I’ve mentioned, November will always be a rough month. The sparkle and spooky of Halloween fades, the Christmas glitter isn’t quite set yet, so I always felt a plummet in my mood as daylight savings took hold and the trees gave up the ghost on their leaves.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 11/1/2024

As a child, we were not allowed television, movies, newspapers, magazines, or most books. But we watched one movie once a year. It was about an hour long, made in 1953, a documentary called The Conquest of Everest about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who scaled Mount Everest on a shared expedition.  […]

It’s a challenging time to be in publishing. It’s like swimming in Greece and being out at sea beyond the edge of the coastline with the big waves. When I swim out there, I start to get pulled out toward the ocean, and it takes a long time to get back around the point to the harbored waves, and an hour to swim back to shore. 

That’s what it feels like. I’ve swum out beyond the point, and I’m trying to get my bearings, and wondering if I do get swept out to sea if Mark will get in a boat and come get me, but there is no boat, so I really need to swim back to Lampi Beach. Publishing is like that now. 

But my story is this: I’ve been training my whole life, and my team are all smart, like Nepalese mountain climbers, and we are going to figure out the best route. If anyone can mastermind change, it’s our crew.

When I watched The Conquest of Everest as a child, I thought climbing Everest was something men did. Everything important was done by men. Publishing used to be run by men. But the world is changing. My children grew up in a world unclouded by such ideas. This is our day to climb. 

Kate Gale, Green Boots: The Story of the Mountain

On October 13th, alongside new books by Isaac Pickell and Giulia Bencivenga, I released a book of my own called Interrogation Days (complete edition) through Dead Mall Press. This will likely be the last time I self-publish through the press, at least for a while, and going forward my own books will be available trough the “Bookstore” here on the blog. And while I’m only talking about my book here, you should check out the details on both Giulia’s and Isaac’s work, and read interviews with each of them here. […]

Additionally, all three books—mine, Giulia,’s, and Isaac’s—are raising money for Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, a small collective in Gaza that is on the ground baking bread, providing shelter, equipment, and services for displaced Gazans. You can find more info about them on their Linktree, and also see videos of their work via their Instagram. Right now we have $222 raised, but we’re hoping to get the number up to $300 by mid-November (in particular, by the 13th, when we will celebrate the books’ release via an online reading. Send me your email to join the list to attend).

RM Haines, Nothing Survives the American Mind

‘You stop at your local bookshop. You want to kill some time in a place where you’re admired.’ This is voice-over in episode 4 of Disclosure, an Apple TV series starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline which is bad in very many ways – the writing and acting for starters – but let’s focus in here because it’s hilarious. The Cate Blanchett character goes into the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in Notting Hill and asks if the books she has ordered have come in and is told: ‘I think we’re still waiting for the Agota Kristof.’

Many months ago I was emailed by a film production company who wanted to have the CBe edition of Kristof’s The Notebook on the set of a series starring Blanchett and Kline. Yes, go for it, and it was nice of them to ask. There must have been a lot of emails because every inch of every shelf is meticulously curated: jars, plants, fruit bowls, pots and pans. The sex is curated too. Not the cooking – the Guardian review of episode 1 ends: ‘What kind of idiot starts frying sole meunière when it’s already obvious her husband is going to be late?’

I think we are meant to be impressed by the Cate Blanchett character in Disclosure wanting to buy a book by Agota Kristof; I think it’s intended to signal sophisticated intelligence. (Kafka would have been too obvious; if she’s asking for Kristof, she has already read Kafka.) This is lazy and silly. My bookshelves are not evidence of my intelligence; nor is there any simple correlation between the making of good art and the betterment of society. By the end of next week the new president of the US will be either a women-hating racist or Harris, who needs the votes of everyone who wants to avoid Trump but is in hoc to a colonialist lobby that’s OK with genocide in Gaza.

The US election is next Tuesday, 5 November. Which happens to be publication date of Invisible Dogs, by me, with a nice review in the Telegraph already up, and the day before a lot of good-hearted people will gather to learn which book on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize, Lara Pawson’s Spent Light from CBe being one of them, gets the cash and the pats on the back. It will be a strange week.

Charles Boyle, Disclosure: Waiting for Kristof

He says he likes poems that
are forest rivers: sunshine and
leaves making patterns like
so many possible meanings.

He says he likes poems that are
abstract paintings, colour
spreading to all corners from
a layered centre.

He says a poem must know
where it stands. And bow
when it passes the graves
of destroyed children.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Twelve times two

Perhaps I felt slightly behind with things because I forgot to make pumpkin soup at Hallowe’en. That and the fact that no one knocked for trick or treat this year. I was late buying the sweets, but took a special walk out to get some before dusk. I put all the orange ones aside as a special treat for me only to find I had the full selection to choose from anyway!

Thank goodness for the reliable tradition of the Eat The Storms Hallowe’en Special. It’s always good to settle down for the Storms podcast, and a special episode is special indeed. This one had a lovely mix of poetry and prose and gave the perfect opportunity to sit still and listen. It is good to be still from time to time. I shared Rapunzel and Clambake this time as they seemed to fit the Hallowe’en theme. It always makes me chuckle that I wonder what I will sound like reading the poems and then like to give myself a congratulatory nod if I read well! The sweets on the plate were a splendid accompaniment to the episode.

Sue Finch, OH MY GOURD

Larks (Ohio University Press, April 2025) has a cover, and it is a beauty. It’s not often you can ask for what you want, or receive what you want, but the conditions and the timing really came together here, and with OUP’s blessing I asked the artist Nicola Davison-Reed for permission to use her photograph “Breathing” for my cover. Nicola is a portrait artist based in the UK, and takes studio preparatory shots before she begins her sessions every day—this is one of those shots. (When I asked, she had just posted this photo and told me “this one is fresh as a daisy!”). Because these poems work with the documentary and multiple lenses, as well as the domestic (yes, there is a curtain blowing through), I have had one of Nicola’s photographs on my vision board for several years. It is SUCH a joy to feature one on Larks’ cover—both soft and spare and reflective and inclusive of the viewer. I can’t wait for you to read Larks in April. Holler at me if you want a review copy or to schedule a class visit or interview with me this spring.

Han VanderHart, Cover for Larks, New poems in Dusie, Psaltery & Lyre, Raleigh Review, Black Lily Zine

The frosts, though light and few, are arriving now. Maybe we will get rain by Election Day? I have too many hopes for next week. Best not to speculate; I can wait.

In the meantime, I have just finished reading Cindy Hunter Morgan’s very beautiful new collection, Far Company, and I recommend it, especially if you like poetry with an environmental resonance and poems of memoir and recalled experience. Purchase it from Wayne State, not Amazon, if you can. To frustrate a certain billionaire, not that he will notice.

We do the small things, right?

Ann E. Michael, Drought, again

I believe poems have to stand or fall on their own merits.  Describing their origin can certainly add interest, but if a poem can’t be understood on its own, it probably isn’t speaking clearly enough.  I have been accustomed to sending out poems into the world on their own.  I’ve had two recent experiences that suggest this is not how others do things.

The first case concerns my poem “In the Service of Beauty” published by Muse,  a journal of Riverside City College, Riverside, CA.  The poem is in the voice of Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter.of 17th century Italy. I received an email from students asking thirteen questions about the work and my ideas.  When their professor told them that was too much to ask, the questions were reduced to three, questions about my thoughts on femininity, the influence of the women’s movement, how that had influenced my writing of the poem.

I wrote back that “femininity” is a construct of patriarchy and I don’t use the word any more.  I made general answers to the other questions, but what did this have to do with my poem, I wondered.

Not long after, I came up against a request to include with my submission a ‘Positionality Statement” “Please state how your identity as a writer serves the content of this piece, if it speaks to a specific component of your identity or intersectionality.”  I conclude that academic discourse is doing its best, once again, to destroy our language.  Of course I have a position, in relation to all the variables of class, race, gender, etc., etc.  But how does a person have positionality or intersectionality? – we are not abstractions.

I will not submit to a journal that wants me to work as seriously on a statement as I do on the poems.  The poem is what the reader makes of it.

Ellen Roberts Young, Odd Questions—Or Am I Just Out of Date?

I read Kathleen Jamie’s first two collections of nature and travel essays – Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) – when they appeared and loved them both. But they weren’t so much nature or travel essays as uncategorisable, touching on humankind’s relationship with nature, both mutual and destructive,  rather than aspects of nature itself. You might say that they were as anthropological as anything. Her third essay collection, Surfacing (Sort of Books, available here), was published in 2020 but I’ve only just got round to reading it. What a deferred pleasure it was. Passing into middle age had evidently deepened Jamie’s already considerable philosophical grasp of time, ancestry and rootedness, as she wrote about places and peoples at what ‘civilisation’ might regard as the edge of things:

Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can vanish, rivers change course. The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.

(‘In Quinhagak’)

But Jamie is no wide-eyed truth-seeker ready to swallow other cultures’ wisdom unconditionally, and puts enough distance to enable the reader to intuit her strength of feeling. As one might expect from such a first-rate poet, Jamie’s writing is often beautiful. It’s now 32 years since her first non-poetry book, The Golden Peak was published (reissued in 2002 as Among Muslims, subtitled ‘Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan’), so a rate of one every eight years seems to me to be just about right.

Matthew Paul, October reading

Rob Taylor: Near the end of Fishing for Leviathan you write about the poets (Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Al Purdy, John Keats) who provided the “thinnest thread of light” in some of the darkest periods of your life. In those times, you were also sustained by writing your own “wonderful, worthless poems.” Where do you think you’d be today without poetry’s thread of light? From that perspective, are the poems really “worthless”?

Rodney DeCroo: I was seventeen years old when I encountered poetry in a high school English class. I’d only recently arrived from Pittsburgh to live with my father in Surrey, B.C. He was the manager of the infamous Newton Inn and wasn’t around much. I spent most of my time pilfering from my father’s considerable cache of drugs and getting high, so I made it to school maybe three out of five days a week. No one at school seemed to notice or care and I was good with that. My English teacher—I can’t remember his name—didn’t like me much. On one of the rare days I attended class he was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” I had no idea what was going on. I knew nothing about poetry. He kept asking me to explain for the class what various lines of the poem meant. I felt humiliated by him and whatever this indecipherable fucking thing poetry was. 

A year later my father moved us to Cranbrook and I had to take an English literature course taught by a man named Mr. Fossey. The first poem he taught was Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and that was it. He talked about the poem in the context of Keats’ life when he wrote it and I was hooked. I didn’t necessarily understand the poem, but I loved the sounds and it made me feel something I could relate to even if I couldn’t articulate it. I kept repeating lines from the poem to myself. After school that day I rushed back to my room in the Tudor House Hotel (my father was the manager so we lived there). I grabbed some paper and a pen from the front desk and started writing poems. They were horrible, unintentional parodies of the poems I was reading at school but they were pure magic to me. I’d nothing going on in my life. I’d drink alone almost nightly in my room and/or get high depending on what I could get my hands on. My dad didn’t care what I was doing as long as I wasn’t causing trouble in the hotel, and it wasn’t too hard getting booze or dope surrounded by drunks and addicts. My father ignored me and I had no friends. So I’d lock myself in my room, get wasted and write poems.

When I dropped out of high school and ran off to Vancouver—even when I lived on the streets—I carried around an old battered briefcase filled with pages of my poetry. I used to give free poetry readings on the bus for my fellow commuters. One time a man stood up on the #14 Hastings Street bus to applaud and I was thrilled. Hey, an appreciative audience is an appreciative audience! I’ll take it! And throughout that time I was reading all the poets you mentioned. They all excited me in different ways. At the time Bukowski spoke to me the most because his poems were so accessible and used language that was similar to the way I spoke. When I started reading his poetry I felt like hey, maybe I can actually do this and I began to try and write the way I spoke. 

Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here. 

Rob Taylor, The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo

Sometimes a person retreats to a cave or a remote croft to find themselves, worried that others might influence them, that their true self will be diluted.

Some writers are rather like that, not interacting with others. If their writing’s good enough for them that’s all that matters. Some become famous, albeit belatedly – Emily Dickinson for example, or to a lesser extent, Hopkins. But most writers like the company of other writers, thinking that it helps their writing. Many join their local writer’s groups. Some reach out further, participating in the big world of literature, thinking that the advantages of joining a local group are magnified by interacting with more people. Maybe so, but the risks are greater too – writers risk being driven by market forces and social pressure, losing their authenticity by doing anything to be published, selling themselves out.

I’m one of those people involved with bigger groups. I look upon new styles not as a betrayal of Self but as a way of exploring new aspects of it. I think some compromise is inevitable – friendships depend on it, so why not the writer-reader relationship? 

Tim Love, Losing yourself

Flowers and votives attract the souls of the departed;
and bowls of food, glasses of their favorite drink.

Flying creatures draw near—wings like stained
and soldered glass; feelers that curl and uncurl.

Across thousands of nights they’ve hovered,
spellbound by light, trying to sort blue from silver,

broken glass from the startling sheen on bellies
of fish.

Luisa A. Igloria, Day of the Dead

Nan Hardwicke was a real person, a real witch living in North Yorkshire. She is mentioned in Peter Walker’s book, Murders and Mysteries from the North York Moors, a book my dad used to read to us when we camped on the moors in my childhood. She’s mentioned in William Henderson’s 19th C. book, Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. She’s always mentioned briefly, as a witch hare, fleeing from hunters, living in a cottage in Danby, or in a farm near Danby. She is ethereal in the sense that she’s hard to pin down as a person, her legend is all that remains.

My own version of Nan Hardwicke the witch, the inspiration, or rather the poem itself, arrived in my life fully formed, sliding into my head one day not long after the birth, and death, of my daughter in 2010, during that long summer of maternity-leave-grief. This was a time of walking and wailing and noticing that I had slipped through the thin veil of normal life into an alternative landscape in which I was completely wild, completely animal. I had fallen away from the tight knit, baby-focussed community, the women with whom I had travelled the territory of years of infertility to reach the hallowed point of pregnancy, to get past the early scans, the scares, to reach the glorious third trimester, though I only had my toes over the edge of that marker, only to find myself suddenly outside it, my body emptied, by little person lost. I can see how Nan entered me then, how I found my experience of the wild transformative experience of pregnancy refleted in stories of transmogrification into the hare, her outsiderness, her unnatural being reflected in my new wandering status.

Nan arrived in my head and brought a poem with her. It was one of those poems that rushes out like a bleeding injury to spatter across the page. The poem is probably my best known, though in the niche world of poetry writers and readers, I’m not sure what that means, but it is certainly the one that has been anthologised the most. It appears, in fact, beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell in the anthology Heroes and Villains, edited by Ana Sampson. […]

Recently my work on a new project has brought me back into the realm of witches, or rather into the realm of the women healers, the elizabethan era in particular, where it seems you could be a woman healer, you could operate on people and animals, you could cure, you could even incant rhymes or spells, but if you were a poor woman, and not wealthy or a woman of the gentry, watch your back, because a rumour was as good as a noose to a woman without wealth.

I don’t want to jinx the project so I’ll say no more and instead quietly incant a little spell over the MS in progress. On this day when the veil is thinnest, perhaps my main character, herself a real woman, might come to me in the way that Nan did and guide me through it.

Wendy Pratt, The Real Witch, Nan Hardwicke

In Alice Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette (1992), a woman travels through an underworld of subway trains–trains that sometimes take the form of a giant snake–and caves, meeting strange and ghostly personages who are forced to live underground. The woman undergoes a series of transformations as she comes ever closer to the “Tyrant” so that she might kill him, releasing the world from his thrall. […]

I wondered whether this isn’t where we are now, collectively, at the beginning of an epic poem of descent. A poem in which we are waking up together, out of a fog, and finding that all is not as it should be. That we are in a dusky wood or in an endless subway tunnel, divorced from light, but learn that we cannot emerge without first going deeper, down into the center of the earth, the center of the beast, for the teachings we’ll receive there. That the only way out is down and through. 

In Notley’s book, the Tyrant—who seems at first to be all-powerful—could be a symbol for any man with out-sized ego, influence, and death drive–Trump, Musk, Bezos, take your pick. Men who seem huge until their bubble is popped by the smallest pin. But the Tyrant is closer, I think, to an embodiment of modernity itself, a system that seems inescapable and absolute until it isn’t anymore. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Descent

Until the end of the year I shall be polishing my next small collection of poetry. This little beauty has been part of my life since late 2022 when I began writing poems inspired be the artwork of my friend and neighbour Maggie Cameron. We took our work to the public in the form of an exhibition (which turned out to be one of the most successful the exhibitors had held) and mused on the idea of a book. From these poems the concept for my latest book emerged. It’s had some success being both longlisted and highly commended in two notable competitions, but there’s something missing. As I’ve been working with the book, I realise there is a question I need to answer…does the world really need any more poems about birds? […]

We live in a world where new horrors emerge each day. Art, music, poetry, dance are ways to express what it means to be human and to make connection with others. Through connection we can actualise change. Change happens in the individual and if one poem I write connects with someone in a way that gives them a better day, then that is something to be proud of. The presence of birds in my poetry brings the presence of joy in simplicity, the presences of ancient legend and myth, the presence of folklore and shared history. It seems that hope is indeed the thing with feathers.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Does the world need any more poems about birds?

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
I’ve never read any of her books, but I enjoyed this on audiobook. The chapters are short, so you could read one a day as a little writerly pick-me-up. I like that she says to write for the love of writing—whether you win awards or earn degrees or publish books—do it because you love it. She is a believer in “the muse” alighting upon writers, but also that writers have to make themselves available for the muse to light upon them—and then do the work once its there. Couldn’t agree more. Maybe I’ll read one of her novels sometime. […]

Broken Waters by Amy Bornman
This collection of poems was interesting in structure to me—it alternated between a poem for each week of pregnancy with a poem from a perspective of someone from the Bible. Even though I’m an old lady and past this baby-having-nervousness, I still enjoyed reading these poems about the yearning and trials of a first pregnancy. (You can also listen to Amy recite one of her poems while holding her adorable baby HERE! How cute is that?)

Renee Emerson, Alexander the Great, 101 Dalmatians, Big Magic, and The Restorationist series

Later in the evening, fellow resident Pamela Tucker and I took a walk to a cocktail bar she wanted to visit for dinner and over beautiful drinks (boulevardiers for her and hibiscus tea for me) and a flatbread, we talked about art and poems. She sketched and I wrote, and we had a lovely relaxing time in the dark narrow cocoon of a setting that made us think we’d been there all night when we emerged to walk home at 7:30 PM. It was a lovely way to spend the early evening.

Today has been quieter, and I’ve given myself permission to slow down a bit in anticipation of leaving this place tomorrow. I did some more submissions this morning, a little website work for Asterales. I spent some time thinking about my dad, whose 90th birthday would have been today. I think about him a lot, but birthdays are always hard for me. If I was home, I’d probably have headed to the cemetery and had a little chat with him. Instead I did it on my walk—inside my head, don’t worry—and felt him with me.

Thinking about him on the last day of this time away from home led me to think about endings in general—how the ending that comes from loss is never-ending, how the ending of a trip is sometimes both a disappointment and a joy in returning home, how the ending of a poem needs to leave the reader satisified but resonate beyond a “summary” or a “gotcha” line. Right now, I’m on an accountability Google Meet with two writer friends, and my goal was to write one more poem this afternoon. I started one. It was utter trash. So instead I’m here, ruminating on this particular ending and what it means.

First, a list of countable things that have been accomplished in the last six days:

  • New poems drafted: 22
  • Number of them that are decent or viable: Questionable- we shall see
  • Number of poetry submissions prepared and sent: Eleven
  • Number of art submissions prepared and sent: Two
  • Number of older poems revised: at least 20
  • Number of new forms created: 1 (see post from a few days ago)
  • Number of book re-read and re-read to take notes for blurbs: Two
  • Number of blurbs completed: Two
  • Number of lovely meals with all the other residents and our hosts: 3 (will be four after tonight’s farewell meal)
  • Number of excellent conversations about art, both writing and poetry: Too many to count
  • Number of times I have cried: Two (once when fellow resident artist Freda Shapiro read my draft of Unrivered and everything she said about it let me know the book is working the way I want it to work, and once this morning while looking through pictures of my dad. )

No wonder I feel and look like a wrung-out sponge. But, I’m heading home with more writing and more submissions than I’ve had in months. I’m also heading home with lots of ideas for new pieces of art to work on after spending so much time with visual artists this week, which is probably good since I’m sick of words right now. (I keep hearing the song WAR in my head, except as “WORDS…huh…good God, y’all…what are they good for?”)

Donna Vorreyer, Closing Time

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Graphis scripta snuck up between an anthology of essays on Jan Zwicky, far behind me, and a novel just ahead: between those slower, thicker books, this one deked through like a breakaway kid chasing the puck for the slapshot & through sheer luck landing it. After decades collecting lichen and slow walks, plus a daily whirl of work and parenting, the book itself happened fast—had to—and was a sneaky joy to make.  I thought that would be the end, didn’t realize that a book can generate its own life once it’s out, and now it’s me chasing after it—readings in unexpected places, lichen walks, scientists getting in touch about poetry, connecting with ecopoets in other countries, new projects. New life. […]

Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I write lots of one-offs in the moment, most in my drawer, be glad, but I love reading books with a tiny focus—could be structural, thematic, conceptual—as they tend to take you everywhere, and that’s what happened here.  After a couple of early lichen poems and essays on metaphor, the idea of a science-art poetic field guide with an Index of Names came at once, sketched, grounded in walks for local species, after years of silent looking.  Graphis scripta was always a book.

As for the poems themselves – most begin with looking and a phrase that arrives unbidden —like a line of music—the notes and the vibe all there – and for me the work is to see if there’s more there, a whole song.  Often what comes first is an end that I then write towards (chasing after the puck again). What to me are the four or five truest poems in the book arrived entire like that, whole, one draft, it was like taking dictation. Elf-ear, mushroom, the diva Cladonia, a couple others. Maybe some writers can access that sphere often or easily or all the time. I’m not there yet!

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Clare Goulet

As chance would have it, a couple of weeks ago I received two books on the same day that seemed designed to be written about together: the beautifully produced Flood Editions volume of Basil Bunting’s translations from Persian (Bunting’s Persia, edited by Don Share), and a particularly accomplished first collection of English verse taking its inspiration from Iran, Armen Davoudian’s The Palace of Forty Pillars (Corsair Poetry, 2024).

Both of these are slim volumes. The Palace of Forty Pillars contains — like the palace at Isfahan itself — actually only 20 separate titles (or ‘pillars’). (The point of the title is that the pillars are reflected in the water: twenty of the forty are the reflections.) Two of these ‘titles’, though, refer to quite long sequences, the longest of which, ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’ itself contains twenty sonnets. The other sequence, ‘The Ring’ contains five linked sonnets. The maths doesn’t quite work: you end up with twenty poems (counting titles), or 39 (counting only ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’ separately), or 43 (if you count ‘The Ring’ sonnets separately as well). But as a conceit it’s neat enough, and it’s a great title, especially as the motif of the palace is linked to a recurring slogan or saying, Isfahan nesfe jahan (‘Isfahan is half the world’), rendered several times in the collection in both English, Roman transliteration and in Persian script.

The phrase refers to the artistic and cultural wealth of the ancient city of Isfahan: there’s so much there that it amounts to “half the world”. But in a biographical and literary sense, too, Iran is ‘half’ but not all of Davoudian’s world. The poet was born and raised in Isfahan, but he is of Armenian heritage, and now lives in California. Poetically, this is a collection in English which draws richly on the genres, forms, styles and stories of Persian literature, but does so in a style of English verse which is always keenly aware of English literary heritage. We find ghazals, quatrains of the type used by Rumi in the Rubaiyat (a word that means ‘quatrains’) and allusions to many of the great Persian poets and poems, but also sonnets, sonnet sequences and an echo poem, and allusions to Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Shakespeare.

Victoria Moul, And lances, making the valley a cornfield

I have a soft spot for any book published by Wandering Aengus Press—their publications include the anthology, For Love of Orcas, a gorgeous tribute book published in 2019. Jed Myers’s Learning to Hold won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award, and is another beautifully written, and beautifully wrought book.

This was one of my August Sealey-Challenge books. I read it on Amtrak, Portland to Seattle, on August 26. (I know because I used a print-out of my ticket as a bookmark). So, I read it on a journey, and the book is a journey, placing a personal and familial history of war and trauma and healing into a larger context. Yes, the world is a bloody mess, but this book tells us, with the tenderness of a father reassuring a child: “Don’t let go now.”

When I opened Learning to Hold this morning, this poem leapt out at me. It’s a wonderful antidote for election anxiety.

A Prayer

A cormorant crosses a harbor low,
wings’ pulse keeping an air pillow
on the bird’s shadow, that black
belly a steady few inches aloft. […]

Bethany Reid, Jed Myers, LEARNING TO HOLD

The poems in “Baby Cerberus” draw from classical mythology, video games and speculative futures, mostly but not always earthbound. Their primary focus though is connection, how humans interact and care for each other. The first poem, “Tamagotchi” remembers those early electronic virtual pets,

In a thousand years, this poem will be forgotten too
like an unopened email in the trash, or a dream

lost to vicious waking. I ask the earth instead to cradle
our long-dead device, hold rusted gears in mercy.

Not all love stories merit monuments, but every story
is worth its weighty moments: the first time your heart

beeped like that hungry digital pet as fingerprints soiled
the hem of your shirt, or when a heavy silence traced

your shoulders so gently you’d already abandoned
thoughts of swapping the eroded battery…

The poem ends with a plead to be remembered. Love, like pets, needs sustenance and care otherwise it withers and partners drift apart. Plath wrote of poems being “moments’ monuments”, but the poem argues that not all moments deserve monuments. That maybe the best we can hope for is that someone remembers, that we don’t become entirely obsolete, like an old electronic device that can’t connect with contemporary devices.

Emma Lee, “Baby Cerberus” Natasha Ramoutar (Buckrider Books) – book review

“Make the ark with rooms and pens.”
Include thick creamy paper, soft
as brushed cotton, and enough ink
to write our way through.

None of us asked to be born into
the generation that might lose
everything: not just homes
falling into the waters

from North Carolina to Alaska
but also democracy. Not just
a free press, freedom to be Jewish,
freedom to not be pregnant

but also the capacity to draw
a full breath. Who does that anymore?

Rachel Barenblat, Ark

Emil Cioran calls it sublimity. Across decades of words and texts, music shuts him up and pours the ineffable all over his head.

There’s a part in Anathemas and Admirations where Cioran sits inside the stone womb (or the tomb-birthing chapel) of Saint-Severin and listens to an organist playing through Bach’s fugues, calling this moment “the refutation of all my anathemas.” 

Like music, poetry is composed from sound and silence, two materials which invoke each other and are figured in different ways. Because the resonant sound of a text is subjective, depending on the reader’s relationship to sound, the text exists in relationship to the reader’s sonic experience. 

“Mute” suggests an inability to speak, or a state of speechlessness which may be imposed from the outside or chosen as a response. But to be muted is to be rendered inaudible, to have one’s volume turned down. To say that ‘I muted myself’ is jarring, since the conventional use of a muted female involves being rendered silent, and then being determined to be complicit in that silence, insinuating that  muteness, as a condition, inscribes the power of the world over the sound one can make. Watching someone go rapt over music is like watching their face during sex, or realizing they love it.

Alina Stefanescu, A poem and 2 things: Louise Bogan’s “Words for Departure”

Bowie died. Prince died. Leonard Cohen died.

And everyone that made you feel beautiful and young is going, one by one and there is nothing you can do about it. Everyone who knew you when you were beautiful and young will all fade away. One by one. Nobody will be around to remember the young you any more. And your heroes will disappear, they will stop being there and then you will hear that they died and then you will die a little bit too. You probably haven’t seen them for years. Nor listened to their music nor read their books nor watched their movies. But there was a time you had their poster on your wall, a shrine in your heart, they were the soundtrack to the good times, your glory days. You might go to their funeral. You might go to a bash in the local pub in their honour. This is how it will go. Your heroes die one by one. […]

I just hope new heroes are being born this year . . .

Your heroes are here! Your heroes are all already here, darling. I see your heroes, I follow them, I watch them, they keep going and never stop. Your heroes are never giving up on their dreams. I see heroes at the food bank, your heroes are at homeless shelters, they take food to people sleeping in doorways. Your heroes are itinerant and broke, with no funding or arts grants. Your heroes are in Calais and Dunkirk, they wait by the shores of Mediterranean seas and volunteer to help the capsized boats and refugees. Your heroes are on the borders. Your heroes are down in Soho donating and distributing food and blankets. Your heroes are working overtime in the crumbling NHS departments, your heroes are your doctors and nurses, your teachers and volunteers, people taking phone calls at the Samaritans and talking people down from the edge.

Your heroes march for human rights and the future of the planet. Your heroes are millions of school children protesting for the climate strike. Your heroes write graffiti and poetry. Your heroes are everywhere, they walk among us. Your heroes are waking up every day, skint and underpaid and busking it, your heroes are making work, beautiful books and music and art that you cannot see or find or read as is drowned out by all the propaganda and noise and adverts and the fear-mongering and the performative cruelty of politicians. It is your job, your only job, to seek out and support and nurture heroes, this is all your responsibility. We can all do our part in the chain, to help others to help others, to help the others who help the others who inspire and help the others.

Salena Godden, We Could Be Heroes

Let me recount all the stars I’ve witnessed in my falling.

Giant stars, congregations of hydrogen and helium angels, combustible godbreath whispered into their divine bounty of being.

In my falling,

there have been other stars,

the city lights of Los Angeles. Illuminated streets and brake-lit freeways, vast as a string of diamonds and blood pearls spilling across the landscape.

There is peace in this falling when your feet aren’t touching the ground, as if you’re smoke, feather, air.

When worry slips away from your being as you hang above the earth—

waiting for it to shift into Tuesday and beyond, and whether the world will lean more towards darkness or light.

Rich Ferguson, All the Stars In My Falling

i decided not to give myself a shot that night.
instead, let the light pass through
my three little testosterone snow globes.
recently my lover asked me,
“why don’t you switch to the gel?”
suggesting that maybe i could
stop taking injections. i felt sad
& insisted i did not want to stop.
it’s hard to let myself
find anything beautiful because
it is always too late. i want
to save my life 3 milliliters
at a time. do not tell me there are
easier ways to be alive. i want the ritual.
the alchemy. another election ad
pops up on my youtube video
& says, “trans gender ideology.”
it is so bad right now that you have
to laugh. i am so afraid to tell you
what i think is beautiful.

Robin Gow, beautiful poem

November 1st saw our first batch of snow here in Southern Finland, just as I was driving my car home from getting its winter tyres and service at the garage. Everything was sorted by the skin of my teeth. I was hoping the autumn weather would hang on for a bit longer, but there’s no escaping from winter. The temps will bounce back up above zero after the weekend, but this was just a reminder to not get too comfortable.  

I didn’t manage to do much of Scotstober this year, but I have a handful of snippets, some poetic lines that I might try to do something with. I’m not getting much writing done, even when I was on holiday. Ideas rattled around but didn’t stick. I can’t seem to focus on writing and I have too many other things I need to do first before I can relax into poetry. Even today I was scanning documents for a child’s school application and going through some course work rather than work on a poem. 

I’m not worried, my writing is cyclical like the seasons. When I have been writing the past few months it’s been autumnal, the fear of winter side-by-side with the love of the harvest season. The geese leaving me behind. Now, when it comes, my writing will be full of ice and frustration with the long, dark winter hibernating behind windows. 

Gerry Stewart, First Day of a Too Familiar Winter

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