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: notes on self-preservation, walking through fire, soundlessly mouthing the syllables for “beloved”, the gunpowder plot, the intimacies of the woods, and much more. Enjoy.
Last night, I dreamt that I had swept under a radiator in an area of the house where I hadn’t cleaned since we moved here. I got on the floor to look under it before sweeping, and I saw a partially eaten apple. It wasn’t even brown; it was a perfect red apple.
According to an online dream dictionary, “To dream about a partially eaten apple means that you’re blinded by something and you can’t see the bigger picture of an important matter. Start looking with your own eyes.”
* *. *
I had one cigarette left when I went to bed last night. My big plan was to smoke a celebratory cigarette in the morning and quit. It’s not that I expected the planet would be saved by a moderate Democrat who refused to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people and the need for a national healthcare system. It was simply a step in a better direction for most marginalized groups, including women.
Instead, I woke up, smoked my cigarette while crying, and bought two packs at 7-Eleven while my husband was walking the dog.
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Feeling Blue?
How To Make An America
• 1 part genocide
• 1 part slavery
• 1 part apartheid
• 1 part supremacyHeat for 400 years
Jason Crane, POEM: How To Make An America
in a pressure cooker,
until the steam
escapes the valve.
Then, holding
the cooker at arm’s length,
carry it to a bombed-out
hospital or school,
set it in the foyer,
take 20 paces back,
wait.
Your voice, imagine it—held in a conch shell, or in the damp cold breath of an unformed wish.
What would it take to speak despite a cut throat, or with lungs fully soaked and drowning?
This is where we meet, then—this place where there’s no air, soundlessly mouthing the syllables for “beloved” since we’ve long forgotten our names.
Lori Witzel, Calling
ELECTION 2024, MORNING AFTER
When even a giant duck-shaped cloud can’t lift my despair
I remind myself to take the farthest distant view.If gravitational force were a billionth of its strength stronger
the universe would have collapsed after the big bang.If attraction between electrons and atomic nuclei were too strong,
atoms couldn’t bond and molecules couldn’t form.Truly, anything in this marvel of existence,
in your marvel of a lifetime, is possible.I know every civilization eventually falls but damn, it’s hard
Laura Grace Weldon, Distractions For The Time Being
to watch its own citizens knock down the pillars supporting it.
I meant to show up today to do a blog-review/appreciation of Ada Limón’s 2011 collection of poems, Sharks in the River. It felt like appropriate reading for this week. (And, indeed, it is.) A woman of color, our national poet laureate.
The problem being, I can’t seem to pull a review together.
Time is not the issue. I am at a 4-day writing retreat on Hood Canal, staying in a cottage at the lip of a cove. Each day I wake early and watch the sun come up. I take at least two long walks during the day and see mergansers, grebes, buffleheads, harbor seals. We have a resident great blue heron, and a resident kingfisher. (When I walk, I think of it as going out to see my kingfisher, and he almost always is there, briefly holding still for me to admire him, then chittering across the water.) I feel awash in gratitude for the consolations of nature. I mess around with my writing, too (not really getting much done), and in the evenings I eat wonderful food and talk with like-minded friends — poets, all. For the most part, we are trying to take a break from politics. But sometimes a fragment slips in, like those intrusive thoughts one gets while meditating, and we gently push it away. Later.
(To take a look at the belted kingfisher, visit All About Birds at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)
Meanwhile, this arrived via email from The Nation, the closing paragraph of a bid to subscribe. Which I may do when I’m feeling a little better. Anyway, it’s a paragraph I have shared with a number of friends, and I think you may need to hear it too.
The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
What an excellent and timely reminder.
Bethany Reid, When Artists Go to Work
Last night found us at a short film screening with a company J has started doing some marketing work for in addition to DJ-ing work. It was about alcoholism and accountability, and fit very well into their mission of making films that have weighty subject matter examined in new ways. All along and all the way home, I was thinking about art and its role in this terrible, terrible, world that is also, quite deceptively very beautiful sometimes. About power and change, and how art is a statement whether it has a clear cut message or no.
It’s been easy to feel, and I know it’s not just me, that as creatives, what we create does not do much beyond, at its most basic level, distract. Or at its best, entertain. Maybe it’s just me as a poet. and a very specific poetry related thing. During Covid, and after, even though I was writing steadily as the year ended, it felt very much for naught. Like, who cares about poems when the refrigerator trucks are lining up to haul away the bodies because there are too many to store?
Kristy Bowen, words and witchery
Because this week withered the apple in my rib cage, I place a spiral basket on the table and ask everyone to fill its emptiness. People dead-fish through their backpacks and pockets: no jug of mums or crusty loaves, no newsprint or candles. Instead a leather bifold and Do-Not-Disturb sign in French. Outside a high window, trees shake their brilliant heads; in here we can only harvest a plastic snake plant. Some slap their stillness into the basket or lob it from two yards down. A notebook silenced by an elastic band. Blunt pencil whose dinosaur eraser bares its teeth. Medication for an emergency that has loomed for years. That most beloved, a glitter-cased cellphone. Why do they trust each other, trust me? I don’t trust them with my trembling hands. For me, it’s the same old skull with shadow eyeholes. Men boast about assaulting women as other men assaulted me, again and again. Beyond the glass, leaves brown as I watch them. Now write, I say, and the poets lean in.
Lesley Wheeler, Shaky & a still life
I posted a couple of days ago on social media that I’m not quite to “You could make this place beautiful” yet. I believe it, and that hasn’t changed. I’m glad to see that some people are in that headspace and heartspace already, sharing “Good Bones.” I know I’ll get there. I always get there, and I have to get there, frankly, in order to parent and write and live. But today I’m here, in another poem from Goldenrod, “How Dark the Beginning.”
Sending love to wherever you are, and thinking about what you might be carrying. Sending love, which is more powerful than anything we’re up against. I still believe that. […]
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalfof the good dark. Let us
talk more of how darkthe beginning of a day is.
Maggie Smith, A Poem for This Day
If you think it’s all small stuff, you are living the calm, protected life of the American middle or upper class. Watching only certain news stations. Unaware that for many people in this country, and in countries with less money or endless wars, there are problems that exceed “small stuff.”
We have a saying at Red Hen: We are measured by how we walk through fire. During the easy times of a marriage, a family, an organization, a community, or a nation, you don’t know who possesses resilience.
You know when you are walking through fire. Who stays the course. Who keeps walking.
In the end, I was irritated by the idea that “it’s all small stuff,” because I was moving mountains. I felt that the obstacles in my life making publishing and literary culture work—the raising of funds for diverse books, the partnerships, the distribution of books, the business itself—all of it felt like Everest, and I couldn’t bear to have my work reduced to anthills.
If I had any idea how hard it was to build literary culture in a city like Los Angeles, to find support and allies, I would never have started Red Hen. But now, I am all in. It is not small stuff.
I am not alone. I have a team of warriors who believe in books and stories, which are more important than ever. Every day, we come to our work believing that we will find more allies to publish change-making, world-shaping books, authors like Afaa Weaver, Douglas Manuel, Amber Flame, and Kristen Millares Young.
We who work to change the world see our lives in grand terms. We are building castles, running up mountains. We are, as they say, “at play in the fields of the Lord.” For me, that means we are doing the work of making room for the voices on the margins, for untold stories; we’re saying, yes, yes, I will build a bookshelf, and a bookstore, and lift your story into the world. We arc and grand and sing and wonder here at the end of the world, hoping to keep it all going, sundered from dark, ready for wild.
Kate Gale, How We Walk Through Fire
Today was another hard day. And tomorrow
Jill Pearlman, After Angel Food
will be harder. Well, we will eat thick soups
with large spoons. Hazard a guess which
swooping shadows are birds, which one leaves.
I once pressed gingkos between pages for the future,
the other day I saw a girl with a gingko necklace.
I love November. The intimacies of the woods revealed through nude branches. I glimpse folds and swells, intriguing vales and outcroppings I hadn’t seen before as I zoom by in the car. Love the smells of damp soil, rotting wood, mushrooms, and the acrid scents of plants I’m cutting down in the garden. The creak of limb on limb with wind through the trees, and the foot’s crunch crunch through the leaves. The transition is over, summer is gone, winter not quite here. This is its own fecund time of settling. For me it’s a time of ideas, of breathing, of signs and divinations. A chunk of rainbow the other day, hefty and pale, missing its arc, but present in all its ROYGBIV against the dark billow of cloud.
Here is a stunning poem by Lucie Brock-Broido. In my panoply of poetry gods who know how to deliver a reading, she’s right up there. I viscerally remember her reading, how she tasted each word, savored the vowels, licked the consonants, allowed the silences. It was a masterwork, how she read. So give this some time as you allow its unfolding. Give each word its due. And the silence.
It occurs to me the day too deserves such attention, the hour, the moment. As much as we can give. “Finished world”? No. Not yet.
Marilyn McCabe, In the clot of darkness that falls on the land. In the thrice-ploughed field, picked
“Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
“Daddy” by Sylvia PlathEvery woman adores a Fascist.
Turns out men do too.
But we imagine the boot
on someone else’s face,
a face that doesn’t look
like ours, the face that arrives
to take our jobs and steal
our factories, while laughing
at us in a foreign language.No God but capitalism,
the new religion, fascism disguised
as businessman, always male,
always taking what is not his.Brute heart, not enough stakes
to keep you dead.
We thought we had vanquished
your kind permanently last century
or was it the hundred years before?As our attics crash into our basements,
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sylvia Plath’s Wisdom
what soft rains will come now?
The fire next time,
the ashes of incinerated bodies,
the seas rising on a tide
of melted glaciers.
Singers need to sing, dancers need to dance, poets and writers need to write, artists need to paint and draw — and we need to do this on a regular basis, with focus and concentration. It’s so easy to let life intervene, and of course, sometimes it has to. But when we’re able to maintain a practice, day after day, week after week, then we can make progress, even if it’s in very small increments.
Our practice is a big part of what sustains us, through the good times in life and the difficult ones. And our practice is what helps us sustain others, whether through our creative work or just by being better balanced and more fulfilled human beings. Sometimes we need to jump-start our practice, and sometimes we need to do a housecleaning, or to take stock and rethink what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. That comes with this territory.
But we can’t let ourselves be de-railed by negativity or the endless opportunities for distraction, even as our hearts are filled with strong emotions from outrage to anxiety to compassion and grief. Today, I’ll work on some more art, and I’ll also play my flute for half an hour, and do some cooking. Over the weekend, I made bread for the first time in a long while. Winter’s coming. We need sustenance in all its forms.
Beth Adams, Maintaining One’s Practice…notes on self-preservation
Around 11:30pm last night, my rage arrived. I’m sure it had everything to do with the fact that earlier in the evening, I read some new poems and discussed the process with a lovely group of undergraduate students. (Like, WOW: a young people wanted to spend their Friday evening, the week of our evil election, discussing poetry.) It was so great to be with them. They brought apple cider and cookies and a bag of tangerines for us to snack on.
Just before I left, I called over four black students who had attended and asked brilliant questions all evening. I told those young women to huddle up. We put our heads together. “I think y’all know what I’m about to say,” I said. They nodded. I asked them to take care of themselves and each other. “This country isn’t looking out for us. But it definitely ain’t looking out for y’all.” I said a few more things that I won’t share here because, frankly, I don’t know y’all like that. Those four beautiful brilliant black women were like “mmhmm, got it, message received.” We hugged and parted ways.
It does… something… to a person to have to have a conversation like that with young people. America, I will never forgive you for making that conversation necessary once again. I spent much of my evening writing and reading, a desperate bid to keep my heartbreak and rage at bay. But it’s here now. It’s here.
And before you comment on this post: don’t worry, I am fully committed to lively long well and richly. Every day that I’m alive and working and breathing, I hope my life feels like a jagged shiv in the side of America’s neck.
Saeed Jones, RIP, “WE.”
Aquaman is battling the red-orange fire trolls who are vomiting lava, while Randy Rainbow dances in a pink satin dress singing MAGADU. It’s surreal. I close my eyes. I whisper to myself, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening,” over and over. It’s raining as I fall asleep.
What if the fire trolls are not as bad as they’re drawn? Who is telling the story, anyway?
PF Anderson, Election Day
This is no holiday, but the neighbor at the end of the street
has unfurled the largest flag across her front porch—it looks so smug, especially the red and white parts
above the flower boxes, an idea of self madeeven more visible for its refusal to remember certain
truths in history. Which is to say, the archive
is full of instances when light was reflected, refracted;polarized, diffracted, scattered. But also transmitted,
Luisa A. Igloria, On the Behavior of Light
as the world is still filled with light-emitting bodies.
As I continue to process and work to understand what’s happening, I keep thinking about something I learned long ago that helped me make the decision to choose a small life: Saying no is always a way of saying yes. We all have finite resources, and knowing what we won’t use them on is as important as knowing what we will. It’s OK to limit, as much as possible, all those tiring things from my life.
If I am not having to use my resources to repair what it takes me to fight causes that are lost before they begin, it gives me more ability to say yes to fight for causes I can win. It means I can nurture relationships and care for those I love (and the people they love); be a good steward of the things that are mine to protect; carefully curate the people and information sources I allow into my sphere; make art; speak truth; pursue health; be kind to everyone I encounter; and cultivate joy for myself and others. I will still be tired, but I hope the right kind of tired.
And look, I—like all of us—am a work in progress. I am imperfect in doing all the things I listed in the last paragraph, and I can hardly bear to go back and read many things I wrote in the aftermath of 2016. There was so much I didn’t yet know or understand then, and it may well be that 8 years from now I will think back to this time and wonder how I could still be so naive and wrong about so many things. But this is what feels right today. We all, always, have the right to change our minds when we get new information.
Rita Ott Ramstad, I am tired
The only thing I know for sure is I am still a writer, so I will write and submit and keep trying to encourage people to read, and specifically read short stories and poetry. I’m supposed to do a class visit soon. Right before the election, the site Poetry Out Loud posted my poem, “Spellcaster,” which is from my latest manuscript which I am now looking for a publisher for. […]
The whole place collapses,
a series of chandeliers made
of glass and ice. Off she goes.Blackberries and currants in her pockets.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Doing Terrible? Me too! Setbacks in Physical and Mental Health, How to Move Forward (with Typewriters and Poems)
Roses blooming in her footpaths.
Wouldn’t you rather be the girl
that casts her own spells?
[A]fter a feast of a bring-and-share lunch, Kari unpacked the treasures she’d brought to show us. Boxes built to contain beach finds, delicate fish-skin bowls, a big book covered in fish-leather and another about ash trees with pop-up birds and end-papers printed from slices of tree, a book about sea-swimming and another about fish, a paper pulp cast of a seaweed frond and a giant hanging leather sculpture. Her work combines imagination, artistry and fine craftsmanship in many media. We were enthralled. As Bron said, “Difficult to sum it up, but she’s expert in many different departments: fish skin tanning, handmade paper, woodcut printing, bookbinding, botanical printing, Norwegian mythology, and all of that combines to make her large enticing books so interesting.” She is very much more than just a bookbinder. But, come to think of it, that could be said of all of us around the table. […]
hand stitching over the lines
with silver words
from the ashes to the new growthshe went down at night
got into the River Parrett
but shadows enhance the workdon’t set off with an idea
ask for the skin
printed with squid inkharvest the reeds in autumn
Ama Bolton, ABCD 9th November
lord of the gallows
god of the hanged
A topical piece this week, because Tuesday was of course . . . Guy Fawkes’ Night! On the 5th of November each year Britain celebrates the foiling of a 400-year-old terrorist plot by setting light to things and blowing them up. There’s something undeniably odd but also psychologically satisfying about this, and I suppose the celebration has endured so long partly because it neatly acknowledges the illicit thrill of mass destruction under the guise of commemorating its avoidance. […]
The Gunpowder Plot is also the source of one of the few surviving bits of political epigram in ordinary English culture, the English rhyme: Remember, remember, the 5th of November / Gunpowder, treason & plot. / I see no reason / Why Gunpowder treason / Should ever be forgot.3 At the time, and for a good century or so afterwards, the plot prompted an absolute flood of poetry. Some of the most original verse responses are the earliest ones. One of my personal favourites is a truly barn-storming long Latin ode by Andrew Melville, an uncompromising elder statesman of the Scottish Reformation. The way he uses long lyric forms for political polemic and invective is not at all classical — for a rough analogy, imagine something like a crown of sonnets devoted to the most topical kind of political invective. This kind of thing is characteristic of the fashionable poetics of the second half of the sixteenth century, but probably already seemed a bit dated (Melville, born in 1545, turned 60 in the year of the Gunpowder Plot.)
I don’t read much good verse invective these days, but Melville had a real flair for it. His long poem — 108 lines and 27 stanzas — is dramatically sophisticated, filled with both direct speech and rhetorical questions. But strikingly, it does not recount or even allude to the foiling of the plot itself — assuming reasonably enough that everyone knows all that already — or the prosecution and execution of those held responsible for it. All of the sinister triumphalism of the poem is that of the plotters themselves.
Victoria Moul, Remember, remember the 5th of November
The cat, words above its head, the shadow and marks on the wall. I’ve felt ambushed a little by November, perhaps in a good way, mostly in an ambivalent way. And the scratchiness, discomfort of William Kentridge’s image, a photo I took two Novembers ago, seems the only way to express this November feeling.
The library books, the gym, the swimming pool, the sewing, picking tomatoes (still – outside) are ways of accommodating the scratchiness, of mitigating it. And it hasn’t been cold, not too grim, a little, but there are months when old festivals make sense and I wish I hadn’t closed the curtains, that I’d stood next to a bonfire reflected in all the windows around a village green, watched wood burn to ash.
Yes, November’s got to me but there’s a lot to do and more in the world to focus on when it comes to feeling.
Jackie Wills, November’s got me
On Thursday, I was a guest poet in the University of North Dakota’s Virtual Speaker Series. I read a variety of my poems and talked about my process of learning (over and over again) to let myself write what I need to write without letting my worries or anything else hold me back. Even via Zoom, they were such a lovely audience and had great questions. I’m grateful to Patrick Henry for inviting me and teaching my work in his class!
Yesterday afternoon, I got to be a guest speaker at the International Memoir Writers Association monthly gathering. I talked about and read from my chapbook 28,065 Nights, answered questions about chapbooks and about how poetry and memoir intersect, and ended with a writing exercise (that got me writing too!). I was honored to be invited to share with this group of kind writers.
Another thing that lifted me away from post-election despair was this: I filled in for a friend’s American Literature class on Friday, and he had assigned readings from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. Re-reading these texts and discussing 19th century women’s rights with a room of college students (all brilliant women) felt so important, and I think it fired me up to face whatever comes next.
Katie Manning, Election Week Poetry Events
i could be
Robin Gow, 11/7
the sacrificial bull who is made beautiful
just before the harvest. we picked
the persimmons. we gathered
chestnuts. it is too late for most kinds
of holiness. instead, we have the meat room
& the knife that is not sharp enough.
Apologies for not having blogged for quite a while but after taking up the guitar five years ago, I decided I wanted a new challenge. So, I went out and bought a banjo. That was back in February and increasingly, I spend my spare time practising. Like my guitar playing, I have no great ambition, but I thought I’d post this haibun about it (first published in Presence, issue 79). Hopefully, it goes some way towards explaining where I’m at with my music – and by extension, my writing!
So, here goes:The Hal Leonard Method Book 1
I buy a copy off eBay and when it arrives, pages 1-9 are creased. After that though, the book is pristine. Whoever owned it before me stopped at Clementine, the tragic song of a miner’s daughter drowned in a stream. The image of her ruby lips, visible just above the water, haunts me.old banjo
the clawhammer tunes
it already knowsI’ll never be able to play bluegrass like Earl Scruggs or sing like Evie Ladin, but when I put the strap of my Goodtime Leader over my shoulder, feel the smooth finish of the rock maple neck, pick each steel string to check the tuning …
oh my darling
Julie Mellor, Banjo time!
every journey
starts with a journey
It was Adrienne Rich who first reintroduced the poet Muriel Rukeyser to me, and to many readers in What is Found There in the early 1990’s. My paperback edition is dated 1993. My copy is marked in three different colors of ink.
The poet today must be twice-born. She must have begun as a poet, she must have understood the suffering of the world as political, and have gone through politics, and on the other side of politics she must be reborn as a poet (Rich 21).
While Rich is likely talking about herself in this package, this could refer to Rukeyser as well. In 1996, the poet Jan Freeman’s, fabulous Paris Press, reissued The Life of Poetry—which Rich had referenced over a dozen times in What Is Found There. I love this story of a poetry friendship across generations. Rukeyser and Rich met in New York—Rich, maybe in her twenties, Rukeyser, perhaps in her forties.
“In many ways, ” writes Adrienne Rich in her Introduction (A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Revised), “Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time – and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: the connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country’s psychic geography.”
Rukeyser was jailed in Washington D.C. for protesting the Viet Nam war. In addition to many volumes of poetry, she published a biography of the physicist Williard Gibbs (which I’ve just started), several children’s books, translations, 3 plays, a novel, and in 1957 produced a film, All the Way Home. […]
I think a lot these days about a life well lived. Is it possible to make a positive difference in the world and have a fulfilling personal life and write, too?
It seems Muriel Rukeyser may be the poet we need the most in this moment.
Susan Rich, The Stellar Life and Then, Rebirth of Muriel Rukeyser—And More!
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I like the idea that good poems–and poetry collections–clarify the question, even if they don’t answer the question. Plus, reading a preachy collection can feel abrasive, for me. It’s a fine balance of wanting poems that provide solace and some answers, but not too many.
Current questions for me are: How do we slow down and why can’t we? How do we stay as present as possible? How do we contribute to a less violent world? How do we not sink into despair?
The questions evolve with each poem.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think they do have a role, but that doesn’t mean that all writers fulfill that role. It feels hypocritical to me, to do otherwise, as in, to believe in the power of words (to whatever extent) and not speak to larger cultural moments that need attention, advocacy, and change. This doesn’t mean that all writers need to write about the exact same thing at the exact same time, as much as use their voice to advocate for pressing issues that affect everyone.
For example, I’m inspired by writers like those in the Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG), who have spoken openly and advocated for a return of hostages and an immediate ceasefire in Palestine.
I think writers have a duty to choose what matters to them and express it. We can’t have opinions about everything, sure, but we can acknowledge violence where we see it, always.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allie Rigby
Stevie Nicks – the witchy, rock and roll goddess who carved out a 50+ year career with Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist – continues to delight and intrigue music fans. From her sold-out tours to provocative new music, Nicks remains a vital force and beloved figure in the pantheon of rock and pop culture. As the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, she’s set records and broken barriers. Her number one hit “Dreams” helped make “Rumours” one of the best-selling albums of all time, its legacy enduring across generations.
Nicks is also a poet at heart, with many of her most famous songs beginning as handwritten verses in her notebooks, which she occasionally shares with fans. Her music continues to captivate new audiences with ethereal ballads and powerful rock anthems, striking a chord with all ages and becoming the soundtrack for viral videos and memes across social media. Her candid reflections on love, addiction, and the music industry’s ups and downs continue to cement her status as a cultural icon. […]
While we love platform boots, swirly shawls and messy affairs, we want to see poems that go beyond the headlines to explore how she has personally influenced you as a poet. Absolutely NO rewrites or reinterpretations of the Stevie Nicks song catalog. There is a reason “Dreams,” “Edge of Seventeen,” and “Stand Back” are iconic—there’s no need to mess with perfection.
Collin Kelley, Submissions open for “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology”
16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence first came to my attention a few years ago via social media, and I’ve experimented with various things over the years – I think one year I posted one poem a day on my blog from my sequence “How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping”, (from my first collection The Art of Falling). This sequence explores my own experience of domestic violence.
We’ve had an an amazing time designing a programme of events featuring writers that I believe put transformational social change at the heart of their creative and writing practice. All of the events are free and there is a mix of in-person events, online only events and two hybrid events.
I am really excited that on the 25th November I’ll be reading alongside Laura Bates. This event will be hosted by Malika Booker. Anyone that knows my work knows that Laura was hugely influential when writing my PhD thesis and the two books that came out of my thesis (All the Men I Never Married and Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism). This is a hybrid event – there are limited tickets available in person so if you are planning to come, you should book soon.
There have been times this year when it feels as if we are in a landscape of violence, and I’m taken over by a the feeling of hopelessness. There has been so many of those flashpoints of hopelessness this year, that feeling of being overwhelmed and as if nothing you do matters. I felt that landscape of violence closing around me, as if was not just the ground I walked upon, as if violence was in the air. But that is not true – there are good people in the world, despite all the stories we hear to make us feel as if this is not true. It’s times like this that I want to surround myself with people I love and writers I admire whose work burns with urgency, who dare to believe that poetry, and writing can change something, if not everything.
Kim Moore, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence
The 7th was the anniversary of the launch. I’ll not go back over that again, but you can read about it here. I will re-iterate how grateful I am to everyone involved in getting the book out there: friends, family, editors, typesetters, fellow poets , publishers, readers, people that have been to readings in the last year (often there is crossover between these groups – they aren’t always discrete, or discreet for that matter).
I’ve not really been keeping track (and I should), but I’ve sold a good 90 or so copies here. I think Red Squirrel have done similar (Subs to check), so I’m happy as a lamb in a field of new grass. I’ve read on the same bill as a Carpenters Tribute act, at an open mic with a death metal singer (last Saturday), and a host of excellent poets. I’ve been paid to read once or twice. I’ve definitely not broken even on any of those occasions, but I’m lucky enough for that not to be a major issue. I certainly understand how it could be for others, and that unpaid gigs that can’t cover transport costs (as a bare minimum) are not great. Would that the work of arts funding or punters that want to pay to watch poets/buy books was greater than it is now, but let’s not get into that now.
Anyhoo, happy birthday to Collecting the Data. There are copies left if you want one. Here’s to whatever comes next. I’ve certainly enjoyed reading from you, and to now mixing in newer poems. I think there are only 2 poems from CtD that haven’t been read live yet.
Mat Riches, Celebrating the Data
I recently returned from a week in Mallorca. It was our first proper holiday in about seven years, so I was ready for it. Partly we were there to visit family who live on the island, partly we’d decided to just step out of life for a week, reset, do nothing but soak up sun and listen to audio books, walk, eat, drink. It worked a treat. I have come back refreshed, with a clearer perspective on some of the things I was finding exhausting before I went, and how I need to work with my creative brain and all its strangeness, and my fluctuating energy levels, rather than trying desperately to fight it. […]
We walked around Palma, ate tapas on sunny terraces. I did not have data roaming, so could only access my internet in the hotel via their free wifi. It meant I finally severed ties to TikTok, it meant I couldn’t check emails, or compare myself to other writers on social media, or plan and plot what I should be doing. I found myself writing short stories in the scrappy notebook I’d brought with me. I found myself sketching daily, I even joined a life drawing class and sank into that delicious space of creativity that is absolutely key to my happiness, my survival.
As the week progressed I could feel the anxieties rising away from me. Breaks like this, where you do absolutely nothing – not catching up, not planning, not decluttering, are absolutely key to assessing your life. They are so hard to come by, so hard won. I wanted to make this break work. On the plane journey home I began thinking about parts of my working life that had become unmanageable, and how there had been a habit formed of a continuation of ‘putting fires out’ rather than addressing why the fires kept starting. I began setting up some new systems of working.
Wendy Pratt, What I Brought Back from Mallorca – adapting my practice to suit my chaotic brain
The four volumes of The Collected Prose cost £50 each. Volume One is the best: it’s packed with brilliant literary journalism, witty and precise in its judgements, not yet weighed down by fame and respectability. Running up to 1928, it also includes various suggestive comments about the country Eliot left, aged 26, in 1914. Here are a few.
[Americans] like to be told that they are a race of commercial buccaneers. It gives them something easily escaped from, moreover, when they wish to reject America.
“In Memory of Henry James” (1918)The idea of “escape” here — in a tribute to Henry James, the American novelist who settled in England — echoes the famous claim that Eliot would make the following year in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
Poetry is […] is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
We might say that one of the personal qualities Eliot was trying to “escape” in his poetry at this time was being American: Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922) are notable for how they exchange the claustrophobic Boston of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) for a haunted London. In an unpublished prose poem, “The Engine” (1915), written as Eliot crossed the Atlantic to see his family after marrying an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, he imagines the other passengers as a cubist nightmare of “commercial bucaneers”:
Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine.
The speaker of the poem then retires to his cabin to think about the ship sinking.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #24: Blurb, Dope, Boost
Since 2012 I’ve done a complete list of books read in the year. I generally have add demographics of writers to make me conscious of who I read so I don’t read all old dead white American men but include in my view everyone else.That desire got a wrinkle when reading fan fiction since it is like old usenet days where people have handles not visible identities for gender or nation or any other marker. I think that’s good. It prevents me from getting fixated on ratios or quotas. I want to read not just current books but voices from the 1800s and before to balance my filters. I like to read works in translation to inform my perspectives. I want to read not only poetry that I default to, but memoirs, science, history, novels to inform that project that is Build Self. I want to include easy reads and hard stretch reads.
Pearl Pirie, Fav reads 2024
This volume features selected poems and writings from 1999 – 2024, which covers ten collections of work, by Paul Robert Mullen. Critic Robert Sheppard provides an introduction which quotes Lutz Seiler talking about Paul Bowles, “You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.” Sheppard goes on, “This seems an apt way of talking about the poems of Paul Robert Mullen, where what he calls ‘a lifetime between two covers’ is transmuted into a song, a song that is intensely personal, though not necessarily flagrantly autobiographical, or where autobiography has become song, a distant echo of fact. Mullen no longer tells the story: he offers us that condensed sound, that song, that story of the sound of the poem.” He reassures readers that this “does not mean that a writer keeps on writing the same poem over and over”. It’s a chunky book, helpfully split into 10 sections and best read by dipping in and out. Mullen favours the sparse, minimalist approach which gives readers space to absorb and think.
Emma Lee, “it’s all come down to this: a retrospective” Paul Robert Mullen (The Broken Spine) – book review
Alt text says this week’s photo is: a book on a colourful blanket. I say it is My Humming Bird Father by Pascale Petit on a hexiflat blanket made from left over wool from a vast array of projects and designs by my lovely wife. I loved spreading out the reading of this book over a week and finding different places in which to read it. I saved the final hour of reading for a sunny courtyard in Bakewell while Kath was teaching a knitting workshop at a yarn festival. It felt good to finish reading in the open air. It never ceases to amaze me that I see a film of the book in my head as I read, and I loved watching this one unfold. There is a poetry to the prose of the storytelling here and the images are strong as the story reveals itself.
This week I am particularly glad for social media and the community of people I have connected with there. Without it I might have missed the fact that Todmorden Literature Festival was bringing together Pascale Petit, Joelle Taylor and Andrew McMillan. All three are poets whose work I love, and all three have recently published prose books. I swear when I checked the location on my phone before booking tickets it was an hour away, but it was actually an hour and a half. Not sure what happened there, but it was a lovely drive to a wonderful town for the perfect immersion in time and space for thinking, listening and laughter. It felt like being part of a conversation even though we were listening in.
Such very different books and so much to whet the appetite for reading. I love listening to the process writers use to get the words set down, and it resonated with me when the authors talked about the difference between editing and redrafting novels compared to poetry. One of the things I love about poetry is that to redraft it you can read it from beginning to end in a short space of time and sense how it works as a whole. The contrast of doing this when working on a novel had us laughing at the very thought. It also reminded us that writing each day might be particularly useful for a novel to ensure the characters were not left hanging and the plot went in the direction the author wanted.
Sue Finch, POETRY AND PROSE
Rob Taylor: The opening poems in Crushed Wild Mint establish parallels between prayer, ceremony and poetry. For instance, from “Nearshore Prayer” (one of four poems in the book with “prayer” in their title):
This is a prayer that extends
in the direction of the ocean:
it is not a story; nothing
is apocryphal in prayerDo you consider poetry to be a form of prayer? A poetry book a form of ceremony?
Jess Housty: I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving.
RT: Yes, that’s so well put. I think of poetry books as spaces of (usually non-religious) communion, though we rarely talk about them as such. Connected to this, in “Bowing to Yarrow (1),” you write about “the directionality of prayer,” which “is moving all around us and through time,” so that a prayer given by an ancestor to a licorice fern or a cedar is returned to you anew by the plant in the present day.
I think something similar about poems—that they are not simply given to the reader by the writer, but co-created with the reader, then they are passed on to others and the process begins again. What is given is always traveling out and returning. I’m curious, now that Crushed Wild Mint has been published, how you think of your poems moving through the world. What is their directionality? How do you hope they might come back to you, or the generations that follow?
JH: I love this. I learn different complexities of my own poems when they’re reflected back to me by readers who are generous enough to share with me what they felt when they read my words. People who take in Crushed Wild Mint from a distance pull out themes and ideas I can’t always easily see when I’m so close to my own writing. The most surprising part of offering a book to the world is realizing that there is no final iteration—there’s always a chance that the light will refract in some unexpected way for someone, or that a new echo will bounce off the walls of the valley causing me to see and hear and feel my own words in a deeper way. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable knowing that I can’t control how my writing lives in the imaginations of others and to trust that this brings unpredictable nuance and richness to the practice of poetry. When I take a deep breath and trust that the world will be tender, it feels incredibly liberating to think of poems as conversations.
Rob Taylor, A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty
oh to be eclipsed
Jim Young, oh to
to meet another poet
who outshines me
to climb another step
to the stars
Some mornings I wake to a golden, slanted light filtered through dense fog. It softens outlines, blurs the houses on my street, and mutes the noises of my neighborhood.
This is when I feel my mother’s presence. I release my tears to the foggy air.
I’ve learned some new things about grieving. For example, sudden attacks of heartache are called “grief bubbles.” When I hear that term, I think of myself as a kid, ignoring my mother who is telling me that the bubble I’m blowing will pop and cover my face in sticky goo. It does indeed pop, and I spend the next thirty minutes scrubbing pink gum off my cheeks, pulling it out of my eyelashes, and combing it from my hair.
I see my mother as a young woman, handing me a washcloth to get the last bits of gum from my face.
Erica Goss, Bubbles, bacon and rainbows: the hard work of grief
scuffing through
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: November ’24
fallen leaves
breathing November