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: hard rain, thoughtful grunts, vagaries of the heart, a family of dreamers, and much more. Enjoy.
It’s been a while. I’ve been coming through things, and still am, but here I am, writing again.
In the café at Wrexham General station, the kind barista is putting up the Christmas tree while I drink my morning coffee. I choose to take it as a sign of hope.
It may snow before November is out. I will love again the way snow falls through the street light outside my living room window.
And I’m listening to Haydn’s first cello concerto on ear-pods. It drowns out the hiss of the coffee machine. Moderato – cheerful, adagio – poignant, then upbeat allegro to the resolution. Three movements. Three moods. Nothing authentic can be expressed in a singularity.
I move through things by sitting still, writing, going with the music.
Liz Lefroy, I Write Again
My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy Fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected to look is not going to help matters. I’ll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)
I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, “You can’t make socialism without socialists.” Likewise, you can’t make democracy without (small ‘d’) democrats.
Dale Favier, Contraction
The fact is that you cannot have a social democracy and support a massive military budget at the same time. You cannot have a social safety net for all citizens, and also have a corrupt government that’s completely enmeshed with, and beholden to, corporate, military, and special interests, including foreign ones. You cannot reward corporations and the wealthiest individuals with tax breaks, power, and influence while the citizens who keep the economy going through their labor become poorer, and increasingly feel that they have no voice. And you cannot wage endless wars that destabilize other parts of the world, or fail to deal with climate change as the global emergency which it is, and expect other countries to shoulder all the burden of refugees fleeing desperate situations.
Into that situation of growing inequality, instability, fear and discontent rode Donald Trump, with his promises and lies, his anger and threats, ready to say whatever played the best to his audience, willing to subvert the law, and democracy in the process. It makes me think of a marriage that’s been failing for years, but the husband has been so busy and satisfied with his outside life that he’s refused to see the signs. Then one day, the wife comes down the stairs with her suitcase, and tells him it’s over; she’s leaving with Mr. Right. He’s astonished: “You’re such an idiot. You can’t possibly think he’s going to take care of you or treat you better than me! He’s a liar and a cheat, and everyone knows it!”“Yes,” she says, “maybe that’s right, but you’ve been calling me stupid and fat and lazy for years. I’ve worked hard forever. I’ve told you what we needed to do to keep our marriage going, but you wouldn’t listen. There’s barely enough to pay our bills, and you’re always giving money away to strangers I don’t even know! Now I just want to feel some hope and some pride again. He may be everything you say, but he understands me, he seems to like me, and doesn’t talk down to me. He understands why I’m so angry and scared. I just want to try it. I want things to change.”
The husband can’t believe it. “What about your commitment to marriage? I thought you believed in it.”
Beth Adams, The Price of Arrogance
”That’s just a piece of paper. I want to feel better.”
”Wait and see,” he says. “You’ll come running back to me. And I’m sure we can work something out.” She walks past him, out the door, and then turns for a moment, “By the way, I’m taking the car and the keys, so you won’t be able to drive for a while.”
The roofing guy last week, the night of the election, told us that a new roof will come with a 50-year guarantee.
“Well,” I said, smiling, “that’s nice, but we sure don’t need one to last that long.”
“What?” he said. “What do you mean?”
I smiled. “Oh,” I said, “I guess we’ll be dead before the new roof gives out.”
He laughed in the way people do when they are startled and uneasy and don’t know what to say. I might have said something to smooth the moment over, but even then, even before we knew what was going to happen later that night, I had become tired of the ways in which we all avoid uncomfortable truths. Cane and I have entered the stage of life where, increasingly, we know that we might be purchasing some things for the last time. It’s unlikely that we, personally, will need anything to last for 50 years now. That’s just a fact, one we are both making peace with.
*
It can be hard to know the true beginning of something. If I told you that the water leak and all that came with it was the beginning of the end of my previous marriage, it might seem absurd.
It might be absurd; I can trace the fissures in our union back to its very beginnings—can even trace them back to before there was any kind of union at all. But the breaking of it? I could make a case that it began with the water leak and how we each saw and responded to it.
By the time everything in the house was repaired, all evidence of damage erased, the kitchen nicer than it had been before that October day when we finally learned what the bump was all about, the marriage was too far gone to save. Hard things happened during the months of repair and reconstruction, and then more, different hard things happened (a home invasion, a friend’s terminal illness, major surgery, a grandmother’s death). Interpretations of those events and their aftermaths were shaped through a lens created by the water leak.
You know how people lately like to say of great changes that they happen slowly, then all at once? After the bump and the mold and everything that followed them, I became aware of all kinds of leaks in our life. I saw how quickly everything could change if we didn’t repair them, how a person could leave for work one morning and not return to the same home in the evening. We were all fine, in the sense that we were all physically safe, but it does something to you when you are told you have 15 minutes to gather whatever you think you will need and don’t know when (or even if) you might return.
It changes you.
Rita Ott Ramstad, It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
I still sometimes imagine your face rippling beneath the surface, peering at me from pothole puddles and glasses of whiskey – your lips lifting and lowering in ambiguity. Your freckles, miniature galaxies of melanin, spiraling over cheeks. Pale eyes pin pricks of confusion.
Your sister and I skipped school together, hid on the floorboards of her rust-pocked truck, her fingers entwined in your long red hair as she held down your head, tires slinging gravel out the gate after the bell. We’d spend the day smoking weed and sketching, you showering us with Fritos and reading Moby Dick out loud.
You were the perfect foil for our willful ways, the tether to our hot air balloons. We wallpapered those crumbling walls with our trippy imaginings and your favorite passages, wrote our names in decades old dust. But for you we might have ended up in a ditch somewhere, might have become the drowned ones.
They say shafts of sunlight set your hair afire even as errant strands languished in sediment, in a turbid haze of creek and twisted metal. Your sister used to say,
“Be kind and the universe will take care of you.” – but it didn’t take care of you, the kindest boy I knew.
Charlotte Hamrick, Aqua Pura
I still believe in “keep moving,” the way I still believe—must believe—that we could make this place beautiful. We can, and we must, despite it being an uphill climb that just got a lot steeper. “Keep moving” is what we’ll do, because what choice to we have? Giving up isn’t an option. And—not but, but and—I also believe that taking some time to be still, to listen to one’s own inner voice and to listen to others who are grieving, is essential. I want to move forward with purpose, intention, and care. I’m giving myself permission to slow down, to keep the door to my heart open, and to see what steps inside.
I’m listening hard, the way I might after hearing a sound in the woods. My experience tells me that sometimes the answers to difficult questions are whispered, and I don’t want to miss them.
Maggie Smith, On Stillness
These past days feel to me, in some ways, similar to the early weeks of Covid lockdown. People (including myself, those immediately around me) seem raw, a little shaken and bewildered, like they’ve woken up to find the wind has blown their tent down on top of them, and they’re pushing and pulling to find the shape of things, to locate the pieces they need to prop back up their fragile shelter.
Also the same: A common desire to reach out to those most vulnerable, to support those most at risk, coupled with the need to care for the people in our own homes, families, neighborhoods (sometimes these two groups are the same or overlap).
What’s blessedly different is that we can, safely, reach out to each other now, rather than further atomizing in our separate spaces, behind our separate screens. We can hold potlucks and book groups and hiking trips and dance parties and teach-ins and game nights and funerals. We can stand or sit alongside each other. Hold hands.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tangled in the Tent
I am
Saeed Jones, “My Project 2025” A New Poem By Me
pulling the voices of people I desire
and love and trust and worry over
into me. I am inviting them into the bright
dark of my soul. I am gonna live forever
because all the money I touch looks at me
and says e pluribus unum, out of many,
one. I am the water Jesus drank in the desert.
I am god talking to herself. I am evicting
America from my body and making room
in the borders of my black bad bitch body
for everyone I was sent into this life
to love loudly.
I dreamed that Trump had asked me to be in charge of the Department of Education. In my dream, I thought, I don’t have the experience to do that.
I woke up thinking, well, I have been teaching since 1988, so there’s that. And in the days since that dream, as various cabinet candidates have been announced, I’ve thought of that dream and who has qualifications to lead which parts of our national government. I still think that I don’t have the right kind of qualifications to lead the Department of Education–that person should have K-12 teaching experience.
Of course, I will not be asked to be part of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and if I was, I would say no. I hope to avoid that kind of toxic workplace going forward. I feel incredibly lucky to be responsible for teaching, not administration, and that’s how I want to end my working days. I am under no illusions that “I alone can fix it.”
In fact, in moments of despair, I have doubts that anything can be fixed (see hurricane in North Carolina mountains). But then, through the magic of technology, I see good theatre, and I am once again inspired to write.
Last night, we watched Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a play I read long ago in high school. It was the 2019 London production with Sally Field and Bill Pullman, and what a performance! The play, which was written in 1946, still feels fresh and also timeless.
It also reminded me that I’m teaching the American survey class next term, and I am so looking forward to that. In these days where there’s so much happening to upset us, let me remember how much joy we can still have: good literature, good teaching opportunities, good theatre, and vegan creations that give us autumn in a casserole!
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Friday Gratitudes Two Weeks Before Thanksgiving
What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.
Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:
“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”
Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).
Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.
Bethany Reid, Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?
A few months ago, I had a meltdown. Societal and political discourse – not only where I live, but everywhere – has become so troubled, so vitriolic, so angry, so polarised and so polarising that I became overwhelmed by words. It felt, and still feels, as though everyone is shouting but no one is listening. No one takes the time to ask thoughtful, constructive questions, to examine assumptions or consider nuances. Humility and compassion seem to be absent.
I retreated from words. Silence, always precious, became even more so. I stepped back from social media, withdrew from poetry communities and book clubs, ceased tuning in to the news and consciously limited my reading. I cut back on social engagements. I stopped writing.
Instead, I sought refuge in the natural sciences. I turned to equations.
Like passages of text, equations contain their own resonances, depths and layers of meaning. We can think of them as visual poetry. Yet they transcend the egocentric world view that preoccupies us much of the time. Their symbols, letters and numbers represent our efforts to understand, to seek coherence in a vast and complex universe.
Marian Christie, The Poetry of Equations
My college roommate, Tara Polek, who helped get me through Organic Chem and went to UC basketball games with me, who moved from Ohio to Seattle just like I did, who was the smartest, kindest children’s cancer researcher ever, passed away.
I feel like this is where I should have poetic thoughts, but I’m still mostly in sad mode. Tara had two young children and a husband, and I never heard she was even sick. In college, she was the friend who, when I caught pneumonia and the girl across the hall had to be airlifted to the hospital with even worse pneumonia, never even got a sniffle. She ran—for fun—ever since I knew her. She spent her entire life doing cancer research. I wish I had told her how much her 30-year friendship meant to me while I still had the chance. […]
One thing that the death of a good friend will do is make you reconsider your life and where you are in it. At 51, I have spent too much time in the last decade in doctor’s offices, not enough having adventures, traveling, seeing the world. The world seems to have shrunk, especially since the pandemic, and now, with the election, it seems more dangerous than ever to just elect the status quo.
So, I signup up for an online class called She Hits Refresh, about women over thirty moving out of the US, and I’m researching grad schools, cities, visas, vacation time, disability, and medication rules. It’s been my dream for a long time to live in France, and besides that, visit England and Ireland.
On top of that, I’m sending my next manuscript out to new publishers. I’ve got be braver with my art, and my personal life. I feel like I’ve seen my life shrink and I don’t want that to define the rest of my life, or my writing. I don’t want to live in fear.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, When You Lose Old Friends, Interventions at the Zoo with Snow Leopards, and Contemplating Changes in a Supermoon
It was a good run, better and longer than I could have imagined, and yet I’m still somehow surprised that it’s over. I thought I’d be the one to turn off the lights.
Sorry, I’m not trying to be cryptic here. About a month ago, I guess, I changed my bio on the few places online where I post. I added a “Ret.” to “Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus.” I considered changing it “Emeritus” but that’s too academic both for The Rumpus and for me. Retired is the appropriate term.
I was with The Rumpus almost from the beginning. It was December 2008 and Amy and I were back in San Francisco for the first time since we’d moved away 3 years before. Amy had an interview at MLA and I met up from some old friends from my time as a Stegner and they told me I should meet a bunch of them later at a bar in the Mission to talk about this online magazine Stephen Elliott was starting because they were looking for someone to write about poetry occasionally. […]
We went live for real on January 20, 2009. Kind of a slow news day as I recall, though there was a bit of controversy on the internet about a poem by Elizabeth Alexander read during a ceremony that morning, a controversy that required (not really) a response from the new poetry columnist at this website that had just gone live.
So that was the first thing I wrote for The Rumpus. Not a column of links, though many of those would follow. Nope, I wrote a response to the reaction to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.” (I didn’t even have to look that up.) I dug up the poem Robert Frost actually wrote for JFK’s inauguration (which is just goddamn terrible) as opposed to The Gift Outright, which he recited when the wind blew his papers all over the place. I looked back at the offerings from Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (who was one of my professors at Arkansas where I did my MFA) and came to the rousing conclusion that, as inaugural poems go, Alexander’s was pretty good, given the competition, and was certainly poetry no matter what some Impressive Critics had claimed.
It was published as the top story on the site for a little while. Maybe a day? Nothing stayed at the top for long in those days. And I have no idea how many people read it. But a day or two after that, I got an email from Stephen asking me if I wanted to be poetry editor instead of just a columnist. I’d be responsible for soliciting and editing book reviews and occasional essays and I’d still have my column and no we wouldn’t be publishing poetry yet but keep it in mind.
I almost said no. Seriously, I was torn about this. I’d never edited anything before, I’d never written a book review, much less solicited one. I had no idea how I’d even get books to reviewers. I’d never even heard of an ARC. So I mentioned it to Amy and she was like “Of course you have to do it are you nuts?”
Brian Spears, Time and The Rumpus
So, in the video he talks about the Law of Assumption. This is different from the Law of Attraction, which, as I understand it, focuses on bringing something you desire to you. Positive thoughts attract positive experiences, etc. By contrast, the Law of Assumption encourages you to operate under the assumption that you have the thing you seek already.
Here is an example. You seek to have your poem published in The New Yorker. The next step would be for you to spend time envisioning exactly what that feels like. Close your eyes, picture a specific scene. Let’s say it’s the day the issue comes out. Imagine yourself holding the magazine in your hands. Where are you? Who is with you? What does the glossy paper feel like on your skin? How is the light falling across the page? What does your name look like in that magazine’s print?
In other words, the idea is not just to fantasize about getting your work in this magazine. (Or getting the fellowship, the grant, the teaching job, the dream journal acceptance, etc.) But really, go deeply into the specific moment of its occurrence. Live it out in your mind.
There is actually all kinds of neuroscience that explores how the brain does and does not distinguish between lived experiences and imagined ones. As one researcher has put it, “Neuroscience has discovered that imagination and perception rely on overlapping brain circuits.”
Anyway. I watched the video. Thought, Huh, that’s cool.
The next day, I was in the sauna at my gym (my thinking place). I thought, Hm, let me try that visualization-assumption whatever thingie. Can’t hurt, right?
What happened was the following. The simple act of trying to visualize what I wanted forced me to articulate what it is that I do want. As if my brain said, Okay, you have ten minutes to picture something. Anything. What is it you truly want to picture? What matters to you? Really.
I realized in that moment that the thing that truly matters to me as a writer is readers. Awards and acceptances are amazing when they happen. But to me, there is nothing like someone reaching out to tell you that your work meant something to them. To me, that’s it. That’s the gold star. That’s why I do this work.
For you, it might be different. Each one of us has our own path, our own vision. We all have to satisfy various demands and yearnings. But to me, in that moment, it was connecting with readers that I found myself focused upon.
I also realized, as I sat there, that I had not done a public reading of my creative work in a very long time. Could it be ten years? No. But maybe? Close? I moved from a big writing community in one city, had a baby, then there was the pandemic, then we moved again…and lo and behold it’s been maybe close to ten years since I’ve read my work in public.
I remembered that I used to love doing that. Hearing the laughter, the thoughtful grunts, the intakes of air, the listening. Creating something new, something alive, right there in the room with an audience.
So that’s what I pictured. I closed my eyes. I pictured the stage, the dark room, the rows of people in chairs in front of me. I knew the exact outfit I was wearing, felt the weight of my necklace, the white paper in my hands, the white glow of the spotlight. I heard my voice in the mic, felt the smile around my words, the excited jitters in my knees.
Then I left the gym and went home.
Two emails were waiting for me.
One was from a Facebook friend, not a writer, who used the contact form on my website. He was reaching out to me out of the blue. He’d found my stories online, wanted to let me know how much they meant to him.
The other email was from an old friend. She said she will be visiting my area in April. She wanted to know, would I be interested in doing a reading with her?
I kid you not.
This same day.
Less than one hour later.
Now, two things. First, some of you are thinking, well, that’s not a big deal. Writers get emails like that all the time. But I do not get emails like that all the time. Like I said, I have not done a public reading in nearly a decade.
Second, you’re probably thinking, well, that’s just a coincidence.
And yes. I agree. Obviously. It is a coincidence.
But I think perhaps that is the whole point. Visualizing very clearly what you want allows you to notice coincidences as they happen. Arguably, it is the noticing of these coincidences that allows you to feel that things are working for you.
Becky Tuch, Q: How woo-woo are you?
Turning to my own work, I wonder: what is the role of dramaturgy in a memoir in verse? How does the poet create the distance required to invite empathy, without eliciting pity, or demanding privilege?
I am looking to Schechner’s idea of “Restored Behavior”. While he analyses performance, I can see parallels to the written word: the ecstatic element in automatic writing, and the reconstructed events of first and second drafts. After all, aren’t theatrical rehearsals essentially sequential drafts?
History is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study. — Richard Schechner
A lot of dancers have said that dance itself is a language. But language is also a dance. It can move the spirit that would move the body.
I wrote about my Trauma Box last year, unpacking and repacking it after my cancer diagnosis. Some things become little more than artefacts, conjuring soft aches and compassion for the person who put it in the box for the first time.
Maybe the distance of time alone is enough to make a biographical work inherently a work of verbatim theatre.
I knew this person when.
Her narrative is meaningful.
But none of us owe her anything.
Ren Powell, The Trauma Box Redux
six thousand years we lay
face to face
in a fierce embracelimbs twined together
as twins in the womb
we two entombedwith flint weapons
Ama Bolton, Contextual 31: a virtual reading
sharpened for the afterlife
arrowhead dagger knife
Among things from the intersections of yesterday’s notebooks, scribbled in a parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama, between pages of [Giorgio] Agamben’s self-portrait and the uncertainty of my own.
I have many times thought about writing a book that was only the proem or postlude of a missing book. Perhaps the books that I have published are something of this sort — not books but preludes or epilogues. (Agamben) I winced. Like blinking away the thought that hurts. As if to pick it up with a tiny pincer and drop it outside on the asphalt. The feeling of touching, not touching. Flamenco, and what the dance wants . . . is nothing like writing. The dance seeks to avoid the hand that could slow it or mold it; heat is the friction of what could happen. But you can smell the other dancer; they are not an abstraction. “Tangibilia”; from tangibilis, “what can be touched, is palpable.” On the object reduced, tamed, made familiar by the encyclopedic enterprise. Margins where semiotics creep in.
A writer’s secret lies entirely in the blank space that separates the notebooks from the book. Hypervigilance; hygiene of grammar when editing begins. Will do nothing with October’s Sacrifice to Priapus. So-called. As if naming itself provides evidence of its existence.
Alina Stefanescu, Agamben, and the self-portrait of notebooks.
“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning”
Giorgio Agamben on poetry, When the House Burns Down.What luxury, this rage!
It keeps me hot and vital as any
heart medication. First the human project,
then the sputtered failure of words.Bereft; the minutes and hours
Jill Pearlman, Continue to Speak this Dialect
of flame give way. My desire fades,
no rays of sun light the heartbreak.
And J T Gillett is still writing his last poem somewhere in the vicinity of Ashland, Oregon. And talking of J T people, I think of J T Edson and all those paperback westerns and I find a photo of him on-line with mutton-chop whiskers and the information that before he died at the age of 86 he wrote 137 novels from his house near Melton Mowbray and sold more than 27 million copies. When he was feeling good he would write a novel every six to eight weeks. Before he hit on writing for a living he was an army dog trainer for 12 years. His first book wasn’t a western at all. It was Hints On Preservation If Attacked By A War Dog. He also ran a fish and chip shop and was a postman. He said he’d never even sat on a horse and had no desire to live in the Wild West. All this stuff comes from Wikipedia by the way. I only remember the Corgi paperbacks that were everywhere. I read one once sometime around 1968. Thought it was crap. I like J T Gillett’s This Is My Last Poem though or at least the version of it that’s in a book called Ends & Beginnings edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that I bought for six dollars second hand in 1999.
Bob Mee, THE WAKE AND OTHER SCENES FROM LONG AGO
Last night, I was thinking about Novembers past and all their pitfalls and was trying to remember what was happening in November of 2004, somehow impossibly two decades ago. I decided to scan through the most recent files and see if I could get a feel for that fall. Its tastes and textures. One thing that stood out to me was disappointment over the 2004 election and Bush’s re-election. Little did we know things would get ever so much worse.
Also, there was, at the forefront, my book fever struggles. At the time I had completed what I thought was book #1 in late 2003, but I was also going through a lot of evolution and learning new things as an MFA student. Just reading a lot more contemporary poets who were influencing me in various ways. I was coming into a fall where I felt like people were just beginning to notice my work, having won a fairly large contest in the spring and starting to do more and more readings. That initial book wound up being just half of the mss. that eventually got a publishing deal a year later. The work itself was rough, but getting better. I was working on the errata project for a hybrid class, which was changing my basic style in new ways. The version I turned in was a little corset book that you unbound to read it. A year later I also issued a chapbook version.
The book fever may seem, in hindsight that is 20/20, ridiculous–the poring over contests, the money and effort spent. I managed a couple of close calls and then found a publisher in a very old fashioned way. I queried, submitted, and they said yes. The result, the aptly named the fever almanac, was a beautiful book and a great start to my publishing career. Of course, all the handwringing about never finding it a home was bracketed by frustrations over suspect contest winners and bottlenecks. I was determined to self-publish if no one wanted my strange little book. Having both traditionally published and self-published these past two decades, its amusing to me that the latter is where I actually cast my lot these days, mostly due to control over when things are released and just making more income from my work than conventional royalties allow. I also just write A LOT, which means finding that many publishers would be more exhausting than just issuing my own titles as they are completed.
Overall, I was more trusting, more passionate, more enthusiastic in these entries, so they feel strange to have been typed out by my fingers all those years ago.
Kristy Bowen, from the long lost xanga archives
I needed some rest from exertion and from social media, so I’m re-reading Les Misérables. In which Hugo seems to be trying hard to convince readers that compassion and goodness can be awakened in the hardest of hearts through the process of gentle persistence and genuine decency. Radical decency, as a friend of mine put it. Well.
I won’t write that off as an impossibility, since lord knows many things that seem impossible are not. But yes, Hugo was writing fiction, and one turns to fiction for escapism but also for reference, and for understanding human actions and feelings, and for perspective, and for information. I just completed Richard Powers’ Overstory, which offers a vast range of perspectives on the above-mentioned and adds ecology and forest infrastructure and the psychology of groups into the mix. Novel-reading has been giving me a sense of overarching historical range that lifts me a bit from my too-close focus on my own small life and my ability to sustain hope and make art. That acts as a form of recuperation, if you’re me.
This week, though, happens to be full of poetry. Tomorrow, I’m attending a reading at a nearby public library, where I’ll see many poetry colleagues, the sorts of folks who create a community of local writers. Friday, I’ll be reading with Montgomery County’s Poet Laureate, my friend Lisa DeVuono, at the retirement community where my mother resides. Saturday, I’m heading down to Philadelphia to read with another long-time poetry community in celebration of Philadelphia Poets, a long-running zine established decades ago by the late Rosemary Cappello.
Ann E. Michael, Recuperating
I’ve been a keen poetry reader all my life, but one thing I still don’t quite get is the point of the ‘pamphlet’ (or ‘chapbook’). These are small collections typically of between 15 and 30 poems, not usually running to more than 40 pages, and generally — as ‘pamphlet’ suggests — simply stapled rather than bound. Publishing a pamphlet, either via open submission or through success in a ‘pamphlet competition’, has become a pretty standard way of launching oneself as a poet. Wikipedia quotes Jackie Kay as saying that a pamphlet ‘has always been a good way for new poets to reach an audience’. This seems to be the received wisdom — it’s a way of finding your audience. But can this really be true in any significant sense? I read — and, crucially, buy — loads of contemporary poetry in both English and French, as well as many poetry magazines, and even I almost never buy English pamphlets or chapbooks. For the first perhaps 15 years that I was reading poetry pretty seriously, I don’t think I even knew they existed. Pamphlets are hardly ever stocked in UK (or, I assume, US) bookshops so there are almost no chances to browse them and pick up a few on a whim, which you might think would be the point of a smaller, cheaper category of publication, and they are only very minimally reviewed.
Does anyone at all who is mainly a reader (rather than a poet themselves, scoping out the competition) actually buy the things? I would love to see some sales data, or even anecdata. (Do you buy them? Please let me know in the comments.) Or is publishing a pamphlet really just a kind of rite of passage, aimed only (really) at catching the attention of editors and judges. Perhaps it’s the tiny poetry world equivalent of the way in which junior academics are expected to publish at least a couple of articles in scholarly journals, which in 99% of cases almost no-one at all will actually read. Such articles may (though probably won’t) eventually be cited once or twice by other scholars working on the same extremely specific topic, but really they are there to establish that you are a bona fide scholar who has been assessed as such by several more senior scholars in a few bruising rounds of peer review. Publishing them gives you a crack at an academic job and/or a contract for a monograph or an edited collection.
As any academics reading this will know, the problem is that the skills and techniques required to write an excellent, or even reasonably good, article for a specialist scholarly journal are actually quite different from those that you need to write a good, readable monograph with an overarching argument or perspective — even in the case of monographs published by scholarly presses and aimed primarily at fellow academics and advanced students.
Victoria Moul, What’s the point of pamphlets?
I’ve been happily giving away my writings for years to appreciative readers locally and around the world, but I’m sad to say I didn’t believe anybody would actually pay for my work. “Nice book!” I imagined them saying, followed by “Oh — you want how much? I’ll … I’ll think about it.”
Actually I don’t have a book, but recently I did make a little magazine and (smothering my doubts with courage) I hawked it at a small local poetry reading. I went with an attitude of objectivity — a market study of sorts. Would anyone be interested?
And the answer was … yes! :- D
The theme of my first issue is lo-tech — a nod to the unplugged life and to a time when “digital” referred to an LED watch and little else. The analog era was also a time where the only intelligence was human. The world was a simpler (though not necessarily better) place back then!
Bill Waters, This & That: A Creative Writing ’Zine (Issue 1: Lo-Tech)
I don’t know if you’re the same as me, but when reading a poet’s debut publication, you look for those qualities that have drawn the attention of a publisher. In the case of Desmond Childs and his The Vagaries of the Heart (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024), I believe it is his original perspective on one of the great enduring themes of poetry and his ability to produce economical, layered poems. In this chapbook of six poems we find Childs engaging with the nature of that elusive emotion that has fascinated and challenged poets through time, love. In the first poem, Verities Gown, he writes about the idolisation of the object of our affection and the inability to repress such powerful emotions. In Yield and Jig he brings alive the excitement and fulfilment of a loving relationship and in the aptly named Fracture, We’ll Meet Again and Stone he describes the effects of the end of love. […]
Jig, my favourite poem, with which the chapbook ends, portrays a more complex picture of relationships through the use of the extended metaphor of the ‘jig’. The poem opens with the line ‘with her tune, she bound me/ her melody’. The comparison of love as music evokes its captivating, sensual quality, perhaps drawing on Shakespeare’s notion of music as the food of love. Interestingly, however, Child, unlike the Bard, uses the verb ‘bound’ to describe its effect. Not only does this suggest the compelling nature of his attraction, but it also implies loss of power or agency. The object of his affection is in control: an idea given further development in the remainder of the poem. We are told ‘she played the tune’, that she ‘subdued’ him, that he is metaphorically tied up by her (‘she wrapped heart strings around me’) and she brought him to his knees. These are not romantic images. He is totally subjugated by his feelings for her and there is something of a feeling of loss. This is reinforced by the poem’s concluding sinister lines ‘she drew the bow and slew me/ I dance a deathly jig/ to the tune that she plays me/ upon her violin.’ Whilst the bow is one for a musical instrument, it also references cupid’s bow and arrows, evoking the all-consuming love he feels for her that results in the death of self: she ‘slew me’. Childs suggests that love may be a jig, a joyful, wonderful, exuberant emotion, but it also, as one of the other poems suggests, necessitates ‘yielding’, a loss of control, the end of a former life.
Jig is a fine poem and displays Childs’ strengths as a poet. There is much to be enjoyed in The Vagaries of the Heart. At a time of crisis in poetry publishing, it is reassuring to find small poetry publishers like Hedgehog Poetry Press providing debut poets like Childs an opportunity to see their work in print. Long may it continue.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Vagaries of the Heart’ by Desmond Childs
I discovered two of my favorite love poems in high school. The first is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. It is easily recognizable, and many people can quote the first line. I remember reading this poem in junior English with Sister Angele. (She used it as a cautionary tale about boys who say mean things about you behind your back even if they are nice to your face. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, and the nuns were always very concerned about our boyfriends. It was a little bit weird, yet a little bit sweet.) Shakespeare famously lists all the attributes of his mistress that do not match the beauty ideals of the time, yet uses the closing couplet to say she is valuable and rare. In this way, the negation in the main body of the sonnet turns from insult to inspiration.
The second is a little more obscure, but means a lot to me. It was given to me by a good friend who said that he saw me in the poem. […]
In [John Frederick] Nims’s poem, the negative aspects of the poem’s subject are alternated with her virtues, giving the reader a picture of a real human being with flaws, one who is seen and loved despite them. I am clumsy and awkward, and as a teen I was often unpredictable and felt out of place. (I still do in many situations.) But to know that someone recognized me as a person who was welcoming to others, kind, helpful and witty; as someone who exuded love for the world; as someone who brought laughter and joy to others? That was a gift, one that has stayed with me.
But writing a love poem can be fraught with worry. Will the beloved recognize the intention? Appreciate the images, the sentiments? Will the poem be interesting enough for anyone who is not the beloved? The concept of negation is one that is especially tricky. How do you ride the thin line between fact and insult? (This is something that the Nims poem does particularly well – even the negative aspects have an air of charm about them.) Well, you’ll never know unless you try.
Donna Vorreyer, From Dissing to Kissing
It’s been a while since I read Chris Edgoose’s admirable and enticing review for The Friday Poem, here, of Geraldine Clarkson’s second full collection, Medlars, available to buy from its publisher Shearsman Books here (with free p&p, might I add); and therefore about time I bought and read a copy. That I have now done, and what a deferred pleasure it was and is!
Mystifyingly overlooked for the major prize shortlists, Medlars is simultaneously both a state-of-England-post-Brexit collection and one which explores the nation’s folklore and psychogeography. It does so in rich, often tongue-twisting language; the wordsmithery of Shakespeare by way of Raymond Queneau and even, perhaps, ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin.
Matthew Paul, On Geraldine Clarkson’s Medlars
“Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” recalls family stories and heritage from ancestors along with the necessity of remembering in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide (1915-1917). “Morning Stories” starts with a speaker, a granddaughter, begging for stories from her grandmother,
Gram said, My grandmother made kufta
with me, and I carried lunch to my grandpa
when he worked in the fields. Sometimes
she rode the donkey, other times a horse.
Gram said never ride a horse, or a camel!
And we never did, in our Boston neighborhood.I watched her story unfold in my mind.
Her final day home, when she and her sisters
returned from school and found the family murdered,
the locked church set on fire. A silent village now,
except for soldiers that gathered the survivors.They walked from their mountain village,
part of the desert death marches,
thirsty, eating grasses and weeds,
anything they found.
Two sisters fell in the desert,
three trudged on to Aleppo
and onward from there, survivors.It’s noticeable that grandmother’s story about taking lunch is in reported speech, a story actually told. But the story of the grandmother as a girl coming home to find her family murdered, is not in reported speech, but something the granddaughter/speaker pieces together and imagines. It’s a story the grandmother does not want to tell and it becomes a known secret with grandmother not talking about it and granddaughter not letting on that she knows. Or at least knows the facts and has to imagine the emotion.
Emma Lee, “Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” Elaine Harootunian Reardon (Finishing Line Press) – book review
Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?
Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it.
Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma.
Rob Taylor, A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock
I was the guest for the Madrid Review podcast last week. Grace Caplan was the interviewer with all sorts of unexpected questions, leading to discussions on belonging and estrangement, on the difficulties of translation, and on the genesis of my new poems that are in Issue Two of the mag. And I even gave a reading of them! You can have a listen to the podcast on Spotify via this link.
Matthew Stewart, The Madrid Review podcast
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff
It’s a book of statements by poets about poetry. I’ve added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page
Tim Love, “Don’t ask me what I mean” by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)
- “the concept of poetry … as self expression has always repelled me” (John Heath-Stubbs)
- “a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all” (P.J. Kavanagh)
- “The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses’ hooves – bizarrely impressive, but finally useless” (Craig Raine)
- “Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result”, (R.S. Thomas)
- “I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left”, (Peter Whigam)
- “In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards”, (Hugo Williams)
- “one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn’t get a lot worse”, (Hugo Williams)
- “Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match”, (John Hartley Williams)
- “Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves”, (Christopher Logue)
I often say this in workshop, when you put something in a poem, even if you are describing a literal event, it becomes metaphorical. The reader might think of it as emblematic of something deeper.
This poem appears in Susan Rich’s book Blue Atlas, which centers around an abortion that the speaker of the poems had thirty years earlier. When I spoke with Susan on the podcast she said that originally this poem was titled “Self Portrait with Abortion and Beesting.” Even though the speaker doesn’t put it in the title or say it directly, I could tell that this poem was about more than just a beesting. The sting is a metaphor for other emotional hurts, the hurt of a losing a relationship, being coerced into an abortion, and about other hurts the speaker may not even be able to name. […]
The bee is bathing in a “galaxy of purple aster” when she accidentally elbows it. They accordion and then they seperate. But here the poem becomes about something else.
“We’re both shaken / by the brokenness of surprise.” This is about more than a woman encountering a bee or wasp. The phrase is about all surprises. It’s strange wording makes me wonder, are we broken by surprise? is a surprise just anything that breaks us? It’s an odd and intriguing way of describing the encounter and it elevates the experience from a singular instance in the garden to a more general meditation on life.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Self Portrait with Bee Sting by Susan Rich
I keep thinking about that scene
in The Morning Show where Chris
wrote ABORT THE COURT in pink pink lip
stick my house floor hort monster my abor shun
my aborted fast blood slipping out
of a woman’s sacred body I never write SACRED
it’s toosacred
big or small or big tied with green garden wire
thump thump a war in the capital city is moving
SSslip sliding under my floors flooding out intoall you beauty
all you strong
all you sacredwomen
bleeding for the land
Rebecca Loudon, red november
In my recent article about being a neurodivergent writer, I described finding it much easier to run – rather than participate in – workshops. When I teach and facilitate, I know what’s expected of me. I have a clear role, which I’ve practiced and finessed over years. I’m confident and comfortable – and I know won’t be bored.
I don’t experience boredom passively; it’s not the absence of entertainment. It’s an active state, akin to severe thirst. It hurts, physically – a sort of painful anxiety. When a facilitator stalls the start of the workshop to wait for late arrivals, when introductions drag on interminably, when the same voices are allowed to dominate, when the facilitator talks and talks, when there’s lots of theory and much less writing, when everyone reads out their work at length – my anxiety builds from pulse-racing alertness to sweat-drenched, frozen fear. Making the decision to attend a poetry workshop is a serious business for me.
As a participant, I absolutely have to be interested. And to allow myself be engaged, I need to feel safe: to know what is going to happen within the session, when it will start and end, when the breaks will be. Most importantly, I need to trust the facilitator – are they kind and authoritative, informed and prepared? Are they committed to the wellbeing of the participants, are they excited by the subject they want me to engage with? It’s frustrating that my anxieties and hypersensitivities, my struggle to concentrate and keep still, can stop me from taking part.
That’s why I’m interested in learning from other neurodivergent learners how they manage to engage; and I’m delighted to hear examples of accessible and exciting workshops and courses – not least because workshops which are accessible to neurodivergent learners can be the most engaging for all learners.
I’ll offer you my own example: on November 9th, I went to an online workshop run by Georgia Conlon – Happily Ever After – which as you might expect, took fairy tales as its leaping off point. It’s part of a series of “Material Girl” workshops … with Georgia as the facilitator who supplies us with endless material for our poetry.
I worked as a mentor with Georgia earlier this year. I’ll write more about the mentoring experience in another post – but in brief, it’s an intimate, committed relationship, so I only work with people I like, and whose work I respect. I admire Georgia’s work very much – especially how she tackles challenging subjects through form. She’s also an experienced teacher and tutor, with her own “Prompts for Poets” podcast series, which offers creative ideas and prompts to help you with your writing. A quick scan through past episodes – celebratory festivals through Nina Mingya Powles “Mid Autum Moon Festival”; magic realism in Richard Brautigan’s “Boat” – evidences wide reading and really interesting choice of poetry and subjects.
It’s a rare workshop which keeps me engaged throughout, and Happily Ever After did just that – through Georgia’s ability to quietly yet firmly hold the space and guide participants through a series of really interesting prompts and discussions, in a workshop which felt rich and full, rather than rushed. In two hours I wrote five poems, two of which will be included in my next collection. Result!
Kim Moore, The importance of being interesting
You have a career background as a Clinical Psychologist. What inspired you to become a Clinical Psychologist? How has your career as a Clinical Psychologist influenced or inspired some of your poetry?
I was always fascinated with people and their lives. I could have become a writer, but it’s rarely a sustainable profession. Psychology was the route I took. I loved it. I see a lot of overlap between those two choices, so one fed the other.
In your book Sea Trails (Lummox Press, 2009) you include poems based on your 1977 sailing trip in your 22-foot sailboat and you include portions of Lognotes and charts. Where did you go sailing on this trip? What initially inspired you to become a sailor?
I loved the ocean and wanted to be out on it, riding the waves and wind. It takes skill and courage, at times, and that appealed, too. We stopped at multiple harbors. Best to read the book for details, still on Amazon, but we left from Boston and ended up in Florida. We anchored out, except for bigger grocery runs. I loved secluded harbors. Some of my favorite non-secluded stops were Newport, Block Island, out to Nantucket (rich people’s haven, and breathtaking), City Island before the run down the east river past Manhattan, including a day in Manhattan, all through the Chesapeake Bay- such beauty, and then into the waterway with such exciting places as Albemarle Sound, Savannah, St. Augustine, and all the interesting places in-between.
Jacob D. Salzer, Pris Campbell
その奥に梟のゐる鏡欲し 正木ゆう子
sono oku ni hukurō no iru kagami hoshi
an owl resides
in its deep place
I want such a mirror
Yuko Masaki
from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, March 2018 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 16, 2024)
Iris Murdoch—you know I love her—said that a bad review was about as interesting as whether it is raining in Patagonia. I tend to think about rejections this way. (Except: isn’t it interesting whether it’s raining in Patagonia? Shouldn’t it be, to a poet? Anyway, anyway…)
But here is the thing: I think about rejections as uninteresting when I am at my healthiest: mentally, physically, spiritually. When my chronic pain in under control, by some seasonal miracle/existential lottery. When my mental health is bobbing along like a rubber ducky in relatively calm bath water. When I’m not dwelling, to quote one Anne of Green Gables, in the “depths of despair.”
Roll back the camera to 2022, when I began trauma therapy, and found myself wildly outside my window of tolerance. I was hypoaroused after therapy sessions, which basically translates to a numb or dissociated state, which required (for me) a lot of processing time spent listening audiobooks and sewing. This whole year was not a good time for me to be submitting and receiving rejections on creative work—the emails literally made me flinch, and I deleted them as swiftly as possible—so I stopped sending work out. My inbox became peaceful, and my mind with it. I safeguarded myself, as much as I could. I wrote a little, but mostly I listened to audiobooks a LOT: Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—books I could not have read before the therapy itself.
Consequently, in the year following this intense therapy (2023), I published a single poem. It was in a small journal (shout out to River Mouth Review), with editors I knew and trusted. Which brings me to my first point: I was in a survival state in 2022, and I reeled myself back and in, made my world smaller. It felt safer. For those of you coming back to writing after an absence of any kind, it might feel good to start with smaller journals, or a journal with an editor you know and trust, OR you might feel great sending your work out to a wide variety of journals. Do what feels best to you at that time, and be open to the fact that you will feel differently at different times in your life: moving, changing jobs, having a child, elections, health events, new school—any life events also affect how you feel about your writing, yourself, who you are, what it means to be you in the world, sending your work out, sharing it with others. Be gentle with yourself as you recalibrate, as your life changes. It is yourself that you revise.
Han VanderHart, On Rejection and Dwelling in Possibility
I find myself connected to the physical land around me through the interface of my body, and that gives me the same thrill as being connected to the fast, organic rush of writing a poem. Perhaps they are the same thing. […]
There are lives here
that I will never know:
the hand that cut the tangle free
the fish that witnessed its descent
the people walking past
on the beach where it is washed up
in blues and greens.It is too heavy to remove.
I leave it where it is
and worry about its dangers
for days afterwards.I become a part of its story.
Wendy Pratt, Found Poem/Beach Walk/Found Poem
Everyone is shell-shocked from the recent election. I kind of expected it, but to be honest, I can’t summon up much emotion towards its aftermath.
I’ve been on this slide into disbelief, dismay and depression after most elections since the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. Even the Tories being ousted this year felt hollow as I knew Labour wasn’t going to do anything differently, and the SNP faced significant losses.
Now, I just kind of hang around in the numb depression area when it comes to politics and society. I can’t summon up hope in the run-up and don’t feel the raging disappointment others feel when it all goes badly.
I don’t have the energy really, my personal plate is full. I’m balancing so many things for my kids, my own four and the sixty-plus I care for at school. Their needs are my full-time job, my focus is always turned towards them.
And then on the way home from work last week, I received a phone call that dropped another weight onto the pile. A small bump on my nose was found to be skin cancer. I’ve had it for years, but it was beginning to grow and change so I wanted it removed as it’s ugly and annoying to me. Both the doctor and I were surprised by the results. […]
So with all that’s going on in the world, selfishly I’ve turned my thoughts inward even more, towards the people I care for and even towards myself for a change. I just have to keep moving forward, holding so much afloat, as if there is a future for my kids worth moving towards. To give them the foundation and the skills to keep moving forward themselves.
And poetry is left to fall between the cracks of all that. In the summer, my editor said we would try to get my book out in November and, of course, I haven’t heard from him since. After 5 years, I can no longer summon any enthusiasm for his promises. My other collections have been declined by 15 other publishers this year, yet I submitted to another publisher this week.
Gerry Stewart, Turned Inward But Moving Forward
After I sent the book off, I went downstairs in a daze, and sat on the sofa and poured a glass of wine and watched the US election, or perhaps we could call it another episode of the end of the world as we know it. Then I got a phone call from Holland that a very dear friend and big sister of mine died, just as they started calling Trump the winner. I felt it, all of this, at once, letting go, saying goodbye, the changes and shifts, happening out there and in here, all at the same time. Needless to say, I finished the bottle of wine, and wept with you and the rest of the world.
We have so much work to do, to continue to do, but we know that. The work is continuous, the work is the journey, the work is the point, the work is what we were born to do. I cannot ever imagine thinking that all the work is done out there in the big world and in here in my world of words. We live in a work in progress, we are a work in progress, growing and learning and loving.
As for the book, this grassy new-born foal trying to open her wet eyes and stand on her wobbling legs, the new book ‘The Life of Life’ will be published in 2026 with Canongate Books. It feels so far away and in a future world. Who knows who will be here then? Who will read books, who will keep fighting the good fight for books, who will keep championing libraries and indie bookshops and find funding and platforms for all of our beautiful poets and story tellers and for literacy and humanity … and who knows what happens next to our worlds and words and hearts.
Salena Godden, The End … which is a beginning
The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all the terror and tenderness of knowing ourselves in order to know the world, of loving ourselves in order to love the world.
That is what Native American novelist, poet, and children’s book author Louise Erdrich offers in “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance,” originally published in a special edition of Orion Magazine — a poem evocative of Derek Walcott’s classic “Love After Love,” of Leonard Cohen’s lyric reckoning with resistance, and yet entirely original for the simple reason of drawing from the freshest spring of the universal: the most deeply personal.
Maria Popova, Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance
It is a small miracle we can still hold
Luisa A. Igloria, When We Gather
gatherings around the kitchen table,
share meals of soup and bread and rice
piled on breakable platters. Here are
perhaps the first of those days we thought
would never come— war at every window,
drought kindling fires through evergreen
forests; men in suits and ties trading
our bodies and freedoms for a world
shrunk to the proportions of their minds.
But here we are, offering prayers to our dead,
sharing what they taught us of ritual and
remembrance—fruit for sweetness, water and
oil for balm; garlic and onions for strength.
2 AM: a completed poem
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Fifteen lines is one quintain two many
a sated silence
a full moon in the sky, a full moon in the lake
only the poet –
empty, awake