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: apricity, toxemia, yahrzeit, isopods, ekphrasis, and more. Enjoy.
A paper cut, then a dark
red bead—heme, the color
of rust or a bookkeeper’s debits.
The oxidizing wick lit from lungs
to toes so we can burn, then burn
what’s left on our funeral pyres.
Living has its costs—debts that
can’t be repaid, all I can do
to rebalance those books is to
ask forgiveness. Still it’s not
enough to lift the stain.Overhead. The sky, not needing
Lori Witzel, Overhead
payment, opens its treasure to me.
We had a once-in-twenty-year bomb-cyclone storm that killed two people, injured many others, and left almost a million people without power, internet, or cell phone service. We were out of power for four days and tried to tough it out with our propane generator, but eventually went to a hotel downtown to shower, have power and heat (our house got down to 50 degrees, which is chilly!) But even there, the internet and phone weren’t working normally. I am now back at home, buried in emails, laundry and dishes, cleaning up, etc. It felt a little apocalyptic here, especially considering the bad news of the last month. What’s the old saying? “Cheer up, it could be worse!” and sure enough, I cheered up and it got worse! […]
But I am happy to say I had three poems appear in the gorgeous new issue of F(r)iction, pictured at left with a snuggly Sylvia (who hid all the days the power was out? She doesn’t like her routine interrupted, which I understand). My three poems were accompanied by art by Tyler Champion. You can order a subscription here. This issue is the “Dreams” issue.
In other literary news, I found out after I got home that local treasure (and really sweet human) Lena Khalaf Tuffaha had won the National Book Award for Poetry, and Percival Everett (long overlooked) had won for fiction. And I’d been rejected again for the NEA. So good news/bad news.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Bomb Cyclones and Power Outages, New Poems in Friction, Practical Plans for the Future, Doing Something Positive in the Face of Despair
November cold
Sue Finch, PUT THE BACK OF YOUR HAND ON YOUR FOREHEAD AND WIGGLE YOUR FINGERS
is bone cold,
chalked moon cold.
November cold is fragile echoes
for the poet who does not like petrichor.
November cold says,
winter’s coming,
clouds your breath.
November cold has the indistinguishable
scent of trees riding on the air.
November cold
is rain cold,
faintly herbed.
November cold says,
the poet who does not like
rain on dry ground is a fruit fly.
November cold
is metal cold
spiked cold.
If you’re in the area then I hope Storm Bert hasn’t done you any harm. My street WhatsApp group is alive with attempts to locate missing recycling boxes, so I think we’ve been fairly lucky. The fence between us and one set of neighbours is still up despite it being wobblier than a drunk on a tightrope. Bert did stop me going for a run today, but I can’t deny the urge to sleep in may also have played a part. […]
Let’s look at the poem for a bit. There’s an instant clarity to the poem in the way it jumps in straight away, as if the mists have parted. The ‘And it all appears’ is a master stroke of an opening because you could be like I was three minutes ago and think it’s a praise for that feeling, or you could be like me about 30 seconds ago and think actually it’s wrong-footing you because everything hangs on how you read “appears”. Is it coming before you or is it a sleight of hand? Oh, that is good. Dammit…I still favour the former option, but I like the uncertainty of the latter.
Mat Riches, Top Bins
Somehow at the same time
PF Anderson, Yahrzeit
sitting and standing, you
lean towards me unmoving;
you are still and trembling;
you gust into the air
like light and ashes. Winds
carry you through kitchens
and whistle over your
mountain. The air is clean
and dry, hot and cold. You
are silent. You crackle
with electricity.
Timorous or bold are the first three words of Seamus Heaney’s famous (to me) ‘Elegy’ for Robert Lowell. They’ve been on my mind a lot recently. The strange thing is, I had remembered them as coming at the end, in a great flourish of ‘lift-off and surprise’, which is another of Heaney’s phrases, this time from an essay, also about Lowell. But no. Memory is not what it was (was it ever?). I wonder if this is due to the apparent lunacy of the moment we are living through. I also wonder if this is, in part, self-inflicted, arising from my need to live it, as Derek Mahon would say, bomb by bomb, lie by insult by resignation by election victory. There isn’t a person I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks who hasn’t at some point told me said they just need to step away for a few days in order to stay sane.
Which takes me back to the poem. Timorous. Or bold. If I temporarily check myself out, does that make me the former or the latter? Seamus, I want to say, is it always a binary choice? He said once, about his early poem ‘Digging’, that it had something of the gunslinger about it, and for all his craft and guile I think it’s a trait he could never quite bury. (Personally, I don’t mind this in a poem. I was, after all, brought up in the Brethren.) ‘Elegy’ possesses this same quality: it ends with the words ”I’ll pray for you.” So I’ll ask again: can’t I be both? Can some of us not be both?
Anthony Wilson, Timorous or bold
The November breeze wafts through
Charlotte Hamrick, Morning Meditation: November 22, 2024
my window, a long lick across my face
of moisture more productive than any
expensive cream advertised in slick
fashion magazines. What I’ve learned
is, all the promises of wrinkle-free
skin come down to our empty hands
and a stream of money in their pockets.
Instead, I embrace my hard-earned lines and
the sweet caress of nature.
The sad news that Jürgen Becker (1932-2024) died recently at the age of 92 was particularly poignant as I have been translating his work for the past 3 years. I first read about his poetry in an essay I was translating by Lutz Seiler (published in In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2024)). There, Seiler characterises Becker’s work as ‘a process that integrate[s] both immediate and more distant modalities of language, his own voice as well as materials drawn from other sources such as events, photos, maps as well as interjections from neighbouring rooms, from the mail, the news, weather conditions and whatever else stray[s] within range’ (my translation). History, politics, the importance of recording ‘small things’, an extraordinarly porous kind of poetry – these were the aspects that drew me to his work (as a writer of my own poems as much as translator).
Becker’s ‘typical’ poem works at length, resembling a stream-of-consciousness, but better thought of as a kind of collage or montage. His effects are slow-burning, allusive, even elusive, and I don’t think his work is likely to top any UK chart of popular poetry any time soon. But his revered status in Germany is remarkable and I have actually had a couple of successes recently with my translations: a Highly Commended in the 2024 Stephen Spender Trust Translation Competition, judged by Taher Adel and Jennifer Wong (with the poem ‘Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains’), and one of Becker’s longer poems in translation being published (‘Travel film; re-runs’ – see below).
Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the writer often returned to his childhood landscape. I have concentrated my translation efforts on Becker’s 1993 poems in Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium, published by Suhrkamp. The full translation is due to be published by Shearsman Books in 2025.
Martyn Crucefix, Two Poems by the late Jürgen Becker
Often when I’m reading contemporary poetry in English I feel impatient with what feels like a kind of complacency, a readiness to be satisfied with mere description. I want poetry that does more than just describe, even precisely and beautifully, because the best prose does that too, and arguably (often) better or at least in a context that is more engaging and sustained. I want music, some sort of structure aside from and in counterpoint with that imposed by the ordinary rules of English syntax, the pleasure of form or of narrative (or both), and some tonal interest. I want to have that feeling of irreducibility and completion.
Or perhaps — sometimes — I just want it to be more in a way that is not really possible in English and the feeling of fretful dissatisfaction is linked to linguistic constraints. Some of the most perfect poetry I know, after all, is largely ‘pure description’. Kalidasa’s Meghadūta, written probably about 1600 years ago, does have a “plot” of a kind, but it’s a pretty basic one: a certain yaksha (a kind of nature spirit) is living in exile on Rāmagiri in the Vindhya mountains. After eight months, he sees an enormous cloud on the peak of the mountain. Realising that the cloud will move north, towards his home and his beloved wife, he asks the cloud to be his messenger (Meghadūta means ‘cloud-messenger’) and convey a message of love to her. Essentially the entire poem — 121 four-line stanzas, all in the same metre — is taken up with his description of the route the cloud should take and how he should identify his home when he gets there.
Compared to most (all?) contemporary poetry, this is an extravagantly artificial poem, in which nothing actually happens. But it is both ravishingly beautiful and profoundly satisfying — satisfying in a way that makes 99% of contemporary work feel like the merest froth. As Goethe remarked, ‘The English translator of the Cloud Messenger, the Meghaduta, is deserving of all honour, since a first encounter with a work of this sort marks a date in our lives forever’.
Victoria Moul, The poetry of pure description
I saw her smile.
Sitting alone on a green park bench.As if she was dreaming a happy poem.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The poem at 16:00 on a random Thursday
(But what is that?)
Or found the right words for something
more desperate, more evil, more macabre.
Or remembered a woolly line from a poem that
was fully formed in the middle of the night
but vanished with its commas before the sun.
We’ve been wandering around, there and here, over the past little bit to help promote our new books: her hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here] and my On Beauty: stories, (University of Alberta Press, 2024). You should pick up copies if you haven’t already! I mean, they would make great holiday gifts, I would think. […]
On Sunday, November 17, Christine and I did a reading together in Kingston, alongside Kingston poet Allison Chisholm, as part of Wanda Praamsma’s Drift/Line Series (the last of the 2024 season), with a musical set by Kingston musician Megan Hamilton. Allison mentioned upon stage that she’d manage to forget her glasses at home, so I made a point to only take blurry photos of her (out of respect, of course). Her reading was great! Such small, careful, delicate poems (although she should have read longer). I’m hoping there might be a further book on the horizon at some point, soon. [see my review of her debut here]
Christine was, of course, remarkable. You really need to hear her read from this hybrid/memoir collection [you can catch the video recording of her incredible performance as part of the Ottawa launch here via the Ottawa International Writers Festival, in case such intrigues]. It was lovely to be hosted by (and hang out a bit with) Wanda! And it was great to see local folk, including poets Jason Heroux (above/ground is soon producing a collaborative chapbook between him and Dag T. Straumsvag), Armand Garnet Ruffo (reading soon at VERSeFest, you know) and Eric Folsom (whom I have now known for thirty years! he was good enough to pass along a recent chapbook of his I hadn’t yet seen). It was a packed (admittedly small) house! A lovely time had by all. Although, exhausted by adventuring (and the prior day’s ottawa small press book fair), we crashed pretty early, and drove immediately home the following morning (where I delivered Christine back to work around noon). A day and a half or so of regular, before we’re all back up into it.
rob mclennan, some recent adventuring : someone editions (Toronto) + drift/line (Kingston) (and Calgary tonight, fyi
I am looking forward to reading with Marc [Janssen] at this Head for the Hills poetry event. If you happen to be around the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, come and hear us read. Let’s celebrate together and give thanks for the written and spoken word.
I often ask myself why write poetry? The answer always returns to me in the words of poet Christian Wiman. “Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both”.
So poets all, come and listen or read your own poems. Let us fully inhabit all the worlds we find ourselves in.
Carey Taylor, Head for the Hills
And today the magic is heightened
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Trees, magic, kindness
by the warmth of the winter sun
and the word I have learned for that:
apricity. The consonants sparkling
on my tongue as I feel the heat
on my face, stepping over puddles
wearing their wrinkled coats of ice,
and take the track towards home.
Business as usual seems beyond me right now, and I’m daily amazed by the advertisements that make their way into my email-inbox—including from writers merrily chirping about new classes and life changing strategies for writing “your next best-seller!”
But here’s me. Dropping some of my 2024 goals, downsizing from the usual blog reviews, but still reading poetry and still wanting to share amazing poets with you, particularly the ones who are sustaining me just now.
We Had Our Reasons, a Washington State Book Award winner from 2022, is one of the books I keep picking up.
This community effort was created by poet and translator Ricardo Ruiz. On the cover, we find not only Ruiz’s name, but also: “and other hard-working Mexicans from Eastern Washington.” It was published by Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing (Seattle, WA).
Each poem appears in the language of the writer (or collaborator), and in English translation. […]
The voices of the poems vary. Many are young, sounding a bit like any suburban kid dealing with divorcing parents, Game Boys, attempts to buy beer. Some, like Centavo, work alongside their parents in the fields. Many of the voices sound to me older, worn out with work and trying to keep families together. Ruiz’s own poems often address his service in the U. S. Military. The profiles of the collaborators are in prose, in the back of the book. We Had Our Reasons has a cumulative power that moved and educated me.
These are the people who will be threatened with deportation in the coming years.
Bethany Reid, WE HAD OUR REASONS, Ricardo Ruiz
Days go slowly for the lucky but go all the same.
Outside, children chatter and laugh
as they study online a topic entitled
Great Snowfalls Of The Past.And there’s the man – honestly, I know
Bob Mee, LONG POEM: MEDITATION THAT FLOWS ON A SNOWY DAY
you won’t recognise him but it is him –
exhausted by memory,
as the snow thickens and freezes.
He sits by the river, watches the water flow.
The past one way, the future the other.
Everywhere I left, he says, I left in shame.
My low mood continues, for a number of reasons: the recent political news, the continuing wars, my mother’s consistent decline, the drought, my physical distance from my grown children on the other side of the continent, a friend’s death, a bunch of recent poetry rejections, the fact that I can’t go into a store without hearing Christmas music…granted, some of these reasons are not earth-shattering but the effect is, well, cumulative. Han VanderHart’s recent blog post speaks to the rejection, reminding me of things I know and should keep in mind. The challenge is just getting through and occasionally finding delights at which to marvel, for the delights surely endure. Ross Gay’s Book of Delights is my book group’s next selection, a book I’ve read before but which–at this particular moment–will probably benefit me when I re-read it.
I also feel creatively dried-up, and that’s dismaying. Reading novels (see my last post) offers peasant distraction but seldom gets me writing my own work. I’ll never be a novelist. I’ve been reading poetry, online and in books, as I always do; yet right now, the poems I have been reading, no matter how wonderful, have not inspired me to work on my own.
I’m not even revising! This is not my usual self, not my poetry “norm,” not a space in which I feel happy or well-regulated or at least inspired. Perhaps I have encountered the dreaded writer’s block. Or rather, a drought of some kind, an inner sluggishness of the imaginative flow. Despite the glorious stretch of sunny days and moonlit nights, the incessant blue sky reminiscent of those high-altitude desert environments I seem to love, despite these delights, I’m discontented.
How very human of me.
Listen, there’s a trio of redtail hawks along the woodlot. Their nasal “screeee” and their graceful swoops between the bare branches catch my attention. Sunlight on the field tells me, “You could at least get outside and take a walk.” Okay. Can do.
Ann E. Michael, Drying up
Louis MacNeice’s
best pieces
have a philosophical cast and an untidy metre
that only makes them neater.https://poems-for-you.com/poems/mru8-entirely
In this poem, as usual, MacNeice is counting beats, or stresses, rather than syllables. Every stanza has eight lines, which alternate between 5 and 3 beats, but syllable counts vary widely. A couple of the line-breaks seem odd to me (e.g., “great / presences”, “no / road”) in service of the metre and the rhyme. The rhyme scheme is bespoke: ABXBCACA. The first and last line of each stanza end with the title word, “Entirely”, a version of a bracketing technique which MacNeice uses in several other poems to achieve a sense of closure or completeness. MacNeice manages all this while developing an interesting argument by combining everyday talk with some gorgeous lyrical flourishes. As writers, we may never “get the hang of it”, but we would surely be delighted if “the splash of words in passing” or “falling twigs of song” that we conjured were as striking as “a mad weir of tigerish waters”.
The force of the argument and its tripartite rhetorical structure have something in common with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’. In Mitchell’s song, she ponders, in turn, clouds, love and life itself and finds them all paradoxical and unknowable. In MacNeice’s poem he begins with writing (I’ll say writing, but perhaps poetry, or language is the focus of the first stanza), before turning to love, then life-as-journey, and similarly concludes that none can be mastered entirely. Life might be more boring, MacNeice suggests (in a typically stoic gesture), if things were otherwise.
Stephen Payne, Finding Louis MacNeice: a reading of ‘Entirely’
I don’t like
Rachel Barenblat, Tangles
what I’ve woven
from my outrage,
every ugly headline
a bold slash
of the wrong color.
What dissonant plaid,
plasticine fabric
dyed with arguments
about who counts.
Righteous indignation
too easily curdles.
Every choice
lays a thread.
In 2015, I published my first full-length collection The Art of Falling. In that book is a sequence of poems “ How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping”. The first poem in that sequence “In That Year” I’ve written about here before, when I was writing about the process of drafting (you can find that post here)
“In That Year” was one of the first real poems I wrote about living in a violent relationship. I say a “real” poem – I’d written things before that didn’t elevate themselves into poetry, that were just pain, or diary entries, or just terrible poems. When I read this poem now, it feels like a telescope looking back to that year.
And though many things have changed, some things haven’t. I remain convinced that when you have experienced violence of any kind, it changes something inside you, and you see the world differently. In my darkest days, I feel as if I carry that year inside me always, as if it colours everything I do, as if it will damage and warp my relationships and my love and my friendship, as if I must always be on my guard. If that year is a path, I am still in the past and the present tense, I am still walking it.
I can choose now who I walk that path with though. November 25th 2024, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I’m choosing to spend it with some amazing writers, my beautiful colleagues and hopefully over 130 audience members who want to think about the different kinds of violence we endure, how it changes us, how we resist it, how we can change ourselves and society.
Kim Moore, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence
I was saddened today to learn of the death of Sandra Gilbert, and then I was surprised to find out how old she was when she died (87!). Don’t get me wrong–I’m happy that she had a long life. But in my head, she’s been a young scholar, the way she was when I first read about her and Susan Gubar becoming friends during their first teaching jobs at Indiana University in the early 1970’s.
I remember how electrified I was when I first read The Madwoman in the Attic, back when I was first in grad school; I will always be grateful to Gilbert and Gubar for that book, along with their editing of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. I also loved Gilbert’s poetry.
And while I’m on the subject of losing literary greats, let me also note the passing of Dorothy Allison, who was 75 when she died. I was familiar with her work even before Bastard Out of Carolina; I’ll always think of her as the young writer, struggling to figure out how to make a way in the world that didn’t particularly care about voices like hers: poor, female, lesbian, Southerner moved to San Francisco. Her voice seemed important for the reason that there hadn’t many voices like hers that won awards before she came along.
And even now, there aren’t many voices like hers getting published through traditional publishing venues and winning awards.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Literary Greats Leaving Us
Recently I came across the announcement of a book entitled Poetic Logic and the Origins of the Mathematical Imagination — written by Canadian professor of semiotics, Marcel Danesi, and part of the Springer-Nature series, Mathematics in Mind, Here is a link to an overview of Danesi’s book. And, in the publisher’s summary of the Danesi book, we find this:
The aim of this volume is to look broadly at what constitutes the mathematical mind through the Vichian lens of poetic logic.
Reading Danesi’s ideas and thinking about my own poetic musings has reminded me of a long-ago poem of mine, “Can A Mathematician See Red?” I posted this poem in this blog long ago (in August 2011, at this link) — and I offer it again, below.
Can a Mathematician See Red? by JoAnne Growney
Consider the sphere —
JoAnne Growney, PRECISION vs. IMAGINATION
a hollow rounded surface
whose outside points
are the very same points
insiders see.
If red paint spills
all over the outside,
is the inside red?
The mathematician says, No,
the layer of paint
forms a new sphere
that is outside the outside
and not a bit inside.
A mathematician
sees the world
as she defines it.
A poet
sees red
inside.
“Can a Mathematician See Red?” is found in my 2010 collection, Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press).
This past week has been devoted to doing another round of proofing for RUINPORN, which is getting closer to finished and a wrap and will be ready for release come just after Thanksgiving. It feels important it come out in November, however cursed with badness /blessed with goodness this coin-toss month always seems to be. I did one pass as an editor looking for anything amiss in the text, than another eagle eyed one looking for misalignments, punctuation anomalies, font weirdness, and any margin shifts. This is similar to my final pass on chapbooks before saving that final file. I’m confident this latest proof, which arrived today, probably only needs one or two changes and I am ready to order the first batch. I’ve already started sharing teasers for the book on Instagram, and next week, time willing I will be making some reels and a book trailer, as well as promo graphics.
This is the longest full-length I’ve ever published, topping out at just over 150 pages. It seemed strangely unwieldy, and I almost removed one section before putting it back in place. My slimmest books are the book length project manuscripts like THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS and GIRL SHOW, both of which are just over 50 pages total. Everything else falls in between, the longest probably being DARK COUNTRY. Of course the borders between chapbook-length and full-length mean less and less. GRANATA was probably only 35 pages of poems with another 30 pages of collages, so a book, but as a manuscript more of a chap. THE POET’S ZODIAC was technically around 50 pages, but always felt like a chap, the printed version saddle bound and handmade.
Occasionally I glance at the books on my shelf, soon to be 15 longer projects, and have to pinch myself, thinking who knew I had so many words in me. Or maybe more who knew I could even get them out. That I could shake the body or the brain or the soul and out would fall so much language. Sometimes I am the girl with her teen bookshelf stacked high with horror novels or the college/grad student whose every surface held a little bit of everything. Poems, fiction, plays. It still seems surreal that I have written so much in the past 30 years. Or that it was published (half by traditional presses, another half my own hand.) Also that there is more to come–a whole other manuscript of smaller series called WILD(ISH) and the longer carnival project , WINTERING, that feels like a sibling book to GIRL SHOW–all complete and just need some edits and a revisit–both of which I will likely release next year. Also another book that the title just unveiled itself for that is about fifty percent written and a couple other projects we’ll see if they get their wings.
Kristy Bowen, the final stretch
[Steve] Barbaro’s use of multiple typefaces, font size and colour, indentation and the negative impact of lifting the text out of its visual context also makes it difficult to quote from, so all in all, a reviewer’s nightmare of a book. But here goes nothing.
Reading the text you get the impression of a self that is immersed in, moving through a world of sensation, and while much of that world seems comprised of Barbaro’s Sicilian origins and his Chicago now, it’s also a world in which ‘no proper names/seem worth mentioning’.
I say impression for a reason, as this is impressionistic writing, on the whole, moving over the surface of things. The book is punctuated by a set of ekphrastic poems based on paintings by Cassat, Manet, Cézanne, Braque and Hiroshige (at least I’m assuming that Barbaro’s 37 Panoramic Views of Edo are based on the Meisho Edo Hyakkei).
Studying a long–dead landscapist’s work, we shudder.
Your attention’s a kind of pool, mine’s more of a puddle.There are points at which Barbaro’s exuberant soundscapes summon the spirit of Dylan Thomas, laced with American demotic:
at night, the pond’s surface is stupidly eel–dense…
you’re just lingering there amidst the eels’ flippy
countlessness OK whatever yeah so why the hell
must the word IRREDEEMABLE so clutter the mind’s
air?At other points there’s a kind of nod towards a more minimalist aesthetic:
i like ponds; i like strident
strayings circling
modern places: i like, like
the plenitude of the days
U-shaped crowds curl
like faintly
shriveled bubbles over
the corners,
the casings of steep
lawns… limbs
rhyme…But mostly the text sits in long lines that lets it breathe, with jpeg titles, overlays, photomontages and oddly scrawled words and phrases (‘who cares’ and ‘OK shhhh’ recur) like when you try to write with the cursor in Paint. It’s a book you don’t so much read as immerse yourself in and definitely one of the most interesting visual/poetry (or visual poetry) ones I’ve read in a while.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading November 2024: A Review
Whatever your views on opera, it seems an apt metaphor for Kim Addonizio’s collection: there’s music, drama, characters, exploration of how snobbery can make anyone feel small in poems that look like casually strung together, stream-of-consciousness pieces but are sonorous and musical. The title poem starts “The shieldmaiden waits in the wings. The operagoers wait, shifting in their seats/ Out in the forest, the ember waits in its cigarette to make its black mark on the world,” and ends,
“Again you must wait. If you see lightning, listen for the thunder to tell you how far
or near you are. When Milton went blind, he felt useless, but then he decided it was okay
to stand still. To abide. Look at the trees, who are patient, who suffer us to touch them.”Waiting is valuable, whether it’s an anticipative waiting for the drama to start, a wait to orientate yourself to dodge lightning, forest bathing, or just a pause to observe and connect with what’s around you. The long lines meander, give readers time to slow their reading and absorb, underlining the poem’s meaning. The couplets are almost a call and response, the performers and audience wait for the opera to start while the cigarette’s ember waits to destroy. Milton felt useless until he used his time to utilise stillness.
Emma Lee, “Exit Opera” Kim Addonizio (Norton) – book review
In the tenth anniversary issue of Critical Quarterly, published in 1968, the journal’s founding editors, C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson, reflected on their critical mission to broaden the audience for contemporary writing:
It has been of particular importance to us that we publish poetry alongside criticism, and a matter of pride that we have first published, for example, Philip Larkin’s “Love Songs in Age”, Ted Hughes’ “Hawk Roosting”, R.S. Thomas’ “Here”, Sylvia Plath’s “A Birthday Present”, Theodore Roethke’s “The Long Waters” and Thom Gunn’s “Back to Life”.
Choosing new poems for publication, they argued, “is an essential critical activity just as important as literary analysis itself”, contrasting their hospitable approach with F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny magazine and its famously “negative attitude”. As well as mingling poems with essays and reviews, Critical Quarterly also ran poetry competitions for new writers, and published “an annual one shilling poetry pamphlet” comprising
twenty or so of the best of recently published poems. These pamphlets sell between 10,000 and 12,000 copies, and are much read by students.
When the first of these pamphlets, or “supplements”, Poetry 1960: An Appetiser, was announced in the third issue of the magazine in 1959, the editors said that
special efforts will be made to sell this to hundreds of people who have not looked at a poem since their formal education ended […] we are hoping that local representatives will sell the supplement in universities and other places; if you wish to help please write to let us know.
Warming to their sales pitch, they asked:
Why not buy ten copies to give to your friends? Or to use in class, if you teach? Or simply to have to hand when someone asks: “But what poetry is there today?”’
The place of poems in the original editorial vision of Critical Quarterly was, in other words, far more than a decorative filler between the essays and the adverts; it was central to a mission to educate.
If a pair of academics launched a magazine in the UK now and managed to sell 10,000-plus pamphlets of new poetry off the back of it annually, we would say they had one hell of an Impact Case Study on their hands. Modern university managers — for whom “impact” means research income — might rub their eyes in wonder to realise that Cox and Dyson did it largely out of enthusiasm, plus, in Cox’s own words, “plenty of spare time”. Looking back in 2008 on the “safe job for life” that he started in 1954 at the English Department at Hull, Cox remembered how
my total teaching load was about seven hours a week. On a typical day I would take a tutorial at 9.30 am, adjourn for coffee and possibly talk to friends until lunch.
Enviously watching him across the Senior Common Room was Philip Larkin, who arrived as librarian in 1955, and liked to take a sceptical attitude towards the academic life (he teased Cox that he should try to get the notoriously hard-drinking footballer George Best a lectureship, after he was suspended by the Football Association). Larkin was nevertheless very supportive of the magazine, arranging for Oxford University Press to handle subscriptions, allocating Critical Quarterly its own office when a new library was built, and helping to judge the first poetry competition for poets who had not published a book — which resulted in the appearance in Poetry 1960 of a poem by Sylvia Plath, who went on to edit the second pamphlet, American Poetry Now (1961).
Jeremy Noel-Tod, How to Sell 10,000 Poetry Pamphlets
That sitting in the sun
hasn’t changed when
everything has changedthough houses stand streetwise
like gaps in a young girl’s teethwater will seep slowly
under your fingernailsdrip by insidious drip
someone’s nails turn blackblack velvet paintings once plunged
you into raving pleasure zoneswill you ever get back
Jill Pearlman, Blink Twice
I have been practicing silence. In part because words are failing me. In part because words are flying from me too loud and obscene. In part because it occurs to me that listening is perhaps the only reasonable path available to me right now. In part because, well, words have been proved to be inadequate to the task. The task being maintaining community. The task being a commitment to empathy. And what is empathy if not listening? And what is listening if not a kind of silence? The receptive kind. Alert, aware, taking in both words and hesitations, words and silences, words and the unsaid but conveyed through the body’s tics and tells. I am trying to still those in myself as well. In part, to feel safe in a time in which I feel unsafe. In part to commit to the listening with my whole body. I am hoping something blooms of my silence: a deeper empathy, a richer community, a bit more love, the of-my-fellow-humankind kind. I am hard soil, I fear. And the wind is blowing.
Here is a poem of hesitations, of sentences scattered, strange absences. A song sung in the wind. Its pivotal word, gentian, is a kind of flower, also known as bitter wort, and is usually bright blue. Where I live in the world, they are an early fall flower and rare, opening and closing with the light.
Marilyn McCabe, less than the word, brittle
Today marks 14 years of my daily writing practice — I’ve written at least one poem a day since a snowed-in morning (rare in these parts on the eastern seaboard, probably even more rare now because of climate change) in 2010 when I drifted over to Dave Bonta’s microblog The Morning Porch, and where I read his post that day morningporch.com/2010/11/159121245/ – and was moved to respond in the comments box in a poem. I did that for a few more days afterwards; though I’m not sure I posted all of them in this same way. Dave noticed, and invited me to post my poems on Via Negativa—and I’ve been doing that ever since.
Out of my daily practice, I’ve learned some helpful things about myself and my process; and I’ve put together 4 books and 4 chapbooks from the running review (and the revisions) I do of my writing. At least, these are things that I’ve found to apply to myself–
– Writing is the best way to keep writing.
– Before any thought of publication, there’s the joy of meeting yourself on the page.
– Doing this (above) reminds me every day that writing is an opportunity to play; to follow ideas down rabbit holes, discover things, pay attention in this space of writing, no matter how brief every day (I typically do 30-45 minutes).
– Writing poems, I’ve found, is my preferred form for “processing” how I experience the world: in language, in images.
– Despite what anyone will tell you about “published is published in whatever form,” your writing is yours.Especially in the last 2 weeks, I feel even more intensely how poetry has the capacity to “save” me – from utter, unfocused distraction; from utter despair…
Luisa A. Igloria, 14 Years
— I’m looking for a (new to me) way in this space to express things about beauty, at a time when we have to hold our anger and disappointment and fears in one hand, and fiercely attempt to hold joy and beauty and goodness and truth in the other hand. For now, I’ve the thought that writing notes is a way to open things up a little, to leave spaces. In bonsai there is the instruction to leave space so as to allow room for birds to fly through. So that’s what I’ll try for.
— A lot of people have written books in the form of notes. W.S. Di Piero was the first person I read who did so. I’ve been away from this space for a bit because of not just a holiday (I’d imagined I’d be doing my usual posts from Florence as I have on previous vacations), but because it seemed the internet was flooded with folks saying things about grief and beauty and joy and hope much better than I could. And also: I wasn’t feeling much hope, even while surrounded by the extreme beauty of renaissance and other art in Florence.
— Di Piero talks about living with depression and how for others it feels particularly hard before a long winter. For him, it’s spring that is difficult. He feels a “paralysis induced by flowerings and restorations; new green and growing things agonize and terrify me.” He says that “the heart can’t stand so much blessedness and bestowals…” It’s interesting to think that someone would feel so opposite to most and it helps me to keep this in mind. The way I feel about beauty isn’t necessarily how others feel.
Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes – Wounds, Exhaustion, Holding Flowers Like a Weapon, and Doing Life Together
you can get so alone you become
Robin Gow, prayer for living alone
a terrarium. or, rather, maybe you just
discover what has already been there.
the isopods & the centipedes. the words
hatching beneath rocks. i became
so vast & so small.
I read a lot of poetry, and there is no shortage of brilliant poems about traumatic and difficult life experiences. But many of my favorite poems live squarely in the realm of what some would call “ordinary.” The best poets can use the ordinary to reveal the layers underneath. One of my favorite poems that does this is Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Housekeeping.”
Housekeeping By Natasha Trethewey We mourn the broken things, chair legs wrenched from their seats, chipped plates, the threadbare clothes. We work the magic of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes. We save what we can, melt small pieces of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones for soup. Beating rugs against the house, we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie. I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog, listen for passing cars. All day we watch for the mail, some news from a distant place.
At first read, this poem may seem like a list of the ordinary things that surround the speaker’s family—broken chair legs, chipped plates, worn clothing, soap, neck bones, dust, rugs, bugs, ironing, a catalog, cars going by. However, the verbs in this poem are what make it sing—mourn, work, save, mark, watch. Those simple words turn the items and tasks into statements about loss, toil, frugality, imagination, practicality, joy, music, and hope, always hope. Only the speaker and the mother are mentioned, but there is the listening for the passing cars and waiting for news from far away, implying someone is gone or missed. There is no mention of economic circumstance, but the broken and worn things are all repaired, and no food is wasted. I used to ask my middle school students to answer the questions “What is the poem about?” and “What is the poem also about?” Yes, this poem is about the ordinary routines of a household, but it is so much more.
Since I retired, my days are often filled with the mundane: long walks, yard work, chores, making meals, watching movies, etc. Yet everyday, during those ordinary tasks, I find beauty. The heron at the lake unfurling his great wings. The tiny flowers hiding in the clover. The satisfaction of a freshly-swept floor. The fragrance of garlic and peppers on a chopping board. My husband’s laugh beside me on the couch. Who is to say that these are not deserving of a poem?
Donna Vorreyer, So Ordinary
April 14, 1930. Moscow, an apartment in Lubyansky alley. The final night of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s life.
What would you write if this were to be the last poem your hand offered to a page? What would you say to the eternity that will be April?
She loves me, loves me not. I pluck my hand
and throw my torn-off fingers away,
like the games with stray daisies
you tear up and discard each spring.A shave and a haircut will show my gray hair;
I want the silver of years made very clear.
I hope and believe I will never attain
the shame of common sense.It’s past one o’clock. You must be fast asleep.
The silver river Oka in the night
Is just the Milky Way.
I’m in no hurry; no need to send
Telegrams to wake and worry you.I want the silver of years made very clear, the evidence of what living costs us.
Knock on wood I finish the Ariadna poems. Maybe I’ll clean up the essay that is a sack with holes, sculpt shape that can carry the holes hiding inside Tsvetaeva’s as both speakers are swallowed by the trains returning them to their lives. A bird in my hand— and hers. Your name thrown like a stone into the lake of the things I’ve written and hidden. One more silver river in the night disguised as the cosmos.
Alina Stefanescu, 13 notes on silver.