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: looping echoes, words that feel distinctly blue, a claustrophobic fairy tale, 19 shades of untrue, sour milk and fermenting earth, and the cosmogony of you. Enjoy!
It’s December 1 and both neighborhood cul-de-sac and ocean just beyond the edge are dark. A few lights are beginning to illuminate windows here and there, but this most immediate, surrounding world is largely muffled and still this morning.
A friend has mailed me coffee from afar and I’ve saved its opening and taste for this long weekend. Today, I brewed it in the French press. Pulled from the trunk a hand-pottered mug purchased in Homer while on writing residency at Storyknife a few summers ago. It is both the dark and light, dirt earthy tones and golden light creeping in around the edges. I’ve added just a bit of the good Irish stuff to it to enjoy the morning, put a cap on a fine, holiday weekend, and bust through the poetry that needs writing. My to-write list is longer than my arm.
But it is December 1 and there’s much to look forward to. My college daughter and her traveling cat will soon be home in a couple of weeks and Solstice to be celebrated soon after. I thank the editors of The Bluebird Word for including my poem “Tilt” in today’s winter issue publication. It is timely and I’m enjoying all of the poems gathered here in this space, this welcome to winter and December’s return.
Kersten Christianson, Waking to Snow
The day after Thanksgiving, skies
finally clear. One by one, we startbringing our trash and recycling
to the curb. A light wind siftsmore dry leaves on every house
plot, every yard. Neighborstake out their leafblowers.
I think of the endlessness ofour labors, and the greater
Luisa A. Igloria, Immeasurables
optimism of infinity.
Welcome to this series of Palestine Advent blog posts.
Each day for the next twenty-four days I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian poet.
Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada.
I Grant You Refuge, by Hiba Abu Nada, translated by Huda Fakhreddine.
Hiba Abu Nada was a novelist, poet, and educator. She wrote this poem on Oct. 10th, 2023. She was killed in her home in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023. She was 32.
Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a writer, a translator, and the author of several scholarly books.
With thanks to Natalie Jabbar and Chris Rose for inspiring this idea.
You can donate to the Amos Trust Gaza Christmas appeal here
Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 1: I Grant You Refuge, by Hiba Abu Nada
Is it time to draft the poem anew?
No more the pretense and no more the farce.
This poem is nineteen shades of untrue.Look, the poem has its own point of view.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The nineteenth poem needs true rhyme
It must be reflection and looking glass.
Who will come now to the poet’s rescue?
My poetry collection Blackbird Singing at Dusk is already heading out into the world and landing on the doormats of people who were kind enough to pre order it, but today it officially launches into the world. […]
The beautiful cover art is called ‘Hidden in the Crab Apples’ and is by Little Rams studio, who you can support by going to their shop and buying stuff: Little Rams
I’m very pleased and proud of this collection, written alongside my memoir The Ghost lake, it feels like a kind of sister collection to that longer work. If you enjoyed one, you’ll likely enjoy the other. You can buy The Ghost Lake from the bad place where it has 22% off here or from here, and both books are available in high street book shops, and you can request them at your local library. The Ghost Lake is also an ebook and an audio book, read in my own voice, my own accent.
Wendy Pratt, Blackbird Singing at Dusk Takes Flight
In my academic calendar, Thanksgiving Break is the first full week without teaching or meetings since August, so it’s often a time of reflection for me. We went up to NYC for 3 nights then NJ for 3 nights: downside, lots of driving; upside, we saw a lot of dear people and it was impossible for me to work (much). I thought a lot about the semester that’s nearly behind me and the winter ahead. It’s been hard to juggle grant applications for a projected sabbatical, festival/ conference/ bookstore applications and other tasks toward the launch of Mycocosmic, ongoing health stuff, and the usual heaping plates of academic work. I feel starved for just a little time, even a couple of hours a week, to nudge ahead newer creative projects. Yet dessert is coming.
Lesley Wheeler, Harvest (while still sowing)
Last night we landed back in Picton just in time to deliver the children to father-in-law, and catch the monthly PEP Rally Reading at the local bookstore, curated by Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner of Assembly Press. The reading featured Ottawa poet Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Toronto poet Matthew Tierney and Toronto writer Spencer Gordon, all of whom were reading from new or recently-published books. It was good to catch all three, especially Madhavan-Reese, unable to hear her properly in the spring as part of VERSeFest. Any event I’m hosting or organizing provides me a divided attention, so the ability to focus on her reading was appreciated. Christine and I agreed that Madhavan-Reese [pictured, above] gave the strongest reading, in part due to her poem “Saṃsāra,” from Elementary Particles (2023), a poem titled from the Pali and Sanskrit word meaning both “wandering” and “world.” We appreciated her repetitions, looping echoes as a kind of cycle on progression, loss and connection. “After that,” Madhavan-Reese writes, “we had everything we could want, though / we didn’t want to leave it in the care of strangers.”
*
Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry (2024): “To never be touched again. That line / has a sound. Hear it?”
I’m poolside, attending our young ladies, who take turns doing flips in the shallows. Christine and her father, errand.
I’m still thinking about the effectiveness of Madhavan-Reese’s loops in that particular poem, how her repetitions moved further and around, allowing each phrase and new and singular weight, however many times they appeared.
rob mclennan, the green notebook
Since I haven’t been publishing a lot of my own work lately I also haven’t had a lot of critical feedback, so it was rather thrilling to find that my debut collection, School of Forgery, is mentioned in Andrew Duncan’s new Shearsman volume, Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen Grabs of British Poetry in the 21st Century. If the title sounds dismissive, that isn’t the intent; Duncan’s starting point is that ‘beautiful feelings of sensitive people’ is, broadly, what people expect of poetry and poets — that any more sophisticated understanding of what the art can achieve has lost its grip on the collective conscience … for now. This is in part due to the sheer abundance and variety of poetry being published, such that any other general characterisation runs into trouble immediately.
His ‘screen grab’ approach is refreshing. Rather than presume to pick out a few poets as the leading lights of a generation, thinning the herd in order to tell a neat story, he accepts that any serious expedition into the landscape of contemporary UK poetry “can last for years”, and involves travelling through many ‘micro-climates’. The book is therefore a series of snapshots from one such expedition. When he comes to School of Forgery, he finds the key to the book is the poem about Bleach dōjinshi (fan comics in which the characters often enjoy intense romantic liaisons), adding:
Stone seems to prefer inauthenticity, but this allows him to jettison the apparatus of realism and moral seriousness, so that the poems have a wonderful lightness, bursting like fireworks.
It’s a huge book, covering 80 poets in all, and so far I’ve only read the entries for about a quarter of them.
Jon Stone, “Like a pair of thin keys”
My low mood seems to have abated, at least temporarily, and I wrote a few poems and revised a few others during the past three days. I’m trying to accept the fact that this year, we will see neither our son nor our daughter for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. So I’m trying to get creative about things to do that we might not have done if we were preparing for family celebrations. Yet we miss the concept of family celebrations. I guess that’s a socio-cultural thing, right? I may need to reassess what value “the holidays” have for me these days.
~
I have also kept myself busy re-assessing a chapbook manuscript I’ve worked on forever (it seems) and am now looking for the sort of small, independent publisher that might consider a hybrid poetry-journalistic/historical work influenced by Muriel Rukeyser‘s long-poem The Book of the Dead. My poem is about a Korean War veteran tried as a traitor upon his return to the USA, a man who was my friend David Dunn’s father. It has been a real creative challenge to figure out how to tell his story, and the resulting text is definitely “hybrid,” with footnotes, magazine articles, military court proceedings, letters, and poems. People who believe that poems simply flow from some internal inspiration would probably take issue with a poem-ish thing like this, but I keep feeling compelled to find a way to tell this man’s story. The unfairness of it, the long-term damage, the people who used him as a scapegoat, his short life (he died at his mother’s, age 39, discouraged and unwell from physical wounds that never healed, divorced, unable to overcome the dishonorable discharge that kept him from gainful employment). David kept losing his father over and over: to prison, to PTSD, to divorce, to death. It’s an all-too-common narrative, but each tale is also deeply and profoundly individual. Hence the need to write it.
Ann E. Michael, Re-assessing
1. ) The earliest poems in this collection were written in late 2021 and were based around TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, one of the most influential works on my baby poet self back in the 90s and something that felt it needed to be revisited, especially amid the modern political, social, and post-pandemic environment. Conversely, the latest poems in the collection were written early in the spring as the broken places series about crumbling houses and disappearing pasts. […]
3.) This is my seventh self-issued title somehow, which means the process of layout and design is a little smoother and doesn’t take as long mired down in formatting stuff, which I can get close to in place by the first or second proof copy (which means a faster turn around from start to finish and actual copies in my hands faster.) I learn more, however, each time I do it, both about design and promoting a new book amid a sea of other poets and other books. I still feel like it’s much more work than traditional publishing in so many ways, but most of it is work I enjoy and I love having complete creative control.
4.) The middle, and longest section of the book is memoir in bone & ink, which was basically all about not wanting to write poetry anymore, and yet, here I am.
Kristy Bowen, 5 facts about my newest book
Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar: Selected Poems is a very substantial volume bringing together work from her three collections published in Australia. Its sumptuous production chimes happily with the style of her writing: culturally sophisticated and highly intelligent as she clearly is, it’s above all the seemingly effortless sensuous evocativeness of her work that makes an impression from the beginning. Bloodaxe’s generous spacing and the poet’s fine rhythmic sense allow these impressions to flower in the mind.
‘Exhaustion’, from Aria, the first collection represented here, can illustrate the physicality of Holland-Batt’s writing at the basic level of literal description:
One afternoon I went into his silent study
and found, behind the tidy compartments
of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,
an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,
wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,
graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in
the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,
a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end
folded over and over until nothing was left.Well written and promising though this poem is, it seems to me to have limitations of a kind that are not characteristic of Holland-Batt’s work. We’re to learn more about Holland-Batt’s grandfather – an English architect and artist – and much more about her own father, whose study this perhaps describes. And of course the contents of the tin, particularly the folded and refolded paint tube, metaphorically express the idea of exhaustion in general and invite us to reflect on its different manifestations. However, the relation between the literal and the metaphorical levels of meaning in this poem is relatively static, and you need to read the poem as a whole for it to emerge, as it does in that haunting last line. What’s already exciting about most of the poems in this first collection is how sensuous perception is heightened and vivified by the transformative power of the poet’s imagination and by her ability to fuse differing modes of perception.
Edmund Prestwich, Sarah Holland-Batt, The Jaguar: Selected Poems – review
Living in such a visual world, our most accessible sense, sight, can become tired and jaded. Annie Ellis’ Tempo of Colour (Beechwood Press, 2024) is the perfect tonic to awaken the reader to the visual spectacles in our natural and urban environments if only we took the time to look.
It is not surprising given this passion for landscapes to find this expressed in the collection through a number of ekphrastic poems. I believe the best of this genre should stand alone as poems and not depend on the painting for meaning. However, they must do more than merely describe what the onlooker sees. They should offer a response and convey something fundamental about the work of art. Ellis’ Market Day, based on the painting ‘Market Scene’ by L.S. Lowry achieves both. She captures the essence of the painting, the artist’s interest in the hustle and bustle of the scenes he describes. He is not a social commentator, exploring the hardship of mill town life, his interest is in the activity and variety offered by the scene. Ellis’ poem captures this through her use of four line stanzas, each line consisting of generally three or four syllables: ‘Men stand tall/ hats on heads/ long skirts keep/ ladies warm.//Women chatter/ watch their children./ Three dogs follow/ one on a lead.’ The resulting staccato rhythm is perfectly in keeping with how one’s eye responds to a Lowry picture, darting from the depiction of one activity to another.
Another example is one of my favourite poems in the collection, No-one Turned to Look, after ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by Pieter Bruegel. This skilfully captures the solipsistic nature of humankind. Significantly Ellis chooses to describe the angler with ‘a cup of grubs by his side’ and the ploughman as cutting the soil like ‘sliced meat’. There is a sense here of our tendency to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others as we pursue our own ends. The fisherman is prepared to sacrifice the grubs in pursuit of his supper, and associating the ploughman’s actions with the slaughter of animals suggests a similar willingness. So, when Icarus falls from the sky and drowns and the poet asks the question ‘Did the boat’s creaking timbers/ hide the sound of the splash?’ we know the answer. The bystanders are too wrapped up in their own pursuits to bother about the tragic event offshore. The poem becomes a chilling statement of humankind’s inhumanity and callousness to the suffering of others.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Tempo of Colour’ by Annie Ellis
Shash Trevett’s debut full collection, The Naming of Names, published by the Poetry Business and available to buy here, follows on from her 2021 pamphlet From a Borrowed Land, with more poems relating aspects of the Tamil experience of the civil war in Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009 and some on other, ancillary matters: British colonialism and racism (including that of the UK government’s immigration policies). Readers may also know that Trevett was one of the three co-editors of the exemplar and acclaimed Out of Sri Lanka anthology, published by Bloodaxe last year.
Estimates, disputed by the state’s Sinhalese majority, suggest that more than 100,000 Tamil civilians died during the conflict, many as victims of brutal violence, including sexual violence, bombings, massacres and/or dismemberments. As the title indicates, Trevett’s collection aims to put names to some of those victims, to reanimate them as real people, so that they aren’t just statistics. As a refugee from the war herself, Trevett writes with understandable passion, though in spare language which allows the individual and collective stories and incidents to speak for themselves without embellishment. It’s necessarily a difficult read, as any bearing of witness to war crimes is, as in ‘And on the Ceiling, a Lizard’:
When he rested his gun against the wall
and told me to lie down.
When he placed a grenade by the pillow
and unbuckled his belt
I watched the dust motes hang
in the air and the lizard freeze
on the ceiling, and knew that words
had never had the power to save me.This almost matter-of-fact recounting magnifies the terror far more than any liberal sprinkling of adjectives could do. It’s hard in reading this fine collection not to think of Gaza, Sudan and other places where State-inflicted warfare inevitably kills thousand of civilians as collateral damage. Above all, though, it shines a light on what very specifically happened to the Tamil people, the ramifications of which are naturally still being felt. (When I worked for Kingston Council, in the Student Awards team, in the early 1990s, I saw a good number of customers who were Tamils living in exile in Tolworth and some of whom revealed the circumstances of what they’d seen. That Tamil community is still going strong.) This brave, elegantly crafted collection doesn’t flinch from the horrors, yet somehow also finds a sense of beauty among them […]
Matthew Paul, (Other) November reading
Old swingset and a refrigerator full of apples
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem Fragments from April
one bite taken out of each
Fermenting earth and sour milk
a pile of pecan shells to mark your passing
The idea of lives of the dead altering the lives of those they have touched in life is familiar enough, though I was working on my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke around this time and I’m sure his influence is in here. It is not just the remembering of a friend who has passed away, but also that our own perceptions of ‘a house, a street, a flowering tree’, for want of a better word, spiritualises the material object, giving it a life, a light, an existence, beyond the ordinary. […]
At 790, I leafed through life and death
in Ancient Egypt for her older brother:
how they wash their dead in water and oil,
then bind them in linen smeared with gum
and priests wrap lucky charms insidein hope that none will break the seal
till the dead themselves in time of need.The ‘lucky charms’ idea naturally led the poem on to what I myself might place in a good friend’s sarcophagus and gave rise to a list of his multifarious likes and loves, concluding with the heartfelt wish that his (prematurely unhirsute) head might – even in death (though he had no religious belief as far as I know) – remain somehow protected. The image on the underside of Laurence’s umbrella is a truth!
Then I’ll wrap Homer for you, Wolves black-
and-gold, your Micra, Marvel, Blockley
and booze, moist, sweet cake for the road,Frederick Leighton, Sir Frankie Howerd,
Wisden, The Smiths and that Italian umbrella
you flourished one day and thundered open –
behold! the Sistine roof appeared
to keep your bald head from the hissing rain.‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ was originally published in An English Nazareth (Enitharmon Press, 2004).
Martyn Crucefix, On Revisiting Blockley
What does it mean to have a literary community? What do people want from such a space? Is it necessary? Can it hinder one’s progress, if one feels their writerly identity is tied up with certain people, a certain place? Can you ever return to something you’ve left behind?
These weren’t questions I was conscious of asking myself. But, on some level, I must have been. In many ways, I was continuously searching for a means to reconfigure what I felt I’d lost.
These questions became even more urgent for me in 2021. We had to move again, from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, for my partner’s post-doc. By this time I’d come to love Pittsburgh. But now I was leaving another time, which meant once again parting ways with a small literary community I’d found, as well as good writer-connections and friends I’d made.
At the very same time that we were preparing to leave, the Bad Art Friend debacle broke out. (I won’t get into it here. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you can look it up.) This situation highlighted profound differences of opinion and ethics between me and the remnants of the Boston community I still had. I cut ties. Boston was officially over. Sadly, now, Pittsburgh was over too.
What does it mean to have a literary community? What is the foundation upon which that community is built? Does the foundation itself matter? How do you find community? What is it that writers want from such a space? More questions, the same but different, circling, circling. At the same time, I found myself more alone as a writer than I’d ever been in my life.
But, in fact, as it turned out, that was not true.
Becky Tuch, Thank you. Thank you.
In Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt 9, 2024) Cameron Anstee ponders the relationship between sales, connection, the gift economy and capitalism. (Only 80 copies printed. Get it if you can.)
It raises valuable questions. What is a cut off for what “counts” as meaningful? Who decides? Is it a numbers game or a long game among peers in a historical chain? Is poetry to disrupt mainstream default easy thought? Is it to participate in something less bound and directed than product placement, clichéd shorthand relationships, closed narrative arc with commercial breaks?
I used to publish in seasonal cycles as if were a press with staff & interns, marketers and pitch sessions with book selling chains. A few titles each spring and fall on a commercial model, even if take home is lucky to break even on material costs, the printers and Canada Post the only clear economic winners. Now if there’s something I can’t not do, sporadically I will publish. But it’s still either way about connective tissues of ideas, of ligaments of community. Not a bestseller or award winner. An exploration. Of sharing what delights or tickles as a ping to see if there is an answering ping of me too.
The usefulness of published words isn’t A + B or an A to B route. It’s more: Here’s some thing niche people might find welcoming to read under the flap of their freak flag. Or wow, this person is ahead of my curve or has been on my curve and now I get something that eluded, or don’t feel so alone. All reading is one person to one person.
In this model what is the sense of awards season and ward’s culture or best of the year lists? Best for what purpose of whom? Isn’t that inherently a capitalist frame for a chaos factor of poetry? […]
To consume and not make, cuts off the roots of creativity feeding everyone. To write and listen to the makers is part of building the society we want to make on a granular level. Consider the words of David Hurn, “record it because it may not happen in 50 years so record it as accurately and as honestly as you can”. He was speaking on factual photography as evidence for the future but it applies as well to writing your inner and outer world.
Pearl Pirie, Cost and Rewards
I’ve been facilitating this “legacy writing” workshop, even as I’ve been trying to figure out what the heck “legacy writing” is, and if I myself were to do such writing, to whom would I be leaving this so-called legacy? And isn’t all creative effort toward making something anyway a kind of legacy creation to some unknown reader/viewer/listener? One of the things we do in legacy writing is look back at our lives and think, “Hm, what was THAT about?” Or, let me say, that’s what I do in MY legacy writing anyway. I looked back at some of my choices and found myself, well, bemused, I guess is the best way to put it. I seem to have had this pattern of doing things that seemed to make some bit of sense at the time, but I remember thinking, well, I’ll do this and hopefully figure out along the way why I’m doing it, or if I should be doing something else. Hoping for enlightenment, in other words. I’m still operating this way. Still waiting for the light of understanding to radiate. Or at least come up with a damn fine idea as I potter around. Ideas come, ideas go, realizations come, then I forget them. Rationalizations too. “What was I doing?” I think. “What am I supposed to be doing?”
Here’s a poem I’ve been sitting with. I don’t really get it; and I like the way in which it operates, just beyond my grasp, the images vivid, the intent pretty clear — “satori” meaning enlightenment — but everything’s all topsy turvy, looking for enlightenment in all the wrong places, finding light in the dark. I come to the end of it over and over and think, Hm, what was THAT about? And it pleases me.
Marilyn McCabe, the pile of dirt
I feel like my mind has always naturally worked via collage. Maybe I’m ret-conning here, but at the very least, there has always been a strongly visual aspect to how my mind operates, and it’s one I’ve suppressed—sometimes for good reason. In fact, when I first tried writing in a literary way, I was guided by a weird synaesthesia: the words that felt right to me were distinctly blue, and I felt a powerful need to avoid words that felt red or yellow. I eventually had to get over this, and this added layer of extreme subjectivity in my relationship to language has caused many difficulties, but it also is the source of much of my love of language. I’ve spent many years trying to sort out how to control my language use while still finding inspiration in it, and feeling that that inspiration was distinctly related to something more visual and play-oriented. […]
This appreciation for chance, surprise, and visual play is something I struggled to express through writing. I simply couldn’t make the connection between this random play with pictures and the more self-conscious handling of language. Partly this has to do with my own temperament, but it has also to do with the nature of language itself. Language operates sequentially in time: one word follows the next, building sentences that begin and end, telling stories or communicating thoughts that have a point, an end. Whereas collage offers a vision of pre-literate simultaneity and indeterminacy, writing is profoundly linear and determined. One can learn to overcome these factors of the written word, to an extent, but as a young writer I was constantly struggling to do that—or even to recognize that I needed to do that. […]
I think it’s good that I struggled as long as I did, as eventually it forced me to really learn the rigors of grammar and syntax, as well as the delicate interplay between these factors and a poem’s lines. After years of writing promising, intriguing poems that all felt stifled in some way by their awkward sense of form, I eventually got pretty good at writing rather straight, linear poems— I guess I needed to prove to myself that I could. but this was a rather hollow satisfaction. The real breakthrough for me occurred when I began to write in a more chaotic, collage-like style, using highly visual material, citations and fragments, in which to arrange linguistic objects. And this is when my first “mature” writing emerged: writing that others seemed to like, and which I also liked—what’s more, it was writing that excited me.
RM Haines, Going Into the Collage
I used to call it being grabbed by the short and curlies. The expression seems quaint but being hijacked is real. Here’s my dilemma. Go back on social media I hear, because I’m without a publisher for a poetry collection in waiting. I left after seeing friends torn apart, brought down, then my Instagram account was cloned. It took weeks to get the clone (using my name to ask friends for money) off the site. And I was happier not being there, not comparing myself to golden award winners. Visiting Linked In occasionally satisfied an urge to ‘get out there’ that never used to exist but is now present in my system like pesticides. And because I’m old, because I’ve been distracted by life demands, writing has felt like scratching at dry earth but I can’t believe my last book is my last because I’ve always believed in reading and readers. So I went back to Instagram, to show I’m here.
For a few days it was fine and then the rain, Storm Bert, and with it the floodwaters of advertising until now I see nothing of the people I started to follow. It’s become a rather terrifying and claustrophobic fairy tale, swatting away manic voiceovers, close ups of faces selling me stuff I don’t want. A cautionary tale, a parable, a fable. I noticed the same on Linked In, incessant promotional shite, including (what algoryhythm was this?) one for a weapons company. And so what do I do? What do you do? Caught in this sting, giving away likes and dislikes, neighbourhood ramblings, personal quirks, idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, our tastes and opinions. Is that what it’s all about? Do I stay or do I go?
Jackie Wills, Should I stay or should I go?
Reading the news
is like
waking into
still having
dead parents.Microplastics
and wars
persist.
Permafrost melts.
Hillsides burn.Soon, in charge
of health:
a guy
who doesn’t trust
vaccines.No limbic system
Rachel Barenblat, Cracked
was made
for this.
I am
a cracked jar.
Does this sound familiar? You’re doing something boring and repetitive, maybe folding laundry, and an idea pops into your head.
When this happens to me, I drop the shirt I was just hanging up, grab a pen, and write the idea down. I know this seems obvious; after all, I’m a writer. But it wasn’t always so.
Until just a few years ago, my immediate response when an idea would occur to me was to judge it. My criteria were simple: the idea was great or it was terrible. I only recorded the ideas that seemed “great” and ignored the others. As a result, a lot of my ideas flitted away, lost forever.
But then something happened.
On October 19, 2019, I wrote, “I went to St. Vinnie’s to donate a few dozen books I’d removed from my office. It was cloudy and threatening rain. I wore my ‘Oregon’ blue flannel shirt which I bought at St. Vinnie’s last year.”
I’m not sure why those sentences made it past my binary judgment filter. After I looked at what I’d written, I shrugged. There was nothing in those lines that wowed me. Not terrible, maybe, but surely not “great.”
A day or so later, however, I went back to those lines. There was something in their very ordinariness that begged me to try and fix them up. Hmm, I thought. How can I change these lines from dull to dynamite? From trivial to terrific? From flat to fantastic?
As I experimented with those lackluster sentences, something weird and moody began to emerge. It occurred to me that the sulfuric odor I smell some mornings might come from a nearby paper factory, which made the donation of books crafted from paper seem like a small but significant act—as if I were giving something back to Nature (or, more realistically, to new readers). Not only that, but I live in Oregon, whose main industry for most of its existence as a state was timber. Surely some of those trees became the wood pulp used in producing paper.
These thoughts came together in my brain and led to the poem, “Donating Books to St. Vincent de Paul,” which was published in 2021 at Blue Unicorn.
Donating Books to St. Vincent de Paul
I surrender them, loose in
grocery sacks. When they
shift it sounds like whispering.
I cannot seem to leave. […]Encouraged, I started keeping track of all my ideas, including the ones I deemed so-so. I quickly discovered that my less-than-great ideas greatly outnumbered my great ones. I filled more and more notebooks.
Erica Goss, What happened when I stopped judging my ideas
When E. and I do distance runs, he always speeds up at the finish line. He says knowing it’s almost over motivates him. But for some reason, seeing the finish line slows me down. Self-help indoctrination tells me that this is because my mind believes the task at hand is already completed: a premature celebration, of sorts. But I honestly think it has more to do with savouring.
The ending of things, all things, has always felt anti-climactic.
How often do we reach a satisfying point before the sudden raveling? When we’ve rung the bell and stepped away, letting the heavy sledgehammer pull our arm towards the ground until we have to drop it? Can we be satisfied? Or are we attentive to the aching muscle’s memory of the weight of the sledgehammer, and our immediate powerlessness?
They say that grief is the price we pay for love. But when the pain we feel at the end of a love affair overshadows the exquisite past, how is it better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all? What are we measuring and why?
I guess I’m talking about purpose. And avoiding those so many Regrets of the Dying. I don’t think purpose can be found in, or via, accomplishments. Purpose has to be in the moment. In verbs, not nouns.
Ren Powell, Enter the Baroness
Recently, on a long walk, I realized that my life is like a poem in another way, too: My life, like a poem, is small and enormous.
Let me explain. In a poem, counterintuitively, compression creates expansion. A single image or metaphor opens up into a wide open space. Less is often more. The more I edited down my life to the essential elements, and the more I revised away the extraneous, the bigger it got.
It occurred to me on this walk that for me, this is happiness: being clear about what matters and taking my red pen to the rest of it. It amazes me now to think about how simple my life is right now, and by simple I don’t mean easy; I mean pared down. It’s people I love, work I love, and experiences that excite and inspire me. Love. Art. Community. That’s it.
The people that don’t bring me joy or peace? Edited out of the poem that is my life. The work that felt like it was not the best use of my time and talents? Edited out. (As my dear friend Saeed Jones says, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.”) All of this editing means setting good boundaries, and not making decisions out of fear, anxiety, or a scarcity-based mindset. It means taking risks and trusting my gut. If I feel negative or even just meh about something, I let it go.
In my experience, the risk is worth the reward. I’m living the most compressed life I’ve ever lived, but it’s the biggest and best life I’ve ever lived. The smaller I made it, the bigger it grew. It feels like magic.
Maggie Smith, Pep Talk
I stumbled across The Way of the Fearless Writer: Mindful Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life, by Beth Kempton, maybe in March. I picked it up, to begin with, at my local library. After a couple chapters, I ordered my own copy and returned the library’s (with a hardy recommendation to the volunteer at the desk).
In other words, I knew almost immediately that Fearless Writer was a book I had to mark up.
To write in service of the writing, not the ego, is a radical act. (p. 24)
Kempton is a Japanologist, who has also sojourned to China, and somewhere along the way met herself on the path. She invites us to do the same—not to study Japanese or the Tao Te Ching, but to embrace writing as a way of being. The passage quoted above continues:
What if we gathered up all the energy we usually spend worrying about what other people think and poured it into our writing? What if we really lived our lives, moment to moment, and wrote about that? What if we wrote to release what is burning inside us, allowing that to be enough for now? (pp. 24-25)
Kempton arranges her book around three gates (a symbol that has, for some time, spoken to me). When I reached her chapter on the gate of emptiness, my mind flew open. I was sitting in my writing cabin, my old dog snoring beside the door, but I felt, literally, as though I were poised on a threshold, about to embark on an entirely new way of being with my work. What if we wrote in service of the writing, not the ego?
It matters that I began reading this book around the time I was finishing Red Pine’s translations of Tao Yuanming’s poems, and, before I finished Fearless, I saw the Capitol Hill premier of a film about Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to see this film, produced by Ward Serrill, and available now on-line; I have watched it three times.) Taken together these texts—these transcendent works of art—were transforming.
Bethany Reid, Books for Writers
Much of the best advice about writing poetry has been expressed in terms of the body. This might seem paradoxical at first: poetry is the least embodied art, words plucked from the air, to be read in the head or aloud. But the simplicity of its medium means that poetry is also intensely embodied, because it only needs a body to happen. “I made it out of a mouthful of air”, said W.B. Yeats — and I remain confident that AI will never write a really memorable poem, because it doesn’t have a mouth: [see] Smoothing Google.
Making poems with a mouthful of air isn’t just about sound, either — it’s about the whole feeling of communicating something across space from one body to another. Ben Lerner defines “poetry” with a story about “rolling [a] word around, as it were, on my tongue”:
I remember walking around as a child repeating a word I’d overheard, applying it wildly, and watching how, miraculously, I was rarely exactly wrong. If you are five and you point to a sycamore or an idle backhoe or a neighbor stooped over his garden or to images of these things on a television set and utter “vanish” or utter “varnish” you will never be only incorrect; if your parent or guardian is curious, she can find a meaning that makes you almost eerily prescient […] And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry anymore— that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.
This describes the exact opposite of what Large Language Models are trained to do: for ChatGPT, the satisfying click is all. Liquefied language would rust its circuits. [,,,]
There are no physical descriptions of the South Korean poet Lee Seong-bok in Indeterminate Inflorescence (Allen Lane), a collection of 470 “notes from a poetry class” made by his students and translated by Anton Hur. But Lee’s programme for the would-be poet is all about cultivating an almost-physical attitude towards pen and page. Throwaway your theories, he seems to say, and be. “The brain is deliberate and social, but the hand is closer to desire and the unconscious. A poem is like a finger that breaks out of your head.” It’s easy to imagine the lecturer’s emphatic gestures.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #25: A Finger That Breaks Out of Your Head
When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese-related poetry?
I was an avid reader of poetry 20 years before I learned about Japanese short form poetry on Twitter/X. At the time, I was writing micropoetry and enjoyed the challenge of precision in word choice ‘back in the day’ when tweets were limited to 140 characters. I loved exploring the depth possible in that limited space. I didn’t have a mentor and (until fairly recently) rarely shared my poems with anyone pre-publication. I just read and analyzed how and why poems work. Sometimes a kind editor would provide feedback. My first haiku (in retrospect, its own kind of birth place!) was published in Hedgerow issue 11 in 2014:
my birth place
a distant memory—
firefliesWhat do you enjoy the most about haiku?
Through poetry, we can express what cannot otherwise be expressed. I enjoy the awareness and centering that comes with conveying a big experience in a tiny poem. The number of words is finite but the meanings can be infinite, so the space between words is included to help create meaning. The tools available to us can turn haiku into tiny powerhouses that are bigger on the inside than the outside.
I like that I can write haiku in my mind while I’m doing other things. A haiku can become a series of words that I repeat in my mind until it clicks into place. This was particularly helpful when I had young kids. I would sometimes walk around with a satchel containing a notebook or WIP to take advantage of an odd minute for writing. A haiku can be a companion in which we ruminate on a poem then need only a moment to jot it down.
Jacob D. Salzer, Kat Lehmann
I taught language and literature (in English, Latin and Greek) for twenty years and I always thought about teaching — whether it was an elementary language class or a doctoral student — as helping both others and myself to read better. There are so many ways to do this, both as a reader and as a teacher, but one thing that comes up quite a lot is the difference between a purely personal response and a critical one. A line of a poem might move me because it reminds me, for example, of a nursery rhyme that my grandmother used to say to me. The particular memory of my grandmother and all that that brings with it is entirely personal to me; but the way that the line echoes a well-known nursery rhyme is not. On the other hand, if I am struck by a piece of writing because it happens to use a word that my grandfather or my first school teacher often used, that might make it very moving for me, but it probably does not have much relevance beyond myself.
As sophisticated readers, we know that coincidences or echoes of this latter kind are not really critically significant in themselves. We teach students, and learn ourselves, to sift them out of formal writing. But all the same, these sorts of associations can be very important to us as readers, and are quite often part of what draws us into a work of literature, even if they are not what keep us there. And perhaps we can talk meaningfully about how literature may provoke such associations — the way that some kinds of poetry, for example, seems designed to elicit them.
These sorts of private associations only multiply, I find, when reading across languages. I’ve mentioned the contemporary French poet Gérard Bocholier before (most recently in this post), as I’ve been reading him slowly but steadily for a few months now. Today I thought I’d offer you one of his poems which I found particularly powerful in the way that it prompted, for me, both the sort of associations which I think we’d all be happy to acknowledge as allusions or part of the poem’s frame of reference, but also a series of other, increasingly personal or specific ones — the part that, perhaps, we don’t usually “say out loud” when we are talking formally about poetry. I can’t speak for M. Bocholier, but it seems to me that the strength of his poetry lies partly in the way that it creates space for these reactions as well.
Victoria Moul, Bocholier, Horace and the nuchal fold
Rob Taylor: The poems in your third collection of poems, 2020’s Governor General’s Award finalist Orrery, largely focused on outer space (an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system), as do many of the poems in your new book, Asterisms. That’s not the standard preoccupation of most poets! Could you speak a little about what drew you to writing about space, and writing about it via poetry specifically?
Donna Kane: I grew up surrounded by a landscape where other-than-human life vastly exceeded human, so the natural world has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. Northeast BC is quite prairie-like (as Lorna Crozier, one of my favourite people and writers, once said, “It’s the closest BC gets to Saskatchewan.”). As a result, the sky takes up a lot of room. On dark, clear nights, the stars are the main feature. I also grew up during the Space Race. I was ten when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The night sky, space, and the natural world were formative parts of my early years, and they have remained not only of interest, but places of solace.
I also write about these subjects in my non-fiction work. I’m currently working on a prose manuscript that chronicles my experiences sleeping outside (I’m heading into my fifth summer of sleeping on an old cast iron bed on our uncovered deck in Rolla) while exploring subjects related to the nocturnal world, astronomy, and light pollution.
RT: In both Orrery and Asterisms, you write poems directly about outer space and the science that underpins its study, but in Asterisms we see that scientific language working its way into poems about animals and objects here on earth: a butterfly flies as if “nicked by a gravity well,” a can of Bartlett pears is no less than “the pivotal moment when the first star / formed… deep within their cosmic dawn,” and even the speaker of your poems is transformed, becoming, in one, an “interstellar object / on a mission to a glass of wine”!
I think the instinct of most poets would be to go in the opposite direction, to use more earth-bound, familiar objects (butterflies, pears, wine) to describe the complexity of the wider universe. (He says, knowing full well that metaphors always end up flowing in both directions.) In reading Asterisms, it felt as if the firmer, more grounded of the two worlds for you was not the earthly, but the cosmic. Would you say that’s true? Do you see deep space around you in the forest, just as others might look up at the stars and see, in their patterns, animals?
DK: Great question. It reminds me of the first four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hourI do feel that. And it’s important, I think, especially now, in the face of climate change and an often-divisive world riddled with fake news, to remind ourselves of the discoveries made by science, and how we understand much better the connections between ourselves and the larger universe because of these discoveries. I also think it’s good to be reminded that not only do we depend on the natural world for our survival, we are nature. Our bodies are comprised of one of the universe’s first elements—hydrogen. There is no element in us that does not also exist in the cosmos.
My interest in and knowledge of the night sky and astronomy has deepened since I began to sleep outside. With the stars and the movements of other planets more viscerally a part of my nighttime experience, I have been reminded of the night sky’s natural and cultural significance, and it has inspired me to learn more. When so many of us live in urban centres where light pollution blocks out the sky and where access to natural spaces is limited, we may not always be aware of the deleterious effects of being disconnected from nature and darkness. A study in 2023 claimed that only one in five North Americans can still see the Milky Way. It’s unsettling how our connections to the night sky are being lost, not to mention that with more animals active at night than in the daytime, the greatest impacts of light pollution have been on other-than-human life.
Rob Taylor, The Hinge Where the Mysteries Lie: An Interview with Donna Kane
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular soul across billions and billions of blind steps each one of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.
Azita Ardakani offers a lyrical antidote to this self-expatriation from our cosmic inheritance in this breathtaking piece she has kindly let me publish on The Marginalian — part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.
Maria Popova, The Cosmogony of You
A common theme that has come up throughout these first couple of days of activism is a refusal of the idea that we must suffer for art, that we must suffer in life. On Day 1, Laura Bates talked about it in the Q & A, that as writers we don’t have to reproduce our trauma for consumption.
I’ve never felt an external need to do this, more a kind of fire in my belly to talk about domestic violence and to use poetry perhaps to make people think differently about it, but more importantly, to make them feel differently. To make myself feel differently about it.
A more pressing concern for me has been to ensure that in the portrayal of traumatic events, I am not retraumatising myself, or others. That the event of the poem transforms the experience into art. That it no longer exists as merely pain, but is instead held by language, framed by language, broken apart by language or shaped by it or fragmented by it or illuminated by it or made exactly the size that it is by the white space and the language.
On Day 2, Clare Shaw also talked about the importance of realising that we don’t need to reproduce trauma or pain, and that poetry is for them a tool of connection and hope. There is a wonderful interview with Clare over at aAh! magazine, which you can find here. When I read this interview, even though I know Clare very well, and have to put up with them randomly turning up at my house, peering through the window and making possessed little snowman on my windowsill, it made me cry. I can’t imagine the power of reading these words as an 18, 19, 20 year old at university for the first time, and navigating the complexities of gender and bodies and love and desire.
In the interview, Clare saysText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
I think what poetry can invite us to do, whether it’s through words or through form or through performance, is to connect with and to feel the realities of violence, the legacies of violence, but also to feel the realities of our own agency and power. It’s about asking people to connect with violence, and this is a difficult ask, but it’s also about connecting with hope and connecting with the drive or recovery, or connecting with resilience or connecting with the power that we find alongside each other.
This connection with hope, with recovery and resilience is so important and we need to keep it not until the final day where in a token gesture, we try and finish on a positive note, but running throughout the 16 Days, a thread of light that weaves through everything.
Kim Moore, Day 4 – 16 days of activism against gender-based violence
Let us crown ourselves
with mud. We of the stinking mines (mine. My own.)
We of the town of mines. The town of little gold
mushrooms growing out of wet ash
to fill our winter bowls
with cold.Backstory
Back in 2018 the small, forested town of Paradise, CA burned up in the Camp Fire that devastated Butte County. Later it was determined that the Camp Fire had been caused by a faulty power line that had been neglected by PG&E. The whole fire and subsequent deaths and destruction could have been prevented for $15 worth of updates on PG&E’s equipment.
Some of you may know this, but I was raised in Paradise, CA. I hadn’t been back to the town in many, many years. But, needless to say, I started thinking about that town again, my time there, and what the fire meant to me. Then I started doing research on the town, its history, and what I uncovered intrigued and disturbed me.
The town, which was ultimately destroyed by a greedy public utility company that refused to prioritize human life over profit, was also built on greed and the destruction of human life too. In my research I realized just how vicious the pioneers who settled the town were to the Chumash Natives, to the land, and even to each other.
I generally don’t write a lot of political poems, but I found myself writing a lot of poems exploring the history of “Paradise.” This is the first of many, which was published by Emerge Literary Journal. My thanks to Theresa Senato Edwards for selecting this poem.
Tresha Faye Haefner, My Most American Poem So Far
In following my previous post about seeking to do positive things that will help lift our spirits, we visited the holiday lights – somewhat non-traditional – at Bellevue Botanical Gardens, which features dragons and flowers made of lights, as well as a very cool underwater scene. Video of dragon below pics.
This year they also had concerts every weekend, and this time they had a jazz quartet, so we listened to a concert of jazz standards by Cole Porter and the Peanuts Christmas theme. We hadn’t seen live jazz in a long time, so it was a fun bonus.
Tomorrow I’m doing a class for a university on the East Coast early, and later in the week I’m going to meet a friend downtown for drinks and then go to the SAL event featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whom I’ve known since we started blogging in….2003? So it’ll be nice to go be social a bit. I hope you are also keeping your holiday/election blues at bay with whatever makes you feel even a little happier.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Post-Thanksgiving, A Season of Rejection, Holiday Lights with Dragons, Seeing Friends and Winter Birds
i became
Robin Gow, 911
a disciple of the cob webs. a caretaker of dust.
that is what it means to be a poet. someone has
to tell the truth about how we came apart.
i sometimes wish i was a different kind
of cartographer. not one who wrote about
hunger but one who wrote about wholeness.
about finding the foot you’ve been missing
& sewing it back on with beading thread.