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: open hands, amphibious poetics, winter’s bones, pockets full of hope, and much more. Enjoy.
In the beginning, I thought I was asking for help. Now, I know that I am building a castle, and the gift is everyone who comes along and builds the castle with me.
The Cathedral of Chartres was burned down and rebuilt five times. Each time, the faithful gathered, gave gifts, and rebuilt it better than the last. Everyone who gave is part of the cathedral.
Everyone who has ever given to a nonprofit is part of the soul of that organization.
The basic DNA of Red Hen is community, so we are happy to invite people into our space to be gift-givers in any way that works for them. We do our best to return the breadth of generosity by uplifting essential stories into the world and inspiring the next generation of writers.
This holiday season, I plan to give gifts and make gifts. Maybe flowers or wreaths, fudge or cookies. I think of gifts as inviting your loved ones into your wander dream space. If you’re in the circle of water, I will have something for you.
One of the best gifts I ever received was when my friend, Jacqueline, gave me eight rose bushes. Every day, they give me happiness. Jacqueline, you gave me joy. I am giving back that joy every day.
Let’s keep the joy going. Let’s live with open hands.
Kate Gale, The Gift: Living With Open Hands
I’m wearing a darker shade of lipstick
deep red, black rose, my double and I taking pleasurein the mirror we sing – à la Brecht — about the dark times.
Jill Pearlman, The Art (a)Part
Questions sift to a close. The cat left a gift
of a dead rabbit on the doorstep.
The first image of the poem, though bursting with lush language and color, is not a beautiful memory. The “but” turns us to a different memory of the mother nailing her wedding dress to a tree, letting us in on the secret that life with the mother wasn’t always difficult. In this second anecdote, the poem shifts in time as well as content. The dress is destroyed over time by grackles and weather, yet the nails continue to sparkle. The language in this section uses the vernacular of sewing as its central focus—bespoke, stitch, seam, teeth which makes another title connection, completely disparate from the first one.
At this point in the poem, the two stories, though different in tone, diction, and purpose, are building a multidimensional portrait. Both scenes deal with creation—painting, fabric—and link the reader back to the title. But where will the poem go from here?
Donna Vorreyer, Quick Turns
When spring comes the snow
will flow into the North Sea
and Stavanger’s quayside will smell
of watermelon
and Kentucky summer daysand your head will fill with stories
Ren Powell, When Spring Comes
of dead goats and swamp moccasins
and you’ll find yourself straddling
continents and piecing together
scraps: a found poetry collage
I’ve spent far too much of my first six decades weary – some of the tiredness inevitable, of course. Much of it the result of trying too hard to avoid something. Myself, mainly. Myself as reflected to me by the extremities of my childhood. I know it’s time to rest up from all that. I’m getting help to learn how.
So, here I am, or there I was, thinking about and now quoting what young Freddy said so lovingly to his beloved CC (grandpa) when Ted explained he couldn’t stay at Freddy’s home because there was no bed: “But I Will Build You A Bed, CC!”
But I Will Build You A Bed, Liz. A place to sleep, a place to grow strawberries, a place to read and write, a place to receive massages, a place to run, a place to sing and dance. A place to take heed, at last, of those wearisome wearinesses, carried since childhood, to lay them to rest.
Liz Lefroy, I Will Build You A Bed
frosty morning
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: December ’24
a distant flock of starlings
twists in the wind
I’ve been working on the poem below for 11 months now, and the process has made me think about the purpose(s) of revision, the why of why artists and writers do it. In the case of this poem, I’m revising for entirely personal reasons. My revisions have little to do with creating a stand-out poem that strangers will read and appreciate; I want to tell a particular story about someone I love in a way that might demonstrate, to that person, compassion and some understanding of his feelings. I believe this is a valid purpose for making art, even if it is subjectively personal–ie, not “universal,” not groundbreaking, not timeless.
Ann E. Michael, Revising for the personal
I recently had the enormous privilege of presenting poetry at the 2024 Palliative Care Summit: ‘Navigating the Crossroads: Building the intersection between Palliative Care & Neurodegenerative Disease’. The summit was hosted by Palliative Care WA in the Pan Pacific hotel in Perth. I mention this because it’s the place I was held in quarantine while my mother died in a nursing home just a few kilometres away. Perth’s hard border control at the time was brutal. While many people have understandably just wanted to move on and forget about the pandemic, it’s taken me a bit longer to do that. For a long time, the sorrow and grief seemed knitted into my skin.
Of course, I could have said no to the summit. But I sensed that this occasion was bigger than me, that these poems might serve others, that performing them might also help me work through residual grief, resentment, and anger. The poet Bernadette Myers spoke about writing ‘occasion’ poems. ‘This is part of our purpose as poets,’ she said. ‘Poetry as work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others’. So I said yes to this work in the community. And I’m so glad I did.
Caroline Reid, Navigating the Crossroads of Palliative Care & Dementia: A Poet’s Perspective
Rachel Davies and Hilary Robinson have been friends for over 20 years. Friends call them the ‘poetry twins’. They are both accomplished poets and you can find their biography below.
An altogether different place, published by Beautiful Dragons Squared, is a joint project. In 2022 Hilary’s husband was diagnosed with vascular dementia; in 2023 Rachel’s partner with dementia and Lewy bodies. In the introduction they write ‘dementia is a catalogue of cruel diseases’. Living with and caring for someone with dementia ‘you come to know grief by slow degrees’. Through poetry Hilary and Rachel ‘found a joint space to laugh, cry, find context and write out their experiences’.
The collection is sold to raise essential research funds for dementia charities in the UK.
Fokkina McDonnell, An altogether different place
In my early twenties I taught Ancient History to Jr. High students at a small school in California. I was probably just as intrigued by the subject matter as any of my students. I loved learning about ancient people, the art they made, the things they discovered, the way they moved civilization forward with tools that we would consider primitive by today’s standards.
Even after I stopped teaching the topic, I continued to read up about ancient cultures, the discovery of old sites and statues. Later, when I moved to Costa Rica and had more free time to both read and walk under streets lined with mango trees, I realized that a lot of my fascination with older cultures was really my fascination with nature. I was curious how earlier societies put nature and animals and plants at the center of their lives, in their iconography, in their texts and poems and prayers. Although I like modern living in many ways, I worry that most people have lost touch with the natural world, and not only is that robbing all of us of an appreciation for our planet, but it’s also putting the planet in danger.
I’m not alone in my concern. Many worry that as we get farther away from our understanding and connection to nature, the closer we come to destroying it, and also ourselves in the process.
When I read this poem by Danusha Lameris, in her book, Blade by Blade, I thought, here’s a poem that gives voice to all of these concerns, in one eloquent poem.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Alphabet of the Apocalypse by Danusha Lameris
This is the King James version; take means catch. The foxes need catching because they’re going to eat the grapes, which besides being, as Miles Burrows puts it, good advice for “market gardeners” is simply an admittedly extreme extension of the poem’s central conceit: spring is here and so we better be about our business. But take is so much better than catch. The poem is all about pleasure, abundance, desire: take almost reads as though the foxes are being scooped up along with the grapes and the figs. They are, after all, only little.
*
We were sleeping on rugs a little way from the jeep, in a makeshift square bordered by bags. The fire had gone out, but there was no need of any shelter, except perhaps from the stars themselves, which were terrifyingly near. It was March 2011 and I was travelling with friends. We had meant to go through Syria, but when the time came Egypt seemed like the safer option.
We were in the White Desert, a surreal expanse of dunes and mushroom-like rocks near the border with Libya. Our driver had warned us about the foxes, but it still wasn’t pleasant to hear them shuffling and sniffing around in the dark. Every time I rolled over, I saw something small duck behind the wheels of the car. With your eyes closed, they seemed nearer. Soon, as the others fell asleep, they really were: weaving between the bags, brushing against toes. Somehow, heroically, I slept. When I woke, the desert was green and so was the sky. The moon was full and the stars were gone. The foxes were there, too, a little way off, with green eyes.
They were back in the morning, playing further off. In the sunlight they were adorable. I think they were Fennecs, the smallest species of fox, but they might have been Rüppell’s, which are more closely related to our Red Fox. Presumably the little foxes in The Song of Songs are one or the other, too.
Before leaving, we followed the foxes to their den behind a small dune, which can’t have been more than a few metres from our camp. There was a single sock on the sand below the entrance (later we discovered that many more were missing). At the time, I imagined it was all coincidence: we were hours from anywhere and happened to park next to them. Presumably, though, the driver parked there every other night and that’s why the den was there.
*
Contemporary poetry is full of foxes and this must be because contemporary poets see them all the time. They are the closest that many of us come to meeting a wild animal. Often, the foxes in these poems are endowed with a kind of mystical quality. Through the encounter, the poet accesses a wilder part of themselves which had been lying dormant. That wildness sits a little uneasily with the fox’s sheer ubiquity. It’s our wildness, not theirs.
The most famous example I can think of, Ted Hughes’s “Thought Fox”, is a very deliberate piece of self-mythologising, though Hughes’s fox lives in the forest (he was remembering Yorkshire). The story you hear at Pembroke, Hughes’s old Cambridge college, is that he wrote it while sitting up one night looking over the old court, bored stiff of essay writing. One version of this myth says that there was a real fox crossing the court. The myth also claims to know which ‘starless’ window he wrote it by. I don’t like “The Thought Fox”, but then I don’t really like any of Hughes’s animal poems. It’s his wildness, not theirs.
Jem Wikeley, Take us the foxes, the little foxes
Most metaphorical poems about courtship-as-hunting do not push the comparison this far, but if we understand that in this stanza the huntsman is cutting the deer open to see how thick its layer of fat might be, we appreciate better the link with the white upper silk of the skin and the dense red velvet of the flesh in the second stanza. One of the many disturbing features of the poem is that Lovelace links undressing a woman (clothed in silk and velvet) with slicing into a hunted animal.
George Steiner in On Difficulty has a good three-page discussion of this poem in which he sets out several of the ways in which it draws on a traditional blurring of hunting and sex, while at the same time conveying strongly but in a way that is hard to analyse a sense that something else is going on too.6 Steiner suggests that the ‘something else’ is theological and hears an echo of the incarnation in incarnadin and incorporate. But Steiner’s reading is vaguer than it needs to be. There are many sophisticated cross-currents in this poem, for sure, but the main source of the ‘something else’ is really the third stanza, the only part of the poem that is about healing rather than killing; sealing rather than cutting open; making whole rather than taking apart; repairing rather than penetrating. If you remove that stanza, the lyric is much simpler, more straightforwardly nasty, and much more obviously coherent.
What might that strange third stanza actually mean?
Victoria Moul, Naught but bone, bone
After a year of living in London **cough* years ago, the company I worked for moved down the road from Holborn to Farringdon Road, and we ended up in an office near Smithfield Market. For those that don’t know, it’s an area of historical significance in London. This ranges from revolutions in the middle ages to raves in the late 1990s via a long-standing meat market (circa 800 years). I’m doing it a historical disservice here, so read the links above for more if you don’t already know.
I spent many happy evenings in the pubs round there in my mid-20s, and was taken out for a few meals in Smiths of Smithfield. It seemed so exotic as a place. I was fascinated by the idea of SoS doing a gussied up version of a fish finger sandwich on their menu. What, the thing I used to eat as a skint student, using the cheapest Fish Fingers*, nasty white bread and Salad Cream as a flavouring is now on offer for the best part of a tenner…? It was a mad world.
The area has been undergoing change since the dawn of time, and continues to do so.
Notably, the rate of change seems to be increasing and sadly there are plans afoot to change the market. The powers that be want to close it down, and I assume it will be turned into flats, or something equally pointless, but I have a feeling the closure is inevitable…
So it was interesting and timely in the week that I read about the potential/likely (delete as applicable depending on the way you see a glass with 50% of its water capacity in) closure that I finally got round to reading my copy of John Challis’ ‘The Resurrectionists‘ and turned to his poem called ‘Advertising’. I won’t put it here as it’s available on John’s website, but have a read. I feel seen, part of the problem, and in awe of the way it covers time, class, skills, and manages to make it all happen in such a small space.
I also have to note that ten pages after that poem is a poem called ‘The District Line’, and would you Adam and Eve it, I was reading John’s book on the District Line. I’d had to change my route home due to delays on the Circle Line, and look, you might not see it as spooky, but I did…The last lines of the poem left me to stumble a little when I got off the train. Go, buy the book and find out why.
Mat Riches, Uncareful Owner
Against Oblivion by the late critic and poet Ian Hamilton is easy to dip into, given that it is part anecdotal, part biographical, part critical, and each short chapter ends with one or two, sometimes three examples of each poet’s work. I find it an enduringly fun read. […]
He re-evaluates Ezra Pound a little at least. While acknowledging the facts of his bonkers support for Mussolini and increasingly extreme right-wing views that eventually led to his internment, Hamilton felt his Cantos show he was capable of more depth than his political stupidity suggests. “Pound,” he says, “was always at his best when he stopped thinking.” He points out that William Carlos Williams called Pound a noisy crackpot but acknowledged his talent.
Williams lost patience with Pound, wanted to find a more ‘American’ poetry, hated The Waste Land, possibly because of Pound’s involvement in it, and in spite of his going in and out of fashion, he was a steady man who stuck to his task. His final poem, Paterson, was unfinished, in spite of being developed and worked on for the last seventeen years of his life. This ordinary general medical practitioner worked in Rutherford, New Jersey, for mroe than four decades and was, Hamilton says, ‘the least scandalous of modern poets’.
Similarly, Wallace Stevens endured ‘no divorces, no breakdowns, no upheavals,” worked as the vice-president of an insurance company, was a remote, aloof and apparently sometimes contemptuous man who was admired but not loved by his readers. Hamilton feels this would not have upset him in the slightest. “It would have pleased him to know that his invisibility was durable.”
Bob Mee, AGAINST OBLIVION, SOME LIVES OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POETS by Ian Hamilton
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry after reading Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (a novel about vampires). I was probably about 13-years old. In the book, he uses a poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” by Wallace Stephens. I had no idea what the poem meant (I’m still not sure I do), but I wondered why this mysterious poem was in a book about vampires. Thus, my love of poetry!
I’ve never really tried fiction; perhaps I’m lazy. I do go through periods where I write non-fiction, which I enjoy, and which can be as lyrical as any poem. A while ago, I was in a writing group that committed to 100-word stories/week. This was a perfect forum for a poet: I had to practice concision, as well as story-telling. My poems don’t always follow a narrative or chronological arc (this can be problematic at times!), so being in this group helped a lot. The stories tended to be biographical or, at least meditative. I was able to complete a 1000-word creative non-fiction piece about a statue of the Virgin Mary in my childhood neighborhood who, people believed, began to speak, to prophesize. This story still haunts me; writing it as prose was a way to contain it.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer Martelli
From Wilfred Owen in 1917 rhetorically asking, “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” to Kevin Powers in 2014 directly stating, “War is just people making little pieces of metal pass through each other,” contemporary Anglophone antiwar poetry and literature has largely been the purview of conscientious objectors and soldiers who fought in wars and either succumbed or got disillusioned. The imperialist invasions of the U.S. coupled with national liberation struggles worldwide in the latter half of last century, however, saw survivors of displacement, persecution, and torture enter the American lyric by offering what poet and activist Carolyn Forché terms a “poetry of witness” that serves as “evidence of what occurred,” while being “as much about language as are poems that have no subject other than language itself.”
While the western literary world has nevertheless confined itself to Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s somber observation that “no lyric has stopped a tank,” Alareer turns the Nobel Laureate’s remark on its head in a crucial essay in If I Must Die. He brings up legendary Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan as he asks, “Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone under house arrest, she only wrote a poem?” Not only does he then go on to clarify that an Israeli general is on record equating the late great Tuqan’s poems with “facing twenty enemy fighters,” but he also recognizes how important literature was to the legitimization of the pre-1948 Zionist project. “Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry,” he writes.
So, in his poetry as well as prose compiled in If I Must Die, Alareer creates the counternarrative by daring to imagine a free Palestine as much as caring to portray the realities of Gaza getting destroyed in front of him. On one hand, the life of the Shujaiya native who went back home after graduate studies in London and Malaysia traces a tragic throughline that saw him lose family and close friends to the IDF’s terror campaign from 2008-09’s Operation Cast Lead (or “The First Gaza War”) through 2014’s Operation Protective Edge down to the ongoing Operations Swords of Iron and Summer Camps. On the other hand, the narrative Alareer stitches together is one of rugged resilience, unbounded optimism, and most importantly, fierce collectivism of large, interlocked families determined to outlast the occupying power on their land.
Karthik Puru, Portrait of the Artist as a People’s Historian
The fundamental importance of names (names of people, names of objects, names of places) to the way we generate meaning has been a concern of writers from Shakespeare to Proust and well beyond, and [Shash] Trevett adds her voice to this tradition with great accomplishment. For her, it is the names themselves, but also the naming of them, that allows us to retain some form of connection with those who have left us. Not just the giving of a name to a person, but the repeated acknowledgement of it, the saying of it, the recitation of it, perhaps even the incantation of it. […]
Many of the ‘Naming of Names’ poems (there are eleven) are simple alphabetised lists of some of those who died in the twenty-six-year Sri Lankan Civil War – taken from lists in reports by the Sri Lankan North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESHR), themselves, as Trevett points out, only a fraction of those who actually lost their lives. These names do feel more ‘set in stone’, as though they are names lining a wall of remembrance. There is a formality, even grandeur, in this presentation, and the poems are I think, in one sense at least, intended to honour the dead – certainly to remember them. But right at the beginning of the collection Trevett puts this much more beautifully, in three short stanzas entitled ‘Dear Reader’, where (as in her family’s experience of naming names) there is not the coldness of stone in the names, but the warmth of life. I quote the poem (or perhaps I should call it poetically lineated prose) in full:
This book is filled with names. They will be strange
and unfamiliar to you. As you turn these pages you will be tempted
to gloss over, skim, even ignore them. Please don’t. There is music
in these names.Each is a whisper of a life lived and loved. Each a Tamil man,
woman or child killed by the state. Each a forgotten victim, mere
collateral damage, peripheral, expendable.These names are mausoleums for those denied gravestones.
They are the staccatoed prayers of remembrance.
The hiss of incense on a funeral pyre.This touching exhortation reads like a plea to return dignity to those denied it by the calamity and disgrace of the civil war.
Chris Edgoose, What is in a name: The Naming of Names by Shash Trevett
This week, I shared a group poem which was created in a matter of minutes by participants in an online workshop. It was a celebrating the culture and ecology of wetlands …. it gave rise to this conversation between me and the poet Chrissy Banks in the Substack comments:
Chrissy: “That’s an incredible group poem. It seems so coherent and the imperatives starting each sentence give it the sense of being one certain, purposeful, guiding voice”.
Clare: “I really enjoy working online as it opens up the possibility of this sort of collaborative writing. All it takes is the imperative, or a repeated phrase, to create what can feel like a coherent, living, breathing poem which writes itself as you watch. It’s quite magical.”
This afternoon, I’m reading at a local fundraiser for Palestine … and as it seems like entirely the wrong event for ego, and exactly the right place to build a collective voice, I want to share some work by other poets, including Naomi Shihab Nye’s Gate 4, which ends with the line: Not everything is lost.
Even – or especially – as we protest against the genocide and atrocities taking place in plain sight, it seems crucial to remember this. I’m going to invite everyone at the event to help construct a poem to take away with them – and I’d like you to take part too. Please would you post in Comments any reason why “Not everything is lost”. Give me your examples of kindness, solidarity, hope, change, resistance or healing. Give me the things which sustain you, and which help you to believe in a shared world.
I’ll share the result in the coming days.
Kim Moore, An invitation to write a group poem today
Nazim Hikmet said, however and wherever we are,
Luisa A. Igloria, On Living and Dying
we must live as if we will never die. This is
such a strange paradox, because we know we’ll die
at some point. He said, living must be your whole
occupation. We know the weight of living is heavy,
and we’re afraid of how, by itself, death
never announces when it comes. But the poet says
think of the audacious— plant some kind
of fruiting tree in your old age, enjoy the humor of little
moments, even as wars are waged and millions
of microbes circle this earth that has been dying
ever since it was born. You’ve just spent
the rest of your paycheck again on another home
repair issue, or helping out a child in need.
Every day brings a new kind of sadness. What
is anyone to do? Find a new set of batteries,
string some lights in the window.
I love the almost infuriating visual art medium of Etch-a-Sketch because of its ephemerality. I’ve made some pretty good sketches on them now and then. But one shake and it’s all gone. And that one shake is inevitable. Oops. And necessary to make way for a new vision.
I love that. And it horrifies me. The way some artists, like Andy Goldsworthy, make art that becomes, by its very nature, eventually unmade appeals to me. (This is far different, by the way, than the rich guy who bought the banana taped to the wall and then ate the banana.)
I sat one evening at the window, meaning to get up and do something else, but the light and colors of the sunset kept changing, shifting, deepening. It was an incredible show. Then it was over, and it was dark. Oops.
Beauty cannot be held nor eaten, and yet I eagerly reach for it and try to gobble it before it disappears. Because it does disappear. Or I do. Or certainly my fond attention to beauty can get distracted by, well, all the other stuff.
I appreciate poetry for its insistent attention on things — not just the beautiful, but the awful, the strange. I like a poem that gives me pause, that whirls me uncertain for a moment, that gives back to me the familiar world made odd.
Marilyn McCabe, The moon croaks from the well
Rob Taylor: Wet is a work of poetic fiction inspired by your experience living and modeling in Singapore. In it you describe Singapore as a city of great wealth, but one which often feels highly unnatural: poisoning animals (lizards, birds) and mistreating foreign workers, with shops full of “H-TWO-O isotonic drink” and NEWater (made from recycled urine) which people drink instead of water.
Compounding this, when you were living there Singapore was caught in the midst of a months-long drought and corresponding forest fires, often making the air unbreathable. Midway though Wet you write, “The truth: I think I’m a monster.” To what extent is that “monstrous” feeling connected to your, or your speaker’s, feeling of disconnection with the natural world?
Leanne Dunic: When I was a model in Singapore nearly two decades ago, I was simultaneously the owner of clothing boutiques. Experiencing the real and usually unglamorous side of modelling, I realised how I played a role in the seemingly never-ending patterns of consumption. A few months after I returned from my modelling stint, I decided to sell the business. Of course for all of us, it’s a precarious balance between taking care of self while also considering the ripple effect on other earthkin. I try to do what I can, and I hope this book will help others think of their place in their environments/communities.
RT: As an “American-born Chinese girl” modelling in Singapore, your speaker seems positioned as an outsider everywhere: Chinese in some people’s eyes, American in others’. You, too, move between countries and cultures frequently, and your books often mix prose, poetry, visual art, and music. You not only write in hybrid forms, but you teach them at SFU.
Do you see a parallel between your hybrid life and your hybrid art? Do you think your border-crossing life inspired your genre-crossing art?
LD: Absolutely, I think my mixed-race identity and transnational tendencies have influenced how I create. For my PhD research, I’m exploring the possibilities of something I’m calling “amphibious poetics”—my artistic practice, like an amphibian, moves fluidly between environments and is multiple in genre, form, content, aesthetic, and ecology. This approach allows me to let the content dictate how it wants to manifest as far as form is concerned.
Rob Taylor, Amphibious Poetics: An Interview with Leanne Dunic
My spouse Chris Gavaler is a comics scholar and creative writer who does crazy things with Microsoft Paint, an old graphics editor that’s supposed to be very limited but which he keeps inventive finding ways to redeploy. He’s also on sabbatical and just finished taking a drawing class that developed his visual arts skills. One of his latest Microsoft Paint projects: creating a comic based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” which recently appeared in ASP Bulletin and is forthcoming in my March 2025 collection Mycocosmic. The art he developed is here, consisting of reworkings of tarot’s Major Arcana cards (the featured image above is The Empress). The full comic, incorporating my poem’s words, is drafted but not posted yet, as he’s workshopping it with friends soon.
I’ve been thinking about tarot since the pandemic, when the cards offered a desperate way for this obsessive planner to imagine what might lie ahead. Since then they’ve become, for me, less about the possibility of divination and more about the necessity for contemplation of currents operating in my life or in the lives of people who ask me for readings. My poem “Rhapsodomancy,” with numbered sections keyed to the Major Arcana, began when I learned about the practice of divination through poetry. Basically, rhapsodomancy is a version of bibliomancy: you ask a question and randomly pick a bit of a poem for the answer. What “random” means can encompass a variety of procedures, but when I originally put the poem under submission, it carried these instructions:
Add the number of times you’ve sustained a memorable burn to the current intensity of your existential doubt rated on a thirteen-point scale. The number corresponds to the advice below. If your answer is a negative number, set a match to the poem and study the scorched fragments.
I sent it out a number of times, but the version of the poem with these instructions was never accepted by a magazine; I think they made the whole thing seem too cute or flip. The poem has a flip edge without them, after all, although it reflects serious wrestling.
Lesley Wheeler, Myco-comic for Mycocosmic
I’ve been re-reading Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf. I read a copy from the library and had to resist the urge to underline passages which always tells me I need my own to dog-ear and mark. Published in 2018 before many of us were thinking at all about AI and its future ramifications, it seems like a book that anyone interested and involved in literacy work should have in their pocket. […]
Wolf says that “Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the Artist in society to that of the canary in the mines; both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.” She quotes Marilynne Robinson who warned of impending “moral catastrophe” and how Robert Darnton said we “live in a historical ‘hinge moment.’” And it feels like in 2024, some ships have sailed.
In the book Martha Nussbaum is quoted from a piece 20 years prior and it pretty much rings out right now:
“It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavours, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.”
Wolf herself then says, “I could never have imagined that research about the changes in the reading brain, most of which reflect increasing adaptations to a digital culture, would have implications for a democratic society. Yet that is my conclusion.”
Shawna Lemay, Repair Shop – Healing Place for the Soul
This Lit Hub piece is a very interesting read about the rise of the poetry machines. Last year, I applied for a part-time position that was supposed to help AI bots to write poems, and while I got all set up to be paid, when it came to the training, they sort of ghosted me (which didn’t give me a lot of faith in the company, so I just let it go after a couple emails.) They seemed highly unorganized and bad at communication, not what you would expect from a tech outfit, so no major loss. I applied as a lark after seeing someone post about it on FB, and was infinitely curious about the ability of a non-self entity, an LLM, to practice a very self-oriented activity. Poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, is a reflection of the self and personal experience and imagination, an interpretation of language and symbols and a translation. Take apart the craft and poetic devices and really it’s just one person sounding a bell to resonate in someone else. I am not sure a bot can do this.
I tend to have a more welcoming attitude compared to some about generative AI. I think it will open as many new doors as it will close. For visual art and design, it doesn’t feel all that different from what I’ve been doing for decades as a collage artist. It’s just faster and has a broader scrap box to draw from. I’m not sure what I get there could be called art. Even the scraps that I then try to make into art. Or I can make them into art by using them as a jumping off point.
Overall I think there are dangers of echo chamber effect for prose, especially when it comes to writing informational and promotional content and I occasionally stumble across blogs and articles very obviously not written by a human. Yes, you can get copy in seconds, but I am not sure you want it. It seems ripe for misinformation and just unintentionally erroneous statements. It troubles me not that they exist so much, but that some folks wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. In general, I am actually a little excited about LLMs and their ability to amass massive amounts of information and spit it back algorithmically. I think they also give us the opportunity to delve more into what makes creativity creative beyond technical skills. What it means to be artists, not just by what we can do with our hands or tongues, but what makes us different as humans.
Kristy Bowen, poetry and the machines
Leave the cracked crockery, the coffee
Charlotte Hamrick, Breakfasting in Winter
cold in my belly,
your broken breath scattering shards
of embers, frosty ash
casual in its cruelty. Our crumbs
are better suited to winter’s bones.
I saw the sunrise more than once this week, as I got up early at the beginning of the week to do a class appearance for Dr. Lesley Wheeler’s class at Washington and Lee University at 9:30 AM Pacific Time. The class asked great questions, they asked me to read poems from Flare, Corona I hadn’t read out loud yet, and generally had great vibes despite the early hour.
This week was also filled with social activity—downtown Seattle dinner with poet friends, attending a Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) event, and an early morning downtown Seattle breakfast to end the week with old friend (best-selling writer and poet) Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Some days you don’t feel great, your MS has been acting up, but you peel yourself out of bed, put on a dress and do your makeup, battle an hour’s worth of crazy Seattle traffic (narrowly escaping accidents multiple times) to see your friends for dinner and see your other friends read at SAL.
At you know what? At the end of the night, it was definitely worth it. And part of the reason you spent four hours getting an IV of covid antibodies over a month ago. I think the moral of the story is: even if sometimes you’re not feeling 100 percent physically up to something, sometimes it’s beneficial for your mental health to do it anyway. Counting my spoons but also counting my blessings for great people!
The next morning, I woke up early again to meet Aimee for breakfast at the beautiful Edgewater hotel lobby, and saw, once again, beautiful skyline with early morning light. And it was great catching up with Aimee—it can be years between good catch-up sessions with my poet friends who live in other parts of the country, so I don’t take it for granted. Thanks Aimee! I left breakfast feeling more cheerful than I had in weeks. Not only that, both times I went downtown, people stopped to say hi, compliment my hair or dress or just wish us happy holidays, and I was like: is Seattle getting friendlier?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Busy Week of Pre-Holiday Teaching, Celebrating with Friends, SAL Event with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and More
Pale as the rain
thin as December
the strangeness of kindness
this kindness I remember
So I sold a poem and I went to a bar
got a shot of what you got
for every pretty girl
and I felt like a rock star
Felt so good to say, put your money away
baby, I’ll get this round […]‘Pale As The Rain’ was released with our band SaltPeter on the ‘Hunger’s The Best Sauce’ album around 2007. Words and vocals by Salena Godden, music by Salena Godden and Peter Coyte. I am not very good at playing guitar but I remember picking out this melody and walking around the December streets of London, writing these lyrics, humming this tune, feeling this way. I reckon it must be around now, maybe December 2004, maybe exactly twenty years ago. I share it today for you, for Giving Tuesday, sharing it for Grief Awareness week, sharing it because I just heard it and remembered the loss I felt in this time, how it was another time and place and another era. I still have a map of that time of London in my head, I still carry the feeling of it.
Salena Godden, Pale as the rain, thin as December
I enjoy winter, and find it is over so very quickly – the first tips of iris reticulata will be showing in less than a month’s time.
I’ve set aside this winter as a time to nourish myself as a writer too. Having spent the year working on two small themed collections (I do struggle with the throwaway feel of the word pamphlet) I feel I’ve been living very much in the past, reworking old poems, revisiting old themes. I’m proud of both of these books, yet feel as though I’ve achieved nothing – they are in the limbo of publisher land, awaiting the yay or nay. There is nothing more to be done at this stage (although I am still working on both in preparation for resubmission!) but what I realise I need is to return to writing for the joy of it, to the nice stage of just making something and seeing how it turns out.
The bedrock of this nourishment is reading, of course. I have three new books to enjoy, Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt, The Taste of Rain by Cherry Doyle and These are her thoughts as she falls by Louise Longson. I read poetry slowly, noticing details the way I notice tiny changes in my garden. I also love to have structure and a sense of discipline in my reading and to this end have undertaken a Writing Advent project. This is a super simple thing, whereby I read and write around a hundred words in response to what I’ve read. I’m late starting, which doesn’t matter a jot, but I’m already feeling the benefit of having a focus that forces me stop, read and write even if it’s just for half an hour. As well as reading, I’ve attended a couple of online book launches, and short workshops. My goal for next year is to be more present in the poetry world – a consequence of grief and general terror of other humans is that I do tend to hide away and I’m realising that nourishment comes from interaction with others as much as it does from books.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, December
While dropping off to sleep during the week I was amused to find myself dreaming that I was a gingerbread biscuit on a baking tray. I could feel the metal underneath me and was hugely impressed by my own flatness. There seems to be a thing about transformation for me that occurs on the edge of sleep lately. Having vividly been a spoon and a biscuit I wonder what I might be next!
Tidying my desk this week I decided to recycle some old notebooks and refresh my supplies. I am attending a writing masterclass with Caroline Bird this week and starting a new journal now will set me up for writing in the new year. I found a few bits and pieces that I had started and not finished so have set these aside to come back to. I also found a notebook with just one page written on.
Sue Finch, A YELLOW SALT DOUGH STAR
Yesterday a social media post reported that a swan chick was trapped in the ice-covered Tjörnin, a lake in Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavík. Conservationist Kerstin Langenberger saw the post and replied, “I am on my way with the necessary equipment.”
She immediately set off on a rescue mission bringing thermoses of warm water and a surfboard (in case the ice was unstable). She gently poured warm water on the cygnet’s frozen feathers, rubbing away the ice to release him. Although he could easily have died, he was saved by concerned bystanders and a person with the necessary equipment. He flew off without any apparent injury. […]
Everyone I talk to feels overwhelmed by all that’s going on and all that’s coming. I think it will help if we focus rather than react to every outrage. If women’s issues or immigration or climate change or the genocide being perpetrated in Palestine are your top concern, hone down to read about and act on that one issue as a priority.
When I look around, I see all sorts of necessary equipment in use. A Dad Hugs shirt worn to Pride parades. Smiles brought by volunteer reading tutors. Handouts used in citizen testimony to stop Ohio’s mandated fracking leases at all state parks. Tea shared between groups from different religions. Paint and brushes brought to create a community mural. Household goods given away through local No Buy groups. Videos taken to document and report abuses. Chainsaws brought to clear trees downed by storms. Typewriters set up in public spaces for free poems written by request. Neighbors out walking to help find a lost dog. Shareable groups formed to create a walking school bus, a regular stranger dinner, and much more.
There are infinite ways we humans reach out to care for the world around us. Our experiences and abilities are exactly the tools needed. Rest up, breathe deeply, keep your pockets full of hope.
Laura Grace Weldon, Necessary Equipment
I sit against the old oak. Its leather leaves
Sarah Russell, End of Autumn
crackle, gossiping about the coming snow.
Passersby are zipping jackets, pulling hoodies
tight to cover ears. Though robins have headed
south, nuthatches and chickadees linger at the feeder,
even when yearling squirrels shimmy up to fill
their cheeks and race off toward the pine. Shadows
are long by four. I’m glad for stew simmering
in the crockpot and logs stacked for a fire this evening.
I rise and find a new ache in my bones.
today, a girl still under a mountain of rubble
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The twenty-first poem must
and buried in a line, thirteen children from one family – a precision air strike:
they tell us to ignore the growling dark in the sky
but a poem must write of drones
that swallow the doves
a poet
must scream
must
cry