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: handmade lanterns, no more flowers, gingerbread houses for hurricane refugees, a thousand erasure poems, a thousand haiku, and much more. Enjoy.
new morning / new mourning / images rushing / images merging /
methane-spitting / missile-spouting / forest-burning / cyclone-churning / regime-changing / border-drawing / billion-bursting / record-charting / child-killing / land-stealing / people-hating / people-hurting / power-conniving / poor-starving / resource-extracting / resource-exploiting / post-truthing / deep-faking / lion-preaching / herd-kneeling / devil-dancing / god-watching /
you-consuming / you consuming
Rajani Radhakrishnan, you-consuming / you consuming
as if / you are / removed from it all /
as if / you can be / drinking tea in silence / (feet warm in December)
as if / you are / elsewhere
as if / the news has come / to you / as a curious visitor / from a nameless faraway
as if / the news is not today’s sermon /
as if / a dragonfly goes past / without ever / meeting your eye /
I was standing in the closet on Thursday morning when my phone started screeching. I was confused for a couple seconds; then I felt strong shaking. I quickly crawled under an oak coffee table to ride out a very scary earthquake. Everything rattled and swayed, and in the hot tub, my husband Paul got sloshed around. An hour later, my phone squawked again, this time with a tsunami warning.
But thankfully, though it was a 7.0 shaker just 63 miles away, there was very little damage and no tsunami. The only casualty we sustained was a taper candle that fell over and broke. This was very unlike the 6.4 earthquake here two years ago which seriously damaged dozens of houses, knocked out power to 70,000 people and broke our water pipes, plaster and dishes.
earthquake cleanup
all the cobwebs
left intactBetween the shaking ground, the dark plans of our president-elect, and governments from France to Syria unexpectedly collapsing, much is in upheaval these days. Sometimes it seems the earthquake mantra, “drop, cover and hold on” should apply to the rest of life too.
a long day
Annette Makino, Drop, cover and hold on
of watching the world burn
his steady breathing
I’ve been thinking again, again, about desire, that wanting word, that wishing on a star word. I wish I didn’t desire. Wish I didn’t wish for what I don’t really “need,” a word that, interestingly, comes down by way of a Germanic word meaning danger. So there’s that.
I wish enough were enough (a word coming from a prefix “for” or “with” plus a root from “what can be reached”). I mean, what bounty is mine! (C’est si bon.) But inside me is a rootling piggy, snuffling among the leaves for more more more, for some tuber of richness that will somehow fill me and will never fill me. And I wonder what fills other people.
I observe that for some people, other people seem to fill them — particularly children, particularly grandchildren. Or at least that’s what it seems like from outside, where I stand. For some it’s work. For some lucky few it’s play. For some it’s some deity or other. Or so it seems. Or do all of us nurse a small internal reaching-for?
Maybe, really, we’re all just rootling around in the leaves, and what seems to fill, well, only smooths the edges. I don’t know. Or I’m mistaking myself for everyone else. Anyway, I’m trying to at least sit with my stars, with my reaching hand, sit with the wanting, and feel empathy for whatever it is, this strange hole, the anxious pig.
It is something of this strange wanting that informs, I think, my interest in this short essay by Lindsay Stuart Hill I encountered in Plume Poetry magazine. Plume Poetry clearly sees it as a prose poem, but its effort is, I think, an essay in nature, essay from the French meaning to try. The author articulates an experience from her childhood that has haunted her, and in the act of describing hopes to, but fails to exactly identify what the experience did to her/for her, how it filled her, momentarily, like a hand full of star. I like that it leaves the experience still a mystery, that the effort toward naming fell short, remained a reaching toward. A snuffling around.
Marilyn McCabe, the light from a match struck in the dark
At the end of their lantern walk, the four family members are standing in their yard with their handmade lanterns under a black sky—clouds having obscured the moon and stars—and they decide to experiment by blowing them out one by one to see the change in the light.
Then, when only Sylvia’s lantern is left burning—five year-old Sylvia who had been worried at the start that the little tea lights wouldn’t be bright enough to walk by—the four stand quietly around it for a moment until she begins to move toward the house and they all follow, “huddled, peacefully around the single little flame of Sylvia’s lantern.”
The story ends with the words, “A little bit of light, it was enough to lead them all back home.”
I’ve been holding this story, this query, these past few weeks as the nights have lengthened and cold has finally settled over NC’s piedmont region. The question of how much light we really need feels deeply personal this week as I grieve the unexpected death of my oldest friend, and attend to my father in the hospital. The question is also collective, as so many of us process the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and what the results are likely to have in store for so many vulnerable people (both human and nonhuman) and places, grapple with how to live in the metacrisis, and take stock of how we arrived where we find ourselves.
The truth I’m holding is two-fold: that we often need less light than we think we do, and that we could also sure use more than we have.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, How Much Light Do we Really Need?
And also, look at this bowl on display at the Met Museum. It was made in ancient Egypt using clay pulled from the banks of the Nile. Someone posted a picture of it on BlueSky two days ago and it’s all I’ve been able to think about. Look at its little feet. They point inward so shyly. Look at how the bowl tips forward as if to say, here, I’ve brought something for you to eat. I’ve ordered two copies of the bowl from the Met’s online shop. I woke up thinking about the bowls on their way to me and smiled. I keep thinking about an artisan working their hands over clay pulled from the river bank, making little feet with little toes simply because… well, because it felt good. Because it made them smile. I keep thinking about how that artisan’s joyful work has reached me through time and space. I hope my joyful work travels like that one day.
Saeed Jones, Joy in the dark is a candle.
At the end of his life, my father needed antibiotics and possible surgery. He walked into the hospital with his DNR. He was in a lot of pain and had been for years. He was dead in a couple of days. He lay pale on the hospital sheets, Dilaudid dripping into him.
That’s not how I plan to go. I hope to live long, writing, walking my dogs, threading my life with my children and my eleven friends, remembering that I came out of the fire to find stories, and I don’t have to live in pain. I can breathe.
Everything in America tells us, “Be afraid, be very afraid.”
Breathe, I tell myself. You got out. You’re going to be okay. Keep on writing and swimming. Your kids turned out alright. America may seem like an emergency, but keep breathing.
America is so much more dangerous and beautiful than I imagined it would be when I first walked out of the cult with my dog. But I am so much more powerful than I was as that child, with only a sleeping bag, dog, and harmonica.
Kate Gale, The Body Won’t Stop Keeping the Score
Every so often I look at what I’m writing, what I’ve just written, or if the inclination takes me I look a little further back, and see nothing that’s any good.
It’s not something to worry about. Doubt is good for any writer. Sometimes you have to stop what you’re doing, or attempting to do, examine and assess it.
And sometimes when you look at it – or when I do – I see nothing to recommend it, which is exasperating and destructive. Often the mood passes in a day or so, some kind of constructive force returns, and I crack on again.
This time the doubt has lasted longer. From being positive enough to think about one final collection in book form a couple of weeks ago, in a matter of hours, or a day at most, now I look and think ‘What’s different about it? What’s the point in it that makes it anything other than the dreaded run-of-the-mill?’
I don’t write because I have to, but because for more than fifty years it’s been the most appropriate way for me to find a creative response to the world’s madness, chaos, joy and loveliness. It feels right. Yes, I can paint a little bit, draw a little bit. Yes, I like taking photographs that speak a little bit to me at least. It’s writing, though, that has drawn me into it and made me explore the furthest.
I wasn’t bad as a journalist. Was neither a great writer, nor a bad one. I learned the craft and stuck with it until it earned me a good living.
Poetry has always been a more uneven ride. I threw all the early stuff out. By early, I mean everything until I was almost fifty. More recently, perhaps because of the impending sense of mortality, I’ve kept it on here. Even the experimental, hit-or-miss stuff that sometimes comes from stream-writing that can appear like notes for several later poems, I have let run and have allowed it its own space.
A couple of weeks ago, though, I relapsed into the state of mind that shouted out ‘oh, for goodness’ sake, this is all rubbish, delete the lot and start all over again – or not’. Only the fact that it’s so laborious to get rid of every single thing with the ‘Move To Trash’ process has stopped me doing it. I’ve also taken the time over the last year or so to copy all of the poems longhand into large notebooks, so would have to sling those in the recycling bin as well, which might be more difficult to handle.
Bob Mee, A HEALTHY DOSE OF DOUBT
I have a new book almost ready to go.
It is called ‘Lightwork’, and includes some of the poems I have written since
2017. This seems like quite a time span, given that my previous collections
‘The Sun Bathers’ and ‘The Great Animator’ came out within 3 years of each other.I was fortunate to have a slim book of translations published in 2019, but this new book of poems will have been eight years in the making. For someone previously used to writing and editing quickly, this really surprises me.
I suppose there are several reasons for the slow-down, one being that I haven’t been in a hurry. I became very interested in the benefits of meditation, and also rediscovered the joy of other creative outlets, such as playing music and making paintings. I’ve also been busy enjoying my job, my family, my friends.
At one stage, I think I lost the motivation to get a book together, and despite having enough material that I liked, was even thinking of not taking up the kind offer to publish. I wondered if the world needed another book from me; would anyone be interested, was it any good? During a concentrated period of reflection, I had deep philosophical conversations with myself as I worried about the role of my poems as ego gratifying vehicles. Then I stopped worrying and overthinking.
Roy Marshall, New Book in the New Year
I was reading Exit Opera, Kim Addonizio’s latest book of poems, when I came across the following lines from “20.5 Light Years from Earth:”
“Sometimes writing feels so stupid I think I should get out into the world & do something
like repairing fountain pens, milking snakes, something useful—
sexing chickens, dyeing lemons—fecal pathobiologist is another job I could maybe do
if only I would slide off my couch & stop reading & writing so much.”
I have days like that too. I think about all the time I’ve spent agonizing over the placement of a semicolon, or whether a title made sense, or if x was a relevant metaphor for y. I ask myself, why am I doing this? What use is it? Does anyone really care?
Then I ponder the random collection of skills I’ve accumulated over the years of my life and wonder if any of them could be called “jobs.” Maybe a few; none so weirdly offbeat as the list in Addonizio’s poem. But I’m wary of turning hobbies like gardening, sewing, or drawing into a job. That seems like a sure-fire way to take all the fun out of an activity meant to be joyful. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in Four Thousand Weeks, “The capitalist pressure to commodify your time robs your life of any meaning and renders you almost incapable of conceiving activities that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all.”
Being a poet is not always fun or joyful. It’s not rewarding in any conventional way. But the unconventional rewards are endless. It’s the best way I know to make sense of things, to stay in the present, and to resist the capitalistic urge to monetize every minute of one’s life. It forces me to be patient. It sends me on quests for just the right words, phrases, or forms. It teaches me to heed my dreams.
Erica Goss, Why I love being a poet
The tenth poem in our Palestine Advent series is by Noor Hindi.
Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying, by Noor Hindi.
Noor Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. Her debut collection of poems Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow was published in 2022 by Haymarket Books.
Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 10: Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying, by Noor Hindi
I really loved this poem [“Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” by Noor Hindi], and in many ways I agreed with it at the time, by which I mean I could feel it, feel where it was coming from and could say “yes, I feel that way too right now.” At the same time, I’m a poet who frequently writes about flowers and the moon, and a lot of things that seem cliche or banal when held up against the ongoing suffering that people perpetrate all over the world. I wrote the poem not as a way to argue with the Hindi poem, but more to ask myself, “why do I write poems about flowers when everyone is at war?” I went back and forth about whether or not I should include a nod to Noor Hindi’s poem in my piece. I decided against it because I didn’t want anyone to read my poem as an attempt to negate or disagree with Hindi’s poem, which I deeply admire. I do, however, want people to read Hindi’s poem, which is why I am sharing it now.
Tresha Faye Haefner, A Bird Ate the Last Hate in Your Heart
I’m intrigued by Philadelphia poet Stephanie Cawley’s latest full-length poetry collection, No More Flowers (Raleigh NC: Birds/LLC: 2024), a collection that follows My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here], a manuscript chosen by Solmaz Sharif as winner of the Slope Book Prize. No More Flowers is constructed through three untitled clusters of poems, bookended by the three-page extended poem, “Loom,” and nine-page extended poem, “To the Lighthouse.” “The machine weaves cloth / so a woman can write / a poem.” begins the opening poem, “Loom,” “The machine weaves / so one woman can write / while another woman // wipes the first woman’s / baby’s bottom.” There’s an emotional rawness to these poems, one that overlays a craft that displays a lyric comfort, and an ease, as the poems in No More Flowers write of resistance, endurance, survival and simply making it through.
“I didn’t want to write anymore about fucking.” the poem ““Normal Life”” begins, “Someone died. Someone was always / dying. I was writing about fucking probably right when somebody died. Ground / down to paste, my tooth grinds. I finally broke into the prison, the poet’s last tweet / before she dies. I slide into the tub, salt the water so I am a chicken in broth. My sad, / little heart, I think.” I like the way Cawley layers a Leonard Cohen quote over thoughts of sex and death, rippling echoes across a prose poem held by lyric bond. There’s an urgency across Cawley’s lyrics simply for the absence of it, writing an exhaustion and a grief that permeates every poem, every line. The poems are constructed across an attempt to articulate and construct a life, blending intimacy with public declarations, realizing the only way inside might be all the way through.
rob mclennan, Stephanie Cawley, No More Flowers
On Sunday, I read poetry at “Songs for the Grieving, Poems for Peace” – a gathering of Calderdale folk to express solidarity for Palestine, and to raise money for grassroots projects. For far too long I’ve avoided the news from Palestine, skipped over adverts from charities pleading for money. Yesterday, instead, I listened to Mohammed, who left Gaza City after the invasion, and I heard from the women of the Battir collective, who joined us via a live Zoom link. The connection was poor, and translation was difficult, and there were children shouting and playing in the background in Battir and in Todmorden. The women looked tired, and sad, and cold – and strong. And they smiled and laughed, and talked about their beautiful UNSECO-listed village, and its aubergines, and they shared pictures of the marmalade they make with oranges from Jaffa, and Mohammed told us about Kill Zones, and the death of his friend, and the grassroots projects he is fuelling with his grief. […]
For those of us who have never lived in a war zone, it’s almost impossible to imagine life in Palestine. But we have all experienced fear, and grief; we’ve all experienced hunger, cold, pain. Perhaps we can start there. Perhaps less predictable are the smiles, and the children and the marmalade, and how the women from Battir stayed online to listen to poetry in English, and to hear Sonya singing about comets and love.
A Rose Shoulders Up
(by Mosub Abu Toha)
Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.As I planned my short reading, I thought of Naomi Shihab-Nye’s Gate A4, with its story of human kindness in unlikely circumstances – And how those small but significant acts can stand their ground against what sometimes feels like a deluge of horror and despair. “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world” – and so it felt appropriate to create a shared reading, matching every poem that I read with Mosub’s, and finishing with a group poem created in the hours before the event.
Clare Shaw, Not Everything is Lost.
My last post (here) generated some intriguing feedback and was cause for further reflection about revisions, at least on my part. Because I was writing a poem for a specific person–my son–I got useful information from his response, as well as responses from other readers; so I had the chance to hear back from my audience, however small, and to compare reactions. My son, the “you” in the poem, told me he liked the descriptions and that the piece did a good job evoking the atmosphere of the experience he’d had. He liked the closing lines, too. However, he said that while he had some moments of anxiety during his stint on the military ship, his overwhelming feelings cantered more toward frustration and an almost-constant irritation. He thought I had focused over-much on the anxiety aspect. “Though a person certainly could be feeling exactly that way in those conditions,” he added.
And that’s fascinating, because in earlier drafts I did not work toward evoking anxiety; I was trying to get the details right and to create a sense of annoyance, even anger, at the situation. (Apparently, that is closer to how he responded.) Here’s the “BUT”–but those revisions weren’t making the poem work any better. This is a challenge for many of us writers: when the impetus for writing the poem, and the initial intentions of the writer, don’t resolve into a good poem…and then some alterations–some “fictionalization”–make a better poem, but maybe not the poem the poet set out to write. Do we stay with our initial idea and keep whaling away to make it work as we initially imagined, or do we let the poem move into new territory somewhat removed from initial inspiration if the resultant revisions are more powerful, more believable?
I’m inclined to go with whatever works to make a stronger poem, most of the time. There are other options, though. Sometimes I end up with two or more poems stemming from the same initial idea. A bonus! One prompt I have occasionally used for myself is to re-write an earlier, less-satisfactory poem from a different viewpoint or to focus on a different aspect of the experience. This practice has been awfully helpful, and it keeps me from getting over-invested in the more obscure, personal components of a writing piece.
Ann E. Michael, Whatever works
John Polwhele was born in about 1605 and died in 1672 — he came from Cornwall, and spent most of his life there, settling in St Erme with his wife Anne Baskerville after a few years first (probably) at Exeter College, Oxford — the traditional college for students from the West Country — and then at Lincoln’s Inn. Other than that, we know almost nothing about him. All that is left is a single notebook, inherited from a friend, Joseph Maynard, probably in the later 1620s — Maynard went on to be rector of Exeter College, Oxford in the 1660s. I first looked at Polwhele’s notebook either as a doctoral student working on Ben Jonson, or immediately after my doctorate, when I was a Junior Research Fellow (a kind of post-doctoral position) in Oxford, rewriting my PhD dissertation as a book. At first glance, it is rather unprepossessing. These are the opposite of neat drafts, and even at his neatest Polwhele’s hand is best described as a scrawl […]
Once I began transcribing him, though, I was won over. Some of the ‘voices from the archive’ that you encounter in manuscript are so vivid and become so real that it is almost like a kind of relationship, and I think this is especially true when you work over a long period of time on essentially intimate documents like this notebook, which were obviously never intended for circulation. I have gone back to Polwhele repeatedly over the last twenty years, and especially to his impassioned translations of Horace and Boethius made during the English civil war.
Victoria Moul, No more of this ear-lecherie!
Michael Hofmann’s Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems includes four pieces by Georg Heym – not bad for someone who died at the age of 24 (in 1912 – an accidental drowning in the frozen Havel River, probably while trying to save a friend). Heym is generally regarded as an early Expressionist writer (of poems and short prose/novellas), though his early poems are very much under the influence of Hölderlin, then much of the surviving work suggests the powerful influence of Baudelaire (in both form and content), though in his final months there seems to have been a return to the looser forms of Hölderlin. His best-known poems combine a gothic, morbid imagination, often with extremes of Expressionistic distortion, with a counterbalancing devotion to regular forms. The sonnet ‘Berlin II’, when it appeared in Der Demokrat, in November 1910, led to the publication of Heym’s only collection published during his lifetime: Der ewig Tag (The Eternal Day).
Antony Hasler’s translations, published by Libris in 2004 (Hofmann also includes translations by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, and Christopher Middleton), are the best to be had at the moment and I’d definitely recommend searching them out (Libris has since folded). I’ve been in a bit of a translation lull for a few months so thought I’d try a few of Heym’s poems myself. The challenge is to make something readable in English, while not toning down the dark brutality, yet also staying close to his classical chosen forms.
Martyn Crucefix, Translating Georg Heym’s ‘Berlin II’
A new project in which I plan to create 1000 erasure poems—drawing on haikai and haiku poetic sensibilities—from Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s metaphysical classic, A Thousand Plateaus (tr. Brian Masumi, 1987). Follow Deleuzian Haiku on BlueSky for regular updates.
“The only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted. Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted… A system of this kind could be called a rhizome.” (D&G, p6) […]
#7chaosmos
Dick Whyte, Deleuzian Erasure Poems Vol. 1
rather than cosmos . . .
the cry of a rat
On my birthday this year, I started what would become my first successful completion of the Buson Challenge, in which you write 10 haiku a day for 100 days. You can read more about my 2024 experience here: Buson Challenge Blog Post.
I didn’t create the Buson Challenge; I learned about it in a talk from Failed Haiku founder Mike Rehling in his 2020 presentation at the online Haiku Society of America annual conference. You can watch the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ozWETA0PeQI?si=T6hpIGni8rfPMl_R&t=939
I’m planning to start 2025 with another round of the Buson Challenge. The biggest thing that helped me was having a group to work with. Our regular check-ins made me want to push through on the tough writing days; I didn’t want to have to come back to the group and say I didn’t get my writing done. We didn’t check in every day; we came and went as necessary.
While I connected with fellow Buson Challengers through the Station of the Metro Discord, you don’t need to join that to participate. There are lots of communication channels in the world, and I use most of them. So if you want to take the challenge with me starting January 1st, 2025, just shoot me a message. I’d be happy to have you write along with us.
Allyson Whipple, Let’s Write 1,000 Haiku in 2025
I’ve been on Substack for a year and a half, exploring how this platform might differ from the blogs I’d written for decades. The move to Substack, with its option for “paid subscribers”, has prompted me to reflect deeply on what feels right for me—what supports my poetry and playwriting goals, and what is worth your precious time. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the shift from writing purely for personal reflection to publishing with readers in mind, crafting work that resonates and engages without relying on an editor to curate my choices.
During this year and a half, I’ve also been updating Finding My Bearings Now, a raw and unedited account of navigating life after a breast cancer diagnosis. Writing that diary has helped me reflect deeply on personal experiences while offering support to others navigating their own health challenges. It has been a grounding space, providing me with the clarity to approach Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen with an increasingly professional focus.
This platform has shown me how my authentic interests—some of which once seemed unrelated—have converged. Poetry and nature’s metaphors have always been central to my work, but I’ve come to see how deeply they intersect with theater. Aristotle defines poetry as mimesis—a reflection of nature—and he saw theater as the embodiment of this principle. We understand the natural world through human metaphors and the human world through nature’s metaphors. And, unlike other art forms, theater exists only in the present tense—expressed by living, breathing human bodies, in a shared space. Also in this way, are nature and theater inseparable.
My time on this platform, as both a reader and a writer, has given me a clearer sense of direction. With that, I’m excited to relaunch Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen with a new name, new features, and a clearer focus. Welcome to Dramatic Roots.
Ren Powell, The Second Act
I not only want to get back to blogging, but also some poetry writing and submitting. The places where I submit are getting fewer and fewer–submission windows are open and closed more quickly, and there are fees I’m not willing to pay (and more and more journals asking for more and more money).
Let me record some of the poetry ideas I’ve had.
–I’ve thought of my series of poems about Noah’s wife who has made life changes after the Flood (that flood that required Biblical Noah to build an arc); one of my favorites, “Higher Ground,” appeared in Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, and you can read it in this blog post. I have also written poems about Cassandra, as a way to talk about climate change, and one of the more recent ones I’ve written imagines Cassandra living in the mountains.
Revisiting these characters in light of Hurricane Helene seems promising.
–I’ve also been contemplating my Facebook feed, which is full of people constructing gingerbread houses alongside people rebuilding houses wiped out by Hurricane Helene floodwaters. My commute to church in Bristol, TN takes me through some severely devastated areas, where nothing is left of homes but rubble, and I can’t imagine they will be rebuilt. It seems there should be a poem there, but I’m not sure I can pull it off.
–I’d also like to get back to a daily practice of shorter poems and observations. I need to train my attention again. Happily, I’m teaching literature classes this coming term, which always helps me return to poetry roots.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Goals in the Waning Year
I recall the days of yore when I had a dozen daily blogs, each catered to someone’s complaint or wish. That is someone said at general blog, like the food stuff, focus on that. Or I despise foodies. Or, never mention the scourge of pets. And I’d trot off and make a spin off blog to accommodate those 10-second commenters. One for selfies, one for vegan cooking, one for general photographs, one for life minutia, one for poetry, one for flash fiction, one for dreams, one for my sock puppet musings, one for cat, one for reflecting on people who influenced me, one for hm, was it twelve? It was a lot of verbiage at any rate and bending over backwards for diminishing returns.
Now I’m still spread far but don’t spend much time on the computer or on the internet. I’m at a few places, sorta, sorting out what they’re about. I’m hoping Pinterest might serve the function of Instagram so I can leave the Meta-empire. I’d rather someone bought Instagram from them. I’m monthly or so at substack but I’m not finding things to read. Some post too often too much. I skim at best. Which is something but I’m in the mood for deep dives, immersions in worlds.
I like books is the thing. I have hundreds of books I haven’t yet read the first time.
Pearl Pirie, On my rambles
I’ve been avoiding blogging—so much for my goal to do 52 blog reviews in 2024. (For this, I forgive myself.) On the 11th, which is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth, I thought it was time, and would take my mind off my mind. Well, I’ll do it on the 12th, I told myself yesterday. And now it is the 13th.
I read a friend’s substack. She sends me to a post on Radical Acceptance, which I badly need. I see that I’m behind in reading her posts—long, personal essays that ought to be collected in a book—and so I spend the afternoon reading all of her recent posts. I wish I could write something so personal, so dense with emotion and pathos and history. I wish I dared.
What exactly is it that I’m avoiding?
Two books I have been re-reading: Edward Hirsch’s splendid How to Read a Poem (Harcourt, 1999), and Patricia Fargnoli’s Necessary Light (Utah State Univ. Press, 1999). These, perhaps more than anything, help.
“Poetry puts us on the hook [Hirsch writes]—it makes us responsible for what we might otherwise evade in ourselves and in others. It gives us great access to ourselves.”
I wrote this passage into my journal on 16 November and didn’t add the page number. For the last hour, I’ve thumbed back and forth, back and forth through the pages and can’t find it. Plucking it from my journal, retyping it for you, offers a glimmer of understanding. I begin to imagine that I could write about what’s troubling me. It’s a first step.
Bethany Reid, Necessary Light
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more.
Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural act of courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature — that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light.
To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough.
The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”
Maria Popova, How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
Last week I recorded my poem ‘Snow’ in celebration of its publication in the Black Bough Christmas & Winter Anthology. I have received some lovely comments about the reading and there is a real joy for me in being able to do this and to see how far I have come in building my confidence to record my work. The Black Bough anthology includes a wonderful range of writing, and I always feel proud to be in the pages. Last year it allowed me to set down on the page our family tradition of The Man in the Moon which began when my sister was little. In evenings in the lead up to Christmas I would take her out for a walk to breathe the magical air of Christmas and as we were walking the Man in the Moon would send us clementines. They always tasted extra delicious from being out in the cold.
Sue Finch, DONNING THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS FOR SHENANIGANS
Carol Rumens is widely known for her excellent Poem of the Week column on Guardian Books, a vital window into the world of poetry for many, but she’s also a very fine poet in her own right. Her latest pamphlet, Mind’s Eye, Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan, is a fascinating sort-of conversation with the German poet in two parts.
The first section, ‘Notelets’, consists of a dozen ‘short letters to, or about, Celan’, two of them being free translations of poems of his. Part 2, ‘Dialogues’, ‘takes the form of a conversation between Celan and an imaginary poem of his, un-titled and unfinished, but keeping him company during his last years of mental illness and suicide’. The quotes are from Rumens’ ‘Forenote’ to the pamphlet.
The ‘Notelet’ poems move between present and past, with, for example, current events in Eastern Europe echoing Celan’s own lifetime:
Russia. Snow. Ukraine. Once more you pale
through whirling snowflakes towards me.
I know I know you, word-ghost never met.Elsewhere, she puns on Celan’s poem ‘Corona’ to introduce another contemporary angle:
Now in the wreathing of years
the word breathes differently –
a virus old as love and new as every
lover’s new mutation.These are letters from the present to the past, and both times exist simultaneously in them, allowing Rumens to engage with Celan in his own time and as we might read him now.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading December 2024: A Review
The title of Irish poet Billy Mills’ new volume, a book of sounds, is a paradox. A yoking of opposites, a kind of Metaphysical conceit. A book is, literally, soundless : an archive of mute poetry. The poet underlines this with an end-note, quoting American composer Charles Ives in a preface to his own work : “Some of the songs in this book… cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are : that is ‘in the leaf’; and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.”
The poems in a book of sounds are indeed muted. Brief phrases, preternaturally quiet, simple. Each page enveloped in a wash of marginal white space. This is where they work their miracle. In such quiet, sober seclusion and near-silence, the reader’s mind and heart find rest. Not escape, but a steady, clear-eyed recognition of our human condition : on this planet, in this present time.
Henry Gould, Peaceful Wonderment
I’m so happy to have a new review of Martha Silano’s latest, the winner of the Lynx Prize, This One We Call Ours, up at Mom Egg Review. It’s a wonderful collection and I hope you take the time to read about it—a call to action about the environment, apocalyptic and fierce. Here’s a short excerpt:
While Silano’s previous books have dealt with similar subject matter – physics, biology and the end of the world, the science of human psychology – this new book make the danger that shimmers in the background of her other books more menacing and urgent.”
As much as I liked this book, I know Martha’s next book will be even better. Happy Holidays!!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, My Review of Martha Silano’s New Book on Mom Egg, Holiday Lights and Holiday Celebrations with a Full Cold Moon
Today is the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her work was often nature themed which is what draws me to her poetry. As someone who finds comfort and inspiration in nature and gardening, I feel a kinship with poets who feel the same, like Emily, like Mary Oliver. […]
Leap, I think, That’s what they’ve done whether by choice or by push, they’ve all taken the leap into death. I walk through the cemetery reading tombstones of people who are now ghosts before finding Emily Dickinson’s grave. Removing my gloves, I pass my hands over the headstone inscription, Called Back, while leaves in the red oaks seem to whisper the words like a lullaby as they rub each other gently, reverently in the breeze. Suddenly Emily, my labradoodle, gives a little yip and lies down with her head on the grave. I read online that Emily became more reclusive after her dog’s death and once said “They are better than Beings – because they know – but do not tell.” My Emily rolls over the grave, leaps up with an excited bark, and runs through the long grass while the oak leaves sing.
Charlotte Hamrick, Celebrating Emily
We didn’t get the DYCP grant for Planet Poetry. ‘Other applications preferred.’ Not unexpected, but still a blow. Still, our first two episodes of Season 5 are up – Danez Smith and Isabel Galleymore – both definitely worth a listen if you haven’t already. In the latter, I read a poem by Indy Moon who was one of the Foyle Young Poets winners this year. I went to the awards celebration at the British Library last month and it was a lovely celebratory event. Indy is one of many names to watch out for in the future.
Robin Houghton, How the collection is going, and other news
If print is no longer king, where’s that defunct webzine who published a couple of my poems a few years back??!!
We’re so immersed in digital worlds that we often forget just how unstable and temporary the internet is. Even fully funded websites can disappear soon after they run out of money to pay for hosting, unless they’re lucky enough to be archived by the likes of the British Library. Still, at least I’ve still got my copies of printed mags stretching back to the 1990s…!
Matthew Stewart, If print is no longer king…
The exercises in the writing class feel like a portal. I am writing like I never have. For days in a row, I wake up and make a mental list of things I want to do, and then I spend the whole morning writing instead. I am writing about things I’ve never written about, in ways I’ve never written. […]
In her work on inspiration and creativity, Elizabeth Gilbert conceives of ideas as “disembodied, energetic life forms” in search of human collaborators who can manifest them.1 I am not sure of that, but I recognize my recent experiences in these words of hers:
But sometimes – rarely, but magnificently – there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defences might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organise coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you towards the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.
And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?”
The past few weeks, I have recognized this invitation, and I have been considering my answer to it.
In the past two decades, the years since the publication of my only book, I’ve gotten a few such invitations. It wasn’t so much that I turned them down as that I couldn’t find a way to accept them. It became so painful to let those opportunities go that I changed my address and wrote “Return to Sender” on the few that managed to find me anyway. I told myself I didn’t want to accept them, when the truth was that I just couldn’t.
I don’t want to do that this time.
I am realizing that I no longer have time to fuck around. I am no longer in mid-life. I’ve already had my second chances. I might still feel much like the girl I once was, but I am 60 years old.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Getting small to go big
Before I started writing this particular post, I read Karen Walrond’s latest post on her the make light journal. She says, as always, a lot of really timely things but because I’ve also been thinking about the ratio between what we consume and what we create this stuck out for me: “And so, in the interest of full transparency for 2025 and beyond, you can expect me to be creating more than I consume.”
I want to read more books than things on a screen. I want to disappear for longer intervals. I want to give, but I need to make sure I fuel myself with good work first. When I share something I want to be more mindful: is this helpful? is it beautiful? is it fun? I want to be more useful. I know the world is heavy and fraught and full of news so brutal that if you have half a heart it will break you. I don’t think we can or should look away from the things going on in the world, but I try not to read the same story ten times, you know? as happens in newsfeeds.
Have we all been thinking about how we share our artistic gifts, online anyway, in the age of AI? Rumi as translated by Daniel Ladinsky: “They are a good secret to keep, our gifts. When you can. A mystical awareness becomes more natural.” And, “Creation needs someone who is truly humble / and cares about love. Otherwise, its walls would / decay.” And isn’t this something to remember too? The element of being truly humble when we create. The element of love. Authentic art is real art, is love.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Twenty-four Pencils
there is nothing hungrier than a gift shop.
Robin Gow, gift shop
desperate. a forced smile
inside a disposable camera.
we roamed the aisles. shook snow globes.
saw our reflections in the wide windows.
all the ways you can say,
“do not take me home.”
we waited for the sun to emerge
dazzling & wearing everything i wanted
but could not keep.
In the future that’s ours, every day
we’ll learn with growing clarity the way
the smallest bones in our bodies are knitto every possible articulation of thought, how
Luisa A. Igloria, In the Future that’s Ours
they want to bend to the honeyed moods of light.