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: taking stock, a guilty murmur, brand new rhythms, the skins of clementines, and more. Enjoy.
Chet Baker, late in life,
approaching the fall
that would kill him,
plays the most incredible solo
on “Shipbuilding” – including,
at one point, a delay pedal
that makes him sound
like a choir of trumpets.I used to know a guy
who played with Chet:“Everybody always wondered
Jason Crane, POEM: The Next Pretty Note
what he was thinking to play
as beautifully as he did.
He once told me: ‘I’m just looking
for the next pretty note.’”
You might have read the poems. For over a year, they have been shared and quoted widely. You might have read Refaat Al Areer’s prophetic If I must die: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale.” Or you might know by heart Khaled Juma’s O rascal children of Gaza: “Come back – / And scream as you want, / And break all the vases, / Steal all the flowers, / Come back, / Just come back…” Or I wish children didn’t die by Ghassan Kanafani: And when their parents would ask / them “Where were you?” / They would say / “We were playing in the clouds.” And you, poet, you might have thought of Marwan Makhoul’s verse: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent.” So many more. Witnessing, reporting, imploring, guiding, teaching us how to find words for despair and loss and courage and fear and memory and home.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, For the quietest quiet
I remember this story was written one Christmas holidays after a long and tough time, a most challenging year, I can recall sitting down to write this. Today I’m remembering the young poet I was and the feeling of writing this on a rickety fold-out table in a tiny yellow kitchen that isn’t there anymore. I woke up recalling the hope it holds, the love it shares, so I share this feeling here as we enter 2025. […]
In 2025 I sense I have a very different year ahead. I’m unsure what happens next in my little world of books and poems but I know … in the words of my late great and much-missed friend Gigi, “Bravo, come mi pace a me, senza programmi” or “Good, how I like it, without a plan”
Salena Godden, The Happy Story
Old ghosts dancing with the diamond-eyed newly arrived. Grief intermingling with grace.
A sorrow, a stain, healing, and happiness.
No need for raucous celebration or lurking in shadows, performing shotgun weddings for old wounds.
Sit with all that these quiet hours hold, refuse to blindfold joys, or leave any doubts in charge of firing squads.
These days and all their aberrations: a scar, a schism, saint-glow, and nightingale séance.
Should these moments in time ever die, I swear to visit their grave.
Rich Ferguson, These days and all their aberrations
Gateways, doorways, nodes and connections — these have become increasingly important themes in my writing and teaching (eg. the titles of the last two pamphlets I brought to international conferences: Hidden Entrance and Steal Through the Gap in the Hedge). There’s good reason for this: everything that weighs on me, that is a cause for grave worry — the ongoing diminishment of the arts and instability of the university sector, the disastrous tepidity of centrist policymaking, the growing numbers needing support for illnesses and impairments, the racialised murder sprees sanctioned by my government, the toxicity of social media and so on — all of it is tied to a thinning of possibilities, a barricading of doors and filling in of passageways.
That is to say, the failure and volatility of market capitalism has produced louder and more frequent demands that we simply make do with less, stay in our individual pens and think of little beyond toiling away. Everything else is deemed frivolous and punishable. Conservative reactionaries, whose representatives keep securing stronger and more permanent footholds in power, are not shy about outlining their vision for civilisation: dramatically less emigration, education reduced to vocational training, no social safety net, no experimental art, no politics or philosophy in our entertainment media — no politics at all, in fact, outside of nationalist propaganda. The message is clear: we should no longer think of social improvement, except via those technological cures beloved of the culturally disengaged, which encourage emotional isolation and remove ever more autonomy from the workforce.
Not coincidentally, my third article for The Conversation — by far the most popular in terms of reads — was about the recent Porter and Machery study showing people can no longer tell the difference between AI poetry and that written by humans. The article is hopeful rather than angry; I dismiss the idea that there’s any threat to the existing demand for human-written poetry, paltry though that demand is. But the offensiveness of AI poetry doesn’t really have anything to do with how good the poetry is, or how easily it fools us; rather, it’s the very idea that poetry should be viewed as a product, an output. This makes it a matter of routine, something that might as well be done mechanically, as opposed to an engine or cognitive process, a way in which we generate new ideas and ways of thinking.
Jon Stone, Blowing Open the Door on 2025
On the last night of the year,
Luisa A, Igloria, Doorways
my mother bids us open all windows
and pull open all drawers, all cabinet
doors. Then the children bang pot lids
together to chase away the demons.
“Yes, the writer is an engine of profanation fueled by blood until the heart gives up,” I told my dog, Radu, after discovering the author, Enrique Vila-Matas, wandering down the streets of Dublin with his character, Riba. These two fellows, the writer and his character, were strolling along when they both spotted an “irate, limping man” on page 106, a man who suddenly became an “irate ethereal man” after stepping into the doorway on page 107, since the doorway is a literary threshold with the power to make a minor god of most verb-carting mammals.
Alina Stefanescu, Farting, breath, and Beckett.
I first read this poem a year or so ago, on my way to see Jane Clarke and the other shortlisted poets at the TS Eliot prize readings. Much like its titular arch – refusing to “crumble” – something about the poem has stayed with me. As I revisit it again now, I’m transported to that chestnut-lined avenue, looking up at the weathered stonework of the ruins. Somewhere, too, is the ghost of the old building; a courtyard alive with comings-and-goings, stories stretching back into the past.
I’m reminded of a trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland a few years ago, an abiding memory of which was exploring the various castle and church ruins dotted along the coastline. Across the road from our Air BnB were the ruins of an old abbey, whose buildings dated back to the 12th century. I can still picture our two-year-old daughter wandering around its maze of walls and arches, tiny under a roof of sky.
In Clarke’s poem, the magnificence of the arch lies in its functionality: it had a job to do. I like the way the architecture takes on a character in the poem: stoical, stubborn even. The arch is the gatekeeper, protector. It’s also the load-bearer, designed and built with strength in mind. As we move down the poem, all this weight and history sits quite literally on top of that final couplet – the poem’s keystone, if you like. And in one deft sentence, all that weight falls away as we realise, in fact, there is nothing left to hold at all – or rather, what is being held is not what’s there but what’s not.
It took my breath away, that ending. As if a door is suddenly opened onto this edifice of unacknowledged grief. It brings to mind the sorts of losses that accumulate gradually over time; the slow erosion of relationships, roles, parts of the self. How the wounds of these losses can go untended. The sudden, lurching awareness of absence.
Jonathan Totman, On Ruins and Thresholds (after a poem by Jane Clarke)
once i lived in a room with no windows.
Robin Gow, every window
when i felt particularly unfettered
i would take a pencil & draw on where
i would like to place them.
one in the ceiling & one right next
to my bed.
It was another year of long reads, book-ended by Don Quixote in the first part of the year, and The Magic Mountain this past fall, both read with my book group.
I did a deep dive into two renowned poets, reading the complete works of Louise Glück, and much of W.S. Merwin, and read a number of short stories as well as other novels. Of these, I was especially struck by the power of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction, most of which I’d read long ago; by Thomas Mann’s short stories; and by “The Pole” by J. M. Coetzee.
At the end of 2024, what remains most vividly in my reader’s mind? The Magic Mountain, without a doubt. This was my second time reading the book, and — fittingly perhaps — happened while I was recovering from COVID. As I wrote in a blog post earlier, “Mann’s book shows us human beings as primarily short-sighted and self-interested, drawn to the pursuit of pleasure and superficialities, and prone to ignoring and forgetting the lessons of recent experience — but also looks at other possibilities of how to live one’s life.” My understanding of this book, surely one of the greatest novels ever written, was enhanced by Colm Toíbín’s fictionalized biography of Mann, The Magician. By contrast, I found Don Quixote repetitive and tedious, and I’d be hard put to recommend it to anyone! […]
Reading is a way to understand my own humanity through the experience of others, all the way to the beginning of writing. It’s a solitary pursuit, but I love talking about books with fellow readers, and am immensely grateful for my book group friends and our weekly discussions, as well as other literary-minded friends in my life.
My choices of books have become more deliberate as I’ve gotten older, because setting priorities feels ever more important. I’m a fast reader, but even so, I don’t read primarily for “escape” or entertainment, but to learn and think, and to absorb exceptional craft in writing and literary conception which I hope make my own efforts better. I can see why I often prefer to read older books, trying to fill in the gaps in my reading history rather than picking up whatever is new and getting a buzz, and I’ve also found it very rewarding to deeply immerse myself in a particular author’s entire work. But the new and experimental also appeals to me – it’s just becoming more rare. I do think the highly competitive, financially-driven publishing atmosphere, as well the extreme influence of the media, tend to push many authors toward what will sell and generate “buzz”. It’s a loss for us, and, frankly, a loss for the writers as well.
Beth Adams, Books of 2024
In 2024, I managed a title per day, averaging 118 pages a day.
Two dozen were re-reads, a title per week were read aloud, or were audio books, which was more than i expected even if more or less the same as every year since 2020 when I began tracking it.
136 titles, that is 37%, were digital, and the remainder, paper. As I mentioned before, 60% are poetry, but specifically, 5% total were haiku or tanka. […]
I flagged 28 titles as memorable. 68 I rated as 5/5 and only half a dozen I pursued to the bitter end despite feeling it as 1/5. If it’s not for me, better to quit, but stretch reads are building hooks for the future.
Pearl Pirie, Reader’s Log, Supplemental
Earlier this year, a reader asked me, Where do you find your books? The library, I think I said, or friends give them to me, or people send me a book with a request for a review. Thriftbooks.com is a good source when I need to purchase a book.
Well, forget that. This year I lost my mind and spent a ton of money on poetry books.
I’ve read a couple of these (see pic) — I have reviewed none.
My best excuse is that it was self-soothing behavior. Remember my spring CRI course, “Good Poetry for Hard Times”? Months ago I was already freaked out about the election, about Ukraine and Gaza, about climate change, and so on (and on).
Unsubscribing from a number of news feeds has helped. And poetry has helped. As a nutritionist once said to me, Why do we crave comfort food? Because we need comfort. At least there are no calories involved in reading poetry.
Bethany Reid, Year’s End
When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Walking. Going into the world, taking the train to the beach alone—anything that will get me out of the apartment. But it’s true that one does need to spend a lot of time in one place in order to write. I mean, in a general sense. When my writing gets stalled I read also, reading is so much of my writing process.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Bianca Rae Messinger
It’s so interesting to be encouraged to look back at the process of writing a poem. I seldom do it (I suspect I’m not alone), forever rushing on to the next ‘best’ thing (we think, we hope). In looking back at ‘Muzzle’ (I find I have the very first draft and several subsequent ones) two things strike me: that it took so long to get to a ‘finish’, and that I’d forgotten how important the context of the poem was to what it might be expressing. […]
I’ve always been pleased with the adjective ‘established’ to describe the shooting-party’s positioning, their being arrayed as the ‘establishment’. The finished poem ends ambivalently. The walking couple escape the shooting-party but are faced with another threatening situation: the gun, the dog. The ‘guard-like’ posture now puts me in mind of prison camp patrols the world over and I’d be happy for readers to get there too: there is a policing of freedoms going on here, a sliding scale from rural pastimes, to political enforcement, to genocidal pogroms.
Martyn Crucefix, ‘Muzzle’ – a new poem for the New Year
In the past decade or two, I’ve made resolutions in different ways. I’ve “set intentions,” but those are mostly resolutions. I’ve chosen a word for the year. I’ve made goals and lists and wishes and hopes. But really, I do this all time. One year I said I wanted to read 100 books, a specific goal which I found very motivating, much better than “eat more veggies.” […]
I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Three Specific Intentions for 2025
So, do you have a vision for your 2025? I am working on mine, though I admit the vision is not as goal-oriented as usual? I have hopes. Hopes I will be more well, and that I will get back into better physical condition (immune and otherwise.) Hopes that I can visit friends and family I haven’t seen in a long time, and visit places I have never seen before but always wanted to. Having the bath renovation in the middle of the year may be a good excuse to get away someplace (since I can’t be in the house for three weeks of the work due to my asthma and allergies.)
I watched the Wicked movie last night – I’d read the book when it first came out, but never saw the musical and though I enjoyed it, I repeatedly thought “I don’t really think I identify with the good witch.” Which would make sense given my first book was called “Becoming the Villainess,” even though I do like pink. I’m working on my next book which has villainesses like world-weary Persephone, Cassandra, Poison Ivy, confronting a world of plagues, politics, environmental disaster, with only their powers to protect them. I hope I find a publisher soon, but it’s a fun, and dare I say, defiant, book? So that’s part of my 2025 plan.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Hello 2025! Upcoming Appearances, Classes and Readings in January, Plus Plans
Mirrors gang up, opalescent
as oysters, staring – the tide,
soft as zinc, washes and rises.And resolutions, renewal
of renewal – exhausting!Body will do what it wants.
Already destined. Mad dance.
Diamond. Apple. Meaning.
The one thing we can’t see clearlyand beg the angels for.
Jill Pearlman, Play It Again, Sam
It’s tricky to search the web for poetry about specific months of the year because they aren’t always *named* for that month. Frustrated by this myself, I started curating poems for every month of the year as I encountered them in the world.
Notice the word “curate” there: This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of every poem that mentions a month. I’ve included work I enjoy and admire, which means, in most cases, leaving out light verse, children’s poetry or greeting card-style poetry. In other words, these poems are (in my humble opinion) well-crafted poems that capture compelling moods and scenes … and just happen to name the month or date. As a result, I hope it’s a one-of-a-kind list that departs from what’s typically cited and offers you a source for poems you may want for specific occasions or seasons.
Carolee Bennett, Poems for Every Month of the Year
The Dirigible Balloon website is a curation of poetry for children and “Sky Surfing” is the second anthology of poems from the website with illustrations, as the opening stanza from “An Owl, A Pussycat and a Balloon,” by Val Harris demonstrates,
“An Owl and a Pussycat looked up at the sky.
Flying looks fun, shall we give it a try?
We could go a lot further and see a lot more
In a flying balloon, on a round the world tour.”While parents and grandparents may remember Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”, children will engage with the fun and rhymes. It makes reading aloud for or alongside children engaging for adults too. In other poems there are travelling cats, a sea of stories, earworms, silly friends and inevitably the moon […]
Emma Lee, “Sky Surfing: Adventures in a Poetry Balloon” edited by Jonathan Humble (Yorkshire Times Publishing) – book review
Saint Agnostica by Anya Krugovoy Silver
This is the last book Silver wrote before her untimely death from cancer, and it is raw. She holds nothing back, asking God the hard questions, desiring to be free from pain but still wanting so much to see her son grow up and to keep living in this imperfect world. I like a faith that wrestles, because that is the faith I have too – Jacob and the Angel, Job with his questions. If you aren’t crying while reading the book, wait until you get to the dedication page lovingly written by her husband, since the book was completed before she passed away but published afterward. A favorite poem from the collection:Lessons and Carols, Advent
by Anya Krugovoy SilverI’m told that light meets the darkness
Renee Emerson, Books to Close My Year and Open Yours
and is not overcome. But I am overcome,
again and again, each day a stumble into grief.
I want to slap the maudlin out of myself.
Where has my fearlessness gone?
Where is the owl that once perched on my wrist?
My husband curls his arm round my waist.
Woe, world-sorrow. I long for so much.
Angles fly around the church dome
as if this world didn’t belong to sparrows.
Several decades ago, poet Elma Mitchell was an early contributor to a discussion that’s remained under the radar of public policy and there are many reasons why. Social care has been neglected but chiefly because the majority of carers are women, and old. And this is why Mitchell’s poem, Thoughts after Ruskin features early in On Poetry and why poets are as important to a national debate as policy and money makers.
Mitchell’s poem, first published in 1967 describes combat – a woman against a hostile regime of domestic demands. She underscores a woman’s relentless physical activity, the violent impact caring has on her body, her own impact on the material world, the bodily fluids she has to deal with. The poem details a mid-20th century English woman’s daily duties and sets them against the same era’s image and expectations of a wife. Mitchell’s women may be jugglers (they have to be chemists, surgeons, torturers, assassins) but ultimately they’re reduced to gynaecology.
And this is why the poem is a triumph, and virtually unique in its subject matter and courage. After all, who wants to read about the domestic? So I was reminded of it this morning, reading an opinion piece about how little novelists now earn. And of course, writers should be able to live, as should carers, as should older women.
So what happens when a carer is a writer and an older woman, triply low paid or unpaid. Where are our poems or stories? When a woman critic wrote about one of my books that I’d be better off working up a sweat cleaning the kitchen floor, I wrote a poem about the kitchen floor.
Jackie Wills, Care, neglect and the domestic
Pictured above are four strong new poetry books I read during the time-out-of-time between Christmas and New Year’s. Television Fathers by Sylvia Jones, a former Shenandoah Editorial Fellow, stretches the boundaries of the poetic in surreal and striking ways, often by deploying ekphrasis. In Rough, there’s lots of powerful ekphrasis too, but what stays with me most is how Nathalie Anderson fashions a spikily alliterative verse as if only rough-textured language can capture her fiercen grieving for lost friends. Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree also prickles with fascinatingly sharp edges, but the mood is witchier (lots of divination poems!) and the subject is often sobriety. In The Beautiful Immunity, Karen An-hwei Lee addresses a “dear universe of destroying angels”–her prayer-poems finding the times dear indeed despite pandemic, climate crisis, and a range of other catastrophes.
Lesley Wheeler, 2024 in reading
Some poems do not come easy. They are never fully realised and condemned to the Locker Room of Lost Poems, while other undergo transformation after transformation. Possibly it is because I don’t know exactly what it is I want to say, or the original words didn’t quite catch the essence and so I search for clarity.
It was the topic of our summer
one we would return to every so oftenAs we sat in the central school playing field
looking at the cloverCounting leaves
one two and threeOn the lookout for number four
the rock solid gateway to the luckYou told me that your uncle
once known a man who found oneHis boat had come in
more luck than he knew what to do withThe days were long
the field was largeJust beyond our fingers
Paul Tobin, ON THE LOOKOUT FOR NUMBER FOUR
possibilities tantalised
Maybe it’s because I have a degree in the Psychology of Creativity, rather than an MFA in poetry, but I tend to think of the publishing process as being more about creating bonds between people than about anything else. I’m interested in strong writing, and I always want to help poets I work with hone their craft, but ultimately what I hope a poem does is touch someone on a deeper level, or stir the imagination, or ignite a conversation. If a poem can do one of those things for an editor, the editor will sometimes overlook flaws in technique, or else they’ll write back to the poet and ask, “could we change a few small things so that we can otherwise accept this poem?”
Over the years I’ve also found that getting published shows me who my poetry “friends” are. When I get a piece in a journal, I always take time to read the other poets who are published alongside me. Then, if I like what I read, I connect with them on social media. Some of the poets I’ve “met” through mutual publication have become life-long friends and some have even come to take workshops with me at The Poetry Salon. Some come and become guests on The Poetry Saloncast. Why? Not because any of us is perfect, but because we are engaging in the same discussion. Our poems are talking with one another and we’re finding that together we are expanding one another’s horizons.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Why you should submit your poems even if you’re not 100% sure you’re done
I’m happy to say I spent WAY more time with my friends in 2024 than I have in the past few years, making time to share a meal, a walk, a shopping trip, a game night, a concert, a writing weekend, a class, a vacation. I explored two new countries (Serbia and Costa Rica). I read (and listened to) more fiction this year than usual, finding some new authors I really enjoyed (Chris Whitaker) and tried again in vain to like some authors that lots of people seem to and I just can’t get into (Sally Rooney). I read a LOT of poetry collections. I spent time making visual art, even taking a collage class in July. I had some of my artwork appear in journals (Pithead Chapel, Black Lily, and Thimble Lit) and had my first piece in a gallery show at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago as well as a little one-woman show at my local library.
Some fun things were also a result of hard work—publications. I always feel as if I haven’t done anything writing-wise compared to the others when I get to the end of a year. Then I scroll back and see what has actually happened and surprise myself. This year, I had 25 pieces published. Thank you to these journals who saw fit to share them […]
Donna Vorreyer, Taking Stock
In the end, I had 11 publications publish 17 poems.
I had a 22% acceptance rate which isn’t bad, considering all my numbers are down from my best year of 2022 where I had 28 acceptances for a 32% acceptance rate. But still better than 10% when I started counting in 2017.
I have been submitting my books more to publishers, 13 times with 16 rejections. It’s frustrating that I cannot find a publisher for them. And even more frustrating that the book that was accepted in 2019 is still not published. But I’m trying to focus on the slow writing I’m doing, each tweak on a poem, each new line scribbled.
Everything feels dark just now, but with the solstice past and the new year waiting, we know the sun will return.
Gerry Stewart, Sliding Out of 2024: End of Year Review
Holding steady in more difficult times reminds me why I love to celebrate joys of all shapes, sizes and intensity. The joy of watching my family unwrap their presents, the joy of seeing what people chose to gift to me, the joy of shared meals, quizzes, laughter, fairy lights, half price mince pies, Brussels sprouts that travelled many miles in the car, the moon with Venus on a clear night.
Today I will share a poem I wrote on the 6th January 2019:
Epiphany
Today the sea danced.
Sue Finch, READER, I DONNED ‘EM
Rocking and rolling brand new rhythms,
flirting with the sky for colour change.
Slapping out its energy, it lifted itself
sent its white curls up and over.
On the wet width of the promenade
we stepped a hurried waltz
to dodge its high jinks.
Stopping to frame the horizon
I caught the scent of summer –
cold but definite.
Against shades of blue,
stirred with the grey-green,
you smiled.
At last you let me photograph you.
I’m never entirely sure of what this poem is about. Is it a dream, or an imagining? A memory? I guess that it’s something that drifts fluidly between all of these states, via an exquisite description of a first love, and a luminous evocation of how nighttime alters all contexts entirely.
The poem appears in the first half of Butterfly House, amongst poems like “Portrait of My Cancer As a Ring Tailed Lemur” and “My Body Files for Divorce”, published just two months before Kathryn’s death. I think this gives another reading to this poem, and to the that final image of the endlessly self-creating anemones … which in reality, can live for up to 150 years. Kathryn was 49 when she died. […]
Kathryn died in May; in June I lost another close friend, Jackie Hagan. Jackie won the Jerwood Prize for poetry in 2018, which gave rise to brilliantly titled poem “Awards Ceremonies Are Full of People Who Think They Are Something”, which she sent me along with other poems like “Eleanor Rigby wears jogging bottoms, a salmon blouse and gets the No. 42” and “CTGF gene polymorphism, late stages” – the condition which she was diagnosed with just after her thirtieth birthday, and which ended her life at 43. Jackie was joyful and hilarious, chaotic and irreverent, loving and fierce, and an absolute genius who wrote for stage and for performance as well as for the page.
Clare Shaw, Their gift survives it all
In a recent NYTimes article I have learned of the passing of poet-mathematician Jacques Robaud (1932-2024) who was a key figure in the development of OULIPO (an organization that has explored writing using a variety of constraints). Here is a link to Robaud’s poem “Amsterdam Street.”
Today’s Washington Post offers the obituary [of] poet and scientist Myra Sklarew (1934-2024). Sklarew was a DC resident and activist — and is featured in these past postings in this blog.
JoAnne Growney, Mathy Poets — Gone but Alive in our Memories
It’s -3 degrees outside. The skins of clementines from Corsica that I am eating in Paris smell like the sun of another solar system. When I bite into one of the orange sections, the juice runs in my mouth like warm blood. I no longer think about anything else, not my unhappiness, not even the unhappiness of the world. The tiny clementines have green leaves. One can look at them for hours. One can touch them like the skin of a lover. I no longer think about how cold it is outside or what I wanted from this life. The truth is that all I ever wanted was clementines.
Saudamini Deo, Clementines, Paris.
With a great book contract comes great imposter syndrome. I have loved everything about having The Ghost lake published, but perhaps because of the nature of the book – memoir- it leaves me feeling a little but vulnerable: waiting on reviews, watching sales etc. It plays on my imposter syndrome. It is an active battle. I’ve noticed as I have reached the end of the year feeling a bit burnt out that my confidence has wained and I am comparing myself with those who seem to effortlessly make and accomplish plans, are social, are good at networking and social media and all of the stuff that I am so acutely aware that I am not so great at. Anxiety, social anxiety absolutely rules my life. Though I do try and work with that. At times like this I try to remember my worth is individual, it cannot be compared. I might not be great at networking or making the sort of contacts that lead to well paid work, but I am good at helping people to find their own way into writing, I am good at providing quiet space, and I have always been OK at making my own way in the world – finding the paths and creating the doors for my peculiar shape of existence. I also think I’m good at what I do, as a writer. I am a good writer. Why is that so hard to say without wanting to dissolve into a puddle of cringe? I wouldn’t be putting myself out there and writing books and sending them into the world of other people’s judgement, if I didn’t think they stood up well among the work of other writers who I admire. I’m trying to hold that thought too, like carrying a very fragile egg on a spoon.
When I see the successes of others, in particular those where I can see that success is at least in part because they are so good at the interconnectedness of the writing world, I say to myself ‘it takes nothing away from me’ I am just on a different path, I’m woking with who I am, not trying to be anyone different and while I will never be well off doing things this way, I am actually very very happy with my slow, artistic, creative life.
Wendy Pratt, Writing Practice – What I’m taking into 2025
It’s been another year of highs and lows. The biggest high was the publication of Wonder &Wreckage back in April. This new & selected collection was six years in the making, and it was a nail-biter right up until the launch event.
I’ve sung her praises here before, but Elizabeth Holmes really saved my ass and deserves all the flowers. She did the interior layout, designed the cover, mopped up a number of messes, and dealt with confusing messages from the printer. The result was a gorgeous-looking book and a perfect way to cap off my poetry life.
Of course, I keep saying I’m through with poetry, but poetry is obviously not through with me. […]
On Halloween, Megan Volpert and I opened the call for submissions for White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology, which will be published by Madville Publishing in 2026. Subs are open until Jan. 8, so send us your Stevie-inspired/informed work.
Believe it or not, I was sifting through the poems cut from Wonder & Wreckage and I started contemplating putting together a chapbook, which has a tentative title: The Cutting Room. This would be a limited edition, DIY kinda deal that would strictly be available directly from me and a few local bookshops. Watch this space to see if I follow through with this madness. See, I can’t get away from poetry.I’ll be in the political fray as the new editor of the Georgia Voice, which is Atlanta and Georgia’s LGBTQ news outlet. I am excited to take the helm and bring readers the news and features they need as we move forward into the uncertain next four years.
Collin Kelley, A year in review
Moon Tonight: The refrain of “moon tonight” coupled with the repetitions of images—particularly “bird call has died” and “birds sing no more”—weaves a spell through the words, producing two poems inside the one: two faces of the moon. One side turned toward the sun, waxing and waning in the earth’s shadow to a regular rhythm. The other turned toward the dark thickness of the universe, scattered with stars, singing as they turn . . . […]
what magic
did the builders
of horizons
grace you with—O sky?
Dick Whyte, Gwendolyn B. Bennett – 6 Short Poems (1923-26)
O flower?
天鵞絨の海を回遊初鯨 筒井慶夏
birōdo no umi o kaiyū hatsu-kujira
migrating
in the velvet sea
first whale of the year
Keika Tsutsui
from Kōsa (Crossing), a haiku collection of Keika Tsutsui, Saku Shuppan, Tokyo 2024
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (January 2, 2025)
A sunny and mild morning post-frost, not uncommon at this time of year.
A Cooper’s hawk calling, hassling the songbirds, as they do. This one’s been hanging about our yard for a week now, sometimes perching right next to the leafless shrubs–it is amazing to watch how they can maneuver through the branches to grab at a finch or sparrow. A lithe and handsome raptor.
A solo Northern mockingbird, boldly eying me as I stood watching it (six feet away) while it gobbled up oriental bittersweet berries. […]
The inner environment today has been focused on yet more revision. I much prefer it to sending poems to journals. It’s playful and creative, if occasionally irritating when a poem refuses my attempted improvements. At present I’m wrestling with a sonnet. Not a bad way to end the year, I reckon.
Ann E. Michael, Year-end with raven
I take a step
Charlotte Hamrick, There is a humming
back and observe
scores of honey bees
flowing like liquid gold
from bloom to bloom,
multiples feasting together
on a gluttony
of pollen-laden lollipops.
Tiny legs shimmy
a winter dance
of gratitude
as I dance a two-step
in a gratitude
of my own for this
unexpected pleasure.
Weekends are always a little slower, and this, the first weekend of January and a fresh wriggling new year, has been no different. We had some sun the past couple of days, which meant my body, if not my mind, was up earlier, but that later I needed a nap as the sun set still so early in the afternoon. Saturday nights are usually a marathon since J’s out running karaoke til the wee hours, which means we get to bed right before sun-up typically, then sleep long, long into Sunday afternoon. I had some writing work to do, pushing off some press stuff til the next editing/design task day on Tuesday, but I did manage to pack up a few orders. This week is actually pretty slow in general, with a couple late night film screenings and a steady diet of writing in the afternoons through evening. I am soldiering on with both the advent-inspired series, which I am posting a few snippets of on IG this week, and the writing/thrifting memoir project which I’ve set as a goal to devote more time to in the new year (daily, if possible.)
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 1/6/2025
Being a poet and thinker, it was hard for me not to understand this damage as metaphor, especially as it happened around my birthday, and especially as other greenhouses all around stood firm through the high winds.
Today, I reinstated the ability of my greenhouse to be a greenhouse by replacing three panels in the door, two at the sides. It was when I slid and clipped the first side panel in, that I felt emotion rise in me: a rush of relief. The sensation was unexpected, and the Doubter inside said, ‘It could still go wrong, Liz.’
This inner voice is the voice which questions whether I can manage things by myself. Wouldn’t it have been better to ask for help? I’m not averse to collaboration. A friend made a significant contribution by transporting the glass in his estate car, but apart from that kindness, I’d managed to make the correct measurements, buy the right fittings, and position the panels (without breaking them or cutting my fingers) all by myself.
My acts of independence may be moderate, aided by YouTube videos, and fine sunny weather; but I realised today, at a greater depth than ever before, that they hold a deep significance. This has something to do with freedom, autonomy, womanhood, space to learn, and a growing confidence in my physical, embodied self. In turn, this all has something to do with a metaphor for my ability to mend, to create for myself a house of light and growth.
Liz Lefroy, I Re-Glaze My Greenhouse
new snow in winter darkness
Grant Hackett [no title]
death dream comes from nowhere
i am a white stone who can climb the sky
A friend sent me an article “The Real Reason People Won’t Change” from the Harvard Review. My first instinct was to not want to read anything from the Harvard Review. Since Harvard is primarily attended by rich students, I would assume the Harvard Review is giving advice to that same group. I believe that when one’s worldview comes from wealth, one might have difficulty understanding what it’s like to live their entire life without enough money to get through the next month.
I never expected to be a successful writer. I didn’t go to a writing-focused school. I didn’t study prose with any renowned writing teachers. I read. Books were my teacher, so when I started my memoir, Sailing the Milky Way, many years ago, I never imagined it finding a home like Zando. We will see what it does in the world, but my dreams for it were small. Now, they are large. Now, I have world-class dreams.
Kate Gale, We Are Limited by The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Poetry seems to me to be the most important art form most days as it can respond with immediacy to the news of the world. We all know the famous lines by William Carlos Williams:
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Some would argue that “poetry is useless as evidence.” When Anthony Wilson began posting his Palestine Advent Calendar it felt utterly useful to me.
I’ve written a lot of posts about poetry, but not, I think enough. One of my earliest posts is still one that is very often clicked on. “Transcendence — On Reading Poetry.”
In the post, I quote Joseph Campbell who says in Thou Art That — that poetry is a possible path toward transcendence:
“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually.”
Like Adam Zagajewski in the next quotation, I have to insist that poetry has power. I don’t need proof or statistics either:
“Don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and pre-human, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. So yes, it has the power to restore the mutilated world, even if no statistics ever show it.”
Shawna Lemay, 25 Words for 2025
I’ve been thinking about that poetry pharmacy they have in England, and about poetry as a balm. And arguing that poetry isn’t only about something that will make you feel better, less alone. That it can also be a call to awareness, to action, a light on injustice, an arrow at the heart of hate. (The writing-of-poetry as healing action, okay, has its place, but I’ve always tried to draw the line between poetry-as-therapy and poetry-as-art, by which I mean, if you’re using it as therapy, read it to yourself. Otherwise do the hard work of craft to make it art. But that’s a fight for another day.) Poetry can be a DIScomfort, a thorn in the side, a call to self-scrutiny. It can be an argument. A fight song. A guilty murmur, a sexy huff of breath on the ear, an intimate glimpse into a strange Other. It can be a reckoning, a whiff of abyss. But let’s face it. Here in the dawn of 2025 in this country, in this world, lord, I need a little balm.
Here’s a William Stafford poem. Quibble, if you will, with the personification of nonhuman things, with the romantic idea that the wild has something to say to us human species, centering us as is our usual homocentric way — I say, let it go, today. Be with this moment he chronicles. Believe in his belief. It will cost you nothing, and gain you, well, a little hope. I hope.
Marilyn McCabe, at the edge where your vision joins
In the Alleghenian rust belt of Pennsylvania there is a river. Along this river is a wooded hillside and on this hillside is a hole that goes into the ground. As a child alone in the woods, I lowered onto my stomach and shimmied backwards into the hole, feet first and fearless. The darkness enveloped me as I continued moving backward into blackness. At one point, my body existing in divided space, I watched the bright canopy of trees ahead of me grow smaller and smaller into a marble of green and blue. Degrees of separation prevented my head from knowing where my feet were going. Eventually, the narrow underworld expanded into a room where I eventually stood inside dark earth, unable to see my hands.
And so it goes, this life of thresholds, of observing one place from another.
Sarah Lada, Edge Effect
snow
Jim Young [no title]
a child knee deep
in wonder