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: ravaged days, a faint buzzing, a dead boy’s imagined journey, a night pure and thick as a womb, and much more. Enjoy.
Within the smoke and ash, particles of plastics, fuels, and metals.
The lingering remnants of vanished homes, schools, plywood and plastic encampments.
Lost photo albums, family recipes, and cherished letters.
Brush pile bobcat dens, a playground slide and religious center.
These fires burn counterclockwise cruel, leveling communities to past tense before our eyes.
Still, we move through our days, breathing in the collective smoke and ash.
All around us: courage, shock, people donating time and resources to help those in need.
Others doing their best to reestablish routines.
In the not-so-distant future, these ravaged days will be known as the charred space between creature comforts and rebuilding.
The anguished cry between inhale and exhale.
Rich Ferguson, The Space Between Breaths
If I keep my doors open –
propped with a shoe or block –
everything pours inA city licked, hot rage,
a pit of immolation, a mess of
humanity tempted to leap,grieving for lost secrets,
trinkets, old diaries, ardencies,
hot notes of love and painto fend off the evil eye, the rage
of a tyrant who wields his baby rattle
like a gavel, his innerchambers nonexistent, his fire
Jill Pearlman, Hot Damn
and wind toxic.
I’ve been spending a little more time with the thrifting memoir this past week with an hour dedicated at the top of the day, and I am finding my need for asymmetry and fragmentation at equal times unbearable and comforting. I feel, having read lots of persona essays of the lyric variety, that there needs to be structure and sense making, which always feels very at odds with my poetry work. Those shorter bursts of brilliance or terribleness, but sustaining something over a longer page count feels unnatural and subject to so many more pitfalls.
Because, even like poetry, what is experience? And self? Isn’t everything point of view rather than objective truth? Does it even exist? I wake up and the headlines are terrible and California is still on fire. The world makes no sense, so I am not sure you’d be able to create sense via words on a page or screen right now.
Kristy Bowen, fragmentation and memoir
Megan Volpert and I have extended the deadline for submissions to the Stevie Nicks anthology until Feb. 12. We had a number of poets reach out to us who are working on poems and ask for an extension, so this new deadline gives everyone a chance to try and get something in. Keep ’em coming. The guidelines and Submittable portal are at this link.
Sadly, the new year is off to a wretched start: the terror attack in New Orleans, the devastating LA wildfires, the tech bros kowtowing to Trump and the four-year shitshow to come. And although we knew Jimmy Carter’s passing was imminent, it was still sad to lose a man who had dedicated so much of his life to public service. I met him and Rosalynn a decade or so ago randomly at an art festival in Atlanta. A sweet man. Honestly, so much has happened in the first couple of weeks of 2025 that it already feels like another year.
I seriously want to get off all the social media platforms and just come back to blogging here on a more regular basis.
Collin Kelley, Deadline extension and a wretched new year
Look at how much information, how much tragedy, how much catastrophe, how much chaos is going on in the world right now. It’s no wonder that people are starting to suffer from new forms of anxiety when we’re told that the world is in an extinction crisis, and politics are so terrifyingly polarised, and the culture of consumerism is creating death and destruction right around the world. There are famines and wars and street crime and violence and oh, I could go on and on and on.
Our natural tendency as humans is to grab at the information and store it so that we are able to defend ourselves with our enormous, complex brains when the danger comes. But in the age of instant information, the danger is always coming, always just about to arrive, which leaves us in a constant state of flight or fight. What has this got to do with creativity? Several things happen when creatives are under this sort of difficult to identify danger:
1. It causes the writer to wonder if writing is actually important and think that they are wasting their time writing when they should be stockpiling food and building a bunker. This is an exaggeration, but it does increase the natural tendency to not prioritise writing as other things seem to need doing in the seemingly very short space of time we have before the BIG DANGER comes.
2. It fills the head up. I don’t know about you, but news stories, especially the ones in which we are losing our wildlife, stick in my head. I’ll read something in the news in the morning and won’t be able to stop thinking about it all day. I’ll tweet* about it, chat with friends on social media, try to answer the unanswerable question that is what can I do? When I sit done to write, there it is still, taking up space in my creative zone. Perhaps I’ll try to write about it, to write it out of me, but if that isn’t the thing that I was going to write about before I read it, it’s difficult to settle into it, because I know I should be doing something else. So I end up doing nothing and drifting back to look for people who feel the same about the news item as I do, reaching out to help myself feel better. This would be fine if this was a one off, but with the world the way it is, and news reported on a loop, there is no ‘day off’ from it.
3. It perpetuates a feeling of not having very much time left, which means instead of writing happily, writers switch into striving to achieve what is necessary before it’s too late. It’s good to have goals, but if that’s hampering your creativity, if you are thinking about where to submit next, when you might hear about a competition, when a certain deadline is, it can be detrimental to the creative process.
4. It might cause you to compare yourself to other writers. That feeling of the clock ticking, it makes us look around at what everyone else is doing, and compare ourselves badly. This can lead to a cycle of punishment, striving and suffering. And that’s not conducive to the creative practice.
Wendy Pratt, Approach your writing with a beginner’s mind
Twenty minutes into a Bergman film,
the projector went dark.
I heard a faint buzzing, like a distant bee
describing a flower to friends.
No loud pop, no smell of smoke.
Just darkness. And silence.This was going to be a serious poem,
Jason Crane, POEM: Plot Twist
but as I was writing that last line
the kitten fell onto my head
from the bookshelf above me.
Science is wrong:
They don’t always land on their feet.
Today I received a photo of my poem ‘Survivor’ as it appears on a poster on Long Benton Metro Station, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. The poem was a runner-up in the Nexus/Metro 2024 competition. The theme was ‘Care’. It was inspired by a video shared on Instagram by the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. The four winning poems will be displayed until the end of 2025. Thanks to Nexus, Jane Burn, and the Poetry Book Society. [Click through to view the poem.]
Ama Bolton, Some Poetry News
Sometimes a line can lead to a novel, but not every time. The first poem today is a good first line but I am not sure I understood where to go with it.
the weather today is called drizzle
those of you from more edgy environments will be relieved to know that the precipitation on this planet is principally CO2 with a dash of microplastics and heavy metals
incidentally the inhabitants of this island will be very happy to discourse about the weather
please note this does not mean you can ask them any other questions
It’s a piece of nonsense, but it requited deft handling to bring off the necessary lightness. I honestly do not think I have achieved it. Killer first line though, probably one to put away for a long time.
Paul Tobin, THE WEATHER TODAY IS CALLED DRIZZLE
2024 closed with “thundersnow” in my neck of the woods, a weather phenomenon that I find rather thrilling in its strangeness. And the year commenced with the conflagrations in California, not to mention everything else that goes on daily in the cosmos. Oh, the difficulties of life in interesting times.
It so happens that I had made plans, and purchased plane tickets, to visit my son in Los Angeles during the week that AWP is holding its annual conference there, in March–that is, assuming the situation in Los Angeles County doesn’t get even worse and assuming his apartment building survives the fires; it hasn’t been easy to keep myself from doom-scrolling and watching updated fire maps. I remind myself that there is not a thing I can do beyond sending money to charities and such, perhaps, and waiting for the winds to change, and that making myself stressed will actually do harm. But I am not one of those Pollyanna types (now termed a “toxic positivity” person, I have recently learned). I’m aware that the world can be hard, and that we may suffer. […]
As for writing-related resolutions, I make them all the time, not just at the beginning of the year. But in that one respect, the first dozen days of January are going surprisingly well. I’ve been spending more time on revising older–sometimes much older–work, and I have been drafting some new poems. I even submitted just a few things to lit journals and have been making minor progress in the monumental task of culling and organizing my writing files.
Best of all, I enrolled in an online poetry workshop with Anita Skeen through the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation, which starts this week. And I registered for an art class in February, so my plans to focus more on my creative work post-retirement are proceeding more or less apace. We balance fear and misery with art.
Ann E. Michael, Breathe
Reading through James Yeh’s stunning interview with legendary American poet Eileen Myles in the latest issue of The Believer (Vol. 21, No. 2; Summer 2024), my eye is briefly distracted toward the fifth part of a “microinterview” with Devon Price, conducted by Emerson Whitney. I’m struck by how Price, an American social psychologist, blogger and author focusing on autism, speaks to how community is so often approached in the wrong direction. “Your approach is often colonialist, if that’s all you’ve ever known.” The mistake, as Price articulates, of asking yourself what you can take instead of what you can bring. I am startled by both the wisdom and obviousness of their statement. How the rest of us, perhaps, have approached the whole consideration of community entirely wrong. Community as a kind of pot-luck, further enriched by each succeeding participant.
The interview with Eileen Myles is incredibly rich, offering their own knowledge based on skill, experience, and too much to repeat here, but one that echoes some of Gail Simone’s thinking:
I just think it’s repetition. It’s like anything. It’s really similar to how you know if a poem is good. You know because you’ve just been there and you’ve been repeating and repeating. For some reason lately I’m freaky on repetition as a value. Because everything that’s good, you’ve done it again and again and again and it becomes your friend and it becomes your turf and it becomes your nest and then it’s just the right place to be and the right way to be.
Anyone interested in writing process and structure, or even the very notion of how to keep going, should read through this interview. How to not only figure out how best to write but how best you should be writing. This is, after all, an important distinction, and one not everyone seems to have figured out. It took me close to a decade of active prose writing before I came to that same conclusion: not how I thought a novel should be written, but how best to write a novel in my own way. Give out all your tools, I say. A bit further on in the same answer, as Myles offers:
You kind of make your own nest, that’s the thing.
*
I’m having a hard time focusing on much of anything today, knowing my short story collection, On Beauty, lands today on our doorstep, direct from the printer. I’ve already addressed a handful of envelopes to mail copies immediately out, including for Patreon supporters and a handful of my half-siblings. Our young ladies enjoy the first day of their week-long day camp at the Aviation Museum, which means I’m only here for another few hours. The Purolator website says “OTTAWA: On vehicle for delivery.” This has remained unchanged since 8:22am. I know, because I keep checking it.
rob mclennan, the green notebook
Above is a portion of the transcript from the first video interview I did with my mother. I’ve used a simple markup tool in MS Word to black out most of the text, selecting words that have resonance for me. In doing so, I’ve created new meaning—different from what is under the black bars, but true to the emotional experience of this project and my relationship to my mother. […]
My aim in this project is not to take my mother’s voice away from her and I think maybe the reason I feel okay about the poems (so far) is that I know they are only one dimension of the whole. I am also working with this material much more straightforwardly in prose. Ultimately it will be something of a hybrid work. I’m also teaching my graduate students about literary hybridity this semester, so the timing is good for me to really grapple with these instincts I’m having. They feel important and I don’t want to turn away from them.
Sheila Squillante, Erasing My Mother
we have all been so far from
Robin Gow, the only one awake in the world
rest that sleep feels supernatural.
i am convinced though that i have
found those sweet spots.
when the dark & the silence
swallow each other ouroboros style.
i’m not sure who is the head
& who is the tail but there i was.
the only person awake
in the entire world. the silence
was soft like moss. i did not
let myself close my eyes.
i drank in the aloneness.
wrapped myself in it.
just as fast as it comes,
the moment always leaves
in a blinking pair
of headlights.
Last weekend, Brandon and I took Oliver and a friend to a planetarium for the first time. I had memories of going to the same one—the Morehead Planetarium on the campus of the University of North Carolina—for field trips as a child, and had been looking for an opportunity to experience the magic of the starry dome with him. The show we saw was based on the Magic Treehouse books, of which we’ve read many, and follows the book characters Jack and Annie as they answer a series of questions about space that many children likely share (How long would it take to fly to the sun? What is it like to travel in space? How many stars are in the sky? Why is the earth so special?).
Oliver was sufficiently amazed by the experience of the constellated dome, and clung to me for comfort in moments as we seemed to leave earth and move through the expanse of space. Together as a family—my right arm wrapped around Oliver’s small body, my left hand in Brandon’s hand—it felt good “both going and coming back,” as Robert Frost says in his poem “Birches.” […]
I wrote about the significance of light in my Solstice post last month—the sacred practice of protecting our small lights in the darkness of this season—but of course this light would be meaningless without the darkness in the first place. In truth, we live in a light-obsessed culture, a culture in which we’re expected to stare constantly into blue-lit screens in perpetually illuminated cities where we can’t even see the stars. A culture fixated on the light of facts (real or alternative), on “information,” on “the news,” the all-seeing scroll. It seems we are less comfortable with darkness—literal darkness, but also its associations of unknowing, of confusion, of depth, of intimacy.
In our drive to know, to see, many of us (including myself) have actually become dis-oriented in the real landscape, in our places on earth. Many of us couldn’t pick out north from south in a given room, let alone identify the constellations in the sky or describe the boundaries of their watershed. As Joshua Michael Schrei points out on a recent episode of The Emerald Podcast, many people in urban areas might go through their whole life without ever seeing the band of the milky way, the wondrous view of our own galaxy that has inspired stories for thousands of years in cultures all over the planet. The milky way that is the milk from the goddess Hera’s breast, that is Freya’s necklace, the blood from the severed tail of the dragon Tiamat, the Goddess Nut, the River Ganga in the Sky, and a trail of corn where a dog dropped if from his mouth while running away.
And so, lately, I have not only been cherishing the light, but also pining for the dark, a night pure and thick as a womb without the rough speculum of electric light. I want to feel the feral black closing in on my house’s walls, its hair shining and slick as God’s cloak. And to be clear, when I say dark, I don’t mean evil, though there may rightly be a touch of fear. Yes, a bit of that primal kind that tingles your skin so you can smell your own sweat, that calls you in to the flickering warmth of the hearth.
I light a candle at my bedside each night and each dark morning, and watch the fingertip of flame pointing ever up. The edge where form blurs into space, light into dark. It is a holy meeting there, a ticklish disappearing, the seen into the unseen.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Ode to Darkness
むささびや大きくなりし夜の山 三橋敏雄
musasabi ya ōkiku narishi yoru no yama
flying squirrel−
a night mountain
became bigger
Toshio Mitsuhashi
from Haiku Saijiki electronic version edited by Kadokawa Shoten, published by Kodansha Sophia Shuppan, Tokyo, Japan, 2018
Fay’s Note: Toshio Mitsuhashi (1920-2001)
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (January 8, 2025)
I lost an old friend recently. So half my brain has been in the past, half in the present. There is a strange dizzying thicket in between, so confusing I can barely look at it. Who were we then, who are we now, what happened in between? I barely even understand my own trajectory, much less anyone else’s, however good a friend they had been then, or now, or anywhere in between. Do we any of us really know each other? Some days I feel a stranger even to myself. I guess it is out of that bleak abyss between then and now, and the future without my friend, as limited as our interactions in the near past had been, this poem, this bleak poem, sits with me. Remember last week I wrote that poetry did not owe us comfort? Well, here it is. This is a poem by Shara McCallum from her book The Water Between Us. Why, when I already feel half-bleak, do I linger with this poem? I guess for the cold company. Join us, won’t you?
Marilyn McCabe, nothing will hold you
no matter the speed or pattern of habit of your writing, when you can write anything, and you can, how do you decide which is worth pursuing?
what is too pat or easy? what nags as wrong or unresolved? what all can you disassemble? what feels right?
that subjective line of choices (rather than fate or bodychecking muse) suggests things have no inherent hierarchy of value, or anchor, no implicit profundity, weight or significance except what you attach. whose worldview are we backing?
within a chaotic universe, do we add chaos or comfort with a tiny subset of order? what do ethics and honesty in poetry look like? will our poems have painful earnestness or sense of play and humour? do we decorate or strip their bell-holders bare? why? to gain what?
which horizon do we push towards? what do you play up or downplay? what do you take for granted vs take as unscalable cliffs of granite? behind each of these questions is why. does your decision come out of who or where you are? or who or where you will be?
Pearl Pirie, Wise is the plural of Why
22. Fighter jet pilot: is the moon not pretty enough to change your mind?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Thirty shades of moon
23. But truth be told, the moon was never a muse, just the poet’s excuse.
24. What if earth had a second moon that filled the near sky with blue light?
25. Vain moon, watching itself in the wet mirror, all it takes is a frog.
26. It is not the moon I love as much as the potential of moonlight.
27. Like a monster unleashed on a moonless night, my first verse bares its teeth.
28. Sickle moon and Venus punctuate the sky, the poet fills in words.
29. Moonliness: looking both very far and very close at the same time.
30. Gibbous moon, will you tell the children of Gaza they are not alone?
I’m hitting the road again this spring with Dear Writer, heading to New York, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Columbus.
I hope you’ll grab a few friends and come say hello! This will be fun, and we have some exciting surprises up our sleeves, too.
At the core of this book is a belief that creativity is our birthright as human beings. Yes, all of us. Dear Writer is full of pep-talks, craft tips, writing prompts, and revision strategies inspired by ten essential elements of creativity: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. You can apply them to art-making—if you’re a writer, or a painter, or a filmmaker, or a musician. But I’ve found that anything that applies to writing also applies to life. Problem-solving is a creative act. Conversations are creative. Parenting is creative. Falling in love, leaving your job, changing your mind—all creative acts. Creativity isn’t just about making art. It’s about how we live.
Maggie Smith, Book Tour Announcement!
A book is an intellectual comfort. Theater, at its best, is a somatic experience composed of genuine empathy. The same work may be cathartic for some, but therapeutic for others. It’s why even watching weakest of productions, I will cry at the curtain call: this is what it means to me when Dickinson says tell the truth at a slant. All those playwrights and actors telling a basic truth of human experience without a spot of shame.
I will never fully embrace Artaud’s ideas, his Theater of Cruelty, break-you-down-to-build-you-up, approach to using theater as a therapeutic tool. I have to confess that I have never been able to sit through Clockwork Orange. Though, from what I understand, all that exposure to cruelty didn’t go well for Alex.
There is such a thing as precision surgery. There are ways to address pain without numbing everything. I honestly believe this is why I keep returning to theater, no matter how impractical it is. It is doing the good work.
Or trying to.
*
I’ve written four more wasp poems this week, and am enjoying the process. As for the play, I think I understand the Baroness now, and am close to finding a way to tell her story. I discovered a common need that she and I share. A drive that is so intense that I can honestly forgive her all the things I find repulsive, and I can love her. I can tell her story without shame.
Now my job is to make you love her, too. Shamelessly.
Ren Powell, A Gentle Theater of Cruelty
Analogy is the siren song of poetry, irresistible but fraught with danger for the poet. Somehow, we’ve been sold the idea that simile and metaphor *are* poetry, that everything has to be spoken about in terms of something else.
Maybe that’s why the Imagist dictum ‘Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective’ was so radical, and remains so radical.
Which is not to say that analogy doesn’t have a place, but for it to work it’s important to remember that at base any analogy operates on strictly logical lines: A is to B as C is to D; ship is to sea as plough is to field.
As with any logical structure, use well, analogy can either be a statement of the obvious or contain an interesting insight.
To take a couple of well-known examples, I would argue that pen is to poet as spade is to farmer falls under the ‘the obvious’ while curfew is to day as funeral knell is to night brings the physical, temporal and cognitive landscapes of Gray’s poem into a single, sharp focus.
And then there’s the possibility of logical disruption, which can result in McGonagall
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,or surrealism,
The iron circles of the sky
Are worn away by tempestSo, I’ve come to distrust simile and metaphor, while not rejecting the role of analogy in poetic thought. There’s a balance to be found, but to find that balance I feel the need to be aware of what I’m doing, and not just be seduced by the song.
Billy Mills, Some thoughts on analogy in poetry.
As it happens I began pondering these remarks at 3 a.m. this morning, while couched on my supposed bed of slumber. I’ve been reading Edward Butscher’s biography of American poet Conrad Aiken, a near-contemporary of Eliot and Pound, who criticized Imagism at its moment of emergence – arguing that its absolutism, its austere foregrounding of sharp images of visual objects, resulted in a narrowing of poetry’s complexity, its humane resonance. This was an iconoclastic stance for a young poet, then – the shining hour of the avant-garde, Imagist “Poetry Boom” in England and America, pushed along by Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, Pound, Eliot et al. And Aiken, through a long, eminent-marginalized career, never relinquished this skeptical attitude toward the dogmas of the Pound Era.
I continue to explore the haunted byways of Conrad Aiken : the shocking trauma of his childhood; his troubled, somewhat perverse personality; his mentorship and close friendship with Malcolm Lowry; and above all the antithetical figures cast by his own poetry and prose. But let me close this notational brief with a few primitive thoughts of my own on the subject of metaphor, analogy, and Imagism.
Aiken’s characterization of a “narrowness” planted in Imagism set me pondering. Objective imagery, “direct treatment of the thing” – underneath the valid craft of these aims, its allegiance to the plainness of the “real”, lurks ambiguous lexical ground. Are not words themselves – language in toto – symbolic, metaphorical, analogical? A word is never “the thing itself” : a word is an icon, representing something else (visible or invisible). And if we believe that strict imagism in poetry offers a transparent equivalent to the “thing itself”, we are inevitably turning that icon into an idol.
Pound defined poets as “the antennae of the race” : but sole reliance on the image, as the basis of poetic style, can transform those antennae into mere tools for insect-vision. Just so the charisma of a flashy photograph can deflect us from the roots, the deeper syntheses of experience (emotional, intellectual, visceral, spiritual).
I think this is in part what Aiken was getting at, and I tend to agree. “Direct treatment of the thing” is a kind of shibboleth. Because word and thing are never simply identified – never just one and the same (no matter how powerful the insect-antennae of a Pound, or say a Hemingway, may be).
Henry Gould, Billy Mills’ *Thoughts on Analogy*
It’s a kind of discipline, Matthew [Zapruder] writes, to not remember the persons we abandoned in the relationships that shaped us, whether inherited or invented for the purposes of time and place. But it is the irreverence of the closing act that testifies to the speaker’s respect for the poem’s addressee, namely [Witold] Gombrowicz, whose tone of total disrespect for modern humankind punctuates his fictions as well as his diaries.
The fork intrigues me: where the speaker honors by peeing on the very old tree, this peeing still feels like the sort of melancholic irreverence that Matthew is known for. In other words, Matthew pees on the tree in order to honor by communing with his subject, but his subject, Gombrowicz, took irreverence much further, past the point of laughter and straight into the acreage of contempt.
‘Of all artists, poets are people who fall to their knees most persistently,’ Gombrowicz said, naming us as the worthiest of contempt. But, as Matthew keenly culls, the act of pissing on a tree is how the poet earns the respect of the surly shade known as Gombrowicz, for it is this carnal, a-lyrical fleshiness that the dead writer admired.
To make him laugh is to libate Gombrowicz, and the splendor of this poem lies in precisely the gentle, lyrical way in which Matthew Zapruder accomplishes this.
Alina Stefanescu, 3 things: elegy, owl, and power tool.
This is the second poem in my new collection The Lost Art of Ironing (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). It originated in one of Kim Moore’s workshops a few years ago. I can’t remember the title of the prompt poem but I know it was about imagining yourself as the best friend of someone famous – and Emily Dickinson sprang into my mind. I’ve always admired the clarity, brevity and profundity of her writing. I’m also intrigued by the fact that she was a recluse for much of her life, yet still managed to become one of the greatest poets the world has known.
It was one of those rare occasions when the poem almost wrote itself, my imagination taking me where it wanted to go, in response to Kim’s prompt. When I was preparing this collection, I sent the draft manuscript to Brian Patten, a long-standing friend and one of my favourite poets. He kindly read it and said he thought this poem was one of the strongest and should be near the front. That made me realise that I should start the book with poems about other women’s lives, rather than my own, and I think that makes the collection more resonant for readers.
Drop-in by Kelly Davis (Nigel Kent)
Emily Holmes Coleman (1899-1974) was born in California, and attended Wellesley College. Moved to Paris in 1926; began publishing poetry in the experimental poetry magazine Transition, and wrote a novel—The Shutter of Snow (1930)—based on her experiences of being institutionalised. Society editor and staff-writer for the Paris Tribune, and at one time secretary to anarchist writer and political-activist Emma Goldman.
Goldman, in Living My Life (1931), recalls: “I started for Saint-Tropez, a picturesque fisher nest in the south of France, in company of Emily Holmes Coleman, who was to act as my secretary. Demi, as she is familiarly called, was a wild wood-sprite with a volcanic temper. But she was also the tenderest of beings, without any guile or rancour. She was essentially the poet, highly imaginative and sensitive. My world of ideas was foreign to her, natural rebel and anarchist though she was. We clashed furiously, often to the point of wishing each other in Saint-Tropez Bay. But it was nothing compared to her charm, her profound interest in my work, and her fine understanding for my inner conflicts.” […]
A Note on “Poem” (1927) by Emily Coleman . . .
The use of blank space in the composition: the “page” comes to life, energising the words. The arresting depths of expression. The use of fragmentation, each stanza both woven into the tapestry and entirely capable of standing-alone as a complete poem in its own right. The haiku-like opening tercet;
love of the silent twilight—
the benediction
that is in your handsThe rhymed-couplet;
moving waters of tenderness
on the burning glitter of my madnessThe quatrain;
quiet hands
asylum for my bewilderment
when phantoms of other worlds seek after me
peace to my spent spiritAnd the cinquain;
come to me when the day is sleeping
still my conflict with your aloofness
and I shall be a burst of star-dust
to rend the weary curtain
of your monotonyDue to Coleman’s play on the structure of growth, gradually building the stanza lengths (3, 2, 4, 5), there is no end-stop, but a suggestion instead: for the reader to “become poet” and continue the pattern . . .
Dick Whyte, Emily Holmes Coleman – 4 Short Poems (1927-28)
In addition to my earlier post about AI here are some further thoughts and pieces of information
Tim Love, More on AI and poetry
- The latest Acumen magazine has an article by Robert Griffiths. He suggests that programs like Bard may encourage us to think more about how poems get written. Can computers produce unexpected but effective lines?
- I think AI is best at “Well written, competent” mainstream poetry, hermit-crab forms, and some styles of avant-garde poems (e.g. N+7). Will poets shy away from writing in these styles? How did artists react to the advent of photography? They didn’t flee from Realism – photographic accuracy had rarely been their intention. Indeed, the idea of Hyperrealism only appeared decades later.
Chessplayers have been affected by chess programs. Advancing rook’s pawns has become more popular, and knowing that their opponents have prepared using the same computers, they deliberately play sub-optimal moves to thwart the preparations. I can imagine more poets veering toward daring imagery/styles rather than trying to emulate the Masters.- I sometimes write on autopilot, using much the same techniques as AI. For example, I try to write tidy final lines that allude to more than one earlier detail.
- The UK’s ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) surveyed their members about AI. See A Brave New World
- In December the UK government launched a consultation on generative AI and copyright – see Copyright and artificial intelligence
- Several articles last year used a paper from Nature – AI-generated poetry … – to suggest that people preferred AI-generated poetry to human-generated poetry.
This past week I was alerted to an announcement from Atticus Review. The magazine will be transitioning to the use of blockchain and will be reconfigured “as an NFT marketplace.”
This transition won’t happen overnight, but our goal is to slowly build a curated collection of NFTs—works for our readership to enjoy, admire, reread over and over again, and own. That’s right, own. Atticus readers will have the opportunity to purchase the poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimedia pieces that we publish as minted NFTs. We think NFTs can (and will) revolutionize the way digital creative arts and letters are exchanged, and that they can ultimately benefit the writer, the publisher, and the reader.
A good many of you might be scratching your heads. Words like “blockchain,” “NFTs,” “minting,” and “web3” are not familiar, the concepts not necessarily easy to grasp. For those of us who are not tech-savvy, it can be daunting indeed.
I find it all daunting too. Yet I also think we have a responsibility to try and make as much sense of this as we can. Many writers are rightly concerned about the integration of AI into writing and publishing. Plagiarism, over-saturation of the market, the replacement of human labor, not to mention the technology’s water and energy consumption, are all very real concerns.
What about other kinds of emergent technology? What do we understand about it? What are its benefits to writers and publishers? What are the risks?
Becky Tuch, Q: What’s up with lit mags & web 3.0?
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of those “best books of 2024” pieces. There’s always something engaging about a list, but it’s a bit silly to pretend — as most such reviews are forced to do — that much genuinely first-rate writing is published in any given year. I prefer the versions in which the author lists the best things they happen to have read in the previous twelve months, regardless of when they were published.
None of us, of course, read only for purely literary purposes. I read plenty of books and articles and even sometimes poems for non-literary reasons and I’m sure you all do too. But anyone whose primary interest is literary is likely I think to reach a point in life after which most of your, let’s say, “top quality” literary reading, the really transformational stuff, is re-reading. When this point occurs surely varies and in a second or third language one might (happy thought!) never reach that point. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that any fairly committed reader of literature gets to this stage, in their mother-tongue at least, somewhere around mid-life.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think I read anything in English this year, either in prose or poetry, that seemed to me genuinely top rate and that was also completely new to me. (Of course, I re-read lots of wonderful things.) There are two small caveats to this observation, though, in both cases authors of whom I had read only a few poems before. In both instances reading them in their entirety this year gave me a very different impression. One of these was Aurelian Townshend (1583-1649), one of whose lyrics I wrote about — along with Virgil, Horace, Shakespeare and Charles I — back in May. […] I don’t think Townshend was, taken as a whole, an absolutely first-rate poet; but a couple of his lyrics certainly are, and they made an outsize impression upon me earlier this year.
The other partial exception is the American poet Anthony Hecht, who died in 2004. Here too, I’d read a few poems before, but the one I could actually recite turned out to be both rather unrepresentative and derived from an anthology which (I discovered when I read the complete poems) printed only half of the original poem, excerpted in such away as to make it unrepresentative even, as it were, of itself.1 Reading Hecht entire revealed a more significant but quite different poet. He struck me as a fascinating case of a poet who was clearly in the top rank but every one of whose greatest poems — and several of them really are great — I find genuinely revolting. The only plausible comparison I can think of is perhaps Juvenal, but even that’s not quite right. Since almost every essay I read about Hecht — of which there were many this year — seemed to be reading a different poet from the one I encountered, I have written my own piece. It’s forthcoming elsewhere, so I won’t say more here, but for sure he is worth reading.
Victoria Moul, A one-handed year in review
I have been up for hours, with a lot of different kinds of anxiety, like traveling on roads that might be icy and generalized worry about the health of loved ones. So I went ahead and got up. I decided to work on a poem, instead of my usual pattern of doom scrolling.
My 2025 goal of creating 52 finished poems is working really well as a motivator right now. As I look back through my poetry files, I can see that I’ve done a good job of writing down fragments, and that even when it’s been a month or two of lesser fragment generating, I do make my way back. But actually getting a fragment to the finish line? I have not been doing that.
My pattern for the last few years has been to write the fragment down, be unsure of where to go next, put it aside, and forget to return to it. So far, my 2025 goal has kept me focused (I know, I know, it’s only been 2 weeks, but I’m taking success where I find it). I write a fragment and force myself to try to finish it on the same day or the next day.
So far, I’ve finished 4 poems. Are they publishable? I have no idea–ask me in July when I’ve gotten some distance.
I’ve been able to stay focused because I made my goal 52 poems in a year, not one poem a week. I can get ahead now, knowing that there will likely be times in the upcoming year when I won’t be able to do as much poetry writing.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Snowy Paths, Poem Completions
There’s a particular weirdness about suburban movie theaters, especially when they’re deserted. Our showtime was at 9:30 pm, and there were no ticket-takers or snack vendors in sight; instead we were confronted with an automatic machine saying “buy ticket here” on its digital screen, and no one ever checked the tickets — resembling a grocery store cash register receipt — that it regurgitated.
When we pushed open the doors of the large theater, final credits scrolled on the screen while three grey-haired people wrestled themselves into their heavy winter coats. One woman, gave me a knowing smile as she passed us on her way out. “Why is everyone so old?” we asked each other, and laughed. The enormous, comfortably squishy seats reclined with the push of a blue-lit button to whatever position you wanted.
I couldn’t help wondering what the young Bob Dylan, shown in an early part of the film in a Greenwich Village movie theater with his girlfriend, would have thought of such a place. The Bleeker Street of those days looked pretty familiar, though; I remember it as it was in the 1970s, and how it’s changed since.
The film, which covers Dylan’s early career up to the time he left the pure acoustic folk tradition and went electric, is excellent. I was glad to see it on a big screen: it’s completely immersive, the acting is brilliant, and the film took me right back to my own adolescence. I was only nine or ten when Dylan first came east, hoping to meet his hero Woody Guthrie who was dying in a New Jersey hospital, but I was already conscious of the resurgence of folk music and began trying to play my father’s guitar by the time I was in junior high school. By the mid- to late-60s, he became the poet-prophet of my generation. When Jonathan and I got together, in the late 1970s, we realized that we owned nearly all of Dylan’s records up to that date between the two of us. We’ve only seen him once in concert, here in Montreal about ten years ago, but that was a definite Moment.
Beth Adams, Prophets in their Own Land…are seldom believed
Gboyega Odubanjo Adam (Faber & Faber) – Odubanjo of course not present after his tragic, untimely death – this his first and only collection – Adam the name given to the torso of a boy pulled from the Thames some years back – a couple of recordings of the author were played – poems read by Joe Carrick-Varty and Gabriel Akamo – the latter the much better reader – a memorial set of poems to the disappeared, the dispossessed – the dead boy’s imagined journey through Germany to the UK – thank you to the woman, the people, the police – this language is more like music – a montage-like, even Whitmanesque feel to the rolling cadences, a riffing and use of repetition, the material rising towards the mythic – blow trumpet as if apocalyptic – chorus, musical bridge transition, outro – a burned CD, its track-listing – a weird fairy tale about water – frog and scorpion, two sisters, ocean and sun in a dialogue – gosh – yes this is good work.
Martyn Crucefix, Impressions of the TS Eliot Prize Readings 2025
All the precision, wit, and quiet profundity that readers of Rebecca Watt’s previous two collections, The Met Office Advises Caution and Red Gloves have come to expect are again on display in her third, The Face in the Well (all Carcanet); but her poetry has – I am looking for a way to avoid saying matured here – shrunk. And by shrunk, of course, I mean grown. It has grown in subtlety of rhythm, in nuance of rhyme, in lucidity and succinctness of metaphor, it has grown in precision, wit and in both profundity and the quietness of that profundity. And for all these reasons, it has shrunk. It is not that the poems are shorter – some are, three of the four ‘Soundings’ poems, observations out of childhood which dot the first half of the collection, are a crisp four lines long – but while Watts has always been an economic poet, she has now also found a way of condensing the essence of each poem into a small pool of complete clarity.
Chris Edgoose, Shrinking and Growing: Rebecca Watts – The Face in the Well
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.
We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation — religion to save us from our sins, therapy to save us from our traumas, marriage to save us from our loneliness — in order to salve our suffering, which is the price we pay for the fulness of living. And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.
That is what the Uruguayan novelist, journalist, and poet Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) explores in his astonishing poem “No Te Salves” — part indictment, part invitation, reminding us that we most often break our hearts on the hard edges of our own fear of living, on the parts of us so petrified that they have become brittle to the touch of life, the touch of love.
Since I didn’t feel that the standard English translation quite captures the urgency and intimacy of the original language, I have translated it anew. […]
don’t fill up on tranquility
Maria Popova, Do Not Spare Yourself
don’t claim from the world
only a quiet corner
don’t let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
don’t remain lipless
don’t fall asleep unready to dream
don’t think yourself bloodless
don’t deem yourself out of time
My good friend John Foggin died a few years ago now. John was a serial poetry workshopper, who managed to write the most amazing poems in the space of six minutes (or ten – whatever time was available) in beautiful, looping handwriting, usually with a purple pen, between the covers of a book he’d often made himself. John was utterly enthusiastic about poets and poetry he loved – anyone who has found themselves the recipient of this enthusiasm will know it felt like being lifted up high into the air. If John loved your poetry, he wanted everyone else to love it, and for someone like me who finds it hard to take and accept compliments, that sometimes was difficult to believe. And if John loved you, he wanted everyone else to love you too, and that felt like being held up to the light. I am missing him terribly this month- I always do, whenever I’m running workshops because he would have been at every one. And I know he’d have emailed about the T.S Eliots to see what I thought about the poetry – he was less interested in the gossip. It was always the poetry with John – what were poets doing with the language?
The January Writing Hours sent me back to John’s final collection Pressed for Time, published by Calder Valley Press. The editor was John’s good friend Bob Horne, and Bob tells me that after I shared this poem during the January Writing Hours, it resulted in a flurry of orders for John’s collection. One of my biggest regrets is I didn’t do this when John was alive, because he would have been so happy to think of his poetry getting out there into the hands of people who didn’t know him. I hope he’s watching somewhere now with that big grin on his face as we read his words.
It seems amazing to me now that he wrote this poem during those final months when he knew that the end was approaching. The title “open-eyed” could be a manifesto for the way John lived – always open to experience, endlessly curious and fascinated and driven on by a desire to know, to know more – about language, about coal mines, about the landscape, and of course about himself.
But in the poem there are hints of that ending that was approaching. We can see it in the semantic field of the poem, in the language choices. The hawthorns “white as bones” that “close like a noose”. The “violent shadows” of the poplars. The “muttering sea”. And that buzzing – which I think is both the buzz of life, of life going on – after all the dog fox is considering moving in. When human life stops, nature takes over, life in whatever form carries on. But it’s also, I think the buzz of death approaching,
I like to think of John at home in Yorkshire, writing this poem and letting his mind range far and wide to pull those images across time and distance. The “raindark eagle” and the “muttering sea” I suspect is from the Isle of Skye, one of his favourite places in the world. It is a poem of desire. The academic L.Alford defines a poetics of desire as being defined by lack and this lack resides in either time or distance away from the loved one. Is it possible to have a poem of desire for a landscape that you can’t get to anymore, except in your mind? I think so, and I think this poem proves it.
Kim Moore, “open-eyed” by John Foggin
Twenty years years ago, I attended my first Arvon residential – thanks to a full grant. One of the other students on the course asked me which poets I liked, and I told them, with great enthusiasm, that I was a big fan of Brian Patten whose “Love Poems” I’d read and re-read so often I knew them off by heart. Her response? “Oh dear”. I never challenged her on this, or asked her to explain her response. I guess I already felt out of my depth, out of place. So I quietly accepted that my reading wasn’t complex, or intellectual, or contemporary enough.
No one should ever, ever be made to feel embarrassed for the poetry they read. Poetry is not a competition. Having said that, I’d love to speak to that student now, and ask them which major poetry publisher they are with … and how many collections they’ve published.
Take it away, Brian.
The Stolen Orange
by Brian Patten
When I left I stole an orange
I kept it in my pocket
It felt like a warm planet
Everywhere I went smelt of oranges
Whenever I got into an awkward situation
I’d take out the orange and smell it
And immediately on even dead branches I saw
The lovely and fierce orange blossom
That smells so much of joy
When I went out I stole an orange
It was a safeguard against imagining
There was nothing bright or special in the worldYou don’t have to like every poem you read, just as we don’t like every piece of music we hear. But it’s hard to imagine what’s there is to dislike about this deceptively simple poem which allows itself to burst into light – and flight – in its language and imagination. The best poems – like this little gem – are rarely all light or all dark. I love how its simple, sentimental message is grounded in a sense of struggle, and hardship – why did he steal the orange? What did the dead branches stand for, and where did he step out from? Why did he need the safeguard of the orange?
Clare Shaw, FRUIT!
Maybe we’re all saying the same things these days, but it doesn’t hurt to say the same things in different configurations.
Get weirder, be messy, and go deeper, and wilder. Be free with your words and your thoughts and think into the beyond.
In my [New Years’] post, I mentioned a book that I love and that I’m so grateful I read as my first book this year. The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart is already a life changer for me. And you can read about it in my previous post but I’ll quote one more little bit from it. She talks about experiencing a work of art that has “something about it that is slightly ‘wrong.’” She says that “the resonance of the work is increased by its inherent dissonance.” She says, “present-day software engineers use the term, “worse is better” meaning that the quality does not necessarily increase with functionality and that there is a point where less functionality (“worse”) is a preferable option in terms of practicality and usability.” She talks about how auto-tune ruins music, and we might think of the warmth of an LP rather than Spotify.
I’ve been thinking about the off-kilter, the weird, and about leaving in the messy background. I’ve been thinking about how to make this next year as authentic and true as possible. Especially since we’ll be living in such a climate of lies.
Pay attention to those places in art that are slightly “wrong.” It’s a message from the artist about what is real. That’s where the light gets in.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – We Work in the Dark
Fractals of ice, tendrils
of fire; letters of unknown alphabetsresembling their plain selves before
receding again into mystery. There does notseem to be an end to what light can do,
Luisa A. Igloria, Epistle of Illuminated Shards
even with all these broken pieces.
dawn
the sacred eye closing
dreams journey back to the country of the dead
birds changing place with stars
Grant Hackett [no title]