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: oystercatchers, blood stew, the ground and the groundless, lovers’ clocks, and more. Enjoy.
May I whisper to you? Of colours on a winter’s day, of the songs and light within?
Today is Imbolc, the first day of spring and half way between the winter solstice and spring equinox. It is also St Bride’s Day. Known as St Brigit in Ireland, she is the patron saint of scholars and sailors. But she is also known for her association with oystercatchers (the gille-brìghde, servants of St Bride). According to legend, she arrived on the shores of South Uist with an oystercatcher on each arm. For centuries, sailors have listened out for their powerful calls, knowing they sang of land and home.
The piping of oystercatchers is one of my favourite coastal songs; their voices are redolent of solace, wide open spaces, wild winds and breaking waves. Every time a hear them, I am reminded of family holidays here in Scotland, of empty beaches where their calls mingled with the happy voices of my young children. Oystercatchers are the signposts to happy memories for me. Their songs are the sounds of wildness and remoteness but also the joys of family life. I cannot untangle my motherhood memories from either the birds or the saint or the promises of spring.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, breathing blue
Woke up again today to temperatures below zero. It’s been a long, cold winter already in Upstate New York, and we’ve barely put January in the rear view. As someone who loves only heat and sun (I’m looking at you, Summer), it’s a really harrowing season with so many long shadows.
I survive it by maintaining aggressive self-care, keeping my head down (i.e. old-school denial/endurance) and blowing on embers of tenderness and connection in hopes they’ll flare into something that will warm my hands.
I found one of those embers recently in “Meditation at the End of Winter” by Mollie O’Leary (Wildness Journal). It’s a devastating poem about being at the bedside for a loved one’s end-of-life/dying — a place I’ve been, though I’ve ran fast and far as soon as I could.
The poem looks back at the season when the family’s care taking was in full force and then brings us to the speaker’s present moment:
… Today I tread along
February’s blue edge, the trees holding
their winter vigil among last year’s fallen
leaves. The tenderness I witnessed during
those final weeks is the only kind of devotion
that’s ever brought me to my knees.The word “devotion” in the penultimate line yanked me up by my collar. I was surprised to have failed to consider the word as a description of how myself and my family tended to my mom in her final weeks. I hadn’t even see “devotion” as one of the options.
A decade and a half later, I’m still too knocked down by the gore of it to see anything but horror, but then a poem comes along and grabs me by the scruff of my neck and stands me up to a very different possibility. It takes a while before my knees stop buckling, but once they do, I’m grateful. In love. Connected.
Carolee Bennett, “February’s Blue Edge”
February already. Did I really say I’d write here more regularly? As I think I said in January, I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal before sleep, and it completely removes any shyness about starting out with a weather report. So — the temps have dropped again to around freezing overnight, which means that if I put yesterday’s pot au feu out on the kitchen balcony, in the morning the removal of the fat is made easier by its being frozen. Still a delicate operation, given that the surface of the pot is lumpy as a sea with wreckage, meaning lumps of ingredients: onion, leeks, carrots, meat, marrow bones, bouquet garni. But it lifts off fairly easily in your fingers. Today, because of the cold, the air is cold and dry and the sky is blue.
I’ve been working on some new poems, one that is only new in the sense that, after years of work, it is unfinished to my satisfaction. It’s about the hole in my tummy when I go to the university library or even just survey my own bookshelves and face the fact that I will never be able to read (or reread) all the books. And about how my husband seems to read so much slower than I do, and yet (perhaps?) more deeply. That reminds me how much I love the French expression for ‘skimming a book’: to read diagonally (‘lire en diagonal’).
Beverley Bie Brahic, Paris, Monday 3 February 2025
Given my teaching schedule and other commitments, I may not blog every week in 2025, but I am continuing with my project of reading a book of poetry each week. This week I read a collection of poems by Bellingham poet Maureen Sandra Kane, The Phoenix Requires Ashes: Poems for the Journey (Gray Matter Press, Seattle, 2022).
According to her bio, Kane is a former winner of the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Award, and a mental health therapist, interested in and for literacy, homeless youth, health care access, and disability awareness. Judging by her poems, I would like to add to her list of passions: bodies, all things Zen, and madrona trees. Consider these lines:
I believe I would like to be a Madrona in my remaining years:
—from “Madrona”
Comfortable on the edge,
holding fast to the earth without concern for falling.
Knowing how to shed my skin for growth.
Welcoming wind and storms because I need them to become strong.
Embracing soft, exposed flesh,
trusting that new bark always comes.
Growing toward the light wherever it is.Although many of these poems look back to Covid, others look forward, offering strength to the reader for the fight ahead: “I speak for the sinew that pulls at my bones. / Red and raw—gaping and mawing. / Holding all together, the strength required astounds” (from “Her Body Speaks”). The poems cycle down through isolation, sleepless nights, despair, then up into love, compassion, and an invitation to join life’s dance. Ultimately the message here is one of optimism and hope.
Bethany Reid, The Phoenix Requires Ashes
This week has been something of a dull blur. I’ve been on painkillers since surgery on Thursday, and have been reluctant to write under the influence.
I’ve been reading too much of the news—by that I mean reading the “news” rehashed and amplified as click-bait. I’ve been bouncing between despair and pollyannaism, but I believe that somewhere between the two extremes, is a place of responsible citizenship. […]
I’m not a social scientist. I’m not even a practicing academic. I am a poet. And everything I am working on now, seems so small in some ways. And yet, taking a step back, I see how it reflects more than I would have imagined. I think that implies a universal truth.
A wasp is a kaleidoscope of metaphors. Judged. Shunned. Sweet pollinator, servant of Dionysus. The Baroness approached the world with the curiosity of a child. The scraps, the scatological evidence, the discharges of sickness. She was unafraid. She was terrified. Between the wars, between countries, between obsessions. She died before she would have had to take a stand—in her home country of Germany, or her home in Paris. I’m certain it would have come down to where she felt she belonged.
Neutrality is the ultimate privilege. One has to be above need.
Ren Powell, A Crisis of Belonging
I imagine a morning where I am not at my desk answering emails at 6am. Instead I am in my reading chair, and the curtains are open and I am drinking the good coffee, and I am staring out of the window at the deep purple and salmon of a winter sunrise, and I am allowing that sunrise to enter the room and move across me as I stay still and present. I am imagining a day in which I just take photographs of things and play with them, and follow an internal narrative around beauty and expression. I imagine myself lighting the stove and settling into my chair with nothing to do except keeping the fire burning. Maybe I write. Maybe I don’t.
How much of this is a fantasy that can’t be captured? How much of this is a little cry for help from me to me? How much of this can I incorporate into my life without needing to take a fallow month to recover from simply being alive in the world with all its stresses and strains?
Wendy Pratt, Acts of Love: Next Year I’m Taking January Off
After a decade long break, I could finally open a book and read. It’s not that I didn’t have the time, or no book. It’s because I was so depressed that reading was senseless, the sentences jumbled, the amount overwhelming. An existential crisis had been fought and won for now. Indeed, life offers lemons, and some are even foul.
Kati Mohr, Orion
Over coffee earlier, I made a list of things either in progress or planned. There are some older things that have associated art that I haven’t yet started writing the text portion of. There are text projects that have sat abandoned for many years. There are others that I am undecided on if I want to do them, or combine them into other manuscripts and projects. There’s a new collage project (see above) that may be hankering for poems. On a normal weekend, I would have been able to make decisions on this, but the society-wide fuckery of the past couple weeks have made it hard for me to dig in, or plan, or concentrate on anything. Even paid writing, which I try to get done expeditiously in the hours I loosely schedule (or am scheduled for in the case of HD) are overly prone to distractions and doomscrolling if I happen to briefly check messages or social media or the news. I thought that signing off FB and IG may help this, but I find enough to be concerned by when checking in on Bluesky or even just going over to post a link to a new article published. Its reaching new heights of ridiculousness with each click. I’m so glad this nation sacrificed 200 plus years of democracy for rabid racism, a few bucks off eggs (not even happening), and weirdly irrational fears about gender-neutral bathrooms.
It seems odd to be writing and working and going to movies while it all sways in the wind. I was under the mistaken impression that safeguards were in place to stop things like this from happening, but either I am just wrong or they’re moving in secret (I hope so.) The news outlets are mostly just as ridiculous in their non-coverage, leading me to pretty much rely only on international sites to even have an idea of what is going on. Mostly, I am angry not just at the right (especially the extremists) but also the news outlets that use language that only lessens the impact. The fear and hopelessness feels like the early days of the pandemic, though this time the US brought it on themselves, not nature.
All of this makes things I normally take solace in, like writing and art, feel superfluous and unnecessary, but perhaps they are even more necessary. To weigh terror and beauty in a palm. To continue to make things even in a world that might not be habitable for them I cling to routines and habits because they may be all I can keep from unraveling.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 2/2/2025
We visit the Saturn Cave, and I go for a swim; the cave is huge, the water fresh. It is like swimming in an underwater cathedral. I am the only one swimming, and there are only a few people in the cave. We visit the Cuevas de Bellamar and go all the way to the back alone. They insist on a guide following us down, but we are left to explore, and we adventure to the tiny crawl space at the back of the caves where ancient people journeyed.
We climb tiny stairs to the top of a church. From up there, we can see the large scoop that is the bay of Matanzas, the deepest bay in Cuba, and the massive ships in its harbor.
When we return, it is lunch, then back to writing. We have enough money for a single meal a day. Mark has a small, thin pizza, and I eat a small bowl of rice with sliced cucumbers. For dinner, we will each have a cup of coffee. For breakfast, I have coffee and guava slices.
What you envision of a country you have never visited is your imagination. I thought I would find authentic Cuban food, like fried plantains, everywhere we went. But every bit of food is controlled within the black market, and all most people can afford is pizza, a cheap brand of chocolate ice cream, and steamed rice. […]
The Cubans don’t have so much as a surfboard, but music is the lifeblood of the island. Almost anyone can participate in the making of music by playing an instrument, dancing, or singing. When you don’t have much, as Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen said in “Guitar,”
They went out hunting for guitars
Kate Gale, Dreams of Blackberries and Music: Cuba Pt. 2
underneath the full moon.
Once we arrived at the residency, we unpacked and started to try to relax. The night air was warm enough to walk outside and look at the planets above the palm trees. I set about working on my manuscript-in-progress, reorganizing, editing poems, putting in new poems and editing out older ones. Every time we stopped into town, the people were so friendly and upbeat, such a difference from the gloomy and let’s face it, somewhat sullen Pacific Northwest crowd. I tried a Dole whip for the first time at Lappert’s (hole in the wall with good date shakes, ice cream, sorbet, and of course, two Dole whip machines.) It was a little cold for the pool this time out, but it was still warmer than Seattle. Lots of Costa’s hummingbirds, a v of white pelicans overhead, mockingbirds and Western bluebirds. Besides being a lovely place to write, it’s a bird watching paradise. […]
I have not caught up on news or social media, or even laundry or unpacking. It is supposed to snow almost every day for a week. I have a stack of books to read, a goal of doing a couple of submissions and spending more time on the new-and-improved version of the manuscript, and thinking about whether or not to try to go to AWP (expenses, timing, health, and more concerns there.) Although it was lovely to be away from home, my cats were very happy to have us back.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Much-Needed Residency in the Desert in a Time of Sorrow and Strife Part 1
Outside Macy’s, fervent Korean evangelists with bullhorns and banners proclaimed “Jesus is Lord”. Onward to Times Square, where we stopped to take photographs. It’s hard to know whether to photograph the incredible digital advertising displays, which seem to have multiplied every time we’re here, or the people taking selfies with Times Square behind them. And in this center of capitalism stands a large cube, covered with a glowing neon flag, and a sign saying “US Armed Forces Recruiting Center”. […]
We also saw an exhibition of works by Jesse Krimes, who was incarcerated for six years and conceived several very large installations during that time, using materials that were issued to him or available at low cost in the prison commissary. It’s hard to describe these powerful works; you can see more about them in the video linked above. One installation was a whole wall of tiny pebbles, wrapped with different colors of string, and suspended from sewing needles stuck in cloth-covered panels. There are 10,000 pebbles in the artwork, collected by inmates and sent to Krimes at his request for “the ideal pebble from your prison yard.” I was stunned when I realized what I was looking at, and what this piece says about the vastness and anonymity of incarceration in the U.S.
Beth Adams, A New York City Diary: Days 4-6
another gray morning I wake
Sharon Brogan, a sadness of dreaming
from a dream of the end
of the world it comes
without warning the alarm
a deafening buzz as all
the bees in the world
die in a hum at the end
of it all honey gone sour
and seeping
from empty hives like
sap from dying trees all
sweetness lost
This week, the publisher Simon & Schuster announced that its authors will no longer be expected to obtain blurbs from fellow authors for a new book. Sean Manning, writing in Publishers’ Weekly, traced the decision back to his realisation that
many of the biggest-selling, prize-winning and most artistically revered titles in the flagship’s history did not use blurbs for their first printings: Psycho, Catch-22, All the President’s Men…
Manning now believes that there is an “excessive amount of time spent on blurb outreach” — which, if nothing else, is a memorably new combination of words.
Blurb outreach has certainly increased in British poetry in recent years. I’m always happy to say something positive about a new book if I can, especially if it’s from a small press and/or a debut author. But I inevitably then wrangle too long with the job, as though it were a “real” piece of writing, rather than a nice cheerful signpost. That’s a mistake: to adapt what Gertrude Stein said about remarks, blurbs are not literature. But I can think of some poetry blurbs that are at least interesting footnotes to the life and work of those who wrote them, and the poets they were written for.
In this post from last year I noted how T.S. Eliot noted — 99 years ago — that “blurb” was a piece of American slang “pretty certain to be adopted in this country”: [link]
Eliot’s definition of blurb, though, was a “publisher’s notice on the wrapper or jacket of a book” (Gelett Burgess, the American humourist who coined the word, defined it as “a noise like a publisher”). So the current meaning of “advance praise from a well-known name” seems to be a later development. The OED only traces usage as far as 1955, when the blurb is still talked about as something written by the publisher. The invaluable online edition of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, however, comes to the rescue: in a letter from 1957, Jack Kerouac says: “I wrote a jacket-blurb for Gregory Corso’s new book”. The book was Gasoline, published by City Lights, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac appears on the back cover, calling Ginsberg and Corso “the best two poets in America”. Were the Beat Generation also the first Blurb Generation?
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #27: A Noise Like a Publisher
This poem is from Jorie Graham’s [To] The Last [Be] Human. And one of the reasons I want to share it is because of what Robert Macfarlane says in his intro to the book about this specific poem, which is titled precisely that — Poem — because it is connected to all poems, poetic activity, life. Here is what Macfarlane says:
““Emergence” is the term given in biology, systems theory, and beyond for the properties or behaviours of an entity that its parts do not on their own possess. Graham’s poetry is strongly emergent, its effects irreducible to the sum or difference of its components. It shoals, schools, flocks, builds, folds. It has life. To read these four twenty-first-century books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in the mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one another, ad across collections, and the song that joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book.”
And that poem is the one below.
I’ve been thinking about EMERGENCE a lot lately, and you might remember me talking about it in my massive haha NY post, referencing the work of adrienne marie brown. But I think this is one of the possible ways forward. We have to get down to the work in our three metres of influence. We have to think: murmurations. Look what we can do when we move forward with good purpose. Like Macfarlane says, we need to think “shoals, schools, flocks, builds, folds.” We are the starlings. We are the murmurations. The knowledge is in us…we know what to do. We know how to fill up the emptiness with flight. We do.
Maybe it won’t be everything but it will be something.
And anyway: Jorie Graham’s title, [to] the last [be] human, is perfect. Even if we are the last human, we must be human to the last, to the ends.
Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – This is Why
The cabin is clapboard white, its slanted roof white,
drifts of snow are white.
If not for the sun’s glitter, all would disappear.
No one has written the story, as of yet no black letters.There comes the old woman, bent like a comma.
Jill Pearlman, Lost in the Narrative
She is dragging a line of black text,
a large black seal, the kind that often loll
on beaches when tired of swimming.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through four drafts of proofs for my collection Snow day (2025), a book out as soon as we clear all corrections. A sequence of sequences, held by the title sequence, one composed at the prompt of another snow day, back in 2019. The snow fell and it fell and both children remained home.
I’m all for a snow day. I’m tempted to return to the extended prose poem, as I did for the original “snow day” poem, six years ago. How different or similar I might play with the form. Where might this go.
Our young ladies in their corners, on their devices. They are eight and eleven years old. The snow, falls. Outside, the snowplow. If everything, seasons. The snowplow, attends. The ground, and the groundless. A stellar cold. For why, the lament. Alta Vista: snow descends in straight lines. These shadows, blue. The rules of the game. Nothing rests. What the tides don’t permit.
Yesterday, a cluster of birds.
Rose is attending a craft. If anyone, to witness. Can I have this box. I want to make something out of this box. Yes, you can have that box.
*
A temporality. Emails, from both of their schools, from the snowplow company. It is here, it is coming. Snow. How many words for it. Remain in your homes, they say. Our young ladies, relieved. Blizzard, onding. An outcrop of flurries.
The air, a crispness. A sharp edge. I brush layers from the car, abandon sentences. Return to the house.
Mid-morning, I tell the young ladies to put away their devices. They spend the rest of the day taking turns coming in to request things or register their complaints of the other. By early afternoon, a silence. They are in the dining room, quietly playing a card game.
As I wrote on social media, responding to another: my poems these days seem to be composed through me stepping directly into the middle of the poem and pushing out in every direction, until I am finally able to free myself.
I used to write poems that began at the beginning and moved their ways forward until finding the end. It seems I do something else, now.
rob mclennan, the green notebook : , regarding a snow day,
aren’t the two halves of my life wind, wind :: and a needle going through
Grant Hackett [no title]
When I was first reading English poetry seriously as a young teenager, two anthologies had a particular impact upon me — first, 100 Poems by 100 Poets, selected by Harold Pinter, Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury, which I think must have been given to me as a present. As every poet here gets just one piece, they are all as it were equal, especially for a relatively naive reader without much prior knowledge about relative literary stature. The poems are in alphabetical order by author — starting with James Agee, Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden and Aphra Behn (what a start!) — with no additional commentary or information other than the author’s dates. I still know lots of these poems and I followed up many leads by reading more of the poets in question. It took me quite a long time for my calibration of how these poets were “rated” to catch up with my initial impression, based on this book, that these were basically the top 100, all roughly on a par, and I’m not sure that was a bad way to start out.
A year or so later, I got hold of Jon Stallworthy’s wonderful Penguin Book of Love Poetry, which, aside from an excellent choice of verse written originally in English, is an editorial miracle in its selection of translations, almost every one of which works as an English poem in its own right, meaning that the book includes translations from Latin, Greek, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Persian and Chinese, all of which seem like real poems. At my father’s funeral a few years ago, wanting to describe the love between my parents in my father’s final weeks, I read Nabokov’s translation of Tyutchev’s ‘Last Love’, which I had learnt originally from this collection, and which kept coming back to me as I watched them together.
Victoria Moul, Love at the closing of our days
If you can read Italian at all you can feel the double movement here – on the one hand how slowly, step by step, and in what sharp focus, metre, rhyme and syntax make us see and imaginatively inhabit what’s happening to the pair, and on the other how relentlessly we’re drawn to what follows by the way the second line of each tercet rhymes with the first and third line of the tercet that follows. This slowing does so many things. It gives weight to every line, both making us feel on our pulses how momentous the moment is and creating a mental space in which suggestions and reflections can flow around the words. It makes us feel how raptly Francesca is remembering the moment in all the tenderness and terror and joy it had at the time and in all the dreadfulness of its consequences. Most terrifyingly and movingly – most in tune with Wilson-Lee’s words about rhyme it makes us see things simultaneously from the perspective of time and eternity – so that we’re intently absorbed in the moment and momentary feelings of that kiss and at the same time see, as the lovers didn’t then but do now, how their fate for all eternity depended on what they did then. Solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse echoes with that horrified realisation. Quel giorno più non vi legemmo avante seems to me to echo with the same poignant irony. That day they saw no further into the consequences of what they were drawn into.
Edmund Prestwich, Time, eternity and terza rima in Dante’s Inferno 5
In “The Friday Poem” (31st January 2025) Stephen Payne articulates a feeling I’ve not been able to put into words – how the language of some poets is slightly, persistently, non-standard. Reviewing ‘The Island in the Sound’ by Niall Campbell he writes that “This is immediately interesting writing. The syntax is … reduced or disrupted … There are a few part-rhymes … There’s the playfulness … the verb-choices are novel: I’m sure I’ve never seen ‘comb’ as an intransitive verb meaning “to become a honeycomb” or something similar.”
It’s not a style I can do. I wish I could. In my self-doubting moods I feel that poets who write like this are “thinking in poetry” rather than translating into poetry. The review points out that “All these aspects of the surface language – syntax, sound effects and phrase-making – … combine to achieve a dense and intense lyricism. “. There are radical ways for poets to make readers distrust words/language. I think this gentler style stops language being transparent (the way it tends to be in prose) without making it opaque.
Tim Love, The Friday Poem and The North – poetic language
i feel someone’s heart
stir within mine
the poem as a string
pulling on the marionette of meat the edge of reason a poet
Jim Young, reading a poet
can posit something
and i can feel it was me
that pulled the poet’s strings
to pull upon the heart of me
Louise Gluck: Poems 1962-2012
Renee Emerson, The Last Snake, Summer-Birds, and Poetry Bibles.
Bryan and I jokingly call this my “Louise Gluck Bible” because this is a hefty sucker. I’m writing a lecture on Gluck’s life and work right now for a reading / lecture I’m giving in March (if you live near Rome, GA, come by and check it out!). This volume includes all but her last two books (Faithful and Virtuous Night, and Winter Recipes from the Collective), but those books are no good and completely skippable anyway (I love you Louise, but what happened?!). It is instructive as a writer to read through a large collected works like this—to see how a writer’s voice develops over time, what risks she takes, how her tone and style shifts. I’ve enjoyed immensely looking at each book and how they differ. Plus you can get this book for under $15, a steal for how much poetry is in it! If you aren’t familiar with Gluck, I would recommend starting with The Wild Iris, one of her best and most accessible collections. Her style is sparse, dry, and witty, often biting with sarcasm.
The source for this erasure poem is “Spontaneous Revolutions” Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement by Natalie Lawrence in The Public Domain Review. The essay examines a chapter in Darwin’s research to create a way to make movement of plant life visible to the naked eye. The essay is not very long and is utterly fascinating if you’re interested in botany or gardening. The 1843 illustration below is of the wild mock cucumber which is the plant Darwin used for his observations.
My “Something Small, Every Day (or so)” series is inspired by Austin Kleon’s piece here where he says, “Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day’s worth of effort over time.”
Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): Unconfined
In 2022, exhausted by the challenge of managing a freelance career alongside my neurodivergence and mental health issues, I contacted Access to Work – ,
‘a grant that funds practical support if you have a disability, health or mental health condition’ – and I was awarded money to employ a PA.
The rest of this blog is written by the PA I appointed. Olivia Tuck is a wonderful poet in her own right; you can find her work here: https://poetrynonstop.com/tag/olivia-tuck/
I agree with every word Olivia says, especially about the crucial role of karaoke in a PA/ client relationship. Olivia, by the way, has a wonderful voice. And my invoices, these days, arrive on time.
Thank you so much, Olivia. You’re a star.
*
In May 2023, a friend messaged me a link to a Facebook post on the profile of a certain poet named Clare Shaw. Clare was looking for a PA/support worker. Someone ‘efficient, friendly, organised’ (words I’d tentatively used in my CV). Someone with a bit of arts administration knowledge – I’d gleaned this from my years of poeting, of helping out at literary journals and running a national young poets’ competition. Someone with experience of neurodivergence: I’m Autistic.
I messaged Clare. We agreed we’d give working together a go. I can only speak for myself, but I feel we hit it off straightaway. There’s a certain kinship you feel as a neurodivergent person talking to another neurodivergent person. It feels so much more fluid than the stiltedness I feel (the stiltedness that may not be immediately obvious to the rest of the world, but nonetheless, I feel it). I never thought I’d be able to be unapologetically weird in the workplace. It felt like coming home. […]
The unique quality that a poet PA must have, of course, is the ability to talk poetry. To be someone to bounce ideas off. A poet PA can send an invoice and talk about whether or not a metaphor is violating its terms or not. A poet PA can check up on what has or hasn’t been done admin-wise, but also we look at manuscript drafts and frail, newborn poems in all their vulnerability. We compile weekly admin reports, then look at sustained images and narrative arcs. We phone the doctor’s surgery, then listen as our clients thrash out their central idea for their next collection. The ability to move fluidly between the practical and the creative is what makes the poet PA useful.
My parents often refer to the time they took eleven-year-old me to an induction evening at my new secondary school. One of the speakers made the point that a lot of us kids would one day be working in jobs we didn’t know existed – some of which that, as of then, hadn’t yet been invented. I like to think I’ve invented a brand-new job: ‘Poet PA’. Although I’m sure there are other poet PAs, flung across this big wide planet. And there should be more of us, in my view.
Clare Shaw with Olivia Tuck, Poetry, Neurodivergence, and Access to Work
I was in that grey corridor between the end of a beautiful book and what seemed like the end of the world, wondering if I should ever write again. Could ever write again. I had just finished Then the War by Carl Phillips and his liquid verbs and stormy angst had created deliberate bubbles of light that I was afraid to touch. What if it all disappeared: poetry, pain, love, forests, language? Words to explain the loss to myself?
But when all else fails, there is foolish bravado. I pulled out a poem I had written in December. Perhaps it could be edited. Perhaps I could be salvaged. Hope is that thing that can backspace. Four hours and twenty-one open tabs on Chrome later, the December poem still as brittle as I found it, I signed up to talk to DeepSeek, the new bot on the block. Redemption would have to wait.
Of course, I asked it about the Phillips book. It said His work often feels meditative, inviting readers to slow down and reflect. True. Phillips effortlessly slips in lines like “How easily, tonight, the sea’s motion makes it / almost forgettable that the stars reflected there have their own motion.” When I said, wonderful but somehow still opaque, DeepSeek provided validation: he tends to layer meaning, imagery, and emotion in ways that require careful reading and reflection. Not just me, then. You see how this could be a real conversation? With something, someone who got poetry?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Hide and Seek
i don’t know what
Robin Gow, ai shark woman
i’m watching for but i spend thirty minutes
scrolling through a tiktok page
that is all ai generated. it is of a researcher woman
with a great white shark. the shark looks
terrified as if he is trapped inside a dream.
those deep blackberry eyes.
his jagged teeth. her misshapen nose.
her freckles stolen from a deep wound.
they both look like they’re calling for help.
the comments are scattered. some people
who say, “this is clearly ai” & others
that say, “i am worried for this woman”
& “do we know her name?”
her face shifts slightly from video to video.
skin putty. the bone beneath the bedsheet.
sometimes she is ugly. other times,
gorgeous. in some videos she is ocean swimming
& scraping barnacles from the bodies of whales.
When Felix developed the idea for Untitled (Perfect Lovers), the two lovers’ hearts were still beating. Slowly, the clocks would fall out of time, caused by both the running out of batteries and the very nature of the mechanics.
When the clocks were installed, they were to touch. The two black-rimmed clocks could be, however, replaced with white store-bought clocks with the same dimensions and design. The two hands, minute and second, were to be set in sync with the awareness that the two hands might eventually go out of sync during display. If one of the clocks required battery replacement, it was to be done, after which the clocks were to be reset at the same time. The clocks were to be exhibited against a wall painted in light blue. […]
Once we were driven by “homesickness for the past,” Mark Fisher said in 2006, “now, it is the impossibility of the present.”
Alina Stefanescu, Félix González-Torres and love’s time.
The clock that was edited out of my iamb recording by creator and curator Mark Anthony Owen, and also appeared in my poem ‘The Clock Ticks Louder Now’ has gone to start a new life with a new owner. We originally rescued it from a charity shop for £3, and it has now returned to attract a new owner. It will enhance someone else’s house because we have decided to home one of Kath’s Mum’s clocks that did not sell at auction. Our new clock is beautiful in a different chunkier way than the red one. It is a clock that does not tock or tick whilst it tells the time. There will be no more removing of the clock from the room each Monday in order to record my podcast. And now I wonder whether the owners before us loved it until they too noticed the volume of its counting of the passing of time. Perhaps it is one of those clocks that will enhance a good number of homes in its lifetime.
If you didn’t know, February 2025 sees iamb celebrating being five years old. That’s twenty waves, 320 poets and almost 1000 poems. It is a wonderful site and it is so good to see its continued growth. A site with clarity and vision that truly celebrates poetry.
Sue Finch, THIS IS THE LAST DAY FOR CHERRY FONDANT FANCIES
Today is the feast day of Saint Brigid; for more historical information, see this blog post. I’ve written about her before, and one of my poems about her was published in Adanna (you can read it in this blog post). This morning, I thought I’d write a new poem about her, but it isn’t turning out as expected.
Actually, I didn’t have much in the way of expectations, so maybe it is turning out that way. It doesn’t mention Saint Brigid yet, but maybe it will. I am trying to create a poem that weaves together cold winter nights, monks arising early to pray, a woman getting up in the middle of the night to check on dripping water to keep the pipes from freezing, and distant stars.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, An Unfinished Blog Post on the Feast Day of Saint Brigid
It’s been bizarre, reading around the poetry world this past week. Death is everywhere. The dying, the dead, illness, loss. Poems of “this is hard and here is how it is hard.” I know! I know!
Poets, death is rich fodder, but please. Yo. Tell me how to live. I need some rhythms against adversity. I need some good advice.
Fortunately, James Crews steadily murmurs from his corner of the poetriverse, comfort, encouragement, useful reminders of how to move through the days, the nights, the dawns. Here is one, and I thank him for the breath, the slow unfolding, small action and its flowering.
Marilyn McCabe, in a process that could take years, until
This plane we’re on is crashing.
The masks have fallen from above.
I adjust my own then help the person beside me.*
My heart is full of love and rage.
I float and shake.
I dream and plan.*
As a kid I wanted to be
a paleontologist, to study beings
so much larger than myself.*
The sound of the wind has now covered
Jason Crane, POEM: Love & Rage
even the whine of the engines.
Flames lick the wings.
Whatever the crow cries, try it on for shoes. Feel how a squabble of struggle can lead to the bittersweet.
Somewhere, an evening streetlight waits for you to walk by.
Let me hold you in my glow, it will say as you cross its path. Sing to me. If you make a mistake, repeat it, then it’s no longer a misstep.
Here, the light will say, let me hold you closer in my glow. So many new beginnings are found in endings.
Rich Ferguson, Sometimes all you need
Decorate
a plate with orange sections,a spoonful of rich blood stew,
a fragrant mound of rice. Lay thisoffering on the counter before
pictures of those who’ve goneahead. Isn’t it marvelous they’ve
retained an appetite for things in thisworld? May we who’ve known the labor
Luisa A. Igloria, On Lunar New Year
of life have such abundance.