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: milk-blue light, a bag of grief, demonic possession, the promise of spring, and more. Enjoy.
Morning twilight brings me a sense of peace like nothing else. There is a quiet hope, a sense that the world is surviving, despite everything we place in its way. Birdsong builds, milk blue light rises above the trees and, just for a moment, nothing is spoiled.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Embroidering Hypnagogia
I try not to hate on February. The days do get longer; there’s often some early blooming or greening, a little more birdsong in the mornings, days that aren’t too miserable for walking. But. A lingering malaise of the spirit often natters about in the background of my days. This year, I am trying an infusion of art.
I’ve enrolled in an art class–visual art–drawing, sketching, experimenting with different media such as gouache, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils. I just want something to do with my eyes and hands that isn’t reading, writing, photography, social media/texting. I think of it as an exploration. The workshop I took with Anita Skeen and Cindy Morgan Hunter in October made me realize that using other forms of art might feel good to me, body and soul. This year, starting now (February), I’m taking an 8-week art class with Helene Parnell of Blue Church Art. We shall see how that goes. I am not doing this to create a good “product” but to enjoy the less-intellectual, more freeing aspects of the art as process…the way I did with the collages and book-making in the New Mexico workshop.
Ann E. Michael, Febru-dreary
The writing door in my brain has been closed lately. Slammed tight. Swollen shut. Locked and barred. I have only written two poems since January 1, and one of them is so awful that I shudder to even call it a poem. I have been trying to revise and submit, what I usually do when I hit a rough spot with my writing, but that hasn’t changed anything nor has it fulfilled the urge to make. So, with my writing door closed, I don’t look for a window. I look for another door.
Another door implies that I’m choosing to cross the threshold into a different space. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the computer, reading and responding to subs for Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters, so finding something offscreen with which to engage was appealing. That hallway has led to working on the Februllage collage challenge. From their Instagram page: “Februllage is a collaboration between Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandinavian Collage Museum. This initiative invites collage artists to make a ‘collage a day’ throughout February using our OFFICAL WORD PROMPT CALENDAR – 2025.” They provide a prompt word each day in February, and artists from all over the world, both beginning and experienced, post their results.
Donna Vorreyer, When One Door Closes, Look for Another Door
I don’t have a strong idea of who I am and I change my mind a lot. To have a strong identity of self is to have a steady thought process, a set of similar thoughts about one thing at once. You know who you are because you always think this way or that way. I’m making assumptions here, about people with a strong sense of identity, please do comment with your experiences. The flip-flop nature of my identity is, I believe, in part because I have lots of thoughts and images in my head at once: my brain is like a switchboard on which all the lights are lit up at the same time, each one containing a separate idea. These ideas are usually connected in some way, but that connection might be sensory or imagery based rather than concrete. […]
There are a handful of what I would call ‘self portrait’ poems in the collection. Some of them obviously self portrait poems, unashamedly using this very well used poetic device to explore identity. Some less obvious. Boulder Returning in Echoes of Self is a self portrait poem, Sometimes I pretend I am a Dog is a kind of self portrait poem, Drone is a kind of self portrait poem. There are a lot of poems in which my body is reimagined as nature; as an interface for nature, and my brain as the receptor, the translation place for nature. I like that idea. That is my identity in this moment. Perhaps my identity is not meant to be anything solid, perhaps my identity is meant to be fluid. There are a lot of poems in which identity, female experience and the rural identity are merged and explored, and these are often self portrait type poems. […]
The hearth is my heart. I am
rooms of darkness and forgotten light.
My language is the mid-winter sun.Whale-backed. Face-down.
Wendy Pratt, Writing the Poem: Self-Portrait as Bronze Age Burial Mound
Burrowed into by rabbits.
Burrowed into by rats.
Ashes and teeth are my language.
The human is a bag of grief; a bag pierced with holes,
Jill Pearlman, Bag of Grief
a multi-headed bag, split and split
again. It still asks questions: Who put the country
in the blender and pressed whirr; who remembers
when “decent” was what we called citizens?
Who let homo sapiens out of the bag
to torture their own?
This week has been given to procrastinating, the biting of teeth in pain, two trips to the emergency room to check on an a post-surgical infection, sleepless nights, and cabin fever. The rain has been coming down relentlessly since Wednesday, and I’m struggling to get a full breath. Something is bothering me. And, ironically, if I could just bring myself to write, I might be able to calm myself and breathe.
This is not the first time I’ve had this breathing issue. I first saw a doctor about it when I was in my 40s. It didn’t stop until I quit my job. Then it started again during cancer treatment. It has something to do with losing the hope that I will ever feel moored. Instead I feel that my life is flowing backwards into chaos instead of following a story arc from rags to riches—metaphorical riches—like all those stories I read as a child. The heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess had a martyr-like disposition, had a neighbor with a monkey—though I would absolutely settle for a neighbor with a donkey or some fainting goats.
Can I at least expect a deus ex machina to swing in sometime in the next decade and make me feel like I have “done something with my life” before it’s over?
Memoirs have story arcs about transformations. And while I’ve been trying to shape this memoir, I’ve been writing these poems about wasps, who transform from eggs, to larvae, to wasps; from carnivores to vegetarians. But I’m not sure that I’ve undergone a transformation. Or maybe I’ve undergone several, only to morph back again to my basic insecurities and my dysfunctional methods for compensating.
Ren Powell, Arriving at the Banality of Evil
There’s a moment about 40 pages into Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want that, in retrospect, comes to read like his own description of the book at work, its operating principle, so to speak:
I only know what I think when I’m in conversation. Conversation’s an art: my thinking comes alive in dialog. I don’t have doctrines or positions, I have modes of engagement, situational rejoinders, reaction deformations. It takes two to tangle, three to rumble, four to do the Brooklyn trot.
It’s more than apt that this is the opening to the first response in the first of a number of interviews collected here, conversational interviews where the questions are sometimes longer than the answers. However, the conversational tone spreads far beyond these formal conversations; the whole book is a conversation involving Bernstein, the kinds of poetry (and poets) he wants, the reader and the kinds of poetry he doesn’t want, ‘the button-down decorum that masquerades as serious poetry’.
Billy Mills, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies by Charles Bernstein: A Review
— To whom is the poem faithful?
— To itself.
— Who does it serve?
— That flush of emotion that birthed it.
— Who does it betray?
— The world.
Alina Stefanescu, Sul ponticello.
I mentioned in my last post that January had been intensely difficult, but the weeks since then became even more harrowing. My dad had a heart attack and has been sedated in the ICU with all sorts of tubes keeping him alive. This week, I had the scariest asthma attack of my life and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Yesterday, my son injured his foot in PE and is now on crutches. And, of course, the entire political situation in the US gets more absurd and awful each day.
But just yesterday, my dad was finally able to wake up enough to nod in response to questions and squeeze hands when asked. That feels like a miracle.
I’ve had to miss or cancel many poetry-related things so far this year, but I’ve also had several lovely poetry-related things happen: I had two poems each accepted in the new journals Villain Era and Jackdaw Review, and I was invited to contribute to a really cool project called The Creative Process. Today, I get to read at the first event for the MAW Reading Series, which is run by students in our new M.A. in Writing program. I’ve been writing new things alongside my students during exercises in my writing classes.
Somehow, in the midst of so much bad, there is still creativity, newness, and good.
Katie Manning, Bad News, Good News
i don’t want to buy a mask anymore.
Robin Gow, guy fawkes mask
where would i go with it anyway? i am not that man.
i have seen the fires already & they have seen me.
we do not all want the same midnight. oh if only we did.
mine has sugar & a heavy moon. theirs
has a pane of glass from which they dream
of watching us burn.
Silicon wafers endure a strenuous process of weathering and production in order to become the little aerial landscapes we call microchips. Silicone dioxide is grown or deposited upon it. Lithography occurs, preparing it for light resistance. Parts exposed to UV light are hardened, the other parts to toxic gases. Some parts are doped with chemicals. Aluminum paths are interwoven into the landscape of the microchip. Computational power is pumped into the tiny square. Time and the manipulation of its materials has led to a single microchip possessing up to 50 billion transistors. To hold a microchip on one’s finger is to hold time and its materials.
*
I roll onto my side and focus on Nineveh. Thousands of years before Christ turned water into wine, men turned sand into a metropolis. It is argued that the meaning of Nineveh is “place of fish” or “house of the goddess”. The city, located on the east bank of the Tigris River, most certainly became a place of fish when flooded. Located next to the modern city of Iraq’s Mosul, the metropolis of the city is a backdrop to the diligent uncovering of an ancient civilization.
*
From quartzy river-worn sand comes the microchip. From above, any given microchip resembles an aerial view of a civilized metropolis. The central square, a headquarters or palace. The aluminum rivulets, a meandering river. The interface here, a suburban town. The interface there, a parking lot to the module grocery store. The USB Host is City Hall. The JTAG Interface, a skate park. The WKUP Button, a rotunda or aviary. The LCD Interface, a dairy farm full of cattle. The UART Debug Interface, a playground. And so much green space!
Sarah Lada, Time and Its Materials
Tanka are a vessel for holding tough things. I don’t want to add “in a beautiful way”. I would rather prefer to say “in a way that is necessary”. Sometimes a poem stabs you, shooting out of the dark alley of your being.
bloody uterus,
when will you
finally stop
hurling at me
probabilities—[…]
the truth is we lost
Kati Mohr, … an ode to tanka
as we began to look
the other way
augmented
reality
I have listened to “Not Like Us” over and over since it came out. I feel this song beating inside me.
There is a reason this song won so many awards. Kendrick Lamar is a talented musician. This song catches the national heartbeat. I am the least qualified person to write about rap/hip-hop, so I won’t try to speak over the voices of lived experience. I know about Drake. I know about the diss war. But if you didn’t know any of that, you would know this song. It is America singing to you. […]
I’m not giving up.
It’s painful now, but the best of us are interested in all the ways that we are magical, unique, and share humanity. That’s why I believe that travel is so great. You meet people who are different than you, who think differently.
The first time you realize there are people in the world that eat with sticks, you think, “Wow, all this time, I’ve been stuck with these metal implements? I could have been eating with those cool sticks!”
The first time you go to a fancy person’s house, you think, “You have got to be kidding! How much silverware are you putting on the table?”
I have to say, that’s what I love about Red Hen’s current board. A group of people curious about books, stories, how the world works, and how to make it better.
That’s what makes life so amazing. Learning about the forks and sticks and the napkins folded like flowers, and the platypus, and the mangrove swamps, white dolphins, and the rings around Saturn, and all those wild stories waiting to be written down and read.
Yes, they are not like us. We could learn from them. They could learn from us. We could all sit around the campfire and share food and listen to music and tell stories like we did at the beginning of the world.
Kate Gale, “Not Like Us” and the national heartbeat
— Let something call to you — a beautiful or frivolous object, a word, a picture, and then follow it, learn about it, ask questions about it. Maybe it’s a glitter ball, maybe it’s a typewriter.
— Disco balls or Glitter balls were patented in 1917, used in nightclubs in 1920. We know them from the movie Casablanca, and we remember Madonna’s disco ball entrance.
— Kingsley Amis called the typewriter an “alphabet piano.”
— In her book The Art of Resonance, Anne Bogart reminds that “the typewriter is a transformation modelled upon a piano.”
— The Gen AI gang like to quote (or paraphrase, let’s be real) T.S. Eliot (have they ever read Eliot? they might enjoy The Wasteland lol) who said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better or at least something different.” We hear the phrase, “steal like an artist,” often enough. Artists are allusive, though. Artists pay homage.
— Maybe we should all start imagining the phrase, “steal like a librarian.” You know, add the footnotes, the citations, the bibliography, the endnotes, the indexes. Still, that’s not really the writer’s or artist’s job. The work of art should make you want to delve, dig deeper into meanings, allusions, subtexts. Look how this worked after Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime gig.
Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes – Typewriters and Pianos
It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it — its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow — is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a “wave in the mind” — the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable. […]
as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:
The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times… I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging — which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical — things.
In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature (public library):
HOW POETRY COMES TO ME
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the lightComplement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world.
Maria Popova, Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force
I was thinking about [Hilary] Mantel’s description of demonic possession this week partly because I’ve been rereading several of her books, but also because I’ve been thinking about different types of religious poetry, and especially about how women (in particular) describe encounters with the Muse, a kind of supernatural or spiritual experience which often combines a kind of possession with a story about origins — what it was that made the poet a poet. (Mantel’s story is horrible, but it, too, is a kind of explanation.) I am particularly interested in examples which (like Mantel’s descriptions of encountering the demonic) are largely unironic.
When I asked this question on social media, several people wrote mentioning Jo Shapcott’s poem, ‘Muse’, which is clever and memorable but not exactly what I mean. Her poem relies upon the modern sense of a ‘Muse’ as a (real and human) person who inspires another’s art and who is, very often though not always, also a lover or at least a person of, as it were, erotic interest. Typically, a male artist has a female muse and the wit of Shapcott’s poem lies partly in the reversal of that — though I also like the way the beloved is compared to a dreaming dog, lost (like the poet) in its own passion of pursuit.
Obviously sexual passion has overlaps with spiritual experience, and for many contemporary poets perhaps an erotic metaphor is the most accessible way to approach the mystery of inspiration. But when I asked the question I was interested in more literal — and therefore, I think, in a contemporary context, much more surprising — ways of imagining this sort of supernatural or religious experience of encountering an external power. I am particularly interested in poets who find ways to write about this sort of encounter as straightforwardly as Mantel does: the opposite of the sort of wishy-washy ‘spiritual-by-numbers’ sprinkling of vague profundity which is surely one of the most irritating features of a lot of contemporary Anglophone poetry.
Victoria Moul, Muses and demons
Surely we all have one or two Faber anthologies edited by Geoffrey Grigson on our shelves? Love Poems, Popular Verse, Reflective Verse, Nonsense Verse, Poems and Places, Epigrams and Epitaphs . . . As a critic he often wielded a savage power through his magazine New Verse. And as a big beast on the literary scene of the early 1980s, Hermione Lee interviewed him on Channel 4. But since his death in 1985, he’s better known merely as the husband of Jane Grigson, the celebrated cookery writer. His own poetry has been neglected which made John Greening’s 2017 Selected Poems from Greenwich Exchange a welcome opportunity to re-consider it. I think Grigson’s contrasting themes were established early on. The influence of two great poets (not Eliot, not Yeats) is clear from the start and it may be that the limits of Grigson’s poetic achievement and the absence of much development in his style, are because he never chose one path or fully escaped either. […]
‘To Wystan Auden’ records the moment Grigson learned of Auden’s death in the “English September” of 1973. His admiration for the younger poet is fulsome. With the appearance of his early work, Auden became “living’s healer, loving’s / Magician”. From the other end of the temporal telescope, we can now see what the young Grigson gleaned from Auden’s poetry:
You were our fixture, our rhythm,
Speaker, bestower, of love for us all
And forgiving, not condemning, extending
To all who would read or would hear
Your endowment of words.For all Auden’s own protesting about poetry making nothing happen, for Grigson, “time, after you, by you / Is different by your defiance”. One might ungratefully gripe that these are rather vague compliments from one poet to another. But Greening quotes Grigson suggesting that Auden’s achievement was in destroying “a too familiar, too settled monotony in manner and subject”. This is undeniable and this selection shows Grigson following Auden’s lead, yet at the same time, through his life, also being drawn back to a different, more traditional poetic style in the model of Hardy.
Martyn Crucefix, Remembering Geoffrey Grigson
Poets, obviously, display varying means, foci of attention, strengths, weaknesses. Peter Gizzi’s special strength lies in his ability to transport inarticulate emotions – grief, dread, disorientation, wonder – directly into verbal music. Here I mean music in a very literal sense : ie., the words his poems, though they are words, remain inarticulate. They are sometimes quite moving, as partial songs, untranslatable melodies : yet it seems to me Gizzi attains this state of unrealized elegy – unmastered grief – with a very deliberate poetic method or constructed idiom.
The reader/listener is held fast by this suspended, unrelieved emotion, this unresolved grief – on behalf of the poem. Mute, “unexplained” emotion provides the material foundation, so to speak, for the independence, the hermetic integrity, of the poem-as-poem.
Some critics and commentators have questioned the lack of a clear elegiac “object” of emotion in Fierce Elegy. They have also noted the quick tonal shifts between slangy demotic “street-talk” and refined allusions to past poetic masters. In my view both of these effects are only incidental phenomena, representing a more pervasive stylistic idiom, which Gizzi shares with several other American poets of recent decades. I would (with fear and trembling) label this style postmodern deflection. Here, by “postmodern”, I’m suggesting that the style’s roots extend back to early modernism : the great wave, across all the arts, toward abstraction, autonomy, autotelic hermeticism, free self-realization. And by “deflection”, I suggest this style’s roots go back even further : to the symbolist revolt against “journalism”, the rhetoric of all social collectives – in favor of art-for-art’s-sake and poésie pure, the literary “absolute” of Mallarmé and (to some degree) Rimbaud.
Henry Gould, “Forget daylight, I prefer a dark tenderness”
A daughter-father relationship and threats to a way of life mingle in Fat for Our Stories by Vivan Faith Prescott, a native of Alaska. Prescott and her father harvested salmon together; several poems describe that labor, its joys and difficulties. Others comment more specifically on changes in the climate, leading to a sense of things out of season. The reader learns about both the life of salmon and the concerns of those who depend on them in a series of gentle poems using a variety of forms.
There are many sad notes, like “We were once good at reading weather.” in “Five Degrees Above Normal.” but also hope, as in the end of “On a Variety of Temporal and Spatial Scales”:
The scent of my natal stream
still awakens me, the sea butterfly
still stirs my morning coffee.”This chapbook is well worth ordering from Green Linden Press, especially for those like me who have not personally experienced a life dependent on nature’s balance.
Ellen Roberts Young, A Chapbook I Recommend
Snow day has landed! Given the wealth of snow we’ve had since Wednesday (a snowfall record over a few days, going back to 2008), the arrival of my first copies of this are absolutely perfect. This is my third title with American publisher Spuyten Duyvil, following How the alphabet was made (2018) and Life sentence, (2019)! This collection is constructed as a kind of sequence of sequences, and includes the title poem, “Snow day” (produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2018), and “Somewhere in-between / cloud” (also produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2019), which was composed for and published as part of Dusie Kollektiv 9: “Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween”—A Tribute to Marthe Reed (1958-2018).
rob mclennan, Some updates: new poetry book (Snow day) + next week in Vancouver
I have finally again (again) started a daily writing practice — just five or ten minutes in which I note what I’ve been seeing, what I’ve been thinking about. I’ve resisted it even though I know it feels good to do, to take notice of what I’m noticing, if not living an examined life, the kind worth living, according to Socrates, at least a half-awake one.
I’ve been sitting on this Tony Hoagland poem for a long time, trying to figure out exactly what I want to say about it. It’s an easy poem, maybe a little too self-conscious, a little too wink-and-nudge. But I give Tony Hoagland a lot of leeway, as his poetry tends to be open-armed and gleeful anyway. (Plus, I have soft spot for him since that day in a workshop after I read my draft, he said, “Yeah, now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.” The guy can do no wrong now. Well, I mean, he’s dead, so, yeah. Rest in peace.)
Anyway, it’s a poem of notice. A narrator noticing themself noticing, finding themself finding, and writing it all down, nosing it all down the page, but thinking, in the end, of you, reader. Finding in the end of the journey of writing that they’ve discovered a poem, and in the poem they’ve found you peeking over their shoulder. And in the poem Hoagland picks up the poem and gives it to you. Here, he says. Lookee here.
Marilyn McCabe, Once in a cool blue middle of a lake
Lots of people liked my post last month featuring a week’s worth of short poems from recent reading: [link]
So I thought I’d give it another spin. My model was the late-night radio show where the DJ has the freedom to play a mix of things without much more comment than the name of the track and the artist. This time, I’ve widened my range from recently-published books to include poems from magazines too, and sprinkled in a few links.
*I found it hard to pick a favourite from Ian Duhig’s excellent new collection, An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador). So I decided to go with one that continues last week’s post about my discovery, as a teenager, that other poets sometimes made fun of Ted Hughes.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #28: Animal Facts
One Language (SmithǀDoorstop, 2022, available here), the debut collection by the photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, intermittently dazzles with its poems from far-flung warzones, as in ‘Welcome to Donetsk’:
You teach me this wartime trick –
to look for living pot plants
in the windows in Kievska Avenue.
Most are crisped and brown.
But one green geranium
and a succulent spider plant
offer proof of life
for the person who waters them.It’s interesting that she writes ‘for the person’ and not ‘of’, and in so doing shifts the perspective from the external observer to the unseen person inside.
Despite their most serious subject-matter, some of the poems feel inconsequential and fragmentary, like a diary haphazardly moulded into poetry. The most affecting highlight is a 12-part sequence, ‘Stories No One Wants to Hear’, recounting, in perhaps necessarily prosaic poetry, key incidents where, for better or worse, violence played a part in her life. I was left feeling that where she does tell her important stories well, Taylor-Lind might have rendered them more successfully still as a prose memoir, in the manner of Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, because it feels like she has a lot more to say, e.g. regarding her position as one of the few females in her profession.
Matthew Paul, February reading
Long ago, in a less digital world, I wrote things and sent them through the mailbox to a few print magazines to see if they wanted to publish them. I enclosed a self-address, stamped envelope (the old SASE — anyone remember that acronym?) and waited, often for months. Most of the time, my poems came back to me like homing pigeons in the old SASE, sometimes with an editor’s letter explaining why they weren’t going to publish them. Once I had a rejection letter from the editor of The Atlantic. I considered framing it. Once I had one from the distinguished editor of Poetry Magazine. Again, frames were considered.
But in today’s digital world, everything is online and happens fast. I send out a batch of poems only to get my rejection — or acceptance — within a few days or weeks. I can post a link to the poem in the online magazine and people can actually read it at the touch of a button. No subscription required.
What I’ve learned from this is that writing — especially poetry — is for sharing. For me, it’s not about collecting distinguished credits but about being read by actual people. Many of whom don’t normally read poetry, let alone subscribe to poetry magazines.
The comments I get back teach me things. The biggest thing I’ve learned from publishing my poetry is to be generous. Writing a poem is a way of giving something to the world. It’s about the reader, not about me, though it usually starts being about me and my memories, dreams, and thoughts. The fluidity of publishing my poetry in the world is now a conversation, and as a poet, I become part of a community. I highly recommend it!
Rachel Dacus, Publishing My Poetry Online
I have a structural problem, with books. So far my digital storage isn’t jammed but there is no way in sweet purgatory that these stacks are all going into those shelves. They have overrun the box capacity and heaven help but 4 more at least are coming by mail this month. Not to mention the wish list and the inevitable caving in at least some cases.
I have to make some hard calls. No, no, not purge. Probably. Boxing up anthologies and magazines so there is room for novels, history books and single author poetry collections. Even that mitigates little. I could actually box up some to sell that I expect I won’t read again. I believe I have a box or two that I meant to drop off at a book fair but mislaid when the time came. Or I unconsciously wanted to keep them.
Two walls are covered floor to ceiling in shelves. There’s a lot of windows and few options with quilting supplies also overflowing containment. And now more canvasses, and more embroidery gear. This is getting a little out of hand. But to be surrounded by possibility and options is rather delightful.
Pearl Pirie, Conundrumming
When a dream mates with an anvil, they create the heaviest thoughts.
When conundrums shack up with condominiums, you get troubled dwellings.
What if we could take what we consider to be the worst parts of ourselves and rearrange them into a cosmos where every planet can play any musical instrument with no training?
Rich Ferguson, One of Many Litmus Tests for Longing
You erase a comma. Then put it back.
And then erase it again. You keep wondering — why did you spend this winter writing a book? Because one day we all might burn books for heat. One day we might use books to build rafts. We’ll tether books together to sail to safety.
I think maybe the world will end with dead unread books.
You snap your laptop shut. You go downstairs and switch on the TV. The news is on. There are images of empty supermarket shelves. The newsreader is talking about stockpiling food and medicine. They cut to footage of a couple stockpiling tins. The couple stands side by side and they smile into the camera by a wall of baked beans. They grin down the lens and tell us all at home that they are ready.
I’m ready. The man repeats. We want to be ready. His wife nods. We want to be ready. They say this in unison as they fill plastic storage boxes with tins of baked beans. I think the beans situation is covered now thanks to John and Elaine in Maidstone.
At the end of the world, will baked beans be like heroin? You now imagine swapping a book for a tin of baked beans and wonder, which book would you sacrifice for a tin of beans? You picture yourself scoring a cheeky hit of beans on toast by a public toilet. Hey man, got any dirty brown sauce?
You switch off the TV and go into the kitchen to make tea. You stare out of the window at the pink and the sky and the light. It is summer but it is February. But it is summer and it is February. And too bright and too warm and too weird and too sunny. It is alarming that they don’t mention this heat on the news. We need sun cream in February. Sun cream in February. And my neighbour is having a barbecue in February. And the last super tusker elephant died this February. And it is summer and it is February and it is summer and it is February.
What was the point of writing a book all winter? What is the point of us? When our time is so fractured. Divided. Distracted. Interrupted. Our attention is demanded and demanding attention. Our world is burning, flooding and changed.
But then if not for love, then why are we all here?
Salena Godden, Sun Cream In February
You know you’re only mortal and not a god
Luisa A. Igloria, If You Know, You Know
but that doesn’t mean you know nothing
about how language is right now being used
to camouflage ignorance as virtue, villainy
as self-control, avarice as acumen. Whole
planes collide mid-air or roll over in flames
on the tarmac. Lawyers stutter I don’t know
rather than tell the truth.
The job of the politician is to try to find practical solutions for these problems. The job of the poet though is to help express how we feel, both individually and collectively. It’s not an easy thing to do.
Perhaps that’s why I felt particularly drawn to this poem by Cynthia Atkins, because she takes this difficult subject and handles it so effectively. […]
The poem comes from a book where “God” appears as multiple objects in the modern world. I interpret the title of this poem, “When God is a Bullet” to be a nod to the many powers – good and evil that fill the world but are beyond our control. In this case, the bullet is a god that takes away life and is beyond understanding.
It feels like the speaker is outside the situation looking in, trying to understand the boy who does the shooting. This is difficult which is why the speaker turns towards metaphor.
“This is the scar of the battle lost to each failed self. . . This is the blemish larger than a shrunken world. . . A jacked-up car . . . This is a storm in a damaged town.”
But this is also a real person. The speaker posits a boy who feels excluded, isn’t invited to parties. She’s trying to understand what causes him to become a shooter. But rather than trying to distance the boy and other the boy, she looks at how he is familiar, part of a family, part of a school.
Tresha Faye Haefner, When God is a Bullet
Someone wrote me a question about what her young daughter should read, if she enjoys my poetry, but couldn’t find other poetry like mine. I thought hard about the poets that had inspired and influenced me when I was a young girl, although I was certainly a somewhat unusual reader – Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, E.E. Cummings, and Louis Simpson as a ten year old. I was reading my mom’s college poetry textbooks and encountering T.S. Eliot and Yeats and Robert Frost. In college, definitely inspired by Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, Margaret Atwood, and of course, Sylvia Plath. If my own work seems somewhat unusual, it could be because it was the kind of poetry I wanted to read and couldn’t find – funny and pop culture-y and dark and not afraid. Of course, besides poetry, I was very influenced by mythology and fairy tales, prose like A.S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood and Terri Windling’s collection “The Armless Maiden” and later on, Kelly Link. I read a lot of male science fiction writers as a kid, from Isaac Asimov to Ray Bradbury, but also read female science fiction writers, like Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L’Engle. What recommendations would I make to a young person today? There are so many more young women writing and getting published than when I was a kid. Who would you recommend?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Supporting Each Other in Difficult Times, and Recommendations for Young Poetry Fans
I wrote a draft of a daft poem after hearing a discussion on The Verb between Ian and Cecilia Knapp that used the phrase heavy lifting. The draft mentions reviews. I then looked at my RSS feed after the show and saw an article by Emma Lee about reviews. All this in a week when I thought about getting back into the reviewing game again. I’m still choosing not to as I don’t care what I think at present, so why should anyone else?
Mat Riches, (not) Under the influence (aka Two Timming)
A couple of years ago I wrote a pair of Sukkot poems, Fragile and Rejoice. In the manuscript for my next book of poetry, they’re a two-part poem titled “Shekhinah says.” You could read them as written in God’s voice to us, or as written in a human voice to a human beloved. (Or both at once.)
In recent months composer Adam Green (who is also the music director at my synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires) wrote a musical setting of those two poems. And yesterday, at our belated Tu BiShvat concert, the two-movement piece was premiered by the CBI Choir.
It’s an incredible honor to have a composer write music to uplift my words. Melody and rhythm give them a whole new layer of meaning. I love that one piece feels wistful and soft, like watercolors or fog in the valleys — and the other, written in 5/4, feels multilayered, surprising, like it ends too soon.
Every time we sing these poems, I’m hyperlinked to what I was feeling when I wrote them. I can call the exact feelings to mind and heart. And now the poems also have another layer, because I hear them in harmony! Adam also switched the order of the two poems, which (for me) subtly changes their arc.
When I wrote the poems, I was praying for a trajectory from fragility to rejoicing. I began with what’s broken, and closed with the hope of wholeness. Adam’s choice to put them in the other order makes an existential point: even within wholeness, we are fragile. But in that fragility, we are not alone.
Rachel Barenblat, New music for Rejoice / Fragile
February always brings lovely things in this household – a birthday, a wedding anniversary and the promise of Spring in the offing. I’ve already been spring-cleaning my poetry folders, and feeling rather humbled as regards my poor submissions habit. I seem to have a reputation as a submissions queen, because of my spreadsheet. But there’s that expression ‘physician heal thyself’ (where the heck does that come from?). A number of people have accosted me recently to ask about magazine submissions, and I’ve had to admit I haven’t submitted anything much for ages. Why? I suppose it’s partly because I feel there are so many up and coming poets whose work is appearing everywhere, I’m feeling my work might be a bit ‘has been’. But I know that’s stupid really, because for all the ‘fast fashion’ that exists in the poetry world, decent writing is still appreciated. Plus, my first collection is about to launch, so this is no time to wallow in self-flagellation. I guess I’m making excuses for being a bit lazy. Having Sharon Black of Pindrop Press critique my poems for the collection, in great detail, has given me a bit of a kick up the bum I suppose. As a result, I’ve pulled together all the poems I’ve written over the last few years that I’ve abandoned, sometimes after multiple failed submissions, others that I just lost interest in too soon, and have them now all in a 2025 folder ‘to be worked up’. There are over seventy poems or proto-poems in that folder. I picked one out randomly and (without planning to) spent a whole day playing with it. I have plenty of material to revisit!
Robin Houghton, Readings, giving myself a talking-to and some early Spring cleaning
Maybe I’m waiting for spring, as I always am, but in a new way, to uncurl and find a new appetite to turn towards. A new sun.
I sometimes tell myself I’m a fool, an old fool, that life is slipping by. But I know I have so much going on in the reality of my life, my kids’ lives, that maybe I need this silence to conserve my energies.
My writing has also changed. I’m writing love poems to no one, to an invisible someone. I’ve been single for about 6 years, there’s no one on my horizon and until this year my ‘love’ poems have been angry or happy to be defiantly single.
Now, what I write is overwhelmed with a different emotion, gazing with love into that dark stillness I’ve built in my head. I don’t know what I see, but the lines that came to me today have that hope of spring in them.
Gerry Stewart, A Change of Appetites
I’ve been in London for a few days, to see family and for a reading at the Broadway Bookshop, a lovely place on Broadway Market in Hackney. Also an appearance on Poetry Breakfast, on the erotic, for Valentine’s Day. Back the day before yesterday, now slipping back into my usual writing: mornings writing and reading, afternoons: maybe more writing, maybe biking (in the Vaucluse, or walking (Paris) plus a Tai Chi class two evenings a week. I’m reading Heaney’s translations, Will Eaves’ new collection, working on Leopardi. Also reading Eli Weisel And the latest PNReview. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. My edition, which I bought second hand, much foxed, a little brittle. It includes the shorter poems that William was working on in the period she was writing her journal.
Weather cold and sunny. There’s a church (St Sulpice) across the street, and yesterday a team of rock climbers with helmets and ropes began placing climbing ropes on the church.
Beverley Bie Brahic, Paris, Tuesday 18 February, 2025
I ask, “With what eyes should poetry look at the harshness of our world?”
I reply, “With eyes that refuse to look away.”
[…]
I ask for a poem like the skin of a
snake. The kind that will be moulted,
will be renewed, as wounds heal, as
spring comes, as a dark nimbus must
rain, as words must make way for
words, as life must make way for life,
as love must make way for love.The sun tells me even a lament must
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Not that kind of a love poem
end in hope. Derive a possibility.
Everything is moving, I say. Snakes
and worlds and wounds and water
and words. And love. Look how hard
everything is trying to fall into place.