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: sound and silence, the worm moon, war news, the lost forest of time, and much more. Enjoy.
I heard the author of this poem read it at an open mic, and it haunted me, this haunting. It’s a dream poem, but ghostly. I think it’s the sounds heard in the poem that haunted me, the creak of oars, the voice, and also the inability to see, that straining that is a part of so many dreams that are remembered in the morning. The unmet desire to reach. But how can sorrow be beautiful?
Reading poems that make me teary feels like practice for the real times of sorrow. Rehearsal. Or a revisiting of times I had to push away, a chance to sit with them again with the pain less acute. This is, after all, someone else’s sorrow, safer, and made art. Art that makes us feel what the maker feels is communication magic, the kind that defies mere words. Yet poems are mere words. Isn’t it strange?
Marilyn McCabe, of trout or perch, gone before I could relish
Needless to say, I haven’t posted in forever. Work and traveling occupy much of my time.
My mother died in late January after an accident in early December, and I was out of commission for weeks, first trying to prevent it, then trying to make it bearable, then (and still) sorrowing over it. She was 88. She was lucky to have her wits about her until her last days. She was a very good mother and person.
Along with many other people, I’m in disbelief about what is happening in the U.S. But everyone reads the news, one way or another. And some people who don’t like democracy think it’s all just fine. May they boil in oil.
As a respite from the news, I turn to nature and books written long ago. I’m rereading “Swann’s Way” in a different translation now, and it’s as fabulous as it was 10 years ago. I am again cataloging the abundant flowers.
Sarah J. Sloat, Needless to say
For months after his burial tourists came to the cemetery to see where he was buried. If people saw me kneeling at my daughter’s grave they would come and ask me where he was and I never thought i could tell them to fuck off, but I wish I had, because they were paying no reverence to my daughter, who had also died, who was also buried there, and they were paying no respect to me. It was all about the fame of Jimmy. When I wrote The Ghost Lake, I talked a little about this moment, when someone almost stood on my daughter’s grave, leaning through the hedge to ask me where Jimmy was buried, without even a hello. Is if by being a part of the cemetery, by having a burial in the cemetery, I was somehow now a guide to the burials. I hated it. I hated the way Jimmy’s gravity was affecting the peace of the place, how all our smaller stars were being sucked into his story. He had a triptych gravestone put up, of course he did, black marble, obviously written by himself, with stories of his charity work, of how loved he was. They had to put one of those iron chains around his grave because so many people wanted to see it.
And then the allegations and the investigations began and Scarborough didn’t know what to do with their town celebrity. Even more people were coming to the cemetery and it began to be a source of shame to the town. The gravestone disappeared, taken down. Then later the iron rope, leaving no trace of him in the cemetery. People did still come, but couldn’t find his grave, unless they were obsessed with it and knew where it was. Less people came over time, now very few come. The town defended him for a while, until he became indefensible, and then they quietly removed the blue plaques and the street signs and the only stories told about him were like this one – I met Jimmy Savile once…and we change the narrative slightly, pull out from our memories the places of darkness, the unnerving awfulness of him that was always there, it was definitely always there; the creepiness, but now we pull it to the front, and we are embarrassed that we could be so easily taken in by the script of Jimmy, by the rose-glow of nostalgia.
Sometimes I think about what archaeologists will find in the cemetery in hundreds of years time. They will find this person encased in concrete, different to the other graves because of the burial’s strange angle, the gold still bright and sharp as the day it went into the grave. They will think, here is a high status individual. And there will be so little left of everyone else, nothing of my tiny daughter, and the stories around Jimmy will be shaped in that way, as they always were.
Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: The Day I met Jimmy Savile
Red-winged blackbirds make the mornings noisy–they have so many different songs and calls that three or four of them sound like multitudes, almost drowning out our year-round singers, the song sparrows. Early migrant passerines have returned, but it’s still winter here. Some bugs have gotten active and are emerging from hibernation or incubation. No bees as yet. When I turn over rotting logs, I find amphibians’ eggs and lots of different varieties of soil centipedes.
And, of course, worms. March’s moon is sometimes called the Worm Moon, and tonight there’s a total lunar eclipse around midnight here in PA. Is that auspicious? It’s also when I will be reading at the Lambertville Free Public Library in Lambertville, NJ. I’m excited to participate in an on-site, in-person reading again…I’ve been hibernating a bit from poetry events, but it is time to get stirring. […]
A concerned European friend recently asked me how I was faring under the stress of these first three months, and I told him that since making art (poetry) has generally been an unconventional act/behavior/response even under the patronage system, my response is to keep making art. Granted, it isn’t much, nothing earth-shattering, not gonna change society that way; but it keeps us observant little non-conformers on our toes, creative, and flourishing in the face of weirdness and oppression.
Which is something we can do. Like early bloomers in the cold days of late winter.
Ann E. Michael, Mid-March
The same day I got two crowns, we also had a beautiful full lunar eclipse, which I managed to get some pictures of. The bad news is, like many times in the past, getting dental work and lunar eclipses both seem to equal MS flares, and this time was no different. (See this poem about the night I was diagnosed with MS, which was also a Blood Moon Eclipse) Feeling incredibly fatigued, in pain, and slow-brained and clumsy, we’ve also had to deal with a crown complication, an error made to make the accessible bathroom counter six inches too high (which we have to pay to fix, even though it was the company we hired to design an accessible bathroom’s mistake,) and dwindling money and health, plus terrible political news. It has all been very draining. So if I owe you something and you need it urgently, let me know – right now I am postponing things like crazy and trying just to rest and drink fluids until I’m feeling a little better. I am also prepping for AWP and hoping I feel better enough to attend. I could also talk about putting together how submitting a book manuscript can feel incredibly dispiriting and hope-inspiring at the same time, how going through a home renovation is hard on the body and on marriages and checkbooks (so don’t underestimate it!), or how trying to guess how to manage money when a madman has ahold of the economy and is seemingly trying to strangle it is tough. Lunar eclipses usually portent a shift in energy. Let’s hope it’s a shift for the better.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Lunar Eclipses, Dental Work and Cherry Blossoms, Plus MS Flares
I am a bird squatting on a rooftop in March’s chill.
Do they really grow back once you’ve clipped them? The feathers?
This week, the x-ray technician will press my foot to the cold plate and take an image. The doctor will decide if I can walk again. If the bones in my toe have grown together, after the chiseling and the scraping. If the metal plate and the screws have done their job.
This body isn’t a jaguar that can swallow the moon. It isn’t a dog, a sow, or a soft toad on the running trail. It is a hybrid of slings, and stents, and screws. It walks because humans strip the bark from yew trees for chemotherapy drugs, because they eviscerate the earth and make oils, and metals, and plastics.
I mourn the passing of this Blood Moon. I feel my loss, because from this perspective, from this landscape so far from my toddling, my arm-grabbing, “look at this” home, I’m reaching for something to blanket all the exposed hurts. A bit of superstition, a bedtime story.
Goodnight Moon. The jaguar, the sow, the dog and the toad will surely devour you again. You will survive them. Yet I fear for you.
I look up now and apologize in advance for our footprints, our defiled planet’s relics, and for what’s coming.
Ren Powell, A Blood Moon Blanket
It has been a long winter. I just tested negative after ten days of being cooped up with Covid 19. I am feeling much better with mostly fatigue and upper respiratory congestion as the main symptoms. Five years in and I feel fortunate our family was not hit harder in the beginning with this novel virus. I am grateful for vaccines and medicine that I believe helped lessen the burden this virus may have had on my immune compromised friends and family.
Last November I sent an Ode to an organization called “Poets for Science” which is a movement that explores the connections between poetry and science. I sort of forgot I had sent it in until today when I was cleaning up my “submissions” folders and saw I had not heard back. I found out today after going on their website it was in fact published in the “Global Gallery” section on the web. Maybe it is good I found it today after a bout with Covid. Enjoy “Ode to Paxlovid” directly on their site and check out other poems about science as well. May you all stay well.
Carey Taylor, Covid 19
Perhaps it is time to ransom my soul
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Coracles of Hope on St. Patrick’s Day
which has been sold to this empire
of the modern workplace.
I look to the monks
and their rigorous schedule of prayer.
Feeling like a true subversive,
I insert appointments for my spirit
into the calendar. I code
them in a secret language
so my boss won’t know I’m speaking
in a different tongue. I launch
my coracle of prayer
into this unknown ocean,
the shore unseen, my hopes
rising like incense across a chapel.
I suppose it’s the teeming abundance of images, ideas and suggestions it contains that makes ‘The Windhover’ such a remarkable poem but it was the sheer energy of its utterance that made me fall in love with it at school. At that point I had only the faintest, most general idea of what it meant beyond expressing the poet’s joy at the sight of a bird and moving from that into thoughts about Christ’s self-sacrifice. This ‘energy of utterance’ still seems to me the most solid, immediate and irresistible element of the delight it gives. By ‘utterance’, of course, I don’t just mean the sounds you hear in the poem, I mean the physical energy demanded of you and released in you as you say the words, even if you articulate them in the silence of your own mind.
Edmund Prestwich, Sounds of glory – Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’
In 1982, I saw Denise Levertov read at Santa Rosa Junior College, where I was a student. I had read her poems since I was a child, and I knew what she looked like from the photograph of her on the backs of her books, but nothing prepared me for hearing her voice. On that early Spring day in Northern California, I learned how a poem should sound.
Levertov herself was unassuming: a small woman with short dark hair going gray. She wore glasses and a pink checked dress. She must have been close to sixty then, impossibly old to twenty-two-year-old me. But when she approached the microphone and began to recite her poetry, I was transfixed. Her delicate, British-accented voice rose and fell as she took the audience, a large, packed hall, into that emotional place that only poetry can create.
When she spoke, it sounded like a friend telling another friend the most profound secrets. She told us about surviving World War II, about her love for her former husband, about how her sister struggled with her mental health, and shared epiphanies acquired on the subways of New York. With a slight lisp resulting from a missing front tooth, she pronounced each word as if it were holy text.
I left the hall a changed being. Now I knew how a poem should sound.
Erica Goss, How Should a Poem Sound?
People turn away, chat among themselves.
Bob Mee, POEM AS INSTINCT
Who are you talking to?
I don’t know.
I didn’t know I was talking.
I thought it was just sound.
After one revolution, before the next.
After one mad president, before the next.
After one poem, before the next.
A poem is an instinct, nothing more.
Voice is love’s voltage to energize and empower our lives.
With a well-honed noun or verb, we can sweep someone off their feet.
But when adjectives turn tragic, we’re swept under the rug.
Have you ever heard the cry of a newborn revolution?
Have you ever noticed a day that couldn’t modulate because a gun was stuck in its throat?
Sometimes we speak in hushed tones when reciting poems, prayers, or lullabying a child.
I like it when we’re loud—
when we sound like gasoline saints in the combustible church of cool.
Rich Ferguson, Voice Up
The silence stays close, a shadow. I don’t
mean the kind without form or sound.
More cloak or armour, its texture
changing: corrosive, calloused, molten,
foul like maggots in the carcass of
another time, cold and solid like ice
cubes, the last memory of warmth
frozen out of them.It sits with me at dusk, offering
Rajani Radhakrishnan, What will I find if I stop searching?
words.
The poet himself is a gentlemanly presence throughout this, his fifth collection, never more so than when he’s introducing ‘Deliverance, 1961’ the novella-in-thirty-two-cantos which takes up the back half of the book. Like a good-natured aide conducting us to the office of an eccentric royal, he’s at pains to explain the poem’s form (so that we may better appreciate it) and prepare us for the dubious views and behaviours of his period characters (so that we might refrain from judging them unkindly). The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into ‘Our Better Selves’, ‘Our Lesser Selves’ and ‘Our Contemptible Selves’, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.
Jon Stone, The World You Now Own by P. W. Bridgman
The most recent issue of Rattle, which just reached me in Paris, has a focus on the haibun, described by the editors as ‘the combination of haiku with prose (and sometimes other forms of writing), popularized by Bashō in 17th-century Japan’. The majority of the published examples — 22 of them — take the form of a single paragraph of prose followed by a haiku or something like it. One or two do it the other way round (haiku followed by prose). A couple are made up of a series of prose paragraph + haiku alternations, and there are one or two other variations.
I’ll be honest and say that I don’t love this form in English and I wasn’t won over by any of these poems. But I am fascinated in general by prosimetric work — that is, literary forms that combine prose and poetry — and I can strongly recommend the interview with Lew Watts, a Welsh poet living in the US, who’s a well-established writer of both haiku and haibun. The interviews in Rattle are one of the best things about the magazine — the editor Timothy Green does a great job of eliciting thoughtful, detailed and wide-ranging conversations prompted by questions which always seem respectful and well-informed, without flattery or soft soap. This particular ‘Conversation’ takes up a good chunk of the issue, and Watts speaks compellingly about the relationship between the prose and haiku elements, and about his own evolution from writing mainly rhyming verse in quite demanding traditional forms (like villanelles) to haiku and haibun. In fact, this background comes through in his own contribution to the issue, which is the only one to combine not just prose and haiku but also some rhyming verse (imagined I think as a song). Watts’ contribution is unique in having this three-way formal alternation (prose/haiku/song).
Anyone who’s written a few poems has probably had that experience of starting off in prose — perhaps a diary entry, memory or description jotted in a notebook — that then starts to turn into poetry. To me, the modern American haibun too often feels like that — a writer’s exercise more than a fully-fledged form. But thinking about — and learning to write — verse in close relation to prose has a distinguished history. Ben Jonson claimed that he always wrote his poetry as prose first, and then converted it into verse, because that’s what he was taught to do by his schoolmaster, William Camden.
Victoria Moul, The Anglo-Latin haibun
The first time I thought of myself as an American was when I left the country. I had a scholarship to France, and spent the summer learning French. Our last night in Europe, we were set to fly out of Brussels because the Paris airport was closed, so we went dancing. But I was lonely dancing, thinking how much I missed the United States.
What I missed more than anything was Mexican food. Around ASU, the Mexican food was delicious: layers of cheese, avocados, tortillas, salsa, the enchiladas perfect, the mole, abundant. The Belgian boys were happy to be dancing with this frothy cloud of American girls, and suddenly “Born in the USA” came on, and we were screaming to it, as if it were our lifeblood. I remember feeling the Boss’s music throbbing through my American veins and dripping with longing for margaritas and salsa.
When we miss America, we miss Mexican food. We miss the churros at the park, the Chinese food we eat on Thursdays. We miss the Vietnamese place where we go for soup when we are sick. We miss our favorite Armenian bakery, the place we go for naan and tandoori on Sundays. We miss kosher delis and Middle Eastern grocery stores. In Los Angeles, we visit Korean markets to buy fresh fish and sushi rice and make sushi at home, spreading out the nori, preparing our rolls.
When we say we miss America, we are missing all the cultures that make America glorious. When you go to Greece, they have Greek food; when you go to Japan, they have Japanese food; when you come to this country, we have everything.
All of this is why being at the London Book Fair this past week was overwhelming.
Kate Gale, Born in the USA: Why Do We Stay?
a baby
Jim Young [no title]
trying to scroll the window
mum on her phone
I am taking all the dopamine hits I can. Today, it’s a day devoted solely to writing things. J was away overnight (late night karaoke and early morning DJ gig at a party downtown before the river dyeing and the parade had him catching some sleep in his car instead of driving all the way back to the northside after loading and unloading gear all night.) I slept in, made coffee, and started working on edits on some poem efforts from last weekend, fueled by Cadbury caramel eggs, which are frightfully cheaper than actual eggs this year.. Since my days are feeling cumbersome and prone to distractions, I’ve switched from daily poems to more chunky groups of poems on certain days. Right now, this works for the more sci-fi project underway (you can see some bits at IG in the past couple weeks.) I don’t know how long they will keep going, but I am giving them some space to grow..
Every March I contemplate NAPOWRIMO and usually decide to do it, but I may sit it out this year. This clustering approach to writing is yielding nice results and the month of April is always a morass with things like taxes and my birthday anyway. I’ve also noted before how lonely it all feels…when I am just writing and posting normally I don’t feel it or mind if it feels like poems get shot out into the universe with no response, but it feels especially lonely in a month that is supposed to be devoted to poems.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 3/16/2025
San Francisco poet and activist Beau Beausoleil has sent me his new book, War News II, number 23 in the Page Poets Series published by FMSBW (ISBN 9798989413393) and available from Amazon UK for £8, a price that makes me suspect that the only one making a profit is Amazon. This is ironic! I don’t buy from Amazon so I’m not allowed to post a review there.
Many of us – and I am guilty of this – have from time to time switched off the news. It’s easier to sign petitions and donate to Medecins Sans Frontieres than to take the news, day after day, deep into our consciousness and to wake night after night with a scream stuck in the throat. Beau has remained attentive to the cruelty and suffering, and processed it and its fallout in his life, by writing a poem every day from October 8th 2023 in response to the war in Gaza – ‘ … a visceral and personal reaction to what I was reading and seeing in the media each day.’ Such an undertaking comes with serious dangers to the poet’s health and peace of mind. I am happy to say that Beau is making a good recovery from the illness that struck him down last November.
The first one hundred poems, covering the first three months, were published in December 2023 as a free ebook by Agitate! Journal. Volume two takes up where the first leaves off, on December 9th 2023. In his Preface, Beau describes this work as ‘both useless and necessary.’ Each poem has the same title, and each one is a meditation, a daily prayer almost. The book has a bed next to mine, and each morning I wake it and it gives me a text for the day.
Ama Bolton, War News II
Non-poets often wonder about the use of patterns in poems — does following a set of constraints help of hinder the process? For me, often — though not always — constraints push me to discovery. Below I offer a triangular poem by Washington, DC poet E. Laura Goldberg which I re-found recently in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM); Goldberg’s poem remembers the costs of war.
JoAnne Growney, A Triangular Poem
Daniel Hinds’s “New Famous Phrases” is a collection of poems, playful on the surface, but with deeper intent as a conversation with earlier works and myths, whether creating a magpie inspired by Ted Hughes’s “Crow” or evoking Merope in “The Pact of Water” “signed in a squirt of squid ink spray”,
“Put your ear to a stone shell or a seal’s black flank,
Hear the submerged voices raised in the world’s blood.Now we look down in meropian blindness,
Discern no cities capped beneath blue braes.We let the water fall through our hands.
It leaves a tentacle pucker mark.”Water, both essential to life and capable of destroying it. As human life heads towards a climate emergency, rising temperatures mean rising sea levels. The suggestion here is that current human life will see cities submerged as Atlantis was. But humans shrug their shoulders, ignore the warnings from history and let it become tomorrow’s problem.
Emma Lee, “New Famous Phrases” Daniel Hinds (Broken Sleep Books) – book review
As you may remember, I’ve finished a full-length poetry manuscript called Words with Friends. I post a request for words on Facebook, and folks contribute one each. I then use all the words in a single poem, one supplied word per line. Here’s a poem about this detestable month. […]
be still and you can feel the dirt beneath you crack
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, March
with promise of tender shoots and sturdy stems
just like every other march first in your memory
the way it comes in and perches itself on the edge
how it teases you with moist breath, dangles
the songs of birds, parades these salacious days
then turns beastly cold like spring was all a lie.
Anaphora in poetry — repeating the same word or phrase at the start of each line — is one of my most used (and most successful) generative writing exercises. As Rebecca Hazelton says in Adventures in Anaphora, “Students write more creatively when they repeat themselves,” and I find that to be true for myself, as well.
But anaphora isn’t just for getting started on a blank page or in a writing journal: It also works in finished poems.
Without a doubt, part of my affection for anaphora in poetry is its sisterhood with the list poem. Anaphora does result in a kind of list, and I love seeing how poets use it to create momentum and play with language.
Carolee Bennett, Anaphora in Poetry: 40+ Examples
What if editors provided more incentives for reviewing issues of lit mags? Post three reviews on Facebook, send the screenshots to the editor, get a free subscription.
What if there was a central platform like Goodreads but for lit mags? There, readers could post star-ratings, talk with one another about what they liked and did not like? Readers could follow one another to see what their peers are reading, what’s on their “TBR” (to-be-read) pile, what they’ve labeled as DNF (did-not-finish).
Might editors consider hosting reading clubs of their own? Imagine lit mag clubs hosted by five lit mags. Every six months, the editors host a live chat, with contributors. They offer their issues in a packaged bundle. Would people pay for these journals in order to attend the live chat and hear from the editors and contributors? I think so. Especially if the conversation is fun, honest, real.
What if editors buried secret codes inside the pages of their journals? The first person to crack the code gets a fast-track read on a submission. The next ten people to crack the code get a free subscription. Editors could build up mystery around the secret codes, plant little Easter eggs from one issue to the next.
What if editors offered rewards, badges for sharing the work from their pages? Share five different pieces from the latest issue on social media, write a sentence or two about the piece, screenshot your posts and send it to the editors, get a tote bag, a chapbook, a shoutout in the next issue.
As for writers, what if we approached reading lit mags with the same game-mindset that we approached submitting to them? Check out my reading spreadsheet! Let’s start the 100 creative-nonfiction pieces challenge! Who can stuff their bookshelves with the most lit mags! Show me all the lit mags on your TBR pile!
Could we have the lit mag counterpart of BookTok, in which readers discuss their lit-mag-reading goals and invite others to participate in challenges? Let’s call it LitMagTok. I would happily watch.
Becky Tuch, Q: Could gamification inspire lit mag readership?
This week, in my “Modern Poetry’s Media” course, I told my undergrads about poet Helene Johnson‘s success during the Harlem Renaissance, subsequent disappearance from the literary scene, and rediscovery late in the 20th century. “Rediscovery” is a funny term, of course–she knew where she was the whole time, although other poets and the critics weren’t tuned to her signal. I adore her work and am grateful for the existence of the posthumous anthology This Waiting for Love, edited by Verner D. Mitchell and containing poems, letters, and lots of background information. It’s a great example of how literary scholarship can serve us all, notwithstanding the university-haters who are loud and powerful right now.
Next week I’m teaching excerpts from another amazing piece of scholarship: Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, edited by Robert Dale Parker. (Notice both books were published by university presses.) Parker combed through decades of newspapers and magazines, finding treasures I’d never seen before, much less encountered during my own education. Mary Cornelia Hartshorne is on the syllabus for Monday, and as I prepped, it clicked how young she was: she wrote these poems (originally published in The American Indian) in her late teens. And then she went on with her life in a way Parker couldn’t discover.
My current favorite is “Fallen Leaves,” also the only poem by Hartshorne that seems to be online. Subtitled “An Indian Grandmother’s Parable,” it begins by quoting “white sages” to the effect that Native American lives and cultures are “scattered” and gone like last year’s leaves. The rest of the poem is the grandmother talking back to that ignorance, depicting the leaves in detail, chronicling how “discarded fragments” become “dry, chattering parchments / that crackle and rustle like old women’s laughter.” The leaves go on to protect and nourish a new spring’s “leaflets,” helped by streams “manumitted” from the ice (=released from enslavement). In short, scattering isn’t the end of people a militarily dominant culture wants to forget. Those leaves are still delivering news.
Lesley Wheeler, Rustle like old women’s laughter
“March” is a sharp word, brusque and bracing, like its month. “January”, “February”; they meander like rivers; “April” is like the sound of raindrops on the windowpane; but “March” is a gust of wind flinging grit.
Adrian Bell, 1 March 1958The anniversary of the Covid lockdown in the UK last week took me back to this post about the poem that I thought of when it was announced: Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”.
And thinking about the historic shift from horses to tractors took me back to Adrian Bell, one of my favourite writers about rural life. I first read Bell’s newspaper columns, “A Countryman’s Notebook”, in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, when they were being reprinted about fifteen years ago. The original series ran from 1950—1980, and seems to me one of the great literary achievements of the newspaper column as a form — perhaps not to be compared with Baudelaire’s feuilletons, which became the “little poems in prose” of Paris Spleen (1869), but an enduring contribution to the art of the sentence nevertheless, written with a poet’s feeling for words.
One thing I enjoy about “A Countryman’s Notebook” is how many light-hearted allusions to English poetry Bell manages to work into a column ostensibly about life in the Suffolk countryside, to be read over East Anglian breakfast tables each Saturday morning. As he told his life story, at the age of sixteen he read Tennyson’s lines about “The moan of doves in immemorial elms / And murmuring of innumerable bees” and decided to dedicate himself “to the plough and poetry”. His allusions are often to such Golden Treasury-style touchstones, but his range is wide.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #29: Slow Bars of Light and Shadow
Found myself wandering through The Arcades Project today, looking for Napoleon’s Madeleine (or its ruinscape) only to wander off into a passageway that led me back to Baudelaire’s sonnet, “A une passante”— which Walter Benjamin discusses in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, among other flaneuries . . .
Lightning . . .then darkness! Lovely fugitive
whose glance has brought me back to life! But where
is life—not this side of eternity?[…]
The final verse of Baudelaire’s “Damned Women” sticks to the skull:
Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies,
Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains,
Pour vos mornes douleurs, vos soifs inassouvies,
Et les urnes d’amour dont vos grands coeurs sont pleins.And since all of the translations included at the Fleurs du mal website felt a bit stuffy, I decided to wrangle my own:
You whom my soul has pursued into your hell,
Alina Stefanescu, “A une passante”
My poor sisters, I adore you as I mourn you,
For your anguished sighs, your quenchless thirsts,
In your grandiose hearts, love’s urns are filled to brim.
In the Midnight Hour
a thousand recalls
tongue
moan
whisper
shadow sleeping storms
cry hot man-made howlsToday I used the Magnetic Poetry Kit online for inspiration. But instead of scrolling through different pages of words, I chose all my words from the first word page presented. It came out a bit on the dark side.
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): In the Midnight Hour
Zinesters, I’m passing this along…the poetry collective RODAISUN, has been distributing their poetry monthly in Montreal since July 2021. The group is three multidisciplinary female artists, Iva Čelebić, Emma Cosgrove and Catherine Machado. They’ll next do 6 issues annually by subscription, thicker, slicker double issues, sent out every two months, for a total of $12. Link to sign up for mailing service: https://www.grapeseedbooks.com/product-page/rodaisun-in-the-mail
Pearl Pirie, Events coming
Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room – a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristran Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I’ve read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening’s poetry – “fog makes surprising what it does not conceal”, etc.
Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance read one’s poems out is worth paying for. I didn’t read but at least half the attendees did.
Tim Love, Vona Groake and Karen Solie
My birthday this week, and so, naturally, like all normal people, I’ve been thinking about what books I have and haven’t read. What classics, what essentials, what life-changing glorious tomes have I neglected?
The past few years, I’ve been trying out some of those books that for some reason or other were never assigned to me during high school or college or even grad school. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace. I’m not afraid of a long book or a difficult book. I do, however, give myself complete permission to quit a book if I don’t like it, because I am adult, and this is my own independent study.
Renee Emerson, 40 books before 40
The birthday, and the birthday poem; similar, one might think, in how I’ve also been approaching my “Sex at 31” poems: a declaration and exploration of where I might be. Fifteen years ago, the chapbook-length examination that became Some forty (2010), offering similar question:
some forty: an almost
ambiguity, the space
of numbers, age; what does all
this time mean, spent?
Can one learn anything from going through one’s own work? I’m probably too close to it, still. Moment such as these suggest all poems are poems of mortality, of time. Of where one is at, a moment which will quickly fall into the past. What can you see in this, from where you are now. American poet Robert Creeley, his poem “A Birthday” from Words (1967), published when he was forty-one, offering similar lines of questioning: “I had thought / a moment of stasis / possible, some // thing fixed— / days, worlds— [.]” The question of where one is at, and if any moment might be held, like a breath. Or this poem by John Newlove from THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (1999), a little unnerved to think about how close I am to this age, now:
FIFTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY
I seem to be forgetting what words sound like.
Soon I shall be reduced to a tiny vocabulary of phrases
such as I love you,
or I hate you,
or death.“[…] my / birthplace, / that is substance / of me, quick against the form,” wrote Thomas Clark (1941-2018), as part of his poem “BIRTHDAY,” from a 1964 issue of Poetry Magazine. One could suggest this a substance with further clarity these days, given the administration south of the border continues to push the idea that we become the fifty-first state. I write a substance, against the form. I spent years attempting an annual birthday poem, but I’m not entirely in that mindset these days, working instead in other directions, although, as they say, the poems will come soon enough. Is that what they say? The poem might not have occurred this year, but the return to those same questions, those same clarifications, hold. Perhaps this is my poem this year.
Or my poem for forty-five, which seems both recent and distant: “We measure, syntax.” Is that all there is?
rob mclennan, the green notebook
i buy the cicadas barbie shoes & leave them
Robin Gow, waiting for cicadas
in the dirt. an offering. i am hoping when they come
that this time they will have an answer.
some kind of prophecy. “here is how
you save yourself” or, even better,
“here is how we will save you.” the year before i left
my hometown they broke free. left their
shells like brooches all across the pine tree trunk.
some of them became pendants in the amber sap.
i harvested as many as i could. put my ears
to their husks & heard them sing.
I started this blog in May 2011, fourteen years ago, and this is my eight hundredth post and I would like to thank all the people who have supported the blog over the years. I am not sure what I make of this latest piece. It is still in its early stages. An EMP is an Electromagnetic Pulse. An airburst would destroy all electronic equipment retendering everyone back into the analogue age. […]
That would kill every screen stone dead
and soften them up for the expected invasionHe had prepared for this
if they ever dropped the big oneHe would go out listening to West End Blues
and its beauty would carry him into the next incarnationI’m not happy with it at the moment as it feels out of balance. West End Blues is a tune by King Oliver. My favourite version is by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. I do have a 78rpm disc of the tune.
Paul Tobin, CARRY HIM INTO THE NEXT INCARNATION
I’m a bit ashamed to say that, though I love poetry, I can go long periods of time without reading it. One of the many things I appreciate about running January Writing Hours is that for several months, I absolutely have to read – to return to old favourites in new ways, to discover new collections, to fall into rabbit holes of language. In the first half of the month, I shared a poem by Ursula K Le Guin, whose Earthsea Trilogy rests on the concept of the Real Name – the power we acquire over a person, or a thing, when we discover the word which perfectly describes its essential nature. It’s a concept which stretches back into folklore, and in exploring that history, I encountered “Spells of My Name” by the poet IS Jones, who was entirely new to me and who blew me away.
“Spells of My Name” explores naming as an act of reclamation. Jones is constantly on the search for a better language for the body and for their own multiple selves. They write into trauma and desire and uncertainty – and their first collection comes out this year. I love what they say in this interview:
“ I mostly write poems at night, and I remember being up at 2:00 a.m. writing a new poem and I thought to myself, “This is a part of the work that I love the most, when it’s dark and it’s quiet and nobody cares what I’m doing and I’m playing and I’m exploring and I’m reading poems and I’m dreaming about what I want them to look like.” I thought to myself, “I don’t ever want this good magic to end.
As Black artists, I don’t think we talk often enough about pleasure for the creator of the work. I definitely have been guilty of contributing to this pervasive notion that artmaking has to come from pain and trauma as opposed to coming from pleasure and joy and wanting to share a vision that you have with other people”.
As someone who often engages in trauma in my poetry and in my working life, I could not agree more. Writing does not have to hurt or harm us – and even giving words to our trauma can be an act of community, validation, and comfort.
Clare Shaw, Naming It
The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy.
And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open.
Breaking alive.
It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.
Ellen Bass reckons with all of this in her splendid poem “Any Common Desolation,” originally published in The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day newsletter and later included in James Crews’s lifeline of an anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (public library), shared here with Ellen’s blessing.
Maria Popova, Any Common Desolation
Police close ranks and bodies form a shield
but not a weapon clicks in place. His rights
are read to him, unlike the thousandshe ordered shot because “Human rights,
son of a bitch.” A milky fog, a kind of gauze
bandage, drapes over this ordinary day. A doglimps down the alley. A partly disemboweled
Luisa A. Igloria, Elegy for the Human, with Extradition Standoff
squirrel’s plastered on the road, syrupy
rot beneath the traffic stop.
Here’s the face of a very young poet.
Found this in the archives yesterday digging around for an old Dazed article for a project. Funny how I used to keep all my newspaper pages and magazine cuttings in files. I kept press clippings in folders with the article or review cut out and the date and name of the publication all glued and set there. Even the mean ones. Even the derogatory ones or silly things: I once did a feature testing toothbrushes. I used to keep every scrap of press, every flyer and ticket, memories from all my gigs. That’s thousands of shows since 1994. I kept a paper trail of good times and big nights. No photos, no phones back then. Just the paper trail. The electronic world has erased a lot of this behaviour. We take photos on phones and upload to sites that are electronic scrapbooks and social media. I think I am going to get back on it again. Be a better archivist, keep my paper trail alive, scrapbook my things, because all of sudden it will be 25 years in the future and that means it will be 2050? All of these existential notes and blogs won’t even exist and none of this will be here and nobody will see this page, and all of this work and writing and thought will be erased and gone, like the way we left MySpace and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, all gone now, our poems and posts, our notes and stories, songs and art, like rusting abandoned shopping trolleys in the lake of the lost forest of time covered in moss and frogs spawn. We won’t be here and nobody will be here to see or feel or remember what we were thinking and how we got here or what we did with our spirit and our minds and our bodies and our words and our short time on earth. I guess that’s why I love books, I love making books, writing longhand, I love writing diaries, I love reading books, books stay put, you can rely on a book, a book on your bedside table, a book in your hand, your notebook in your bag, your novel in your suitcase, it’s all coming with you, it’s real, its yours, it cannot be deleted, it’s all yours, it is your own paper trail.
Salena Godden, Women’s History Month, March 2025
I’ve talked about vertical time here before but I thought it might be a good thing to think about at this time. And how do we now as humans, some of us who happen to be creators — maintain our mental health and also our desire and ability to create. (All of which go hand in hand). It helps me to try to find my way into, and to think about how vertical time is created, made. Why do we need art? What does art give us?
From my book of the year, The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart — “Usually we think of time as a sequence of events that happened in the past or that we want to happen in the future,” says Bogart, referring to horizontal time. She says that art helps us experience another kind of time: vertical time. It feels like “plunging a stake or dropping an anchor into the endless flow of time, thereby creating a sense of eternity in the human body.” It is a real feeling of “nowness” and being present. We feel outside time, part of a continuous present. […]
I have a copy of Another Beauty by [Adam] Zagajewski but the spine has cracked and I need to repair it. I don’t want to delve into it too much until I’ve done so but it does open at a story about looking at the Vermeers in the National Gallery in Washington. A man, about forty, an American, says to him with joy: “I’ve been looking at reproductions of this paintings since I was twenty, and today I’m seeing it with my own eyes for the first time. I’m sorry to bother you but I had to tell someone.” Zagajewski writes, “I can take such lack of culture any day.”
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Vertical Time, Comedy, Joy
The glass-smooth pond waits
Jason Crane, POEM: Glass House
for the return of its winged tenants.
Spring has called them north,
back across the imaginary border
recognized only by us,
discomfited as we are
by the idea of freedom.
escape is the timeless lie :: my path never strays from its crow
Grant Hackett [no title]
あたたかし粘土が息をしはじめて 堀田季何
atatakashi nendo ga iki o shihajimete
spring warmth
a piece of clay
begins to breathe
Kika Hotta
from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), March 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 14, 2025)