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).
All over the northern hemisphere, it seems, spring has sprung, bringing a new crop of words to the poetry blogs this week: takatalvi, the quadrille, dindsenchas, reclamă, A.S.M.R., and more. Enjoy!
Spring has come early to Finland. The snow is melted and the city is full of dust from the grit they use on the roads. Finns and those non-Finns who have been here for a while are suspicious, knowing it’s too early to get our hopes up. That takatalvi is always a possibility, the Finnish return to winter. Takatalvi means a return to winter: a sudden dump of snow or the temps dropping to twenty below zero just when the weather seems to turn towards spring. True spring when you can actually pack your shovels, snow boots and gloves away is always late here, well into April usually.
I should be writing about the light returning as my poems are usually seasonal, but I’m still writing my strange, half-love poems. I’m ignoring a lot of ‘shoulds’ which is a slight worry, but also very liberating. Nothing vital is being ignored with my kids and my job and whatever else they put me in charge of. I am carving out very specific times where I just don’t, unless I want to. And that feels good.
I’m writing again thankfully. Of all the things that slipped away this winter that worried me. I have a pile of unread books I know I will get back to, the dust bunnies will wait, but there was a definite sense of lack in being unable to find a way into writing. So I’m thankful for the rush of hormones or whatever is driving these weird poems.
Gerry Stewart, The Shoulds of Spring
I can feel myself gearing up for April now. I’ve not written any new poems for about six months or so now, although I’ve been steadily reading and filling myself up with poetry. I’m now at the state where I’d quite like to sit down and write. It’s like a full feeling, perhaps how a glass that is almost to the brim with water would feel, if a glass could have feelings. Or it’s like teetering on the edge of a very long drop that you know once you go, you will be falling for a long time and it will be fine, but you are putting off going.
I’m hovering on that edge now. Or I’m holding myself perfectly still, so I don’t spill over the edges of myself.
Kim Moore, Writing in and through motherhood
How will a poet sit on the edge
of his soul and peer into guilt
and shame and ugliness?What will proximity do
to language? Can verbs
overcome weakness of spirit?Or will every attempt
at truth end as another
poem about the moon?***
Quadrille: The quadrille is a 44-word poem with no rules about meter or rhyme.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, 44 words are plenty
I find that writing creatively comes in waves and winter tends to be a fallow time. If I’m not writing poetry, then I like to be reading it: going back to old favourites and finding new inspiration. It has been a real delight lately to encounter new poetry on Substack as well as dipping into the wealth of literary magazines online. But there is nothing quite the same as immersing oneself in a poetry collection. It is in the gathered poems of a collection that the voice, tone and style of the poet — what makes their writing theirs — truly flourishes. It’s the reading equivalent of listening to an album all the way through rather than highlights on a Spotify playlist. You can listen to “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac on its own but the brilliance of the track is best heard as part of Rumours.
Virginia Woolf’s essay on reading looks at ways to read different genres and for poetry she posits “one must be in a rash, extreme, a generous state of mind…” Poems may be brief, but often their very brevity requires of the reader more focus, more concentration of intellect, more power of imagination. As Woolf suggests, there is an “exaltation and intensity” to reading poetry because more than any other written form we are required to bring our own interpretation to the page. In a collection, we must do this time and time again, considering not only the meanings of one poem but the possible connections across a range of poems. This is why, I think, that reading a collection of poetry requires returning many times — and therein also lies the reward. […]
I love reading fiction and I consume narrative of some kind on a daily basis. But I have to admit, it’s not like that with reading poetry. I can’t just pick up a collection any time and get stuck in. Even individual poems that I come across on Substack or elsewhere, if I really want to take them in, I have to read them and then come back to them. Even though they may be shorter, it takes longer because this type of reading is not purely about consumption. It’s slow reading, an art in itself and one that is making a comeback in our fast-paced times.
Ruth Lexton, “a generous state of mind”: diving into poetry
At winter solstice, nature’s new year,
the one plants honor, I become
Queen of the Night, with pages,
blank or inscribed, for courtiers
who urge me to exile the to-do list,
intention’s nagging inversion.
I visit the day only to restock
my supply of wine and chocolate.My rule ends at the equinox,
Ellen Roberts Young, A Poem for the Change of Seasons
when Queen Persephone returns
from below, living green takes over,
I become servant, day-worker,
watering, feeding, trimming plants,
attendant to the majesty of growth.
Maurice Scully’s deep understanding of Irish poetry informs his own practice as a writer. Unlike the English pastoral tradition, which, as I have argued elsewhere, is essentially a poetry of empire, of the land as owned object, this tradition is one of the land as living world. From the 8th century haiku-like lyrics of intense perception to the onomastics of the Metrical Dindshenchas, medieval Irish nature poetry concerned itself with the stubborn actuality of things and of the odd relationship between those things and the words used to name them. These lines from Scully’s 5 Freedoms of Movement (Etruscan Books, 2002, originally Galloping Dog 1987) illustrate the point I am trying to make:
persistent undersound of a river. hardness.
table facing a square window inset in a deep white wall.
the four places. & more. the head of a narrow angular stairs.
sometimes an animal passes. brown white black.
a fly sometimes in the sunlight.
sometimes a man.When Scully writes like this, the most fruitful comparison available is with the earliest Irish lyrics. The sheer concreteness of the writing mirrors the desire to present what is with minimal interference from the vanity of the writing ego. The world is not presented as a stage set for the acting out of some human drama but as a complex system of which the human domain is just one part. Or, to quote again
a large brain & a long childhood
leaves branches water (where was I?)
with all the ornate figurations in meta- this & that
(branches) climbing while the truth dwindling in proportion
to the glare of the accentuated frill will. well.
many mouths moving. no wonder nobody with any sense.Wary of theory, this is a poetry of learning to live with and in the world, not of explaining and improving on it.
Billy Mills, Sustainable Poetry
birds breeze over
happy wander
between root and tendrilspirited song thickly moist
green and fresh
seeding a sanctuaryfor a long sweet spring
Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): Spring Soak
I’m currently working with the novelist and poet Anna Chilvers to curate “The Book of Bogs”, which will be published by Little Toller and Blue Moose Books this September. It’s an incredible book, with poetry, short stories and more from 30 incredible writers, including Alys Fowler, Pascale Petit, Robert McFarlane, David Morley, Patti Smith – and of course, Kim Moore.
Kim has already treated you to a snippet of the short story she has written for the book, along with a description of the process which gave rise to it. In her article “Where do ideas come from anyway?” Kim writes about finding the idea for her story in an old notebook. In writing my lyric essay for the anthology, the biggest challenge was narrowing the ideas down … because I’m writing about my love for Walshaw Moor, and for moss, and peatland – and like Seamus Heaney’s bog, that love feels bottomless; it has no horizons.
On Sunday, Anna Chilvers and I will be running “Bog Bodies: A Creative Encounter” online from 10-30-12.30. We’re probably all familiar with the ancient bodies found in the bog in state of stunning preservation due to the chemical qualities of peat. But there are other bodies in the bogs and on the moors, just as fascinating. In this Sunday’s workshop we’ll focus on tardigrades (otherwise known as moss pigs or water bears) and the billions of tiny, other-worldly creatures of the bog; alongside Lindow and Tollund Man.
Clare Shaw, Land: a Love Story
I haven’t been writing many haiku lately, but I had a lovely time making this artist’s book last week in a workshop run by Sam Jackman who kindly provided all the hand printed paper for the covers as well as guiding us all through the process.
Admittedly, I did try and fit in every technique she showed us, and there are a few things I’d do differently next time, but I could see it would be an excellent way of presenting haiku and I’m hoping to combine the two disciplines when I get time. Could be a nice project for the summer holidays. Counting down already and it’s not even Easter yet!
Julie Mellor, A book without words
If my body were a basket,
I’d like it willow please —
flexible, ultra-strong
and weeping
comes for free.
[…]M.E. is a wildly fluctuating condition (for me at least). Some weeks I almost forget it. Others I cannot get out of bed, cannot read. Most weeks are somewhere in the middle.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, If my body were a basket
More than a decade ago I wrote a book explicitly about the apocalypse. Or maybe it was a book about different kinds of apocalypses instead of any specific one. There were vague dangers, nuclear bombs, underground houses, and zombie attacks for sure, all the stuff of dramatic end-times scenarios. Really, I was just watching a little bit too much Supernatural and the central series “apocalypse theory: a reader” just sort of formed out of it. I enjoyed reading these poems during a slew of readings in the summer of 2013. A couple years later, the book was done and was scooped up by a press who had published my work before. The next couple years had a lot going on, including finishing SEX & VIOLENCE and it finding a home at BLP, the loss of my mother, lots of work-related drama and happenings. By the time the press shut down, which I wasn’t sure was what was happening because I was frankly afraid to ask, so much was going down. In 2018 and 2019, I was barely hanging on to my mental health by a string, and then in 2020, there was covid. By then SEX & VIOLENCE was in the world and I just decided to issue an electronic version of that older book and move on (and actually, it was easy since most design work had already been done on the interior.) It’s worth a read and fun little bit of imagined endings. What I didn’t know was that I would keep writing about it.
In early 2018, during a sprint of daily writings I wrote a steampunk-ish series called ordinary planet, in which climate change and massive floods produced a futuristic alternative planet world very unkind to women, whose choice was domesticity or pretending to be mystics fortune tellers (inspired by the famous Fox Sisters, of course). In 2019, when I was gifted some time and reading gig at the Field Museum, I wrote extinction event, a series about extinction as a gathering, like a gala, that no one wanted invitations for. The poems that arose during covid could also be considered in a similar vein. Bloom, the most autobiographical series of our time under lockdowns, but later the strangeness of existing in that world just reemerging, with the plague letters. Similarly, when I wrote unreal city, inspired by Eliot’s The Wasteland, in late 2021/early 2022, the end times felt like they, themselves, were ending. These series were scattered across different book projects–AUTOMAGIC (ordinary planet), COLLAPSOLOGIES (bloom and the plague letters), ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER ( extinction event.) Each book, with the exception of COLLAPSOLOGIES, which also has an apocalyptic feel overall, with its own subject matter and thematic concerns.
I did not set out for RUINPORN to be so bleak, but it happened. the Eliot-inspired series kicked it off, in a time where it felt like we were all white knuckling our way through life. Or maybe it was just me, with job stresses followed by job changes (good ones, but scary at first). With more loss after my dad passed in 2022. I literally intended that to be my last book with that apocalyptic feel. I was ready to move on, to be kinder in my view of the world and its future, but the events of the last 5 months or so have me reconsidering. I am not sure what to make of the world in poems, but it’s showing up in a strange way in the new, more sci-fi poems I’ve been writing to go with a set of collages I actually finished in 2023 but wanted to revisit.
Kristy Bowen, unhappy endings
あさつてはないかも知れず雲雀の巣 矢島渚男
asatte wa nai kamo shirezu hibari no su
there may be
no day after tomorrow
a skylark’s nest
Nagisao Yajima
from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, November 2022 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 22, 2025)
isolate – From the Latin, insulare, to make into an island
I – sol – ate
Liz Lefroy, I Isolate
I am solo
since the positive Covid test
have made myself an island
plotted my time
as a map of solitude
coordinated myself to a pattern of rest
On Sunday 15 March I learned the British government was considering a compulsory quarantine. The next day I emailed the owner of the campsite asking if I could arrive early. He replied immediately. I booked a flight, transferred money, packed, agonised over which poetry books to take to my ‘desert island’ near The Hague. I flew to Schiphol on the Wednesday. The local buses already had the area near the driver closed off with white-red plastic.
Here are two poems about that first lockdown: […]Six months of safety in a static caravan,
waking to birdsong each morning,
shielded from the sun by the golden elm.
I walked my daily rounds on the grass lanes.Forsythia, tulips, narcissi, rhododendron,
Fokkina McDonnell, Saved by bankruptcy
pyracantha, salvia, rock rose, asters:
the seasons’ steady markers. From a distance
I waved to neighbours finally arriving.
Just back from a walk along the beach at Pevensey, part of the newly-established ‘England Coastal Path’. Sunny days at this time of year are so precious, aren’t they?
Now I’m about to get down to some work, mostly to do with the forthcoming book (ahem! did I mention that before?) which is now put to bed and being printed as I write. One of the last jobs was to decide on the cover image, which I’m very pleased with, and will talk about that in a future post. The Lewes launch is arranged – I’m sharing the gig with Peter Kenny who’ll be reading from his not-one-but-two pamphlets that came out in 2024. The original plan was to have the launch event on the official launch date, which is of course May 1st. But for various reasons it’s a week later. Close enough! Being a modest type (well, let’s just say I find it cringeworthy to do too much self-promo) I’ve engaged some help with promotion… more on that in a future post too, no doubt. Meanwhile I’ve made a Mayday Diaries landing page. And one of my wonderful blurbers, Rory Waterman, recently gave the book a glowing endorsement on Bluesky. Gulp!
Robin Houghton, New book stuff, and other Spring shenanigans
In January I traveled to Book Tree in Kirkland to attend a celebration for the launch of the Western Washington Poetry Network. It’s been around for at least a year or two, but this was the official “big deal” launch. Representatives from almost every writing group and open mike from Vancouver, Washington, to Bellingham to Duvall were there. There were cookies and wine. It was raucous good fun.
I was asked to speak about our poetry group—the only showing (so far) from Mukilteo—and, in part because I’m not sure we want new members, I talked instead about this blog. I told them how many poetry books I read in 2024, and how many book reviews. I invited people to take a look. I promised to promote WWPN.
And, as a result, I was handed several books by local poets. Like I needed more poetry books! (Of course I did.)
Bethany Reid, Western Washington Poetry Network
Look at me!
I am an idiot, I am farce, I am a smoker or “Furniste”
Look at me!
I am ugly, my face lacks expression, I am short.
I am like all of you! (1)(1) I wanted to advertise myself a little.
In Romanian, an advertisement is called “reclamă”— and there is always a bit of excitement for me when translating Tzara’s Dada years, when his French was still hypercoagulated with Romanian verbs and idioms.
reclame
- inflection of reclamă (“advertisement”):
- nominative/accusative indefinite plural
- genitive indefinite singular
reclame
- third-person singular/plural subjunctive of reclama (“to report”)
Obviously, Tristan Tzara (and Dada) was deeply invested in revealing the dishonesty of newspapers and media, where what got reported was often a scandal that distracted the miserable veterans or citizens of industrial capitalism from the numbing boredom of their factory-driven lives. And so perhaps the “report” that tangles with the “advertisement” amuses me, even as it sashays through my imagination, straight into the unfinished parts of Benjamin’s Arcades, where I look for traces of Tzara’s footsteps in the Zurich-Berlin-Paris pipeline of the early 20th century.
Alina Stefanescu, Tzara boots.
I’ve written before about my impatience with the default ‘surrealism-lite’ of a lot of contemporary poetry in English — especially the kind that gets published in big poetry magazines — but overall I am persuaded here. I find the poem very American, slightly irritating and rather successful. The final couplet in particular is both aurally delicious — marlstone and mud-rich; air / everywhere — and genuinely funny. Wit is quite uncommon in poetry of this kind so I really appreciated that.
The poem also has a sense of history. [Natalie] Shapero is obviously aware, and assumes that we too are aware, of the very ancient link between the appearance of a comet and social upheaval — most often they are taken to portend war and plague, though sometimes change of other kinds. The comet seen in the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC is widely reported in ancient sources, and included by Shakespeare too — as Calpurnia says to Caesar on the morning of his death, ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’ (II.ii).
Victoria Moul, How to watch the war: three poetic comets
In the first weeks of this year, I participated in a virtual poetry workshop with Anita Skeen. It was so useful to me that I signed up for another workshop, this one on writing the prose poem, with mixed-media artist and poet Lorette Luzajic. She is the editor of an online prose-poetry lit journal, The Mackinaw.
In this workshop, I’m returning to a form I learned early in my writing practice. My friend and mentor David Dunn may have introduced me to prose poems, I cannot recall anymore; but I do know he was writing them in 1980 and that some of the poems in our collaborative chapbook The Swan King are either prose poems or on the verge of being prose poems. Prose poetry was then considered a “new” form and was (& in some quarters, remains) controversial among poets and critics. It sounds self-conflicting: if it is prose, how can it be poetry?
In the decades since I was very new to poetry, reading everything I could find of contemporary work and experimenting all over the place, the prose poem has been much written-about in literary forums and academia and is–mostly–on pretty sturdy footing as a “form” of poetry. I never completely stopped writing prose poems, and a few appear in most of my books. I’ve been writing so many sad lyrical-narrative poems since 2018, however, that I haven’t spent much time really playing with poetry, and play is a huge part of creative thinking. So Lorette Luzajic’s workshop, which gives us a chance to experiment and play, appealed to me.
The workshop has got me thinking about versions and expansions of the form, turned up some exciting new poets to read, and offered amusing prompts that have moved me into ekphrastic, surrealistic, dream-based, and pop-culture themed poems. I have found some surprises in my own work, which is always a reviving feeling.
Ann E. Michael, Prose/poetry
How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote my first book (Rhombus and Oval) in Buenos Aires, under the influence of a certain poetic mixture of narrative, non-fiction and fantastical literature. It is a very Latin American book that happens to be written in English. It “changed my life” in the sense that my identity was already that of a writer, specifically a poet, because I’d published things in magazines, and was an editor and translator of books, and above all, was an obsessive reader (which can make you believe you are the writer of everything you read). But now I had a book to my name. I’m very fond of it but not overly attached. Many people I knew in Argentina thought about the “work” more than specific books, and I think that I always have, too. A book reflects a certain moment in time, and if you keep writing books, you will have a work. There’s no need to become anguished over creating a great monumental worldchanging text as some people do, thus blocking themselves from creating. Probably most masterpieces are created by accident, in the sense of emerging from intentional artistic decisions at a moment that could not have been anticipated.
I’ve never cared too much about genre divisions, and love writing that moves freely between poetry and essay, incorporating visual elements and music. I’m now making songs with poetic lyrics, experimenting with conceptual art, playing with rhythm . . . My most recent book Taal is explicitly musical. “Taal” refers to the rhythmic cycle in Indian music. But it also refers to Gabriela Mistral’s book Tala, which plays on the Spanish meaning of the word talar, to cut down a tree, and furthermore is a nod to the Chilean poet’s interest in India.
The difference between the first book and now? I’m an older person, with more experiences, happy and otherwise. And I’m in Chile, and don’t think of leaving—I consider myself to be a Chilean-Indian diaspora-noneoftheabove poet, in deep engagement with local sounds, speech patterns, folkloric traditions and history.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jessica Sequeira (rob mclennan)
The collection tells a story. It opens a portal. It began as a painting in acrylic I did 10 years ago: [click through to view] As time went on, I wrote the poems included in this volume. […]
Each poem is a brief reminiscence, isolated in time and creator of nostalgia. Senses subtly overwhelm experiences. There is an intense longing, a wave over the sands. Then all is wiped out. The first poem of the collection, before we met is a visual impression of first love. The second poem, discarded objects of a love affair deals with the acceptance of the loss of love. What is left behind is a canvass of objects that add to the memory of what might have been. the tango dancer recalls the memory of hope, abruptly cut in the last poem, drip petals. One is left with a deep feeling of longing about something that does not exist any longer, one surfs on the mane of memory.
A drop-in by M.C. Gardner (Nigel Kent)
who taught us
Robin Gow, lovespoon
to want to keep each other
both like birds & like bulbs?
hold me not in the mouth
but in the woodwork. i want to be
shaped by your hands. breathe only
when you cut the heart, an eye
in the middle of the wood
for us to look at each other through.
John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone,” he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself.
Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath — lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.
Maria Popova, How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons of Creative Work
The collection “Exit Strategy” explores how a surviving partner might navigate an afterlife, one that has to adjust to a major loss, while trying to make sense of that loss and respond to bereavement. The poems are a thoughtful, crafted response. Different forms suggest differing approaches, some are a slab of words on the page, others expansive, using the page’s white space to suggest hesitancy and exploration. This is new territory. Artworks seem to suggest a map, but the wanderer has to decide on a route, interpret the symbols and explore what they might mean in this new landscape no one can prepare for.
Emma Lee, “Exit Strategy” Patrick Wright (Broken Sleep Books) – book review
Epitaph
Dick Whyte, Joseph Rocco – 4 Very Short Poems (1929-1930)
—: After Joseph Rocco :—
by Dick Whyte
for your multifaceted
role in death
make your peace
giant—
the earth has teeth
sharper
than any dead bug
My aunt who took antidepressants, forgot them on a business trip, and had a seizure while driving and killed a stranger. She began drinking. My aunt, who is dead now.
My aunt who married a man who murdered her child. She lives. And I don’t know how she has the strength. And I will never know, because we are solitary wasps, all of us. If there are no threats between us, there are threats surrounding us. Internalized.
We each chew the stationary that desperate letters were written on. Spit out the mass to seal the entrance to each little cell.
Yes, there are prison stories I haven’t told you.
I had an uncle who married a witch. Then he disappeared. Like his father who disappeared. But that is another story.
What I am circling here is that there are all kinds of deaths. And renewals. Sometimes I believe we are fated to repeat history because that is what humans do. It doesn’t matter who raises you or how closely your DNA is related, your story will be eerily similar to someone else’s hidden story. Because that is a fact of nature: the recirculation, the renaissance of what came before. And whether that is the glory or the shame, is a matter of perspective. Whether the lapwings come two and two again, or whether they’ll find a safer place this year, it is a form of the imperfect repetition.
I believe in blowing up our lives now and then. I believe in writing more than one story.
Ren Powell, A Routine Blow-Up
I enjoyed Jeanette Burton’s beautifully produced pamphlet, Ostriches, subtitled ‘Ten Poems about My Dad’, published by Candlestick Press and available here. Burton carefully, and wittily, writes affectionate portraits of her father without tipping into dull sentimentality. At their best, her poems – ‘such as the flamboyantly titled ‘Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun’ and ‘Poem in which I recount the finding of my dad’s love letter to my mum in the style of a Ronnie Corbett monologue’ – speed along with a giddy mixture of whimsical silliness, acute observation and pride. It might be tempting to suggest that some of her more stream-of-consciousness poems could do with some vigorous pruning, but I reckon that would deaden the sheer exuberant flow of her poetry.
Matthew Paul, March reading
I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.
To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for” (Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.
She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:
“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”
Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).
I have no sweet story of meeting her or of a connection between us except for one very particular one (just for me). I realized it only when Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem lead me back to the bookshelf: June Jordan and I share the same birthday, although I was born several decades later. This moment I’m struggling to write the kind of political poetry I wrote when I was still a human rights worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Gaza. June Jordan is the poet I need right now.
“Poem About My Rights” feels as if it was written in 2025, everything she mentions still true today. Listen to this poem in her on voice right here.
Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now
I have, finally, completed a draft of the manuscript of poems that emerged from a daily writing practice I sustained from New Year’s eve 2019 until the first week of 2021. It’s taken me four years to sort through, hone, and revise the material, and I am very happy with the result. Some of the poems have been published. “Sunset,” for example, appeared in the lovely journal humana obscura; “The People of Gaza Keep Dying,” appeared on New Verse News, and “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…” was published in Michael Broder’s Second Coming series—on, ironically enough, February 4, 2025. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like Poets of Queens 2, The Scene, and the literary journal published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement.
During the initial stage of this project, I set myself only one constraint: that while I did not care how little I wrote on any given day, I would not write beyond the limit of that day’s page in the Lechtturm1917 page-a-day planner I’d bought. Once I was ready to start sorting, honing, and revising, though, I increased those constraints to three:
- I would work on the poems only in the order of their composition;
- If it turned out that the way to make a particular day’s writing work as a poem was to combine it with material from another day’s output, I would only take that other material from something else I’d written in the same month; and,
- In terms of content, while I would allow myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted/needed, I would not introduce anything into a poem that happened after the original day, or if that were not possible, the original month of composition. I made two exceptions to this last constraint, “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” and “In That Moment of Change.”
I wrote the poem that became “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” in January 2020 in response to the experience of reviewing Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, by Steven Sher. Sher’s book is a deeply racist, proudly anti-Palestinian, Orthodox Jewish justification of the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel and to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish nation state. Particularly disturbing is a poem called “Bombing Gaza” that, in light of the devastation Israel has wrought there since October 2023, could be called prophetic.
Before October 2023, I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to focus the poem. Once Israel began to bring Sher’s “Bombing Gaza” to life, however, it felt irresponsible not to connect the poem explicitly to current events. I decided to give the poem a title that would do this work instead of changing the text of the poem itself.
The detail I added to “In That Moment Of Change” is its dedication to the memory of my friend Veronica McGinley, who was murdered by her husband in April 2021. At that time, the poem had still not fully taken shape. It fills me with a deep, deep sadness that she will never read it, which is why I am dedicating this book to her.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #38
Naivëte, like a broken clock, gets it right twice daily.
Jews and Muslims are cousins, are family, I hear
in Morocco, from the taxi driver, the be-scarved womanguarding a blue synagogue. Even though they should be
Jill Pearlman, The Shared Overlap of Skullcaps
cranky, be-swearing food and drink; even as it’s Ramadan,
and the driver in baseball cap careens in his springy red taxi.
God gives us strength. Of Jews they smile, they glow.
I am currently assisting with editing the next Sidhe Press anthology. The theme for this one is Grief and the submissions have come from a wide range of angles. All poems carry the poet’s unique view, but here there is something specifically tender about the words that are set down for us to read. Taking that first read of someone’s writing is a privilege and a joy, and editing always has me eager to see the poems that are sent in for consideration. Having said that there is a need to take things slowly and give each poem its own space in time.
There is a wonderful tingle when certain lines from a poem continue to echo in my head after reading, and I love that feeling of resonance. There are also always poems that are very good in their own right but don’t fit the arc of the anthology as it forms. These have to be let go, but I know they will find their actual home somewhere else. I had heard this from editors before and having experienced it myself I can see more clearly now what they were referring to. Parts have to fit the whole so that the poems weave themselves into the whole journey of the book and make that arc. Some poems talk to each other along the way.
Sue Finch, A POCKETFUL OF TYRE VALVE COVER THINGS
Wikipedia describes ASMR as a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli. The nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial, with strong anecdotal evidence to support the phenomenon but little or no scientific explanation or verified data. It has become a recent internet phenomenon. Online discussion groups such as the Society of Sensationalists formed in 2008 on Yahoo! and The Unnamed Feeling blog created in 2010 by Andrew MacMuiris aim to provide a community for learning more about the sensation by sharing ideas and personal experiences. Some earlier names for ASMR in these discussion groups included attention induced head orgasm, attention induced euphoria, and attention induced observant euphoria.
It’s interesting that these titles draw attention to the ‘paying of attention’ and, inevitably perhaps, my own thoughts about it revolve around poetry and its effects: the familiar defamiliarised, the frisson of the uncanny, Emily Dickinson talking about poems taking the top of your head off. ASMR seems linked to a particular quality of attention-giving which yields a rippling of pleasure, close to the erotic, but not the same as that. It is powerful yet undramatic; it is most common in quiet moments of observation. It seems to come when there are no goal-directed intentions in the attention-giving. It is also in a neutral sense ‘bestial’, an animal shiver, like hackles rising, but not out of anger. It’s surely something reaching far back into our ancient past, linking body and mind, yielding pleasure, rooted in a mode of being pre-dating language and conceptualisation. That interests me a great deal. Poetry is language deployed to circumvent the limits of language; these days I take that as a given. Yves Bonnefoy says: “poetry was not made to mean, but to restore words to their full intensity, their integral capacity to designate fundamental things in our relationships with ourselves and others, here and now, amid those chances that one should never, as Mallarmé did, dream of abolishing” (2012 PN Review interview with Chris Miller. Even if just considered as metaphor, perhaps ASMR is what poetry taps into, invokes, rehearses, re-discovers.
Martyn Crucefix, Back in the A.S.M.R.
But the mystics are right too.
When we’re fully here, God
is in this place.When I’m paying
continuous partial attention
to three different news appsor biting back responses
to someone wrong on Facebook
I’m not really here.But last night my son
Rachel Barenblat, Here
danced with his double bass
and the headlines all fell away.
— I’d honestly not heard of Etel Adnan before reading a post last year on my favourite poetry blog by Devin Kelley titled Ordinary Plots. Who knows what rock I live under :) I ended up underlining half of The Spring Flowers Own which begins:
“The morning after
my death
we will sit in cafes
but I will not
be there
I will not be”— “flowers do not grow on rifles” she says. And, “flowers triumph / over the human race / their tragedies are / short-lived.” And:
“It is not because spring
is too beautiful
that we’ll not write what
happens in the dark.”— I was feeling rather worn out this morning and came upon a reel on Instagram by Sheniz and it gave me a real feeling of uplift — this reminder of the importance of colour.
— “Enemies are energizing but that fuel is short-lasting.” C.D. Wright said that. Flowers are also energizing. Planning your garden is energizing. This year, I plan on putting in extra dahlias and hollyhocks so I can give more away. Already imagining the random acts of flowers that I’ll be able to do.
Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes: On Flowers, Mostly
When I was in first grade, I used to have
recurring dreams in which I hovered a few inches
above a sheet which turned into a quiet billowingsea. I don’t have them anymore, only the images
fixed in memory. But I recognize the attitude:
listening for a hush that isn’t completesilence— filled instead with insinuations
of sound and movement. Isn’t this too
a kind of reading, and the rippling a kindof poetry? Yes, I think these are some forms
that help us. Or spirits, if that’s how you want
to name them. Dreams, for sure. But there’sgot to be something in you which knew it wanted
Luisa A. Igloria, Dreamwriting
to turn its face in that direction, which wanted
to follow. How else could we have gotten here?
In all the stuff on this blog, I’m thinking about poetry. Even when writing about Nirvana, I was thinking about poems and popularity and the way that obscurity can be an advantage. I was thinking about an underground for poetry, and how the idea of “indie” given to us by the 90s really cross-pollinated with literary culture and “indie publishing.” Because the hollowing out of the term “indie” and its contradictions matters for poetry too. Just as “indie” has long since become a mere algorithm and a fashion in the music world, many “indie” presses and bookstores prove to be highly de-pendent on corporate and state partnerships. A big difference, though, is that poetry has nowhere near the commercial appeal of music: a poet can’t “sell out” in the same way, because nobody is really buying.
And that is part of the problem. In this cordoned off, non-commercial little world of poetry and its “community” and the “independence” it so values, everything gets rationalized and excused, and you can get very deluded about your position. You can end up thinking all poetry is on the same side, inherently against the status quo, and sanctified by its being “non-profit.” This is often aligned with the view that poetry and its culture is somehow spiritual and immaterial, “a noble calling,” and that the political economics of it all is just a troublesome afterthought. I’ve called this view “literary exceptionalism,” and the problem isn’t just that it leads to an insular culture of boring poetry, bad politics, and exploitation; it’s also that it makes it hard to have any real sense of one’s position as an artist—and as such, “independence” ceases to be a material fact. It becomes “indie” as mere vibes, style, aesthetics.
And these are two things I’m always rattling on about: 1) literary exceptionalism is bogus and has no material analysis, and 2) independent literary culture—a counterculture for literature—is defined by how it relates to material factors. My idea of independent literary culture is one whose grounding principles draw a material line, not merely an aesthetic one, against the bullshit constituting establishment literary culture. To achieve this, one has to see the forces shaping the field of poetry and how these fit into the larger political-economic picture—and also how one fits into these, or against these, oneself. And for poets, in addition to broad factors like class itself, the unique conditioning forces include the state, the neoliberalized university (with its culture of professionalism and scarcity), and sources of centralized wealth (as given directly by entities like Amazon and as funneled through foundations and non-profits). Literary entities aligned with these things constitute, in varying degrees, the establishment forces—or at least those who have ceased to actively oppose the establishment.
In the last 35 years or so, there has been a massive blurring between this establishment—with its resources and infrastructure—and the ideology of “indie” within poetry. Everything has been disoriented. Where once it was absolutely clear where the establishment centers were and who was on their side in poetry—”Official Verse Culture” was institutionally and aesthetically distinct from the various schools of oppositional poetics, and the latter mostly lacked the resources of the former—now virtually every way of writing poetry has some foothold in the establishment.
R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no.1)
Goodbye tombstones. Goodbye minus signs.
Goodbye to the summer storm that became a winter of unsolvable arithmetic.
Hello wings. Hello honeycombs.
Hello murmurs emerging from the underground full-throated as a high school battle of the bands.
It’s early morning. I’m too sleepy to remember much that happened before this moment.
I’m too awake to release us from any promises of a dream.
Rich Ferguson, Hello, Goodbye
This season’s live session was all about growth. Growing your writing, pruning your writing to help it grow, identifying places where growth was being impeded. The session was lively: it’s good to give space, and be in a space, in which writers feel safe enough to express their fears, and one of the topics that came up, a topic that almost always comes up, is the fear of being left behind.
As we worked through exercises aimed at identifying what we wanted to write about rather than what we felt we should be writing about. One of the recurring blocks I see writers struggling with is feelings around the pressure to conform, keep up, replicate ‘successful’ writing and writers, all of which end up being a block to authenticity. The talk turned towards feelings of being irrelevant. The feeling of not really being listened to, not really being counted, not being classed as an emerging writer, because all the awards, all the attention, all the references to emergence in the writing community is aimed towards younger writers.
So much of what is happening, particularly in poetry, seems very non traditional in terms of style. But this is how literature evolves. Poetry is not a static art form, it is an evolving art form. Boundaries are always being pushed. I say this a lot, but it’s worth staying again – good writing never goes out of fashion, and authenticity is the path to good writing. Replicating a writing style because you have seen that style win competitions will lead to dissatisfaction because eventually that writing, that writer, won’t progress, they won’t grow.
Wendy Pratt, Growth Session: Older Writers Emerge Too
Let us be skunk cabbage, robed in red with our sisters.
Sarah Lada, Awe, A-W-E
Let us be spring peepers singing multiplicities.
Let us be river rocks guiding the bright breasts of fish and fowl.
Let us be symphony, whirlwind, and egg tooth
piercing the membrane, quietly cracking speckled shells.
Woke up feeling dread, like an important task was left undone, or some big issue was going to have to be faced. The smoke from the neighbor’s chimney writhed like a live thing, a fish desperate to escape the line, twisting, straining first in one direction, then the opposite. Temps have dropped, in the way of spring here, first one thing then another. I am a puddle of self-pity one minute, glorying in snowdrops the next. We’re weeks past the spring forward but still in transition. The new the new. The news the news. Yesterday I went to a store I rarely visit, and sat staring at the back of Dave’s apartment building. Later Bob said, I can’t believe Dave is just gone. Yes, I said. I know. But turns out he was talking about another Dave. Another type of gone. So many things seem unbelievable. So many things I thought would be different are not what I thought. I have wanted many things and sometimes it passed, the wanting, sometimes not. Sometimes I got what I wanted. Sometimes I got something else not looked for. And sometimes that resolved the unmet want. Sometimes it didn’t. Tulip and iris greens are shoving up, and the swamp is bruised with burgeoning skunk cabbage. We may get some snow. I wonder if I shouldn’t have bothered to get up today at all. But I did. I did.
Marilyn McCabe, Time to clean because I’m sick of keeping things
Worked on this version of Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem this morning.
Ode to a Suit
Morning, and you lie
Roy Marshall, Ode to a Suit
on a chair, waiting
for my airs, my graces,
my tenderness,
my hope, my body
to inhabit yours,
I step off the boat
of sleep, leave it
rocking behind me,
fill your sleeves,
set foot
in your empty legs,
the embrace
of your unwavering faith,
go into the street,
into poetry […]