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: synapses on fire, cryptic colonial zooids, a hearth of spiders, open secrets, a big smashing life, and more. Enjoy.
I’m thrilled that spring is finally here and with it, the National/Global Poetry Month. I’m particularly excited to be writing ekphrastic poems this year. Many thanks to Maureen Thorson for gathering the NaPoWriMo community around another poetry feast and for setting our synapses on fire with each of her wonderful prompts.
Like in previous years, the first draft of each poem written this month will expire when the next day’s draft is posted.
Romana Iorga, NaPoWriMo 2025
Welcome to my *fifth* annual installment of poetry prompts for NAPOWRIMO! You can find past editions here:
- prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2024
- prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2023
- prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2022
- prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2021
As you write to the poetry prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025 (or any of the writing prompts published here), please be mindful of these important rules:
Carolee Bennett, All new Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025!
- Follow these prompts *wherever* they take you. Don’t get hung up on the details.
- Never, never, never, never, never, never copy the sample poems. They’re for inspiration only! If you borrow style or quote excerpts in your drafts, please be sure to credit the original and the poet.
In my own current writing journey I am pleased to say I have made a small breakthrough: the daily exercises are helping. In short, I have allowed myself to play with the writing exercises, sometimes using them specifically on the project, sometimes just writing for fun. Reader, I should really take my own advice more often because I’m writing now. I’m writing well and writing with joy and not dreading my desk on a morning. I’m back in the writing flow that I enjoy and it’s because I stopped taking it too seriously and started enjoying it. A mix of less pressure, more joy.
This is the power that a daily external structure can bring to your work and while there is always a danger of becoming over reliant on prompts and exercises, a dedicated practice for a short amount of time is such a good way to boost your motivation and put the determination and JOY back into your work.
Wendy Pratt, April Write-A-Thon
Yesterday I graded the daily writing that I had students do on Monday, the day of the quilting bee. I had decided to have a quilting bee because we were doing a module on Susan Glaspell’s one act play, “Trifles” and her short story that she created after the play, “A Jury of Her Peers.” We watched this presentation created by The Edge Ensemble Theater Company, which was filmed in a historic farm house.
Ideas of putting a quilt together by quilting or knotting are integral to the play, and even when I first taught the play in the 90’s, students had little to no experience with quilts. I thought it would be fun to do a quilting bee for the entire Spartanburg Methodist College community, along with my students. I hoped that students would make connections to the play, but I wasn’t sure that they would, so we had continued discussion on Wednesday.
As I graded their daily writings, I was impressed with the connections they made without my insight. Most of them made the connections about the wrung neck of the bird, the noose, and the knotting done on a quilt, connections that I hoped would be obvious but often aren’t. Several students said that working on the quilts helped them appreciate what a lonely life the farm women in the play had had. Some of them talked about the stories that quilts show. Their writing reassured me that the effort to do it was worth it.
I’m at a school where the medieval lit professor has her students make chain mail and illuminated manuscripts, and her efforts made me want to do something similar. Almost all of the English faculty do more with their classes than have writing assignments, and I’m impressed with the kinds of posters and presentations that they create. I’m so grateful to be at a place where we all know that there are more ways to assess student learning than in written papers that we keep on file until the next accreditation review. I’ve worked in places that discouraged genre-stretching assignments for fear that the accreditors would see them as suspicious. It is so wonderful to be at a liberal arts college.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee
I’ve never read Homer’s Odyssey, so it was a surprise to me to find out that the word mentor is derived from Mentōr, an old man and an incarnation of the Goddess Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Fitting, Mentor offered Odysseus and his son Telemachus advice – and these days, of course, “mentor” describes someone who guides a less experienced colleague.
I’m not sure I had even heard of the term before I was lucky enough to be given my own mentor. For six months, as part of my Arvon/ Jerwood Young Poets Prize, George Szirtes and I communicated by email where he shared his wisdom and insights with me. George is a prolific writer of incredible skill, grace and wisdom, and his role as my teacher is hard-wired into my brain – to the extent that I still ask myself “What will George think?” when I share poetry news or opinions on social media.
George set the bar high: becoming a mentor myself was a scary business. But over the last fifteen years it’s been one of the most rewarding parts of my career. A mentoring relationship is intimate and committed – like Anegla Chevaux says, “Mentoring involves much more than careers advice and feedback on poems, it is an intimate relationship of sharing and listening, of support and trust”.
For the last year, I’ve been a pastoral mentor for four writers on the Writing Chance programme; a New Writing North scheme which supports new writers from working class and lower-income backgrounds. Instead of focusing on their written work, I’ve spent time discussing self-care and wellbeing, helping writers to develop writing routines and to explore career possibilities. It’s left me with an even keener sense of how various and complex our writing lives are; how the writing we produce is just the tip of the iceberg, just the quickest glimpse into personal, emotional and professional world of the writer.
Clare Shaw, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”
I was recently reminded of the poet June Jordan (1936-2002) by the stellar human and 2024 National Book Award winning poet, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Ms. Khalaf Tuffaha was visiting Highline College, where I teach, to read her work to over a hundred students, most of them, who had never heard a poet read before. It was an alchemical afternoon of poetry, politics, and much-needed community.
But things didn’t end there. Before Lena read her spectacular poem, “Dear June Jordan,” she told the students of finding a copy of Jordan’s book in a shop when she was a college student herself. She told my students in a teacherly voice that they heard, “Go home and Google her tonight.” And to my delight, many of them did.
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 poetry 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).
Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now
One hundred daffodils have opened in my yard, and the rocket arugula is ready to pluck for salads. The blueberry bush survived its first winter, though last year’s berries were all eaten by the catbirds, and there’s new growth on the hydrangeas.
It wasn’t so long ago—last spring, in fact—that enjoying these things came without remorse and regret. This spring, though, watching the doves do it in the redbud tree can sometimes make you feel a little guilty for enjoying nature’s spectacle while fascism rises. You can concentrate on lining up the rusty glider’s heaves and hos with the grackles’ squawks for only so long before it hits you that democracy is dying in bright sunshine, too. […]
I’ve been making lots of signs and flyers and even t-shirts for my daily walks around the neighborhood. My first was a test to see how Indivisible Baltimore’s logo would look on apparel. For me, Indivisible is the point at which creativity meets activism. Here’s another: A Torch for the Long Night: Voices Against Fascism. Poets, please consider contributing to this journal, which I am coediting with the phenomenal Ren Powell.
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, pièce de ré·sis·tance
Physalia is highly successful organism, widespread across the world’s oceans. Nevertheless, its environment is under increasing threat from pollution and climate change. Its potent armoury of highly toxic stings is no match for this type of attack. Perhaps new forms of cryptic colonial zooids may evolve to reverse the damage… If they had the words, what would they tell us? […]
I have used invented or code-based languages before on my videos, eg The Ferrovores. They have all followed their own internally consistent grammatical rules and meanings. But in Physalia, the “language” is purely phonetic and has no underlying structure or meaning, other than what was in the source sentence.
The biomorphic creatures in the video are not real Physalia, not least because I didn’t have any footage I could use. Instead, the Physalia biomorphs were variously constructed from Particle Illusion (Boris FX), coralline red algae, Muntrie flowers and Eucalypt flowers. Very few people have seen Physalia out at sea (I have a few times!) so using imaginary shapes seemed fitting.
Ian Gibbins, Physalia
In the beam black scraps of stealth
strobe in and out of existence
it hurts to chart their orbitsand I question my eyes
Paul Tobin, BLACK SCRAPS OF STEALTH
all the way to the car
I’m excited to share that I have a new poem published! Check out “Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” which is currently featured as part of Split This Rock‘s Poem of the Week series. It’s always meaningful to see my work find a home, and I’m grateful to everyone at Split This Rock for featuring this poem. This poem will also be included in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which, for those unfamiliar, is an amazing resource for general readers and educators alike.
“Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” is a poem that comes out of my history with speech therapy as a child. The first draft came from a writing exercise I did alongside my students in the poetry workshop I taught last year. The exercise in question is Rita Dove’s “Ten-Minute Spill” from The Practice of Poetry.
José Angel Araguz, new poem up at Split This Rock!
On Monday, we were with the above group in front of the U.S. Consulate in Montreal, standing up for Canada’s sovereignty. Similar demonstrations took place all across Canada, at consulates in every province. I met some good people. One woman had come in from the Eastern Townships, motivated by the controversy over the small library in her community that straddles the border. As of Oct. 1, US officials will prohibit direct Canadian access to the main entrance of the Haskell Library and Opera House, which has been used cooperatively by local residents of both countries for over a hundred years. The border is marked on the floor of the library, but library patrons have always come from both sides, with patrols making sure everybody goes back where they came from and nobody unknown goes out the wrong door. Soon, Canadians wishing to use the library will be required to go through U.S. customs first. […]
I think of the remarkable city of Montreal where I am privileged to live, and how most of us view diversity as one of its strongest aspects. I live in the very mixed-ethnic neighborhood of Cote-de-Neiges. When I enter a metro car, I am always — as a white person — in the minority. This is, frankly, a good experience, and if more white people had it, the world would be different. Around me are people from all over the world, speaking many languages, wearing all sorts of clothing, from elderly to newborns. As we observe each other going about our daily lives, we see our similarities and commonalities: everybody’s cold, tired of winter, bundled up, sniffling — in another month, we’ll all be smiling because it will be spring. We’re tolerant and accepting, as a city; we eat each other’s food and love it, we learn languages as a hobby, we travel a lot, we all share the parks, the river, our bike paths and transit system, our crazy northern climate. In the very rare events when there is a racist incident such as an attack on a mosque or a synagogue, the reaction from our city leaders and population has always been, “This is not who we are in Montreal, we won’t tolerate this kind of hatred.” This ideal of tolerance and protection includes all oppressed groups, from women to indigenous people to those of various sexual orientations and genders. When accusations of racial profiling by police arise, citizens push back. Of course racism and prejudice exist here. However, we do pretty well as a city, living together.
How I wish that more of the world could be this way — and how worried I am that it could so easily be lost! All we have to do is read the news to see what’s at stake. Last night’s video of a Tufts University graduate student being arrested on a Boston street and abducted in under four minutes by a swarm of masked, black-clothed ICE agents was absolutely terrifying. Her crime, so far as we know? Co-authoring, with three other students, a letter to the Tufts administration criticizing its position on Palestine/Israel and calling for the university to divest. She and other students and professors across the U.S. have been doxxed by Canary Mission, an organization targeting pro-Palestinian (they use the term “pro-Hamas”) activists on college campuses. This likely led to her arrest. Canary Mission also has a website in Canada, which exposes the names and faces of 431 Canadian professors, university staff, and students that the group similarly accuses.
Free speech is the bedrock of our human rights; when it’s gone, our humanity goes with it.
Beth Adams, Speech Must Remain Free
ten-word salad
no more sewage-talk
nothing wrong with cardboardfrom ebay
Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2025
from my fridge
from a rubber plantation
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been going through my days with half a mind grasping toward prayer, and mostly coming up empty. None of the ones from my childhood make sense for me—I’m not a Christian—and many of the Sanskrit mantras feel both too short and a little too distant, not being in my own language. In the early morning hours when I’m driving my child to school and the beauty of the sunrise awes us both to silence, when a giant hawk watches us drive by from his brief perch on a neighbor’s mailbox, when I’m overwhelmed by the “muzzle velocity” of illegal and inhumane actions coming out of the White House, or when my Telegram chat thread is full of new photos and videos of the dead coming out of Gaza, what words can my mind hold to?
What language to honor the heart-rending generosity of Spring in North Carolina alongside the mechanized death machine?
So, last week I finally sat down and wrote my own prayer—the one I need right now. I’ve been repeating it to myself multiple times a day, honing the language of it as I do, and have also shared it with my son. It feels too intimate to share it here (maybe I will some time in the future). However, part of my inspiration was The Emerald Podcast, in which the host Joshua Michael Schrei often intersperses beautiful prayerful passages amidst the larger experience of each episode. The most recent one of these episodes, “Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis,” arrived right when I needed it, as it is devoted to this ancient yearning I’ve been feeling to hail the Sacred when the everythingness of the world has been turned up to eleven.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Staying with the Trouble
i see a video on tiktok about ways
Robin Gow, what does not grow legs
to leave the united states. you can pour yourself
into water bottles & throw them into the ocean.
you can bury yourself in a time capsule.
hope that when they dig you up
that the world is softer & less terrifying.
So. I’m back in Los Angeles, my old stomping grounds (writing grounds, eating grounds, loving grounds) for AWP and I’m suddenly flooded with emotions. To me, these hills are haunted with the ghosts of my past selves. Failures. Triumphs. Men who dumped me. The one who didn’t. The friends I’ve made and lost. The poems I’ve had published and the many, many, many projects I’ve abandoned, given-up on, or failed to get accepted. They’re all up there in those barely-green hills. Or they’re waving at me when I drive by the sea. All of them mocking me for what I’ve failed to accomplish.
I’m used to that, but then I saw on the calendar of events that a poet who was very mean to me ten years ago (won’t start rumors about who it is), is headlining at a big event. Worse, she’s headlining with some of my favorite poets who I want to headline with. […]
It reminds me again how challenging it is to be an artist. 90% of the time we’re failing. The 10% of the time that we “succeed” we still have to ask, “is this good enough?” And then you throw into it a situation like AWP. This is where all of the “great” writers go. Some of them are your age. Some are much younger. All of them are amazing and you look up at the luminaries on the stage and ask “Why isn’t that me with that book deal, major prize, panel position and group of adoring fans?”
I was feeling really bummed the other day, and got on the phone with a long-time poetry pal. This is one of the writers I most admire and look-up to and wish I could emulate. Instead of flicking me away like the little piece of dried up hair dander that I feel I am these days, she told me that she too is feeling less-than at AWP. Her latest book isn’t ready. She didn’t get the deal she wanted. And at the age she is, she isn’t yet a household name.
I was so glad she told me this. It’s not that I want to see a fellow writer struggling, but at the same time, it reminds me that none of us are alone in this struggle. This poet is one of my favorite people to read, learn from, and most importantly, spend time with. If neither of us ever get to become household names, I’m still so glad I get to/got to spend my time sharing poems with this one true audience member.
Tresha Faye Haefner, A Pep Talk for Those Going (and Not Going) to AWP. With advice from Danusha Lameris and Elizabeth Gilbert
Yesterday evening Peter Kenny and I stood in the doorway of the wood-panelled hall at the Art Workers’ Guild in London and surveyed the throng: who were all these very tall, young people? I’ve no idea who gets invited to these shebangs, but it was a mystery to me – ten years ago the event would have stuffed full of the grandees of the poetry world. Now it’s all become a very youthful. Which I’m not complaining about, just observing!
So on to the ceremonies, and we were given readings of all the seven commended poems and then the top three. All poets did a good job, and the judges too, particularly the smiling Romalyn Ante. I particularly enjoyed Kit Buchan’s ‘Hallow’een Ghazal’, read very confidently from memory, and Matt Barnard’s second-prize ‘Two Boys at Midnight’. And then who should be announced as the winning poet but Fiona Larkin – out of the Pindrop stable no less! – and someone I feel actually know, with a lovely poem ‘Absence has a grammar’ – actually the title alone is prize-worthy.
I asked Fiona afterwards – what was it like getting the call? “It was back in January,” she said, ” I had a message to call the Poetry Society, and I assumed my direct debit hadn’t gone through or something…” Haha! An anecdote to dine out on for some time I think. How wonderful!
Robin Houghton, At the National Poetry Competition awards night
VerseFest runs March 25-29. The kickoff was at Saw Gallery, Ottawa. It runs every day. We are so lucky to have access to this and some events are even offered for free.
What a strange thing for this rural hermit to be in a city, teeming like an anthill. More pedestrians per block than I’ve seen in months and months. And in a low-ceilinged room, so many tables and familiar faces. (I was too gobsmacked to be social but a few people hallooed me.) […]
I wasn’t going to take the mantle of thankful posting for the privilege of witnessing the poets this year but this process gives me a chance to reflect.
I’m not going to be obsessive like some years, going to every event, livetweeting, taking hundreds of photos, even with fresh concussion, migraine, meds and hiding in hoodie, cap and sunglasses. That was a mad caper.
Pearl Pirie, VerseFest is now on
J and M made me laugh like the monocle de mon oncle in the Gopher alcove. We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns. This is how friendship works between writers: we converse through various texts while wrangling quotations and interpretations as if the world depended on it. As if we, too, depend on it. The as-if is our solace and our shared joy. We refuse the world we are given. We argue over the other ways it could be. We blow up the given to realize the otherwise. We entreat our readers to imagine more— and urgently. We fear dying before the book that escapes us, the book that will free us, the text that will loosen the compulsion or obsession to write. We covet the pure products of pears and apricots. We ode them for blowing our minds. When we leave each other, we return to the world where literature, art, philosophy, humanities, and words don’t ‘really matter’ — or matter instrumentally. But these moments are called upon in nights of despair, and we remember that we are not alone. Not entirely alone. Not utterly so.
Alina Stefanescu, Notes on what the programs called “AWP 2025”.
This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin, wren, blackbird, an extremely jazzy thrush, and somewhere at the back of it all, like Ringo Starr making his presence known in the corners of Abbey Road, a woodpecker, his knocking persistent and timeless. Two dipper came out of nowhere, trailing each other’s twists and turns like Spitfires in an aerial display of astonishing dexterity. Apparently exhausted, they came to land on separate rocks in the stream, their white bibs bobbing. Take away their markings, give them a black beak, and you could be looking at a blackbird. Their song is not a million miles away, either. Then they were away again, lost in their spirals. Leaving the wood for the road back to the car, a wren, briefly at eye level on a fence post, glared at me for a second, then treated me to a solo of distilled purity and scorn.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my blog post from last year on Tom Paulin’s great poem of anger and healing, ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. Again without going into details, it has been in my mind again recently, as we negotiate the slow-slow-slow-slow-quickquickquick of our beloved NHS as it limps to put right that damage. Not the closing of the poem this time, but the first line of its final stanza: ‘the vicious trapped crying of a wren’. As fulfilment of the lyric utterance promised in the poem’s title, this is worth the admission fee (sorry kids) on its own. Everything you can possibly know about wrens and wren-ness is in those six words. I can’t prove this; I just know it to be true.
This led me, by way of faulty memory, to the much unhappier reading experience of being given 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson for my birthday several years ago. It’s not just a book I was unable to finish, it joins a select group of books I have actually thrown across the room.
Anthony Wilson, Birdsong
Let me here jump on the Ada Limón bandwagon. I have not read her work in a while. Here’s one. It’s this line that sticks with me: “I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.” Isn’t it great? A hearth of spiders! I see a flat stone spread before the gape of a fireplace, see the detritus of insect leavings on the slab and the dusty crisscross of webbing, frayed and swaying in a breeze down the chimney. But the fire is just there too, the heat of it also, the spiders warm and hungry, wound in the corner watching, waiting. In an early hour they dart out at a floundering in the lines, something tiny and caught. It breaks free. Something else causes the web to sway, the spider to dart, but it’s a cinder, dry, useless.
But also I love then the quotidian: the ritual garbage rolling. The idle chitchat.
I love that the poem then stops short. I bump into it as it says, “Look, we are not unspectacular things.” Yes, I say. That is true. So true!
This poem billows out into the world just like the stars are fabric-spread across the sky, and we, we too billow in our possibilities. You. Me. All of us. Our hunger, our burning, our wonder, our promise.
Marilyn McCabe, what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Blueprint produce a series of elegant pamphlets wrapped in a distinctive, iridescent blue cover. “Year of the Rat” has a central sequence about a large family of rats who’d moved into the woodshed, but it doesn’t start the collection. […]
Most of these poems would have been written during Covid lockdowns, pushing the idea of survival and what family connections mean to the fore. Covid is not explicitly mentioned, these are not lockdown poems, but it lurks. These poems are an unsentimental, compassionate look at family, how blood connections and inheritances survival and can either strengthen or weaken familial bonds.
Emma Lee, “Year of the Rat” Charles G Lauder Jr (Blueprint) – book review
In the curtains are still we see [M.C.] Gardner’s talent: it is a characteristically vivid depiction of a scene which has a powerful emotional resonance. Not a word is wasted. Each line strives to convey as much as possible, in as few words as possible. As her drop-in revealed, Gardner deploys these skills to explore the nature of male-female relationships. Many of the poems in the collection explore the frustrations, the anticipation, the hopes, the joys, the disappointments, and the memories of love affairs. There are, however, other themes too. For example, melted in cubes examines the transience of life; a walk in the woods explores the palliative effects of nature during Lockdown; the project the unreliability of appearances; the wedding canvas, and the summer exhibition the nature of visual art and the life of the artist; and all rules are suspended and manipulation the nature of freedom.
There are also poems that are informed by Gardner’s Romanian heritage. I found remember the locusts particularly interesting. Here the style is significantly different: ‘we are trapped- / mile long Sovrom train with Cyrillic labels/ locked freight trains with a message of friendship…/ Sovrom wood, Sovrom meat,/ Sovrom grain, Sovrom cement,/ Sovrom pipes…/ we are trapped.’ The cumulative effect of repetition and listing conveys the repressive nature of the regime. Furthermore, it is the directness in these lines and in lines such as: ‘I must watch over my shoulder/ there are informers everywhere’ that makes the reality so authentic and imaginable. Its debilitating effect, however, is left to Gardner’s characteristic imagery of: ‘broken pavements, bare poplar trees,/ silent streets of decaying villas/ with blue paper at the windows…/the old and the young walk shrivelled…/ ghosts of long queues’ and to the symbol that concludes the poem: of ‘the silhouette of the street beggar/ rummaging into the street refuse bins.’
I have always been an admirer of M.C. Gardner’s poetry and consequently had high expectations of this collection. I hope it is clear from what I have written above that those expectations were realised in full. Lovers of imagist poetry will find much to enjoy in discarded objects of a love affair.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘discarded objects of a love affair’ by M.C. Gardner
Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge [by MC Hyland] exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight.”
With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next.
rob mclennan, MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge
I was very happy this week to learn that one of my favourite writers, Anthony V. Capildeo, has been awarded a prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for their poetry. Twenty years ago — when they were writing as Vahni Capildeo and I had a small poetry press called Landfill — I published their prose poem Person Animal Figure (2005), a sequence for three voices expressed through three typefaces. Typesetting a text is one way to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and my ongoing interest in the nature and history of the prose poem began with the making of this pamphlet.
Capildeo has since published many more books and pamphlets of poetry in both prose and verse, and this is the achievement that the Windham Campbell Prize recognises. Something that doesn’t yet exist, though, is a collection of their critical prose, which I admire just as highly. Their gift for fluent reflection on writing as a kind of thought woven into the wider business of living seems to me comparable to that of Virginia Woolf (who once wrote “the peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other”). So this Pinks is a selection of passages that I find particularly illuminating of their own poetry.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #30: A Poetics of Reverberation
The bit of Latin immediately preceding the Shakespeare quotation is from Erasmus’s Lingua. Pointing out how Erasmian Shakespeare is seems to have gone out of fashion — probably just because not many people read Erasmus any more — but in my (unoriginal, if dated) opinion he is much more like Erasmus than anyone else, and I suppose the anonymous compiler of this collection thought so too. (For the avoidance of doubt, being like Erasmus is a good thing.)
Scholars trying to build an academic career have to reserve any such “discoveries” for a big splash in the Review of English Studies, ideally with a linked piece in the Times Literary Supplement. But one of the fun things about not being a career academic any more is putting this sort of thing on substack instead. I’ve done this a few times already — pretty much all my posts in the “from the archives” section on the contents page contain original research. Many of the manuscripts I’ve written about here haven’t been studied by anyone else, and that’s even more true at the level of individual Latin poems: I’ve written before about a tiny bit of Latin that might possibly be one of John Donne’s lost Latin epigrams, for instance.
But today I thought I’d try to write a slightly more systematic account of what you do, as a scholar, when you make what might be a “new find” — when you come across in manuscript what might be a “new” (i.e. previously lost or overlooked) poem by a reasonably well-known author. In this case, a Latin poem that looks plausibly as if it may be by Robert Southwell, the English Catholic poet and Jesuit martyr, hanged at Tyburn in 1595, but which is not any of the relatively small number of his Latin poems that have previously been known, and — more interestingly — is also not at all like them.
Victoria Moul, A possible new poem by Robert Southwell (with a bonus smidgen of Shakespeare and Erasmus)
For Auden and his fellow social realists, the world was to be understood, to a greater or lesser degree, through the lens of a particular kind of Marxist thought, with its essentially Victorian view of history as linear, the arrow of time pointing on to inevitable progress. This was married to a relatively unproblematic view of language and its relationship with the world the poet wished to evoke and the ideas he (invariably a he) wanted to expound. In the 30s at least, the MacSpaunday poets had something to say and every confidence in poetry as a vehicle through which they could say it. The result was a body of work, much of it very powerful, that was ironic in tone, impersonal, favouring (in theory at least) the communal over the individual, suspicious of the profound; what their Irish contemporary Brian Coffey described as the poetry of the audenary.
Of course, decades are not impermeable containers of the homogenous, and not all 30s poets were the same. Indeed, there was a strong counter-current of writing that moved to a different rhythm, or set of rhythms to the mainstream. Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne and the small group of English Surrealists associated with him forged their own individual styles during this time, and that most individual of all 20th century British poets, David Jones, published his Arthurian epic of WWI, In Parenthesis in 1937. This poem, in which history is absorbed into the mythic, appeared just a year after TS Eliot published Burnt Norton, whose opening lines are an implicit rejection of linear time:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.Barker and Gascoyne were to discover their voices in the decade that followed, while Thomas and Eliot, the Eliot of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, along with Yeats, were major influences on the younger poets who came after them. And many of these poets were beginning to publish before the end of the 30s, in student magazines out of Oxford and Cambridge and the anthology The New Apocalypse, which appeared in 1939.
Something had clearly happened to cause this shift, and that something was the imminence, and then the actuality, of a second World War. In the face of such a definite instance of history repeating itself, it must have been difficult to accept the idea that time was a steady march towards a Socialist utopia, and ironic indifference to the difficulties of expression through language may well have seemed an unaffordable luxury. Auden himself tacitly acknowledged this shift by sailing for America as a prelude to more or less abandoning his left-wing politics.
Billy Mills, The Collected Poems of Terence Tiller
You stir the substance of memory:
start and stop and start again, not knowingwhat you’ll turn up, where it will lead—
you know it goes deep, down to the water table.
That’s where you seek the roots of conversation.When you stand at the lip of the well and call,
Luisa A. Igloria, In Conversation
only your voice bounces back and echoes. Do it again,
start and stop and start again, not knowing but knowing:
in conversation you’d talk with someone besides yourself.
Many writers were stunned to learn last week that Meta, the tech conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been using their books to train its AI assistant, Llama 3. In a major story for The Atlantic, Alex Reisner outlines how Meta wished to circumnavigate time and financial costs, and so turned to LibGen.
What is LibGen? According to one site, “Library Genesis is a Shadow Library, and a useful and comprehensive online portal that offers free access to millions of ebooks, articles and pdf files in a range of languages.”
But what exactly is a “Shadow Library?” According to Wikipedia, “Shadow libraries are part of the open access and open knowledge movements. They seek to more freely disseminate academic scholarship and other media, often citing a moral imperative to make knowledge freely available.”
Fully-flowing information? Open access to knowledge? Free books for everyone in the world? Sounds pretty good. Except, according to Reisner, “Over the years, the collection has ballooned as contributors piled in more and more pirated work.” Now, that pirated work is being used to train Llama 3 and ultimately enrich Meta rather than the authors themselves, many of whom were unaware their works were even available.
The Author’s Guild has initiated legal action “against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using pirated books. If your book was used by Meta, you’re automatically included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action…”
To see if your own work, which includes pieces published in literary magazines, appears in LibGen, you can search the database here or use Reisner’s “cleaned-up version” here.
Becky Tuch, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By Lit Mags!
Today, as I walked across the L.A. Convention Center at this year’s AWP conference, someone asked me, “Are you important?”
“No,” I said, “absolutely not. Are you? I’m nobody.”
She seemed to give it some thought as I continued on my way. She watched me like she might know me, despite my explanation: I’m nobody.
I think of Emily Dickinson’s follow-up line, “Are you nobody too?”
Being nobody has always been a comfort to me. No parents. No expectations. Writing Nobody to contact in case of emergency in my young years. If I’d become a drifter or a grifter, it would have been par for the course. “I figured you’d steal your way across America,” Charity said to me once. Charity, my biological mother.
“Making enough money to support one person isn’t that hard,” I said. I was still in college then. “I suppose if I want to build a big smashing life, that might be something.”
In many of the stories I read, women are not presented as reliable or valuable narrators. You can’t quite believe the woman’s version of the tale.
A man’s story is another matter. In literature, a man’s story is a great thing, a revered thing. A big stomping thing in the world.
When I have a conversation with a man, their words stomp all over God’s world, and mine walk around the edges of the room. A man and his story stare at the sun, the whole face of the sun.
A woman’s story is a small, smudged thing, a stepped-on thing, a hard-to-see thing, a crowded back thing.
In my childhood, adults were not reliable. Other kids were not reliable. God was not reliable.
I always knew my mother was an unreliable narrator. Nothing she said was true. She said I was evil.
I’m not really evil, I thought. Evil is relative.
Now that I’m an adult, evil feels real, not relative.
Kate Gale, Are Women Reliable Narrators?
A lawyer sends me a pdf of my mother’s handwritten will. I’m not in it. I have a legal right to contest it. I think it’s funny that contest as a noun is defined as a competition to obtain something, as a verb it means to oppose something as wrong.
It’s funny in that kind of laugh or it will kill you kind of way. Who wins? And what does anyone get out of calling out the monsters under the bed. In the bed.
I print the will, rip it into strips, put it in a blender with this mossy Norwegian water, and I make new paper out of it. Then I make collages in the shapes of wasps.
And only then do I write to the lawyer, removing myself from her obituary.
Ren Powell, Estranged
I’m still thinking about what Rebecca Solnit says in Hope in the Dark: “Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.”
This past week, I found joy in a March snowfall — out like a lion and all that. I was also working so just had to do quick little clicks on my way there. I would have liked more, but also, I did get a few okay ones! Joy! And there was a lamp in the window, with books. This seemed to symbolize so much for me at that moment. All this weather. So. Much. Weather. But also, a light in a window, steadfast. It feels like we’re all living in a snow squall, in a spring storm. Still, there is hope, there are those making of themselves a light, offering light, keeping a light on.
Shawna Lemay, A Lamp in the Window and Other Joys
There are still wars raging, crying for
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The unravelling
attention. There are still pictures of blood
and rubble, renewing grief. There is still a
world falling apart, demanding correction.
There is still a lopsided reality begging
for the weight to shift. The language of
being has bent itself into errors: we
debate in the wrong tense, our curt
apostrophes are in faulty places forcing
mistaken belonging, an unequal grammar
is purging all meaning, leaving untethered
words: words that fall like fire into the
stubborn mouth of disbelief. The moon
hangs like a sword over us. How should
we deliver ourselves to the clouds?
beneath a sky that may or may not answer
Grant Hackett [no title]
i bring out my heart
i begin to read