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: when the egg is already broken, when women were birds, when everything seems a little closer, and when poetry makes us squirm. Enjoy.
Years ago I wrote a poem about the places where I’d lived that I loved most and what they all had in common was this sense that they might not be here tomorrow. I was talking about New Orleans, San Francisco and Fort Lauderdale, and about natural disasters, about hurricanes and earthquakes and sea level rise. I wondered if being faced with that possibility along with the real likelihood that everyone local had lost someone to a disaster meant that we reached for reasons to celebrate whenever possible. It’s more complicated than that, especially when race is a factor, but I think at some level it’s true. Take joy where you find it.
Brian Spears, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
I don’t want to say more than what the poem already does—doing so would diminish it—except that I wish I could hug that child who was so afraid of everything. I wonder what has become of her dolls. […]
Spring is not
Romana Iorga, God’s Dollhouse
everything, but it seems
to be the answer.
God is here,
stretching her green
knuckles to set
the heart aflame.
I’ve been trying to put all these elements into a poem: redbud trees, the slant of cold light as the sun sets, the struggle between the governed and the inept, the fact that we’ve never been far from the fascists we fear. I thought that by bringing in a political element, maybe I could avoid the cliches that come with poems about the first blooms of spring.
So far what I have is a collection of images and lines that don’t seem to go together […]
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Redbud Blossoms, Winter Sunset Songs, and Government Takeovers
The poem talks about glorious beautiful mornings, but I actually lived in a basement with a tiny window hidden behind bushes. Those windows are not among my favorite memories. I wanted to retell parts of the myth of Leda and the Swan, but I was not in a mental space to deal with the story I really wanted to tell. This was a baby step; a baby telling a bad dream it knows the mother won’t believe.
I remember drinking the tea. It was in a heavy pure white porcelain cup with a chip along the edge, rescued from a yard sale because I loved the smoothness and weight of it in my hand. I remember the tea was red and tart, brewed from hibiscus petals. The red was almost blood red at the deepest part of the cup, shading to a watery pink near the lip of the cup. The steam curled up briefly and wisped away. It was too cold to stay more than barely warm. The surface was so still it reflected the bare lightbulbs glaring off the waterproof industrial gray walls. I remember the gritty floor under my feet, sand mixed in with the paint covering the floor, broken off pieces of concrete falling from the ceiling.
PF Anderson, A Changing World
The title of this poem refers to a real shop that in 2020 was selling World War II memorabilia in the Royal Victoria Arcade in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. As well as RAF badges, Vera Lynn records and cellophaned copies of the Daily Mail from 1945, the shop also – and chillingly – offered a range of Nazi items, both new and reproduction, including swastika pin-badges and SS paraphernalia. The poem takes all of this as its starting point, and as a way of exploring a particular version of an English mentality, one that is fascinated by the war and by fascism, which experiences these things vicariously, and which identifies Englishness via Anglocentrism.
This is a poem that is deliberate in its use of cultural references and allusions. In the latter case, the ‘forced emblems’ are those of Union Jack bunting, the idea being that the very notion of ‘union’ in Britain has forever been haunted by a coercion that is often ignored by nationalist thinking. Elsewhere, ‘the overlords’ refers to those who took part in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France on 6th June, 1944, while their ‘avatars’ are the men who never saw the war, because they were too young, but who nevertheless ‘ruck’ internally with their own fantasies of military victory and the truth that they are civilians born after 1945. I think there is less pity here than there is anger towards arguably two generations of English people, among whom there is a malign streak of exceptionalism and arrogance. The middle-aged backbenchers who trumpeted Brexit in the Commons are among the older of these, while Stephen Yaxley-Lennon leads a younger group, one might say.
The rhythmic hesitancy of the poem’s opening is an attempt to capture that strange admixture of fascination, excitement and taboo that appears to manifest itself in this context. The second and third stanzas deliberately struggle to settle, and fail to settle, into clear lines of iambic pentameter, as if that verse form so commonly used for rhetoric in English is unable to accommodate the complexity and discord that the poem’s ideas seek to establish.
Drop-in by Jacob Lund (Nigel Kent)
The poem below was prompted by something a colleague said–that she’d consider belonging to any religion that permitted red wine and brie cheese. She was joking around, but the idea stayed in my mind. When I elaborated on it in a draft, the poem needed to be in first-person. And then it took off in an unexpected direction. Kind of a world-weary, sardonic direction, a commentary on our society perhaps. No: certainly. The poem changed tone from something rather amusing to something more reflective and serious. I had not seen that coming when I sat down to draft it!
I like that unexpected directions happen when reading, and writing, poems. One thing I have noticed when I see so-called poems “written” by an artificial intelligence program is that they deliver no such surprises. An algorithm’s surprise is called a bug; it occurs when something goes screwy in the code string. But AI isn’t human enough to understand surprise. Not yet, anyway.
Ann E. Michael, Unexpected directions
Whilst wondering which poem I would like to record for ‘Poem of the Month’ for my YouTube channel I found myself thinking about what Alan Parry wrote about one of my poems about grief. In his review of Welcome to the Museum of a Life he says: “I Don’t Know explores the uncertainty of loss with a quiet, devastating honesty: “I don’t know if biting one by one / through a dozen budded tulips would help.” Finch does not attempt to impose order on grief; instead, she lets it unfold organically, offering moments of both revelation and ambiguity.” I was drawn back to this poem and decided that it was the one I wanted to set down this time.
This led to me leaving a note on my desk to remind myself that I had chosen which poem to record. When I saw it the next morning and it said, “Poem of the Month: I Don’t Know”, I chuckled because very often it is actually the case that I don’t know until the last minute which one I will record and sometimes I can go to bed knowing and wake up no longer remembering!
I do know that the regular habit of recording my work has been a good way to develop my confidence with sharing my words as well as being able to share the poems as they sound in my head. When I read them silently to myself I see and hear the words as I read as if they are transported from the page – they scroll like a script. There was a lovely moment of revelation when I reached the end of this particular reading this month as I heard myself realise my nan is always with me. There was a wonderful sparkle within me at the whole resonance of that.
I have always thought of it as a quiet, contemplative poem, and I was surprised and pleased when both Julie Stevens and Susan Richardson engaged with it shortly after the book was released. I love seeing which poems from a collection others enjoy reading.
Sue Finch, I DON’T KNOW
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
To think about Terry Tempest Williams is to think about Utah, red rock, wolves howling, and a clan of one-breasted women—her maternal lineage. Williams, a long-time advocate for the environment, averts her gaze from the desert of her homebase to the blank pages of the journals her late mother have left her. Taking this as a sign, she decideed to write—in pencil—the narrative of her wise mother and use the opportunity to figure and flourish as a woman. This was a lovely book and while writing my daily poem, this book made an appearance in one of the stanzas. Here is an excerpt from my poem:
A woman once died, having left her journals to her daughter
Sarah Lada, Fumbling for a Light Switch in the Dark
and every page was a bank of blank, white snow.
Using a pencil, the daughter filled the journals
with feathers, beaks, talons, and pebble-filled narratives.
It was in Woodstock, NY that I bought the book.
The cashier, a mystic, fluttering and pecking around the shop,
understood the salt and ice of the author’s Utah
where the sun hammers on sand, ignites red stone.
Since 2022, I’ve tried to work on this as a poem a few times and it has come to nothing, I couldn’t get anywhere with it. Perhaps this is because I didn’t really know who the sky-woman was myself, but she did stay with me. I kept thinking about this little bit of text from time to time.
Fast forward to 2025, and thank goodness for my absolutely inability to delete any files or throw bits of paper away, and I decide I’m going to try and write a short story about the sky-woman. I then realise that perhaps this short story is not just about the sky-woman, but about the speaker, who meets the sky-woman (whoever she is) and is changed by her. […]
I had great fun writing Bill and Leah. With Leah, I know I am moving in the same land as poetry. Leah connects disparate things together, she makes jumps back and forward in time and space. Leah knows everything is connected to everything else, that a person can make you feel as if you are part of a thousand year old landscape. Leah doesn’t use punctuation, thinks only in words and silences. Bill is eminently more sensible and I am using the part of my brain that somehow manages to do admin by using paths that go in one direction, the part of my brain that makes lists and breaks tasks down into tiny parts so that I can do them, the part of my brain that believes in behaving oneself and not doing anything surprising.
Kim Moore, Where do ideas come from anyway?
Process is something between Joana Gama’s performance of John Cage’s “Suite for Toy Piano” (1948) and jumping into a random lake impulsively, for the sake of the feeling. How does a poem get written? Generally, something bothers, irks, itches, distracts, or interests me — in a landscape, a musical performance, a scene, an image— and a secret sensory tendril sets off on its own, venturing forth, biding its time, waiting for me to pull away from life and give it attention. I never know what I will find there. Never quite anticipate what is simmering. At most, I know it will surprise me, this strange thing that accrues in the mind while one does other things.
Example. One of the teens took a photo of me leaning against a wall at an outdoor mall, bitching about how much I hate shopping, begging the teens to let me go sit in a cafe, whining that I had not even brought the right pen, being insufferable. I was actively thinking about a poem I wanted to write when she took this photo; lines were bulldozing through my brain and Crusoe was there. Those bones became two of the poems that got published in Iterant.
Alina Stefanescu, Notebooks
This year’s iteration of the Buson Challenge might feel like a bit of a slog, but the good news is that I have more winter poems than ever before! And two have gotten published in the last few weeks.
I have four pieces over at Cold Moon Journal, one which is new, and three older pieces that I’m happy have a home. You can view them at the journal site and on Instagram.
I also am making my first appearance in the Sense & Sensibility journal with a new haiku. I believe it’s Maybelle’s first published appearance as well! You can find the new issue here.
And with that, it’s hard to believe we’re into March already! I officially step into the managing editor role of Frogpond this month, and I have about 5 weeks left of the Buson Challenge. Plus, of course, slowly chipping away at the Culinary Saijiki manuscript. And counting down the days to the Cardinals home opener, the Route 66 Literary Festival, and Haiku North America . . .
Allyson Whipple, Sunday Sharing: Winter Poems
It’s suddenly all happening.
The Mayday Diaries from Pindrop Press launches on 1st May (oh yeah!) and the countdown has begun!
Negative thoughts: I’m reminded that I should have started thinking about promoting the book ages ago. Probably need help.
Positive thoughts: The marketing cap is back on, I’m reviewing my websites and socials and preparing to dust things off and move up a gear. I’ve bought a domain name. I’m creating an action plan.
Robin Houghton, Coming soon!
I’ve been busy gathering, editing and preparing a new book with 95% tanka, and it is no easy task, as I want to make it right. At the same time (good news, Kati!) it has been joyful to read and revisit a lot of poems and to see their potential to become part of something bigger.
I see a book as an extended poem in the sense of that putting the right poems in the right order side by side creates a combined “greater” meaning. It’s almost like a sequence, almost. (Heck, let me take up the cudgels for sequences and lament the lack of them in short poetry journals. Yes, I know it’s in the name “short poetry journal”. I want to remind editors out there though that haiku wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been renga before, which is not quite known to be a short form…)
(That’s my inner little burning desire for others to learn about the brilliance of sequences… haha. I enjoy using the white space between the beads of short poems in a row.)
So. A new book! I came so far as working on a cover and that’s how far I got[.]
Kati Mohr, /nju : z /
For the past several months, I’ve been cooking up a proposal for a creative writing craft book currently titled Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, and I’m so pleased to report that I recently signed an advance contract for the book to be published by West Virginia University Press in their marvelous Salvaging the Anthropocene series. In the coming months, I will be turning as much of my attention as possible to writing this book, which will be (as far as I can tell) the first creative writing craft book for environmental/climate writing. […]
Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change is a call to creative writers of all experience levels and backgrounds to take their unique abilities and contributions to this moment seriously, use them with care and intention, and recognize their value. It investigates the role of literary writers at this moment, affirming literature and artmaking as valuable contributions to the planet’s passage through this mess to what may lie beyond. As an intervention in the field of environmental writing, this book offers the framework of “wilderment” as a provocation to embrace the bewilderment of these times through the thoughtful engagement of negative capability and “staying with the trouble” as well as to become wild ourselves, cultivating those parts of us that live in nuance and complexity, and that refute, question, challenge, and deepen existing beliefs and assumptions—especially our own. While political frameworks and affiliations, especially in the digital age, train us to “stay on message,” to repeat and repost, this book argues that the writer/artist must stay in close contact with dreams and shadows that may—rather than helping to deliver an approved message—further complicate matters as they expose the underlying fears and harms we’ve repressed, or identify the irreconcilable contradictions in our assumptions and ways of life.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change
My book-spore have been released! Like all wild things, they’re not as calendar-driven in their dispersal as an author might pretend. Tupelo people and I agreed that the official launch date would be March 4th because Tuesdays are traditional in the industry and “march forth” sounds cute–that’s when the local party happens (Downtown Books, Lexington VA, 5-7 pm). But keen foragers have already collected my sixth full-length poetry book, Mycocosmic, because the “launch” actually comes after “publication” and only somewhere around the “release.” Right now Tupelo’s distributor, University of Chicago Press, simply says “2025” and that Mycocosmic is now available in print or as an ebook; Amazon and Bookshop.org say “March 1.” Chicago also offers a “for instructors” tab for course adopters and Tupelo’s own site provides a free reader’s guide under the course adoption tab. These manifestations can look as complex as mycelium and, from my low-to-the-ground perspective, almost as mysterious, but the weather is clear enough now to announce the upshot: the book is out there in troops (did you know “troop” is the collective noun for mushrooms?).
Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic is in the field
When putting a manuscript together, a poet and their editor (if such an entity still exists!) work together on synergies, grouping and flow, on how poems establish dialogues with each other on the page. However, once the book’s been published and the poet starts giving readings from it, a whole new process begins, in which they have to relearn the collection from the perspective of different audiences.
What do I mean by this term? Well, I’m referring firstly to finding out which poems work in public and which fall flat, which work on the page but not when read aloud. And secondly, there’s the question of how to introduce them: not too much, not too little, not a paraphrasing or spoiling of the poem as a whole but just enough information to facilitate entry when the audience hears it for the first time.
Matthew Stewart, Relearning the collection
I had two gigs recently. One of them was for a local WI, and I had such lovely comments afterwards, and even sold a couple of books. I selected poems that I thought would appeal to the audience, as I always do, and they were such a lovely audience to read to, because they got all my references, many of them being a similar age to me and with similar backgrounds. I led a small writing workshop for them and in the Q&A, they asked some interesting questions. I would love to do more for local WI groups. The fees may be modest but the rewards are great, simply connecting with people beyond the world of poetry, but who relish the opportunity to hear poems from me.
The other was at Poetry Whitchurch, which is a high quality open mic night, which features a guest poet. It happens at Percy’s Bar in Whitchurch, which is an extremely quirky place. The step up to the stage was quite high, so they set it up for me to read from the front of the stage on a chair, because my sets were a little too long for me to do them standing. I was invited by poet Helen Kay and introduced beautifully by Harvey Vasey, the host. Very few of the poems I read were the same as the WI gig. I always plan a bespoke set to suit the audience and venue. The open mic, in which everyone got to do two poems, was very entertaining and everyone performed well. It was a bitter cold night but the atmosphere was warm.
Angela Topping, January and February 2025
Writing is a peculiar way to spend time. Whether done to make a living or as a hobby, it’s a solitary task and one that demands a lot of the person behind it. When I write I put a little bit of myself into each piece of work (maybe not so much when I’m writing catalogue descriptions for Spurs merch but you know what I mean) this means sending work into the world takes a bit of courage and a lot of faith. If I’m honest it’s not always easy and I sometimes have to work hard to keep being bold enough to put myself and my words out there. […]
As a way to keep this courage alive, I began to think about the moments that make me happy as a writer, moments that have made me feel really brilliant about what I do. Here are a few of them.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, When I think of my proudest poetry moments
- When a couple told me a bespoke wedding poem captured their love story perfectly and brought a tear to their eyes when they first read it.
- When a daughter told me I’d summed up her relationship with her Dad perfectly, and that the poem I wrote for his 75th birthday made him laugh and cry (in a good way).
- When I worked with a best woman to write a poem for her dearest friend who’d had the most horrible time but had finally found love and safety. We wrote something that showed how much she was loved, and celebrated her new beginning.
- When I was asked by a mum to write for her daughter, who couldn’t see how wonderful she was and was told how much my words moved them both.
- When people I’ve never met get in touch with me about Dust to tell me how much it comforts them and helps them feel less alone.
- Every time I write a poem for a wedding reading or speech and know that I’ve told the story of the couple in a way that works for them.
- Every time I realise that my words are part of some of the most significant times in someone’s life. (I really do have to pinch myself at this one!)
Every morning,
Luisa A. Igloria, You’ll See
light flakes from the salt cellar that is the sky.
In Rome, where the Pope is dying, the swallows
are weaving a shroud. Midmorning scatters
a darkness of rubies. By noon, darkness
might lift, if you say it could lift or
if stones could unroll like curtains.
Night is made of the bodies of thousands
of bees.
I was moving some books around on my shelf and realized I have now published just as many books via self-publishing as I did traditional publishing. Slightly more if you count the e-book version of LITTLE APOCALYPSE that never came into being because the press closed as we were in the final layout stages. The last traditionally published book was SALVAGE, which came out in that weirdness of covid lockdown summer, and actually managed to sell quite well compared to my previous Black Lawrence title published in 2016 (though not as well as GIRL SHOW did way back in 2014.) Part of it may have been that I doubled down on promo since there were no possibilities of release parties and readings and such to move copies.
After 2020, I felt a shift in my relationship toward po-biz and publishing, as well as a general backlog and build-up of unpublished work. In those intervening years, I’ve had fairly long routines of writing poems daily (or at least fragments) By the time 2021 had rolled around, [I] was sitting on three full-length manuscripts that I genuinely had no idea what to do with. I submitted at least two of them during reading periods for my current press, but nothing was picked up those go-rounds. I am not really a contest person, especially if they have high entrance fees and the idea of finding an forging another relationship with an indie seemed an up-hill climb. And no one publisher could possibly take on as many books as I had stuffed away in my hard drive.
Kristy Bowen, adventures in self-publishing
My friend and fellow Pacific MFA alum Susan DeFreitas died after a year-long struggle with cancer just a few days ago. After losing several friends in the first few months of 2025, this one hit me hard, especially as her story, described in the essay below, echoes so much of my own experience – not being able to have kids, going back to an MFA at 32 (the same age as me!), expecting to be read earlier and more than she was. Women writers with ambition tend to be talked down to, often discouraged, as students, as emerging writer, even by family and friends, and even more so as their careers advance and as they age. I hope that the essay encourages you to read more of Susan’s work.
Fighting to Be Heard as an Emerging Woman Writer
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Poems at Villain Era, Losing a Writer Friend, A Few Bright Days, and America, the Ukraine, and Appeasing Bullies
I think often about misogyny. I mean, not a day of perusing the headlines goes by without it staring me in the face. Its face varying to great degrees, from the benign smile of a fashion article touting some new ridiculousness aimed at the ubiquitous male gaze, to the everyday dismissals of men-only leadership cabinets or boardrooms, to brazen abusers running for and winning public office, to rape statistics, to genital mutilation. And everything in between. Everything you can imagine and much unimaginable. Except maybe I don’t really understand the meaning of the word “unimaginable.” I am guilty of it myself — assuming the doctor someone is referring to is male, e.g., or the UPS driver bombing up the road, or being judgey over some woman’s dye job. There are places I don’t walk, times of night I don’t walk, groups of people I maneuver in differently from other groups of people. It is the way of life, for a woman. There are times when, societally, it gets worse. But it rarely gets much better. That’s just the plain truth.
I like this poem by Jeannine Hall Gailey for its sly send-up of myths and stories about women, how it holds them and reconsiders them, claims them and shifts them. I admire that it is both a pretty object and one with a sharp edge. What can poetry do? Catch the light on its shiny blade.
Marilyn McCabe, born inside a plum blossom, raised by wolves. Never the usual mess,
You encounter, midflow, many lines with quotation marks around them when reading the Collected Poems and Prose of Elaine Randell (Shearsman, 2024). In an e-book they would have hyperlinks, because they hint at hinterland. They aren’t selected as fine phrased flourishes on the theme nor (mostly) epigraphs; not starting point nor – for they aren’t woven into a pattern of complementary consonants and vowels – a melody that started variations. I imagine them in the heavy underlined blue of a hyperlink because that would add tendentiousness to the grafting-on. Actually the word “tendentiousness” should often be “deep relationship to the other”.
Here be canons, to an extent. Randell’s tangential quotes are very often from contemporaries, but not always. I’m not sure there are any readers for whom all her quotes readily bring a full text to mind. As the last century isn’t fully digitised, and copyrights present their necessary impedance, the legwork reader is therefore stalled.
Ira Lightman, Randell madeleines
A poetry collection I’ve been re-reading this month is Lynn Melnick’s Landscape With Sex and Violence. Though it wasn’t intentional, it seems fitting as so many of us struggle daily to comprehend (and contend with) the barrage of hate and harm coming from the White House.
One of the experiences I crave when reading poetry is reassurance (or maybe it’s recognition) that someone else understands, that at least one other person on the planet sees what I see. It’s not comfort, per se. (I don’t mind when poetry makes me squirm.) Maybe it’s relief? Relief that someone has been able to name it — the devil we know.
Take this from Melnick’s “She’s Going to Do Something Amazing:”
“She’s going to go where no one is getting high off her suffering
and then she’ll be approximating a whole person.”And this from “Landscape With Dissociation:”
“I guess I’ll just stand here now
and read to you about any of the times I managed to love
when it sure is a roughhouse, isn’t it
living.”We get kicked around, the feet delight in the pain they inflict, and the poets sing together into the circle about living and its beauties.
I’m so blessed to have found my way to this particular brand of love.
Carolee Bennett, “Sure Is a Rough House, Isn’t It?”
Last week, I did a fun thing. I talked on Zoom with my longtime virtual friend, Ren Powell. We probably met 25 years ago, when I submitted a poem to one of her publications, and we fell in love, got married, and had children. OK, only part of that is true.
Today, Ren published the post with me in it. Read that and watch my interview, if you can stand it!
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, More Than 15 Minutes of Semi-Fame
A month has passed too quickly in a haze of painkillers and antibiotics—in a haze of headlines that are so surreal, it’s difficult to actually accept it all. As my bones are growing together, I’m watching too much Netflix and—oh! these dystopian stories!—we’ve known what is coming. We’ve practiced how the world falls apart. […]
I’m so grateful to have had a chance (an excuse) to talk to Leslie. And I’m happy she’s agreed to help me edit the anti-fascist anthology. When considering who would be a good person to help me, she is the first person who came to mind—and then there was no need to continue thinking about it.
As I told her: Leslie will keep me brave. Here’s information about the anthology that Leslie and I are editing, please consider submitting your poetry, photography, comic strips, or collages: [link]
Ren Powell, February’s Show Notes
Are you having trouble focusing? I know I am.
Right now, the political situation is relentlessly chaotic. It’s a very hard time to concentrate. I stare at my screen, my mind wandering off, unable to complete the simplest sentence. I find myself dissociating repeatedly.
Overwhelm and disengagement result in the same condition: paralysis. Our brains are on overload. We simply cannot decide what we should be doing, and so we do nothing.
Our attention is the most precious commodity in the world—if it weren’t we wouldn’t be bombarded with endless demands for it. But the idea that attention is an article of trade doesn’t occur to most of us, even as we are being manipulated into handing it over to the next shiny object.
This state of mind reminds me of Muriel Rukeyser’s famous poem, which she wrote in 1968, addressing the chaos of the time […]
The lines that resonate with me right now are “the news would pour out of various devices; / I would call my friends on other devices.” They seem eerily prescient, even though Rukeyser wrote them long before those ubiquitous devices called cell phones.
Erica Goss, Between Freaking Out and Checking Out
I’m developing a new relationship with my phone which requires me to keep it further away from me. It’s helping. It’s quite a beautiful thing — many have written about this before me. I’ve deleted all the apps except Instagram from my phone. I’ve reinstalled SelfControl on my computer. I’ve stopped railing in my mind about AI because I can’t do a damned thing about it. I agree that it’s unlikely (thanks for the link Kerry) that I’ll be able to post my way out of fascism. I believe in calling the thing the thing.
Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes – A Cosmic Sadness
I recently lost my phone, by which I mean I broke it in an embarrassing manner. It wasn’t really a problem but it did mean I lost some notes and the beginnings of some poems, mostly the nonsense verse that I’m writing a lot of at the moment. One went something like this:
Sing crayfish Sing partridge Sing magpie Sing bee My love is a slow curl smoke leaving the lake
Another observed that it was “very strange that dogs have eyes”. Without the poem to refer to, I’m not sure how, or whether, I went on to justify this.
Jeremy Wikeley, Things like us
By Friday, my passport, gone.
Kate Gale, Crouched Behind The Moon
Stolen? Who knew.
I wild and keen into the day.
[…]
Without my passport, the world ending.
It only takes this small blue thing,
The world ending.
I am not sure of being a person in the world.
As I write this, it’s been three days since I’ve eaten a meal.
Meals tell us we’re going to live.
Meals tell us the world is not ending. Sun will rise.
Crouched here behind the moon as we are on this planet.
This planet we’ve destroyed.
The highlight of last week was attending Durs Grünbein’s reading at The Goethe- Institute, where he was in discussion with his English translator, Karen Leeder. At the beginning of the evening, Grünbein joked that he’d not been in the UK for a few years and this was the first time he’d had to produce his passport (the blessings of Brexit). Interestingly, in the light of last weekend’s German election results, Grünbein has often been described as a poet of the reunified Germany, having been born in Dresden and now living with his family in eastern Berlin. Grünbein’s poetry is witty, wry, perceptive, and influenced by a broad range of literary texts and often presents the disillusionment of having grown up in East Germany and explores Germany’s identity in post-Cold War Europe. He has been very vocal in recent years on the issues of immigration and the defence of Ukraine. Helen Vendler commented on the ‘sardonic humour, the savagery, the violent candor—all expressed in lines of cool formal elegance’ and Philip Ottermann, in The Independent, noted ‘Grünbein loves to jump from one register to another—one moment he is the street poet of Berlin, the next … all marble and ancient philosophy’.
Grünbein’s earlier poems were translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published in Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (Faber, 2005). Karen Leeder has now published Psyche Running, a selection of more recent poems from 2005–2022 (Seagull Books). During the evening, Grünbein commented on the process of those earlier translations as ‘strange’ and the results (as is Hofmann’s wont) as being very free, very sparky, and Leeder suggested there was a particular excitement in the ‘to and fro’ between author and translator to be found in them. She then suggested her approach has been rather different, perhaps a more dutiful one, still needing to make the poems ‘live’ in the target language, but also demanding a fidelity, to capture the original’s form and architecture as closely as possible. The work read during the evening suggests that her translations triumphantly achieve these goals.
Martyn Crucefix, Durs Grünbein Reading at The Goethe-Institute, London
What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Ideally, it is a role of truth, beauty, complexity, rigor. Perhaps to be guardians of language. For a long time, I’ve felt that there is a politics of estrangement in aesthetic work, a resistance to the flattening of thought and experience that is inflicted by commodification and capital, one that is made possible through the complexity and strangeness, through the distortions and reformations of grammar and thought, that are in poetry. This is, along various axes, a Marxist sentiment. And it also suggests something as simple as the awakening and expansion of consciousness. I believe this. But lately, as we seem to be entering an era that is sometimes called “after truth,” I also believe that poetic language — in its particularities and nonconformities, but also in its perceptions, accuracies, and recordings — is necessary for holding on to how things really are, as weird and complex as that realness is. Among other things, this is to say that poetry is also a form of vigilance and witness. In a very pragmatic, honest sense, the “there there” is slipping away in social media algorithms, AI, and political misinformation. Poetic language can and should work to resist that. Though poetry’s relation to truth is an ancient topic that could be exfoliated forever, one thing that is accurate, however complicatedly, is that it can be “extra true,” so to speak. Practically, there’s a small audience, surely, especially in the US. But that doesn’t mean the “role of the writer” is any less real.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Holden
[Sara] Sturek’s essay [The Erotic in Poetry: Self-Knowledge, Empowerment, and Sexual Liberation] is a thoughtful meditation on the connection between poetry and the body that goes well beyond the usual ways that idea is expressed, as, for example, in Charles Olson’s idea of Projective Verse, where the connection is through breath as a means of establishing rhythm and meter. Sturek asserts that the constraints vulvodynia exerts on her sexuality are not unlike the formal constraints of the sestinas she writes, that working within those constraints to seek pleasure, whether of the body or of art-making, is, in the end, a way of “practicing what it mean[s] to be free.”
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #37
Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis […] is the most extraordinarily good poem. Apart from Paradise Lost, I can’t think of a better long poem from the seventeenth century. (You can read the whole thing here.) Henry Oliver and James Mariott had a fun conversation on substack last week about the twenty best British poets. I’d have both Dryden and Pope on any such list, though they are both very out of fashion; and even within the neglected field of Augustan poetry, formal panegyric of this sort is particularly uncool. But Annus Mirabilis is an incredibly modern poem in lots of ways, for all its adoption of a very ancient genre. It’s a poem about trade as much as anything else — and more than that, about trade war.
Victoria Moul, For I go seek the Thames
Every February for the last six or seven years I have taken part in a postcard exchange for peace.
It’s somewhat informal. There’s no cost. A friend of mine runs the sign-up list and gets all our addresses straight. She calls it the Peace Poets Postcard Exchange. Which is exactly what it is. This year there are 5 groups—participants from numerous United States, and several other countries—each of us sending a postcard to 26 or 27 other people in the month of February, each postcard with an original poem about peace.
I think of it as a way to put more peace into the world.
In 2022 a Dutch mixed-media poet, artist, and writer named Martine van Bijlert joined our ranks. She is no ordinary participant, but has worked as an aid worker, researcher, and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan. PEACE, PEACE they say is the extraordinary result of her three years of postcards. It is dedicated “to the peace makers” and in her introduction she writes:
As I sat down to write about peace, I kept turning to war, wondering whether I would stand out—a sender of dark collages and words that refused to sound upbeat. A poet who kept reaching for memories of aftermath and foreboding. (p. 3)
Having spent “a large part of [her] life surrounded by ripples of war” she found herself groping for the stock images. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “I lost the words.” It is a stirring and beautiful introduction, and ends with these words:
So we live. We can’t be overcome by despair and we can’t pretend [war]’s not there. We can’t keep calling peace what isn’t peace, but we also can’t disparage what is, or what could be, however insignificant it might feel. We should speak of it, even if we can’t find the words. Because we need to hear from people who no longer know what to say. (p. 4)
This is the first poem in the book:
and on this first day
I realise I know
how to write
aboutriddled bodies
a whole country
in mourninghow to listen to
longing and people
who still dreamhow to feel anger how to
watch the young their
eyes still shining butI don’t know
where I left this
elusive thingthat was given to me
for safe keeping too—Martine van Bijlert
The poems are sometimes tentative, raising hard questions […]
Bethany Reid, PEACE, PEACE they say
How to dream
Jill Pearlman, Towards a New Form
when the egg is already broken
whisk
until soft
and silky
in what colors
towards what peace
I re-read Auden’s legendary 1st September 1939, when he sat in a Manhattan bar contemplating the world as it was on that equally dark day. ‘All I have is a voice,’ he pleaded towards the end of this towering poem. In another famous poem, Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love, a phrase pops out at me: ‘…fashionable madmen raise their pedantic boring cry’. Auden could do nothing, obviously, to stop or alter the course of the carnage. Perhaps nor can we. Changes in world mood and opinion move so slowly. Meanwhile, the oppressed, who just happen to be in the wrong place at the right time, die, or are maimed, are scarred, and pass on their traumas to their children and grandchildren.
Poets can’t talk constantly of politics and war. Neither, in my opinion, can we ignore it. I try to find a balance between writing about the daily experiences contained within my removed, privileged, still mostly thrilling existence and the world ‘out there’, which is a perpetual presence, given the screens most or all of us spend so much of our time watching. I have always, or at least for as long as I remember, tried to write as a participant in the world’s goings-on as well as an individual with my own responses and desires.
Poetry, particularly it seems British poetry, often frustrates me because it’s too insular and fails to acknowledge or address our relationship with the planet, whether that be war, climate change, or how we treat others.
I had a point in case this week when I bought a book published last year, which has been lauded in reviews. I won’t mention name/title as I have no wish to be unkind. And if others enjoy it, then that’s good for them. However, I found it exasperatingly fashionable and, frankly, boring. It was confined (constrained) to an examination of the poet’s relationship with himself, with lovers who indulged him, with immediate family, the whole thing an invitation to be immersed in a world that revolved around his personal sensuality. It was competent. Although very few phrases or lines leaped out at me, I liked a few of the poems well enough. In general, though, it was comfortably dull and self-absorbed.
At the end, I sat thinking if there had been any point to any of it.
In the end each of us write how we want to and I can’t tell this poet, or anyone else, what his poems should ‘be about’.
As for me, I have a voice with which I can sometimes attempt to untangle the world, past, present and future – and my place in it – and all I can do is use that to the best of my uneven, flawed ability. Sometimes, I hope, that will include using the iniquities of the worst of us to make art. Is that a positive? It must be, surely?
So that’s where I stand on this frosty, bright morning of March 1st 2025. Last night we stood outside our house and saw Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Venus bright in the night sky. It was a wonderful reminder that we are a part of something so astonishing that we can only try to honour it, defend it, take care of it.
Bob Mee, MARCH 1st 2025, WHAT NOW?
I just returned from a trip to Seattle, where I gave a talk for Seattle Arts & Lectures—an honor and a joy, I have to say. While I was packing for the trip, I opened a glasses case, and a fortune cookie slip fell out of it and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and read it: “You always see better with your heart.”
Well, damn. I grinned thinking about Past Me choosing to put that message inside one of my many glasses cases. “You’re such a POET,” I could imagine my kids saying. They love to roast me.
That little slip of paper had been sitting in there for who knows how long—probably years—and its message found its way to me during a time when I had started to question that way of seeing. I’ve seen with my heart for as long as I can remember, often despite what my other eyes can see. It’s not logical, and it’s not very strategic, and sometimes it hurts like a son of a bitch, but it’s who I am.
When life feels difficult, it’s tempting to close up, to focus on thinking vs. feeling, to protect myself. But then this little fortune fell to the floor, and there was my answer: Stay open. Stay a stubborn hoper. Keep pedaling.
Maggie Smith, Pep Talk: On Hanging in There
This post could be a LitHub article—or, I could have developed it into one. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep it intimate and small. I did not want it to be for everyone. I did not want it to be wide, to have many applications, to appeal to a great number of readers. Instead, I wanted to share some texts that have particularly carried me, helped me, been a balm and a salve to me as I healed and wrote Larks. Because how do you write trauma? How do you go into some of your darkest times, your deepest wounds, and write? In part, you read. In part, you sit with others who have also suffered. You take your time. You do not rush. You learn to breathe again. Here are three poetry collections that helped me breathe again. […]
[B]oth Robyn Schiff’s poetry and Schiff’s person as a teacher gave me language centered around the concept of Greek tragedy and kindness —and I needed that kindness most of all. It is rare to meet so brilliant a poet who is also an extremely kind person in their actions, giving of themselves to students who are not well known or privileged. I’m deeply indebted to Schiff, and lines from “Fourth of July, 2012” provide an epigraph to my long poem “Larks,” at the center of Larks.
I hope this encourages you to draw close texts as you write your own books. We don’t write or think in isolation. To be human is, as Heidegger of all people said (!), to be a conversation. We don’t need to write alone, or feel alone. We have a community of books, and each other. And that is something to celebrate, that we have models for our storytelling and articulation.
Han VanderHart, Poetry as Tender Carrying, or Three Poetry Titles That Have Carried Me
I’ve always wanted poetry to be consumed like art– hung on museum walls: giant rooms with poems in elaborate frames, numbers to punch on little devices so the voice of the poet streams into the listeners’ ears as they sit on benches, letting the words sink in, the world dissolving and reconfiguring like kaleidoscopic patterns inside their eyes. And everywhere, people: hearing, reading, nodding, a new light in their eyes, their lips arranged in strange shapes that could be smiles or sighs or something that happens when everything seems a little closer, a little clearer, a little more alive. […]
The last door opened into a mirrored
room and she saw herself. Was it a
metaphor? Was she? Was this an
omen? An end? The ceiling offered
inversions. One wall became a hundred
walls. One face, a hundred faces. One
truth, a hundred lies. She whispered
one word to one face, to one mirror.Outside, unseen, a crow flew over the
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The museum of poetry
museum, a half-moon still in its beak.
Today, I’ll [be] working with children aged between four and eight. Do you know, I ask all of them, that until five hundred years ago, there were only two seasons? Winter – which came from an old word meaning “time of water” and Summer – from an even older word meaning “to burn, or be on fire.” It was only 500 years ago that we started talking “the fall of the leaf” or “spring of the leaf”. We think briefly about the magic of words: how having the words for something is like bringing it into being, and I ask them – if Winter is a time of snow and rain, what is spring a time of? […]
With the very small kids, we think some more about the meaning of “spring” – bouncing and jumping – and we talk about lambs and seeds and our feelings leaping into life. And though we know that not all poems need to rhyme, we agree that rhymes are good fun, and repetition is a great way to order a poem – a fishing net to catch a fish of words – and together we write.
Clare Shaw, Natural Born Poets.