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: feathered messages, spring monsters, animal bodies, emerging seeds, and much more. Enjoy.
It’s all Humpty Dumpty now,
PF Anderson, Mitzvah 44: Not to Prophesize Falsely #NaPoWriMo
the promises of riches
floating in a golden sky,
soaring carrion eaters
eyeing the brick walls stained red,
the red spreading as the walls
fall, and fall, and keep falling.
In 2022, when I started Dead Mall Press, I was emerging from a pretty demoralizing period […]. I had tuned out of poetry for a while and focused on music, but eventually I realized this resignation was something I had to push back against, or it would just stop my own artistic impulse. But it wasn’t enough just to write anymore: I felt a need to materially enact some of my ideas about publishing and to learn from doing—from physically making. And in a vague sort of way, I believed that there was something vital about the materiality of published objects—and I wanted to understand it.
While the entire experience has been on a very small scale, so far it has taught me an enormous amount—some of which I am not even fully conscious of. Things happen around and through these books, connections form, time unfolds—among people, in dialogue, through echoes and unknown attention. Each book is a material thing, and yet it involves psychic intensities that exceed its materiality almost excessively. And making this happen, circulating this experience, becomes an adventure—a cultural one. And I started to recognize others—other poets as well as other micro-press/DIY operations, of which there are so many—who share a desire to keep this cultural adventure alive even in its ephemerality. And this also means making sure it stands against professionalism, institutions, and capital.
As such, I think the right way to look at it, for both writer and publisher, is that both sides are peers in collaboration: they are coming together to create books of poetry, but also to give material life to a culture of oppositional imagination.
RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 2)
Yes, I’m going to take the challenge this April, and write (or noodle around on) a poem every day. That includes haikus, a single couplet, and rehabbing ancient drafts that weren’t working.
I’m working on a new poetry collection tentatively titled Feathered Messages highlighting – you guess it – the importance of birds in our midst and the way they affect us. Did you know, for example, that hearing birdsong regulates your pulse and breathing to calm you?
Rachel Dacus, April abundance & poetry month!
Sometimes a line comes singing into my head. What a gift. “The light has always been going down” began this way with the opening line “What. The quiet work of words.” appearing on the way back from dropping my kids off at school. Other time it is an image that triggers a poem, something I saw. Other times, it is the space I make for the writing of the poem that triggers the poem: sitting down on the couch with my dog, sitting down with my student in a sterile, grey study room on a tired, Friday afternoon, and a poem blooms out.
Han VanderHart, Everything I Know About Writing Poetry (with Jane Kenyon)
Making something from scratch — whether it’s a chocolate cake, a poem or a plant you grow from seed — stands in opposition to those whose modus operandi is destruction and chaos, and heals our wounded spirits. This is where we have to start: with ourselves. The efforts to create, and to appreciate created things, bolster our recognition that destruction and its desired effect— paralysis — don’t have to prevail. Even in the worst situations, no one can take away our ability to look for the beauty and complexity of our world, and make something from it, even if it’s just words or a melody or the idea of a drawing that we hold in our head during a time of suffering or fear. I hope a lot of you are participating in demonstrations today. And I hope tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll write some words or play some music, read a good book, walk in a park or natural area or garden, or make a good meal. Let me know how it’s going with you. Sending love.
Beth Adams, One Brushstroke at a Time
In order to keep loving, we’ll
have to keep living for those
deprived, no longer alive, takentoo soon. Pollen dusts the porch,
and new maps of the world appearbefore our eyes.
Luisa A. Igloria, Some Things to Love Today
It’s April (woohoo) and I’m bunged up with a head cold and my birch allergy, so I’m hiding indoors though the weather isn’t too cold. Spring always gets started without me when it finally comes along as there is just so many birch trees here. Time for writing, watching rugby and indoor chores. Not too bad a way to spend the weekend.
April is also time for the write-a-poem-a-day challenge from NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo. I’ve been posting my attempts on my various social media channels and have managed to keep up the first six days. I don’t always manage a full poem, but usually have a start I can play with over the next month or so. I use various sites for inspiration, including the official site listed above, Wendy Pratt’s Substack prompts, Todd Dillard’s thought-provoking prompts (he has the last few years’ threads on Twitter, I think, but I won’t link to there) and my Substack feed in general. I’m enjoying the break in my day to come up with some lines or just play with words.
Gerry Stewart, Poetry Snippets for GloPoWriMo
April really is panning out to be the cruellest month in politics. We still have poetry. No one can take that away from us. I hope you’re still managing to write poetry. We need it; poetry is important (and even mysterious). And maybe it’s equally absurd to not write it now as to write it. May your life become poetry this month in the name of all those whose lives have been lost, whose lives have become harder than they needed to become, who are living with grief, who are afraid and anxious, who are living with unimaginable difficulties.
This past week I became frantic because I couldn’t find my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Small potatoes, I know, but somehow these days a small thing can take on a lot of whatever else is troubling us. So I’m not using the word frantic lightly. I took apart a couple of shelves on my book case. And quite wonderfully, to me, I found a different book that I’d given up on finding — I ended up believing that I’d loaned it out or given it away by accident. (Meditations ended up being on a top shelf where I’d placed it for easy access, naturally). The book I’d given up for lost is View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska’s Selected.
Shawna Lemay, April is Poetry Month: 2025
Gigging Monster leaps about the house singing, ‘Spring is here! Spring is here! Stop writing! You wrote loads all winter, it’s my turn, it is my time to dance in the spring sunshine! You better have written something half-decent, because it is me that has to do all the leg work and stand on stage and tour it all summer!’
Writing Monster bursts into tears, upset with all the noise. She runs upstairs and throws herself on the bed and weeps about her need for solitude. She pours on the guilt about unfinished stories, she wails, ‘but I like writing, writing is a happy place . . .’ Writing Monster is so needy. She demands all of my time and patience. So much re-living and gazing into the long dark night.
Salena Godden, Monsters In Spring
I should have made more time for parties, lunches, dinners, and other events, but I was usually burned out after about four hours. My energy levels aren’t what they used to be! (More on that later.)
I did get to have a coffee and a bite to eat with Lesley Wheeler, whose new book Mycocosmic just dropped from Tupelo Press. This trip to AWP was a last minute decision on my part—I had decided not to go a long time ago—but I felt that with having to be out of the house anyway (with the ongoing disability renovation) and having felt a bit down since the beginning of the year (and Trump’s re-presidency) it would prove encouraging, and it did. Even getting a bit of a break from Seattle’s cold and dreary spring (everything bloomed after we left!) was nice. If AWP is a bit physically and mentally exhausting—and it is—it also reaffirms you as a writer—a writer some people have actually read—and part of a community—whose books you actually read.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, AWP Part 2: Meeting with Editors and Fellow Writers, My Moon City AWP Reading on YouTube, and Down Days
I think I started sharing Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach on this blog in 2007, though the haggadah existed long before that. […]
There’s new material here, including prayer-poems by me and by my fellow Bayit Liturgical Arts Working Group hevre Trisha Arlin, R. David Markus, R. Sonja Keren Pilz, and David Zaslow. And poems written by people I don’t personally know, like Amnon Ribak and Linda Pastan. And I added a favorite piece from Marcia Falk’s gorgeous Night of Beginnings haggadah, and some wisdom from the new A Quest for Our Times haggadah.
Some pieces appear both in long form and in shorter form. Some pieces appear in several forms (there are six different versions of the Four Children; which one speaks to you this year?)
Most importantly to me: there’s more attention to what freedom asks of us. When I started working on this haggadah for my own use 25 or 30 years ago, I was really focused on the inner journey of liberation. And… in today’s world I am keenly aware that freedom comes with obligations to each other and to those who are not free. So there’s more of that in here too.
Rachel Barenblat, New edition of the VR Haggadah!
I started blogging in 2006. I started and wrote in five blogs between then and 2009, deleting three. I’m not sorry I deleted them because I changed with every iteration of writing and it was time to move on and not look back. The fourth was a New Orleans centered group blog that’s archived but still online. I still have my last blog, Zouxzoux, which is primarily a poetry blog, and I started writing in it again this year after pretty much abandoning it. I’ve been writing poems fairly often in a series I named “Something Small, Every Day (or so).” I’m writing for myself, like I used to, with no thoughts of submitting. I don’t care if I think it’s good or bad or if anyone thinks it’s good or bad, I’m just doing it. I’ve grown tired of the submissions game. Not saying I won’t ever submit again but it hasn’t interested me this year. (I do have one sub in waiting and a flash being published in Bending Genres this month – thanks BG!)
In looking at my archives, I see I participated in NaPoWriMo from 2011 – 2022, skipping the past 2 years. I’m participating this year in combination with “Something Small, Every Day.” I haven’t decided whether to post here, too, but probably not. I’m hoping to get back into the vibrant WordPress poetry community I used to be part of before I abandoned writing poetry.
All of this to say, please visit my poetry blog here, if you’re into poetry and care to. If you’re doing NaPoWriMo, drop a link and I’ll follow and support you as best I can.
Let’s have fun, for us.
Charlotte Hamrick, NaPoWriMo & Something Small Every Day
We’re not even a week into National Poetry Month, and how strange it’s been already, in small and cataclysmic ways. I spent the second half of March giving readings from Mycocosmic (and recording one super-fun podcast with Jason Gray), talking about mycelium and grief and awe and the role fungi play in helping trees communicate. Foragers turned up in most of the live audiences, as well as people who have been experienced in the Jimi Hendrix sense and want to talk about it. It’s as if mycelium connects poets to readers as well as conifers to hardwoods. Fungi also offer substantial hope beyond the mystical vibes: they help landscapes recover from wildfire and pollution, and psilocybin supports some people as they heal from trauma, for starters. Mycelium continues to feel like a role model and a blueprint. It’s done my heart good to hear people’s weird mushroom stories and field questions like one from an AWP guy in a witch’s hat.
Yet it’s not like fungi are altruists. They’re masters, instead, of ingeniously intertwined fungal-plant-animal-bacteria economies. In fact, each one of us apparent individuals is a polity, a microbiome housing many interests. Most of the DNA in our bodies is not human. What a trip! It can all fall out of balance so easily, in which case fungi might sicken and kill us (then help bacteria digest our remains, yikes). I’m working through these ideas and metaphors in a world that’s been out of balance for a long time, with a few powerful entities now hastening the damage along, the better to feed on chaos. Might there be a better equilibrium on the other side? Possibly, but even if so, too much suffering precedes it.
So, yes, between reading tour highs and the lows of being a United Statesian during fascism, I’m feeling emotional whiplash over here.
Lesley Wheeler, Role model, mycelium
I’m jumping octaves again
Startling the pigeons in front of the cathedralTrolling the lake’s edge
Sending swans huffing into the reeds
(Once I caught them eating the ducklings and they’ve never forgiven me)The catfish suck at the high notes
Percussive smacks of mistakeNo, I sing, no, I sing, no
Ren Powell, Jackhammer Song
Latin sapphics were hugely popular in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. This corresponds in part to a wider European fashion, but not entirely so. I think their particular popularity in England in this period was — funnily enough — partly just because the word Elizabetha, the Latin for ‘Elizabeth’, fitted so temptingly neatly into the adonean. I chose Edward Cornwallis’ page because of its handy combination of the metrical diagram and this ‘Elizabetha’-adonean at the end of the third stanza. But you see it over and over again: to such an extent that I think we can reasonably talk about the ‘Elizabethan sapphic’. If you have any Latin, you may also have noticed that Cornwallis, like most English authors of the period, is using sapphics for a grandly panegyric political ode, praising Queen Elizabeth I for her beauty, virtue and might — with her in charge, he says, the English have nothing to fear from Philip (of Spain), the chilly Scot or the ferocious French. This use of sapphics is typical of the period in England, though it’s not at all what we associate with the metre in Sappho, and even Horace in general tended to use alcaics (rather than sapphics) for his grander and more public odes. A metre can ‘mean’ quite different things at different times.
Victoria Moul, The embroidered earth: sapphics in the spring
In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Collected Poems (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’ Likewise, in their adjudication, the 2014 Büchner Prize jury highlighted the way ‘Becker’s writing is interwoven with the times, with what is observed and what is remembered, what is personal and what is historical.’ […]
Though relatively brief, this poem is just one sentence, woven together with the conjunction ‘wie’ (translated here both as ‘how’ and ‘the way’). The weave is dense and as I’ve suggested it’s not really possible to tell whether what is observed – the children, the oil spill, the tree stump (resembling a body) – are contemporaneous or from different eras. My translation keeps these possibilities open: borders here are felt to be temporal, as well as geographical. The German word ‘Avantgarde’ has artistic as well as political implications, but my choice of ‘vanguard’ also brings out the militaristic connotations which are reinforced by the ‘spitzen, grünen Lanzen’ (‘sharp, green spears’) which are then swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are interestingly referred to as a ‘Konvention’ and I retained the English equivalent, intending to suggest both a performance (something conventional, perhaps not genuine), as well as a political gathering or agreement (like the Convention on Human Rights). The ambiguity felt very relevant (and once again topical).
The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen observed through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but she is inaudible to the observer – sum up Becker’s concerns about the media, political and historical change, borders real and imagined, exclusion, and the need to ask questions of those in power. Issues as real today as when the poem was written in the early 1990s.
Martyn Crucefix, Three Poems by Jürgen Becker
Before his landscapes scorched by war and history, paintings of straw
Fokkina McDonnell, Archive
and glue, your golden hair, Margarethe, before ‘Death Fugue’, I was back at
school, deep winter. In the yard blew a few stray crisp packets; seagulls
pecked at crumbs. The annex and fence had the look of an abandoned
camp, in Polish hinterlands. Through a cloakroom window I peered,
looking for a ghost of myself, then at a ghost of myself, as the sun
poked out from a cloud and the contours of bulimia gazed back, in
sepia tones.
dad’s war
Jim Young [no title]
in a mock-leather box
that telegram
home tomorrow
love george
Since I was brought up with sewing as an everyday occupation I’m surprised to find relatively little writing about sewing, although as my research continues one of the most satisfying finds was an interview with the poet Rita Dove for the Stitch Please podcast.
The interviewer is wonderfully enthusiastic and starts with an anecdote about meeting Dove in a fabric shop.
Dove, of course, as an older woman, was brought up with sewing. She talks about sewing being a “sensation of inventiveness”, remembers the dresses her mother made out of coat linings and making a velvet cape for Venice carnival with a matching waistcoat for her husband.
I could talk about fabrics, learn about them, their quirks and difficulties all day. In fact, as I write this, I’m missing that.
Jackie Wills, Rita Dove, Rosa Parks, sewing and poems
my brother was a monk I was a musician
now we gumption
through the trees our horse hooves
clop clopping our brains fucked
with news we wriggle
in this New American Churchput our heads
Rebecca Loudon, April 1, 2025
together tether the breath breathe in
breathe in breathe in
pick up a hymnal
I have a modest goal this month of sharing a poem a day from the pile of books beside my desk. Some of these I read in August during the Sealey Challenge. Others — well, it’s about damn time. I may not read a book a day, and I’m not pushing myself to do the usual blog reviews (though some may ensue), just this: one book, one poem.
Today it is Bones in the Shallows: poems from Mission Creek by Seattle poet Tito Titus. I reviewed his I can still smile like Errol Flynn (Empty Bowl Press, 2015) a few years back.
Tito Titus’s Mission Creek is located near Cashmere, Washington, and runs into the Wenatchee River. (Forgive me if I have any of this wrong.) As the title, Bones in the Shallows, suggests, the creek disappears every summer, drained by drought, by natural disasters, by greed. And in this slim book the creek, its creatures, and the people whose lives are lived on its banks are lovingly chronicled. Nature can heal us, Titus all but says, but only if we don’t destroy it first.
Bethany Reid, National Poetry Month: poetry book #1
“Tempo” is a measured, upbeat collection, with more than a dash of earnestness. Like Mary Oliver’s “There is only one question:/ how to love this world,” Coppola asks readers how to simply be and focus on the moment, savouring the present and asking for readers to coexist and respect the natural world. It’s a world that includes storms and floods as well as sunlight dappling through green leaves.
Emma Lee, “Tempo” Lucia Coppola (Kelsay Books) – book review
The Gods of Winter by Dana Gioia
This is an older poetry collection by Gioia, who has written much. I was interested to read this after learning it was written after he lost a son to SIDS at 3 months old. His collection is infused with this loss, but not overwhelmed by it (like my work in progress, to be honest!). I admire his ability to write formal poems, and this collection shows his range. […]I have a poem in a special project – Poems for Life with Let Go the Goat
Renee Emerson, Have you seen the White Whale?
My doctor encouraged to abort my daughter Kit when she was diagnosed with her heart condition in utero, and, though we only had six months with her outside the womb, I will never regret choosing life.
My book is finally out! I am both anxious and excited—it seems that every time I publish a book, I immediately think of changes I’d like to make. And when the book arrives with its shiny new cover, I am overwhelmed by a sense of nausea and doubt. At least now, I know that’s just part of my process. And I know I’m not the only one. I have heard stories of poets like Clark Coolidge who would edit his books on the shelves of bookshops.
Nin Andrews, Son of a Bird!
I’m not getting squared somehow in the manuscripts underway. I drop a plumb bob and there’s a slant. Is it overwriting? Is there an omission I need to see? How far down do I need to rebuild?
I hold poems at a distance. I can’t get intimate with my poems. Is it a performance anxiety that I see the words through others eyes before my own? I’m too destination/objective minded instead of process-minded. Editing before speech. Could be. Or.
To get out of a rut you need to jolt your schema, get a new influence, new experience or realization. […]
There’s still movement from VerseFest with Phil Hall and Eileen Myles, workshops and listening to their readings.
They are letting things in. Speaking out for the rightness of the extraneousness.
Poetry is not only an act of narrowing down, curating control & shutting out, but seeing, being, allowing in.
Pearl Pirie, Reopenings vs Closure
Poems eat us. Alive or dead, doesn’t matter to them.
Bob Mee, POEMS AND A SELF-PORTRAIT FOR A 72ND BIRTHDAY
Poems swallow the great nowheres of the world.
Poems deceive you, persuade you, tell you imagined truths.
Poems rage, ignore, do what they want.
Poems have no conscience, no guilt, no shame.
Poems bring your darkness into light and when your time in light is done
Poems take you back to darkness.
Poems know how to defend themselves.
Somehow, we have crested into April and National Poetry Month. With work obligations, wedding plans, and the downfall of democracy doomscroll (the DODD I’m now calling it), I am doing nothing in particular beyond my usual to celebrate this month (though that usual is usually a lot anyway.) I am finishing up a short series I’ve been working on and getting ready to start something new. Today, I paged through the stack of books on my shelves that somehow have my name on their spines and marveled, once again, how I have managed to have so many words in me, much less get them out on the page and into book form. This is especially true of COLLAPSOLOGIES and RUINPORN, both of which are a bit longer than other books and feel like companion books ins some way (and not just because of the titles are complimentary.) And even more amazing that I have two other manuscripts in their final stages of development.
Outside of writing, I have many spinning thoughts on things I’ve seen and absorbed recently that are here then gone before I can commit them to the page more in-depth. One was the series of David Lynch screenings we’ve been enjoying at Alamo that most recently gave me a chance to see Mulholland Drive, my favorite Lynch hands down, on the big screen. Lynch is all dreamscape and little connective logic, which I feel is so much what I’ve been trying to capture in writing but always somehow fall short.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/3/2025
Happy National Poetry Month, everybody!
Working in collaboration with Pennington Public Library in New Jersey, my wife and I installed 10 of my poem signs at a place called Sked Street Park for the delight of visitors and passers-by. They will be on display all month. […]
high noon . . . / climbing the sky / a little spider
Bill Waters, National Poetry Month @ Sked Street Park
When and how were you introduced to haiku & Japanese poetry forms?
Since the early 2000’s, I have attended regular open mic events in our city. At these open mics, I was introduced to haiku and senryu by Irene Goals, who has become a dear friend. Her haiku journey started at age 16 and she was well-versed in what the writing of haiku and other forms entailed. I had a hard time grasping the fundamentals for several years, but thankfully she never gave up on me. She saw I was serious about learning the way and mentored me. It was Irene who introduced me to the work of Roberta Beary as well as others. I think it’s fair to say Roberta Beary is my creative standard for haibun. After reading one of her haibun in Rattle, I was hooked. I continue to expand my attempts in Japanese poetic forms. Currently, I am working to improve my grasp of tanka.
What do you enjoy the most about haiku?
I used to think people who say, “Well, my process is…” were a bit pretentious. But when I realised that I, too, actually have a process with writing haiku, I had to shut my own self up. My process of writing haiku is the centering of my thoughts, slowing my breathing, opening my senses, taking the time to see things around me with a deeper awareness and observation, letting myself feel the world in that moment, and feel my place in the world—all of this preparation is a big part of what I like about haiku. The opening of mind and memory, surprising myself with the words that come to me, and the deep appreciation for my surroundings: all of this is a gift to me from haiku.
Jacob D. Salzer, Vera Constantineau
Ah-LEE-nah. Is it wonderful to hear my name pronounced correctly, wherein “correctly” is defined as the way it is pronounced in my native (and very minor) language? Does the thrill of hearing myself pronounced in my first language relate to the power to be one simple thing, one Alina Stefanescu, one constant and stable self? And is there—beneath that thrilling presumption, perhaps— a refusal to be known as one of you, as among you, in your presence, in your language —known as spoken and held in your mouth?
As a reader, it is not your job to acknowledge me, to affirm me, or even to perceive me correctly. I believe that such expectations set us up to fail in beholding one another. It is too much to ask of any human. I keep thinking of Beckett’s Godot and the firmament, and the constant question that the two old friends, waiting, ask one another. The endless repetition: Who am I to you? Who will we be to one another?
To be read is one way of knowing. To be pronounced is another. To be remembered, well, to be remembered as both a blessing, and a curse in any language.
Alina Stefanescu, What’s in a name?
The first full-length collection by American poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson, following the chapbooks Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna*, 2023) and saltsitting (g l o s s, 2020) as well as the co-authored (as mouthfeel) Consider the tongue with S*an D. Henry-Smith (Paper Machine, 2019), is FLAG (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), a striking collection of prose lyric that writes on boundaries, borders and history, elements that read a bit more charged during the current geopolitical climate. “Sometimes there are no words or / the words simply are not the right / ones.” she writes, as part of the opening section. “Or sometimes the words don’t / match, or they jumble. It’s okay, it’s / alright, it’s all flow. Flow, flow, flow.”
Set in six sections—“Untitled,” “Land mouth,” “The Black Bettys,” “One wild blue day,” “Flag” and “Slow coups”—each section rides an unfolding, an unfurling, of accumulations set as individual prose blocks, allowing the music of these lyric narratives a kind of propulsion. As she offers as part of the first section: “It bears repeating that Toni Morrison / said all water has a perfect memory / and is forever trying to get back / to where it was. Writers are like / that: remembering where we were, / what valley we ran through, what / the banks were like, the light that / was there and the route back to / our original place.” She writes of history, slavery and arrival, and the ongoing impacts of that history, little of which has been properly acknowledged by the descendants of the perpetrators. “Certain facts stand.” Or, further on: “Some of us can be traced by how we / arrived—which way up or down. Some / of us don’t remember. Simply can’t.”
Moving from American border space through “Louisiana and Mississippi,” south to Guyana and the “Meeting of Waters in Brazil,” Jackson’s text is lively, powerful and performative; bearing an incredible weight with a music and craft that provides such a quality of light. I would suspect such a collection equally comfortable on the stage as it is on the page, and an adaptation for the theatre wouldn’t be impossible to imagine. Composed through an array of short narrative bursts that string and sing together to form something greater, Jackson’s FLAG articulates a conversation around borders and depictions, notions of country and self-description, and how often that narrative contradicts, and so often at the expense of the very populace they claim to protect. FLAG weaves a variety of histories, music and story, providing an incredible collage-effect of fierce intensity. This is a remarkable book.
rob mclennan, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, FLAG
The past week gave me riches galore; though I am somewhat poorer in the pocket for it, my cup runneth over in about every other way. It’s true that often, lately, I’ve felt that I am living in “interesting times” that are all too much and too awful to contemplate for long. Then again, I could have been alive (possibly quite briefly!) during Boccaccio’s time and weathering the bubonic plague. Thanks to The Decameron, readers later in history have been able to get a picture of what people were thinking about and imagining–or trying to escape–when things were truly terrible all around. And while I’m not pollyanna-ish about the present, I do feel grateful that I live during an era when travel to distant places is possible and rather speedy, that books are readily available, and that some of the wealthy people of the not-too-distant past decided that philanthropy included funding libraries, gardens, and museums for the average citizen to visit and enjoy. Current billionaires, please take note!
What the week entailed was a trip to Los Angeles to visit my eldest child and, while there, to spend a morning at the AWP conference book fair. Riches indeed! I “packed light” to be sure I had space in my carry-on for poetry books, which thankfully tend to be slim paperback volumes. I bought almost 20 books, I confess. So I came home weighted with literary riches, and while at the convention managed to connect (however briefly) with numerous poet colleagues. A shout-out here to Lesley Wheeler, whose book I had to purchase online because Mycocosmic had sold out! Congratulations, and I cannot wait to read it.
Ann E. Michael, Riches
One of the things that I love about my job, even now I work full time in a university is that no day is the same. Sometimes I get asked what a poet does, most often by my dad, who is still outraged about the time I answered his question by saying “I took a full stop out of a poem and put it in again”. I said this to annoy him, it’s quite rare that I get a day to obsess about a full stop (or not) but inspired by Clare’s recent posts about working with small children, I thought I’d start a new series of posts called ‘What do poets do all day’ where I will attempt to pull back the veil on what this poet, at least does, on a particular day.
Today my husband and daughter have gone off on a camping trip for a few days, so I have the house to myself, which is very rare. I have the last week of university teaching next week and this term has been so intense and full on that I couldn’t cope with the thought of camping and then rushing back for my teaching, so I have stayed at home.
This morning I got a lift with them out to Luddenden and ran back along the ‘clearway’ a path that runs mostly alongside the train track and means I can avoid the geese on the canal who are going into full on psycho mode, and also avoid the traffic on the main road through the valley. I got back to Hebden, got the bus up the hill (I’m a runner not a masochist!) and then showered, made myself some lunch and then Clare Shaw appeared to do some writing.
Clare announced they were working on the last part of their next collection and I decided I would have a look at my manuscript as well, after a long break from it to start some edits that have been niggling at my mind for a while.
So my editing job today was to sort out “Damaged Cento” which avid readers of this blog will know was published relatively recently in The Stinging Fly, edited by the brilliant poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin.
Kim Moore, What do poets do all day?
One poet who always feels like a rockstar to me is Todd Dillard. I had to leave Twitter when it got x’d, and he’s one of the reasons I miss it, because that’s how I always found out when he had published a new poem. So, I went to his website to see what he’d been up to and was delighted to find him in Waxwing. His poem “No Rush” really hit me hard, especially, especially, especially the ending. I am tempted to include the last few lines here, but the whole thing fits so beautifully together I didn’t want to break it apart. The poem reminded me why I love his work: Dillard has this incredible ability to pull readers in completely, in a way that feels both vulnerable and universal at the same time.
There is something about Waxwing that makes poetry feel like an open-armed invitation. Chill Subs categorizes it as “top-tiered stuff. Not Paris Review but ok.” Its website is clean and professional-looking, and easy to navigate. I first discovered the journal when I was obsessed with another rockstar writer, Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. He published Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in Waxwing, a poem that has everything in it, including some of the sexiest lines of poetry I have ever read. It is a long poem (which he even acknowledges toward the end) that brims with joy and generosity, even thanking the reader for sticking with him:
“…you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.”You know what I love about sexy poetry? It jolts me awake, snapping me back into the present. It reminds me that I have an animal body. I’m not just a grown-up person with responsibilities, covering myself every morning for work, layering on clothes like dropping down the blackout curtains. A bra to hide my nipples. An undershirt to smooth over the softness of my belly. To keep my pants up, a belt. Then off to work, where I make lists, try not to stress about layoffs, schedule appointments, attempt to budget, and eat something responsible when what I really want is a Pop-Tart.
As much as I love print magazines for pulling me away from screens, sometimes I appreciate the immediacy of finding a sexy poem online. It looks so innocuous…just words on a screen. Of course, words are safe at work. It’s just a poem, right? Except my grip tightens around my phone as I take in the lines. But maybe people will think I am just reading some terrifying news article about the state of the world. Right? Except I’m also blushing.
Becky Tuch, Who Reads Lit Mags? We Do! Spotlight on Little Engines, Waxwing, Blush, Adroit Journal, Citron Review, Epiphany
A garden has lots of failures; seeds that don’t germinate, plants that succumb to frost over winter, vegetables that grow in a way that is most definitely not edible. There is never a year where something doesn’t work out as I hoped. Yet somehow, I accept this transience and uncertainty. When failure occurs, I apologise to the plant I’ve let down (I know, I know) clear it away and move on. I don’t feel personally affronted; I don’t feel that I never want to garden again, and I don’t feel that everyone else knows what they’re doing and I’ll never reach gardening nirvana. Sure, experts exist and show their skills at fancy flower shows but I honestly don’t care. All I’m worried about is my patch of colour and joy, and how to solve the puzzle of keeping geraniums alive over winter. […]
The answer to being content with my writing lies in my garden. It lies in learning to nurture my words with the same care and tenderness I give to an emerging courgette seed (I genuinely cheer when I see them). It lies in accepting failure with a cool understanding that sometimes things just don’t work, that I’ve chosen the wrong place for the plant and I’ll learn for next time. Above all it lies subverting the need for external validation and learning to enjoy the words for the way they delight me, the way they feel on my tongue, the thrill of raising my eyes to sky, seeking the right word and plucking it down to be part of the page.
As the year unfolds, as April continues its journey to the heat and celebration that summer can bring, my goal is to keep my heart light, to keep my mind trained on what brings me joy and to fall back in love with writing. Which I will, if I learn to write with the same perspective I have when I garden.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, On hope and falling back in love with writing
Today is the heavy teaching day, yet my heart is light. We finish Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” today. I had thought about canceling it, because it is long. But we had space in the syllabus, and I didn’t feel like devising a new plan. I am so glad I went ahead with it. I had forgotten how delightful it is to teach.
I taught the first part last week, and it made me so happy to hear students still discussing it on the way out of class; as two students tried to determine if the poem was really talking about bestiality, I thought, I am so happy not to be teaching in high school. I don’t have to worry about angry parents coming back to demand that I be fired for teaching their students about this poem.
As the semester winds down, particularly in April, I sometimes feel a bit of despair about all that I am not doing, the poems I’m not writing, the journals that will be closing down their reading periods for the year without a single submission from me, the books of poems I’m not reading, the events I didn’t organize to celebrate National Poetry Month. It’s good to remember all the ways I am celebrating National Poetry Month, by bringing poetry into my classrooms, by reading poetry to students and sparking interest.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Celebrating National Poetry Month with “Goblin Market”
Glowing white below a greyish sky: magnolia buds. Large, spindle-shaped, and vertical. In the week they open, the pink on their petals counts all the more as it almost always rains, and the splendour is less splendid and quickly over; the petals soaked wet. The pedestrians walking past duck under their umbrellas or into their hoods or into their thoughts.
Then all the green, in a shower.
Kati Mohr, Aye.
Consider:
Rajani Radhakrishnan, But there is the fog
How the night confesses with twinkling stars even as it swallows the flowers.
How the empty quarter of the page cradles your eyes at the end of a sorrowful poem.
How the animal released back into the wild turns once: saying something, saying nothing, perhaps grateful, perhaps disbelieving, perhaps remonstrating, before running away as fast as its legs will carry it.