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: the church of heart and hurt, beachcombing for the broken bits, children marching in the street, and much more. Enjoy.
As a water droplet cut with a knife
as the Red Sea parts, closes, makes us cross again.Everything that brought me to this moment
is carried inside, written in salt water and suffering
Jill Pearlman, Salt Water & Suffering
amidst nihilism and terror,
moistening my lips as I stand on the plain women’s balcony
near the rooftops, t-shirts and sweats blowing.
I’ve become an easy traveler in my old age. I’ll do everything and nothing. I need my daily pill regimen, good morning coffee, an afternoon IPA, a pack of smokes, and a camera. Taking a vacation from work is guilt-free for me. What could happen in a week or two? But it’s impossible for us to take a vacation from this administration. It’s everywhere. We’re like pieces of pumice, with a new hole in our skin for each atrocity that pecks away at us.
I still wake up every day to news from my new besties, Heather, Jessica, Rebecca, Robert H., Robert R., and Adam, and I read it all in lieu of leisurely puzzle-doing. Trying to pick through the bad news for something good is like combing the beach for a single shell that isn’t broken.
Artist’s Statement: I break things and put them back together in a random,
yet tasteful, order. I make the big small and the small big—
in words, photographs, and visual art.But I’m not the typical beachcomber. I go looking for the broken bits. My shells are not destined for a Southern Living spread. I’m on the hunt for patterns, colors, textures. I choose weather-worn whelks, oysters with barnacles, tile-flat bits. My biggest prizes are moon shells and periwinkles, the ones that look most like they once housed a snail, their centers looking back at me like eyes or perky, non-protruding nipples. I found a piece of a helmet shell that looks like an evil, toothy grimace. With two periwinkles, I have created “The Face of the Resistance.”
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Woosah!
What was so exciting about Seville was that it felt ambitious. Perhaps a city that’s so vulnerable to heat and flooding can be brave. I don’t know anything about urban planning, but I loved the easy access to the great river that runs through it, loved what’s been done with older buildings. And this picture shows the contemporary art museum – not easy to find but that’s another story, perhaps it was me. It’s in an old monastery that became a ceramics factory, and is now a place to show contemporary art. Gorgeous, big, rambling almost empty when I went, and with so many different unexpected spaces. In a little courtyard, this business with the vines. I don’t know what they are, perhaps jasmine, perhaps passion flower but these are growing, live, curtains you can part and walk through and I imagine when they flower they’re probably scented and will sound of insects. It was the first museum I went to and arguably the best. I think I’m spoiled having a daughter in Utrecht because the Dutch are brilliant at museums so I have impossible standards. As for the prose project, it’s interesting and challenging to go back more than five decades and try to make sense of who I was then. The key seems to be in stone and trees. At least for starters. I went through the printout sometimes to the sound of flamenco from the flamenco school opposite my Airbnb studio, sometimes to the sound of rain gushing from a broken downpipe. And I understood how much I had to allow myself to fail over and over again as I attempted to put anything in my notebook. I dreaded trying.
Jackie Wills, Living curtains of vines
But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.
Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.
Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.
Matthew Paul, On another haiku by Simon Chard
i am the cutting board god. i eat the carrot
Robin Gow, girl dinner
unpeeled with dirt still dusting wrinkled skin.
scoop hummus from the plastic container.
every little morsel. lick the spoons’ head
& shoulders. i think it’s ancestral. a hunger
like a lightning bolt through me & all
the not-girls, mouths open in the dark. the desire
to be full always escaping us. just another handful
of wings. just one more lemon taste.
the shadow of an iris tree.
I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.
The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.
Beverley Bie Brahic, Sunday 13 April 2025
First World War poetry does not have the same particular identity in France, and the war itself carries a different valency here, where men fought and died — in much greater numbers than in Britain — on their own land, amid the ruins of their own towns and villages. There isn’t, I don’t think, the same edge of romanticism or slightly-enjoyable sadness about it here, and ‘First World War poetry’ does not have the same quasi-generic identity. I did, however, find an excellent French anthology, Poèmes de Poilus, edited by Guillaume Picon. (The poilus, ‘hairy men’, are the soldiers who grew beards because they couldn’t shave.) […]
[O]ne thing that’s noticeable […] is how many of the best-known names are — unlike the English equivalents — not known primarily as ‘war-poets’, but rather as leading poets of the avant garde. In England, even those poets who, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived the war, remain known as poets mainly as and by their war poetry. The French collection, by contrast, contains poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy and Paul Valéry — all very high-profile French literary figures, none of whom (I think) would be considered “first world war poets” in the way that Owen, Sassoon, Brooke and Gibson are.
Perhaps this is partly just because most of the French poets survived the war (Apollinaire was killed in 1918), whereas the best-known English war poets, almost by definition, are those who died in it. (This is true of the second world war too — Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes all died in active service.) This must be linked, too, to another marked difference between the collections: the range of types of verse in Poèmes de Poilus is much larger, and much more obviously influenced by what — in England a decade later — we’d recognised as the first stirrings of modernism. To a small degree, this is perhaps influenced by the fact that Anne Harvey was intentionally choosing poems accessible to a youthful reader; but I don’t think any collection of British First World War verse would be very different. As anyone knows who has taught ‘modernism’ from a comparative perspective — as I did last year for a course here at Sciences Po — the idea that “modernism” emerged as a defined movement quite suddenly in the immediate post-war period is an Anglophone perspective. French literary history looks quite different. Pretty much all the things we associate with ‘modernism’ in poetry were well-established in French poetry already before the war.
Reading these two anthologies one after another this week made me think how interesting a mixed French and English (and even German and Russian) anthology would be.
Victoria Moul, In Time of War
Because in a perfect world, no word rhymes with war.
Because for a perfect verse, there can be no bar.
It is not day that ends night, nor night that ends day.
Where then will a poem end, when will its light fray?***
Imayo: Of Japanese origin, this form has four 12-syllable lines (48 syllables) with a caesura between the first 7 and the next 5 syllables of each line.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, So can silence
The next panel I attended was titled “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges” (Shinelle L. Espaillat, Rashaun Allen, Keith O’Neill, Gail Upchurch-Mills). Here I learned about the efforts of humanities professors to “fight the commodification of higher education,” as well as the process of students being turned into “clients.” All of us are inherent writers, the panelists told us, and should be allowed to “dream on the page” without anyone’s permission. We write ourselves into existence, and communities only function when everyone participates. One of the problems all the panelists shared was how to instill a love of reading in students whose attention was being diverted, constantly and shamelessly, from exploring their potential as writers.
My third panel on the first day was the extremely enjoyable “Craft for Crafters: How Fiber Arts, Book Arts, and More Shape Our Writing” (Meg Cass, Felicia Rose Chavez, Emrys Donaldson, Genevieve Kaplan, Sarah Minor, Doug Van Gundy). As a person who enjoys sewing and crafting as hobbies, I was intrigued to learn how the panel would connect those activities to writing. It was an unexpected pleasure to see poet Genevieve Kaplan, whose book Aviary I reviewed in the December 6, 2021 issue of Sticks & Stones. Some takeaways from this panel: sewing is like writing—cropping, darning and weaving; crafting is like poetry—language is “bits of things” we move around to create other things; crafts connect to writing, playing, revisioning, re-seeing. I enjoyed Doug Van Gundy’s story of how his sewing practice began by making pencil cases because he couldn’t find any decent ones. That grew into journal covers and messenger bags. He also revealed that sewing calms him down, allowing him some much-needed relief from an over-active brain. Doug is also the MFA director at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a 7th-generation West Virginian.
Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025
Subtitled a magpie’s pilgrimage through the psalms, my erasure project is finished. 160 handwritten pages. This week I have made a cushion on which to display it in Wells Museum next month. The top of the cushion cover is a remnant of embroidered furnishing fabric that I bought years ago in a rather posh shop in Saxmundham. I loved the bird and her nestlings. I knew I would find a use for it some day. The underside is made from a much older fabric, a coarse unbleached linen 40cm/16 inches wide, handwoven in the Soviet Union. It probably came to me from my mother. The one-and-fourpenny predecimal zip fastener is from Bourne and Hollingsworth, a London department store that closed in 1983. I think this too was bought by my mother. The inner cushion (which contains 3 kilos of rice) is made from a sleeve from an unfinished cotton lawn nightdress trimmed with hand-crocheted lace I recognise as my grandmother’s work. The fine white cotton thread I used for stitching it also dates from my grandmother’s lace-making days.
Ama Bolton, “The Soul as a Bird”
I’m behind on reviews, I’m behind on a couple of editing gigs, I’m behind on a few other thousand things. I hide in our wee house either at my desk, or downstairs, folding and stapling chapbooks. […]
Otherwise, I was recently podcast-interviewed by Hollay Ghadery, which was plenty fun. The podcast has been posted over this way, if you wish to hear our conversation, which was focused on my recent On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Kitchener poet and reviewer Chris Banks interviewed me recently, posted over at The Woodlot: Canadian Poetry Reviews and Essays. Michael Greenstein was good enough to review the collection over at The Seaboard Review, and Salma Hussain managed this absolutely stellar and breathtaking review of same over at The Temz Review; she gets me. She really gets me. It is a rare thing, I will tell you, to be read so well. […]
Oh, and my fall poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a direct follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), already has a pre-order page! (but I might have mentioned that already; did I mention that already?). I should probably be thinking about fall events, possibly. Where should I go?
rob mclennan, an update, an update, my kingdom for an update
As a rule, I find it difficult to pick a poem from my books because I think in larger structures, sequences or books, not individual poems. However, this piece is something of an exception. It’s the coda from my a book of sounds, but it started out as a response to a call for submissions for Stride magazine’s 2020 TALKING TO THE DEAD project, which asked for poems addressed to a dead poet.
Now, I don’t often respond to such calls, but this one intrigued me as I was rereading, again, Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, a book I’ve owned for almost 50 years now and read more often than I can remember, and thought I’d like to try to inhabit her formal methods to some degree. It’s not the first time I’ve acknowledged my debt to her work; a previous book was titles Imaginary Gardens, but this time I wanted to do something much more direct.
The stanza form I invented for the occasion is, like so many of hers, syllabic rather than metrical, and there are numerous words and phrases of hers woven into it. Unusually for me, there’s an overt rhyme scheme, while my normal practice is to create patterns of assonance. In fact, this poem is, on the surface, so different to how I usually write that I considered it as a one-off and unlikely to be something I collected in a book, as my books tend to be organic wholes, units of composition in themselves.
But when I put the original typescript of the book together it was clear to me that something was missing. The book is, on one level, a collection of songs (hence the title), songs that focus on the small things that make a world and on our attempts to map that world, those things, in words. But the ending as it stood seemed to me to call for a coda, a kind of final restatement of the (aural) themes that run through the book, and it slowly dawned on me that Ms Moore’s Menagerie was just what the book needed to close with a kid of half-echo of the opening lines, a translation of an early Irish nature poem that deploys a semi-syllabic four-line stanza and intermittent rhyme. The book is a cycle, and this poem is a kind of recapitulation, closing the circle while leaving the idea of song, of sound, wide open.
Drop-in by Billy Mills (Nigel Kent)
This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation.
Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn’t close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.
“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, “The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures.
A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.
Alina Stefanescu, “Short talk on whatever.”
When the brochure for next month’s Stratford’s Literary Festival dropped on to the doormat yesterday, I was, naturally, interested to see what’s going on.
We’ve lived here for almost forty years and I’ve lived in Warwickshire for almost all of my adult life, so I know the score. Stratford’s a posh(ish) place – well, some bits are – where literary types and tourists mostly gather to see what’s on at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Occasionally, but not more than anywhere else, poetry events pop up.
As to literary festivals, we know that in order to attract sponsorship they have to make money, or be seen to provide events in which ‘big names’ or at least people who are blessed with a dose of temporary fame appear. Some, like the Stratford one next month, also have charitable status. It’s good that they exist.
We also know that poetry is still, whatever those of us who write and read it might like to think, viewed as a somewhat embarrassing literary sideline, like an odd, eccentric, ancient aunt at a family party.
Except that this time that old aunt hasn’t been invited.
I read all 42 pages of the brochure scouring the listings. Nothing. I read it again to make sure I’d not turned over two pages at one. Not a single poetry reading. Not even an actor reciting a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not even the conventional sop to the poetry world, the open mic. […]
Whatever mad ideas the Criminal President is dreaming up today will have far more impact than a literary festival in Middle England, but I’d have thought that at least one of the ‘festival team’, as they describe themselves, would have pushed for, perhaps, at least the inclusion of the Poet Laureate. Or maybe he was busy. Or maybe the only poets they thought of turned out to be dead.
Or perhaps they were a bit frightened that poets might be a bit unpredictable and rowdy. (When I used to read to an audience, if, as did sometimes happen, I’d forgotten my reading glasses, I tended to shout and rave a bit in case of the need for improvisation.)
To cite an even less controlled, less egocentric example, I’ve just received a critical appreciation by Andrew Taylor of the poetry of that old rogue Peter Finch, who once, it is said, ate his own poems after he had read them to his audience.
Bob Mee, POETRY DOESN’T MATTER IN STRATFORD-UPON-AVON – OFFICIAL
National Poetry Month has brought with it a sad bit of poetry news: Harry Humes has died. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you might want to check Penn State’s PA Book site’s biography of him, and then find one of his books:
https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/humes__harry
He was an excellent poet, influential for many folks–especially for Pennsylvania writers–and while I never knew him well, our lives intersected in some surprising ways over the years… […]
When I was hired at DeSales University around 2005, I learned that DSU held an annual poetry event for high school students. I attended/participated often, and Harry Humes–who was a good friend of the program’s administrator (Steve Myers)–was always involved in the workshops and events. Humes had retired from Kutztown by then, and was writing more poems, fishing, and enjoying family life. He always greeted me with a big smile and asked about my writing. That sums up for me what kind of person he was: generous; possessed of a self-effacing, even self-deprecating humor; kind and encouraging to people just starting out in poetry.
Here’s a poem of his that I like a lot, which I clearly recall him reading that day at Godfrey’s so long ago: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=154&issue=3&page=13
Ann E. Michael, Rest in poetry
[Isabelle] Baafi’s “Chaotic Good” demonstrates an understanding of craft and poetic forms, knowing that form can enhance and underline meaning, guiding the reader through the poem. Baafi explores a personal journey from childhood to adulthood, through marriage to a single life, but broadens that journey to include family ties, inheritances, cultural heritage and the struggle to find self among the pressures of societal and familial expectations. The poems eschew self-pity and sentiment, preferring compassionate reflection into love, threat, suspicions, the inertia of staying in a relationship an individual is not yet ready to admit has failed and become toxic, using different forms to drawn attention to different aspects, until the traveller arrives, surefooted and redeemed. It’s a journey that includes the reader and rewards re-reading. “Chaotic Good” is as thought-provoking as it is liberating, acknowledging the work that went into building a sense of self-worth through a library of precise, crafted, lyrical poems.
Emma Lee, “Chaotic Good” Isabelle Baafi (Faber and Faber) – book review
Gilonis’ poem marking ‘the 3rd Thatcher election’ fits with the overarching impact of Tory politics mentioned in the introduction. It’s there fairly explicitly in Duncan’s own work, and in poets like Simon Smith:
The sun floats about the meadow crazy as Whitman.
Codeine does the job good. Make a note to myself. Can’t bear
to look. ‘Codeine’. Debts bite hard. More jobs
will have to go. Lines crackle like a telephone call in danger.But it’s there, too, in Khaled Hakim’s idiolectic talk poems of identity and confusion or in Andrew Lawson’s ‘We are enjoined as good consumers to juxtapose and meld appearance’. And it’s there gloriously in Elizabeth James’ satires on culture as consumer object, as meaningless status fetish or decor:
I am concerned with the interior as a “walk-in” still life.
I was always thought of as the “artistic child”.
The salon, in beige, was designed around my own painting,
entitled Landscape–I’m going to make it like a country road
with trompe-d’œil dirt and leaves, my garden and courtyard
being so perfect that they don’t seem real.While this political dimension was something I expected to find here, there were some real surprises, including writing that shows a move towards psychogeography in Frances Presley’s map-driven walking poems or David Rees’s semi-doggerel London pieces that link the influence of Iain Sinclair with the city’s long association with nursery rhymes.
Billy Mills, Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby (eds): A Review
We’re excited to feature Marcy Rae Henry at our upcoming virtual reading. Their work is full of sharp turns and soft landings, moving through memory, family, and fleeting conversations with a voice that’s equal parts tender, irreverent, and quietly profound.
In their poem “this poem appears in,” what begins as a casual walk home unspools into a meditation on growing up, ancestral survival, and the strange, aching limits of language. Capturing how life’s most private and public moments often blur, they write:
“If only we had more than 1–10 to describe / happiness, sex, last night’s Thai food…”
This is poetry that drifts and returns, that wonders more than it explains. It’s emotionally precise while formally restless—rooted in stillness and always on the move. I knew right away this was the energy I wanted to start the latest issue with.
José Angel Araguz, Salamander virtual event next week (Spotlight: Marcy Rae Henry)
The sun sets before we reach the mountains. There are three men from Turkey in the row of seats behind me. They’re having an animated conversation in their mother tongue about something that keeps switching gears from playful to contentious. In front of me are three Romanians. The woman in the middle is speaking non-stop. Her voice is a strange aria. Romanian is a quick and seamless rise and fall in my ear.
Memories seep slowly into my consciousness. Lying in the backseat of a car—in those days before seat belts were the law—staring out the window at the stars in the black sky, and listening to my mother and my stepfather—to their voices only, not bothering to work out words, or even tone. Utterly uninvested, but enveloped by the mysterious business of grown-ups. […]
But another of our hosts keeps telling people that I’m “really” an American. It’s strange perhaps that I’m so offended that she’s taking control of my narrative. Maybe I’m especially sensitive since memories of my childhood seem to be coming more often and more vividly now, and I want to put a wall between who I am now and those years when I had no agency.
All the years that I traveled often were a way for me to figure out who I am. Not in a linear way, and not in a pretty way—but eventually. Strip away the trappings of your national identity, of your habits, and your preferences for food and drink and music, and you feel naked and new. You eat trout with capers and tangerines and wonder what on earth you really ever liked best to eat.
Ren Powell, Traveling in Transylvania
Always crouching down, looking the same all over.
To men he tries to show those great big, endless eyes.
If you really want to know if you yourself are small,
Try seeing your reflection in a filled hoof-print.咏虾蟆
坐卧兼行总一般，
向人努眼太无端。
欲知自己形骸小，
试就蹄涔照影看。Another from the bantering poems of Complete Tang Poems books 869-872. Jiang Yigong was a Five-Dynasties guy from Suzhou who made a name for himself for righteous satires, finding much material in his troubled times. Unlike a lot of the other comic poets from this section, he also has poems in the main part of CTP. 虾蟆, háma is used for both frogs and toads—to keep it snappy, I picked one. That really is, I’m ashamed to admit, only there to fill out the meter.
Larry Hammer, In Praise of the Toad, Jiang Yigong
The Palm/Passion story also reminds us of the fleeting nature of fame. Don’t get me wrong: if I’m chosen to be Poet Laureate, I’ll do as good a job as I’m capable of doing. But I’ll start every day by reminding myself that the fame is likely temporary. The important thing remains: the work.
The Palm/Passion story reminds us that we’re characters in a larger narrative (as does the Passover story, which people across the world have heard/will hear this week too, both in Jewish traditions and some Christian traditions). We will find ourselves in great danger if we start to believe it’s all about us, personally. No, there are larger forces at work.
To put it in poetry and Scouting terms: I’m put here to do my best writing, but also, to leave the poetry campsite better than I found it. How do I do that? I work to promote not only myself, but other worthy poets, I work to make sure that the next generations know about the rewards of poetry, I envision the kind of world we would have if poetry was valued, and I work/play to make that possible. I also work to have a balanced, integrated life: my work in poetry cannot be allowed to eclipse other important work: the social justice work, the care of my family and friends, my relationship with the Divine, the other creative work I do, the self-care that must be the foundation of it all.
I find many values to being part of a religious tradition, but the constant reminder of the larger vision, the larger mission, is one of the most valuable to me. The world tells me that many things are important: fame, money, famous/rich people, a big house, a swell car, loads of stuff. My religious tradition reminds me of the moth-eaten nature of these things that the world would have me believe is important. My religious tradition reminds me of the importance of the larger vision. And happily, my religious tradition is expansive enough that my creative work can be part of that larger vision.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Lessons from Palm/Passion Sunday for Poets and Other Creative Types
Wondering whose turn it is
PF Anderson, Mitzvah 407: The Second Lamb #NaPoWriMo
to sacrifice this time, what
to give up, what bitterness
to ingest, accept. Arms full
of plush youth, wriggling, resting.
Arms emptied from work that came
before, that follows. Fatigue.
But what about the Instagram and LinkedIn and tumblr icons at the head of this page, I hear you ask. Good question. I think they may be about to go as well. Maybe. Perhaps. I’m just no good at them, you see. The Instagram I set up so I could feast on the photos and art of my friends R–, R–, and D–. But of course it is more complex than that. In an ideal world, I would follow only them. Once the cat is out of the bag, you have to follow everyone else you know who knows them, even the ones posting about their jam making. LinkedIn is harder. And I’ve been using it much longer. But it is useful. For example, it is the only platform of anything that my activist friend W– uses, and the only way I can see what she’s been up to around the world. So it has its uses.
But as Martin Stannard once said about picking up a copy of a very well-known poetry magazine, I can sort of feel the depression rising up through my fingertips and my arms as soon as I start using them. I’m back where I started, with that edge-of-the-playground-feeling of marvelling at the utter confidence with which everyone shares the minutae of their lives. Five minutes, tops, that’s all I can manage. Then the double-maths-feeling hits even harder. Everyone else has the answers: why not me? I have nothing to say. And who on earth would listen?
Anthony Wilson, On being useless at social media
My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.
I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.
It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.
Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know? […]
Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”
I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Finally, in a real way, warts and all
In my life, I have chosen risk over and over. We risked everything to start a publishing company. Keeping it going was wildly stressful, but we kept at it.
I cannot keep my kids safe. I want them to be strong. Independent. Compassionate community builders who know when to be fighters. But in my inclination for risk, there are limits. I wouldn’t suggest that my daughter and her wife move to Texas right now. The three billionaires who fund and control Texas politics have drawn a line comparing being gay to incest. To them, the two are one and the same. They want to outlaw gay rights.
I think the 1.7 million queer people in Texas are less safe than the 2.8 million queer people in California; hopefully, they make it through.
Several times, I have been to the Sharjah Book Fair. There are people who have told me that Tobi, our queer marketing director, could go there. Before I got on the plane, I researched the laws. I usually do before I go to a new country. I had the proper clothing. Tobi presents as a man. Tobi is a walking violation of Shariah law. As such, Tobi could go to prison for ten years or be sentenced to death. Not a risk worth taking. No reason ever to go to the Emirates or any country with Sharia law. Not necessary. I can go for Red Hen. Being in prison isn’t an adventure.
Kate Gale, Do You Feel Safe in America?
I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.
It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.” […]
It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:
It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.
Bethany Reid, Susan Rich: Blue Atlas
Do I lose myself over consequences and weird linkages I wish this story were different but here I am in my kitchen baking bread honey dripping into my sink not my honey not this honey I bake for children in the street children marching in the street am I property am I pleasure or a pretend god feeding pretend children maybe we could go into the mysterious history of god’s sisters I have given myself over to the hands of strangers mayday mayday here we are another war song another war another where was I when the bells last rang what was the song
Rebecca Loudon, April 12
Above is a screenshot from a reading of the stage adaptation of The Other Jack, directed by James Dacre, with Jack (played by Nathaniel Parker) on the left and Robyn (played by Jasmine Blackborow) on the right. The script is by the US playwright and poet Dan O’Brien (CBe has published his poetry and essays). It’s based on the book of the same name by myself, published by CBe in 2021, with some material also coming from 99 Interruptions. […]
The original book is loosely constructed around a series of conversations in cafés between a man (a writer, ageing) and a woman (a waitress, much younger). They talk ‘about books, mostly’, according to the cover, but also about ‘bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas’. The man is me, or is me as much as Jack Robinson is me, and here I am being evasive again, something that Robyn picks me up on. The play is not the book and I could say that the Jack in the play is not me but Dan O’Brien’s script is self-effacingly faithful to the book so it is me, whether I like it or not. On the left, smug ageing writer; on the right, young woman concocted to demonstrate writer’s self-awareness of his smugness – so that’s all right then. There’s something monstrous here.
Charles Boyle, The Other Other Jack
Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.
five decades
Jason Crane, haibun: 12 April 2025
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird
The full Pink Moon was actually pink this weekend, so I tried to get a picture of it in its true color which is always challenging but this one got pretty close.
My birthday is coming up soon which is always a time of introspection, as is tax time (how is it possible I did so much freelance work for so little money? I ask every year.) I am hoping to find a new home for my next book, maybe a chance to do more lucrative work teaching or publishing, and of course, balancing the joys of life and the stress plus health stuff. I am trying to find more disabled and chronically ill women’s books to review (so definitely comment if you have a new book coming out), and besides the book club and open mic, trying to get together more regularly with other writers. AWP (and maybe the art gallery and protest, too) reminded me of the strengths of feeling like part of a community, rather than just a lone eccentric trying to live your lone eccentric writer life. Helping others, speaking up, these things are also part of feeding the soul, not to get too cheesy.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring is Here with Cherry Blossoms and Art Shows, Tulip Fields, Pink Moons, and Visits with Family
the night is still / as April’s pink moon rises / lying / in his hot and fevered bed / the billionaire will meet an angel / walking in the soft shoes of a nurse / moonlight washes the city / as the hungry cry and shiver […]
‘Pink Moon’ is published in ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance’ out now with Rough Trade Books. April’s full moon reminds me of this poem, I think it was written around 2020 in lockdown and commissioned by BBC‘sThe Verb, to me this feels like a poem from another version of time, but some feelings still ringing true in 2025.
Salena Godden, Pink Moon
An artist once told me that every person has a pose, and it is rarely what we think it is. A person, their body, will fall into a kind of muscle memory of posture. There is no replicating it or forcing it, it is unique. It is beautiful, but not in the way that bright smiles and a tilted head makes a good photograph, but rather in the way that nature is beautiful, the way that beauty is everywhere. This, she said, is what she looks for when she sketches people.
I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m imagining my body, observing images of myself at different points in my life, trying to pin down my unique pose. There is the head in hand of the writer who reads her computer screen in a curled question mark of spine and chair. There is the hands on hips of observing garden, shopping, practical tasks that need a certain type of robust physicality and household organisation – this is the pose that my sister and my mum all share. And then there are the poses my body falls into when exploring, when my senses are alert to the outside world and the time points poking through, the places that connect the past and the future. I’m thinking about it now as I think about what it was that made me want to include Seamer Beacon, and the bronze age burial complex around the mound, in the series of pilgrimages that would make up my memoir, The Ghost Lake.
Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon
Sometimes the moon
looks like the flap of a creasedenvelope— whatever message or instruction
it bore has slipped into its darkpocket. Now it is swimming so far out
Luisa A. Igloria, Missing
at sea, to a country not yet discovered.
When I’m asked a question I’m not totally sure on or not prepared for, I just start talking and then find my brain running behind going, ‘What the hell is she on about? Somebody stop her!’ Luckily, it was interviewing for the job I’ve been doing for the past two years on a temp contract, so they know I am not an idiot, though maybe also know I’m prone to babbling.
This is why I feel comfortable as an editor, especially of my own writing. In writing my poems, I often don’t know what I’m saying until I have the meandering mess of it down on paper or screen and can sort it out, clean it up, take out the waffling that isn’t needed, the details that are just too off the wall or unclear.
I do the same thing with emails, write it all out then edit it appropriately. I have, in the past, sent out those in the moment, emotional, unfocussed, unedited emails and it never ends well, so I always try to pull back and look a second time.
I may have mentioned on this blog before that idea as my best piece of advice every given me, ‘Look at everything twice’. It was said to me by a Holocaust survivor I met when I was working in a bookshop in my small university town. She came in some Sundays to buy the big papers and chat. One day as she was leaving, she grasped my arm and said this and it’s always stuck with me.
I’ve never considered the phrase in terms of my love of editing. I’ve always just thought of it as take a moment to appreciate what’s around you, the small things we overlook. By looking twice at anything, we understand it better and our place in it. We should spend that extra time to consider what we’re seeing, doing and saying.
This applies to our writing as well. Slow down and consider. I need to do that when I speak as well it seems.
Gerry Stewart, Look at Everything Twice – Editing
I asked myself a question last week. Could I write with the same joy as I have when I garden? It turns out I can. Perhaps by putting these thoughts on paper I understood what I needed to do to help me fall back in love with my creativity or perhaps it’s being part of NaPoWriMo courtesy of Notesfromthemargin April write-a-thon that has made the difference. […]
If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll know that my relationship with my work goes through huge peaks and troughs (I suspect part of this may be down to having Bipolar) so I won’t be surprised if this joy ebbs away a little. For now though I’m going to write as though I’m writing for fun, for myself and enjoy the responses from my lovely Notes from the Margin group. I’m writing in a way I haven’t for a long time – I look forward to the prompts each morning and write with instinct and enthusiasm rather than fear and self-doubt. It’s a wonderful feeling – almost like when I returned to poetry after almost thirty years away from writing but with better results.
I’m also going to revisit the dozens of poems in my files, see what’s good, what sings to me and try to get some order. I’m terrible at keeping track of everything and feel so sad that work I’ve been proud of is languishing in a forgotten file, or misplaced entirely. I’m not looking forward to this bit quite as much.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, I have taken my own advice
TPS: Tell me about the genesis of this book. How did you start and when did you know it was finished?
MS: Terminal Surreal began with my diagnosis—late 2023. It was a way for me to process what was and would happen to my body, but to be honest a good chunk of my brain didn’t quite believe I really had ALS – I think that’s how I managed to write poems like “When I Learn Catastrophically,” “Is this My Last Ferry Trip?,” “Self-Elegies,” and “Abecedarian with ALS.” A few poems were written before I knew I had ALS but was experiencing—muscle spasms and these things Inow know are fasciculations (when a nerve twitches).
I was hoping all my mysterious symptoms were anything but ALS. I did the Grind (where you are grouped with others via email and post a new poem draft or revision daily) in January, February, and March 2024, and the drafts and revisions from those three months gave me about half the book. In May, I sent it out as a chapbook, then pushed to get it to around fifty pages. I then sent it to Acre Books during their open reading period in May 2024, and heard a month later it had been accepted. I had never put a book together so quickly, and by then I was already in bad enough shape that the amazing editor, Lisa Ampleman, put the book into sections and did the arrangement for me (I was having trouble looking at screens).
I guess Terminal Surreal was officially finished about a month ago, when my partner Langdon Cook and Lisa did the final edits, and sent Lisa one last poem I asked to be added, and she said yes!
Tresha Faye Haefner, Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano
The prompt today from NaPoWriMo.net is to write a villanelle that includes a song lyric. I’ve never written a villanelle and it reminded me of solving a puzzle. I kept referring to the pattern described in poets.org and this poem by Elizabeth Bishop for guidance. At first, my mind couldn’t translate the pattern into lines or stanzas but when I began really dissecting Elizabeth’s poem, it began making sense. So, thank you, Elizabeth! To be honest, I’m not sure the poem is technically correct but I had a hell of a time trying! […]
Initially, I had this scheduled to post this morning but I got cold feet and unscheduled it late last night. I thought, this villanelle is cheesy. This morning I thought, Who cares? I’m doing something creative every day and other artists (my readers & friends) know we can’t be perfect every time!
Charlotte Hamrick, Tom Petty & a Villanelle
How we remember the past isn’t always how the past remembers itself. As for what happens next, who knows?
Tower, Star, Nine of Wands. Ace of Cups, Two of Swords, Lovers.
In this mysterious church of heart and hurt, pleasure and pain are swallowed as communion. Inevitably, some preach hate louder than love.
It’s tarot weather.
Rich Ferguson, Tarot Weather