no natural day is like
the time to come

when backward remembering
will come forward

and break me
when I unfind myself

a field full
of castles and air

so dead it could not
be set on fire

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 13 October 1663.

I took my own place
as an answer

to that lie about creating
some less ordinary life

who am I but a beggar
wish list in hand

having suddenly to shit
straining into the void

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 12 October 1663.

This week: gods in the undergrowth, a hue of metaphysical blue, the traffic of Jacob’s ladder, the low notes of the left hand, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m not religious but I like a sense of the spirit behind the natural world and our interactions with it. The Finnish concept of väki encapsulates this; everything, living or not, has an energy or spirit and it impacts our lives as we come into contact with it. My poetry has been bringing all these influences together recently.

The wet dark, the thick gold light, the spiral of leaf fall, the gods in the undergrowth, creeping age, desire. Though I try to vary what I write about these are popping up again in my poetry at this time of year.

In a strange coincidence as I’ve been reading Sappho, connected to those last two themes, Anne Carson arrived on my radar and on my Substack feeds. I love some of her Sappho translations, so I bought Autobiography of Red a couple of months ago though I haven’t read it yet. I’ve read some her own poems and essays and she kept showing up. I clicked more links. Last month, I wrote a poem inspired by her and Sappho which starts ‘she keeps arriving in worn stone and sandals’ trying to capture this sense of the two of them stepping into my life now.

And then to hear she’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Do we shape the algorithm or does it shape us?

I wrote algorhythm at first which must be a poem.

Gerry Stewart, The Gods in the Undergrowth

I’m sitting in Ted Hughes’ house writing about Sylvia Plath. It feels strange. The desk in my room looks out onto a steep pitch of dense, dark trees on the far side of a valley that reaches almost to the top of the window. Blurry birds occasionally fly past below me. It’s a wonderful, wondering house.

And my random book picker picked Plath this week. This week! The week I’m on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank, her ex-husband’s house, by the village where she is buried. Honestly, it did. I don’t know how I feel about coincidences, and I don’t go looking for signs in my life, as a rule. But I also don’t mess with them if they do show up, and I will tell you that a whacking great black butterfly flew into my window as I was deciding whether there was enough light left to visit her grave yesterday afternoon, and that when I left the house and started up the lane, a whacking great barn owl wheeled silently over me three times and flew away. I’ve been surrounded by poets and poetry and trees all week, so maybe I’m seeing metaphors everywhere, but obviously, I went to see her. The sun came out, and I told her about the owl.

Nia Broomhall, Week 30: Ariel

The back-yard maples are still perfectly green […] but the city’s ash trees are dropping their little tongues of flame on streets and sidewalks and front lawns. They give the lie to this poem, since the summer was terribly dry, but they’re still brightly golden. I’m not complaining.

It’s odd that the yearly change of the leaves appears to be changeless, given how much has changed in the twenty years since I wrote “Suburban Samsara.”

Substack doesn’t do well with stepped lines, so I present these four-stress alliterative lines with verticals to mark the midline caesuras:

Suburban Samsara

Season finale: | last fall, the street
was flaked in yellow, | flecked with sheet-flame,
leaf-gold layering | over the lawns.
The garden buddhas | sat bare-bellied,
navel deep | in a dreamed nirvana,
almost conceding: | Not all is suffering. […]

Maryann Corbett, Leaf-gold Season

As I’ve settled into a regular cadence of writing poetry again, as well as reading a fair bit of it, I figure this is a good time to bloviate all about my pretentious literary thoughts and theories. What else is a blog good for, after all? Here are some of those thoughts, in no particular order:

I don’t think that poetry always needs to be about the sparse and the spare and whittling everything down into the leanest language that can possibly get the job done. I think some poems need space to blunder around on the lawn, mumbling under their breath and slopping their drink over the edge of their glass. Some poems need a thick mattress to jump on as they scream into the void and poke at the sky with a gnarled stick. Some poems are born chubby and need a little more elbow room than others. Some poems need to put on every coat in their closet all at once. Some poems need four cupcakes and the entire jar of sprinkles to self-actualize. I’m beginning to discover the satisfaction of giving them exactly what they want. That’s its own kind of precision.

I’ve never before felt compelled to write a response poem, but I’m writing one now in response to a poem by Daniel Berrigan, and although the topic is grim, it’s an interesting experience, and after this I may want to write more of them. Maybe a poem gets lonely sometimes and wants to hear itself echoed. Maybe a poem wants to know how it affected someone else. Maybe a poem just likes gazing at itself in the mirror.

Kristen McHenry, What a Poem Wants, What a Poem Needs

There are eight months until the publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise. I’m still editing a bit here and there and adding some poems, while waiting for more comments from my editors. Here is a paragraph I added (spoiler alert!):

Up to a point in my life, I appeared to be fearless. People often said that having a baby in a hotel room in Kabul was courageous; rarely did they say it was foolish and dangerous. As a teenager, I went through an illegal abortion, traveling to Nepal while pregnant, and having an unattended birth. I felt confident that I could do these things. If there were setbacks, I found it possible to move forward. Whether it was fearlessness, naivety, or hubris, my thoughts were free of regrets. There would always be a way forward.

All of that crumbled after my son was kidnapped.

In the interim, I’m working on some other things. I am submitting a poetry chapbook (titled My Private Tornado) to presses and contests, and, with the advice and help of a friend, have done an extensive reordering of the poems. As a general rule, chapbooks should stick to a theme or tell a story. The ordering of poems in a chapbook can make or break its likelihood to be accepted for publication.

Risa Denenberg, Month Minus Eight

I am happy to share that I have a wee poem, “Heat Lightning” in the new issue of Tiny Wren Lit. I’m grateful to EiC Dana Knott and guest Editor Kipp Knott for selecting my poem for inclusion in this special Ekphrastic issue.

I’m partial to ekphrastic poetry because imagination is set loose by art and can end up anywhere. Anywhere at all. I chose a piece of art (above) from a collection in The Public Domain Review, “Studies on Twilight Phenomena, after Krakatoa”. The artwork is part of a set of chromolithographs from water colors by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche. They depict the skies after the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia which created strange optical effects all over the world. Fascinating stuff that linked to more fascinating stuff and down into the rabbit hole I fell. My poem has nothing to do with volcanoes and has only a passing reference to skies so where did it come from? Even I am not sure.

Charlotte Hamrick, Poem in Tiny Wren Lit

Last Saturday I had the absolute pleasure of being part of an art & poetry workshop (part of the ongoing Sun Inn Poets project in Manchester) with local artist Ian Ecclestone.

Alongside wonderful poets Tom Branfoot and Adam Taylor I read my poem ‘I am glad to be your daughter’ to a room full of poets, artists, and doodlers and then watched those lovely people draw all over our poems.

Ian had stencilled each poem onto a large piece of board and placed them on tables in the studio at Altogether Otherwise along with a bunch of coloured pens. Participants were invited to listen to each poet reading their poem and to begin drawing, colouring, or mark making in response any time they felt drawn to. There were zero restrictions. Participants could draw on one poem, each poem, every poem, and they could draw whatever came up for them.

I adored seeing how different each poetry board came together (they were each so very different!), and seeing the gorgeous colour added all over my own poem.

I also loved chatting with people as they drew; with poets I knew, and with people I’d never met who’d come along to hear some poetry and try being creative in a slightly different way.

There were several discussions about cross discipline work and the labels we adopt that can then often keep us hemmed into a single discipline. We also spoke about how creativity stems from a similar inner space for all of us, and how although we’re drawn to certain forms much can be gained through exploration into others.

I suspect something exciting happens within when we bring disciplines together. Art of any form is about emotional response, connection; it’s why we care so much whether our work gets published – not just so we can see our names in print but because the other half of creating anything is that creation impacting and/or being witnessed by someone else. Art is communication and connection, and when we use art to respond to art magical things happen. Just watching what emerged across those boards and listening to people’s experiences during the day was testament to that.

It was interesting too to experience this while I’ve been delving further into ekphrasis. My focus has been on writing in response to visual art, yet here was the opposite, drawing in response to written/spoken art, and it had a similarly wonderful result. Some drawings responded literally to images and concepts within the poems, others appeared much more abstract or to be the result of something internal within the artist that had been sparked through either listening, reading, or being in the space. What emerged through the collaboration was a gorgeous array of imagery that spanned styles, colours, and influence; the interaction of different people’s responses alongside the poems led to wonderfully rich final boards.

Rachael Hill, Colourful Words: Expressive Art & Poetry

This month, I’m guest-reading for ‘s journal After…, alongside the main man himself. In case you’re not familiar with it, After… is a high quality, free online journal of ‘after’ and ekphrastic poetry.

So far, it’s involved some enjoyable reading, a colour-coded spreadsheet, and several surprises about where our tastes converge and diverge.

Since the poems are scheduled to appear only on the date of a full or new moon, there are a strictly limited number of slots for 2027 and I am looking forward to having some wince-inducingly tough decisions, and maybe even the odd arm wrestle, over what to include.

Of course, I have been thinking during this time about what makes a good ‘after’. I started to loosely categorise them into three things I made up: implosion, explosion, and refusal-to-detonate.

An implosion of another piece of art is something that condenses it down to its absolute essentials. It finds the inner mood of the thing (be that another poem, a piece of visual art, a film, etc) and collapses it into itself. It’s not simply a “re-telling” or a describing of what is happening in the poet’s own words. It’s not a pastiche. It’s more like inhabiting the thing from inside itself, perhaps saying something the original thing didn’t even know it was saying.

An explosion, by contrast, blasts the thing wide open, scatters its constituent parts all about the place, and goes for a rummage. It might pick one particular fragment and ruminate solely on that. It might try to make some kind of completely new composition out of the original art. It’s an expansion of, and perhaps a detour away from, the original. Sometimes only the slenderest of threads may remain to connect it back to the place it started from.

A refusal-to-detonate is … well, I’m not quite sure yet what that might be. What would it look like, to create an after of a work that refuses to engage with the work’s own original perspective at all? Is that possible? Can you create an after to a thing from entirely outside of that thing’s frame of reference? I’d like to find out. Perhaps someone can submit one and I’ll be able to say, I’ve seen it, and I now know what it is.

Victoria Spires, A month of afters

I have been thinking about photos and about the Instagram account I started. I’m not claiming to be without a significant ego, but I’ve never been a “look at me” kind of girl. I don’t take center stage, though I’m bossy behind the scenes. The idea of recording myself doing things and recording myself talking about it, or talking directly to the camera doesn’t work for me. It would feel (and in my case, it would be) performative. Instead it is our “hyttebok” – a simple and straightforward amateur photo album that isn’t trying to create content.

I’m a teaching artist, and I think that even my poetry is about teaching—in the Socratic sense: Look at that!

What does it mean to you?
Maybe it means puppies and carburetors.
No wrong answers.
Maybe it is entirely silent: experiential meaning, somatic meaning.

The forest doesn’t need to be performed. And it is full of meaning already. There’s no need to assign it anything that our bodies don’t already understand. Even the shivering.

I’ll know if you’ve got the answer when I see clarity on your face.

The second night of our trip, the temps dropped to freezing. In the morning, we kicked up the heat, had our breakfast and our coffee, then stepped outside to find that all of the trees that had been yellow-orange just yesterday were a deep orange now.

You just stand there, shivering in the breeze, listening to the trees, the treecreepers, and the redwings. Thinking: Why am I not doing this every chance I get?

Ren Powell, Our First Week Out

One day, our class falls into a deep conceptual conversation around the verb, “To miss.” In English, I miss you = I am experiencing the absence of you. We perform the missing. It lives inside of us. We feel it. We inhabit the wound.

In Italian, the speaker is not performing the missing. Mi manchi (I miss you) = You are missing to me, or from me, you are missing. In a way, there is no action. There is only a gaping hole. A missingness. An absence being bestowed upon the speaker.

My classroom is made up of a Swedish person, a Brazilian person, a Polish person, a Mexican person, and an English person. We are not encouraged to default to English, although many speak it; rather, we stay in Italian, no matter the level. We all engage with the concept of the verb from the starting point of our native tongues, bending ourselves around the language, decentering what we know to be true.

I think this is a doorway into poetry.

~~

In my blank moments in Italian, I learn to cherish what I do have. If I have verde, affamato, caldo, incantevole, strano, esausto, e benedetto (green, hungry, warm, enchanting, strange, exhausted, and blessed), I learn to love those words. They are my words. They are what I have. They become close to me. They open doorways to new words. They make me hungry for other sounds.

So, I realize the abundance I was born with. That I have not only Longing at my disposal but want or wish or yearning or burning, or even predilection or proclivity. Or perhaps thirst or itch.

I exist as two selves, then. In English, I am whole. I am lush and wild and feral. I dream in English. I house a thousand variations and build worlds that not only convey meaning but subvert it, double it, contort it, or conceal it.

My mother-in-law once said to me out of nowhere: You know, you are the most erudite person I’ve ever met. She meant it as a compliment, maybe, and I think I took it as one, maybe. But I never stopped to consider who I would be without all that language at my disposal. But I know a new me now, and I am missing fragments.

~~

I wrote my first poem in Italian a few years ago, for my wedding. It was edited by a wonderful Italian poet (Alessandra Bava), and read aloud at the ceremony by my dear Italian-born friend. I want to try to write another—this time without help. In Italian, I am at sea. I have enough to survive. But I barely have metaphor. I have almost no idiom. Can I render beauty? Can I make anything dimensional? Am I dimensional?

How can I compensate for linguistic austerity? How can I make what is concise also soft and also delicious?

And beyond language, I also think of poets who’ve had to relearn how to write due to physical or cognitive disability (see Richard Siken’s newest book, I Do Know Some Things), how my own disability has changed the way I come to the page.

Yet another doorway into the house of poetry.

Lisa Marie Basile, What learning another language taught me about writing poetry

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve never been in a place that so openly honors writers. The park with the busts and the benches shaped like books with the writers’ words on them already pushed them to the front of the line, but anywhere I go in Iași, I see streets named after poets and novelists, placards on walls talking about how such-and-such writer used to walk through this alleyway on his or her way to go to the university or to write in a park or go meet with fellow writers for some purpose. (I need to get better at reading Romanian so I’m not forced to use Google Translate for these moments.)

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Copou Park is also home to the Mihai Eminescu Museum, a play house, and a small bookstore that’s connected to them. And so, before we moved away from this little park, I made sure to stop in there and look around, and I purchased these volumes. [photo]

Now to be clear, I didn’t know what I was buying in either case, though I expected that “An Extraterrestrial in the Palace of Culture” would be closer to my reading level. (I was not wrong). I didn’t know anything about Magda Isanos when I picked up her book from the others on the table. I was going with my gut, and with this Google translation of the portion of a poem on the back cover.

How bright you are, my unlived day… Your halo measures up to my forehead. I walk through the forest of people and happily say: “I want to kiss a single star on the mouth…” My youth shines straight like a sword And every dream guided by it blossoms. My lips sometimes said; “I will die”… But on all seas, I had a ship.

The title of the collection comes from that first line, “My Unlived Day,” and I thought, yeah, if the machine is doing this anything close to justice, then I want to know more about Magda Isanos.

Luckily for me, a Romanian writer named Luciana Moroianu (who I have never met) decided earlier this year to devote a week to telling the story of and translating some poetry of Magda Isanos, and it’s one of those poems I’m highlighting today.

Brian Spears, “Dumneaza” by Magda Isanos

Now that Nell, aka Helena Nelson, aka Helen Beaton, founder, publisher and editor at HappenStance Press, has sent out her final newsletter and announced that the press is winding down, I felt this might be a good moment to celebrate its achievements.

HappenStance started out as a poetry pamphlet press in 2005, publishing slim volumes by all sorts of poets, gaining most recognition for the début pamphlets by up-and-coming names. Several significant contemporary poets cut their teeth with HappenStance. People such as Niall Campbell and Will Harris, etc, etc, not only benefited from Nell’s editorial input at an early stage in their development, but they also obtained a calling card from HappenStance, in the shape of their pamphlets, which enabled them to make the step on to bringing out their first full collections with major publishers. All of the above led to the press being awarded the Michael Marks Award in 2010.

Moreover, in editorial terms, Nell ran a system of submissions windows. Poets sent her batches of their work, and she then replied with detailed feedback. Numerous well-known poets might never have been published by her, but her crit of their work still played a huge, invisible role in their development back in the day. Just imagine how many hours she dedicated to this selfless task!

And then there was Sphinx. Sphinx Reviews was a project that ran alongside HappenStance. It specialised in reviews of poetry pamphlets, a format that has long struggled to receive critical attention, and provided an incredible service to poets, publishers and, of course, readers.

By my tedious manual count, a total of 1461 books were reviewed on Sphinx, many of them by more than one person. That’s the equivalent of over 2,000 pamphlets that were received by Nell, repackaged and sent back out to her loyal band of reviewers. 2,000 batches of stamps to be paid for. Countless treks to the post office. 2,000 reviews that were edited by her (often to the huge benefit of the reviewers themselves, whose prose style and critical approach to poetry were often transformed via this process). 2,000 posts that were formatted, uploaded and optimised for search engines.

In later years, HappenStance shifted its focus to full collections. And again, it punched above its weight, garnering a T.S. Eliot shortlisting for Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point, providing opportunities to fine poets whose writing didn’t fit in with the criteria that major publishers employed to select their manuscripts.

And though Nell would probably admit that she was far more comfortable editing poetry than selling it, let’s not forget that HappenStance Press shifted several thousand units over the years, all via an unfunded subscription model with barely any distribution through bricks-and-mortar bookshops. What’s more, it published several volumes that reached out beyond the poetry bubble and found their way to readers via farm shops and wine merchants, etc, finding new readers for the genre.

Matthew Stewart, An appreciation of HappenStance Press

The Frankfurt Book Fair was a good book fair. Our new titles are getting a lot of attention, and it went by quickly. At some points, I would sit down with someone who was clearly just focused on rapid-fire selling, but this happened rarely. I don’t like it when the meeting is just about selling. We don’t buy often, so a meeting where they try to sell me several titles without real excitement for the discussion of great books is not going to go well.

I often forget something, and in this case, I tried hard not to forget anything, but I ended up losing the computer cord for this laptop, which means that I have only an hour or so, and then it is out of power. Mark will be sad that I’ve lost the cord, but glad that I’m home. He’s used to my losing things, here and there and everywhere. I do lose things. This time, Frankfurt.

I am going to have to get home by reading books and watching movies, which is good for me. I want to move into a new place, charge my life by not working on the weekends. By writing, spending time on my own creations. I am ready to have a new book, a new kind of wild.

Kate Gale, A New Kind of Wild: On Transformation

I have a proof copy of Reznikoff, Testimony. It’s the size of a good brick, the kind you might want to throw through the plate-glass window of an investment bank, or the windscreen of an SUV in Mayfair. (I am not advising this: they are made of shatterproof toughened glass.) I’ve been carrying this proof copy around in my bag, showing it to people in car parks who might be interested in my wares.

On the website there is now a page for the book, with links to other places. There’s an essay by me on the book in the new issue of The Little Review – little in price (£5) but otherwise (176 pages) not little at all. […]

Reznikoff bought a second-had printing press in the late 1920s and both printed and published (in editions of around 200) many of his own books. ‘No more rejection slips,’ his wife noted. 

Charles Boyle, Newsletter October 2026

As you may know, I run a small press called Dead Mall, and on September 22nd, we launched two new books: Alex Tretbar’s Dogsmind and a revised/final edition of my own Interrogation Days (which also comes with a supplementary pamphlet of a closely related poem, “Futures”).

Alex’s book is a wonder and unlike anything I’ve published or read before, and you can read an interview with him here. Both books also features a new physical book design: the cover is gatefolded, which really changes the look, feel and physical experience of the books.

Lastly, we are raising money with each sale, setting aside 25-50% of each purchase for the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio (very near the press’s Dayton home). This org provides much-needed aid to the Haitian immigrant community in that city which has been cruelly impacted by the recent Supreme Court decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status2. We currently have $125 collected, but I am hoping we can add to that amount! Consider picking up a book to add your support.

RM Haines, EXITING THE DOOM LOOP

The weekend also brought another mini-retreat, though my charger [is] on the fritz so I spent the day writing notes and outlines for the play that I started earlier in the summer and never finished about teenage girls and demonology, which seems fitting since we are mid-stream of the new Mike Flanagan Carrie, which is about the rage of young girls, and more broadly, women in general, which is spiking more and more as the country degenerates. So much good horror stuff is coming in the next couple of months on both small and big screen (as well as the stage locally that we are hoping to get to). The Crystal Lake series. The new season of Yellowjackets. Films like Other Mommy and Victorian Psycho as well. 

I am finishing up the galleys of the eco-gothic anthology this week, and once approved by the authors, we will be planning the release. I am also still in the thick of submissions for next year’s book series, so if you have not heard from me, you will be soon. Since we only had a handful of full-length projects, we are starting a second reading period for those through the end of this year.    

Fall feels like it’s slipping away, so I am hoping to inhabit the space of it a little bit more. Since we were out til 4am last night, after a big brunch of biscuits and gravy that J made this morning, I am mostly taking a lazy Sunday to plan the week and reset the apartment. Then tonight, the rest of Carrie and maybe another movie on streaming. We have tickets for a cool horror shorts screening tomorrow called Fresh Meat and maybe another to make it a double feature since we’ll be out. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/11/2026

After months of work, I have an abundance of news and new items to share this harvest season. My 2027 calendar of art and haiku is now available online, with a dozen new artworks of landscapes, flora and fauna. I also have eight new card designs for everyday, birthdays and holidays, plus four holiday notecard sets and three for everyday.

My children’s book, Yung Stands Strong, will be launched this Sunday as part of the grand opening for the Eureka Chinatown Monument. Then the following Saturday, October 17, there will be a book reading and tour of Eureka’s historic Chinatown. There are two more book events after that—see below for details and other Makino Studios events. The book had a limited first printing. You can pre-order copies online now, for shipment around October 31, and find it in local stores soon after.

Annette Makino, It’s harvest season!

I’ve made a decision about my chapbook-length, hybrid-poetry manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong: I’m going to make it into a handmade artist book. I came to this conclusion after meeting with artist/poet MaryAnn L. Miller (Lucia Studio), who was generous enough to listen to my ideas, explain the process(es) necessary, and encourage me to go for it even though I do not feel fully prepared to embark upon, let alone complete, such a project. For people who are thinking of doing this themselves, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I figured I would use my blog to write about the process. It will also serve to goad me into staying on track and actually completing it! Because you know how it goes. One gets distracted, or gets mired in details, or flags in general.

MaryAnn provided meaningful inspiration when I visited her at her studio. She has produced numerous artist books, and they are beautiful objects. Photos do not represent what a joy it is to handle an artist book–the textures of the papers, the feel of the book in hand, the subtleties of color. The book feels like a completed project, and this manuscript really needs that. Or I do, since I embarked on research about Harold Dunn in 2008 and have been working on the poems and historical excerpts on and off since then; it’s something I want to do to honor my friend David Dunn, to learn his father’s story, to help me to understand David’s story–cut short by his own early death.

I have sent the ms. to numerous chapbook publishers, but although two of them expressed some interest in the poems they also acknowledged that the layout of the work would pose challenges for their small presses. I understand that. I looked into print-on-demand options for self-publishing this text, and…let’s just say the process would not have been smooth. Since I’m not doing this to earn any profit, I may as well do it as art for art’s sake rather than tearing my hair out over tech issues. If I make only 10 or 15 books, at least I will have finished this particular project. If I consider this “artistic,” the process becomes more interesting and the result can take its time. I can make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. Which I fully intend to do.

Ann E. Michael, New project

The latest from award-winning Alberta poet Derek Beaulieu is the deliberately provocative Do It Wrong (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2026), a title subtitled “How To Be A Poet in the Twenty-First Century,” an absolutely readable assemblage of critical essays, offerings and manifestos collected into what might actually be essential reading for those interested in writing and publishing, especially if the very idea confuses, intimidates or frightens. For those unaware, Beaulieu is not only the current Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, but the author of an absolute ton of published books and chapbooks across North America and Europe, including titles such as Surface Tension (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2011) and with wax (Coach House Books, 2003) [see my review of such here], as well as a long-established micropress publisher of chapbooks, pamphlets, small journals and other ephemera.

jwcurry once suggested to me that the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was a great writer, to his mind, in large part because he was willing to fail (and therefore manage to achieve what hadn’t even been attempted), but Beaulieu takes that idea a step further, suggesting that anyone who wishes to engage with art generally, or with poetry and/or small press publishing specifically, should be willing to completely go against how it has always and ever be done. “Given the meagre audience for poetry and the microscopic financial rewards,” he writes, early on in the collection, “I suggest that you not only dance as if no one is watching but write as if no one is reading you. Because metaphorically—and mathematically—no one is.” Through a collection of short first-person essays, Beaulieu works through ideas on composition, community, publishing, education, awards, experimental writing, influence, mentors, support and other threads around literary production and engagement that so rarely get discussed, let alone in such detail. Referencing an ethos of sharing and community around The Grateful Dead, for example, in his piece “EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WRITING I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD,” he ends with:

The Grateful Dead and their fans see the music as only one part of a wider artistic life, and they eschew power and ownership at every opportunity except when it can be wielded to increase awareness, make space, or fund colleagues. The Deadheads I know trade tapes, jam together, offer ideas, play their favourite moments for unwitting converts; they are dedicated to being kind. We need more poets to act like Deadheads.

Do It Wrong is incredibly positive and generative, and strikingly honest about how literary publishing works and doesn’t work, offering his years of experience through the literary and small press trenches on how best to approach the work, and what one might expect (and not expect), and how best to propel the art forward. He speaks of experience over commercial reward, and pushing to purposefully make it weirder. Honestly, this is a book I wish anyone engaged with this kind of work, or wishing to, should pick up and read, from the established writer to the emerging ambitious kids seeking glory and career through poetry (and they are very much part of the landscape), to the moody teenager secretly scribbling out lines in their notebook. Beaulieu’s voice is clear-headed and optimistic, articulating a joy through the process of exploration, learning and risk-taking, and a suggestion that those merely in it for themselves will end up in frustration, missing out on all the possibilities that an engaged community offers. 

rob mclennan, Derek Beaulieu, Do It Wrong

“Mistress of accurate minor pain, / Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane,” Marie Ponsot whispered in the privacy of her profanations, in the folds of the poem titled “Private and Profane,” where the enumerated saints are the humans who influenced her intellection rather than Jesus’ obedient followers. The supplicant’s voice knows its address is heretical.

This Kierkegaardian love/mistrust binary fuels the tension in Ponsot’s poetry, where recognition is often derailed by gender socialization and social constructions of identity qua being. I’m thinking of how Soren Kierkegaard put these “two equal possibilities” in Works of Love:

When deception and truth are presented as two equal possibilities in contrast to each other, the decision is whether there is love or mistrust in you. For example, one says, “Even what appears to be the purest feeling can nevertheless be a deception – certainly it is possible; it must be possible– ergo I choose mistrust or belief in nothing.”

The problem is the how much depends upon this facile presumption of equality.

Enter Louise Nevelson, the sculptor whose work moves in counterpoint to Ponsot. Nevelson crafted an exquisite persona from excess and old furniture fragments. She invented a usable childhood to leverage her countercultural choices and never sat still long enough to commit to her shadows and shades. Like Lady Gaga, she was ‘born this way,’ hatched by artifice, wed to self-fashioning as a means of escape. Nevelson’s Philosophy of the Egg, in her own words:

I remember when I was six years old at play recess in school. One girl was taking advantage of another. So I went up to the girl who was being bullied to reassure her that she didn’t have to be conned. And she wasn’t even a friend of mine. At six years old you don’t battle for people unless you’re born with it. It’s like an egg; you can scramble it, soft-boil it, hard-boil it, even devil it. But it is an egg. The ingredient of an egg is an egg.

After turning a hue of metaphysical blue with Ponsot, I burrowed into Louise Nevelson’s genderfucking sculptures for respite.

Alina Stefanescu, Some, sum, somme.

The last installment [link] of my five part review of Living In History by Luke Roberts is about how challenging VAWG [violence against women and girls] was a risky political act for a woman poet, more so in Britain than in America. This has obviously changed since but when, how and why? I look at poems by half a dozen women publishing in the 70s and early 80s. I use the discussion to re-evaluate an often critiqued poem by Denise Riley, “A note on sex and ‘the reclaiming of language’ “. If, as I argue in the essay, there was a wave of defiant semi-autobiographical poetry about rape in the USA in the 70s, led by Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, and yet the subject could lead to being typecast if done by a woman in the UK, then the airport becomes a very interesting place indeed. In Riley’s poem, the speaker is “flying back from the New Country”. In Riley’s allegorical poetics, this could mean, with arch and ironic reservations, that the speaker has declared herself a feminist, that feminism has a zion not necessarily in an actual physical place, and is anyway being looked at differently because she is clever and assertive and therefore might be a feminist, and second wave feminism was the New and Dangerous Thing. But there is more than a hint of the literal USA in 1970. For a woman in 1970 to shuttle between the USA and the UK is to exist between two feminist cultures, and the USA and the UK are the Scylla and Charybdis of talking about VAWG.

To me the feminist finale of my essay crowns the theme throughout, of how the simile, metaphor, metonymy, atmospheric craft of poetry picked up some undercurrents we now value, and by what battle (and also did poets glance off things in the air, and then leave it at that?).

It’s been very interesting observing my networks and some newcomers reacting to my five part essay. Most responses have been about technique, and that I’ve made a good case for reading poets unfamiliar or neglected. Some appreciate my academic backbiting about another writer (and let’s face it, backbiting is a muse for me).

But I think of the last as the best part of the essay, because it exposes the cult of free association as reserved for men, and the club doesn’t allow in all the feminisms. I argue that freedom and poetic license have long been valued and have their own pedigree and chain of references (I remember the 90s when Tom Raworth was admired for the fastest reading style in the West, and then Miles Champion beat his time). To have proper intertextual allusion, as opposed to the nod and a wink of a sect, we have to ask if women had the same audience interrelation and, well, freedom of legacy, in being freewheeling and tangential (why is a Raworth book not about Cancer titled Cancer).

Women were policed and pigeonholed and everything was serious: seriously nice, seriously sexy, seriously angry and violated, mannishly anarchic, writing a (sexual or psychoanalytic) écriture feminine etc. If we look at how 70s women navigated this double standard and this pigeonholing, then we don’t get people “ahead of their time” making the out there agit prop theme poetry de nos jours, avant la lettre. We get to see the actual culture, how it was changed and resisted change.

During my lifetime so far, it has suddenly become easier to write about sexual violence, but in what exact year? Marital rape was made a criminal offence in 1991, so I suspect after 1991. And what were the green shoots and who fell in battle?

Ira Lightman, What we stomach, rumbling

The “Lucy Poems” of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), all but one of which appeared in the 1800 second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, make a curious collection. By his own admission, Wordsworth never intended them as a sequence. As he wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799 — the year following his time in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, with Coleridege as his near neighbor and literary collaborator, and the year when he was drafting these poems, one after another — his writing constituted a kind of emotional “self-defense.”

With the lapse of Wordsworth’s and his sister Dorothy’s lease on the house at Alfoxden, they had decamped to Germany, where they had hoped once again to join forces with Coleridge and his wife, Sara. Economic disparity between the two households, however, meant that while the Coleridges lived and entertained glitteringly in Ratzeburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, the Wordsworths found themselves isolated, in modest and limited straits, in a small town in Lower Saxony.

It was in this isolation, envious of Coleridge’s circumstances and resenting his sister for whose upkeep he was responsible, that Wordsworth began the Lucy Poems. Scholars have quibbled for two centuries over Lucy’s identity. Perhaps it’s safest to say that — however we might read these elegies on their surface, and whether or not she had any counterpart in reality — the Lucy of these poems provided the poet with a repository for his own complex emotions in that low period following his first great artistic surge.

If “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” serves as self-defense, it seems meant to ward off an existential crisis. Wordsworth, feeling that he languished in obscurity, with the malaise that often follows bursts of productivity, could — we imagine — console himself a little with the thought that “a violet by a mossy stone” might still shine with the brilliance of a single star in the sky.

The making of a perfect little thing, in three common-meter abab stanzas, might not thrill as the first large-visioned passages of The Prelude would have done. Still, the poem’s formal effects are worth noting, particularly the way that small disturbances in its tightly controlled iambic meter point to the unrest, buried like Lucy herself, in its speaker’s soul.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

Despite her ongoing health problems, it’s hard to imagine a 27-year-old poet consciously setting out to write her last poems, and yet that is the title of the final section, comprising 14 pieces. There’s a numbered sequence of 12 sections bearing dates from the 2nd to 13th of July 1994, the first of which bears the title ‘Ephemeral Beat’ after its number. This sequence is sandwiched by two short stand-alone poems.

However, the first line of the first poem does seem to signal a sense of impending endings: ‘Adieu aux mots sertis, aux mots de gloire. / Farewell to inset words, to glorious words.’ This premonitory feel is echoed in, for example, the closing lines of the seventh section of the sequence:

But the sea loved us
The lyre of glassware and sunsets
Laying hands on time
We have carried out the simple act
Of growing old

(Note the absence of terminal punctuation.)

And then the book ends in a flourish of something like hope, in this three-line poem:

Waiting among the palms
Full of auburn kisses
Whose splendor astonishes

One of the great joys of this blog is the opportunities I get to discover work that is entirely new to me, and this is certainly the case with Béatrice Douvre, who I’d never heard of before John Taylor kindly sent me this book. She’s an intriguing voice, and one I’ll be returning to.

Billy Mills, Inhabit the Brief Halt by Béatrice Douvre: A Review

The moon was saying goodbye to the sky and opening its
doors to the sun.
I had been sitting barren, on a dusty rock staring at a desert
that was apathy, tightening and the end.
There was nothing, and the nothing was everything and
everywhere.

(‘Chasms’)

So begins the collection, Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser, published by Alien Buddha Press this year. I read it in a flurry when it arrived, then read it again more slowly, and recently found myself coming back to it once more. It speaks a magic spell over the exhaustion many of us have been feeling.

My day to day work is digital-heavy research and writing, while my time is tracked: each minute, keystroke, scroll, and pause for thought accounted for. There is no generative AI involved, blessedly, and I’m grateful for that. My thoughts and words are my own. By the end of the week though, after all those intense computer hours, I’m too zapped to open a social media app.

It weighs on my heart that there are poets I only have contact with via Bluesky, because I wish I could approach poetry differently, with more rest and spaciousness. Poetry began as my creative outlet and I’d like to keep it that way, not see it turn into some grand competition or race, even as I keep reaching towards growth.

Here’s more from the opening poem in Carmella’s collection:

And of the chasms between the everything and the nothing?
That speak silently, between and across, the human and the
desert and the rock.
They are immeasurable!
Fathomless! Illimitable!
Greater than our nothing and everything,
Portals into further suns, into chasms!
And I am unafraid.

(‘Chasms’)

While reading these expansive, searching poems, I was reminded of a painting on view this week at the local gallery. Music was abstractly personified in it, and there was also some connection to quantum theory.

The artist, Ava Orphanoudakis, said, “The more deeply I contemplate the processes of Nature, the more I find myself in a musical space. I have ventured beyond the bounds of the physical to explore a deeper unseen spiritual realm that gives birth to our sensory reality. The essence of a melody lies not in the notes, but in the relationships between the notes, intervals, frequencies, and rhythms. All living beings, all of nature is interwoven in a cosmic symphony.”

She quoted the physicist David Bohm: “What we experience through the senses as empty space is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.”

That same impulse is threaded throughout Chasms, which is full of music (and at times, the absence of music) […]

Jenevieve Carlyn, “The sky flashes gemstones across her eyes”: Reading Carmella de Keyser’s Chasms

If the unearthly and the uncanny are real, then why don’t we see them all the time? And a common answer is that something inside us stops us — some blindness, some blockage, some failure to see what human beings are actually equipped to see.

That, at least, is the range of mystical thought developed by Today’s Poem, “In No Strange Land,” by Francis Thompson (1859–1907). The only work by Thompson widely known is “The Hound of Heaven,” a 182-line ode published in 1890:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

“In No Strange Land” never had the same fame, but it deserves a place in anthologies. Written probably in the 1880s, when Thompson was on the streets, sleeping under Thames bridges, it was posthumously published in 1908. And it captures, from the first stanza on, a sense that the otherworldly is simply in place, marvelously and brilliantly present, could we only see — see Christ walking on the Thames, see the shining “traffic of Jacob’s ladder” (the word “traffic” perfect) in Charing Cross. The numinous is nearby, not off in some strange land.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In No Strange Land

The form echoes the subject matter beautifully. Written in iambic tetrameter, the short lines bear a steady musical beat while the ABCCAB rhyme scheme creates stanzas that weave in and out like the circular design of a web. That turn at the end toward Halloween makes it a great poem to share with my kids who know about E. B. White’s spider from bedtime readings. In fact, my 9-year-old recently chose to reread Charlotte’s Web for her literacy free reading time at school. It’s amazing that a 192-page book published in 1952 still resonates so strongly with children in 2024. But then again, it was written by a man who believed this:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth… Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net.

I’ve told my youngest that E.B. White was also a poet and read her “Natural History” which he wrote to his wife Katharine while he was traveling away from home. Since I will be at an out-of-state conference this week, this last stanza seems especially befitting:

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

“Natural History” was written in 1929, the same year that E. B. White and Katherine Sergeant Angell eloped. The next year, Katharine, who already had two children from her first marriage, gave birth to Joel, her first and only child with White. The small family ended up moving up to Maine, and they remained married for 48 years until Katharine’s death in 1977 at the age of 84. E. B. White would follow in 1985 at the age of 86.

I‘ve always been intrigued by E. B. White’s relationship with Katharine—the whip-smart, divorced mother of two who worked as an editor at a fledgling magazine called The New Yorker. It was there that she and Andy (as White preferred to be called) met and fell in love. An intellect in her own right, Katharine was the magazine’s first fiction editor and she helped develop the careers of Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Taylor, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, and John Updike among many others. Those who are interested in learning more about Katharine can pick up Amy Reading’s new biography, The World She Edited: Kartharine White at the New Yorker (which I have not read yet since it just came out this September).

Zina Gomez-Liss, On the Silk Thread of Invention

In Denise Riley’s recent short collection of essays, A Chorus of Ears (Picador), she reflects on the way the persona of the poet frequently gets in the way of the reader and the poem. Her convincing argument – or part of it – is that during the writing of a poem the poet is effectively ‘anonymised’ by the process of writing; what appears on the page ‘runs ahead’ of the poet’s intention and so the voice of the poem is exactly that, the voice of the poem not that of the poet. At one point Riley conjectures that there may be shy poets out there hiding in the contemporary poetry landscape to whom the idea of standing on stage to receive a prize is horrifying and any attention at all is anathema. They may not even be particularly shy, but they are aware that the poem is one thing and they are another – and so they step aside.

I cannot help wondering if Geraldine Clarkson is one such poet.

The tribulations of sense-making have always been front and centre of Clarkson’s work because she challenges, to a greater degree than most poets, orthodox approaches to understanding language. In previous work, such as the wonderfully baffling Medlars, she has pushed this challenge to delightful limits; and in two relatively recent pamphlets, Singletary (Shearsman) and The Vitalist Sees the Signs (Broken Sleep) and the brand new Palomines (Blue Diode Press), she continues what appears to be an ongoing experiment in how far language can be coaxed to drop its everyday sense in favour of its prosodic-musical features as a means of expressing the inexpressible. Actually, ‘experiment’ is probably too analytical a term, Clarkson’s poems are more like instinctive activations of the latency in words to extend outwards into the abyss, in joy and horror and – as we shall come to later – in praise.

It is a gross simplification of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’, but true nonetheless, to say that in poetry like Clarkson’s the sense-speaking, linear meaning making poet herself, whether it be GB or Geraldine, necessarily disappears; she fades into nothingness as wordplay, surrealism and double-entendre take over, metaphors bounce joyfully off one another, symbolism seeps through the poems’ fabric, and soundscapes of echolalia and lexical resonance descend. You would not get far in conversation with Clarkson as a person if she spoke the way she writes; and so, she is anonymised by the flamboyance and vitality of her poetic choices (to the extent that they are her choices).

Chris Edgoose, Voice Beyond Sense: on Geraldine Clarkson 

I’ve chosen this poem from the collection as I guess, I think, it sums up what it’s all about. Me looking back and reflecting on my life and my choices, or at least some of them, all triggered by my daughter leaving home for University. I would argue though that I’m not sure I entirely believe the last lines I wrote. While of course my daughter is something I believe I did right, because she is just a top notch person who I am exceptionally proud of, I don’t truly believe she is the only thing I ever did right. Perhaps only in moments of deep self doubt/pity do I think this. You could say this is a collection of regrets but I’m not sure I believe in them, either. While obviously there will be things we all wish we didn’t do in our lives, if we are happy with where we are now, in this moment, and I am, then I don’t think you can regret anything. Because if you went back and course corrected, or made even the slightest, most subtle alteration, you probably wouldn’t be where you are. So even though I don’t truly believe this poem, I still don’t regret writing it!

Drop-in by Rhian Elizabeth (Nigel Kent)

My boxing coach is always telling me to stop telegraphing my jab, stop giving telltale movements that show or imply what I’m planning. Trouble is, you don’t always know you’re doing it. Telegraphs can be all sorts: pulling the fist back (‘loading’) before a strike, dropping your hand, flaring at the elbow, tensing, dipping, lifting…. the list goes on. I can hear him muttering: “stop loading that back hand!”. Ironically, it helps if you can relax: loose limbs are less likely to give away your intentions. Power should come from the body, from core rotation, not just from the arm. But it isn’t easy to relax when the stakes feel high.

Last week, shadow boxing in front of the mirror in the gym and feeling appropriately ridiculous, I started to wonder whether the trouble with some poems is ‘telegraphing’ too. Can a giveaway moment ruin the effect of all those carefully-crafted stanzas?

Poems always have designs on the reader. They seek to make us feel / think / recognise / unlearn. But I hate noticing that they do. I feel deflated when I can see a poem’s workings. I am elated when I can’t, when I read someone’s work and wonder ‘how did they get there’?

The poetic ‘telegraph’ might be an unoriginal metaphor, a movement towards a conclusion that holds no revelation for us, an overstated rhetorical argument, the sound of a line snapping shut too neatly. I dislike the sense that the poet knew where an idea would take them all along and we’re all just watching them get there, politely clapping at the end. I hate it when I spot it in my own writing. Yes – I hate that most of all.

This week, I’ve been reading ‘Red River Valley’ by Ian McMillan. He’s a poet who doesn’t telegraph his shots. Sometimes he likes to leave the reader deliciously suspended at the end of a poem. It’s as if we’re Wile. E. Coyote and we’ve carried on running off the cartoon cliff, feet pedalling air, eyes bulging.

Here are a selection of last lines from ‘Red River Valley’, in no particular order:

1. He felt an almost overwhelming urge / to eat pound coins.
2. Even the bushes were frightening / in a language nobody knew.
3. I ask him to sign it / But he already has.
4. But you couldn’t see my nails / In the shadows.

I could go on. Even without context, you can tell there isn’t a telegraph in sight. McMillan is a surreal realist, faithful to the moments of ordinary life so weird you couldn’t possibly make them up. His new collection brims with these observations.

Taken out of context, perhaps these McMillan quotes are misleading and don’t help build my case. To avoid the telegraph, you don’t need to deal in non-sequiturs. In fact, they might become telegraphs in themselves unless you use them sparingly. The best writing sneaks up quietly and takes the chair from under you. It’s as if the atmosphere in a room has changed but you couldn’t say how or when. Goosebumps. Hairs on the back of your neck. The sense you’re being watched. No – you’ve been watched for a long time. The poem sees you.

Helen Mort, “I can’t look you in the voice”

I love a list poem, especially one I don’t see coming.

My high school English teacher, the wonderful writer Christine Schutt, argued that there were two temperaments in American poetry—the Dickinsonian (here she drew her arms in) and the Whitmanic (arms spread far out). One seemed to work by subtraction, the other by accumulation.

Though I’m firmly in the first camp, I’m drawn to both approaches. I enjoy poems that enumerate and accrue, poems whose cadence, momentum, and music are shaped by the list.

Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and scholar, argued that “The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions.” Elsewhere in the interview, he offered a zinger: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

If we see the list as a ritual against death, one we practice to mark our lives, apportion our responsibilities, and organize the unwieldy contents of the mind, then there’s something quite moving about its appearance at the heart of poetry…

There’s a latent narrative even to tasks or appetites (the plot of the grocery list, for example, is the dish to be prepared and enjoyed solo or otherwise), and beneath that, a second, more unexpected (and existential, if we agree with Eco) meaning. We don’t want to die. Here, in this list of errands, tasks, and ingredients, is proof.

Maya C. Popa, And then, and then…

i am still collecting
patterns. turns of the tongue. blood
dried on a microscope slide. the bulb
glowing in the corner of that demolished house
across from the park. so many fly-wings, beating.

Robin Gow, snowflake photographs

When I was a young teacher, I tutored a student who was reading Romeo and Juliet in his high school English class. He insisted that he could make no sense of it. At our session, we opened to Act 2, Scene 2 – the balcony scene – which the class was required to memorize. When I asked him to read it, I understood why he didn’t understand. He hit every second beat of the line with the ferocity of a bass drumkick—“But SOFT what LIGHT through YOnder WINdow BREAKS?” The sing-song back and forth of his cadence stripped all nuance from the text, made the words into mere beats, a pattern like my elementary music school teacher used to make us match by banging wooden sticks together. We then spent the whole session talking about what had happened previously, which he had a decent handle on due to class discussion, and what was happening now as Romeo catches sight of Juliet but she hasn’t yet seen him. We talked about the meaning of the scene before we tackled the mechanics.

I thought back to this lesson as I tackled memorizing Sonnet 116 as a part of participating in Poetry Memorization Month for October. Conceived as a way to spend deep and meaningful time with ONE poem at a time, it invites participants to memorize one poem a week in October. I chose to begin with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, my favorite sonnet. (Yes I have a favorite sonnet. If there was a Shakespeare concert, I’d be screaming “116! 116!” while waving my arms in the air. )

I first memorized it in high school, then again late in college while studying Shakespeare, then again in my 40s. Now that I am in my sixties, when trying to recite it, I found I could only get the first 6 lines and then things got fuzzy. And, since I own a beautiful Mobius strip bracelet engraved with the first three lines of the sonnet and wear it almost everywhere I go, I figured it was only right that I get the thing into my brain once and for all.

I love this particular sonnet because it tries to define love, names it as something that cannot be changed or altered by circumstance, as something lasting and stalwart. As a young person, I found it incredibly romantic (it is). Now, having been with my husband for 45 years, I find it incredibly moving and recognize that this type of love is indeed rare and something to be treasured. (Guess who bought the bracelet for me? You are correct.)

Just memorizing the words isn’t enough for addressing a feeling this big. My student learned this about Romeo and Juliet all those years ago, and I needed to relearn it myself for this first challenge.

Donna Vorreyer, O no! Returning to An Old Favorite

Trained to gaze outward: the loudness, gesture
of excess, boldness of lovemaking. Eyes dilate,
the moon floods the cornea, tears flood to blind.

                    Looking not to see is dṛṣṭi.
Focussing into the keyhole without willing is darśana.

Regard the regardless by cleaning the lens—
a blur first, unwoven strands of fibres, an imprint
of fading mist, scab of a wound in memory scar.

Uma Gowrishankar, Dṛṣṭi vs. Darśana

Congratulations to Anne Carson on the Nobel nod.  I really know very little of her work beyond what I see shared online. I find the idea of the vastness of the back catalogue a little scary. It’s like trying to get into Bob Dylan ( another Nobel winner…you may not have heard of him), but I guess I should just dive in somewhere. And I will,  but I’ve got to get my TBR pile down a bit more first…

To that end, I’ve been working my way through Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of novels (as well as watching the TV Show). I’ve been collecting them all through the medium of charity shops (with the exception of the first and 4th novel), and I finished book 5 at the start of the week. And I enjoyed this section from early on in the novel.

Flyte looked at Lamb. ‘Ever considered instilling discipline into your staff?’

‘All the time. I favour the carrot and stick approach.’

‘Carrot or stick?’

‘Nope. I use the stick to ram the carrot up their arses. That generally gets results.’ Lamb frowned. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m using metaphor. This is not a fucking poetry reading.’

It looked like a fucking poetry reading, though, inasmuch as there were few people there, and none of them stylishly dressed.

Taken from London Rules, Mick Herron, page 100-101

Mat Riches, Lines of Compost Upon Westminster* Bridge**

As many of you will be aware, things are pretty lively here in France at the moment and the school my two older sons go to has been shut by a blockade every day since the end of last week. Since my middle son is only 11 and needs constant help to navigate the bewildering variety of emails, online documents and video links the teachers are scrambling to provide, it has not been the most productive work week chez nous. Indeed, I was woken at 6 this morning by the distinctive sound of teenagers trundling wheelie bins around to build barricades, and I am putting the finishing touches to this piece to the distant sounds of singing and chanting. (When my middle son and I took a break on Tuesday morning to walk around our local area, we passed five blockaded schools or university departments within five minutes of us — from each one you could hear the noise of the next.)

I’ve been meaning to write something for a while about what it’s like to read Greek but with all this going on I didn’t have time to finish that piece, so here instead is something about Sophocles Philoctetes, a play I read in the summer and have been rereading this week, alongside Shakespeare, for comfort amid the chaos. […]

One of the pleasures of reading Greek tragedy is the variety of the Greek, both formally and stylistically. Much of the dialogue is written […] in iambic trimeter, a line which is metrically quite similar to the iambic pentameter we are familiar with from Shakespeare. This alternates with lyric passages in much more complex metres. Stylistically, tragedy encompasses rapid repartee, the concise aphorism, longer speeches of careful argument and/or consummate oratory, and the elaborately lyric […]

Victoria Moul, This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine

So where am I taking this postage-stamp post? Poetry is the expressive double, a specific coral formation of the logos of the sea – which grants the poet the full evocative power of language… as it were, the double soul-companion of the sun.

I am trying to build ambitious sandcastles with my poems, full of fragile seagull gleanings, detritus, bric-à-brac. And I struggle strenuously to keep them together, as architectural constructs, with a special salt-water adhesive. The Rhode Island touchstone upholds both my foundations, and the keystone of the arch. It is the double soul of Roger Williams – both the religious enthusiast and the fierce prophet of secular, cosmopolitan civil liberties, the rule of law – who informs my own point of view.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Which is why only poetry can adequately express this mysterious domain, this earth, this cosmos – “that hath such people in’t.”

Henry Gould, The Logos of Poetry

from far and wide they converge 
upon conversation’s terrain to uncoil 
a group as a line looking to where the 
sea’s amalgam sands their landed sky

drawn by a poem’s flowing lines they wait
for their ears to grow accustomed to hearing
the words paint a picture within a picture
and to feel the seance of bygone times 

funny sunny or bane of rain
heads lift   hearts sore
for the poet has captured more 
so much more than they can say

Jim Young, Gower Walking Festival 2026

I’m teaching a class at the upcoming Skagit Poetry Festival, a class titled Thinning Veil and Poems inspired by the Spooky Season. I’d taught a smaller version of the class, but now I’m expanding it, and I find this season to be so inspirational—Edgar Allen Poe, sure, but I’m also featuring early poems by Sylvia Plath and Louise Gluck. Some of you may know that some consider me a writer of horror poetry—it may not be the main thing I’m known for, but I’ve done it enough to be in some anthologies.

And let’s face it, mythology and fairy tales and pop culture are full of terrific and terrifying tropes perfect for the seasonal poetry. Persephone in the underworld? Check. Cinderella and those bloody shoes? Yes. Children being tossed into the woods to die? Absolutely. In the pop culture world, shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, Twin Peaks, and even lesser-known jewels like Reaper and People of Earth, as well as movie franchises and the tropes they’ve created, like the Final Girl. […]

You may be sleeping more, looking with trepidation each morning at the weather forecast, and digging out throw blankets and sweaters you’d put away months ago. Just remember fall is a great time for inspiration, reinvention, and retreating into a great book.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Perfect Moments and Plans Gone Awry, Social Media and Promoting Poetry Now, The Jobs that AI Can’t Do, Spooky Season

My job was giving birth to the work not selling it on. And I still believe this to be essentially true, not because I’m trying to shirk responsibility in curating opportunity for my poetry, not because I’m arrogant or lazy or even fearful of stepping out of my comfort zone. I’m just not very good at it. I’m not a salesman even less a hustler. I know poets who are both and I reserve a measure of admiration, envy and suspicion for them.

The suspicion I hold is, I think, the same suspicion I have felt levelled against me or against those who ‘make a show’ of reading their work aloud. It can be considered an act, something superfluous to the integrity of poetry, an undignified dance where you are regarded as a ballad blagger, a poem peddler, a pusher, a dealer, a taut. You are looked upon as entering the arena of sales and marketing rather than inhabiting the shadows where poetry stirs nervously, quietly, in secret. The reading of a poem out loud involves both the breaking of a spell and the casting of new one.

Marketing involves a similar sorcery and I’m less inclined to immerse myself in its dark arts. I do to some extent. Anyone with an Instagram account is in sales and with autumn creeping I see my feed filling with a flutter of seasonal images: golden leaves, leather bound journals strategically positioned on tables in hazy cafes, fountain pens and fruit bowls and inspirational post-it-notes, cappuccinos with heart logos in the foam and poets lost in the filter of mist and mellow engagement. All portrayals or projections, depictions or deceptions, representations of a certain kind of writer, one the author hopes will chime with an audience, up their optics, service their numbers. This particular image grift, that of the autumnal elegist, is distinctly virulent at this time of year. But we’re all at it in some respect, to some degree we’re all hawking impressions, selling reflections, hopeful our poems may get a little more traction. Please note: I have never once posted a picture of my morning coffee with the caption, “Waiting for inspiration from these dark grains.” But perhaps I should.

Jan Noble, Nº85 I have new wounds to pursue

— A library can be a space of blooming, of dreaming, of thinking. A place to ask better questions. What is possible. The public library is wonderful. But you can make your own library too. If you’re here, I know you probably have a lot of books :)

— From Cixous’ book Coming to Writing: “The more you let yourself dream, the more you let yourself be worked through, the more you let yourself be disturbed, pursued, threatened, loved, the more you write, the more you escape the censor.”

— She also says that with patience we can give the world life. This is the patience of thinking, of paying attention. Without that we have a “world without flowers” and that is a world that is “bored to death.” […]

— I’ve been slowing down on my insta for a bit now and plan on taking an internet sabbatical for the month of November. I’ll probably pop in once or twice there to check for messages but will be otherwise working on my novel. I’ll be here but perhaps a bit less. Thanks in advance for bearing with. Maybe the role of the artist now is to disappear a bit. And maybe it’s the opposite, given this moment in history. But there has to be some way to subvert the algorithm or make it work for us right?

— How to escape the censor? Write alone, toward excellence. Make your art. Disappear for a bit. Go to art galleries, visit your library. Spend some time reading there. Keep yourself for your self. Take some time and look at a flower. Seems kinda radical. Georgia knew.

Shawna Lemay, The Library is a Bloom Space

Years ago,

when I left my first country, my mother placed
a plaster saint in my hand and wrapped my fingers

around it. Its painted skirt is still blue, its halo
a chipped gold. It stands on a shelf of drawers

dwarfed by the telescope which was a birthday
present for my husband, but which he has not

yet trained upon any corner of the night sky.

Luisa A. Igloria, Inventories of the Missing and Not Yet Used Up

Katie Paterson is an internationally renowned visual/conceptual artist whose projects consider our place on Earth in the flow of geological and astronomical time. Collaborating with scientists and researchers, amateur and professional, she uses both sophisticated technologies and local, DIY apparatus to create intimate, poetic and philosophical encounters between ourselves and our environment, both at its most personal and at its most distant, hypothetical reach.

In 2007 Paterson asked a group of amateur radio operators to create a transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Morse code. She then arranged for the signal to be transmitted to the lunar surface, which acted as a huge reflector mirror and bounced it back to Earth.

In the early days amateur radio, earth-moon-earth (EME) stations needed huge antenna systems, very high power transmitters and complex receiving set-ups. Today EME operation is within reach of most amateurs, and reflecting your signal off the moon, or layers of the upper atmosphere, or even the aurora borealis, are standard ways to send a signal round the curve of the globe. (I know a tiny bit about this. My father is a ham operator and true radio geek; throughout my childhood I went to sleep listening to him tapping out Morse code on the other side of my bedroom wall.) Depending on the moon’s orbit and the tilt of the Earth, your signal might be reflected straight back to you; or if you transmit at an angle (like standing side on to a mirror to see the other side of the room), the signal you send will bounce back somewhere else. Katie Paterson’s Morse-encoded Moonlight Sonata was transmitted from Southampton and received a few minutes later in Sweden.

This was then translated back into a musical score, which for the installation Earth – Moon – Earth is played on an automated grand piano.

When you hear it played, you recognise it immediately. Yet soon there are gaps and absences, new intervals and rests. As the piece unfolds, the gaps become more frequent. Towards the end, whole chords are missing, and the last bars are almost entirely the low notes of the left hand. ‘I wanted it to come back sounding as if it had been touched by the moon,’ says Paterson. ‘By encoding information, absences become present, and presence become audible.’ There is a sense of the music having been frayed or scattered by the empty ridges or swallowed somewhere in the darkness. It produces a real sense of melancholy – or of insentience, or indifference. Though the keys are moving up and down, the present moon is very, very remote.

Earth – Moon – Earth might at first seem to be a sceptical response to our romantic/Romantic appropriation of it. Says Nicholas Alfrey: ‘from Paterson’s perspective, the Romantic Sublime has had a long afterlife in the arts, to the point where the imagery of vastness, distance, luminosity, darkness and elemental forces has become something of a debased currency.’ However this is not her intention. Her work, says Alfrey, is ‘a search for ways to convey the most astonishing subject matter through the most mundane means, and by the cultivation of understatement, irony and deadpan effect’. ‘Very generally, I make work that collapses distance and time,’ says Paterson, ‘bringing together the commonplace with their very vastness.’

But wheels turn; things come full circle. In Cabinet Magazine, our newest Nobel Laureate Anne Carson ponders the moon, and its absence.

The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on color. What after all is a color? Something not no color. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind? There is a moment of reversal within totality.

Totality: The Color of Eclipse

Lesley Harrison, Earth – Moon – Earth

As if reading my mind her mouth opens,
those pupils flash wild.

I have nothing to offer.

A cloud of hayed breath
puffs between us.
Before I can release myself from her gaze,
she clamps my arm.

When I was young
I used to bite my forearms
to feel the resistance of flesh
imprint my incisors.

I bit my brother once.

Now there is a horse,
with blunted yellowed teeth,
latched on hard, biting my skin to burst it

to taste the metal of my blood.

Sue Finch, A PEDESTRIAN WALK AND A ‘P’

something in my head
is not the color of tin

after all-day rain
something must sing

and work their green hands
in the wind

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 11 October 1663.

wind of juniper
water of juniper

I shall grow in the dirt
as clean as the morning

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 10 October 1663.