This week: a migraine’s glittering distortions, a woman who is part moth, warty yellow amanitas, a world of random objects, and much more. Enjoy.

Where to begin?

In the again of this daunting question, there is an effort to match fragments and pieces of memory, to make a map of the mind. One might, for example, leave a page from a notebook on the kitchen table, promising to return to it and find a strand. One might walk the dog and return to the table. One might stare at the paper and prevaricate, maybe spin a wheel to see where the urge to narrate lands. One might procrastinate and pace the summer-warmed floor and settle on the place in the Cote d’Azur where the mouth of the wolf meets the beach.

Alina Stefanescu, “…in the branches of ourselves…”

at the beach no one has
heads anymore. there is a new corporation
who will remove your head & replace it
with a pot & fake flowers for
no small fortune. everyone reports it
makes them feel “less stressed.” i think truly
we should probably be more stressed.
an empire is always dissociating.

Robin Gow, vacation mirror

A young fox is sitting on the path in my back garden as a fierce tomcat from over the road tucks into meat my neighbour’s thrown out. The fox is cautious, checks the wall, stands on it to see if the cat’s still there. This tomcat’s legendary. He spent a night and much of the next day at the top of an elm tree before he was rescued. The fox is back now but the food is gone. He’s elegant, his brush full and healthy, no sign of mange. He walks confidently but is wary, sniffs the ground, jumps back on the wall, back down to the garden to sniff again. Nothing left. 

I’ve moved back into this room, once my office until the children became too old to share and it became my daughter’s. She’s grown up hardy – it’s the coldest in the house. 

(The fox has run through my garden with a piece of chicken, off to a shed roof or the graveyard. A dog’s now in the garden sniffing.)

My desk, once a Victorian washstand is back in front of the window, but now only the wooden top survives, held up by four extendable legs. On it, my laptop and sewing machine. […]

The view through this window with its old, distorted glass, often becomes a tunnel. I live in the city and last night coming home late from a friend’s I met a badger on my path. Sometimes the past gathers like a migraine’s glittering distortions and stars around my eyes.

Jackie Wills, Fox summons the past

Crabgrass is lounging across the lawn and embedded in the garden beds, acting as if it had been there all along, which perhaps it was, abiding and biding its August time to stretch and lie languid, ducking its head under my mower, its roots defying my pull. Some tuberous rooted thing has lunged up in several places in the garden. What on earth is it? On earth indeed, in earth, and I can’t be bothered to unearth it, curious to see what it’s flowering into, sure I’ll regret it next year, as it takes over some corner of the yard. Witness the uninvited goldenrod, the drunken little asters propping each other up behind the deck, whatever that would-be bush that inserts itself everywhere. Some plants arrive dropped by bird poop, and I think about the seeds’ adventures: extruded from a root, nipped by a beak, floated through a digestive system, briefly flying through the air as part of a splat, and splat, dirt, rooted again. And again and again. A reminder of what can come of chance meetings, what glory can rise from a small hard thing.

Marilyn McCabe, Untitled

— It’s the delightful deliquescent dregs of August. The golden hour is doing the old razzle-dazzle like its life depended on it. […]

— Well, the idea that it is in writing that we can create ourselves. One of the ways. This is the thing about making, creating. It’s not even the thing that you end up making, but it’s how the making makes you. I’ve always loved that. And so of course we makers despair at the present time when it feels like that is being taken from us, from the futures of those would-be artists and writers, our youth. I spend a lot of time reacting in my mind to the sloppola. But on the ground level, I’m still doing my writing, I’m taking photographs. I’m making this and that.

— What we have is silence, the silence between words and passages of words, as Jenny Erpenbeck says here.

— We also have courage.

“hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful”
— Adam Zagajewski, from his book Eternal Enemies

— When you have a day where you’re not certain if life is beautiful, I encourage you to take a mirror outside, into the garden, or the forest. Walk around with it and look. Prop it up here or there.

— When Rob is working on a painting he will often check it in a mirror so that he can see it afresh. I sometimes feel like I should be holding a mirror up to pretty much everything these days for a reality check, at least metaphorically. Which is also an old art forgery detection trick, as the reflected image often gives a sense if something is ‘off.’

Shawna Lemay, Courage, Silence, the Deliquescent Dregs

We saw smoke, and the terrible, twisted aftermath of flame. Most of all, we saw – and felt and heard – the dry bogs, the empty streams, the yellowed hills, the heavy air, the crunch of dessicated sphagnum for mile after mile after mile. The tiny velvety bodies of shrews on the hardened, waterless ground.

When I got home, the little bog I keep on my windowsill – a Kilner jar of moss and sundew – was all but dry. I’ve filled it repeatedly today: each time, the moss drinks with a deep thirst and needs more, more, more. I wish i could do the same for our bogs and fens and moors.

A few hours ago, Anna and I met to finalise tomorrow morning’s Writing Bogwise workshop, which will explore how creative writing can support positive ecological practice – and how nature connectedness can restore our health and humanity. When we read from some of the articles and poems we’ll be using – Jane Clarke, Gregory Norminton, Amanda Chester – I felt like some burnt and thirsty part of myself was drinking deeply too. 

Clare Shaw, Restoration: finding hope in a crisis

When the weather is good, I walk. Walking around my neighborhood is the only real exercise I get, so in Minnesota’s climate I’m lucky to be able to do it about half the year. I used to range more widely and see more of it; I also used to be a subscriber to the app NextDoor, a sometimes troubling mix of gripes, grudges, and rants about local issues. The juxtaposition led to the poem I want to share today. This year, my neighbors have proved that they’re better than that, going to great lengths to support the embattled immigrants among us. But in some places one still feels the discomfort, the sense of walling people out, that led to today’s poem, “An Enclosed Garden.”

Maryann Corbett, Walking the Neighborhood

It may be nothing more than the power of the mind and its ability to manifest (or the brain’s love affair with seeking out patterns), and if magic makes you uncomfortable, feel free to set it inside those safer contexts. But as I age and as the material world continues to disappoint, I’m tired of playing it cool. I’m more interested in leaning into spirit and feral female energy. There’s more for me in mushrooms and shells and mist on the lake than in patriarchy, capitalism and the horrors du jour they ask us to accept as par for the course.

I’ve always seen my energy as a force, but I’d characterized it previously by its intensity, chaos, hard edges, ambition, combustibility. This current energy has a different quality. It’s gooey. It breathes from its belly. It smells like salt and rosemary and bread in the oven. It smiles and floats and stirs and digs. It nests. […]

An earlier version of Carolee would’ve been (at least slightly) irritated with so many whirlwind trips to Maine. She would’ve seen them as distractions from the current plot line: finishing her manuscript. Instead, at every turn, including (and especially) the difficult trips, those visits back home opened paths for me to go deeper into the manuscript. Similarly, the naming of magic (and its practice) did not take away from work on the Gertie manuscript. It helped me see writing this book as casting a spell.

Carolee Bennett, Creative Life Lately: Maine, Magic, Manuscript

[…] we are
idle spit dried to salt
on steamy blacktop
withered illusions
screwed up tattoos

we are struggling steel in a hot metal world

This poem was accepted and published in Eunoia Review in 2018 after five other litmags rejected it. When I write something new I always note the date I began, this was begun on 5/17/18.

I was not a fan of Janis [Joplin]. She was a rock star of the 60s and I became a fan of rock music right about the time she died in 1970. Fast forward to 2018 when I discovered the poetry of Dorianne Laux and stumbled on her reading of her poem “Pearl” on PennSound Daily. Here is the direct link to Dorianne talking about and reading the poem. You can also read/hear it on The Slowdown here. Do listen! The power of that poem hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I had never been a fan of Janis, the poem was so visceral and communicated Dorianne’s view of her so purposefully that it made me really see Janis and think of her in a way I never had before. That’s the power of poetry and of writing in general. A really good writer can make you see something in a whole new way, can actually shift your perspective. I love that. Since then, I’ve read articles about Janis and watched a couple of documentaries and now realize what a creative powerhouse she was and how she paved the way for women in rock music, a genre dominated by men.

Anyway, I don’t know what was going on with me on 5/17/18 when I wrote my poem but apparently I was feeling a kinship with “Pearl” in some way at the time.

Charlotte Hamrick, About & Including

I made it through torrential highway storms this week to introduce Arthur Sze at our CWC session on Transient Worlds, his fantastic new anthology exploring poetry in translation. It was a mesmerizing session, and deeply inspiring to hear how the project connects to his work as U.S. Poet Laureate—Sze has made the imaginative and connecting powers of translation his central focus.

In other news, my book’s title poem was published in The Rumpus this week (a huge thank you to Roxane Gay!). If you would like to purchase a signed copy of If You Love That Lady for yourself or someone else, please send me a message—I’ll cover the shipping.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

These poems were written a little while ago, and I never quite knew what to do with them. Well, it turns out that putting them together as a short, themed sequence (which anyway is how they were written) was just the right thing.

They all loosely speak to my enduring fascination with what I’ll inelegantly call (because I think it is called this) the theory of perception. I’ve talked before about how I think poems function as mini Rube Goldberg machines – well, take another step back and … does the same apply to us humans? We take in sensory input and, through a series of complex and ultimately quite bizarre processes, we come to understand the world around us. At the same time, we are converting inner thoughts and feelings into words and actions we express outwardly, in a way that leaves a mark on the world.

At this stage in proceedings, if you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, you might want to look here, or here, or even here.

So, we’re all Rube Goldberg machines, unwittingly but irreversibly wonkifying anything we come into contact with – converting an egg rolling off a shelf into a squeeze of toothpaste on a brush, or the action of a cuckoo clock into a buttered slice of toast. So, would you like to read eight poems ‘about’ that?

You would? Oh, great. The pamphlet is available to buy directly from Shadow & Sax’s online shop, along with other publications, including Urchin by Sand Letellier, which I’m looking forward to getting my hands on.

Victoria Spires, I suppose I do have something to sell

Every Sunday on his fantastic neonpajamas, Benjamin Niespodziany posts poems by others and then creates a prompt for the readers based on some element of that poem. The selection of poems is always great—tending toward the disjunctive and/or surreal and considering what language and all its strangeness can do. Readers are invited to post their responses to the prompts on the site or else elsewhere and then tag him. It’s a brilliant way to spend some time on a Sunday and I try to whenever I can. Last week, Ben posted a poem by Evan Nicholls whose work is always surprising and fresh. I wrote a response to the poem and the prompt (follow that link for both) though I only sort of followed Ben’s prompt because I was most interested in how Evan ended the poem. A really great twist at the end—funny but somehow revealing about one’s assumptions in the poem and in reading in general. There’s often a desire for a poem (or any text really) to speak to universal truths, it’s a satisfying, filling move. But Evan does an amazing turn in the last lines of his poem.

Gary Barwin, Neon Pajamas, Justice and the Pig

Be warned: if your usual method of reading, like mine, is to carry a book with you in your backpack everywhere you go, digging it out on train journeys and in sandwich queues, you will need to take extra care with #Moth (published by Ethel Zine and Micro Press). It’s a hand-stitched booklet, and as well as gold stitching it sports a delicate cover of silver paper, with thread used to add a textured filigree to the moth’s wing pattern and antennae. This is in keeping with the content of the book, which — at least initially — seems focused on the fragility of the human mind, in that it moves from a bus stop setting to a psyche ward in the first two pages, the transition implicitly triggered by the folding door of the bus, or some other simple act this motion approximates.

Holmes describes #Moth as a ‘hybrid text’, and it is — part poetry, part short fiction (it definitely advances toward an ending), utilising a mixture of clinical and lyrical language. There’s no contents page and it’s not always clear where poems begin and end, as there are a few different styles of heading and subheading. It also features a hybrid character at its centre — a woman who is part-moth, or perceived as part-moth by others:

brazen midriff, miniskirt:
body hair fine copper fuzz.

wings jostle inside his chest

Once it settles in there is a steady alternation between pieces which record fragments of doctor/patient conversation (verso) and miniature monologues by different moth species (recto), these preceded by images of the species in question on semi-transparent pages. It’s something of a power struggle; each monologue acts as a different guise worn by the main character — a response to the attempts of the doctor to categorise and contain her. 

Jon Stone, REVIEW: #Moth by Eleanor Holmes

Helen [Mort] is a poet I’ve been in conversation with poetically ever since I first started writing, although she didn’t know it at the time! I remember reading one of her Tall Lighthouse pamphlets a pint for the ghost, published in 2009 and being absolutely blown away – this was three years before my first pamphlet came out. In fact, I’ve just pulled the pamphlet out from my bookshelf and opened it up to find a poem on page 15 called ‘a dram for all the men I’ve never drank with’ – I can’t help but think that this subliminally must have influenced my second collection All the Men I Never Married, which I eventually published over ten years later.

Back to Helen’s fourth full-length collection Stepmother. I managed to get a copy of this from Helen when we read together at Haworth. For fans of Helen’s work, there is still her trademark playfulness and close attention to the musicality of language, but in many ways this feels like a bold departure from her previous work. It is a poetic investigation into the archetype of the stepmother – drawing on fairy tale, pornography and popular culture to examine how stepmothers play out in the modern family.

There are striking prose sections that sometimes read like lyric essays, sometimes like prose poems. There is something meditative about these pieces – there is ‘On silence’ and ‘On Origins’ and ‘On souls’. Silence is a theme that looms large throughout the book. This complicated relationship with speaking – when to speak up, when to be silent runs throughout the book. In “On Silence” a family photographer mistakenly calls the speaker of the poem ‘mum’ and the piece ends with ‘To speak would have seemed like a disavowal, a distancing. To stay silent meant taking something which was not yours.

‘So of course you said nothing. You took it’

The house as a domestic space is often a dangerous place, sometimes configured as a living being, a body that can swallow people whole – in the poem ‘In every house there is a cupboard’ finishes ‘When you lean into the cupboard, you could pitch yourself right down the house’s throat’.

It feels like a risky, risk-taking book. It made me think a little bit about A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk in its approach to examining the straitjackets that women are written into, or spoken into or moulded into by the forces that govern our lives and the forces that we let run loose inside us.

Kim Moore, July Reading Diary

When I was in Malaysia last year, I read with Beijing-based poet Anthony Tao. We discovered, amongst other things, a shared love of writing about bars: theatres of the absurd, meeting points, places of temporary epiphany.

I’ve been fascinated by pubs as spaces of storytelling since my pamphlet ‘a pint for the ghost’ back in the mid 2000s. When I got back to the UK after my fleeting trip to Penang, Anthony and I started writing a few poems-in-dialogue about bars.

I’m massively excited that Anthony is coming over to the UK at the end of this month and we’re going to be reading together along with Matt Byrne at Sheffield’s very own Over The Yardarm on 31st August.

Ahead of that gig, I thought I’d share a couple of drafts of things I wrote in response to poems by Anthony. Mine are set in Manchester, but the first piece took inspiration from a line in Anthony’s poem ‘Hanoi, Day and Night’.

If you want to see us in dialogue IRL, come to Sheffield on bank holiday Monday, August 31st!

Hope you like these two mini bar poems!

Irwell

‘..not stink, just fragrance gone too far.’ – Anthony Tao

The way Canal Street’s overcome
some nights by sudden river
so as you sit under the rainbow flags
at dusk, in unfit northern weather
you might smell something tar-like,
dankness, shipping’s aftermath,
the smoke-on-clothing reek
of defunct industry, lung-deep
and if you let yourself inhale
you’ll notice how the Irwell
holds the scent of everyone
it ever touched […]

Helen Mort, A poem walks into a bar

Poet, Iris Anne Lewis, has clearly chosen the title of her collection, Amber (Graffiti Books, 2024), with care. Amber, the highly valued, fossilised tree resin, is notable for its capacity to preserve traces of the ancient world, including insects and plants. Lewis’s collection performs a comparable act of preservation. It revisits the human past without sentimentality, often through artefacts and images that have survived across time and uses history as a lens through which contemporary life can be viewed with humanity, precision and perception.

Handprints, one of the strongest poems in the collection, is typical of the poems in the opening section, which focuses on history and prehistory. The first part of the poem, subtitled 30,000 BCE, describes the silhouetted handprints found in the caves of Gargas. Lewis vividly recreates the act of making them: ‘the artist splays hand to rock,/ sucks black pigment into hollow/ bone of swan, blows living breath/ into paint.’ The final phrase recalls the classical motif of gods breathing life into human beings. Here, however, it becomes both a metaphor for artistic mastery and an expression of the connection experienced by the modern viewer. These are not merely handprints; they stand for living people — ‘men/ women, children’ — who, although they lived many thousands of years ago, would have known ‘Disease…mourning…grief.’ In the second section of the poem, subtitled 2000 CE, that connection is extended into the present. Lewis moves us into neonatal units, where nurses help ‘bereaved mothers of still-birthed babies,/ take hand and footprints.’ The grief of early cave dwellers is echoed in a contemporary context: the experience of death, mourning and remembrance remains part of the human condition. Yet Lewis does not linger solely on loss. She then turns to the nursery school, where children make prints of their own hands and ‘Proud parents/ display’ this ‘infant art’ ‘on kitchen walls and fridges.’ This broadens the poem’s emotional range, presenting another enduring aspect of human experience: the impulse to create, to make marks and to assert presence. Lewis makes this universality explicit in the closing question: ‘which of us/ has not pressed hand/ to paper, drawn round our palm/ and fingers? Made this statement?// I am here. I matter.’ The poem therefore connects ancient handprints with the fundamental human need to express identity and affirm existence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Amber’ by Iris Anne Lewis

Julia Webb’s fourth collection focuses on grief after bereavement. Grief can be a tricky topic as the poet can either include the reader, by focusing on exploration and communication or shut out the reader by focusing on the personal and individual response that the reader feels excluded from understanding the relationship or the person(s) behind the grief. Webb invites the reader in by focusing on the nature of unresolved relationships, the parts of connections and conversations of avoidance. There are dashes of colour (other than grey) and one poem turns a mother into an owl. Grief here is for a mother and a brother, without details given, not that the poet is obliged to give details, so readers can probe their own familial relationships through the lens offered. Grief is likened to “I have spent years falling out of each window” and its first line “the tall building of grief gave me”. 

Emma Lee, “Grey Time” Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press) – book review

Path, Chris Torrance, Aquifer, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-0684861-3-5

When I reviewed the Test Centre edition of Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door back in January 2018, I concluded by writing:

In his Afterword, Torrance refers to ‘at least 3 more books, taking The Magic Door into the 21st century’. I can only urge you to buy the current volume so that [Test Centre] might publish these outstanding volumes with the same diligence.

It has taken longer than I hoped, but thanks to Aquifer and editor Phil Maillard, we finally have not three, but nine new sections of Torrance’s major poem published together under the title Path, which is also the title of the first new section. The full list is:

Path
A Garden Book
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writing Tutor
RORI: A Book of the Boundaries
Frinite
Wobbly Chair
Dreamin’ Viv
Aurochs
A Book of Number/Gos Diaries

They vary in length from 9 to 40 pages, but each section, however short, is a self-contained book, albeit with recurring themes, including ones from the earlier volumes, running through. There’s so much going on in this book that I’ve decided to focus this review on just some of the many paths a reader could take to traverse it. There are, of course, other paths I could have taken, music, for instance, but to do full justice to this book, I’d need to write another one.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

So, we have a looking-glass book in a Looking-Glass book, which ought to mean something — perhaps that the obvious parody of the quest tale in “Jabberwocky” can remind us that one way to read Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is as a strange and dreamy quest. That’s suggested, too, by “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” the acrostic poem with which the narrative ends.

And suggested as well by the conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”

“Brillig means four o’clock in the afternoon,” Humpty Dumpty tells her, “the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.” And with his learnedly silly explications — “Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?” he asks Alice — we’re warned off the side-quest. And back to the poem’s absurdity, parodic flavor, and bounce.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Jabberwocky

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My mom bought me a copy of Langston Hughes’ The Dream Keeper–the edition illustrated by Brian Pinkney–shortly before my first day of school in 3rd grade. At one point I had most of those poems memorized. No longer. I was fascinated with the Beats in high school, mainly Burroughs, Welch, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Those last fellas are few tough heroes to have, I guess, but who doesn’t have those? College was the big sort of aha moment: Lorca, Mayer, Whitman, Dickinson, Baraka, Notley, O’Hara, etc. etc. I did my undergrad at Brooklyn College, so I was reading New Yorkers alongside New Yorkers. It became my world for a long time. I wrote poems with friends in them for friends and with those same friends–we had a big, rollicking, cinematic writing collective. In a lot of ways, I wrote poems so that I could have friends, too.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

This latest book took me about three and a half months to write. It’s the shortest bit of complete writing that I’ve ever (and probably will ever) accomplish. I was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers after my dad had fallen very ill. I’d basically alternate between rehab room / waiting room / car / Stewart’s (for those who don’t know, a regional convenience store franchise that sells ice cream, usually with bright orange booths for the newspaper-and-coffee set). The writing quite literally fell out of me. I just had to make sure I was able to catch all of it as it fell out. That type of writing feels blessed. It doesn’t happen too often. 

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I write every day, usually in the morning. In college I was introduced to the poetry of kari edwards, who I read fervently and obsessively, and who I think is one of our most massively underread late poets. I can’t remember the exact sequence and durations, but Rob Halpern notes, in his introduction to edwards’ succubus in my pocket, that she would wake, meditate for x hours, read philosophy for an hour, fiction for an hour, and poetry for an hour, constantly writing across these various texts, then finally eat breakfast, go back to reading, etc. I am not nearly as regimented or as robust in my mornings, but I drew a lot of inspiration from hir dedication to encounter and thought. Always reading. Always writing. 

For the most part, I am writing into a question or a feeling, or around a question or a feeling. I do a lot of circling and sizing up. Collage work, mosaic work, lots of tinkering in the first half of my process. I do a lot of work up front. Once the book is together, it’s mostly there. I will send it to a few friends to get a sense of sequencing and big picture work. 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ryan Skrabalak

At the 2022 National Book Awards Finalist Reading, Sharon Olds prefaced her poem “Quarantine” like this: “I just thought that before I read my poem I would show that I rewrote it a little since it was in my book because I read it at a reading and there was something wrong with it. Something in the beginning especially and I fixed—I think I fixed it.” She explains that she removed four adjectives and one adverb from the first version and changed a noun. “So I’m very ha—I’m not afraid.”

A poem can be part of a critically acclaimed collection and also be not quite right, Olds is telling us, though the poem had seemed right to her at one time. And she can’t even be certain she’s completely addressed the problem. She starts to claim to have fixed it, then backtracks. She thinks she’s fixed it, she amends, which implies future changes may be required. And while she begins to say she’s happy with the newer version, she says instead that she’s not afraid. The audience claps and whistles.

I love what Olds offers us here. Isn’t that the task of every writer? To be not afraid? Not afraid to make work and not afraid to let strangers read it and judge it and not afraid to acknowledge the work’s failings and to try to fix those failings, even if the piece was previously declared finished. Even if it’s already been printed in a collection and that collection is up for the National Book Award, for instance.

Which brings me back to the idea that I was issuing corrections while putting together my book. In an interview with Brian Brodeur, Keetje Kuipers was asked how she knows a poem is ready to be published. “I don’t mind the idea that drafts of my poems (good drafts, ones that have had careful attention and revision, but drafts all the same) are appearing in journals and magazines,” she says. “In some ways, it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that I’m sharing that process with a wider audience, and that people may have the opportunity to encounter a single poem in widely varying incarnations by the time it appears in a book.”

I love this as well—this practice of sharing drafts with readers. In rewriting an already-public poem, you admit which parts of your work you found wanting or that you maybe just outgrew. It’s vulnerable and brave to hold your poems with such open hands, allowing observers into your process and accepting that your current creative choices might feel wrong in the future. How comforting to know that even Sharon Olds needs to make corrections. How freeing to think of them as Keetje Kuipers does—not as corrections but as incarnations. Each version of a poem granted its own place in the world. The first version with the plums in it and the second one with pears because plums are trite, aren’t they, and the third iteration with the red plums back in because they are delicious and nearly my favorite fruit, even if William Carlos Williams liked them too, and so it should be plums, I’ve decided. For now.

The Generous Act of Publishing Drafts: Poems as Iterations – guest post by Abbie Kiefer (Trish Hopkinson)

As we close in on the last couple weeks of the open reading period, I am enjoying wading into the submissions pool and have even started accepting some titles for the first couple months of the 2026-27 season (and amazingly am somewhat on schedule getting these last handful of books out for this past season, which is wrapping up as we speak.) I am once again thinking about what makes a manuscript a definite “yes” and what makes me take a pass on the “no”s. Some manuscripts stand out for their strangeness, their innovation. This can be subject matter-wise, language-wise, stylistic, or narrative. It can mean using page space in interesting ways. Using art and graphics mixed in. Using found texts and appropriated forms like glossaries and diagrams. I like books that go for bold in some ways. That aren’t afraid to take risks. I’ve often heard from authors that the book I accepted had been out in submission for a minute and no one was biting. I sometimes am just that weirdo that loves it or sees the potential in it. 

We have recent books that are erasures and black outs. Books that masquerades as other kinds of text–prose, charts, indices. We have books that include original art by the author (which now that we are using a professional  printer, look even more amazing than when I was doing them in house.) This is also true of books that use the page space in interesting ways, which we can now do in differing sizes than the standard paperback dimensions. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part 2

Independent publishing has always operated on the slimmest of margins. It’s not the oil business. In that business, there’s a vertical marketplace. Shell digs the oil, refines it, carries it on the big boat, and sells it to you at the pump. That’s a lucrative business to start with.

The writer gets a piece of the action.

The distributor gets nearly a third.

The printer gets 10-15%.

The bookstore gets about half.

In the end, the publisher doesn’t have enough to buy tuna.

It’s a business that is run on prayer. If you have wealthy friends, and grants, and a few authors who sell well, and you don’t waste any money, and nothing bad ever happens to you, and you don’t make any mistakes, you might survive. That’s a lot to ask in one life, especially for a nonprofit leader.

I like the phrase “Money should flow toward the writer.” Why stop at money? Why not tequila?

The problem is that in the oil business, there is already money. In the publishing business, unless you are in New York, there isn’t any money flowing.

I talked with an agent the other day who said, “Why did you get into this business?”

I told her the truth: “I was in love with stories that wanted homes. I loved Duras and Colette and Marquez and Calvino and Morrison, and I wanted to climb across the fields, run through the forest, and find what was hanging out there longing for the right editor. What about you?”

She said, “I like money.”

I wanted to write back and suggest she move over to JPMorgan, where she could think about money all the time. Investment banking and tech are the fields where you get to like money. Not publishing.

Kate Gale, Keepers of the Flame: Stepping Up in the Dark

I’ll be interviewing Emily Wilson for Literary Hub next month, so more on this soon. In the meantime, some notes from my reading of her fabulous new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. The book, which will be out September 1st, ranges widely, building toward a dazzling final essay in which she lays out her particular philosophy of translation.

Called “Translating the Odyssey,” the essay had its start in a series of tweets in which she compared and contrasted translations for the first line of the poem, specifically the first adjective Homer attaches to his hero.

Polytropos

Robert Fagles gave us “the man of twists and turns.” And Daniel Mendelsohn translated it as the man “who had so many roundabout ways / To wander.” While Emily Wilson made headlines when she wonderfully used, “A complicated man.”

One critic joked that it sounded more like his relationship status on Facebook but I love the translation!

One word, and already the translators diverge—each hearing something different in the Greek, each also responding to the versions that came before.

My own favorite is the one by Stanley Lombardo. A classics professor and Zen teacher, he rendered the first lines like this:

Speak, Memory—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again

As Wilson points out in her essay, Lombardo’s “Speak, Memory” is a Nabokovian wink. His version also takes polytropos apart, distributing its possibilities across “cunning,” “wanderer” and “blown off course.”

Reading them together, Wilson shows us not only how much each translator relies upon the Greek, but how much they also relied on the English versions that came before them. Translation, she reminds us, is not a solitary encounter between a translator and an original.

It is also a conversation, and sometimes an argument, across generations.

Leanne Ogasawara, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea & the Politeness of the Genji Translators

For those of you who don’t know what the GCSE poetry exam looks like, it varies a little between exam boards but essentially, we teach them fifteen poems from the anthology we’ve been using since 2015. One of the poems will be printed on the exam paper and then students have to write an essay comparing it to one of the other fourteen, none of which are printed on the exam paper. They’re comparing something they can see with something they are trying to remember. They are expected to include analysis of language features, poetic structure and the historical context of both poems. Then they do almost the same thing all over again, but with two poems they’ve never seen before, though both of these are printed on the paper this time. These are Sections B and C of a three-section exam (one of two exams) which lasts 2 hours and 15 minutes for most students. If they have a condition which qualifies them for extra time, they’re doing this for the length of The Odyssey movie. Many cope admirably with these demands. Many do not. And whether they cope has almost nothing to do with how many annotations they made, and it definitely doesn’t have much to do with how much they like poetry. Lots of young people love poetry, and say wonderful things about it, and write wonderful poetry themselves. The exam doesn’t necessarily encourage that out of them, that’s all, so what is it testing? If I’m honest, I wish we could assess poetry entirely on unseen responses; take away the stress of the anthology and see what they can really do with a poem.

Even though they can’t take notes into the exam any more (phew), a lot of my students in recent years have become a bit obsessed with them. Annotations are trending, it appears. There are pastel highlighters and insta-style calligraphied headings and colour coded post-its. […]

I think the thing about annotations at this level is that they’re a poor proxy for learning – students feel much happier when they have them and they enjoy making them look beautiful, but ultimately that isn’t the same thing as understanding or genuine insight. This isn’t the kids’ fault. They want to pass, and many have been disempowered by social media, and their self-esteem is often so low that they don’t trust their own ideas. I’ve had intuitive, creative, diligent students, loads of them, sit and wait with poised pens for me to tell them what to write down. It makes me uneasy, that. It’s not the kind of teaching I’m up for. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 23: Hopkins again, and Darren.

At first I thought I would put one object per table, and then I thought it would be more interesting to have several objects.  Some tables had connected objects:  for example, on one table I put Christmas ornaments, a Christmas card, a packet of replacement bulbs for a strand of holiday lights.  On another, I kept the objects from the natural world:  3 feathers, a pine cone, and some shells.  Other tables were more random collections.

I was also pleased with how many tactile experiences they could have.  I had two felted pieces, along with chunks of wood and chunks of asphalt.  The cross made out of palm stalks and the waxy, half-burnt candle gave different sensations.  I put out broken strings of beads and broken pottery.

I told students that they would need paper and something to write with, or they could take laptops to write on.  They all chose paper, and I told them to make sure they had enough paper.

Students sat at a table and had 30 seconds to look at the objects.  Then they wrote for 3 minutes.  They could write about the object or write in the voice of the characters we created in past class sessions or explore their own memories.  I wasn’t looking at their writing, so they had plenty of latitude, as long as they kept writing.

After three minutes, they moved to the next table, a process which went smoothly.  At the end, I had them read all the writing they had done, marking any that had potential.  I reminded them that they could go deeper, but I wasn’t requiring it.  For me, it’s too much policing, having students write for 20-30 minutes.

My students seemed to really like the process.  They talked about how many ideas it generated and how much fun it was to write about random objects.  They also talked about their wonder at what all was waiting to be written about–and I reminded them that we live in a world of random objects, so whenever they feel blocked, they should remember this technique.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Random Objects in the Creative Writing Classroom

I received a lovely message the other day from someone wanting to run a poetry event with their members and looking for some input from a poet, including delivering a talk and a short reading for inspiration alongside some optional involvement further down the line.

I was thrilled, still am really, I don’t often get messages like this.

So I wrote back saying yes I’m interested and asking for some more information, a timeline, and what kind of compensation they’re offering. I received in response:

“I had not anticipated paying for this as I was hoping poets and authors would like to volunteer their time to the next generation of writers.”

Yep. Goodwill and inspiration and yes I probably should have expected that despite them being a national organisation. And that’s ok, I’m not angry so I hope this post doesn’t come across that way, but it raised a familiar (and tired) story.

Why is it so acceptable to ask creatives to work with no offer of payment? In business, ‘time is money’, ‘people’s time is money’, but that doesn’t seem to apply so readily to us. As if we magically don’t need to earn an income from our work.

And yes it’s lovely to inspire the next generation, but you’re contacting me from a multi-institutional organisation that clearly has money (and probably funding), while I’m a singular human living off less than 20k a year. It’s super easy for you to suggest moral reward is enough … would you mind suggesting that to my landlord too?

I feel like there’s this weird dual stereotyping of writers that goes on:

No 1. is that you’re a ‘starving artist’ living hand to mouth and writing furiously till the wee hours every night but somehow at peace with this because you’re ‘creatively fulfilled’ and have ‘chosen’ this life.

No 2. is that because you’re ‘a writer/an author’ with a public profile saying as much you’ve clearly reached the heights of career and financial stability and can volunteer your time any which way.

Realistically the first is bloody hard and frustrating for all of us, and the second, well, maybe if you’ve gone into writing crime fiction or romance and are churning out a book every year…

Either way neither of them seem to amount to many offers of payment for work undertaken. And both of them mean that a huge amount of our time is taken up by either trying to write as much as possible and send as much out on submission as possible alongside actual employment, or trying to write as much as possible and apply for as many grants/residencies/projects as possible to keep the money coming in. Neither of which is great ground for volunteering a bunch of time. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t volunteer, I do think it’s important to volunteer for things when we can.

But when you reduce it down what’s happening is an organisation is asking for a service, one which you can provide and they can’t because you’ve trained and worked hard over a number of years to develop the skills to be able to do it. And then you’re asked to do it for free, regularly. It’s a systemic devaluing of those skills.

Rachael Hill, I was hoping you’d volunteer your time…

Let me preface this with a confession: I’m not great about managing my time. Period. I can get distracted doing laundry—maybe I get a call and walk upstairs to talk—and then I might start emptying the dishwasher, leave that half done because I suddenly remember an email I need to respond to, then get sidetracked responding to emails (or scrolling), then remember I have to pay some bills while I’m online, then wander back into the kitchen for some coffee, only find the dishwater open and half unloaded. Maybe, just maybe, I remember that I was in the middle of doing laundry earlier, and I head back to the basement to finish that.

Whew. If that sounds familiar, I’m sorry, and hello, you’re my people.

That said, someone asked during a Q&A in San Miguel about balancing different parts of the work—writing, of course, but also and other kinds of work, and caregiving, and admin, and social media (if you choose to use it), etc. Despite being a little scatterbrained in my daily life, I had an answer: You get your own best time.

Let me explain. I know that my brain is freshest and most primed to write—to be imaginative, to generate fresh ideas, to find new solutions to old problems—first thing in the morning, before the day has a chance to get at me. Before my phone starts ringing and the emails start piling up, and I get pulled in multiple directions. That’s just me. Maybe your best, freshest time is late at night, when everyone is in bed and the house is finally quiet. Or midday, when you’ve cleared a few things from your plate and can focus on creative work.

But whenever you are sharpest, give yourself and your creative work that time. Don’t devote the best thinking part of your day to emails and errands.

If you’re best in the morning, like me, try to set aside some morning time to write. Maybe that means getting up before your family (I put a quiet Keurig in my bedroom for a reason). I try to devote mornings to anything generative, and save my afternoons, when I feel a little duller, for errands and admin work like emails. I don’t need peak creativity to go to the UPS store or the pharmacy. I don’t need to bring my best sentence-building potential to my inbox.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

Here are a few helpful questions I ask myself when I begin a critique:

1. What work is the title doing? Is it a placeholder? Is it forgettable?
2. Are there any moments in the poem where I am confused?
3. What images / lines stay with me when I am done reading the poem?
4. Does the opening line intrigue me and make me want to read more?
5. Is there anywhere in the poem where I begin to lose interest?
6. Could this poem be lineated differently? Are the line breaks doing any work to add meaning or are they distracting?
7. Is this poem in the correct order? Could an idea or stanza be moved elsewhere in the poem to achieve a different effect?
8. What do you notice with the sound – repetition, assonance, consonance, rhyme or slant rhyme?
9. What is this poem leaving out? Could the poet explore an idea further?
10. What is not essential in the poem?

Though they do take time and can be daunting to begin, if you have the opportunity to be involved with critique, you should do it.

It is one of the best ways to grow as a writer, sharpening your “editing eye” – evaluating why a piece is working or why it isn’t, seeing what is missing, what is unnecessary, thinking through how a piece of writing effects the reader.

Renee Emerson, How to Critique a Poem

How much of writing and submitting are just…waiting? Far too much. I write a lot, way more than I publish, and I submit I would say a fair amount (like between a couple and a dozen submissions per month, I’d say). I’m right now trying to find a place that will publish my next book as well as individual poems. But how powerless are writers like me? Unless you’re one of the chosen (ie, you’re friends with the editor of Paris Review, or got an NEA grant when they still existed, or a supergenius grant, etc,) you’re playing a waiting game. Sending out your work, then waiting sometimes over a year for a rejection.

Sometimes the name of the game is empowering yourself by staying proactive in sending out your work or distracting yourself with other hobbies or work. Distraction isn’t a bad idea if you’re worrying about your work and writing something else—an essay or short fiction if you’re a poet or sketching a local scene or taking photos—something else creative—is a good way to help. And sometimes talking to other writers and encouraging them (or listening to their worries) is helpful too.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Practically Perfect Summer Day with Goldfinches and Dahlias, Sleepwrecked, and Writing as a Waiting Game

Is it worth all the effort? All the research and rejections that come along with it? A while ago I wrote about the dangers and blessings of the publishing “dance” in an essay that Trish Hopkinson published on her blog. You can read it here: Why You Should Submit Even if You’re Not 100% Sure You’re Done

I still stand by what I said in the article. In hindsight, I do have new and additional thoughts. When I was younger, I thought the point of getting published was to make a name for myself as a poet and build a career. That wasn’t wrong exactly, but over the years I’ve found other reasons that are more meaningful. What has proven to be a lot more real and fun about getting published, is finding my tribe. […]

What do I mean by that? Every time I get something published, I read the work of the poets who were published alongside me. I make note of the poems I particularly enjoy. I earmark those as poems to use in my workshops. Then I social-media stalk them – add them as friends, tell them how much I like their work, invite them to be on The Poetry Saloncast, ask if they’re doing readings in my area.

Over the years these shared poems have led to some seriously meaningful friendships, collaborations, and ongoing artistic support systems. One of the friends I met through mutual publication hosted me at a poetry reading in Colorado when I came out on book tour. Another invited me to the beach in North Carolina to do a reading for her venue. Some have been on retreat with me in Costa Rica. Many have invited me to speak to their classes, submit to their journals, or just stay in touch.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Find Your Poetry Tribe This Saturday at The Poetry Salon

7. The Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe

Since Swan, the character in my poem, had his own website, his own social media accounts and was beginning to develop his own identity it felt only right that he’d be on a dating site.

I set up a profile under My Name Is Swan and waited. I got one enquiry, a message that read, “Who are you? What are you?” “I’m a poem,” Swan replied. “Interesting,” came the response, “where can I read you?” “Come to the Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe and you can hear me instead,” wrote Swan providing a day and a time.

Swan arrived early and found his ‘date’ already at a table. He sat down opposite and delivered his poem in its entirety. His date listened intently and then when it was done she stood up. “Thank you Mr Swan,” she said. And then she left. And Swan never heard from her again.

Strange rating: 6/10
Danger rating: 1/10
Beauty rating: 7/10

*

6. The Swan and ******

I’m not gonna reveal the full name of this pub, not because I fear any repercussions but because I may give the impression that it’s a bit of a rough house. It’s not. The landlord was great, the staff were lovely and the punters, well, they were a bit lively. Lads in hard hats straight off the building site, hitting the Stella Artois. This was undoubtedly a proper boozer I’d walked into. No frills, no messing, a working man’s taproom and, if I’m honest, quite an intimidating place to read poetry.

The boys were a few pints in and the pool game was getting pretty animated. I picked my moment and, unannounced, launched into My Name Is Swan. You can see how anxious I was – this moment is recorded in the closing seconds of our film of the same name. I just went for it. The lads gathered round, came in close, clutching their pool cues. I kept reading, half expecting to get a pool cue wrapped around me canister at any second. It didn’t happen. When I was done I got one of the most enthusiastic rounds of applause I’ve ever received. It taught me something about peoples’ ability to appreciate poetry, this innate capacity we have for art and also how judgemental we can be about who it’s supposed to be for.

I understand they serve Thai food in this pub now. I may, sadly, be responsible for its gentrification. I do hope not. And so does Swan.

Strange rating: 4/10
Danger rating: 6/10
Beauty rating: 6/10

Jan Noble, Nº78 The top ten strangest, most dangerous and most beautiful places that I’ve read poetry

Highlights of the Telluride Mushroom Festival? What I’ll remember longest, I suspect, is a guided foray at Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan Mountains. The “guided” part came and went. The leader walked too quickly for me, both because I wanted to look around and because, at 10,000 feet, I’m easily winded. I wasn’t the only one in our large group taking it slow, though. There was so much to look at! Coral mushrooms, violet cortinarius, warty yellow amanitas, a billion LBMs (little brown mushrooms, often stymieing even the experts), tall plants I’d never seen before (bear grass, I was told), slightly worrisome elk and bear scat (enormous amounts!). My fellow ramblers were interesting people, sometimes knowledgeable foragers in their own right. Plus we all reconnected at the end, where the guide confirmed that Chris had found king boletes–porcini, essentially. Back at our rental I fried them in olive oil with salt and pepper until the pieces were golden and slightly crisped. They were GLORIOUS.

Also terrific: how much poetry was part of the gathering! The poetry events were organized by poet Art Goodtimes, a festival co-founder, who has a lot more energy than seems possible in a eighty-year-old. An “open myc” at the library had a lovely, inclusive, community vibe, alternating poetry and music. The big evening poetry show at the Sheridan Opera House was a wilder yet tightly choreographed mix that also featured hilariously shroomy raps, parodies, and more–Art presiding, this time, in a red sequined tailcoat. What a trip (although I was sober) to see SO many enthusiastic people desperate to snag seats in the audience! On the last day, Art and I signed a collaborative chapbook, Hyphae, designed for the occasion, which I’ll say more about below.

Lesley Wheeler, Hyphae–and gifts

After the rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underground
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Approaching the Third Anniversary of Your Death

Today, waking to the excitement of no plans, I packed my rucksack, cycled to my allotment via coffee and cake at C’s, unlocked my shed, assembled my hammock stand and slung my hammock.

A few weeks ago, when my sweetcorn crop was at its peak, inbetween hammock-reading and dozing, I used my camping stove to flash-boil cobs, then anointed them with butter, before eating them like an unholy rodent.

Today, in tune with the ripening season, I dug some desirée potatoes then, satisfied with my haul for now, lay in my hammock to read ‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, and drink elderflower cordial. Of course, I dozed. I read more. 

Deakin’s accounts of swimming fit well with the sway and lull of hammocking, with the being held in the same view as when backstroking. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sling My Hammock

I often experience my body as “other.” Culture sets us up for this view, Descartes and all that, but it also makes intuitive sense that we would feel quite separate from our bodies. In meditation, it is the idea of ultimately being an “observer” of my life that is most confusing. How can one experience feelings, and observe them at the same time? As a longtime dissociator, I beg to differ. So here is a poem along these lines; bear with me through the extended metaphor.

Life at Sea

1–

I am born inside a ship.

2–

I am inside my body.
My body is a ship on the sea.

3–

My body is a ship on the sea
sailing unawares
its muscles, rafters, joints
creaking, bending
straight into the storm. […]

Rebecca Cook, Life at Sea

My tomatoes have been going wild this year, with plants 7 feet tall, 8 feet in circumference, all of them loaded with fruit. I should not mind sharing with a few very hungry caterpillars when, after all, I’m loading my friends with tomatoes and making more sauce than Best Beloved and I can possibly consume in a year. And yet, it is rather annoying. So I was scouting the internet when I found this blog from Brie Arthur re hornworms. It’s a nice overview and shows “both sides” of hornworm invaders (though as she is in North Carolina, she has tobacco hornworms on her tomatoes).

Hornworms bring to my mind two very astonishing Stanley Kunitz poems written from the worm’s viewpoint. A tricky task, taking the persona of a non-human and still avoiding the more common issues of anthropomorphism. Kunitz, a master, pulls it off. Here is an excerpt from “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I’ll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won’t be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

I encourage you to read the entire short poem. So layered. And it gave me new respect for the animals that eat the same things we want to eat, who can blame them?

Ann E. Michael, Hornworms

A day
like today
the air
feels invisible.
Crickets sing
steady songs
while catbirds
riff solos.
Who wants
to think
of darkness?
But look:
the plant
that means
the year
will turn
is blooming.

Rachel Barenblat, Cusp

i mean, death looks more alive than the scholar, right? he is animated, urgent, dynamically beseeching. as if he knows what the doctor has failed to grasp: that mortal life is short, that the ephemeral and embodied joy of music is as real and valuable as the abstract, theoretical weight of learning. so even as the skeleton-maestro leads the doctor on to death, he summons him (and us) to life.

or, read the image another way, and it becomes about resolve: standing fast and holding faith in the face of death’s destructive antics and strange glamour. i’ve needed to keep both these thoughts in mind at different times in my life and what i’ll laughingly call my “career”, which is why i’m sharing this with you now, and why…

i have selected this as the cover image for the department of queer complaint, a collection of poems (finally) forthcoming from the mighty poetry bus press. the collection has been knocking around since my tenure at cambridge ended, but for all sorts of reasons, it now feels like time to shove it up poetry’s peep hole and have done with it. watch this space. or not. it’s going to be wild.

Fran Lock, IT’S TIME

霧吸うてだんだん秋の人  高山れおな

kiri sūte dandan aki no hito  

            inhaling fog
           slowly I become
            an autumnal human

                                                Leona Takayama

from Hyakudai Keiko (100 Waka Theme Practice), a haiku collection of Leona Takayama, Gendai Tanka Sha, Kyoto, 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 20, 2026)

love and fear live
in the presence of the river

a red handprint ought to give
a go-home goodbye

the water unclean
making matters unclear

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 24 August 1663.

a church without dirt
is no home to our hope

we live in a poem
never read

like a road
ending in doubt

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 23 August 1663.

in mine and lead them to a space looking out
onto water or the hills, comb their matted hair, wipe

the grime off their cheeks. I want to sit down beside them
doing nothing, really—and just let the evening wash over us.

laying hen in the act
of pure hoping

to have something
common as hurt

a body in the closet
a new word for day

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 22 August 1663.

mold in my closet
and all my clothes lost

fine linen as green
as water in Paris

which I think will prove
pretty for my violin

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 21 August 1663.

a sudden passion
in the key of spring

we go like joiners
laying floors

for a quiet home body
cleansed of clothes

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 20 August 1663.