Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 30
the many lives of the poem
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: the poem, in all its shape-shifting glory. Enjoy.
oh sweet monster, let’s
go where there are no more stories.
where we use sewing machines
to piece back together
the skies they’ve taken from us.
a broken window. shattered teeth.
you can tell me
all the dreams you have
for your body. the silks
& the furs. i will tell you mine.Robin Gow, an ode to buffalo bill
There is nothing innocent here — the mercilessness of human domination of the landscape, nature, human domination of each other, how we are complicit in the dominant structure, how we learn to be complicit, revel in it, thinking we’re “good,” thinking we’re not “other” ourselves and the subject of some kind of dominion.
One of my favorite lines is “the heat licked the skin clean off our backs and faces.” The sun as a lover but ultimately a violent lover, whose very caresses shear off our skin, and we think it’s an idyll.
Marilyn McCabe, Who decides which
It’s technically adroit, accumulating details, layering them deftly, gradually drawing us in. Much of its power lies in its use of reportage, never telling the reader what to think. Instead, it juxtaposes observations and invites us to engage with its religious and societal ramifications, lifting what might first appear a mere anecdote into resonant verse.
Matthew Stewart, A poem by Barry Smith
In the book, the lyric poem becomes a vehicle for parsing and articulating history and the self, from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. The book’s setting is existential and domestic, tender while also full of sharp grief and documentation. A work of poetic-memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry, and the answer is a resounding yes.
Han VanderHart, Larks, forthcoming Spring 2025 (Ohio University Press)
People often want a poem at a funeral. These are not necessarily people who normally read poetry. So why at a funeral?
My husband is not into poetry (there are exceptions – including mine, at gunpoint). He says ‘why don’t they just write what they want to say?’ He’s an intelligent man. But he doesn’t want to have to ‘decipher’ the words.
When his daughter/my stepdaughter died, way too young, her husband asked me for a poem for the funeral. She was not into poetry either. But she was a woman loved by everyone she met – there were hundreds at her funeral. I suggested Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’. Both my husband and hers agreed instantly.
So what does any of that mean, if anything?
Sue Ibrahim, What do we want from poetry?
In such a poem, every word must matter. “Conjoined” makes me think of conjoined twins (shouldn’t it?) but then they tatter, then the clouds are “freely budding” like an apple tree in spring. “Unbeholden” can mean no one’s looking (except we are looking), but it can also mean not in debt to anyone, without obligation. They are conjoined like twins, but only at first, then tattering off on whatever path they care to take. The poem unfolds less on the page than in the reader’s imagination.
Bethany Reid, How to Behold Rae Armantrout
The poem, ‘Magician’s Trick with Scissors’, is from a sequence of Magician poems. The character last appeared in poems published in Berlin Lit Issue 5; he is a magician who has fled his Circle with a stolen something, and is half hiding out, half preparing for an unwinnable battle ahead. […]
In Hesketh’s poem, meanwhile, a whole cast of characters are paraded, their stories glimpsed in a way that reminds me of the way epic poems recount battles (hence the title, which alludes to medieval reenactment):
The paramedic arrives to deal with a minor incident
while the folk musician leads all the cows and beds
in song. The PA glances at her watch and nudges
the photographer, who is cleaning her lens again.I feel like there ought to be a recognised subgenre of poem, related to the list poem, of which this is an example — one in which many persons put in an appearance, but each enters and leaves the poem very briskly.
Jon Stone, Magma 89: Performance
This title just won’t lie down. And the list isn’t by any means comprehensive. Nor is it perfectly alphabetical. I’ve amended some of the lists to add a bit of rhythm. It’s a work in progress. I remember showing my first idea to Jane Fordham and the late Matthew Miller, then co-director of Fabrica gallery in Brighton. I published it in Woman’s Head as Jug as a block of text, merging the words so they weren’t immediately identifiable. I like that idea, still, so this version may yet change again…..
Jackie Wills, Words for women
Only mind can go there. Body
cannot, sitting in its chair, reading
a travel brochure. You are right
here, even if you’re wrong, having
lost the map, about the where.Ellen Roberts Young, Word Play
One echo in the French word “approximatif” is “roughly” or “vaguely.” Modifying the word “homme/man” it’s a suggestion of a humanity—“man” in the old sense, as in “mankind”— that has merely been sketched or hinted at. In the poem, sometimes this humanity is in an anguished search for completion and actualization of its true nature, but other times it goes through life not even aware of its partial, faintly sketched-in state. At the same time, there is the hint of “approximating man,” of humans forever guessing and calculating, living by the odds, by stats and data sets. Because I’m listening to a lot of billy woods right now (I’m preparing an essay on him which should be up soon!), I can’t help but think of his line, “Instead of poets you motherfuckers begat accountants!” I think that captures something of the poem’s argument, and it’s one that gets some attention in this chapter.
RM Haines, Tzara in a New Translation
Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, turned into the Milky Way, turned into music, turned into time itself. A magpie spoke to me in my mother’s voice.
Maria Popova, An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days
manifest destiny / go west bloodily / abscessed freedom tree / obsessed banshee / hornet’s nest victory / stressed out fixed fee / manifolk freak me / sweater vest therapy / at best feel free / protest wisely / vision quest boldly / do your best you and me / infinite poetry
Rich Ferguson, From the dark to the light
The desire to write fiction is what propels me as a writer. Poetry that plays with narrative comes out when I sit down to write. It’s the shape my thinking takes on the page. I’m also an academic writer. But even as a scholar writing scholarly prose, I write associatively, sentence by sentence, without a roadmap or an outline. Whether I’m writing poetry or critical theory, language is like a stone pathway that precedes my arrival on the scene of the text. Step by step. I follow the stones. I don’t know where I’m going or when I’ll stop.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kendra Sullivan (rob mclennan)
I’ve put some Civil War ghosts into the poem. I’ve noted that she’s the first to notice the turning of the leaves, and she knows the hour in the night that crickets stop calling to each other. The poem has yet to come together, but it continues to percolate.
It’s easier when a poem comes to me in one big rush, but these days, I’m grateful for poetry in any form.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Ghosts and All the Past Goals that Haunt Us
The last time I saw her in the flesh was at Postbox Poets, a night organised by Sarah Dixon. I think I had a guest slot, but can’t be sure. I was there with Steve and John, my husband Dave had driven me there, so maybe I did have a slot. Anyway, Jacks took a slightly blurry photo of the three of us, me with John and Steve either side of me and said they loved us and were we not great mates. I still love that photo. It was so perceptive of Jacks to notice our quiet bond.
Angela Topping, A Tribute to Jackie Hagan
The * indicates an endnote that confirms the reader’s shock of recognition that the poem has, through the force of events, moved from asthma to institutional racist violence via the death of George Floyd. She argues that this is a necessary condition of writing, that the meaning of a poem, for instance, changes over time and with the experiences of the individual reader. ‘A text in itself is a non-breath; without the breath of a reader, Quintilian lies dormant in the archives.’
Billy Mills, Recent Reading July 2024: A Review
There had been an outbreak of poetry
thankfully it was only a villanelle.
The symptoms were a moody intensity,
giving his life an ABA frequency.
He was quarantined in a cheap hotel.Paul Tobin, A MOODY INTENSITY
Some years later, after a major reworking, I sent it out. Several times. No one accepted it; a couple of years later, I realized where it was in need of a change. Tried that. It felt better to me. But no one accepted it for publication. Fast-forward about 18 years, and I made yet another change in the poem. I thought maybe it was still worth submitting to journals. Nope. But, last year, reassessing some older work, I came across this poem and thought it was actually a pretty good poem, worth sending out a few more times. One might say I believed in the poem.
Ann E. Michael, Persistence & belief
This is a long poem (six full pages) and I think most readers would be pretty comfortable calling it ‘surreal’ — that opening image of the Eiffel Tower as a shepherdess gathering the bridges of Paris like sheep is only the first of many very surprising and genuinely disorienting comparisons. (Christ as an aeroplane is a highlight.) […]
There’s a lot going on here but I think the key points are that, alongside the disorientating strangeness and wordplay, the poem is funny, delicious to say and composed in fact in a traditional form. It also ends by alluding to Baudelaire’s address to the hypocrite lecteur — mon semblable, — mon frère.
Victoria Moul, Poetic surrealism
The sense of having achieved a hard-won beauty brings a special kind of pleasure, and the distinctiveness of the form makes the piece stand out in my own mind. But I think there are other significant rewards to working in a form that goes against the grain of one’s normal rhythmic habits. For one thing it creates a kind of detachment. It makes language a more resistant medium and makes me feel rather as I imagine a sculptor might eliciting an idea from a block of stone. At the same time, you’re trying to express ideas and feelings that are important to you, and the difficulty of doing so in this alien rhythm forces you to move around these ideas in a more strenuously reflective way than you would do if writing in a freer way. Like any composition in a strict form it gives an armature around which your thoughts, feelings and phrases can gather, but it does so in a more challenging way than writing in a fully naturalised form like the sonnet would do.
Edmund Prestwich, Sapphic stanzas
The lines of the poem descend the page
Claim your loft insulation voucher here.
According to our records your payment is overdue.
I don’t write for you, says the poet, I write for those who don’t read my poems.
Bob Mee, STREAM-WRITING AGAIN: THE BOTTOMLESS BUFFET OF BABBLE
Yet, there are other moments. Where a woman approaches me after a reading and says, “I have felt all of that,” or better yet, “Have we lived the same life?” That makes me feel less lonely. It makes me feel less strange. It makes me feel like my book and my writing and maybe even me, myself, we have a small place and purpose, if even for a brief 10 minutes in a coffee shop with two or three other people in attendance. Because some of what I put into these poems reflects someone else’s experience, too, and maybe that means I’m a shade closer to figuring out something during my time on this earth.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, A Return to the Blog, Featuring Small Animal Rescue and Lots of Feels (Some of Which are Mine)
Drawn into its wistful
longing, I made up a narrative that perhaps
she’d lost her love to death, but now was praying
no longer to be alone. Oido, wee-do, how else
could I explain the ability, in the absence of notes,
to make music in one’s head? It tries to embody
a whole world of things which are separate and
distinct from us, until we find a language
to bring them almost close enough to touch,
almost close enough to pull into our arms.Luisa A. Igloria, Oido
I don’t know how I could ever have forgotten how much I love the word is. One of the characters in my book Rumi and the Red Handbag is named Ingrid-Simone and she writes her initials, I.s. So, you know, it’s something I’ve put some thought into even!
Anyway, the goal for me these days is to write things true and clean, and to not worry if it’s dark or joy or light. To get another level deeper at looking at beauty. To just get empty. Get true. Put on my famous blue, you know. Did you ever go clear? I want the answer to that to be yes.
One last note: the garden sends messages — reminding us how intertwined everything is. Whatever what is is and all that.
Shawna Lemay, Repair Shop – The Upgrade Problem
the hay’s first turn
the loose scent
of centuriesLynne Rees, Two haiku ~ haymaking
If you get too hung up on trying to write 10 absolutely skillful poems a day, I think you’re going to struggle unnecessarily. Don’t worry if they’re good enough; just write them down. If, after your 10 poems, you have a creative burst and want to write more, write more; you don’t have to limit yourself if your creativity becomes completely unbridled.
Allyson Whipple, Five Strategies for Completing the Buson Challenge
Now 96, she lives alone, as bent, stubborn and fragile
as wisteria, children scattered from acreage bought
a century ago. No money in farming these days.
“They’ll carry me away from here in a pine box,” she says.Sarah Russell, 13 Ways of Looking at my Mother-in-law
Her sockets are fused, she survives still.
Victim only in words. There is an oasis about her.
She is an oasis. Someone loves her.Jill Pearlman, She Plays Still
I just went around the back of the internet. I must have pressed a wrong button, but suddenly this other page came up. It was like being on the other side of a mirror and being on the other side looking in.
I was on the inside of the other side and you were all there staring into your screens. You had goldfish bowl faces, glowing white and ghostly, illuminated by interwebs and the information mines which shone like gold in your glittering eyes.
Salena Godden, Is there anybody out there?
The title poem invites readers to draw a map,
“As you draw, you will begin to find
where to place yourself. Map your town,
put in a pub, a church, a home.
Shrink it to a full stop.
Label it small. Find a footpath and dot
the path, the road, the railway
Label it ‘This way out’”[…]
Measure the important things, which are not undrunk cups of tea, but the connections with the natural world, the work you did to arrive where you are. In effect, to draw your own relief map.
Emma Lee, “Relief Map” Jan Norton (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
A woman folds a
square of sky to bury in
the cracked earth.
Maybe, come spring,
clouds will bloom.Rajani Radhakrishnan, The more things change
Succinct this time but full of resonances!