Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 39
diligent dreaming, a forager of sound, the island of witches, silence as a canvas, taking off Billy Collins’ clothes, and much more
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: diligent dreaming, a forager of sound, the island of witches, silence as a canvas, taking off Billy Collins’ clothes, and much more. Enjoy.
The other day I learned of a new procedure:
they peel your prostate like an orange, removing it whole
rather than slicing it. I don’t know how they get it out,
or if it leaves a hole.The yellow leaves are brilliant in the sun,
the birch bark’s white puts cadmium to shame,
the sky gets pale closer to the ground,
the tide runs back the way it came.Dale Favier, Round Like An Orange
The Wee Gaitherin poetry festival has fast become a highlight on Scotland’s poetry landscape, with three days of grassroots poetry events taking place in the east-coast town of Stonehaven every August. This year, I had a great morning facilitating an outdoor writing workshop based on Poems on Public Art.
We started with some inspiration on ekphrastic writing about the sea from one of Mandy Haggith‘s poems, Towards a Book of the Sea, written in response to a ceramic piece by Lotte Glob, we headed out into the sunshine of Stonehaven’s boardwalk. Along the boardwalk are several metal sculptures. One is an official piece of public art by a pre-Kelpies fame Andy Scott; the others apparently appeared one at a time overnight, installed by a Banksy-like local artist who never owned up to being behind them. (Although, Stonehaven being a village, it didn’t take long for everyone to know exactly who it was.) The local council had a dilemma but eventually decided to leave the rogue sculptures, now much loved, where they were.
The workshop group spent a bit of time each with our chosen sculptures, then had a few weeks to work on the notes we had made. A couple of extra ‘disruptors’ were thrown in to expand the stories we found in the artworks.
Karen Macfarlane, The Wee Gaitherin 2024
I’ve gotten to do a couple of readings recently that were both very special to me.
The first was the Poetry in Ocean event held at the San Diego Public Library. I read poetry alongside a photographer, a surf podcaster, and fellow poets, and we all shared about the importance of the ocean in our work. There was an open mic, a raffle, music, pizza… it was a very lively and fun event! Thanks to Michael Klam and the SDPL for having me!
This week, I also had the honor of reading my poem “Con Pane” at the 25th anniversary event for Con Pane, my favorite bakery (and favorite place). Some of the employees came over one-by-one to tell me how much my poem meant to them, and it felt so beautiful that we could affirm the importance of each other’s work. It was also special to get to share the celebration with my son, who might love Con Pane as much as I do.
Katie Manning, Poetry in Ocean & Con Pane!
It’s a bright sunny afternoon, tropical by Plymouth standards, i.e., not hosing with rain. ‘I’m deciding if we need the windows done.’ They look great to me, I say. ‘The back,’ she says, ‘they’re filthy.’ She says it again: ‘I hate this time of year,’ and walks off down the road.
It’s nothing I haven’t heard myself say over the years. Along with: ‘I can’t wait for Christmas to be over’, ‘I’ve got a terrible week this week’, ‘At least I’m not being shot at’, and ‘I had a perfectly happy childhood.’ I made a vow some time ago not to use these frames to describe my experience because, and I have learned this the bitterly hard way, they do not describe who I am and what is happening now.
What is happening now is that I am really, really tired, and have a heavy cold. But Tatty has got the heating to work and we are watching a favourite police procedural on the telly. What is also happening is that is it now hosing with rain. Some poems were rejected. But another was accepted. So it goes. It is complicated.
Also not quite happening now but in my recent memory of what I did hear myself calling ‘a really terrible week’ (so much for consistency), I have listened to talks and podcasts on the cheery subjects of what might happen if Trump wins the 2024 US election and the climate collapse. In the same time-span, I re-re-read this article on James Schuyler and came across this one, on his line breaks, for the first time. These things do not distract me from Trump and climate collapse, nor do they ‘sweeten the pill’ of the realities of those things. I’m learning (very slowly) that not everything is binary. More likely, things are both/and: rejection/acceptance; sunshine/rain; Trump/James Schuyler’s line breaks.
Anthony Wilson, ‘I hate this time of year’
I found the experience of ‘publishing’ my own zine/mini-pamphlet really empowering and I think there will be more self-publications like this in the future. I’m not sure that Six Poems, with its glossy cover featuring one of Pauline’s intaglio prints, can accurately be described as a ‘zine’ which I associate with punk poetry (nothing against punk by the way, I love its ethos!). Mike at Seren Arts Gallery in Bradford on Avon worked his magic on my publication with his beautiful design and reprographic work (I recommend).
Although Trump withdrew his zero-tolerance policy a few months after introducing it (with no proper arrangements for returning separated children to their parents), the current rhetoric about immigration remains de-humanizing, and not just in the United States. In particular, I find it shocking that children’s lives are treated with such disdain, as if childhood is a state of being only afforded to the privileged – one of the topics I endeavour to engage with in my six poems.
Josephine Corcoran, Poetry, art, and translation, in collaboration
I’ve never been a refugee, an exile, an immigrant. I have met quite a few, though–often very young people, students I encountered at the college where I worked, students from Haiti, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Mexico, Venezuela, Pakistan, Eritrea, Kenya…and my husband’s stepmother, who arrived at Ellis Island from Austria between the wars. And a colleague who was stranded at college in the USA when the Ayatollah took power in Iran, and a fellow employee from Cambodia, who lost her entire family except for one brother to the Khmer Rouge. Whenever I hear about the politics of immigration (which is often), I think of them: how hard they work, what they sacrificed to get here, how hopeful they are, how challenging their lives have been and continue to be. And their grief. […]
One by one we let things go, abandoned
in shallow caves with other people’s
remnants, plastic bags and t-shirts,
books, candlesticks, so much trash after all—
even our skins can barely hold what
we need anymore. We arrive shriven,
numb as feldspar, having walked so long.
May we have water? May we rest, with our
children in our laps, and sing the songs
our parents taught us not so long ago.Ann E. Michael, Northern stars
I think in the abstract, the idea of being there when someone opens up the bag of ash inside an urn and it explodes all over them is one of those scarring-for-life moments. Just as a witness to it, as the person who has to help clean it up or soothe the person covered in cremains. I can’t even fathom what it would be like to be the kid here, but what saves the moment from spinning into horror is that the kid is so innocent, unaware on some level of what’s just happened, that it allows room for the humor of the moment to take over. There’s this cathartic release of energy that starts as laughter and moves to keening, lamentation. But never to sadness.
Then we were silent.
I helped my son sweep his dad
off the chairs, the stairs, emptied
the inside of his shoes and collar,
but the gritty gray bits
of bone and ash wouldn’t fit
back inside the plastic urn.I really like the tone here, the matter-of-factness of it. The reader needs to breathe after the explosion/realization, but also there’s a sense that after this terrible moment, we still have to get on with life, and that means cleaning up the ash and trying to put it back.
Brian Spears, My Box Wrapped in Velvet
My grown-up children were babies once. That’s not so hard to believe–what is harder to grasp is the dizzying passage of time. I still remember my daughter’s weight in my arms, gradually heavier as she fell asleep. The scent of my son’s baby hair after a bath. Night feedings. Holding their heads up for the first time. Crawling. Their first steps. And many other singular moments that emit their own light in my memory. My daughter and my son have made our family’s universe infinite. The joy of bringing them into the world has never abated, it has only expanded to include more love and wonder and appreciation for who they are and what they dream about. Everything in this poem–written by a new mother more than two decades ago–continues to ring true. […]
She pins the stars to their place
in the sky, shapes mountain ranges,
fills craters with diligent dreaming.Look how she’s etched
her own image onto my heart,
how she’s filled the empty
caves of this life with purpose.Romana Iorga, Shadowlight
After a couple of weeks of sunny weather, and mostly warm breezes, autumn slammed into this weekend. Walking Leonard, my shoes soaked through because the little creek has spilled over its banks. The fields are mire after this morning’s rain. But now the sun heads toward the horizon and the clouds are discrete once again. Grey-blue, and dirty lavender. Everything feels in-between. In between the blue and the grey, between the sickness and health, between ambition and resignation.
I started the wasp project last year, when I had so much time on my hands—and so little energy. Now my schedule is bursting at the seams again. I couldn’t be more grateful. Still, I’m realising how important it is to put—and keep—everything in containers of time, and of attention. Saying no when asked to make exceptions is difficult, but I can recognise the dangers now: when I’ve played helpless when I give in and shove aside my own plans to please others. I imagine myself tying myself to the railroad tracks in a parody melodrama. Secretly relieved to be helpless.
Cancer comes with lessons. The first of which may be that we don’t have unlimited time to do what we want to do, or to be with who we want to be with. I’ve had a deep impulse to do “all the things”, but also a sense of disconnection. Most days, I hover somewhere in-between.
I need to stop researching the wasps, and settle into the writing. I’ve collected all the facts in a notebook, and will pull bits out as I write the poems. All of this is one container.
Ren Powell, Juggling Projects
What am I but the forager
of sound:
listener, voyeur, shoreless
sea absorbing verse like light.My turn may come.
My words may come.
My sound will flood the narrow
back alleys of the emptiness.But today is not that day.
The third poem is not my poem.
The syllables coalescing inside my head
are not my syllables.
That sky that holds every poem is not my sky.Rajani Radhakrishnan, There is no third poem
You with your flash flood grudge and storm surge curse. Around your neck, a locket filled with a tombstone’s baby teeth. In your back pocket, a scuttlefuss of ghosts. You, with your cyclops eye of destruction, the only rules you play by: evacuate or shelter in place. Somewhere in Atlanta, there must be a trumpet that can bring you to your knees and blow a little tenderness into your soul.
Rich Ferguson, Hurricane Helene
Sometimes your mouth won’t form words;
sometimes you forget to get into the bed
& you sleep on top of the covers, cold.Hard to even look at the calendar
when the days slam down all the same:hard to get up & hard to stand.
Katharine Whitcomb, Remembering My Father –“After-Apple-Picking” from HABITATS
First of all I would like to thank Nigel most sincerely for inviting me back to talk about my new collection, Toccata and Fugue with Harp (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). I am grateful for everything he does to support the poetry community so tirelessly.
To choose just one poem has been difficult, as the collection is arranged in three parts: Toccata, Intermezzo and Fugue. Each part reflects a different aspect of the overlying theme, which is ‘ Nature or nurture, which has the greater influence on who we become?’
Toccata deals with childhood and the strong influences there, post-war ambiance, religious beliefs, conformity and parental expectations. Intermezzo reflects on how this made me feel, how my view of life was coloured; feelings of being out on a limb, never being quite good enough, over-anxiety about competitions. Fugue moves on to the present day and seeks to reflect my current interests and pursuits, hopefully explaining a little of who I’ve become. One thing unique to my collection is the linking of poetry in the Fugue section to music and colour…. Hence the choice of title Toccata and Fugue with Harp. I provide suggestions for listening before or after reading. These are mostly classical music pieces but do contain lighter music choices too. A colour for each one is suggested too, reflecting the colour dominant in my mind when writing each poem. There is a suggested playlist on my website.
Drop-in by Margaret Royall (Nigel Kent)
Oh, that withering term, “dabble,” insinuating that a “dabbler” isn’t serious, flits about like a cabbage butterfly, and abandons things when they get difficult. It’s right up there with “dilettante,” “amateur,” and “superficial,” related, both in meaning and in sound, to “doodle,” another activity that sounds suspiciously frivolous.
In spite of its bad reputation, dabbling is actually an important, even crucial activity. In looking at the work of several artists, I would venture that they might engage in a good bit of dabbling. The work of Picasso, for example, includes paintings, sculpture, prints, ceramics, and theater design. Picasso also had famous “periods:” Blue, Rose, Cubist, Surrealist, and Modern. It’s not too hard to imagine that some of these were the result of dabbling, or experimenting with a new practice just to see where it would lead.
Many artists don’t confine themselves to just one artistic expression. Lesley Dill incorporates language, specifically the poetry of Emily Dickinson, into her art. She works in sculpture, textiles, photographs, opera, and other forms. Mickalene Thomas works in paint, photography, sculpture, collage, video, and installation art. Experimenting, trying new things, yes, “dabbling,” is a necessary part of growing an art practice.
My chosen art is writing, but I’ve learned how to play piano and guitar, made videos, tried photography and watercolor. I’ve absorbed lessons from each of these, gaining an appreciation for the dedication of musicians and artists who devote their lives to perfecting their craft.
These artists not only kept the inborn creativity we all possess as children, but continued to grow, change, and explore new ways to express themselves. They prove that growing up doesn’t have to mean giving up what makes us most human: our capacity to create art.
Erica Goss, It’s ok to dabble
I’m thrilled to announce that next month, I’m launching a quarterly ginko (haiku walk) series around the Soulard neighborhood. The first event takes place on Saturday, October 26th at 9:30 a.m. It’s free, family-friendly, and open to anyone in the St. Louis area.
I’ve wanted to start hosting ginkos in St. Louis for over a year now, but with everything else I have going on, it kept getting pushed to the back burner. Finally, though, I realized I could start hosting them in conjunction with the Soulard Restoration Group Community Involvement & Events Committee.
Here are my goals for the series:
Provide free haiku education in a digestible format.
Provide space for people to practice writing haiku without worrying about critique or judgment.
Create a family- and beginner-friendly event.
Explore Soulard and learn about its unique history.
Recognize that haiku can be written in any environment, and that urban spaces are just as legitimate haiku spaces as pastoral ones.
We will meet at the Soulard Community Garden and spend 90 minutes learning about haiku, walking, exploring, and writing. The event concludes at the historic Soulard Market, a great place to explore at the conclusion of events.
If you have any haikurious friends in the St. Louis area, forward this post along to them!
Allyson Whipple, Soulard Haiku Walks Launch in October
I am kicking off the month with the first zine of the month, MORNING IN THE WITCH HOUSE, a collection of prose poems and collages written in the darkening days of last October. You can read the e-version here. […]
I have been obsessed of late with New Orleans “casket girls,” young women and girls who were brought over on ships in the early days of the city and may or may not have been vampires. I’ve mostly been doing research, but the first piece came this week, with many more following.
Kristy Bowen, October Paper Boat
You asked me if I had been to the island
of witches, of shamans, of shapeshifters—and I had, but only once, but for less than
a day. We rode a tricycle along the dustyseawall to a waiting motorboat. The waves
were brisk and choppy, but we saw flying fishas the municipality came into view. I remembered
reading about firefly colonies in the molavetrees, and how Spanish explorers thought they
were on fire.Luisa A. Igloria, Siquijor
I return, then, to this place, with my notebooks and pencils and a list of subjects I might be interested in and I wait for the thing that happens in libraries. I am no longer too shy to lift books from the shelves. I gather them to my desk, my little space, where I have claimed my seat with bag and pencils. I stack the books around me and I dip in and put like a wading bird. I wait for the insistent tug of a story wanting to be told. I fall into books of maps and the maps lead me to the people of a particular time and place and feel these long dead people clamour up against my ears like ghosts drawn to a spiritualist. I lose myself in their quick bites of life for a few hours and end up taking a sackful of books, a tote bag of books away with me. This is a thrill that has lasted my whole life – the thrill of the heft of a book bag on the shoulder, the sheer weight of stories waiting to be explored.
While I am reading, note making, building a picture of people and place in my head, the real, live people of Scarborough are passing through this room on their own quests – a man is searching for a photo of a long wrecked shop, a librarian is opening books for him, has on the tip of her tongue the reference he might need. A woman is searching for two names in her family tree. She is shown how to use the microfilm to look for newspapers, but she is panicked by it, can’t work out the tech and the librarian sits patiently with her, making the notes for her. Another woman comes in to fill out forms, take ID photos against the pale wall of the library reference room, she makes phone calls, ties up a job interview, submits an application. And in the corner a woman with a little bairn is being given advice by a charity about nutrition, feeding routines, bed times. I am sunk in my own stories, searching for the treasure and all around me the library with its infinite uses, its infinite places of safety is being an active, living place of security, strength, knowledge.
As I am booking my haul of treasure, my stack of books out – no longer with the satisfying stamp of the librarian, but rather a fascinating, clever device which you simply stack your books on – I spot my own book, The Ghost lake, on a shelf, bound with paper and a note – for the book club- and I realise that my book is now part of this story. I think about the safety I experience at the library, the sense of refuge, and I think about all those people coming in and out, and how all these knowledge points – the books, the computers, the staff themselves – are the bricks that make up the shelter of the people using it. This place is a church or a temple, a place of refuge, a place to come and worship your ancestors, and find out who you are and how to be, and now, my book there, on the shelf, a brick in the building, a footnote in the story of this place.
Wendy Pratt, The library is a church, a temple
A break with routine:
I’ll forego a shower
so as not to miss
the sound of the rain.I waited till the small hours
to close the bedroom window —
preferring a damp carpet
to the loss of the waterfall.Since I was a kid
I’ve loved the car wash,
the sense of enclosure,
of safety in the flood.This pre-dawn morning,
my bed is my transport —
from its shelter
I adore this world of water.Jason Crane, POEM: Tonight, My Heart Is North
animal insistence turned my velvet body to leathery grit arms & legs clammy skin a breath off corporeal temperature shivering dog calm trudge pant & blunt I ate mercury as a child broken thermometers bright pools on the bedroom floor gums not yet black not yet turned a grand tolling into children’s rectums removed it from a velvet lined case passed it with Jesus care one child to the next & I dropped it shattered globs silver animals wriggling toward a fairy-tale center I scooped them into my mouth I am about to die or win a great award a shivering dog inside you life swings onto the gridded macadam as my mother in the driver’s seat turns smiles & waves she holds a cigarette a bottle of gin & a gun
Rebecca Loudon, Bone
One part of growing up in a small town with five cemeteries (one where there were more dead people than live ones) was that we often rode our bikes on cemetery roads. The ones closest to our house were old with few new burials and were therefore quiet and safe. They had almost no traffic and lots of interesting statues to study. And I loved everything about the statues. Their stillness. Their idealized faces. Their draped garments. The feathered wings of angels, the skinfolds of cherubim. Flash forward to today. I still love public statues in fountains and parks and business plazas. Statues in museums, of course. Religious statues (Buddhas, Giant Rio Jesus, altar pieces and icons, etc). And yes, cemetery statues. (Honestly, the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires has some of the most beautiful statuary I’ve ever seen.)
A statue seems to me the height of remembrance, a stoic, lasting memorial to the beauty of what once was, a way to honor that which we deem most important. Stillness and Remembrance.
But stillness and remembrance are concepts in opposition. Memory is an act. Stillness is an absence of action. Perhaps this is part of a statue’s appeal —that in its “frozen” position, it is keeping some feeling or idea alive. That in representing life or belief in action, it creates a sense of calm.
Donna Vorreyer, Statuesque
The poem also has a mirror image in greyed-out, upside down text, indicating its theme is reflection. Being a product of a chaotic, perhaps abusive, drama-laden childhood does not mean that those children have to grow into equally destructive parents. The cycle can be broken. It’s not an easy thing to do but necessary, otherwise children repeat their parents’ mistakes. But it is possible through reflection, through acceptance that healing is non-linear and might feel as bad as living through the hurricane.
“Vision So Bad That…” starts with a ten-year-old narrator failing to hit a soda can with a BB gun and so realising he needed glasses and ends,
“I now understand where I lie in this poem,
that shrapnel is a seed, and masculinity is a metal.I was the coke can, once standing by
watching the chaos, failing to realize
that I became just another part the problem.”The glasses don’t just bring visual clarity, but help the narrator see he has a choice between repeating the problem or being the calm after the storm.
Emma Lee, “New American Monarch” Marcel Fable Price (New Michigan Press) – book review
The scenes I observe daily in the metro should have tipped me off that things had gotten this extreme – I’m often the only person in the car without headphones on, or a phone in their lap; the only person who’s looking around and observing my fellow human beings, apart from people traveling in groups of talkative friends. Yes, sure, sometimes I watch or listen to something, check my mail or read, but generally, I don’t. I didn’t realize that, for many young people, anxiety about silence and being alone with oneself extends even to the idea of taking an ordinary walk. I knew that many weren’t doing it — so many people on the streets are either absorbed in their headphones, or talking on their phones — but I didn’t realize how much was due not to habit, but to anxiety. So rather than scoff or dismiss what’s being described here, I’m happy that some are noticing what’s going on, and trying to do something about it. The author of the article goes on to talk about the longtime spiritual practice of silent walking meditation (which, Ms Maio’s self-described “flow state” aside, is rather some distance from a regular walk) and then speaks about the research that shows how good walking can be for you and your mental health. Reading this left me feeling sad, a bit stunned, and wondering what, if anything, I could do about it.
Many, if not most, of my friends of a similar age still enjoy long quiet walks, swims, car drives or commutes, or time spent cooking, knitting, playing an instrument, or doing other non-passive activities that allow their thoughts to roam freely. We grew up before our devices took over so much of our lives and our mental space, so we know what it’s like to be quiet, without music or podcasts or even a tv or computer in the background. But many of us, too, have left that quiet behind, and with it, our true solitude. We know what it’s like not to scroll endlessly, not to be addicted to social media, to write real letters or blog posts, but…we’ve joined in, and our minds have been shaped and changed by it. Is it any wonder? Not only have the devices practically become part of our bodies and indispensible to our functioning, the world they bring to us has become so much more fraught, so much emotionally noisier and more anxiety-producing, and delivered in smaller and smaller bits, that of course many of us can’t concentrate on anything longer than a few minutes, and of course we seek ways to escape not only the inputs, but the resulting chaos and distress in our own minds.
Beth Adams, The Silent Walk
Before packing the cars and heading off for our weekend adventures I spent some time thinking about silence last week. I have thought a lot about silence as a poet and as a coach. I know for example that work I have done to develop my voice means that I wouldn’t now be able to write my poem Silence. That poem was a moment in time that needed setting down, and my relationship with silence has evolved since then. It is still evolving and that in itself is a joy.
Listening to a conversation on The Coaching Inn Podcast between Claire Pedrick and Oscar Trimboli opened up my thinking even more and began to bring the two sets of thinking together for me. My thoughts started to unfold as I listened in and I found myself transported to standing on the path in the forest at Loggerheads, three o’clock in the morning waiting for the dawn chorus, waiting to hear the first blackbird sing. I found myself visualising silence as a space with complete width and depth. I saw it as a darkness about to be lit up.
That image of silence being a space and width that enables things to emerge got me thinking about the times in a coaching room when something similar happens. Silence as a canvas for thoughts and feelings. When I feel that kind of silence in front of me in a coaching room it gives me a tingle of excitement and curiosity as I wonder what is going to emerge. When I am gifted it, I can feel my thoughts being given a welcome, open space. There’s a real joy when this is created between two people and the very essence of it can be felt. Palpable silence.
I have a poetry workshop that I wrote called “Can You Hear it in the Silence?’ and I can see now that this also relates to my thoughts around the silence of a blank page and the silence between words or lines.
Sue Finch, CAN YOU HEAR IT IN THE SILENCE?
Rather than going for a provocative hot take, I’ve waited ten days since returning from the U.K. before posting my reflections on the trip. A total of five readings in six days was certainly an intense experience, and it gave me a real feel for the poetry scene right now.
First off, it served as a timely reminder that 99% of U.K. poetry exists beyond social media and isn’t even aware of many trendy self-publicists. This is especially true beyond the big cities and festivals, at readings above pubs or in arts centres in provincial towns, where people attend and buy books through a pure love of the genre. These people, of course, are my readers.
Secondly, I was struck by just how many remarked on their disillusionment with the direction that many major journals, festivals and publishers have taken in recent years. In fact, there’s clearly a sizeable chunk of poetry readers, purchasers and aficionados who feel disengaged with current fashions. And I’m not just invoking embittered white male OAPs here. Event after event, I encountered varied members of my audience coming up to me at the interval or once the reading finished, champing at the bit to discuss the issue, expressing deep frustration.
Matthew Stewart, Where do we go from here?
E-mail and social media has increased the amount and speed of interaction between poets. In the old days a fashion might dominate a nation for years. Nowadays the turnover so fast that no single style has time to take root – less fashionable styles are frequently re-integrated. This could lead to homogenisation. Fortunately, the improved communication also gives people a chance to find like-minded people, so sustainable niches are more common now, ensuring variety.
Looking back, it’s tempting to label poetry eras – “The Movement”, etc – but of course many style of poetry were present in those eras. Nowadays these unfashionable styles are more visible than before.
Tim Love, “So Tim, here’s my first question – What actually is poetry?”
A few years ago I read Billy Collins’ poem “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” and immediately knew I wanted to respond. I was in a workshop and without thinking about it too hard, I wrote a reply that was both a mimicry of Collins’ poem, and a response to it. I called it “Taking Off B.C.’s Clothes.” I felt so confident in it that I sent it out after just a few more edits, and eventually it got picked up by Up the Staircase Quarterly (thank you to them!). Just yesterday USQ informed me that they’ve nominated it for a Best of the Net, so I thought I would share it with all of you.
Below are the Billy Collins poem, plus my response. Enjoy and, if you have a response poem of your own, (meaning a response to the Billy Collins’ poem or any other famous poem) please share it in the comments.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, by Billy Collins, Published in Poetry
Taking Off B.C.’s Clothes, by Tresha Faye Haefner, Published in Up the Staircase Quarterly
Tresha Faye Haefner, Taking Off B.C.’s Clothes
This weekend marks the bicentenary of one of the most influential editors in the history of English poetry: Francis Turner Palgrave. Born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, on 28th September 1824, he is remembered for an anthology that has never gone out of print: The Golden Treasury (1861) — or, to give it its full name, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. […]
At four and a half, he began to learn Latin vocabulary; by the age of ten he was memorising the first book of the Aeneid; and one of his favourite games to play with his brothers was to re-enact scenes from Homer. He also spent happy seaside summer holidays at Bank House, his grandparents’ home in Great Yarmouth. His daughter, Gwenilian, later remembered how
he was keenly alive to Nature’s sounds, and delighted in reading Lucretius or Virgil within hearing of a trickling stream or the breaking of waves on the shore
So it’s perhaps not surprising that his masterpiece was a book of poems to learn by heart. But the success of The Golden Treasury was also due to the rise of English Literature as an academic subject in the Victorian era, displacing the Classics at home and across the empire as a founding text of national identity and an instrument of soft power. Schoolchildren recited poems from Palgrave, and soldiers took him to the trenches. In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), the British intelligence agent Edward Wilson reads poetry “secretly, like a drug”, carrying The Golden Treasury with him through colonial Africa, to be “taken at night in small doses”.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #22: A Golden Treasury Treasury
[Cecil] Day-Lewis was the UK poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. Despite a hefty complete poems published in 1992, his poetry has now, I think, fallen almost completely out of circulation — perhaps partly for the depressingly simple reason that very few of his poems can be read easily online. This neglect seems to me rather unfair, as he wrote a lot of lovely lyrics.1 (If you want to speculate on which, if any, of the subsequent UK poet laureates will prove to have a lasting reputation, here’s a complete list.)
‘Walking Away’ is actually not a very typical Day-Lewis poem, but you can see why it has become an anthology piece. Recalling it as I sat by an actual pitch, watching my own ‘half-fledged’ son embark upon a new activity and discovering a new aspect of himself, I thought that the power of this particular poem derives partly from the way it combines such a recognisable parenting experience with the distance of time. Day-Lewis is not writing in the poetic present, but recalling an experience, albeit at the same time of year: ‘It is 18 years ago, almost to the day’.
Hovering beneath the surface of the poem, I think, is Yeats’ best known poem of autumnal nostalgia, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, set nineteen (rather than eighteen) years after its initial occasion and also an attempt to articulate how — as Robert Frost put it — ‘nothing gold can stay’.
Victoria Moul, On rugby and metre
David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Dance has shaped more of my life than anything else except maybe growing up in the country. Ballet, tango, contra, country-western two-step and line dance, country waltz. The attendant somatic practices (Feldenkrais and Pilates), physical therapy and cross-training, and bodywork are all techniques for increasing bodily awareness and self-presence, so that you know what you are feeling and what you are doing: a dancer is a way of being, like a writer is a way of being, only dancing for me cultivates enormous curiosity and joy that happen almost entirely outside of language. Like dancing, writing comes from deep attention, curiosity about what is, and joyous moments of not-thinking. For me, times of not-writing and not-talking sponsor being-in-words on pages.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Julian Carter (rob mclennan)
I hate to admit this, but Flare, Corona (a finalist for the WA state book award) failing to win hit me a bit harder than I thought it would. I tried not to get my hopes up, telling myself I was lucky just to be nominated, but there it is—my emotions said otherwise. My MS symptoms were also acting up as I was running a small fever all week with a cold, so I had to reschedule my covid antibody infusion (which might have been too much this week anyway, with all the tooth stuff). Unexpected expenses, wasting time on not-useful appointments, and just feeling like “why do I even write poetry?”—all capped by a terrible hurricane that hit areas where I had family harder than we expected (luckily, they are all fine, but a lot of people aren’t) and more war in the news. Let’s not even talk about how close this election is. I am not usually a depressed person, but I certainly struggled with getting anything done this week, or even feeling like it was worthwhile getting anything done.
I tried to do some things to cheer myself up, including getting out in nature and visiting a newly opened local pumpkin farm, McMurtrey’s, which also had beautiful u-pick flowers like dahlias, zinnias, and sunflowers. I tried to write but had more success reading—especially interesting articles in, of all places, the New Yorker—an article on Ina Garten’s success (for instance, she gave her first cookbook’s publisher $85,000 for half the print run, and then spent $200K more on PR and photography) now she makes millions on her cookbook contracts. So that’s how to be a successful book writer, LOL! $285K!) plus an article on AI and antibiotics which was fascinating. And I got my contributor’s copy of Mid-American Review, in which I had a new poem.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A New Poem in MAR, A Rough Week, More Pumpkin Farms, and How to Cheer Yourself Up
3 poets, 4 books of poetry today! I had just started reading American poet Morgan Parker’s There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé when books by Canadian poets, Lynn Tait and Margo Wheaton arrived in my mailbox. This afternoon, I sat outside and re-read them, spending a bit more time on the dogeared pages. The thing about poetry is that one tends to read it over once (or at least I do), and then re-read, then, go back to the dogeared poems. And the cool part is that say, 6 months or a year later, you back, and different poems will stick out for you, grab your attention. I think part of the reason I wanted to persist with this “poetry club” is just to model a behaviour of reading, one possible approach. We don’t read poetry like we do a novel. And you know I love novels, but poetry is a special thing, a special gift. One needs to learn their own flare for reading poetry.
We read poetry to resist, to rebel, to come into our hearts. We read poetry because poets, as W.S. di Piero says, “want to say small things intensely.” He says, “Empty heart = empty head” and I’m inclined to agree. Poetry goddamnit teaches us the terrain of our decrepit hopeful broken hearts.
Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – Wheaton, Tait, Parker
In his Afterword to Nada Gordon’s The Sound Princess, Drew Gardner describes her work as being ‘punk rococo burlesque’ and draws the interesting, if somewhat broad brush, notion that Rococo, while being aristocratic in origin, was ‘the beginning of a historical shift toward the enlightenment and, eventually, socialism’. While this certainly opens a doorway into Gordon’s exuberant style, my own moment of realisation came in these lines from ‘The Mess’:
the mugwump
who never stops writing
about writing cuz all
is hypertextWhich, ‘by a commodius vicus of recirculation’ brought me back to these lines from ‘tales from the crypt’, near the start of the book:
I am a secretary,
therefore I secrete.
I am a secretary
therefore I am secret.The poet as one who secretes recirculated, hypertextual language in secret is, in a sense, the primary figure in Gordon’s work as I read it.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading September 2024: Part 2
This is a book, a text, a way of speaking inside a designated context. But texts are not separate from the world in which they are written. Unlike the borders of nation-states or the fences announced by private property, the mind is continuously permeated by the world. Thinking, itself, is an act that involves being altered by thought.
Maybe “this” also refers to the conditions under which this book originated, particularly the coincidence of its proposal in the week following October 7, 2023, as well as the conditions under which it was written. To begin under these conditions is to admit the instability in our ways of knowing so as to inhabit the particular contingencies of authorship. To admit is not a negative thing. Admitting permits us to think into the difficult and to ask hard questions about boundaries, borders, and ethics. In this sense, to admit gives us permission to transgress the facile line between “right” and “wrong” and explore what is destroyed by such lines. We can ask who stands to benefit from administering them. We can use mirrors for something besides self-affirmation. A mirror can reveal the gaps between the way we imagine ourselves and actuality. “Co-creation” turns a monologue into a dialogue that makes creative use of discord and misunderstanding. I make the book as the book makes me; we make each other with every encounter and conversation; we make the world in relation to the ways we know others have made it. The hardest part for humans is that there is no way to know (or control) what others will make of us. Or: what Others will make of Us.
Alina Stefanescu, Excerpts from ‘my X’s’
Wet, windy and dark, we’re properly into autumn, but it’s been so delayed this year which hasn’t been a bad thing. The lingering heat is very welcomed. The leaves are starting to turn, maples first and then the birch. My garden covered in gold flakes that I will have to rake and rake, but I will never stay on top of them.
Seasons cycle and I fall into the same routines, with my gardening and in the house, my moods. Even in my poems, I find myself caught up with the same images, the same thoughts.
Gerry Stewart, The Wet Dark Slips of Gold
きんいろのひかりのなかの秋の蜂 対中いずみ
kiniro no hikari no naka no aki no hachi
golden light
inside of it
an autumn bee
Izumi Tainaka
from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 25, 2024)
Thanks Dave!
Thanks for including me in this week's Poetry Blog Digest , Dave. I was especially happy to read Sue Finch's words on "Silence" as well, so thanks for your careful and thoughtful curating of this space, as always.