Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 42
a head full of dreams, the stillness of a bell, big magic, an impish shadow, and 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: a head full of dreams, the stillness of a bell, big magic, an impish shadow, and more. Enjoy!
We have forgotten how to
make our hands behave, and holda cup of tea. We forgot
the sun on polished wood floors
in homes we no longer own.Once upon a time, we laughed,
in a red convertible
with the top down, and the wind
blowing wild across our skulls.PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 38
In the dark times will there be singing? There will be singing of the dark times.
People often ask why I get up at 4am to make work and all I can say is I love the magic and the silence and the foxes and the first signs of light and life and dawn. I love to watch the light change from season to season. I love to write with a head full of dreams, full of the illusion of limitless possibilities.
Writing. Listening. Watching for first light. I feel like a surfer waiting to catch a wave on night oceans. Waiting for the tide to turn, or for a favourable wind to blow my sails in the right direction to finish a big thing that must be done. I don’t know why I sometimes take these lonely pictures at my desk, maybe to document the isolation, the process of being in here working intensely on this big thing that must be done that has nothing to do with anyone else, that sacrifice, it has nothing to do with reviews or sales or hearts and likes. The pure feeling of making art that is like no other.
Salena Godden, Notes from the 4am writing club
Sometimes I feel the darkness touching my sides. It hugs me, not in [a] loving way, nothing sensual, not even in a caring sort of way.
It’s not a darkness with a mood overhead. It’s not a darkness with the twinkle of stars above. It’s not even the darkness with the expectation of a gradual lightening into a new day.
It is an aloneness that compounds your very existence. It’s a kind of blindness to everything that surrounds you.
It takes your balance away. It takes away joy. It surrenders you to an uncharted surrounding. It’s an emptiness that is missing vibrance that it has not forgotten.
Michael Allyn Wells, I Hear Only Myself Breathing
On the noise of the street, I found myself thinking about New York and all the money rushing by. In the subway, the noise feels like being inside a machine.
When my kids grew up, we gave them no television. I wanted them to experience life without noise, because the best part of my childhood was the quiet. Yes, there were beatings and adults with sticks, there were whistles, and we all rushed to prayers and classes and chores. But there were also hours when we disappeared into the woods, and the only sound was the ticking of the stars. When we listened to deer and porcupines. We slept in sleeping bags by streams under the Milky Way.
When I took my kids out to the redwoods, it wasn’t only to learn how to make a fire and put up a tent, it was because the life of the imagination ignites in silence.
All those years, I pitched a tent in my head toward a future of bookcases and love and joy. I lived in my head, which is why I still live too much of a life of the mind.
The imagination is how we find our way toward cultural transformation. We who are writers, who work in publishing: we are threading our way toward stories that might change the world, but we need our cave time, our dream space. I plan to wander back to the place where the sky was built and find my pulse again.
Kate Gale, We Live in Noise
I’m taking a break from the garden and from the news cycle and indulging in a different form of work: “Making Poems, Making Books,” a 4-day workshop with poets Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM. Yes, I’ll be making my own book–a small accordion book. There are about a dozen of us in the workshop, which is centered around the idea of color. Autumn in northern New Mexico offers a range of hues somewhat different from the post-equinox colors of eastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps that will inspire me. The last time I took a workshop here was in 1993, and I learned how to draw/paint in chalk pastels. A long time ago–and yet, walking around the dusty alfalfa field in the center of the Ranch’s office and dorm buildings, I felt completely at home. As if I’d been here just last year.
This week differs from the artist residency I attended at Joya-AiR in May because I’m part of a class getting instruction in how to make a hand-made book and also participating in feedback on our writing. Nonetheless, every afternoon there’s a nice stretch of time to work on solo projects, hike, drive to some nearby sites of interest, or nap. I will admit I have been doing more napping than I had hoped. The high altitude, dry air, walking more than usual (on rocky trails) and the emotional energy it takes to learn a new skill and meet new people have conspired to creep up on me some afternoons.
Ann E. Michael, With color
Although I work in many media, I sometimes think printmaking is the most satisfying. There’s something both elemental and almost magical about rubbing the back of the paper and seeing the image emerge – human beings have been doing similar things ever since the first artist painted their own hand and pressed it against the wall of a cave. I also love the ability to make copies of a work of art that are neither photographic nor digital, and not mechanical in any way; each one is its own small, slightly unique entity, on a carefully-made piece of paper that feels natural and of the earth.
Beth Adams, Making a Print
There is so much to talk about right now, stuff that i think would be helpful by sharing, but right now this minute I feel like a lightbulb without a shade, and to be honest I want to put the shade on again for a little while. And so I am choosing instead to write about this moment, where now the sky is beginning to clear to a perfect, cold blue, and a flock of pigeons is moving through that blue and I can hear their wing beats in the air, and a thin checkerboard of clouds is now appearing high up, and someone down the village is chopping wood and yes, scent of wood smoke now through the open window
and I am writing.
Wendy Pratt, Between Sleep and Awake
I spent the morning submitting poetry to various publications and their calls for this or that. I also wrote up an application for a $500 writing grant possibility. I’m not sure what my chances are of being awarded such a gift, but I certainly have some ideas on how to use it this winter. First, I’d like to order a Little Free Library for my front yard to assemble and install, only, I’d name mine the Little Free Poetry Library. I’d go wild in its kit design and colors, maybe even install a tiny disco ball from the interior ceiling. First and foremost, I’d love to stock it well with the work and words of northern poets before moving onto the equally beautiful work and words of poets from Outside. Such a Little Free Poetry Library would certainly require its own Instagram page, just to keep everyone abreast of stock. My neighborhood can be tricky to find without a proper street sign. […]
The sun bright in my eyes, I set writing aside when the afternoon beckoned me out to the yard. There I cut back my raspberry patch, pruned the Japanese Maple, and cleared the porch of summer plants and pots. I hauled four leaf bags of clippings out to the overflow and feel pretty good about this first step in putting the yard to bed for winter. And of course, the drive yielded all kinds of sights: Humpback whales, migrating swans, snow creeping closer on the mountains.
October delights. Enjoy every moment.
Kersten Christianson, October and All Its Finery
I am SO EXCITED to reveal the cover to my sixth poetry book, MYCOCOSMIC! It’s also available for preorder from Tupelo Press at this link, and it officially marches forth on March 4th, 2025. The cover art is from a series entitled “Radiant Void” by Pearl Cowan, whose other works you can also see on Instagram and at Good Naked Gallery. I’m in awe of Cowan’s weirdly lovely combination of the spiritual and the fungal. As I was processing changes in my life, especially my mother’s death and the terrible freedom it brought to tell the truth, I was reading in Merlyn Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and elsewhere about how hidden mycelial networks enable trees to talk to each other–connecting us all–as well how fungus eats decay, preventing death from overwhelming the world. That’s when my book about grief and change began to thread together, when I noted the mycelial motif threading through it like fungal hyphae.
Like mycelium, this whole project has been seething underground for a while, and what a miracle to see it fruit. I feel so happy about it–light of heart. Now my mission is to maintain that lightness throughout the labor of getting the word out, which always involves a mix of successes and failures. Rationally I think rejections and inattention are just part of the writing life, nothing personal, plus lord knows there’s this big corporate publishing machine doing its best to dominate media coverage. Yet poetry is a whole-heartedness business, so it’s not easy to stay logical. I hereby vow to do my best, not just about trying for my slice of that attention, but at maintaining grounded peace at the randomness of it all.
Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic cover & pre-order link!!!
When I (used to) read poems to audiences, obviously I hoped the reading would touch them in some way. But I often wondered why I could never remember the poems well enough to recite them. Partly my own empty-headedness, perhaps. (I’d have been a useless actor, too, because I’d have never been able to retain the lines in my head from rehearsal to rehearsal.) But also I think it was because once I had written them, once I had read them aloud to others, they had left me. And it was a process repeated through each reading. They were no longer mine and so reading them again was like visiting an old acquaintance or friend. The experience was sometimes warm, sometimes a little unnerving, sometimes disappointing.
Yet I publish the poems on here and transcribe them back into long-hand in a series of notebooks, it seems in a need to preserve them in their original state, as if to reclaim them. Occasionally I might flick through them – and reading them often brings me up short. I find myself asking ‘Did I write that?’ I don’t remember it.
After a short round of D&D and dinner with friends today, I found myself alone for a few hours at home while J hosted his usual Saturday night karaoke. I was determined to push off my other writing work til tomorrow to get the wrangling mass of RUINPORN edited for the final time, as the design schedule is creeping up on me if I want to at least have things finalized by the end of November. So much happens before the official layout begins, since it’s easier to make rearranging and changes in the text before I start sizing and formatting the final version for printing. I have gotten speedier with each new book, much in the same way of chapbooks. The bulk of any chap these days is edits and back-and-forth more than the initial design. There will also need to be 2-3 passes through before I finalize, then possibly 2 or more after I have a galley in hand. To avoid ordering and paying shipping for proofs, it’s best to have everything but minor tweaks in place now before I upload. I am using the same printer for a couple upcoming chap projects that needed different trim sizes than I can do at home (one, a very boxy 8 x 8 inches) and it’s much the same process, just in collab with the author. It’s not something I can afford to do with every chap, but it’s nice to have the option. I am also very close to having everything from GHOST BOX in hand to release both the e-version and the artist book/box project that will be available in the shop, possibly by Tuesday. There are some fun elements going in, including the above lil’ baby Ouija boards I found on Etsy that are so fun. There is still more coming for #31daysofOctober over on IG, so look for the launch of it there.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/20/2024
I decided to do the tech things before the writing things this morning: getting essays graded for my online classes, getting material submitted for seminary classes. When I return to North Carolina tomorrow, I won’t have in-home internet. My smart phone can function as a hotspot, but this is the week I discovered that unlimited data doesn’t mean a) unlimited data or b) unlimited hotspot.
So, once again, I spent time on the phone with Spectrum, my internet, home phone, and cell phone provider. I have requested unlimited hot spot use, in light of the fact that Spectrum hasn’t restored my internet. The very nice customer service person put in a help ticket. Will it work? I don’t know. […]
I’m trying not to feel stressed about all the work that needs to be done in the coming weeks. Most of the time, I’m successful. Of all the things that I thought might make my jam-packed schedule difficult this term, having a hurricane in the mountains of North Carolina was not one of those things.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tech Weariness
I haven’t been to Western NC since the storm—strangely, I was there just one week before it happened to participate in the Punch Bucket Literary festival—so I’ve been reckoning with the devastation there through supporting those closest to me. My sister’s family, yes, but also my husband who traveled with my brother-in-law and niece for one of the supplies-delivery trips and was shaken by the enormous and sudden changes to the landscape, and also my dear friend, the climate photographer and journalist Justin Cook, who has been traveling there to document the destruction and impact on lower-income residents of Swannanoa, NC. I understand through these loved ones that being there, on the ground, is heavy.
I believe we should all be using our talents and other resources in whatever way we can to reduce both current and future climate harm, while also taking care of our own nervous systems as much as possible, since a regulated nervous system can be a huge gift to those in distress and those most impacted by climate disaster and injustice. For the past two weeks, in addition to supporting relief efforts financially and making phone calls on behalf of my sister’s family (to help find them temporary housing and schooling, etc.), I realized that the best gift I could give those in distress around me was to stay as grounded and regulated as possible. For me, that meant limiting my consumption of news and digital media, taking up an embroidery project to have at hand in the evenings, and baking bread and granola for overwhelmed loved ones who might need a snack. It meant being available to family and friends who needed to share about what they’d seen, to express their grief and rage.
Krista, my other sister and partner at The School for Living Futures, and I have been talking a lot recently about our purpose with SfLF and what it means to be working for culture change when the future is so uncertain. In our biweekly gatherings to discuss the book Hospicing Modernity this fall, our group has been reckoning with Vanessa Andreotti’s observation about how our imaginations are limited by modernity so that it’s nearly impossible for us to imagine what life would look like outside of its thrall. What future can we work toward when we can’t see the future? How can we reconcile the sense of urgency we feel in finding solutions to the climate crisis, when both urgency and the idea of fix-all solutions to complex issues are manufactured by modernity itself, the same system that created the climate crisis?
There are not, in fact, easy or single answers to these questions, but reading Hospicing Modernity has been helping us explore the questions more deeply. As a writer, I believe one of the gifts we artists can offer is our ability to bring our full senses to the present and remain open to possibility and uncertainty. As a curator and community-builder, I believe part of our work in this time of atomization, polarization, and fear is to practice radical hospitality: to welcome each other, break bread with each other, form and strengthen connection both within and beyond our habitual clans.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Troubled Regions
Almost everyone I’ve met and gotten to know in the literary world in the last 15 years I met because of The Rumpus. I started there when blogs were still the dominant form of online discourse about poetry—my initial gig was to write a weekly roundup column of what was happening in the posts and comment sections—and that quickly progressed into writing and editing book reviews and then to curating the National Poetry Month series and running the poetry book club. Back when I went to AWP, my name tag always had The Rumpus in the organization spot instead of the university where I taught. It’s been the biggest part of my professional identity for almost as long as I’ve had one.
The Rumpus has had some financial ups and downs over the years, with the ups never really being that far up. It’s always been tight financially because there’s no institutional support and no big donor behind the scenes. The people who make it happen do it because they love the site and the work and want it to continue to exist.
And while money is always a problem for any independent media outlet, it’s especially one for The Rumpus right now because the people who do the most work for it are still digging out from Hurricane Helene. The Rumpus is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. I’m going to let Alyson tell you more about that part of things.
I don’t usually do this kind of thing in my newsletters, but this situation calls for an exception. Please forward this message to people you know who might be willing to help, and if you can afford it, please either become a supporting member of The Rumpus or make a donation to help the site recover and keep going into the future.
Brian Spears, It’s a relay, not a sprint
It’s interesting to note that Poetry London have closed to submissions for a period. According to the editor, Niall Campbell, there’ll be more info when we decide how best to proceed.
Poetry London, of course, use Submittable, and have been inundated with poems over the last few months, in an experience that’s shared by many major journals. The current dynamic feels unsustainable, that’s for sure, if we don’t want to burn out our editors and embitter our poets.
Matthew Stewart, Poetry London submissions
Most literary magazines and competitions include mention of AI nowadays. It’s a rather loose term (I’ve seen it used for computer-assisted tasks that involve OuLiPo procedures, anagram generation, or randomness) but usually people have a chatgtp-like facility in mind, the computer producing the poem.
The process can be more collaborative than that though, the human keeping control. I’ve heard a leading mathematician say recently that he uses chatgtp to bounce ideas off of, like chatting to someone over coffee. I use Google in rather the same way, to see what happens if (say) I search for “sheep and chess”.
“AI Literary Review” is a new home for such work – “a journal of new poetry, created by humans, utilising artificial intelligence”. The poets describe the process that led to their poem. See Issue 1 (Sam Riviere, Harry Man, etc).
Tim Love, AI
One of my favourite places to browse for new poetry is Good Press, a workers cooperative in Glasgow who run the best online bookshop I know (each item is photographed with sample pages). I found Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror there, as published by Hanuman Editions, a project which, according to its website, continues
the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Our books are designed as a contemporary homage to the playful kitsch and small, object-like format of the original, evoking the Hanuman Chalisa, a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold in the bazaars of India.
The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror is “a fractalized translation and reinterpretation of a classical work in the Tamil Sangam canon, an anthology of 401 short poems composed between 100 CE and 300 CE”. After (NYRB Poets), Narayanan’s epic reworking of the Ramayana, was one of my favourite books of 2022. It’s fascinating to see him working with lyric miniatures now, translating and improvising across playing-card-sized pages on which gapped words “chank shell beads on a string”. The “close-fitting translations” are on the left-hand page, with Narayanan’s improvisations on the right.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #23: Good Stiff Ink
“Signs, Music” is a tender, compassionate look at fatherhood and the arrival of a new baby. The poem’s speaker explores connection with someone so dependent, fatherly concerns, the worry about communication and how his own father might or might not influence the speaker’s attitude and approach towards being a father. Refreshingly it queries the new father’s sense of self, now a couple have become a family and what new fatherhood might mean in terms of work and relationship with the child’s mother. Although she is not the focus, she is acknowledged and appreciated. “Signs, Music” strives to give a voice to those doubts and rewards of parenthood.
Emma Lee, “Signs, Music” Raymond Antrobus (Picador Poetry) – book review
I love this chapbook by Bellingham poet and printmaker Sheila Sondik. I read it before publication and wrote one of the cover blurbs. I read it again during the Sealey Challenge in August. And again, today. New delights and discoveries each time.
“Duff” is the fungi and decomposing leaves and other detritus that sifts to the forest floor, that stuff you scuff through when you walk on wooded trails. The other term you need to understand in order to make your way through these poems is “Golden Shovel,” a poetic form invented by Terrence Hayes in which the last word of each line is taken from a single line of poetry by another poet. Lighting Up the Duff perfectly and playfully marries these two ideas, while paying tribute to Sondik’s influences: Linda Pastan, Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy.
Bethany Reid, Sheila Sondik’s LIGHTING UP THE DUFF
I was lucky enough to read James McConachie’s first collection from Black Bough Poetry Press before it was launched, and to record some of my impressions. Here they are.
It is extraordinary, an earthy, sun-drenched tour-de-force, peppered with the language of his home in rural northern Spain.
He takes the reader to remote wooded mountains, and brings us so close to animals, wild and tame, that we feel their hot breath.
Beyond his breathtaking descriptive powers, James McConachie has an unerring ability to unveil brutal injustice, to present us with human hurts, past and present, with a kind of poetic rage that is always finely controlled. This is a mountain storm of a collection. I heartily recommend it.
In some ways, though, it was a bittersweet read for me. My mother lived in Spain, at the foot of a mountain, for the last twenty years of her life, though she was far south of where James lives. But the language he uses, the pungent descriptions of countryside and rural Spanish life touch me in a raw place, of affection mixed with grief.
Lesley Curwen, ‘Consolamentum’ by James McConachie
The poet stands inside the poem.
The poet marches inside the poem.
Waves a flag. Punches a fist.Oh, that pounding of the podium.
Oh, that insistence, that crescendo.That hush.
The poem itself is made of fragile words.
Like a cloud. Good only for one rain.
But the poet imagines a whole monsoon.
A flood myth. An ark. A rebirthing.
Two by Two. A rekindling.Rajani Radhakrishnan, The eighth poem is wounded
Rob Taylor: Quiet Night Think brings together poems and essays, which felt like a rarity in Canadian publishing until very recently (in addition to yours, new titles by Jonina Kirton, Nick Thran and Wanda-John Kehewin all mix the two). Why did you choose to bring the two together?
Gillian Sze: I intended to write a book of essays, but, in the end, I found an important relationship between those pieces and the poems I was writing during that same period. So much of Quiet Night Think is about fragmentation—across identities, languages, times—and it made sense to embrace those fissures and leaps between genres. I think the point of the hybrid form was to give readers that same sense of halting, slowing, and quickening that I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. The winding of the sentence, the hiccups of the verse.
RT: Did you receive any resistance from your publisher about mixing genres in this way?
GS: No. I’ve worked with Michael Holmes at ECW on two other books, and he has always been supportive. Panicle, for example, also has a bit of everything: prose poems, long poems, creative translations, sketches… Quiet Night Think seemed like a natural place to go in our writer/editor relationship.
RT: In the book’s titular essay you quote William Carlos Williams, who defined a poem as “a thing made up of… words and the spaces between them.” Later in the book, you provide your father’s counterpoint: looking at your MA thesis of poems (and all the space around each poem), he declared “There’s nothing here – it’s empty!” Throughout the book, you embrace the “space between”—between words, between languages, between cultures. It’s even right there on the cover: those big gaps between each of the words in the title!
At the same time, your move towards essays feels like a filling in of that space, that “emptiness,” which bridges a gap between your father’s expectations and your own. Was that part of your motivation towards non-fiction? Does it allow you to navigate, or fill in, the spaces between languages and cultures?
GS: I certainly felt more exposed when I was writing the essays. Even on the page, the essay appears as solid blocks of text. I felt like there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t disappear into thin air. The words string along into sentences. The research is revealed. The history is told. In that sense, I think the essay was useful for me. It was a form that best suited the telling of all these threads: history, research, and memory.
I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way.
Rob Taylor, Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze
I Don’t Know, is featured in Gallery 2 in my second full poetry collection, Welcome to the Museum of a Life. This gallery is a gallery of the unspoken which seems fitting for a poem which is about the grief I experienced when my Nan died.
I thought of it as a quiet, contemplative poem when I selected it for publication and was surprised and pleased when both Julie Stevens and Susan Richardson engaged with it shortly after the book was released.
The poem began in a workshop with Kim Addonizio. When I become fully present in a writing workshop it’s as if my pen is conducting my thoughts onto the page. I think quite fast during this process and enjoy watching the words flow and fill the lines. I also have moments of just being and waiting, and this helps me to stay in the moment and see what comes next. It is as if my brain is scanning my memories and thoughts, and filtering for the important bits.
Drop-in by Sue Finch (Nigel Kent)
I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” […]
One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed.
rob mclennan, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone
I will be reading from a second experimental sequence of my own poems at the launch reading for Steve Ely’s anthology called Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press). My poems, a sequence called Olga Liking Sunflowers, roam through the pandemic experience, the work of David Jones, my local landscape and the delights (or otherwise) of social media. Contributors were encouraged to generate visionary responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene in the context of landscapes important to them. I will be reading alongside Steve, Jill Abram (who is organising the London launch for the book), as well as Katy Evans-Bush, JP Seabright, Anita Pati, and Caroline Maldonado. Steve Ely is also reading from his book Orasaigh, a collaboration between Steve and photographer Michael Faint, inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale.
Martyn Crucefix, A Run of Readings in October/November
I admit to a steadily creeping sense of fuckit with regard to this effort toward poetry, toward “being a poet,” my so-called life in poetry. I’ve worked hard at it. I liked poetry as a kid, wrote a bit in college although not much nor with any seriousness, took it on in my 30’s settling into a serious autodidactic study, got my MFA at — what? — 50? I like what I’ve written, am still interested in it, think I’ve done good work. But — I mean, AND — I wonder about this desire to be heard. I wonder how much that desire is born of old wounds from growing up in a situation in which being quiet was the safest way to be. I admire the work I’ve done toward poetry, in poetry, admire the steady attention I’ve given it. I’m happy with the attention I’ve gotten, but wonder at this sense that it’s not enough. Never enough? I don’t know. I don’t trust the desire. But I do trust the work. But I find I’m not so interested in doing the work any more. Is that born of frustrated desire, or of a natural shift? I don’t know. But something about this poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly got me thinking along these lines. Note its title: “The Leaving.”
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work often gives me The Shivers. She speaks out of some deep and strange place, as if of dreams or the deep chasms of the oracle. This poem is on the lighter spectrum of her work, the narrator self-directed and the feeling one of forward, confident movement than of inching slowly through mystery, or standing struck by strangeness. Although there is a bit of all of that. And, of course, life itself is a bit of all of that.
I find this poem an antidote to my stuck feeling, although I don’t know whether I’m feeling urged toward renewing my work in poetry or toward some other work entirely. There are things to discover in all directions, I guess, is what the poem is telling me. That making effort against odds, within doubts is rewarded, sometimes strangely. Surprises everywhere as light changes with every passing moment, as a bell speaks to silence and the echo and the waiting for the next toll.
Marilyn McCabe, and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
Like most shadows coming from eastern Europe, mine is furtive and mischievous. An impish shadow, filled with shadow thoughts. I suspect some of these thoughts are meant to erase mine and I don’t know how to fight them. Shadow is way braver and more strategic than I am, which she constantly tells me in her own shadow language. This might be enough for anyone else to turn their back on shadow, except. Like me, she loves trees and dogs. The smell of lilac and quince. The sunset. And the rain. […]
Shadow doesn’t cut corners.
It bends them like the pages of a book.
Like the tin roof of a hive.
It crumples them in her fists like rogue poems.
Like bees that have outrun their usefulness.Romana Iorga, What I Learned About Shadow
So today’s post is going to be a little trip down memory lane, as we go back to 2011, when I was still working full time as a peripatetic brass teacher for Cumbria Music Service. I’d just finished a day’s teaching in a primary school in Barrow where the whole of Key Stage 2 learnt to play an instrument. All the kids had just left, and I was packing up my trumpet in a state of exhaustion, probably with my ears ringing from the sound of thirty Year 3 children playing the cornet, when I got a phone call from Ann Sansom, one of the editors at The Poetry Business.
At first I thought Ann was a double glazing salesman, but when it became clear that she wasn’t, that she was in fact, ringing to tell me I’d won the pamphlet competition, I don’t remember what I said in reply. y ordinary life, which had become predictable in so many ways with the rhythm of the school year and the repetition of teaching, the starting again each year with a new class – suddenly it was as if a bolt of lightning had shot through all of it and changed everything. As I looked around the classroom, I felt so happy. It was as if everything was bathed in a kind of strange buttery glow, as if that lightning bolt had left a kind of afterimage behind itself.
It was my third time entering the competition, and though I hadn’t got anywhere the previous two times, I’d used each disappointment as learning, and replaced and revised the poems in the pamphlet. The year before, my best friend David Tait had won the competition with his pamphlet Love’s Loose Ends. We sent each other poems constantly during those days. I knew his pamphlet almost as well as I knew mine.
Before David’s pamphlet won the competition, he referred to it by its title. I remember at the time realising that this pamphlet was an object, a real made thing already, that David wasn’t waiting for permission or acceptance. The magic of naming it and calling it by its name had called it into being in the world.
I remember being honest with myself and realising that my pamphlet was not ready and that was why it wasn’t chosen. I wasn’t calling it by name, it was too shimmery, too ghostly in my mind. I resolved to start and went around for another year whilst I worked on it, calling it by name, calling it into existence, as if it was a dog that needed to be trained. It slowly assembled itself in my own mind, and then in the space between me and the people I talked to about it, and that act made it solidify, firstly in my own mind, and then in the minds of those around me who I talked to about it, and then I entered it again into the competition, and this time it won.
Kim Moore, Putting together a pamphlet (1)
I haven’t cracked open Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert in ages. But I’ve been thinking about “art as a way of life” for well, a very long time. (Thus the category “Live like an artist.”) As a young person writing, I used to yearn, I mean, fuckingyearn, to be a full time writer/artist/maker/whatever. But I’ve also never wanted to write those things (or tbh had the ability to write those things) that would be popular enough to allow that even for intervals. I’ve always known I would have to fit my “live like an artist” bit into other streams of employment. Okay, all this to quote from page 6 of Gilbert’s book, where she talks about the importance of Jack Gilbert in her life, a man she never met. (He died in 2012). They shared a last name (though they’re unrelated), and she held the same job and sat in the same office after he did. You might know his poem “A Brief for the Defense,” as it’s been widely quoted from time to time.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.I think it’s a different poem these days which isn’t a bad thing.
Elizabeth Gilbert writes that it was said “he had seemed not quite of this world.” “He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged [his students] to do the same. He didn’t so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why, because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of the world.” And this, to do this, required utmost courage, utmost bravery.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Why
I left college with my English degree and some experience at harsh workshopping and revising poetry. I started teaching high school English. And slowly, slowly, writing poetry faded because who did I know who was writing? Who would I talk with? Who would I exchange work with? How would I find out, with my three different high school teaching gigs to support my then-husband’s nursing school, that there were exciting new books of poetry out?
In the late 90s, the internet saved me. Much maligned, sometimes for legitimate reasons, the internet saved me. I could find poetry books. I could read reviews. I could dip my toe into a burgeoning poetry culture without having to live in a big city. Fast forward nearly thirty years, it’s possible for me to be “social media friends” with extremely successful poets. I can watch their readings over Zoom. My low-residency MFA program gave me the opportunity to tap into a whole community of writers with whom I stay in touch via email and social media. The internet allows the far-flung writers of Alaska to celebrate our new Alaska State Writer, Vera Starbard, and support each other’s book launches.
But I will tell you that poetry desert of my childhood and 20s into my 30s, has left me far behind. Coupled with living in a beautiful, but completely off the writing circuit place and the fact that I am not part of academia, I have made my peace with the idea that my work will find its readers slowly. That publishing will be an uphill climb. That I will not be invited to teach at out-of-state conference or in-person readings. That I will gratefully spend my life nurturing other writers (especially Alaskan writers) in a way that I did not receive until I was in my forties.
But this is not for complaining, this is for celebrating! Next time you think of signing out of social media forever (which I have from the wicked platform that is now filled with horrible people), next time you want to complain about keeping up your Substack newsletter or your website, remember that these tools connect us in ways that weren’t possible except for those in academia or in big cities. Rejoice in all the weird little online eddies and nooks where writers gather. Take some time to lift up books you’ve read and authors you admire. Not just the famous ones, not just your real-life friends, but also the quirky poet whose work you ran into because someone else lifted it. Be part of that beautiful community that is growing larger and larger that you might not ever have known about except for that @#$! internet.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Thinking of the writing community
My friend Rachel Bunting and I met through poetry, though our friendship extends well beyond the literary at this point. We have both, over the years, helped as readers and editors for other journals, and we have both run a reading series. So when she said, “What do you think about starting a new journal?” I didn’t hesitate. I said YES.
Will it be a lot of work? YES. Will it be just the two of us on the masthead to keep the process streamlined? YES. Will it help us shine a spotlight on writers and artists whose work we enjoy? YES. […]
Right now, the website is live at asteralesjournal.com. You can find a list of Issue One contributors as well as sub guidelines (which will open in January) and a little about each of us as editors.
Donna Vorreyer, A New Sensation
The best donut in a box of store-bought donuts
is not glazed but plain, like a plain-spoken poem.In the farmer’s market, the best donut is the one
which doesn’t smell like apple cider or pumpkinspice. It’s the one that isn’t dusted with sanding
sugar or a cinnamon-cardamom mix. If it’s sweet,its sweetness lingers like the space where a hole
has been made in something that used to bewhole.
Luisa A. Igloria, Shape and Substance
柿吊し終り井水あたたかく 波多野爽波
kaki tsurushiowari imizu atatakaku
I finish hanging
persimmons to dry
the well water’s warmth
Soha Hatano
from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
Fay’s Note: Soha Hatano (1923-1991)
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (October 15, 2024)
Thank you. These are wonderful. I read the first part-poem over and over.