Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Weeks 51-52
gold paint and bird wings, throwing words to the wind, liquid understatement, stopping by woods, a river about a river, 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).
In this massive, end-of-the-year edition: gold paint and bird wings, throwing words to the wind, liquid understatement, stopping by woods, a river about a river, and much more. Enjoy.
Geography is elastic but night has reversed or doubled itself and it is not yet late but soon it will be if I am not diligent diligent being the rudder the bow the shoe’s heel and sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eves as the starlings shoot out.
Rebecca Loudon, Christmas Eve
I cleared my mind for Christmas photocopying outlines of birds and brushing them with gold. Paper birds flew across the front room and others, backed with pages from a dreadful novel, flew across the stairwell. I cut birds out of linen scraps and sewed them onto a tablecloth. I went down to the pier and watched them gather late one afternoon. I read my paternal grandmother’s fortune telling book, its auguries and instructions for interpreting the behaviour of birds (ornithomancy).
I stopped by the sloe hedge opposite mum’s yesterday evening and listened to birds, far too late I thought, it was dark, and remembered the tunnel into the hedge used by the vixen who visits mum. The dark hillocky ridge beyond, punctured by rabbits. Mist sinking into everything.
Jackie Wills, Gold paint and bird wings
Her eyes skirt the trees,
the marshy undergrowth
for a safe settling.
She tires easily now,
seeks sheltered landings
on timeworn wings,
her flight nearing
an unfamiliar shore
that beckons
with no promises.Sarah Russell, Bird Woman
Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time of such profound pain and profound transformation that it fused reading and writing into a single, surprising act of the unconscious: I began making bird divinations to clarify the confusion of living and refill my reservoir of trust in the cohesion of the world. This daily practice left a great deal less time for other reading, especially anything new: The written word today seems more and more resigned to commodified virtue signaling and hollow self-help, so I found myself returning more and more to trusted treasures that have stood the test of time and changing moral fashions.
Maria Popova, Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More
I want to read more – but I do need to clarify in my own mind what I want to read, and why.
I want to write more – but I do need to clarify…
I want to keep posting online.
I want to keep connecting with lovely people.
I want to see more birds (real life as well as photos), photograph more birds, post more bird photos, read and write about birds (oh look, I’ve done some clarifying right there).
Sue Ibrahim, Another year…
Perhaps this particular bird is a singular bird:
its fluting tones original to its temperamentand not to any other in the larger murmuration,
though each wears the same coat lightly stippledwhite, flocked with purple, green, and gold. Yet,
a song only becomes what it is when one note joinsor swerves alongside another, the mystery of never
breaking off a single feather even as it curves.Luisa A. Igloria, Mozart’s Starling
A mixture of fear and feathers in Mary Ruefle’s “Tail Feathers” which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain. […]
Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.
Moist.
Like flames.The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.
I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language.
Alina Stefanescu, Fear maps.
A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted on the images sometimes, which he created after comparing my words to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot images. There were moments I’d say yes, this is perfect, and others when an image had the wrong vibe and I’d suggest it went with a different Major Arcana card instead. I love the results.
Lesley Wheeler, Comics, newsreels, retrospectives
just cold enough
for puddles to freeze . . .
cubist moonBill Waters, 2 poems
The poets whose books I reviewed in 2024 addressed grief and loss, the experience of exile, infertility, and the natural world, of living in the spaces between illness and health, and the power of resilience. They wrote of how the abiding presence of Nature balances an acute awareness of climate change, how language connects family, and why the dead are never truly gone.
Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones: 2024 Book Covers and 2025 Reviews
I’m surprised by my own tears and wonder why I don’t feel this deeply when I read other, similar headlines. Though, occasionally, one will stand out and some detail in the article about strangers will hook me and deepen my understanding beyond the intellectual. Something specific that sparks a network of memories, not their specifics, but the silent knowledge inherent in memory that makes facts move from the part of the brain that understands words, to the part that comprehends lived experience.
We witness.
This is what reading is about, isn’t it? When literature can witness lived experience in a way that mirrors what we recognize to be true. When an external perspective shows us more than we can see on our own. I still find it amazing how words can bridge the gap of distance, and of time.
It’s strange to be working on two projects at once. One is nearly entirely factual, shaped with imaginative connections (The wasp memoir). While the other is nearly entirely fictional, set within a framework of a few facts (The Baroness play). Both attempting to witness the human experience.
Scientists say now that our memories don’t function like recordings, but that we recreate the memory each time we bring it to mind. Every time I get caught up in concerns about writing the truth rather than writing what is true, I think of this.
It is true that my great grandmother was a cuckoo wasp. That my grandmother left the cramped, hexagon cell in the strange hive to wander over the moor. Potter wasp, intermittent mother to my mother. Solitary down the line. I am a witness.
Ren Powell, What it Might Mean to Witness
She turns a page in the journal.
Blank. White. What’s the point?And then, one day, a request for an interview.
A girl, student of history, inquisitive, gentle.A canvas bag, a notebook, pens of different colours.
She has tied her lovely red hair into bunches.Larissa invites her to sit by the window, says.
There’s nothing especially interesting about my life,but do you know how Margaret Clitherow
was crushed to death beneath stones?Bob Mee, TODAY I TRIED TO THINK ABOUT HOW ONE WAY OR ANOTHER SO MANY OF US ARE DISPLACED
Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.
I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.
Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.
Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.
Ann E. Michael, Post-exertion malaise
I used to diarize and write my ideas down on napkins. Now that I don’t go to many places that have napkins, I bring along my book.
I’m a chronic chronicler. Every day on Facebook for a lot of years (and Flickr for many years before that), I’ve been posting a photo I took that day and writing about that day’s events.
It started as writing practice for times when I didn’t have a blog-worthy post. It’s where I dumped my shit, almost literally, like details about my colonoscopy. […]
My friend Susan, leader of writing retreats and author of several books and the Substack Writing and Roaming, advised me at lunch yesterday to get out of my own way. She saw that I was constantly throwing up roadblocks to keep from advancing to the finish line with my own projects: two unfinished novels, an unfinished children’s book about bugs (a passion project) and my finished poetry manuscript, Words with Friends.
I bought that manuscript with me, and she said “It looks finished! Why haven’t you submitted it yet?”
“Because it’s not organized. I need to put the poems in order.”
She said, “The last thing I want to read is six poems in a row about bugs” (or something similar), and I thought shit! She’s right. “Take this manuscript and throw it up in the air. Pick the pages up randomly, and that’s your order.”
Then she flipped through the manuscript, catching on a poem called “Pine.” I kept talking to her while she was reading it, and she was so intently focused on that poem. She pulled it from the stack and said, “Except make this one first.”
What has stopped me from pursuing personal writing goals and instead sent me to the basement to make lamps? Is it a fear of failure? Is it money? It’s certainly not a lack of time, now that I have nowhere to go.
I won’t call this a “resolution,” but I’ll try to spend my time more wisely.
In 2025, I will post my daily diary, along with other content, here, with a TL;DR summary on Facebook and a link to the post. And I will throw that manuscript up in the air and start sending it around.
Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Throwing Words to the Wind
Since it’s a big job, the remodeling of this site to contain both blog and personal website, there’s much to be done, including getting my book and zine page updated to reflect this year, which has been a whirl ever since last January when I decided to create monthly zines of art and writing work. At first, it was largely because I had had to graduate to a paid Issuu subscription, which was going to cost almost 30 bucks a month and I’d better take full advantage of that and actually use it. About midyear, I actually found a much better and much less expensive platform for hosting e-zines, so moved to that. I still enjoyed putting out monthly zines though, even with most of them being electronic with a couple exceptions.
There’s something very rewarding about collecting and publishing poems this way, especially since my work is typically written as a series, and though I occasionally publish bits and pieces in collab zines, journals, and anthologies, they are best experienced in tandem with each other and any attendant artwork. I also like offering the bulk of my work with no impediments like expensive printing and shipping costs, especially in this economy. I’ve been saving the printing costs for longer projects like this year’s full-length collection, RUINPORN, or the larger book projects that had specifications beyond my own printer like GRANATA and GHOST BOX (which was half created in studio, half by the professionals.)
As I was making the collage above for the webpage that lists everything, I realized that is quite a lot of work out in the world this year, which feels really good, because more often in previous years I’ve sat on things for years before releasing them, really with no benefits (at some point, they are done, so its not like they are aging like wine hidden away.)
Kristy Bowen, bookish things
Here’s a sneak peek of the likely cover of my next book, coming out in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something good to read, I highly recommend a new anthology, The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (edited by Todd and Noah Davis and and Carolyn Mahan). it pairs descriptions, habitat and lifestyle notes on key species in the region with poems about those species. Yes, I’m included (my entry is the mayapple). Among the other poets included are David Baker, Kasey Jueds, Chase Twichell, Lee Upton, Marjorie Maddox, K.A. Hays, Michael Garrigan, Jerry Wemple, Chard deNiord, and many more.
Grant Clauser, 2024 Update and stuff
Lately, it’s been about counting. Years. Runs. Words. Work. Breaths. Days. Trees.[…]
12,000 words – the number of words my novel has been stuck on all year. I lost my writing mojo in 2024, but I’ve found it again. Standby 2025, especially February 14th.
18 – the number of years I’ve spent at Wrexham University building a project which includes the voices of those usually excluded from education, from life, from being heard. A few days before my birthday, Outside In won an Above and Beyond Award for embedding Inclusion into the everyday life of the university. A day after my birthday, the group threw me a surprise party with more gifts than I could carry, some flowers that have lasted right up to today.
Breaths – who knows how many? But lately I’ve been practising Yoga Nidra as a way of grounding myself back into my adult self after the re-emergence of childhood traumas, counting breaths in through my nose, and out through my mouth. At first, I found this almost impossible to do. Now, it’s becoming more of a habit.
24 – the number of my advent calendar, and maybe yours: a treat I bought in the dark of November. Each day in December, I’ve opened a cardboard drawer to find a gift to myself. Lavender salve to rub into my temples, geranium hand cream, frankincense oil to rejuvenate my 60 year old skins. It’s taught me something about self-care that I don’t think I knew before – how to treasure myself each day, regardless.
1 – the tree that came to mind in a therapy session recently. This tree is real and imagined, a safe place of non-judgement, acceptance, strength, solidity and power – somewhere I can go, in my mind, to find all that I needed when a child, all that I need now to draw upon when I’m thrown back into child-learnt fears.
And so I find I’ve numbered my days, counted myself into my sixties and up to this Christmas Day. And what have I found?
Love. A growing into love for myself I’ve never thought possible. A growing into receiving love from others I’ve never thought I deserved. A growing love for this world, with all its darkness, all its lights.
Liz Lefroy, I Number My Days
Asterisks and diamond drops
and the cold, so cold,
Lording-over-us blueand the rose chill –
sky’s bright rim of ear,
so cold, asking to be nibbledthis renegade that escaped,
a maraschino cherry
a cocktail on iceso raw and beloved
the song’s song be-
longing in our mortal ear.Jill Pearlman, Bright Rim of Ear Lyric
Is it wildly obvious that blue is my favorite color? I’ve recently learned that it’s scientifically proven that the color blue lifts one’s mood. I’ve just ordered the book Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols to learn more. Wallace’s focus is on blue water, but since I walk the shoreline where I live nearly everyday, I think that’s probably relevant, too. All I know is that the calm and peace the color offers me is real.
No wonder my most recent book is Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) has blue in the title or that the swag bags for Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women are also, blue.
It used to embarrass me that I had such an affinity to one color above all others, but not now.
Not being embarrassed anymore is one of the greatest gifts of growing older. Creating space in the world for others to walk through is another. Almost exactly, fifteen years ago, my good friend Kelli Russell Agodon and I dreamed-up the idea for a poetry retreat for women and Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women was born over a glass of wine, sitting by a roaring fire.
We had both taught at several conferences that featured a less than nurturing atmosphere: a small inside stairwell, an unheated room, and the list goes on. Kelli and I decided, at our writing retreat everyone would feel cared for and seen. There will be swag bags full of new books and everyone will have a one-on-one conference at no extra charge.
Over the years, we moved from Florence, Oregon, to La Connor, Washington. A number of years ago we started inviting guest faculty which have included Elizabeth Austen, Jessica Gigot, Claudia Castro Luna, Michele Bombardier, January Gill O’Neil, Rena Priest, Maggie Smith, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Jane Wong.
This year writer-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield and poet Susan Landgraf will join me on the theme of wonderment and joy. What could be better?
Susan Rich, Another Year, Oh My: Celebrating
Sharing a name with a famous actress was innocuous enough, wasn’t it? We had little in common other than being white women. I am American; she was British. I’m a poet and writer; she was a renowned actress of the stage and screen. I was born in 1977; she was born in 1934 and had already won two Oscars by the time I was walking. Surely we wouldn’t be mistaken for one another!
But, to my astonishment and amusement, once I started publishing books and having a more public life, and especially after my poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017 Meryl Streep read my poem “Good Bones” at Lincoln Center, as part of the annual Academy of American Poets gala. I wasn’t in the audience that evening, but when I listened to the audio later, I heard her say, “I’m going to read a poem by Maggie Smith.” The crowd murmured with excitement, and she said, in her unmistakable voice, “Not that one. The American.”
I laughed. From that day forward, my social media bio has been either “Not that one” or “The other one.”
I hope Dame Maggie Smith, who was known for her wit, would have found all of this amusing as well. As her character Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, once said on Downton Abbey, “Life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”
Maggie Smith, The Other One, Forever & Ever
For me, the year really got started in April with the solar eclipse, which Chris and I watched from Burlington, Vermont, in the path of totality. I still tell anyone who will listen that it changed my life. It sounds goofy AF and over-the-top, and I just don’t care. What I saw and felt was the most profound awe of my life. The magic and power were undeniable, and it became clear: that giddy feeling was what I needed more of in my life. And I needed it immediately, so I spent the year getting after it. [….]
I spent the first six months of the year dramatically revising my poetry manuscript and continuing to send it out. In the process, I crossed the 30-submission mark. And then? I pressed pause. Even though some of the responses included positive signs about the viability of the manuscript, all were ultimately rejections except two that I’m waiting on. I am writing still, just not as much as I used to. I completed Sarah Freligh‘s August Micro-a-Day challenge, gathered some free writes in my journal, attended a couple of local open mics and featured at one.
I’ll get more serious about po’biz again in the future, I’m sure, but for now I’m reassessing what I’m doing, who I’m doing it for and what I want out of it. […]
Art making has come and gone in my life over the years, but mostly, it has been gone. This year, it started calling to me again, however. I had lots of resistance and fear about it initially because I was taking myself too seriously. I’ve been working through it and trying to make it about play. I have some things I want to pursue in 2025, but for now, I’m just practicing and exploring. (You can follow me on an Instagram account dedicated to this art journey here.)
So what now? What’s up next? On the heels of this awkward ritual — the recap — there may be another one: the resolutions, the intentions, the goals for 2025. But if not, the main theme is this: I’m trying to channel the magic and wisdom from 2024 into a new model for writing and art making and being in the world.
That means returning to this idea that we can create what we need for ourselves and for our communities. Our strength lies there, not with typical measures like publications or likes or beauty standards or even elections. That’s a story for another day, but sticking to the theme I have going here, we got us.
We got us.
We make something out of nothing. Almost every day. And the worlds we make are as real as any we’ve been handed. And they’re ours. They belong to us. Imagine how powerful we are when we keep building. Imagine it like it’s already true — and suddenly it is.
Carolee Bennett, To Make a Safe Space for Myself
The final poem in our Palestine Advent series is Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.
Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali.
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1933 in the village of Saffuriya and died in Nazareth in 2011. His So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 24: Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali
I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees. I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot. But through the years, I’m less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.
In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever. Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they’re not going to be scientists–that seems very important to me. Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Success of Adopting a Tree in a Composition Class
When I was a child, my sisters and I were told (and believed) that on Christmas Eve when the clock struck midnight, for one hour all of the animals could talk to one another. This was a magical happening, and also a secret: if we were to try to stay awake and observe this convening (which I suggested on a number of occasions), the magic would be broken.
In my early childhood, we lived in a suburban house with a wide swath of woods behind, and always cohabitated with at least one cat and one or two dogs. Later, we moved to a seven-acre farm and in addition to the animals who shared our house, we also lived alongside chickens, Nubian goats, alpacas, horses and a pony, two barn cats, and a pig, not to mention all of the other wild creatures–birds, squirrels, mice and moles, raccoons, snakes and lizards, turtles and toads, deer–that shared the land. At that point, imagining the conversations that would take place on this sacred night became even more mysterious. What, given the brief gift of a shared language, would all of these creatures say to one another?
Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Christmas
i read in an old grimoire
that if we are sick we should bury all our hooves.
we should prepare for winter. we must
boil a whole tree until it is
soft as flesh.
i pickle the moon to go with it.
sweet lemon divine. i collect the hooves.Robin Gow, healing spells
I grew up in the same New England that Robert Frost wrote about. I saw the roads. Drifts of snow covered them. New Hampshire used to get an average of 174 inches of snow a year. Now, due to climate change, just a lousy 60 inches, a third of what it was fifty years ago.
Snow or no snow, the question might be, do we take the time to look outside at all? Are we intentional about looking up from our phones? The answer is no. We don’t have time—or make time—to look at the woods.
What could possibly be happening on Instagram or TikTok that is more exciting than driving, crossing the street, or interacting with someone at our local coffee shop? It’s all too apparent that we are sucked into our devices. We are absorbed by our longing for the pixels of a digital world.
The first time I realized the phone was a competition was at a Red Hen poetry reading at Poets House. Leaves fell in New York’s late afternoon. Li Young Li was reading with Peggy Shumaker, two accomplished poets. Before the reading began, no one was looking through the Poets House library, one of the largest poetry collections in the world. They weren’t observing the beauty of the space. They were playing with their phones. I realized that the event was competing with something that could fit on their laps.
This was twelve years ago; the phone hadn’t really taken us by the throat. It has now.
Kate Gale, Stopping by Woods: On Returning to Intention
sun dying
i become
part of the darknessGrant Hackett [no title]
In an Afterword, [Robert] van Vliet briefly explains some of Vessels’ compositional background. A few years ago, in the midst of the bleakness and isolation of the Covid pandemic, the poet was tied up in a difficult, exasperating writer’s block. Taking up a popular creative writer’s manual, which offered a method of daily exercises – applying aleatory, chance texts as writing prompts – van Vliet leaned instead upon three much-valued personal sources : the I Ching, the journals of Thoreau, and the gnostic Nag Hammadi Gospel texts.
The poet emphasizes the generative effect of chance operations, comparable to casting the I Ching oracles – and these methods clearly had a liberating influence, opening wide, exploratory dimensions, adding variety to the sequence. But if you read his explanation carefully, you find that the process involved several overlapping steps : sorting, mixing, shifting, recombining. And in fact this step-by-step approach allowed van Vliet’s own voice to emerge : quietly, subtly, unobtrusively. For me it emerges in the refined lightness, the liquid understatement, the powerful simplicity, of his images of nature. Like ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry in its foreshortened, whispering force, its emotional accuracy, his short lyrics find a place where heart, mind, and soul – feeling, thought, and truth – seem to merge in a transparency of light, wind, water, seasonal change.
The ancient source material is by no means an artificial scaffolding, a crutch. It is the avenue for an encounter : because for this kind of Transcendentalist, philosophical writing (think, Thoreau), there is no Truth but lived truth; there is no Word but felt words, embodied words – words in-relation to others, to otherness, to Another. The divine, the sacred, washes through these poems like a wind (or rain, or drought) : the fear and terror are there, as well as the longing and adoration. Moreover the free, questing, skeptical, philosophical mind is there : the only dogma, the only authority, the only truth… you must live them. You must experience them yourself. This is the encounter (in my rough approximation) that the reader will find in this volume. It is supremely paradoxical, supremely mysterious – as is our mortal life in this mysterious cosmos. The poet challenges himself – and the reader – to find life again, beyond the fraudulent twilight realm of illusions, self-delusions.
Henry Gould, A New Song : a New Walk
I’ve been thinking about connections, networks, and finding angels in strangers. These past two months have been an odd kerfluffle of dinners with family and friends, stretches of quiet, paroxysms of activity, stretches of how-can-it-be-only-4:30. My husband has invited another crop of people over for dinner, and I feel resentful. And I feel guilty for that. I don’t know these people very well, or at all. He relies on me for my conversational skills while he finishes cooking, and then also at the table. I don’t feel like pumping up that particular energy. I don’t feel like hearing myself say brightly to someone, “So…” and ask some question about their lives. I don’t care. But I ask myself, what is my preferred alternative? Another quiet dinner and then Netflix? Really? Again?
I think these people coming to my table have nothing to offer me, but how could I possibly know? And why would I cut myself off from the possibility? Don’t I believe that in community lies all hope and possibility, all potential for the human species on the planet? Don’t I believe that these interactions with friends and strangers make rich a life? What is my problem? Something inside me is unsettled and bleating mutely, and something about the prospect of these people, these particular people and their particular connection, makes me feel trapped. Which is completely ridiculous.
But I found a kind of resonance with the shrimp in this poem by Catherine Barnett, from her terrific book Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space. Alone or not alone enough, is the question of the poem.
But I think the real question of life is the “sharing a patch of sea grass” she mentions. I know from another book I’m reading right now, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, that it’s not just a couple of shrimp sharing that patch of sea grass, it’s teeming masses of bacteria and other teeny things, single celled whatsits and multicelled whosits, and fleas and waterworld insects, all awash in waves and winds frantically trying to keep everything in balance. I learned in some other article somewhere that even though we are an incredibly destructive force, we human species have also had some positive effects on the planet, and were we to disappear, those positive effects would disappear too.
I guess my point is, we’re all in this together, we shrimp and insects, we whosits and humans and winds. And although we’re never particularly alone, sometimes it feels like it, and against our will. So look, Elijah could show up for dinner at any time. Just set the table. Prepare to look at a stranger with your brainy eyes, and to say brightly, “So…”
Marilyn McCabe, then they’re gone again
There’s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his ‘Celtic twilight’ poems as – I suppose – trivial and escapist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Carrying Jeffares’ MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason – I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don’t mean I now think of it as weak, or bad, or clumsy but that there’s something static and unchanging in its effect which means that it has lost its life through repetition. ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and similar poems have kept their freshness. I think this is partly because of the sparkling distinctness of their images. Each line brings a separate self-contained flowering of life as well as contributing to a developing narrative:
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.The style of almost childlike simplicity is important. Aengus says things and we seem to see them with absolute clarity in a mood of wide-eyed, wondering but unquestioning acceptance. There’s no pushing of mood or meaning by the poet, and this is part of the difference from the Rose poems, and why this one seems to me so much more artistically resilient than they are. However, I think that there’s something entranced and entrancing about the feeling of the verse right from the start, before the trout transforms to a glimmering girl. What I started this piece hoping to do was to analyse how this feeling is given but that seems to be beyond me. All I can say is that the way we and the speaker are caught in the grid of these delicate iambic tetrameter lines with their abcb rhymes seems to have something to do with it, creating a sense of being in some sort of hyperreal, entranced state or space.
Edmund Prestwich, Magic words: W B Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’
In the artist’s statement accompanying her “Poetry Recitation with Music: The Waste Land,” Beijing-based artist Wang Baoju concludes by saying that her recitation of a Chinese translation of T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 poem performed in time to a Beijing traffic light’s beeping is “absurd.”
But if we stop at simple dictionary definitions (or stop with Google Translate), we lose some important word play. Wang uses the word 荒诞, pronounced huangdan and meaning “absurd, ridiculous, over the top,” to describe the nature of her performance. In doing so, she echoes the Chinese translation of the title of Eliot’s poem: 荒原 huangyuan.
The character 荒 huang repeats, suggesting that not only is Wang’s performance inherently absurd (or, better put, absurdist in the tradition of art that reflects real-world absurdity), but that it also does something with and to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, that it, we might say, somehow wastes the poem, or uses the poem to waste something about poetry itself, or our time, or contemporary Beijing, that it somehow wastes the Waste Land, whatever that might mean.
What are we, as viewers, to do with this?
Can we relate to interminable waits?
To our time being cut up by machines, computers, algorithms, codes
Perhaps some of us might note that parts of Beijing look almost identical to parts of any other global megacity….
We might observe that traffic and people rushing about on their business in the city can, if we sit and watch for a while, seem somehow ghostlike, zombie-like, machine-like, unreal?
That we can feel unreal, too, in cityscapes shaped by the demands of commerce and technology more than by the needs of the human body, psyche, and soul?
That maybe there’s something “dead” about this world we’ve made, with its pulsing energies and seemingly endless tearing-down and rebuilding, its material excesses, profligate consumption of resources, and flows of emissions and garbage?
That all of this is happening in a world that feels like it’s teetering on the brink of some kind of catastrophe, even as we drift through daily life as if things might go on forever just as they do now, distracted by our screens?
David Perry, Hurry Up and Wait: Wang Baoju’s Hyper-Unreal Absurdist Beijing Waste Land
Christmas himself was probably played by William Rowley, a famous comic actor who must — like Jonson himself — have been a large man, as he generally played jolly, plump parts (like Plum Porridge in Middleton’s Inner Temple Masque (1619) and the Cook in Jonson’s later masque, Neptune’s Triumph). But all the other actors were probably actually boys, drawn from the professional companies with which Jonson was associated. The contrast between their childish appearance and the adult jobs Christmas attributes to them (such as ‘Hercules the porter’) is part of the joke. The boy Cupid would certainly have been played by a child, as would his mother Venus, the only speaking female part.
Christmas has just got his show underway, and is part-way through his opening song, when he is interrupted, first by some noise outside, and then by the entrance of Venus, a ‘deaf tire-woman’ (that is, a dressmaker), who — a bit like Christmas himself — insists on coming in and, despite his protests, on staying so that she can watch her son, Cupid, who has a part in the play. Making Venus a deaf dressmaker and Cupid a local apprentice (to a bugle-maker, that is, a maker of glass beads) has obvious comic potential, and we duly discover that Venus lives on Pudding Lane (a poor neighbourhood, famous as the place where the Fire of London began later in the century); that she is the child of a fishmonger (a profession with a reputation for lechery and infidelity); that her husband was a blacksmith (an obvious reference to Vulcan); that Cupid is apprenticed to a bead-maker on Love Lane (slightly east of Pudding Lane), and so on.
The whole thing keeps nearly collapsing into chaos — more people want to come in; Venus keeps interrupting Christmas and then mishearing what she is told; Christmas’ children discover they have lost or forgotten half their props; and then Cupid begins his speech but, interrupted by his mother, loses his place and forgets his words:
CUPID: You worthy wights, king, lords, and knights,
O queen and ladies bright,
Cupid invites you to the sights
He shall present tonight.
VENUS: ’Tis a good child. – Speak out, hold up your head, Love.
CUPID: And which Cupid – and which Cupid [he keeps repeating it, unable to remember the rest]There’s an energy to the piece, dependent to a large extent on the comedy of a performance going wrong — and never being quite sure whether all of the errors are scripted or not — which is quite a lot like a good pantomime, still a traditional part of the British Christmas.
Victoria Moul, Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?
Szirtes’ career illustrates what Pasternak discusses in An Essay in Autobiography (Harvill, 1990). Though our experience of the world is necessarily subjective, there is a sufficient underlying matrix that remains “the common property of man” – the hard-wiring implicit in being human. Superimposed on this is the softer wiring derived from upbringing, environment and education, and the self is ultimately a function of these base matrices in progressive interaction with individual decision-making in the flow of experience. So the objective world is processed through the individual’s particular matrices – his/her sets of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, texturised as it were, accordingly. From this, Pasternak argues that when an individual dies he leaves behind his own unique “share of this . . . the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul”. This, of course, is where “art finds its . . . field of action and its main content . . . the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience”. Art can be defined as the expression of experience playing across the matrices of the self, saying not this is me, but this is, this was, mine.
It is the raw imagery of stasis and movement that emerges in Szirtes’ early work as being truly his and it blooms into the maturity of the late 1980s. In short lyrical pieces the point of stasis is associated with the preservative of art in the spit ball gobbed by a foreign worker in ‘Anthropomorphosis’ which is caught and “suspended” by the poem. The afternoon rearranges itself around it and even the narrator “hung there / Encapsulated in that quick pearled light”. Versions of this encapsulation abound: girls creating a silver foil tree find themselves absorbed into a Keatsian “cold pastoral”. Such freeze-frame moments anticipate Szirtes’ sustained meditations on photography but early on, images of snow and frost suggest the ambivalent status of such suspension. In ‘The Car’ a snowfall is both beautiful and sepulchral: “Fantastic Gaudi-like structures hung / Under the mudguard . . . . / Wonderful, cried the girls under the snow”. A girl who is observed sewing causes consternation (“I do not like you to be quite so still”) caught in a stasis that can “eat away a life” that can “freeze the creases of a finished garment” (‘A Girl Sewing‘).
Martyn Crucefix, George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry
on a notepad
in the stonemason’s yard:
names to be carvedMatthew Paul, My year in haiku
At the opening of The Grail, the final part of the trilogy, in a poem dated 31st October 2024, we find ourselves back in the Providence of Roger Williams and Cautantowwit, in a sense Gould’s earthly Eden. But then circumstances plunge the poem back into harsh reality, with two poems dated the 4th and 6th of November, bracketing the re-election of Trump, and, as it happens, Guy Fawkes’ Night:
Election day, the traitor, redivivus,
golden-orange, breathing fire, emerges
from Hecate’s diamond basement (Hades)…
wearing Empedocles’ bronze shoe, Jesus!
No one could have predicted this. Amen,
howls each mesmerized hurt soul… He’s us!
Meanwhile… Roger, Coke’s fiery lamb… sighs.
These trials of conscience burden suffering MAN!
he shouts: Only soft-hearted JONAH can restore us.
(from ‘Twisted Knot’)I want to pause a moment to unpack at least some of the references in this stanza, which is typical of Gould’s method. By association with Hecate, keeper of the key to Hades, fire-breathing Trump becomes Satan, the ultimate traitor, and with the figure of Fawkes, who figures in Milton’s ‘In Quintum Novembris.’ (On the Fifth of November), a poem that could be viewed as an early draft of ‘Paradise Lost’. Fawkes’ basement full of gunpowder being an analogical Hades of its own. And then there’s Empedocles’ attempted deceit, a brazen (pardon the pun) attempt at self-aggrandisement.
Next we have Roger Williams, whose patron, the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, prosecuted Fawkes for treason. Williams knew Milton and tutored him in Native American languages. He also founded Providence as an oasis of ‘liberty of conscience’. As it turns out, he also wrote about Jonah as being, perhaps, soft-hearted: ‘Jonah did not compel the Ninevites to hear that message which he brought unto them.’ (I cannot source the apparent quote that closes the stanza.) And it may be just me, but Jonah brings to mind Moby-Dick. One way or another, these lines illustrate Gould’s insistence on history as a kind of process outside time, or in which all times and places co-exist and illuminate each other.
Billy Mills, Three Books by Henry Gould: A Review
Over the last few days, I’ve taken some very long walks, several naps, and I’ve read What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, trans. and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill (LiverightPubl, 2025). It is being hailed as “a landmark literary event.” The poems, presented in the original German and in English, were never intended by Arendt for publication, and they don’t strike me as being poems one memorizes or writes out in a commonplace book. They compel, however, if taken as a diary of Arendt’s life:
The thoughts come to me,
I’m no longer a stranger to them.
I grow into their dwelling
like a plowed field.(from Part II, 1942-1961)
If you aren’t already steeped in Hannah Arendt’s work, the footnotes and the introduction of What Remains are a necessary guide. Additionally, they offer the editors’ obsession with the poetry, and a direct look into one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
Bethany Reid, What Remains
Edward Storer (1880-1944) was born in Alnwick, England, lived in Rome, and then returned to England to live in Weybridge, London; “In November of 1908, Storer, author already of Inclinations, much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay attacking poetic conventions.” (Flint, A History of Imagism, 1915)
One of the founders of the ‘School of Images’ group in 1909, alongside F.S. Flint and T.E. Hulme, both of whom were also experimenting with free-verse, inspired by French vers libre, and Japanese tanka and haiku (the influence of tanka, for instance, is particularly obvious in Storer’s short poems, as well as in the stanza forms of his longer poems). The School of Images group also included Florence Farr and a young Ezra Pound, among others.
Storer published three books of ‘new’ poetry between 1907 and 1909—Inclinations (1907), Mirrors of Illusion (1908), and The Ballad of the Mad Bird (1909)—and was a significant forerunner to the ‘new verse’ movements which would eventually take both England and America by storm in the 1910s-1920s. In the 1910s he also published an influential book of Sappho’s fragments in translation, seemingly using tanka and haiku as a model.
Storer also wrote the one of the first truly ‘modernist’ essays on poetics, included as an appendix to Inclinations (1907), but largely ignored by historians. The basic tenant of modernist theory was that each art had its own, unique essence, which differed ‘absolutely’ from one another, and that an artist’s highest calling was to identify, and nurture this essence. Up until the late-1800s narrative had always been seen as one of the foundations of Western poetry, which Storer disputed. Narrative, as an inherently ‘realist’ pursuit relied on ‘believability’, which was fundamentally at odds with the poetic, he argued. Conversely, poetry ignored its own essence the more it engaged with narrative. This led Storer to argue for an ‘imagistic’ model of poetry, in distinction to any kind of ‘realism’, grounded in ‘suggestive’ linking and combination, rather than ‘narrative’.
Storer seldom gets sufficient credit for his theory of poetics, though Pound would go on to plagiarise Storer, Flint, and Hulme’s ideas, as well as those of earlier free-verse poets like Yone Noguchi, in his essays of 1912-1915, under the name of ‘Imagisme’. This ‘new’ Imagist movement went on to include numerous extremely talented poets like Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell, and remains one of the most well know—if poorly understood—movements of the 20th Century.
Dick Whyte, Edward Storer – 7 Short Poems (1907-22)
Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony comprises around 450 poems that tend to begin with a name, a place (farm, factory, saloon, boarding house) and sometimes a time of day or the age of the named person if relevant, and that tend to end with violence – gunshots, knife wounds, mutilation in industrial accidents. Their language is court-room plain, these are the facts; courtly, I’d say, respectful; no Henry James sub-clauses; the power is accumulative. Testimony was published in the US in several volumes by New Directions and Black Sparrow Press between 1965 and 1978; it was reissued in 2015 by Black Sparrow in a single edition – subtitled The United States (1885–1915): Recitative – that also includes as an appendix the prototype volume, written in prose, first published in 1934.
I’ve known of this book without ever, until this year, getting to it. It is one of the books of the last century; it has never been published in the UK. Repeat: it has never been published in the UK.
Reznikoff (1894–1976), by all accounts, was a modest man. He was born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He sold hats for the family business. He wore out a lot of shoe leather, walking 20 miles a day on the streets of New York. In his twenties he had poems accepted by the magazine Poetry and then withdrew them; most of his work until the 1960s was self-published, and typeset and printed by himself. His poetry is included in anthologies of the Objectivists alongside that of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (all of them immigrants to the US or the sons of immigrants). He studied law and practised very briefly but then ducked down, Bartleby-ish, and for many years earned his living by writing summaries of court records for legal reference books.
‘I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases – not a great many as law reports go – and found almost all that follows.’ This is Reznikoff’s brief prefatory note to his 1934 prose version of Testimony. Given that what comes to court is the bad stuff – murders, rape, theft, claims for negligence, property disputes and forged wills – Testimony is not a picnic in the park.
Charles Boyle, Late in the day, my book of the year
It’s nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden’s middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden’s travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.
Jee Leong Koh, Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY
The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.
I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.
I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.
As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s
younger brother Michael, a name I learned
in Catholic school.The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.
I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.”
Brian Spears, Sometimes there’s nowhere to run
The surrendering in the above poem speaks to me. And whenever I read from my volume of Hermann Hesse poems translated by Ludwig Max Fischer I am always taken with the commentary by Fischer. He quotes Hesse, “To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of the great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence…”
I’m interested in his insistence on love. I like that he “saw himself as an advocate for the soul, as an activist for the spirit in everyone beyond ideologies and doctrines.” Hesse saw words as instruments for the possible, and which could lead us to joy.
How many thousands of time in a life do we need to relearn the path to joy?
Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – Winwood, Hesse, Michelangelo
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinking about is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsized MEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop those effects up in a kind of shadow box?
A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility of a coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on the page.
Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection, vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .
In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types of writers) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally cool with being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the big questions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) of looking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within and beyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos that might help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansion of collective knowledge . . .
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer can help proliferate community and thus (quite actively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragile threads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate in service of surviving the horror of Now;
can create literal or figurative occasions for what is also my current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;
can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes of witness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can be meaningful to any single reader;
can, because Literature is a shared experience and requires many types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to a Jesuit high school LOL);
can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for another human, which might act as salve or as awakening;
can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov) suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once give someone an onion when they need it.
That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on this again in ten years.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Olivia Cronk
From a construction point of view, the poem is a masterclass in the strong line ending, and the sounds of this…the ow sound of window, flower, over and glow vs the clipped ends of snapped, snipped, lapped, missed, and the rhymed couplets at the end, but beyond the technical details (in a book that is all sonnets) , I love it for its attentive nature, the partner noticing something that means something to their partner — I can’t always say I manage that despite my best intentions, but as I sit here at the end of a year that has very much done a number on me, it is acting as a reminder that I can and should do more to notice these little things.
Both R and me are struggling today to feel comfortable with doing nothing. She keeps wanting to do stuff (despite being knackered from organising Xmas and looking after my carcass for the last week). I am loathe to sit down having been ill for a week, feeling “better” but exhausted, so sitting still is hard, but we both need to remember we don’t “always need to be on the move”
Mat Riches, Uncareful Owner
the wild geese
are shitting on the snow
icy pondJim Young [no title]
Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is poetry’s equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D – overused to within an inch of its life. I don’t care. Both are wildly popular because they are beautiful; simple enough to speak widely; complex enough to hold and engage. “You do not have to crawl on your knees repenting” is the line I’d like to live in the coming year. And this year, more than ever before, I found my place in “the family of things”.
More often than not, I forget to say that it’s Clare writing this article – but maybe it’s obvious from the different ways Kim and I write, and the things we say. For example – I want to tell you about how, decades ago, one of my girlfriends complained about the way I spoke about my family. It’s always THE family, she said – like it’s a unit. The Family is coming. I’m spending time with The Family. Like there’s no other family! Like you don’t exist without it!
But, I was the youngest of six – a Catholic family – and we were a unit. We were cubs, we moved and lived and rested in a pile. We had our own bible, our own lore. We shared our underwear, changed once a week and washed by hand, we bathed in the same water, smelled of each other, caught lice and worms from each other, ate choddy from each other’s mouths. The Family was my horizon and furthest place; the Family was much more than world. It was my fingers, my thoughts and all my dreams. It was my arterial system and my exoskeleton; my tastebuds and my lens. What do you do when your systems all fall apart?
Clare Shaw, Family Estrangement, December, and the Family of Things
How can we get a decent night’s sleep on a mattress made from fists and crumbling civilizations?
How can we turn a blind eye when reality’s mugshot is posted on the back of our eyeballs, continually reminding us of the crimes humans commit against one another?
A bullet isn’t like a trained dog. You can’t tell it to sit and expect a positive outcome when all it knows is kill.
But something I can say to you with optimistic certainty is this: the story of us has been woven from other stories; our stories will weave with different stories to create future stories.
A hymn about a hymn, a kiss about a kiss, a river about a river, forever flowing.
Rich Ferguson, A River About a River
Overall I read about 41,000 pages. That’s about 110 pages a day on average. It’s a ballpark because some were facing pages translations, some had no page numbers so I didn’t count or made a guess. I only counted up to appendices if I didn’t read those. Assist points go to my back and sciatica and energy crashes which left me capable of doing little more than reading.
I am always adding new questions to track. This year I added a couple new columns to the spreadsheet: re-reads (28 titles) and cost of title.
66% were free to me: downloads, contributor copies, review copies, gifts, jury copies, library, or little free libraries
19% were bought at full price, from the author directly, at small press fairs, by subscription, or else came from indie bookstores
8% from Amazon (sorry)
7% came from thrift stores or used bookstores (so 50 cents to $10)
[…]
Poetry comprised 60%. Most of the rest are novels or novellas. Chapbooks rang in around 20%. The next biggest categories were memoir or essays, then history or science. […]
What work is it that I want written word to do?
To expand me. To teach me how to be a better human. To understand angles of human nature. To conceive of a supportive world. To enter play and silliness, and to enter scary experiences completely unlike my own. To live more lives and to live a life I’m better equipped to understand.
Pearl Pirie, Self-audit and Best of 2024 List
About a week ago, I panicked when I realized I had promised two different writers blurbs for their next collections by the end of December. I had already read the books and taken notes, but I hadn’t started parsing my notes and my pulled quotes to make cohesive statements. I proceeded to put aside everything else I’d been planning to work on and make sure they got completed.
Being asked to create a blurb for another writer is an honor, one that I take seriously and one that takes quite some time. (See ’s excellent recent stack about writing and asking for blurbs.) It is the same with writing book reviews, something that I have done A LOT over the past five years. (Thirty-three poetry reviews at Rhino Reviews alone, six at Tinderbox Poetry – plus others at Limp Wrist, South Florida Poetry Review, and other venues. If you add them up, it’s around 10 reviews per year for the past five years – almost one a month.)
I’m not complaining. Reviewing has made me a more careful reader of poems and a better thinker about my own poems. I have considered this practice one way of giving back to poetry, one way of giving attention and respect to what poets do. I think about providing space for poets on my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey in the same way, and I hope that Asterales, the new journal I am launching with friend/writer Rachel Bunting next month, will be another way to showcase writers and artists with gratitude for what they create.
But all of these things take physical time and mental energy. The more time spent on blurbs, reviews, reading submissions, website work, booking, and promoting means less time on my own creative and personal pursuits, less mental energy for my own poems or freewriting, this Substack, artwork, or even pleasure reading. (Or other personal things like exercise, time with family/friends, traveling.) For this reason, and for some personal ones (including some travel plans), I have decided to make changes for the coming year.
I have decided I need to learn to say no.
Easy, right? Not so much.
Donna Vorreyer, Fa-la-la-la-Labor
Leaving aside the thornily persistent issue of whether ize or ise is the more authentic British spelling, I have to admit that U.K. poets who use American spelling really do grind my gears.
What’s more, I gather from other poets that certain U.S. poetry mags require American spelling and some U.K. mags demand British spelling. Both positions seem absurd to me. In fact, they’re only a short step away from asking poets to correct their use of an expression or a phrasal verb because the meaning is different on the other side of the pond. All these would be red lines for me, as my spelling and choice of syntax represent a key part of the roots of my poetry.
Mind you, before anyone starts getting twitchy about the potential politics of the above statement, it’s worth underlining that this is far from being a question of nationalism or Little Britain. Bearing in mind the negative effects of Brexit on every aspect of my life, I’m never going to be heading down that cul-de-sac! No, it’s more to do with how our uses of language in our poetry express our origin and identity. And we all write through both, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not…
Matthew Stewart, Americanised (sic) spelling
For the past two years, I’ve collaborated with haiku friends on what I call the Midwinter Day Renku. I created this renku variation in response to one of my all-time favorite works of literature, Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day.
The story behind Midwinter Day is that Mayer composed the entire thing on Friday, December 22nd, 1978, the date of the winter solstice. The title refers to the fact that many older, lunar-based calendars consider the solstice the midpoint of the season rather than the beginning, which is the designation of the astronomical calendar we use today.
Midwinter Day is a 100-ish page poem about the day in the life of a young family (Mayer, her husband, and their two children) living in Lenox, Massachusetts. Largely free verse, this poem is highly allusive, contains numerous lists, and frequently incorporates poetic devices such as rhyme. In Midwinter Day, poetry is not separate from parenthood and grocery shopping; it’s intertwined. There is no distinction between art and the rest of life; they are one and the same.
Since first reading this poem in 2015, I wanted to create some sort of homage to it. But my attempts to truly imitate Bernadette Mayer fell flat, and didn’t feel true to the way I like to approach my own poetry. Once I went deeper into studying haiku and learned about the various forms of linked verse, I began experimenting with a linked form that I wrote solo throughout the day. But while you can certainly write a renku or other linked form alone, I found I didn’t really enjoy that. I wanted to collaborate. Midwinter Day might have been written by a sole author, and yet she is anything but alone.
After a couple of years of noodling around ideas, I finally settled on a shorter version of the renku. I wrote the first one with my friend Claire, a poetry friend from my Austin days. Last year, I tried with a larger group: six people in three time zones emailing back and forth. Tomorrow, I will write the third-ever Midwinter Day renku with my friend Dan, who lives in another country. It’s the first international Midwinter Day renku! I’ve kept it just the two of us because juggling such disparate time zones is going to be a bit of a challenge, and I decided a smaller size would help navigate that.
This approach to the form is still a work in progress. Not only do I keep learning more about renku, but I keep wanting to adjust the specifics of the structure itself.
Allyson Whipple, Midwinter Day Renku: First Notes on a New Form
Around this time of the year magazines ask contributors for their books of the year. Funnily enough, I am a lot less cynical about these than I used to be. But they are undeniably strange, in a way that should be familiar to anyone involved in publishing: you have to sign up to the fiction that the only books worth talking about were published in the last twelve months, when of course there’s no straight line between the year a book was published in and its relevance, let alone its quality. Many old books are painfully current. Plenty of new ones are out of date. […]
Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Glück (2021)
The first of Glück’s collections I’ve read, though I knew individual poems. Also her last book. So, I’m no expert and the Nobel Prize win probably speaks for itself. I will just say that the way her poems climb down the page is uncanny. And they are testimony to just how hard – in every sense – so-called free verse and so called-confessional poetry is, or ought to be. This is the beginning of “Night Thoughts”:
Long ago I was born. There’s no one alive anymore who remembers me as a baby. Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever. What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot. What harm could there be in that?…
Jem Wikeley, Books of the year
[I]t’s awards season in the literary community. Social Media is awash with announcements, congratulations, and virtual high-fives, as it should be. But I’d like to give a shout-out to writers who have never had a nomination for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of the Net, Best American Essay, or any of the other awards that I’m not aware of.
There are lots of writers who aren’t on social media and don’t have the exposure others enjoy because, life. Writers who are writing on their lunch breaks, in rush-hour traffic, after putting the kids to bed at night, before the kids get up in the morning, on bits of napkin, on back of grocery lists and bill envelopes, on post-it notes, or maybe only in their heads for now. There are writers writing in liminal spaces as noted in Amy Barnes’ insightful craft essay in Reckon Review.
Lots of writers aren’t in academia, don’t have degrees in anything or maybe in fields like healthcare support or general business, who went to a technical community college instead of an Ivy League university. There are writers who don’t belong to writing groups or attend workshops, who believe in the stories they create in their own heads. There are writers who are published sparingly because the submitting process takes time they don’t have or cost money they can’t give. There are writers who aren’t aware, or maybe only peripherally aware, of literary awards. The first time I was nominated, back in the day, I had to Google the Pushcart Prize. I’d never heard of it.
I want to celebrate the writers whose own life stories, and their made-up ones too, beat anything written by a Booker Prize winner. Keep writing, keep living, hang in there. You are seen. You have people who are like you that read your work and think you are the bomb. Believe it.
Charlotte Hamrick, Reading & Writing a Strong Sense of Place
This year I’ve written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I’ve radically revamped 4 old stories – by merging 2 of them I think I’ve produced 1 printable piece.
I’ve had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.
Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.
And that’s about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I’d write some proper reviews. I haven’t, though I’ve read (or listened to) about 200 books.
Tim Love, My Writing Year (2024)
I have to admit that this was a tough year for me. Is it because of my age? Is this a peri-menopause thing? A mid-life crisis? The election nearly wrung all my positive energy out of me. My last book’s sales were respectable but not great (not as good as my previous book’s), and my rejection vs acceptance rate was mediocre at best. I worked hard but felt a bit like I was butting up against a wall in the literary world. I am lucky to have wonderful writer friends but I’m missing the spark that usually drives me to write. Not sure if it’s plain disappointment or disillusionment or what, exactly. The grungy weather is bothering me a little bit more than normal, and my MS flared up worse this fall than it has in a long time—not sure of the cause, which left me unable to do much besides listen to audiobooks and watch old movies on TCM.
So, what do you do? Well, two good, very healthy friends—one died suddenly, the other experiencing a “surprise” terminal illness—have taught me a hard lesson. Maybe we should be kinder to ourselves, appreciating the days that we do have, and maybe not being so judgy about what we are accomplishing and focusing more and how much we are enjoying what we have, and experiencing things like “joy” and “awe”—things we often don’t put a priority on in our culture of productivity everywhere, all the time. While I am being scanned for tumors and tested for cancer and autoimmune problems, when I am dealing with yet another crown or root canal—I have to remember to prioritize the good days and take advantage of them. I have maybe, in the last four years, lived a too-circumscribed life, too safe? Certainly, too much damn time in doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Have I not been allowing myself enough adventure? Maybe that should be my goal for 2025—to live a more adventurous, joyful life—to maybe take a few risks in the days I have, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! Trumpeter Swans, Revaluating at Midlife after a Tough Year, MRIs, and Ballets
The sky is a persistence of cloud, its low mist erasing trees,
meeting fields, dampening my face, my hair; I feel like
a conduit between two states: earth and water. Perhaps
we always exist in dualities but rarely notice. Perhaps I am
beginning to understand both the beauty and decay
of my wondrous life, the gift and theft of inevitable death.Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Superposition
[I]t’s less shocking than it is mesmerizing, even comforting, for me to see this evidence of my own aging, particularly as it means I get to see a little of mom every time I look in the mirror. It’s good to catch this glimpse every day because I need her—maybe actually I am inviting her, calling for her intercession with this very writing—to nudge me along on this book project which has already taken almost a year since I wrote the first unsure words.
I realized the other day that I need to look at it every day. I don’t necessarily need to write every day, but I need to keep it close to me because when I don’t, when I let weeks go by between writing sessions (because it’s painful to write about your mother’s alcoholism and recovery and death), my synapses get sleepy (a trauma response, remember?) and I lose the thread.
It took me 20 years to complete the book about my father. I do not want a reprise of that experience.
So. I hate resolutions, but let me try to keep this one.
Sheila Squillante, On eyeballs and grey hair and outlines
I made a decision at the beginning of last year to submit to publications I regarded as out of reach. Standards are higher, chances of success are lower – yet it’s a strategy that has paid off. Instead of chasing the dopamine hit of publication I’ve focused on becoming better at what I do, and really understanding what it is I want to say. I’m barely halfway to either of these things, but I am ending the year with two small collections of poetry that have a real sense of identity. Both have been longlisted in competitions I barely dared dream of entering and I am proud to have written them. Publication will come – I just need to be patient and diligent in finding the right home. I’ve had individual poems longlisted for publication in Butcher’s Dog, as well has being part of the final issues of Dreich and the fabulous Spelt Magazine. I’m growing braver in terms of style, and content as well as developing an understanding of what matters to me. […]
My morning has been spent looking at goals for next year – I’ve more work to do in terms of the nuts and bolts, but I’ve had a realisation that I need to give myself permission to focus on writing for its own sake, rather than as a potential income stream. My work as a bespoke poet and copywriter will continue, but as far as my creative writing is concerned I need to see the art as valuable for its own sake – which of course means seeing value in myself. I’m determined to connect with the poetry and writing community in a more meaningful way, rather than squirrel myself away in the safety of home. It’s hard to put myself “out there” but I can see how actively supporting others in their work offers a path to growth and nourishment for everyone involved.
I finish the year in a calmer place. I have a greater understanding of what matters to me, how I want to use my writing and where I want to be in this peculiar, terrifying world. I often bewildered and frustrated, and often filled with rage at my lack of confidence. I am proud that I keep going, and proud of how far I’ve come. As my mental health improves, I hope that the barriers I so frequently fashion will become less powerful and that I’ll be able to continue to develop my skills and build on the connections I’ve made.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I’ve learned this year
知らぬ間に冬の金魚となりにけり 遠藤容代
shiranu ma ni fuyu no kingyo to narinikeri
without knowing how
I become
a winter goldfish
Noriyo Endo
from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), February 2022 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 21, 2024)
This morning I stepped out of my little house in my little village on a day of low cloud and thick mist to head down to the river Hertford. It was the first time I’d been for a walk since before Christmas and I was ready for it. I was looking for fieldfares, which I found, along with a white egret moving through the grey like an omen, and the creak and tick of water dropping through the bare, wet branches of the beech trees. The air was full of the calls of crows, the rattle and croak made more gothic than usual by a mist that sucked the light but leant all sounds a crystallised ring. Through the village I went and out along the farm tracks, passing people from the village; dog walkers, bird watchers, who passed the time with me, telling me about what they had and hadn’t seen – owls in Parish woods, a swell of a storm on the brigg, less roe deer this year, but a fox like an burning ember in the top field and always, always the otter sightings for the luckiest, luckiest few. I have never seen the otters. Though I look or signs and sounds of them, not a single sighting. Maybe they are a village myth.
Out and along the farm track where the land opens up, where the turbine sliced steadily away at the low cloud, and down to the Hertford, straight and low in its man-made state, flowing away from the sea in its strange manner, the sound of water over pebbles bright and hard in the gloom. I stood on the bridge and looked down its length and imagined I could see all the way down to Folkton, Flixton, down past the paleolithic islands of the long blade people to the Mesolithic site of Star Carr and my lake-people ancestors. The cloud was too low today to see any of it, or the mound of Seamer Beacon, or even the lip of the valley, Folkton moor over the rise, the site of the Folkton drums only visible in my mind’s eye.
Here I am, I thought, at the edge of the lake again, paleolake Flixton, The Ghost Lake of my book, my landscape-nature memoir which defined 2024 for me, the year it was published. I have washed up at the end of 2024 satisfied, happy, rolling dazedly to a stop here with the publication of my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to The Ghost Lake.
This is like the ancient custom of beating the bounds, of returning and marking your land, the boundaries of your community by beating on the boundary stones, as if waking up the spirit of a place and attaching yourself to it. Though, obviously, without smashing small boys about. I have this in my head as I tap my gloved hand along the metal of the bridge.
Wendy Pratt, Beating the Boundaries
After ten years of sharing poetry on WordPress, it feels like it has lost its raison d’être. Maybe I, maybe poetry, maybe the passion, maybe that ecosystem — something, some things, all things – have crashed into a wall.
Not that there aren’t still things to say. Maybe just not there. Not that there aren’t any more poems. Though I don’t really know what or where.
But it is a new year. Or it will soon be. Just like this year was new, once.
I think of Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote so evocatively in ‘Burning the old Year’:
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.And even if there are solid keepsakes, events that will crystallize into memories, some even fragrant or warm – like Kobayashi Issa says:
New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.How does one look back at a year? Never mind the sun, the silhouettes tell a different story. Different stories. The sky rips open. Moonlight bleeds like a wound all night. And the poet picks at scabs. It is their job. Sometimes it is poetry that is contrary, sometimes it is life. Sometimes, it is the poet.
It is cold and grey today and the drizzle is a fine mist. The impending year has brought me to this poem. Cold and grey and wet. Beyond this lies 2025.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, One for the road
Cheers for the shout-out Dave! Happy New Year. :-)