Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 16
sea glass, lilacs, lapwings, catkins, and much more
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: sea glass, lilacs, lapwings, catkins, and much more. Enjoy.
The gradual thawing of ice at the lake’s edge. The sudden appearance of snowbells under the protection of the evergreen hedges. The return of the lapwings. I don’t want to miss these things I’ve either not known or have taken for granted. It’s a kind of greed, I suppose. And isn’t all greed tinged with the fear of loss?
In Romania, I was told that the storks had just returned and were building their nests on top of the streetlights. Fruit trees were newly in bloom. But I can’t imagine things any other way because “today” a robin sings in the beech tree outside the hotel window, storks nest on top of street lights, white blossoms open among the white snowflakes, and all the while a bonfire burns in the hotel’s courtyard. It’s a smell that makes me both sleepy and nervous. The wind shifts. Sparks fly. My clothes will smell like comfort and destruction for the remainder of the trip.
Ren Powell, Belonging Away from Home
I attended a reading in Seattle and ran into an old friend, Seattle poet Esther Altshul Helfgott. Among many other accomplishments, Esther founded the “It’s About Time Writer’s Reading Series,” which meets monthly in Ballard and is now in its 35th year. I’ve known her for decades. As she has two books navigating Alzheimer’s disease with her husband, Abe, I told her what was going on at my house. She reached into her bag and took out a copy of this book. She also told me I needed a therapist and a support group.
Listening to Mozart is, in the words of Michael Dylan Welch, “a bouquet of short poems [that radiate] the sharp and sad fragrance of loss.” They were written after Abe’s death, and reading them helped me imagine moving through the stages of grief I’ve been stuck in—anger and denial—and begin to break through to something else.
I don’t agree
with Bishop in One Art—
that loss
is no disaster
she means the opposite—
loss is all disasterThese tanka-like meditations are as much about acceptance as they are about loss, and they helped me to remember that someday this will be over, and I’ll have three daughters who have lost their father. They reminded me that some day I, too, will have to deal with his loss.
when I
awoke this morning
I thought your
funeral was today—
it was three years agoThe poems are about loss, but they are riddled with hope. As time moves on and the poems continue, Helfgott begins to put her life with Abe, and after Abe, into perspective. Cleaning house, going to the bookstore, walking her dog.
a leaf falls
I watch
you pick it up
you disappearWhat I’ve been working through is the realization that the man I married has been gone for a while, for long enough that I’ve found it difficult to remember that guy I held hands with, walked on beaches with, adopted three daughters with, stood on sidelines of countless soccer games with…the man who taught college English for 40 years, the man who retiled our kitchen, built a writing cabin for me in our back yard, built tables and beds…took care of every possible home repair. Up until a day or so ago, it seemed impossible to see that man as also this one. Withdrawn from me, secretive, never finishing a project, forgetting ingredients in favorite recipes, getting into one car accident after another… […]
Esther’s poems helped me begin the journey back to my right mind. These poems and many phone conversations with patient friends, and (finally) a therapist.
Bethany Reid, Esther Altshul Helfgott: Listening to Mozart
Three and a half years ago I moved here from a shady garden, with deep fertile soil, rather damp, rather acid, and I’ve had to adjust to something very different here. It turns out that this garden is, as Culpeper might have put it, ‘under the dominion of Mercury’. Mercury’s plants tend to do well here, for reasons I don’t yet fully understand. The soil is good to heavy, but with a lot of stones in it, not just builders’ rubble and hard core, though there’s plenty of that, but ‘coal measures’ – layers of mudstones and limestone shale above the seams of coal that defined this area until fifty years ago. There is sun, some fertility, but not too much, shelter from the prevailing winds, and enough rain, which they like. As herbs, they tend to be nervines, picking up magnesium from the soil, and therefore good for the nervous system, the brain, memory, coughs and, often, digestion. This garden loves lily of the valley, southernwood, elecampane, lavender, fennel and winter savory, and they thrive here, where many of them struggled in my previous garden.
It is easy to see why they are ascribed to Mercury – the intelligent, volatile, lively and ingenious god of language, communication and creativity – the god of the mind. Mercury has a difficult persona – as a god, he’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, notorious liar, ingenious, dangerously fluent and persuasive, and frankly, about as endearing as Dominic Cummings. And yet. He is the trusted messenger of the gods, the guardian of travellers, protector of herds and herdsmen. His dual personality reflects what was discovered about the planet through history. It is closest to the sun, and the fastest mover – the Assyrians called it ‘the jumping star’ and the Greeks called it ‘Stilbon’ the sparkling star, because of its flashy volatility. It was seen only at evening and morning, which meant that for a long while there was uncertainty about whether it was even one planet or two so Mayans represented it as twin owls one for morning and one for evening. The metal called after him is anomalous, a metal that rolls around on a flat surface like a ball, that divides and rejoins like water, a liquid that isn’t wet. It’s not surprising, then, that when alchemy was extensively studied, Mercury became associated with the process of transition and transformation, forming a triad with the sun and moon. Sun herbs like marigolds and rosemary and moon herbs like mugwort and vervain do well in this garden too. […]
Moving to ‘the dominion of Mercury’ sparked new relationships with the earth, with my neighbours, and with the unfamiliar reaches of myself – and a lot of new poems. Look for bats, ghosts, foxes, druids, rivers, music and herbs. The book is due out in March 2026, and I’m excited about it.
Elizabeth Rimmer, The Dominion of Mercury
Dead flowers mix with the soil and
become other things: fruits, fragrant
flowers, a bird. Ephemeral things.
When love runs out, it becomes a
poem. A forever being. A trellis of
quiet words peering into the water.Like tree rings, a poem cut open
can tell you its age. Meaning grows
inside it, in concentric circles. Each
measuring the growing distance
between poem and poet. Poet and
love. What if we had another hour?
Another month? Another way?Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if we had another hour?
Dryden said that Virgil’s Georgics was ‘the best poem, by the best poet’. Although it’s sometimes known just by its most famous and ‘poetic’ passages — the praise of Italy; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice — the Georgics is a wide-ranging didactic poem about the raising of crops and animals (georgica means farming), about the land of Italy and about man’s relationship to labor, toil, that does not romanticise its theme: passages deal with how to test soil for acidity and how deep to plant seedlings, with winter starvation and plague in livestock as well as sex, spring and the beauty and bounty of nature. The tone of its political message is notoriously ambiguous. If you’ve never tried to read it, and you don’t read Latin, Dryden’s own translation is still a pretty good place to start. […]
There are many aspects to Virgil’s remarkable style, but one of them is the way in which he uses mostly ordinary words in a particularly full and precise way. This is what the English literary critic Donald Davie called ‘purity of diction’, and it’s particularly crucial to Virgil’s ability to make the description even of detailed technical material beautiful, moving and memorable. Such precise use of words which are unremarkable in themselves may reanimate expressions or metaphors which have otherwise gone ‘dead’, flat in the language. In this passage, for instance, Virgil begins his catalogue of modes of propagation with a list of plants and trees known for their tendency to proliferate without assistance — whether by self-seeding, by suckers sprung from the tree’s base, or, in these three lines, apparently spontaneously:
Pullulat ab radice aliis densissima silva,
ut cerasis ulmisque; etiam Parnasia laurus
parva sub ingenti matris se subicit umbra.In other cases, a very dense wood springs up from their roots —
As, for instance, the cherry and the elm; the Parnassian laurel, too,
When it’s small shelters in its mother’s mighty shade.The detail of densissima sylva at first seems conventional – woodland is often dense, dark, deep or thick in Latin just as in English – but here the obvious phrase gathers specific meaning: woodlands composed of trees which reproduce themselves by suckers from the base are particularly dense because the young trees come up, by definition, very close to their parents. The obvious word seems suddenly meaningful. Robert Frost reanimates the same cliché of ‘deep’ woods, albeit in a very different way, in the well-known poem ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’. His woods are by the end of the poem ‘deep’ with a sense of personal significance: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep’ (13-16).
This opening passage of Georgics 2 is also typical of Virgil in the precision of its description. The willow seems to ‘whiten’ (canentia . . . salicta) with a ‘grey-green leaf’ (glauca . . . fronde) because the underside of the leaf is more white or silver in colour, and willow leaves are so long and light that the underside is frequently revealed. (Dryden does not attempt to capture this concise precision: he has simply ‘grey’. Day Lewis has the more accurate, but very wordy, ‘the pale willow that shows a silver-blue leaf’.) We could compare Frost again – one of the strongest English rivals to Virgil as a poet of the trees – with a comparably precise description: ‘When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees’ (Birches, 1-2).
Victoria Moul, Mild brook-willow, and the bending broom
April is April-ing, which means it rushes past and then boom! suddenly it’s spring for real, despite dips and rises in temperature. I open the window in the dining room. I close it. Wear coats when I really need a jacket and jackets when I probably should have worn a coat. Chicago is tricky this time of year, and I could need both in the span of a few hours.
I’ve been catching up on some new releases for dgp and finishing my decisions on upcoming books for fall. If all goes well, I will have everything in line before we open up for the next reading period in June, which seems impossible that it’s here again. I’ve also started something new writing-wise and finished up the last series, though it still needs a little work. Since the world feels chaotic and precarious I decided to bring WILD(ISH) into the world sooner rather than later (part of it is who knows what will be happening in July and also I fear raised printing prices driving up the cost per copy. This may also affect even the printing I do at home, though so far, ink and paper are still costing me about the same, but only time will tell. I raised prices slightly on chaps and other shop goods last year, but I may have to do it again. Postage is also a bear that may need to be revisited (i still end up eating some of the cost on larger orders and author costs typically.)As everything gets more expensive even the luxuries I allow make me wince…theater tickets, tattoo deposits, occasional dresses and vintage housewares from Ebay.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/19/2025
my hands cry out all night in their sleep
dawn rises
a hole in its palmGrant Hackett [no title]
Last weekend, LitHub published a piece by novelist Viet Than Nguyen titled “Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire.” The essay is about as good a statement as you’re going to get about literature and politics from a writer of Nguyen’s fame, and it touches precisely on the contradictions that literary people are often at pains to rationalize and ignore. […]
I think the key insight of Nguyen’s essay is that the same contradiction exposed by Palestine is being further exacerbated by the likelihood of Trump’s defunding of soft power institutions. That is, real historical forces are coming to bear on literary culture in ways that insist on waking us up to material, economic factors. And we fail this moment when we allow the focus on Trump, and what may come in the future, to distract from what Palestine has revealed—and to see the common link here. Once the mask has started to come loose, and we see the violence behind it, does an honest person rush to put the mask back in place again? No, surely not. What does it mean, then, when the Trump admin proceeds to fully tear the mask off? We sure as hell don’t salute him, but we’d be fools to imagine we could simply set things back to “normal.” And so, this moment puts an end to world-structuring illusions that have held US society together for decades, and its hegemonic literary culture is no exception.
With things so radically in question, all the lines are being redrawn. And this is why I keep pointing to counterculture—that that is what we should desire for ourselves and our art. Divest from the dying institutional culture, with its imperial ties, and find new psychic energy with which to endure within whatever is coming our way. (Hats off to the many of you who have already done so, or who were never invested in the first place, and to those of you who have educated me along the way.) As I’ve said in this series before, I take it almost as an article of faith that imagination, liberation, and the truth depend on one another. One thing we are denied by institutional, neoliberal poetic culture is a sense of truth: a sense of being informed and autonomous makers of our own culture—we’re always rationalizing shit and shaking hands with the wrong people. And in turn, this makes one less free as an artist, and it makes one less free to speak the truth at a time when the very conditions for truth are being annihilated by fascists.
RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 3)
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?
My questions or concerns have emerged really out of my professional/institutional backgrounds, which include the art world and academia. Elizabeth was really concerned with the media-technological intersections between the commercial art world and the USAmerican war machine; drones became a kind of figure for that acute anxiety, but also defanged self-disgust in a sense of complicity. Now, I am thinking more about grief, on an individual level but also on a social level. Covid happened and f*cked us all up in ways that we are still only just beginning to recognize, let alone understand. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has revealed many things about the West and the US, including just how tight the chokehold that the executive branch of government has on the academic and cultural institutions that we, as writers and artists and scholars, have tried very hard to be a part of, actually is. Grief feels really close, and closer still the more it is held at bay. There is so much more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now. […]
What are you currently working on?
Right now I am working on a book about grief. It’s also about certainty. It hasn’t really happened on purpose, but whenever I start writing it’s like this kind of elliptical return. It’s also heavily influenced by my very conflicted but somewhat obsessive reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I’m very curious about ways in which philosophers, misguidedly and dogmatically, try to make their readers feel better about how impossible it is to know anything about anything or anyone with any certainty. Philosophy is supposed to be something like therapy, you know? But it fails, and often leads us down worse rabbit holes with more distressing questions, or accusations. I miss my parents and I feel like time stopped when I lost them. But it didn’t for anyone else. I don’t know what to do with that, so I’m writing about it.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Louise Akers
It’s taken me a long time to assemble my second collection of longer-form poems into a coherent state, eight years since my first. I’m delighted to say that it will be published this June, by a new, Derbyshire-based publisher, Crooked Spire Press.
Crooked Spire Press has been founded by Tim Fellows, the editor of the online journal The Fig Tree, here. I am immensely grateful to Tim, not least for his patience. I should mention here that next Saturday will see the in-person launch, in Doncaster, of the first Fig Tree annual anthology (edited by Tim), details of which are on the Fig Tree website, here.
I’m also very grateful to the members of the fortnightly workshop group I’m part of, the Collective, whose comments on drafts of a good number of the poems in the book have been very helpful.
Matthew Paul, The Last Corinthians
My poem “In That Moment of Change,” which I wrote in memory of my friend Ronny, who was murdered by her husband in 2021, was published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement in The Evolving Gaze, an issue of their quarterly publication devoted to questions of manhood and masculinity. They’ve gathered an impressive range of work, in terms of country of origin, age, gender, and more. It’s a publication definitely worth a look on its own merits. My poem is on page 93.
§§§
Back in 2021, I took part in Queensbound, poet KC Trommer’s audio project for bringing poetry into public spaces, both online and in the physical world. The concept is simple. Each poet chose a subway stop in Queens, NY and incorporated it into a poem that they then recorded for inclusion on the site. My stop was Elmhurst Avenue on the R line. If you go to the Queensbound website, you can listen to my poem by clicking on the station, or you can listen on Soundcloud, or—and here is why I am telling you about this now—you can check out the Queensbound podcast, which recently went live. My poem is in the third episode, but I hope you will consider checking out all the episodes.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #39
Endgame is the play for our time. It is about the end of the world, where one man rules everything, although there is no apparent reason why he is obeyed. It’s a play about the absurdity of life. A play about a world ending in disaster. One man controlling the planet from his chair. […]
Last week, our family went to The Groundlings, a sketch comedy theater in the heart of West Hollywood. We saw the Sunday sketches and went to dinner. It was great being a family going to the theater together again. We haven’t done it for a bit. The pandemic threw us off our game. Some of our best family experiences have been at the theater. It takes a community to make theater. To come to the theater. To make art. To make change.
At the theater, we reflect on our humanity. We question the world we live in—and our own interpretation of the world—in a way that isn’t always asked of you when you go to the movies. Many movies are designed to entertain you, and really thoughtful ones will ask you to question something about the way you live, but a play is like entering another zeitgeist. Through the intimate performances required of plays, we see ourselves walking in the world differently. A play provokes.
[In Endgame,] Beckett explores our need as humans to be in a cycle of dominance. We look to someone to be the boss, someone to fetch and carry. Even when it doesn’t make sense anymore, we continue.
Beckett recognizes how we get caught in absurd cycles that we keep repeating. When we become paralyzed by these cycles, we can’t change the game. On a personal level, a community level, a national level, he’s right.
Kate Gale, Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness: On Cycles of Absurdity
The scent of burial spices in my nose,
the last of the death wrappings unbound,
I leave this grave.The weather, with its wintry insistence,
does not deter me, a daffodil
bulb who has known the earth’s protection.Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Good Friday Creations
Throughout his portrayal of the seasons there is this indomitable force of life. Consequently, spring is conveyed as an eruption (‘vivid with/ life erupting’) and in summer he describes it as a ‘unifying fire// that drives all that flows/ burns gloriously.’ The use of the image of ‘burning’ is interesting as this fire is not destructive. It reminds me of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in Dylan Thomas poem of the same name. However, unlike in Thomas’ poem, the force of creation, that makes things grow, does not also bring about their demise. It is unquenchable. It is the force that generates regular renewal: ‘the earth renews/ from this detritus/ which is a process/ (part of the process). Autumn, therefore, in a later poem is portrayed as a time of ‘abscission’, a time of adaptation to survive. In an era of universal pessimism about the fate of the natural world, this is an interesting and positive rebuttal.
This, however, is not to say that Mills does not criticise humankind for its effect on the environment. In the section entitled Uncertain Songs, he states: ‘the world is broken/ because we broke it/ unthinkingly’ and we ‘cannot adjust/ cannot return’. We may have sealed our fate with our destructive actions, but the earth will survive. His anger at this is palpable in the poem ‘burn it all’ which explores the criminal waste of materialism. This is not the natural fire that drives life that we met in section 1. This is fire in the hands of humankind: it is the fire of materialism that will result in the destruction of human life on earth. Mills is critical of such simplistic approaches to living. As he states in can you see how it is, ‘the world is many & simple/ in its complexity/ & delicate oh so delicate oh so delicate// which is its strength & we/ are not the thing itself/ not what we think ourselves.’ The paradoxes of simple complexity and delicate strength seem to suggest that experience defies understanding and explanation. Uncertainty, therefore, must be a part of the human condition. A factor exacerbated by the limitations of language. In speaking is difficult Mills describes language as ‘a system of difficulties/ which we live in mostly// & the world indifferent/ & large evades is/ which is at it is/ & all we have is this/ difficult & silent speech.’ Language is all we have and yet it is limited as a tool of understanding: it fails to get beneath the surface of our experience and in those final words there appears to be an acceptance of the fact. As he says in ‘long poem with no name, ‘language gets us nowhere.’
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘a book of sounds’ by Billy Mills
I’m not much the Easter celebrator, but I do appreciate this day. The sun shines across my desk, starburst daffodils shimmy in the wind out in the garden – I don’t have the heart to cut them to bring indoors – and I’m enjoying the last cup of morning coffee in my bright yellow mug. These things are celebration enough before the start of another wild work week. These things offer me joy.
On the occasion I’ve received a monetary prize in exchange for poetry, I’ve rolled it into fancy kitchenware; Le Creuset in Caribbean Blue, namely. It began with a big, blue sound pot that I named Angus after the wild fiddler of Scottish band, Shooglenifty, with whom Bruce and I kitchen partied at the campground after concert hours for the days of StanFest in Canso, Nova Scotia. Good time, that. Bruce had a few good eye rolls at me, at the pot, and its name before even he gave into calling it Angus.
That said, I’m wildly happy and grateful to learn that not 1, but a batch of 10 poems, has been accepted by Edutainment Night Publishing for publication in the fall. Just enough time to ponder what to add next to the turquoise kitchen.
Kersten Christianson, Easter & the Golden Eggs of Writing
Today, April 17, is International Haiku Poetry Day, which falls in the middle of National Poetry Month. As it happens, I have four upcoming public events focused on poetry and art: a haiku festival, an art opening, a poetry reading and an open studios weekend. […]
The 23rd annual ukiaHaiku Festival takes place on Sunday, April 27, 2-4 p.m. at the Grace Hudson Museum’s Wild Gardens in Ukiah, CA. I’m honored to be the keynote speaker this year, a cool twist for a Ukiah High grad! The organizers write, “Join us to celebrate Ukiah’s palindrome with readings of past haiku contest winners from various local luminaries followed by an all-ages open mic for those who wish to read a haiku of their choosing.” It’s free and open to the public. I’ll have a Makino Studios table with some books, calendars, prints and cards.
Annette Makino, A haikupalooza for Haiku Poetry Day
It seems appropriate, on International Haiku Day, to thank Ian Storr for all his hard work and commitment to the form. Ian has edited Presence for quite some time, around 12 years I believe. I started sending work to him in lockdown and he kindly published my first haiku. It’s fair to say that if Ian hadn’t shown an interest in my work I might not have pursued writing haiku much further than a lockdown diversion. As it is, he’s been a great support, twice forwarding haibun of mine to Red Moon Press in the US, which they have subsequently included in their anthologies. Two and a half years ago, Ian gave me the chance to become reviews’ editor at Presence. What an opportunity that was! I’ve probably read around 90 publications since then, mainly chapbooks, and have been amazed at the inventiveness that’s out there, especially, but not exclusively, from US writers. Ian is now stepping down from his role, and a lovely team from the Edinburgh Haiku Circle are taking over – more good fortune! I’m looking forward to working with the new team, but in the meantime, I want to wish Ian all the very best and thank him for the many hours he has given to the magazine and the writers whose work he has supported.
Julie Mellor, Presence
While Frogpond is keeping me busy, I couldn’t let 2025 go by without a third year of Haiku Girl Summer. I adore running this journal!
As with the past two years, the journal starts on June 1st and ends on September 1st. (I used September 1st as a surprise bonus post for the past two years, but that caused confusion last year, so now I’m just making it an official part of the run.
In order to have poems ready for June 1st, submissions open on May 15th. I can’t wait to see your summer haiku and senryu!
I enjoyed the different perspectives that the guest editors brought to the journal last year. Although I haven’t set up a formal sign-up system yet, I would love to work with guest editors again. If you’re interested in taking part, you can reach me at allyson@allysonwhipple.com.
Please note that I have updated the guidelines for 2025, including a change to the submission period. Please review the updated guidelines here:
https://haikugirlsummer.substack.com/p/submission-information
Allyson Whipple, Haiku Girl Summer Returns Soon!
I began Day 2 of the conference with “Eyes Wide: Exploring the Extended Ekphrastic” (Tess Taylor, Victoria Chang, Tyree Daye, Dean Rader, Allison Rollins). This panel was a high point for me, as it featured five excellent poets who also write ekphrastic poetry. Victoria Chang was commissioned by the MOMA to write poetry in response to the art of Agnes Martin. The result, With My Back to the World, is a collection of elliptical, mysterious poems that seem to fit the cool detachment of Martin’s art. As Chang said, “Being looked at is good for a work of art.”
I was most impressed with Dean Rader’s presentation about the creation of his book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. Twombly was “famously inscrutable,” his art often consisting of scribbles, erasures, graffiti, and collage. Yet from this art, Rader was able to create a series of moving, deeply personal poems. Here are the first lines from “
UnfinishedUnending Journey:” “In the middle of our life, / we never know it is the middle. // It terrifies my son the sea has no center and no end.”The second panel of the second day, “From Dusk till Dawn: Exploring Nocturnes & Aubades”(Amy Ash, Amorak Huey, Curtis L. Crisler, Tatiana Johnson-Boria, Kevin McKelvey) was unexpectedly generative for me. I’d been working on a poem that took place on an early winter evening. As I listened to the panelists, I realized that this poem was a nocturne. This nudged me in a new direction, allowing me a fresh perspective. The aubade and nocturne offer opportunities for innovation, drama and possibility; they are emotionally evocative; they can function like Richard Hugo’s triggering town.
Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 2
Every so often I come across a book that sets itself apart and draws me in. So it is with Robert Seatter’s slim 2021 collection The House Of Everything. I should say what follows is more a personal response than a literary analysis of each of the thirty-odd poems that form the whole. In short, it has absorbed me now for most of the past week, which is good enough evidence that it’s the best poetry book I’ve happened upon this year.
I already had Seatter’s early collections, travelling to the fish orchards (2002) and On the Beach with Chet Baker (2006), both published, as is The House of Everything by the excellent Seren Press, so I thought it would be interesting to see, when I came across it on the publisher’s website, what he was writing now.
The sub-title is Poems inspired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, so it’s right to explain that the work is the result of his stint there as poet-in-residence. Soane’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Holborn tube station, should you wish to visit, is preserved as a national treasure, free to enter, where room after room contains a sometimes startling, often bonkers collection of artefacts that the man himself, a wealthy architect, gathered together and lived around up to his death in 1837.
Seatter pays homage to Soane, giving footnotes to poems that work as background explanations. Sometimes this kind of thing clutters or detracts from a poem but in this case the note usually adds to it, as with the tight nine-line poem Sarcophagus. It helped to know that Soane paid £2,000 in 1824 for the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of Seti I, which had been deemed too expensive for the British Museum. This is now the centre piece of Soane’s ‘sepulchral chamber’. Seatter understands the object is in exile but concentrates on giving it a dreamlike quality that is a subtle alternative to the predictable moral argument – Like a boat left in a room/ waiting for a door to let in a river,/ for a current and for a paddle.
Last August I submitted a manuscript to an open call by the independent press, ELJ Editions. Five micro chapbooks were selected to be included in one volume and mine was one. To say I was happily surprised is an understatement! The entire process with ELJ Editions has been a pleasure. Many thanks to Editor Diane Gottlieb and Founder & Publisher Ariana D. Den Bleyker.
I’m pleased that preorders are now available here. My chapbook, Offset Melodies, is all prose, consisting of micro and flash creative nonfiction and autofiction. I’m excited to be published with four phenomenal women writers: Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie.
This is only the second time I’ve submitted to a chapbook call because, well, if I were ever to have a book, I wanted it to be with a publisher that means something to me. Over the years I’ve had poetry and prose published several times with ELJ Edition journals Emerge Literary Journal and Scissors and Spackle and it was always a positive experience. Also, to be honest, being in a volume with other writers is a bit of a safety net for me. I’m a little nervous.
Charlotte Hamrick, Preorders Open for My 1st Prose Chapbook
This week I was supposed to run a book club for poetry month, record a poetry tutorial for Writer’s Digest, and a bunch of other things, but instead, I was sick in bed with a combination sinus/stomach flu bug, which I strongly do not recommend (if I look like I lost weight in the pic above, I did—from three solid days of being constantly sick and another day of liquid diet. Super fun! Like Ozempic without the cost Lol!) And every day I was in bed, outside the sky was blue, the flowers all jumped into bloom at once (cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, and lilacs generally do NOT bloom at the same time in our area, but the late spring really messed up the bloom cycle). So that was a bummer. It was not covid or the official flu (according to tests) but there are a lot of bugs going around, the doctor said, so just be aware.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy (and Hoppy) Easter, New Poems Up at The Normal School, and a Week of Being Sick (During Beautiful Weather)
I love the presence I have when I’m on vacation. I’m a wandering eye, a drinker of the world, alert, sometimes hyperalert, just on the edge of anxious often, which does serve to sharpen the senses. Waft of subway here and a hint of someone’s cherry vape, and a bit of lilac on the wind; the thrum of human life: engines, mostly, and conversation, its ocean swells when it’s in a language I understand only with focus and concentration. What the wind is doing that very moment: agitating a dry lavender frond hanging from a rooftop garden awaiting the warmth of spring. Nothing is at stake and everything is: the day, what I make of it. Rilke wrote , “Maybe we’re only here to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate….” Immediacy. I love poems that grab me by the immediacy.
It’s what I admired about this poem by Keetje Kuipers. Although here it is about the destruction the narrator wants to undertake, that is, in the immediate future. It’s the details of that destruction and its ostensible reasoning that captured me: “cut down tree after living tree just to get rid of the green,” the narrator snarls, but it is so clearly born of pain, the awful crashing about we want to do out of pain. The poem is so present with it, hyperattentive to it. Burn the whole fucking world down. That’s the only way to avoid pain.
It seems odd to me that this poem appeals to me in the wake of my pleasant vacation. But the world and I are on edge. The green, the green. The sere, the sere. We can hardly bear it.
Marilyn McCabe, let’s turn on every incandescent bulb, each burner
O holidays of promised liberation:
One towards an earthly land,
One to a place promised
posthumously.
In our hands,
Questions:
Which way now,
How to mind the gap,
Is home home? Exile exile?
Do the two meet as two seas that
clash and shamble towards each other?Jill Pearlman, Festive Earworm
— I’ve been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. Rituals stabilize life, he says, and he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who says rituals are “temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” He talks about how things can be stabilizing points, a table, a chair. But today, things are consumed, taking away the mode of lingering. He talks about how smartphones are not things because “lingering” is “impossible.” There is a “restlessness inherent in the apparatus [that] makes it a non-thing.” We are compelled compulsively by our phones. “They consume us.”
— “Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things…” (Byung-Chul Han).
— “Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.” (BCH) Digital communication is disembodied, but “rituals are processes of embodiment.”
— Rituals bring about resonances in a community and without them we lose “accord.” “Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of communication is a crisis of resonance.” The digital sphere is an echo chamber where we hear mainly our own bullshit. (My word not his). If you’re interested in reading more about this book, there’s a really good rundown here.
— The digital sphere is horizontal, when what people crave is the vertical or deep engagement. As artists we are all about the vertical. I can’t help but think about how we all keep being fed this stuff we don’t really want. AI, the annoying stuff the algorithm pukes up, the smoothening out of our seeing via AI, the theft of our work and our words.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist: Rituals and Alignment
No ghost deserves to be shaped into a developmental arc that explains why the selves we abandoned led to the self we perform, a construction so fragile that it requires countless defensive structures to sustain, protect, and coddle.
Perhaps the idea of ‘self-esteem’ has always tasted a bit silly to me, an unsustainable Americanism that resembles our lifestyles in order to brush away the thought of what Ingeborg Bachmann and Joyelle McSweeney have poemed as our deathstyles.
Aesthetics of closure aside, a part of us dies but it does not disappear, does not vanish beneath the earth but remains and hovers in this insubstantial form that Jacques Derrida dragged into hauntology, and revisited in his elegies as well as his writings on friendship.
Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
seaIn a 1923 piece titled “Faites les Jeux” (published in Les feuilles libres, no. 32), Tristan Tzara said that he wrote to destroy the feeling that pushed him to write, a sensation that was too personal, too loud, due relentless at a time when he was actively pursuing his longtime dream of abandoning personality, and not existing as a person. This desire to be “apersonal” (as contrasted with the desire to be “a person”) also appears in the poem “Wire Dance March,” as well as early Dada, which hallows Tzara’s decision (ostensibly made by mother) to ensure that he would never fight in a war. Love sends its sons to Switzerland and then expresses surprise when they wind up in Germany. In early Dada, Tzara’s sense of himself as “a deserter” is never mentioned. Only later would the poet explore this particular shade of his absence.
Alina Stefanescu, Blacktops.
When you come to Amsterdam because of a single sloth graffiti, you almost get the feeling that life is not about what you want, but what you do with what you have.
as if stones
could be
impressed
by us living
thingsKati Mohr, Butterfly House
Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I’ve already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I’ve not read Laurie Bolger’s book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger’s anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I’m looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father’s death during covid.
The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn’t respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn’t a space. This all makes sense to me – some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be “stage” versions of “page” poems.
It delights me that the American Mathematical society links math and poetry by sponsoring a student poetry contest each year. AMS recently announced this year’s winners (along with videos of the winning poems) — and I offer samples of the winning poems (from college, high school, and middle school students) below:
from “Proof” by Emilynne Newsom, Harvey Mudd College
There’s a practice you will see in math.
It is a way of showing what is true.
In steady step-by-step it lays a path
from what you know to what you seek to prove. (Find the rest here.)from “Homeric Simile … ” by Samanyu Ganesh, The Westminster Schools
Just as the sea otters grasp each others’ paws
whilst sleeping, latently
basking in the stillness of their moonlit sanctuary, drifting
assuredly . . . (Find the rest of this poem here.)from “forever” by Nora McKinstry, Edmond Heights, K-12
a mobius strip is a never ending loop a
forever-going cycle of one small strip
but still it goes on and on
impossible to stop but easily created . . . (Find the rest here.)The winners page also lists students who earned “honorable mention” and offers information and poetry from prior contests.
JoAnne Growney, AMS Contest-winning Student Mathy Poems
Andy Fogle interviewed me for Salvation South, and did such an amazing job with this longform interview—we talk Southern denialism, the limit of guilt and shame, the call and response of literature, anger versus the truest emotion, and more.
Salvation South also ran six new poems of mine, including four new Ars Poeticas (yes, I’ve been writing a lot of these for an Ars | Ours project), and two new love poems.
And! There’s a new episode of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast Slush Pile, featuring three of my poems, and the editors’ live process of discussing the poems and selecting them for publication. It is a VERY generous discussion, and left me feeling rather abashed and seen and like my cup had been filled all the way up to the very brim, so if you ever receive a request to be featured on the Slush Pile, I hope you say yes without trepidation (and considerably less anxiety than I did, ha). It was really beautiful to hear my poems read by others, and talked through. Such care and generosity, and I learned a lot about my own work in the process. So many thank yous to Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, and Lillie Volpe.
Han VanderHart, Painted Bride Quarterly Podcast, Salvation South Interview+Poems, Of Poetry Podcast, Moist Poetry’s Summer Riot Open Call
“Naming the Trees” demonstrates a sense of compassion and respect for the woods of Ness Owen’s homeland and the craft of the poems inspired by them. That’s not to say they are full of sentiment and awe of natural beauty. They also tackle the frustration and anger at the impact of commercial interests which act against the wishes of locals and without respect for the woods by people who do not have to face the consequences of their destructive plans or live with the ongoing impact. The poems capture that sense of injustice without ranting, but by showing how humans and nature interact, the importance of the connection with the natural world and respect lie at the core of countering the climate emergency. Disconnection is dangerous. “Naming the Trees” shows how to heal that breakage.
Emma Lee, “Naming the Trees” Ness Owen (Arachne Press) – book review
mayflies dead on the streets of Selma
mayflies dead on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
David and I are there to remember
to pay our respects, to see
but everywhere we look
the streets and sidewalks are covered
with drifts of mayfly carcasses
heaps of translucent white wings
uncountable numbers of corpsesJason Crane, POEM: mayflies
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.
But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.
The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.
The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.
The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.
The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.
The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.
The loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.
Maria Popova, 3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever
i want the world to shrink to the size
of a coffee cup. to be able to reach
for every kind of bird i need. i don’t want
to stand at a gas station & fit my prayers
beneath my tongue. i don’t want
to look for gods in neon signs.Robin Gow, new car
The New Orleans Poetry Festival itself was terrific, rich with different kinds of programming: short “lagniappe” readings, a panel about cool poet laureate projects, performance poetry happenings, a lively little book fair, good food nearby (no L.A. downtown concrete wasteland here!), and much more. I gave a reading with Tupelo poets and spoke on a great panel with the theme “Sacred and Somatic.” I finally met in person several poets whose work I’ve admired from a distance, and glimpsed the amazing Harryette Mullen, although I was too shy to say hello. People said kind things about my book, its snazzy cover, and my new mushroom-print dress. I had dinner with a beloved former student who told me that during a difficult period of his life, I’d made him feel seen, taken seriously as a person and poet. Again: lucky and nourishing convergences.
Yet life has NOT been all shimmer. On the way home, achy and tired, I contemplated the absurdity of flying to New Orleans while coping with the sudden and ferocious bout of sciatica that descended several days before, totally randomly–I was just in the process of sitting down when something twisted. I was nearly immobilized for a few days, then when things loosened up just a little, I got on a plane. I made the right choice, I think, but I was in pain most of the time, and pain makes events and conversations hazy. I liked my unfancy B&B in part because of the fridge and microwave, so after cutting out early from evening readings, I could lie on the floor alternately icing and heating my piriformis. I have been so carefully preventing contagious illness on this book tour through masking plus a swallowing a color-wheel of immune supplements, but I forgot that bodies can give out in a myriad of ways.
Again, I’m glad I went–better to be in pain while pleasantly distracted than in pain bored at home–and very grateful for so many kindnesses from the universe. Yet I’m a little down. Pain taxes a person’s energy all by itself, of course. The Guggenheim rejected me again. I’m behind on everything. I’ve been so looking forward to next week’s Madrid conference, but have had little time to anticipate and prep, and I wonder how much stamina I’ll have for sightseeing. The sciatica IS getting better, by slow degrees, but I’ve mislaid my momentum. Maybe it’s in the side pocket of my dirty suitcase?
Lesley Wheeler, Shimmer, steam, somatic, sciatica
Old magnolia: gaps just the right size
for my dangling legs, a branch to rest a book on.The seaglass blue of sky over hills
like an embrace from the horizon.Limestone painted pink at twilight,
rosemary between my fingers.The light of Shabbat candles
after a brief whiff of struck match.Singing the alto note in a chord,
holding and held.*
For my birthday last month one of my nieces gave me a deck of illustrated cards depicting untranslatable words. I drew a card this morning: querencia.
“Describes a place where we feel safe, a ‘home’ (which doesn’t literally have to be where we live) from where we draw our strength and inspiration. In bullfighting, a bull may stake out a querencia in a part of the ring where he will gather his energies before another charge.”
Shabbat. Jerusalem. Harmony. A particular quality of sky. A tree that was chopped down decades ago.
Where are these places for you?
Rachel Barenblat, Querencia
My great aunt Inez never married, and taught American history in a high school in Endicott, New York, all her life. She loved words, music, and art, and could recite many poems and speeches by heart. Whenever she visited, I would sit with her in her favorite chair and she’d read to me, and tell me stories about the poems or prose and their writers. Sometimes we looked at art books, and often she’d set up her easel in her bedroom and work on a painting during an extended holiday stay with my grandparents and us; I was learning to play the piano and she’d often ask me to play for her as she read or painted.
When I was 9, Aunt Inez gave me a book of poems that she had written out, in her firm Palmer Method handwriting, or clipped from magazines. It was perhaps a peculiar gift for a nine-year-old, but she had seen me pretty clearly from the beginning. She’d be pleased to know that I’ve carried that book around with me ever since.
This morning I opened the book to see if Paul Revere’s ride was in it. It wasn’t, but there were others by Longfellow, Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emily Dickinson. I had followed her instructions and added to them: in the back, written or typed out by me, were adolescent favorites: Frost, Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings.
Today I stopped on the page where Whitman’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was affixed, with ancient glue stains that looked like blood, and my great-aunt’s note at the bottom: [image]
“The ship is the union, the prize is victory”, she wrote, meaning that the prize was the preservation of the Union, at a very high cost.
Beth Adams, Paul Revere and Me
I’ve been thinking about the word brutal and cruel a lot, reading the news. Brutal has appeared a lot, cruel, I think, has been more rare this past week, though I’ve seen it in other weeks. I’m wondering how I hear each of them, what overtones each has. I looked in the dictionary, and both come from Latin words, the one, says my quick check online dictionary ‘dull, stupid,’ but also ‘characterized by an absence of reasoning or intelligence,’ hence its use for animals or beasts (about, not to be unfair to animals) whose brains we know little, to date). Cruel is from crudus, ‘raw, rough’ (think ‘crudities’). And cruel is defined as ‘willfully causing pain or suffering or (and?) feeling no concern about it.’ So which would one choose to use, if one were a journalist writing about the current political news? Why does ‘brutal’ feel more banal and ‘cruel’ more thought-burdened, to me? How do other people reading the one and the other?
Beverley Bie Brahic, Saturday 19 April 2025, Paris (Easter Weekend)
How many squares does it take
to fill the round mouth, reshape
it into another loud
box? Blocks
stacked
on
blocks,
square teeth
delineate boundaries
of ideas that don’t fit,
grinding them down into grit.PF Anderson, Mitzvah 501: Harm Not With Words #NaPoWriMo
Each year on her birthday, which is also the anniversary of her death, I make sure to remember her in a way that is more than just the daily thoughts about her that I have. Writing her birthday poem, exploring the passage of time, exploring grief as an instinctive reaction to death is one way that I do that.
The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, has gifted me a different way of looking at the world.
Today her birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday. I can hear kids in the village having an eater egg hunt. It is joyful. This is as it should be.
Risen
Today I wish to roll back the stone
and bring out of the tomb a fifteen-year-old version
of the baby I buried.All will be undone. A miracle.
The rose petals rising like mist from the earth-hole,
her white coffin suddenly empty,
the pine box held up to the crowd for effect.The grave will no longer feel familiar,
the toys binned, no longer holding
the reverence of votives to the dead.
The plot will be vacated. Someone else
can kneel there now. […]Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her fifteenth birthday
At first, I thought Solmaz’s brilliant poem was, like my little outburst above, a list of responses to illness or distress. Then I realised it’s concerned with something deeper – it’s about the messages we give to ourselves – the ways in which we find ourselves wanting; in which we blame ourselves; in which we seek a perfection which isn’t only impossible, but is also deeply flawed – shaped as it is by the corrupting forces of commodification, profit, reputation, ego.
It’s a hard thing to write a poem consisting totally of questions, and to maintain a momentum. But this poem is actually held together by the questions – they are its form, the scaffold and its engine, the force – even the violence – of the poem. And there’s great variation and contrast within them: some questions are wryly ironic; some wildly and humorously exaggerated; some painful, confronting, disturbing. Some reflect, for example, the huge pressure that the “you” of the poem is under – the reader, the poet, or a universal “you”, trying to hold back the ocean with a glass door. Some reflect intimacy and insight, compassion – “Made peace/ with your mother?” “Have you finally stopped/ shoulding all over yourself?”
Clare Shaw, Reflections on ‘Self-Care” by Solmaz Sharif
I went to the allotment yesterday and began work, but the rain has cancelled my plans to return. I always thank the rain however it comes. Everything has suddenly greened as a result; the lawn, the tiny buds on the trees. Last weekend the Easter witches came, so my daughter was making wands and wreaths out of pussy willow catkins which I used to decorate the door after the kids had gone. Safe to say spring is properly here.
GloPoWriMo three weeks in and I’m still going strong here. I’m not able to write a whole poem every day, but every day I’m turning up at the page and trying to write something.
Some of the poems I’ve written I really like, but I often feel that about poems early on. They feel so fresh and right, but then I put them aside for a bit and when I go back to them, they feel forced or they’re trying too hard to be clever. So I work on them a bit and put them aside for longer, then work on them a bit more until I feel they’re done. Then I put them aside for even longer and come back to them with a totally different eye.
It feels strange to go back and read poems I fell in love with years ago. They aren’t the same beasts or maybe I’m not. Sometimes I still love them and they still have a rightness about them. Other times they clash and just don’t work or strut too much with their own poetic-ness. My writing style has changed in many ways over time, but it’s more that I have changed.
Poetry for me is very much what I want to say right now: my emotions, my obsessions, what I’m looking at and thinking about now. Years down the line I may not see things that way anymore, but the poem is a snapshot of that moment, now gone. And like my teenage journals and blurry pre-digital photos I won’t get rid of them just because they’re cringe-worthy or not who I am now. I love how they show my growth and development. But, as Billy Connelly said, pay attention because it’s all going to change tomorrow.
Gerry Stewart, The Poetry of Who I am Now
My region’s been unusually low on rainfall the past 18 months, but this year April showers seem almost to be compensating…my veg patch is mud. Weeding and more sowing will just have to wait. I walk around the neighborhood and my yard and the woods, squelching through muck and stopping now and again to upend a rock or rotten log and see who’s active now. Lots of worms and arthropods, the occasional spider, many ants.
In such moist circumstances, we get fungi; I’ve been enjoying Lesley Wheeler’s new book, Mycocosmic, which I’ve read twice now–once for content and sound, once to learn more from the poems’ craft structures, all the while fascinated by the science of fungus, which she incorporates into many of these poems. It’s a richly rewarding book, sometimes sorrowful, always intelligent, full of insightful poetry. The collection includes some poems that feel like spells, chants, divinations that suggest there are always imaginative methods for coping with anger, unfairness, and loss. Exploring the vein of how interconnected the natural world is, and the human world (with other humans and with the Earth) feels so vital to me, and Wheeler’s book pivots on this vitality. Look at the way Harry Humes threaded through my life, for example, in small but meaningful ways. The same goes for Lesley and for so many other people with whom I’ve shared intersections, interweavings, and connections over the years. That butterfly effect of influence. (Now that I think of it–Harry Humes has a book with that title: The Butterfly Effect). Or are those networks mycelial, as Lesley Wheeler suggests?
Ann E. Michael, Mud & connections
A nurse
attaches a device to the tip of your finger.
Another threads a clear liquid into your
vein. What day is it? You count with her
backward from ten and wind up in some
backforest where you’ll sink without
resistance into the moss. How much
time were you there? You were opened
like a book, cut into a cross-section,
made porous as a sheet of cheese. Now
your hip bone sings like a flute.Luisa A. Igloria, Machine Shop for Humans
Great selection, Dave. Thank you! I especially enjoyed Kate Gale and RM Haines.