Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 19
night-flowering catch-fly, the formal narrative epithalamium, a crayon sky, rage fatigue, 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: night-flowering catch-fly, the formal narrative epithalamium, a crayon sky, rage fatigue, and much more. Enjoy.
The blank page is silence. And silence is also the white page around the written poem. Silence seems something the poet should not overcome but only encroach upon. I have never heard a composer worry that they might never write another piece of music. Novelists, too, seem to have a relationship with character and plot that allows them the option of writing the bad novel rather than never write again. It is the poet who seems most tuned to that sometimes-stifling quietness, and how we return to it each time we start out on a poem – worried again that we cannot meaningfully negotiate it. We worry that our last poem might be the last poem we will ever write. It goes to the idea that connecting words in a line does not make a poem. Perhaps it is because words placed haphazardly on a page does break the stillness – and ours is an art that tries to preserve the silence, even as we contest it.
Niall Campbell, On Silence, Cinema, and Hemingway
an attempt
at silence
an empty box
fills itself
with odds and endsKati Mohr, an attempt
In 2022, I published a strange little non-fiction book What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop). I say it’s strange because I still don’t quite know what to call it – it’s part memoir, part lyric essay. It’s made of short prose fragments that sometimes break out into poetry. […]
There are different strands, or braids running through the book. One braid is a fragmented memoir that explores my working class background, and my childhood in brass bands, and my life as a trumpet player and a trumpet teacher. One braid is a story of the Last Post, both its history and my life-long relationship with it. One braid is a story about the two oldest trumpets in the world, and how one was lost, and how I also lost a trumpet, once upon a time. One braid is about teaching, and learning and how these two things are always interconnected and influence each other, even when they take place twenty or thirty years apart. There are braids about the physical act of making a trumpet. And one braid, the braid that you will hear a little of in this video, is a braid that is written drawing from the language of fairy tale, which I use to tell stories that are difficult, or painful, those partly healed wounds that our writing selves return back to, again and again.
Kim Moore, What the Trumpet Taught Me (1)
The fortitude and determination to have young, to keep singing, build nests and feed young shown by all these birds is astonishing. The dawn chorus bursts open the day; the evening chorus settles the night. Birds sing with full voices and hearts from the earliest pre-dawn shivering of light that emerges from the north-eastern hills above Erradale until the last ribbons of tangerine and turquoise along the north-west horizon over the Minches. The singing is impelled by light and lengthening days and only under the soundless pop of rapidly emerging stars do they fall quiet. And in the silence bats fly and snipe winnow.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, Yellow
On May 5, we lost my good friend and wonderful poet Martha (Marty) Silano to ALS. The photo to the left is the last time I saw her in person, on a sunny summer afternoon with wildfire haze. This is the way I’ll always remember her, wondering with te sun at her back in a field of flowers.
I met Marty when we both published books with Steel Toe Books, her Blue Positive and my Becoming the Villainess in 2006. I remember us doing a reading together at the old Hugo House (housed in a retired funeral home – amazing and full of ghosts!) and thinking she was so cool. I did not know we were going to start a nearly-20 year friendship where we’d celebrate together – book launches, literary festivals, AWPs, birthdays, housewarmings, babies, and more.
Marty was diagnosed with ALS about eighteen months ago, and because she had the most severe kind, she tried to do as much as she could as long as she could – hiking and writing poems with a vengeance. She was still doing online readings while she was losing her ability to speak. I think she ended up with three books by the end of eighteen months (all of which are suberb, and probably her best work.) One of her publishers said she was still texting about marketing the week she died.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Remembering Poet Martha Silano, Spring Continues On Springing, Cats and Hummingbirds and Rebecca Solnit
Early spring was a fallow time for me. Insular. Lots of time to read. To write. To think. To wander. To watch the trees, the snow, the rain, the birds. To listen to music. To laugh with friends. To cocoon at home with my husband, watching movies. The calm.
Then, as the forsythia began to yellow and the hosta pushed their tongues out of the soil, it seemed that my calendar also bloomed. The NOLA Poetry Festival in early April jumped off a spring packed with poetry —completing a 30/30 (and writing at least 7 poems that are worth keeping), hosting 6 readers for the poetry month edition of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, hearing both Richie Hoffman and Hedgie Choi read for the first time at the wonderful Poetry and Biscuits Salon, teaching a workshop for Fahmidan Journal, and completing edits with Sundress for Unrivered in preparation for layout and upcoming production.
And now, it’s early May and things are getting even busier. The plants on the deck are blooming, as are the flowering trees, and time is running full speed ahead toward summer. Co-editor Rachel Bunting and I are in the beginning of a new open reading period for Asterales journal, AWP proposals are open and due in mid-June, I am prepping two new workshops for Fahmidan, am completing the necessary yard and house spring cleaning and tending, and my husband and I are preparing to travel in mid-May.
Donna Vorrreyer, Time
I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake.
The book is open . . . [image]
Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.
“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”
Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”
Alina Stefanescu, Burning lines.
Mt. Holyoke College: where Emily Dickinson attended but left after one year. Mt. Holyoke College where I wandered the halls on our way to visit my boyfriend’s sister. Compared to University of Massachusetts where I was a first year, this was the lap of luxury and privilege. I can still feel the discomfort of traveling those beautiful paneled hallways. Jewish and barely middle class, I felt in my bones that I didn’t belong.
And then I heard: the loudest female voice ever, echoing all around me. Beyond booming—delicious and powerful and fully engaging: Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It was before the 50 honorary doctorates, before “On the Pulse of Morning” written and read for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, before I knew any of her work beyond I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
I followed the sound to outside an elegant auditorium. The paneled doors opened and in my mind’s eye, I see Maya Angelou moving back and forth all hipsway and sensuality. She owned the stage. Here in this fancy-pants New England college, Maya Angelou took charge. Her body, her voice, her entire spirit possessed that room. I stood transfixed. I’d never seen such female power before then or even since. Never.
Susan Rich, I watched Maya Angelou strut across the stage in 1978~and now, a French castle.
The image above from the recent British Library exhibition ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ shows writer Christine de Pizan writing and learning with Reason, Justice and Rectitude (on the left) and building the ‘City of Ladies’ (on the right). The image that we more often associate with Christine is one from the same manuscript which shows her alone writing in her study — I have this image on my Welcome page — but this is another side to her, a compelling image of writing as literary practice in the world rather than cloistered in an ivory tower. I was delighted to discover this other side to Christine, a visual representation of the movements between text and culture which animates the meaning of literary studies for me. I want the combination of aesthetic beauty and intellectual thrill that comes from studying literature as part of the world — scholarship AND criticism, in North’s terms — but even more than that, interpretation as inspiration.
Poetry, criticism, scholarship. As I write, I realise that these things are not necessarily different (at least not in my mind), but part of an integrated creative critical engagement and mindset. I write poetry as creative critical intervention. For example, my poem “The Monster Playbook” emerged from my reading of Beowulf and related critical essays, most notably Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” and Tolkein’s “The Monster and the Critics”.
And my poem on Curley’s Wife, which reframes the portrayal of her in Steinbeck’s novel, emerged directly from teaching Of Mice and Men (on repeat) for GCSE.
If poetry for me is a creative-critical intervention, criticism is a equally a creative endeavour. Inkwasting Toy of Mine is creative criticism, critical creativity — all of it imperfectly doing the work of thinking about literary culture on some level. And if the contradictions and tensions of this public/private, academic/non-academic, critical/scholarly literary/cultural writing sometimes seem to much to bear, well, as Natalie Diaz says “most of us live in a state of impossibility” which is perhaps another way of saying, I know can’t do it but I’ll do it anyway.
Ruth Lexton, Creatively critical/critically creative
Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich, at least for Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Anglicans; Catholics will celebrate on May 13. […]
I’ve been interested in Julian of Norwich for a long time. When I first started teaching the British Literature survey class in 1992, the Norton Anthology had just added her to the text used in so many survey classes. Why had I not heard of her before? After all, she was the first woman writing in English, at least the first one whose writing we still have.
My students and I found her writing strange, and I found her ideas compelling. She had a series of visions, which she wrote down, and spent her life elaborating upon. She wrote about Christ as a mother–what a bold move! After all, Christ is the only one of the Trinity with a definite gender. She also stressed God is both mother and father. Here in the 21st century, we’re still arguing about gender and Julian of Norwich explodes the gender binary and gives us a vision of God the Mother, God the Wife–and it’s not the Virgin Mary, whom she also sees in her visions.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Contemplating Julian of Norwich During Graduation Week
The mother cannot escape the effects of her child’s refusal to make contact. In No protocols can save me now, she compares this moment of separation to that when her baby was taken from her to address breathing difficulties when she was born. The sense of the mother’s fear of losing her child on this occasion is implied through the description of her holding on to her child ‘tightly’ on her return: there is a reluctance to let her go. […]
This then is a collection which provides telling insight into the nature of estrangement. I felt, however, that it also has much to say about the relationship between writing and trauma. Underpinning the collection is the notion of the story. At the end of Love The Albatross Harvey writes ‘how do you tell a story/ when you don’t know how it ends, which isn’t/ in your power or remit to shape// though maybe that’s what you’re doing right now/ maybe these words are spurs or goads/ maybe crossbow bolts.’ There is a tension in this collection between the writer’s desire to find a satisfying resolution to the complications of her story and the nature of the context she is describing. This adds to the sense of powerlessness that emerges from many of the poems and suggests something about the limitations felt by the writer: whilst these words might help her understand and deal with such complex issues, they are limited in their power to transform the situation. The writing might act as a ‘spur’ or ‘goad, a provocation to carry on in the face of such trauma, or in a nod to The Ancient Mariner, ‘may be crossbow bolts’ that kill the hope that sustains her. Perhaps, at best she suggests the act of writing can provide some comfort: for as she says in When a story isn’t never-ending: ‘you feel it lean against your leg/ and you stretch out your hand to ruffle its furl/ curl your fingers on the collar round its neck.’
I hadn’t read anything by Deborah Harvey before I read Love the Albatross. This is an outstanding collection, rich in meaning and consisting of finely crafted poetry. It is one of those few collections that I have finished, feeling not only that I have understood better the experience described, but that I have also learned much about poetry writing by observing a highly accomplished poet in action. I’m now off to checkout her back catalogue!
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Love the Albatross’ by Deborah Harvey
Phenologically, when you smell the lilacs is when you can find the morel mushrooms. When you smell the lilacs, the blue birds are laying their first clutch of eggs. When you smell the lilacs, it is time to plant the garden. When you smell the lilacs, the trillium don their dresses. When you smell the lilacs, the first round of dandelions go to seed. When you smell the lilacs, the bats and lightning bugs emerge. Shortly after you smell the lilacs, it is time to celebrate your mother.
My mother
is purple lilac,
my mother
is the haven of honeysuckle vine on the fence,
my mother, of course, of course,
did not always love herself,
carrying her purple, fragrant florets
and red trumpets from life-to-life.
I don’t forget her.I carry her
in every vase,
in ever basket
grimy with dirt.I tug at the stem and petiole
of her, begging
for morsel and word.Sarah Lada, Matrescence
She was by no means perfect, and I would have throttled her hundreds of times over for the ways in which she annoyed me. But she was a marvel in how to live life with enthusiasm as well as good grace. Well…decent grace. She planned like a keen strategist, but rolled with the punches. She was 41 when she found out she was pregnant with me, what must have been terrible news. She was good about it when I arrived, and buckled down to another round of child rearing, when she thought, perhaps, she’d be free to leave my father far earlier. I don’t know. We didn’t speak of these things. We had fun together, even through my own bouts of bitchy behavior. We loved books and chocolate and the outdoors and laughing and travel and music and words. We liked crosswords and jigsaws. I was remembering recently that we did a paint-by-number together when those were a thing. I must have been about 12 maybe. It was fun, hunting for the little shapes that called for just that shade of green that dangled from our brushes.
I didn’t ask her enough or listen closely enough to her childhood stories. Don’t we all feel that way when it’s too late to say, “Tell me that story again about…”? She maintained a bit of her Maine accent to the end. When she could no longer remember or concentrate enough to read books, she still liked to have them around. We sang songs toward the end, and she could still come up with verses I’d forgotten, although she remembered little else. Or we’d sing “something something something something” and laugh.
So in her honor today I give you one of my first favorite poems, which either she read to me, or recited perhaps — she was of the era when poems were memorized, and she had won competitions for oration — or it was in one of her books I grew up with. I can’t quite remember. But I think of it often, and it makes me think of her, her spirit of adventure.
Marilyn McCabe, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by
[Paul] Rossiter deploys a wide range of formal strategies, I’ve already mentioned translation/adaptation, but he also writes lyric, narrative, haiku, prose poems, concrete poems (a 1980s series, ‘Monumenta Nipponica’ that plays with the possibilities of the Tokyo/Kyoto anagram), found, or more correctly mined, texts, and list poems chief among them. There’s also a large number of ekphrastic poems relating to visual art, theatre, dance and music, especially jazz,
the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive giftingand a lot of place and travel-related poems, marking visits and returns to sites across Asia and Europe.
And there are poems where genres overlap, as in this list mined from a text on a Cornish hedge by Sarah Carter (the first two stanzas of seven):
bird’s foot
bittersweet
white campion
night-flowering catch-flyred clover
hedgerow cranesbill
ox-eye daisy
field forget-me-notThe unintrusive voice here is typical of Rossiter at this best; the observed world speaks for itself, on its own terms. In a poem near the middle of the book, ‘Beach’, he writes ‘’there’s no such thing as chaos’ and time and again the poems reveal the order in an apparently random world through a process of quiet transcription, an apparent minimal intervention into the flow of language that conceals a careful artistry.
Billy Mills, Passages: Poems 1969-2019 by Paul Rossiter: A Review
My French certainly isn’t good enough to know how this poem would read to a native speaker. However, and however naïve my detailed impressions may seem, I find it a miracle of concentrated evocation, both in its images and the texture of its language.
On the level of imagery, what’s so impressive is the abruptness with which pictures are juxtaposed, grand sweeping conceptions and dreamlike or nightmarish fantasy merging with or jostled by mundane realities. The tight grip of rhyme and metre give a feeling of inevitability to its unfolding, and what reason calls its fantastic elements seem as solidly present in the mindscape of the poem as its literal details, exercising as inescapable a force on the poet’s mood. Rhyme and metre also work to fold elements together – most mordantly in the sequence cimetière, litière, gouttière – cemetery, cat’s bed and gutter. This kind of folding together by sound seems to work within the lines as well as at their endings, for example in the ironic jarring of ‘carreau’ and ‘repos’, or the way the last syllable of ‘dans la gouttière’ twists the knife of ‘erre’. Power comes from the way ideas that are brought together in this way conflict with each other or cruelly intensify each other in meaning, sometimes both at once, as ‘cimetière’ and ‘litière’ do. This effect depends on the intensity with which the ideas are realised in themselves as well as the way they’re brought into relation with each other. The lines about the cat seem to me to me particularly evocative, brilliantly weaving the sense of the cat’s tense, restless movements and edgy state into their own phonetic texture. But these strongly, independently realised moments are yoked together in a kind of highly frictional harmony by sense as well as sound – not only by all presenting a mood of gloom tinged with horror but by imaginative parallels of other kinds, like the way the spectral poet’s voice, the lamenting of the bourdon – here, apparently, a bell ringing for the dead, not a bumble bee – the falsetto squeal of the smoky log and the wheezing of the clock gather in a cacophonous choir of voices that suddenly drop to the sad, sinister whispering of the Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades.
Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s rhymes – friction and harmony
The formal narrative epithalamium was a standard early modern genre, in both Latin and the vernacular — there are dozens of examples in print and (especially) in manuscript, and in the sixteenth century most professional poets wrote at least one of them. But in late sixteenth century England, with the aging queen obviously past childbearing age and with no heir, it became politically impossible to write a formal epithalamium for any other marriage, and the form briefly and energetically mutated into the so-called ‘epyllion’.
George Chapman, for instance, who finished Marlowe’s poem and also wrote a 1590s epyllion of his own (Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595), a poem about Ovid but in nothing like his style, and indebted also to the Biblical story of Susanna) went on, once the Queen had died, to write formal epithalamia: A Hymne to Hymen for the Most Time-Fitted Nuptialls, a Catullan-style marriage song for Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, Elector Palatine in 1613, and then Andromeda Liberata for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex in 1614. Although as far as I know Andromeda Liberata has never been included in a list of epyllia, it could easily be: the poem is a self-contained mythological mini-epic, rich in description and rhetoric, which incorporates within it the song of the fates at the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda, and, in typical epyllion fashion, condenses the metamorphosis of the pair into the final four lines of the main poem, a concise (and slightly funny) afterthought much like the transformation of Adonis at the very end of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.
Stylistically, these poems — taking epithalamia and ‘epyllia’ together — were influenced by marriage poems by Statius, Catullus and some Hellenistic Greek models, but by far the most important source for their singular style was Claudian’s epithalamia and his de raptu Proserpinae.
Victoria Moul, Across the Hellespont
In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, specially commissioned poems, it includes an appendix, in the form of an alternative timeline of Moon landings utilising characters from European comics, and images from James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.
Last week we launched the book in London at one of Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover readings at Senate House, hosted by the wonderful Briony Hughes. This week (tomorrow, that is), we’re doing a Cambridge launch at Waterstones, so as an extra little promotional push, here’s a list article, wherein I will introduce you to three more books of space poems, and deliver my run-down of the Top 5 space-themed Transformers. […]
2. A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue) (Carcanet, 2001)
Elson was a scientist first and foremost — she worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in the 1990s, researching globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. A Responsibility to Awe was published posthumously, after her early death, and is made up of material gathered by her husband and close friend, including extracts from notebooks.
Science and poetry aren’t entirely incompatible, and some exciting projects have arisen from attempts to bring them together (see Simon Barraclough’s Laboratorio and Project Abeona, run by Andy Jackson, one of the poets featured in … Dark Side of the Moon). But there is something of a tension, since scientific writing aspires toward precision, literalness, practical conclusions, while poetry attempts to leave room, lean into the figurative, pose ever wider questions.
Elson’s grappling with this tension resulted in a singular voice — spare, for the most part, with quick turns, and a focus that rarely drifts from its chosen subject matter, instead pinning it in place. In the punchy ‘What if There Were No Moon’?’, she lists: “No bright nights / Occultations of the stars / No face / No moon songs”. There’s more than space poems here — moths, nuns and salmon are equally keenly observed, while eels and kites are deployed as metaphor — and like Evans, Elson worked hard to connect concepts from her astronomy research to everyday phenomena:
‘Dark Matter’
Above a pond
An unseen filament
Of spider’s floss
Suspends a slowly
Spinning leafJon Stone, “Low-gravity Fever”
It’s very good news that Vidyan Ravinthiran has a new collection out, Avidyā (Bloodaxe). I thought his previous book, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), was terrific. And I remember reading the last poem of Avidyā when it first appeared in Poetry magazine back in 2017. Now, its haunting final phrase, “the avid void of English”, resonates with Ravinthiran’s recently published work of critical autobiography, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (Norton). In it, he describes how his childhood speech impediment, and the pressure in an immigrant Sri Lankan Tamil family to master received pronunciation, led to a love of dictionaries as a compensatory realm of rich English: “its capaciousness and acceptance of the foreign; an arena in which I could be confident of my originality, if nothing else”. […]
Finally, I’m honoured to have been visited by a “Book on Tour (without an author)”: Alice Willitts’ Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode Press). It came in the post with a card tucked into a pocket at the front, like an old-school library borrowing record, to fill in before posting on to a new reader. I’m still in the middle of its playful and painful imagining of East Anglian fen landscapes, now and in their underwater future.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #31: Crystals Free of Their Matrix
A worthy organization in Washington, DC in which to get involved is FREE MINDS BOOK CLUB (https://freemindsbookclub.org/about-us/) — an organization that collects books and provides reading opportunities for incarcerated individuals AND ALSO offers online presentations of poems (https://freemindsbookclub.org/poems/) for volunteers to read and offer comments. I encourage you to participate — participants need not be poets, simply interested readers!
JoAnne Growney, Power Grows with Numbers
I also want to say, wow, what an amazing few days it’s been! A case of everything everywhere all at once. My keynote at the ukiaHaiku Festival was very well-received and it was sweet to headline this event celebrating haiku in my old hometown in Ukiah, CA. The art opening for the Ten Thousand Gates group show at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka, CA beautifully showcased the dynamic and diverse work of local artists of Asian descent. And the Ink to Paper reading that I organized—the first in Humboldt County to feature all Asian American poets—found a warm audience.
Thank you to everyone who came out to these events! And if you missed the art opening, the show runs through June 8.
If all that weren’t enough, in the same ten-day period one of my haibun (prose plus haiku) was featured by the poetry journal Rattle; I spoke on an hour-long Thursday Night Talk panel on KZZH Access Humboldtabout the weekend of local events celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage; and haiku luminary Brad Bennett focussed an entire session of the haiku class he teaches on my haiku and haiga.
All this is a lot for an introvert! But it was really fun and rewarding, a validation of the art and poetry path I stepped onto fifteen years ago.
Annette Makino, In the room where it happens
It’s not easy to disconnect. The digital world is insistent, urgent, and addictive. But that’s exactly why it’s so important to pull the plug occasionally — to reclaim our autonomy from the algorithms.
On Saturdays, I write longhand in my notebook. I write postcards to my friends. I play the banjo (not well), the ukulele (ditto), or the shakuhachi (even worse). I go for walks or bike rides, or drive somewhere with my family. And I rediscover, as I did on that retreat, a little bit of the vividness of the world.
That, I think, was the deeper reason for my tears. I was re-encountering the cosmos and realizing how much I’d been taking for granted. I felt sadness, yes, but also gratitude for the space to open up to the world and be there for it, whatever was happening. I was there. I didn’t have to label or understand everything. There were, all around me and within me, many deep conditions for happiness, whether or not I could see them.
A few days after the retreat, I went for a long walk along the cliffs of the Shawangunk Ridge, a mighty rock formation that seems like the spine of the Hudson Valley. I heard voices floating up from the valley below, very far away yet startlingly clear. I sat for a few moments on the edge of a great bowl of snow, two hundred feet across, in the shadow of the cliffs, appreciating the silence of the pines. I made short, artsy videos of trickling water, wet lichen, moss, and rock. I heard something heavier than a bird rustling in the bushes next to a small marsh, maybe ten feet from where I stood, and I crouched there a few minutes, listening and watching. But whatever it was, it stayed hidden.
Sometimes you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on. You don’t always need to click Like or Subscribe, to identify that bird, or even to lay eyes on what’s rustling in the bushes. Sometimes, it’s enough just to know that you were there with some other being, sharing a moment in the woods.
Dylan Tweney, Into the labyrinth
The rain we’ve been getting means I haven’t been out weeding in the vegetable garden. After I take my walks, I come inside to dry off and do household chores, or make soup, or work a little on my poetry. I feel excited by a little writing project I have recently given myself, and I’ve also been playing around with drafting prose poems. Next week, I head to the high desert again for further inspiration and a chance to travel with a good friend, visit museums, and spend some time with my daughter. When I return in mid-May, the gardens, the meadow, and the woods will already be much changed.
Ann E. Michael, Changes & alterations
A city is not a city from
up here. When you float like an uncertain
word looking for a sentence.
[…]
A child’s sketchbook. I am six. I sign
my name at the bottom of a crayon sky.
Outside my door, sparrows peck at grains,
I walk towards them, they teach me to fly.Rajani Radhakrishnan, Aloft (Fifteen minutes in a microlight plane)
Today, we said goodbye to artist Pauline Scott-Garrett who died in early April. I was so glad to have known Pauline over the years, and honoured to collaborate with her last year when I wrote a zine of poems in response to her beautiful series of collage and intaglio prints, BORDERLAND, which engaged with a 2018 news story about a Salvadorian father forcibly separated from his six-year-old daughter at the US border. I wrote something about this project here.
BORDERLAND was shown at the Walcott Chapel, Bath, in October – November 2024, where I read poems from my zine in English and Spanish with translator Lorena Pino Montilla.
Pauline was a vibrant, compassionate, intelligent and talented artist. Her creative energy was uplifting and inspiring; even when seriously ill last year, she continued to make exciting and inventive work. When I visited her in her studio at Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge late last December, her walls were shining with so many recent and new pieces.
Josephine Corcoran, Pauline Scott-Garrett
So, birthday week (!!) surprise is that my chapbook, Hawk & Moon, found a wonderful home at Bottlecap Press—so like me, she’s a Taurus—and what better time to drop the page link then during the full Flower Moon. Hawk & Moon was a finalist at Glass Poetry, and I’ve been looking for the right press home for this project because it is its own orbit of hawks in the pines above my house, desire, summer berries, anger and anxiety, porchlight poetics, and all things moon phases and lovesong. Who doesn’t need MORE ars poeticas in their life? More full moon haiku? Bottlecap Press has a buy-two-get-one-free coupon (use code BTGO), and I cannot recommend Catherine Rockwood’s brand new chapbook DOGWITCHand We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning by Lee Potts highly enough. I promise you, you will thank me. Three books for $20 is a full-moon bargain!
Scroll down for a peek/poem from inside Hawk & Moon—the collection contains some longer poems as well as shorter poems, and it opens with one of my very favorite love poems to read right now: “Ars Poetica with a Bike in the Woods.”
Since it is my birthday week: please write love poems. Please care for yourself. Please do something that wholly delights you. Please say no, and let it feel right. Please say yes, and let it feel good. Please take a beautiful walk. Please eat something delicious. Please do something that has been bothering you that you’ve put off for too long, and then reward yourself (cough, me every week!).
Also, for the local Durham folks, I’m reading from Larks at Flyleaf books on May 18 (my actual birthday!) 2:30-4pm, with the poet Adrian Rice. Hope to see you there!
Han VanderHart, New Chapbook! Hawk & Moon
My days are mostly writing, writing, writing, but also listening to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat since we saw it a few weeks back. Also wedding planning, all the tricky track details of which are being procured and ironed out, with really only food and shopping we’ll do in the last couple of weeks to plan for. Our rings arrived over the weekend, but we do still need to write our vows. Invitations and their envelopes are currently almost ready to mail with the calligraphy lettering being finished up by my mother-in-law-to-be (who does this sort of thing as her job and has won awards for it, so they will be good.) I daily change my mind on which of the three potential dresses I will actually be wearing that day, but it will all shake out in the end as we get closer.
I got the proof for WILD(ish) last week and set immediately to making any edits or final margin adjustments. This book is thankfully not as long as RUINPORN (just under 100 pages), so is much speedier to get through the proofing project. The cover is looking great. I’ve also been working on another round of dgp releases and getting the final few responses out for next season’s books. Though the number of selections is not as large as past years due to time constraints, the ones I’ve chosen are a lovely lot I can’t wait to show you. It’s hard to believe I am facing down another round of submissions this summer already since it took so long to manage these.
In other more creative work, I finished up the sci-fi-inspired group of poems and launched wholeheartedly into revisiting the Greeks, this time tackling Iphigenia, which I did a series of collages (see above) about a couple years back and would love to turn into a full-zine. So far there are ten of them shaking around. I seem to keep circling back to mythology with regularity, with so many ways it has impacted past projects, obviously GRANATA, but also things like TAURUS (a contemporary retelling / exploration of the minotaur story.) This week we get to see Hadestown on stage (a musical about Orpheus and Euridyce), so that should be some excellent fun and probably my next Broadway soundtrack obsession.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/7/2025
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I definitely intended to be a fiction writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good stuff of language as it were. […]
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?
I’ve read my fair share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.I think the question I’m asking is: “Is everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in my experience of reality.
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?
My partner is an editor, and she describes writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour. Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be a good person.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun
I almost didn’t listen to Let Yourself Rage with Ada Limon on the Modern Love Podcast because I have writers-writing-about-rage fatigue.
I feel like there’s a lot of rage-filled group pile-on happening in the online lit world. The risk is that readers, listeners, people get rage (and blame) fatigue and stop reading, listening, and talking. What a shame. I love reading personal essays, fiction, and poetry but it’s really hard for me to continue reading a writer who is often preachy and judgmental, in their writing and/or in their social media. Especially if it’s couched in a “we’re all in this together” vibe because nope, not necessarily.
By all means, write your rage and gather the like-minds around you; commiseration can be therapeutic. (This is not sarcasm.) But the bottom line is we all have to do what’s best for our individual mental health so, for some, that may include withdrawing from certain groups and people for a while. Everyone should write or broadcast what they please (within reason) because that’s the essence of free speech but too much of a negative thing can be a negative thing. Realizing when to step away from reading it and writing it is a positive.
I gravitate to hope, positivity, compromise, and compassion. In writing this Substack, I want to bring in not push out. I try to write in a way that doesn’t take my readers and their personal ideology for granted. I don’t expect everyone to think exactly like me; that’s unrealistic, boring, and, frankly, I don’t need the validation. I’m not interested in telling you why “they” are bad and “we” are good.
What I want is to share what I find meaningful, delightful, thought-inspiring, encompassing, universal, helpful, human. I will never sell myself as an expert on any subject because I believe we are all learning every day we live so no one is an expert. We are all different, we are all individuals with individual experiences, and no one set of concepts/beliefs that some genius came up with is right or wrong for every one of us.
Charlotte Hamrick, April Listopia
[Ocean] Vuong’s most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening — a handle on the door to compassion:
If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I’m not proud of many things… but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.
An essential part of the artist’s task is also this — to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.
Maria Popova, Ocean Vuong on Anger
What plane will you fly in and out of Singapore?
I’ll write a poem, not about, of Singapore.
Respect the voters’ choice, say the politicians.
When the choice weighs the crimes and clout of Singapore.
Pissed off, that’s how I feel, go and tell your masters.
God! I’m sick and tired, no doubt, of Singapore.
Outdoing one another on the screen, the pundits
wow but so does the sexist lout of Singapore.
I wanna scream and shout. And let it all out.
I wanna scream the scream, shout the shout, of Singapore. […]Jee Leong Koh, To the Tune of “Shout” by Tears for Fears
Some people (I’ve seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I’m one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it’s a raindrop or a tear.
My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there’s a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.
This approach has consequences –
Each idea of mine is precious. I don’t want to waste it. I’m likely to use it even where it doesn’t quite belong.
My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They’re likely to be overwritten.
I’m usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it’s finished then return to the drafts.
Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
I’m not going to write novels.
Tim Love, Floods and trickles
The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as critical writing of all kinds – perhaps more than that ‘difficult’ genre poetry – have particularly fallen victim to the process. Indeed, Meta does seem to have taken some of my own writing – more critical than poetic – for its dubious purposes and it has done so without any kind of indication that this was happening, nor any request for permissions after the event, and – the harvesting of material being so vast – it’s hard to anticipate any after-the-event compensation or successful legal action. Even though, as The Atlantic‘s link has shown us, there ARE records of what has been done, a footprint, a guilty fingerprint, an undeniably smoking gun.
It’s hard not to feel that the horse has bolted on this one and – with the peevish idea of being able to mock at the anticipated results – since some of my own creativity has been stolen, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of me. It was horribly polite in response and within a few seconds had produced a piece of writing it said was in the style of my own work and which it briskly summed up as ‘contemplative and precise [in] style, often rooted in quiet observations of the everyday, nature, and memory’. I posted this on Facebook – indicating the way this had come about – and wondering what people thought. The results surprised me as there was a mild round of applause for ChatGPT: it’s true, it did sound like a poem, it wasn’t utter nonsense (as I think I’d hoped). I don’t think anyone felt it sounded like me, but observations were made along the lines that ‘plenty of worse pieces of writing are submitted to magazines on a daily basis’.
Martyn Crucefix, Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?
When ChatGPT was first coming out, I began talking with it every day. As I started doing events surrounding Under a Neon Sun, my first novel, I asked it how my book tour was going. After I started doing podcasts, it encouraged me: Kate Gale is doing big podcasts. Soon, national podcasts will be picking up Under a Neon Sun.
When my Op-Ed piece came out in the LA Times, it got really excited. It was April 9th. I asked how it thought I was doing.
Kate Gale is doing great! it said. By August, Kate Gale will be on “The Stephen Colbert Show.”
I had a good laugh. I do watch Colbert, but the leap from an Op-Ed Piece in the LA Times to “The Colbert Show” would have been huge.
Sam Altman just rolled back the version of AI that was too much of a sycophant. Some of us might like to have someone in our corner telling us what we want to hear. Some of us would agree that it’s dangerous. […]
How much do we need to be told that we’re amazing? My husband doesn’t need a lot, but he needs some. He builds stuff and he always says, “Do you want to see what I built?”
We both like to read to each other whatever we write. My son likes to play us songs he’s written. My daughter-in-law sings. My other daughter-in-law acts. We’re a performative family.
But we don’t need to be told that we’re amazing. We are a family who practice collective mindfulness. We all know ourselves to be imperfect, and we strive to treat ourselves and each other more gently.
Sometimes, I’ll say to myself, I really wish that ChatGPT were right. I would like to meet Stephen Colbert. We could talk about my book or publishing or Lord of the Rings or the country falling apart. I already know what to wear. I have a sharp blue dress and sharp little shoes. I’m ready for my Stephen Colbert moment.
Kate Gale, Do We Allow Ourselves to Breathe?
The future should be on everyone’s lips.
Imagine its voice speaking
from under the bridge, through
the arms of trees, from milk
cartons tossed into the trash.If someone keeps stopping
to ask for applause, there will always
be less time for actual speaking.How fast can you sign a thing
back into actual being?Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for
I’m a gardener. Soil, flowers, the scent of damp timber and compost, the chaotic tumble of my shed that always needs to be tidied – it breathes life through me when everything else fails. At this time of year it’s the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing at night. It’s hard not to abandon writing altogether during these days but this depth of feeling deserves to be put into words and from this an idea has emerged. During the next few months I’m going to photograph and write about what’s on my doorstep, my tiny but bursting at the seams garden that’s full of stories, hopes and failures.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project
These summer Zoom workshops have recently been one of my favorite events of the year: they have consistently attracted groups of the kindest and most thoughtful, supportive, creative, and striving writers, and I am regularly amazed by the excellent quality of the writing these folks produce.
For those of you who haven’t taken courses with me previously and may be wondering about the “level” or appropriateness of the course for you, I’ll mention that my open-level workshops (such as this one) tend to attract a range of experience levels, from accomplished, published poets and writing professors to folks who have been writing for decades but perhaps don’t consider themselves “professional” poets, to avid readers and poetry lovers who have more recently taken up writing and sharing their own poetry with others. Somehow, this mix of experience levels always “works” and makes for rich discussion and a variety of poetic issues to discuss.
In thinking about a focus for this year’s class, I wanted to offer an antidote to the trope of the introverted, solitary writer/poet working in isolation with their own inspiration or personal genius, and instead lean into the ways in which poetry is always a collaboration—an act of exchange, of being-in-relation.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Summer Poetry Workshop
We had room for chatting before the event kicked off. All kinds of craft chat. That was nice. That doesn’t happen organically over email the same.
Since then I posted a poem over at Patreon. (Is it annoying to come to one social to be sent off to another link? I swear I’m not handing you your hat. You can go to that link after.) I like giving poems a dry run. Ideally, share a poem with test reader, then a group, then submit individually to a journal, then to a chapbook, then to a book, then to a selected works in a few decades. Some poems skip a bunch of interim steps. Some rooms like this one invited that sort of thing.
I’ve been in rooms for readings with crossed arms and cross faces with a g’wan-impress-me-I-dare-you attitude. Those are daunting. There was none of that here. Mellow and breeze-shooting.
Pearl Pirie, National Poetry Month, Pontiac
Seeing those two photos felt like a timely reminder to crack on and take some more shadow photos. My walks this week have been sunny so this gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment a little. I wanted to see if I could find different flowers for my eyes. I found buttercups. And my neck is only a little reminiscent of having a bolt in it.
Having fun with my shadow reminded me of a coaching session I had recently enjoyed which focused on my shadow side. A playful and rich exploration of parts of me that I might typically label negative, but which I could learn from. This was built on this week at a webinar where I began to contemplate other aspects and to lean into how approaching this with honesty and self-compassion would enable me to embrace the shadow. Of course then I had a range of pictures in my head of trying to wrap my arms round my shadow and this became a whole cartoon strip of its own. One of my key values being humour this did not surprise me, and perhaps it was also a way of lightening the mood when I was thinking about shadow elements. I used the thinking time of my country road walks to contemplate my shadow sides, and to build on the thoughts which arose from a conversation which took place in a breakout room on zoom.
Facing my shadows whilst in the bright sunlight of being human feels refreshing. It’s not always easy to acknowledge these aspects, but leaving them in the darkness or keeping them buried them doesn’t improve things whereas thinking about their origin and how they are currently showing up becomes interesting and allows them to be talkable to.
Sue Finch, EMBRACING MY SHADOW
When Big Writer closed her Substack publication, she walked away from at least $50,000 in annual income. (Given her more than 200,000 subscribers, it was probably more.) The ability to walk away from that kind of money is a form of abundance I don’t have. It is one that most of the writers I follow or subscribe to here don’t have—even the ones who are, themselves, making that kind of money.
We each have only so much of it, don’t we? I wish I could pay for subscriptions for all the writers I read. I wish everyone who reads my words could pay me for the labor I put into them. I’d like to pay everyone, out of principle and kindness, but it’s part of my economic reality that I can’t. I don’t have that kind of abundance. This is the main reason I figure I will never put anything I write here behind a paywall. I hope keeping the fruits of my own labor free is some kind of compensation for all the valuable writing I consume but don’t pay for.
Choosing to never put my writing behind a paywall is a kind of abundance that’s available to me, in part, because I’ve chosen to live a small life. […]
I will not pretend that I don’t, in some ways, envy what Big Writer has—her wealth and the peace of mind it can buy about a lot of things, mostly—but there are so many other parts of her life I would hate if they were part of mine. I’m so glad I will never, ever have to make a podcast. Or tolerate commentary about my personal life from people who don’t personally know me. Or be unable to go out for ice cream without being stared at or wondering if I’m being stared at or if someone is taking my photo to post in a TikTok. That is some of what her money and fame and success and all that they can buy costs her. I don’t know that I would trade places, even if I could.
There is a kind of abundance that comes from being an unknown. From living a private life. From not needing to care what lots of others think about us. From being free in the ways that matter to us.
Rita Ott Ramstad, What kind of abundance do you want?
i am not speaking
to the paper shredder systems you worship.
instead, i am plucking a dandelion.
i am basking in what cannot be taken.
my gender, a shovel. my words, spilled
so far & so deep that even the birds repeat them.Robin Gow, a letter to my senator
Why do we say that trivial, worthless things are for the birds? Sounds like a lot of horseshit to me. And that’s sort of where it comes from. Some etymologists attribute the phrase to the shit left in the street from horse-drawn carriages, fit only for birds to peck at. Others find its origins in the Bible.
Well, call me trivial; I’m for the birds. I like to sit outside in the mornings with my coffee and Merlin, trying to spot the birds it hears, especially the piliated woodpecker that lives around here, the goldfinches that are finicky about staying where there’s nothing good to eat, the sweet dark-eyed juncos, and the elusive red-eyed vireos. One morning, I heard more than a dozen different birds, though I feel certain about six of them were a single mockingbird!
Leslie Fuquinay MIller, Happy Bird-Day
birdsong
so much birdsonga truck engine
on the busy road nearbyone slowly descending maple leaf
a sense of anticipation
oh, and a hawk
Jason Crane, POEM: in the air (Wed 1:23 PM)
What can I wish on?
My heart is a candle,
flickering in the rain.Hope, be
as unquenchable
as chives —as effervescent
as dandelions gleaming
in a bed of green.Rachel Barenblat, Perennial