Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 20
grief and blossoms, poems about frogs, purposeful loafing, the crosshairs of the present, 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: grief and blossoms, poems about frogs, purposeful loafing, the crosshairs of the present, and much more. Enjoy.
I’ve been thinking about how this feels like the first book in a while that isn’t, specifically or more generally, about grief, even though it swims around us and within us every time we open a news page or or scroll on our phones. I feel those poems are coming, but I don’t know what they look like yet, but here, in this new book, there is a certain feral energy I am feeling now. The first book that felt leaden with grief was FEED, my first self-publishing adventure in 2021, that contained a lot of poems about mothers in the wake of losing my own. COLLAPSOLOGIES, which followed in 2023, was more about societal grief, for covid, for our (woefully innacurate) view of humanity and capitalism, for the things and people lost to all of these. While GRANATA was less so, RUINPORN was about rebuilding and loss in general–for people, for relationships, for homes, and for ways of being and existing in the creative world that had to be shed to move forward.
Kristy Bowen, notes on wild(ish)
pencil stub
the boat that set out
never returnedfor dylan thomas
Jim Young [no title]
Here are some photos from our recent exhibition celebrating Somerset’s papermaking heritage. [images]
Each of us hand-wrote or hand-printed, instead of an ‘artist’s statement’, ten words and our name on a piece of Wookey Hole Mill handmade paper. These were pegged on a washing line above the display of bookworks made in response to ten other words we had each anonymously contributed: soar, bold, flow, dark, fallen, liminal, patch, divergence, round, and gateway. Judy Warbey’s zigzag book on pale blue Wookey Hole paper, Murmuration, includes all ten words in her description of a flock of starlings. Kari Furre’s book on jute Wookey Hole paper literally performs each word with astonishing virtuosity.
One long wall was dedicated to blue books. […]
My last photo was taken on the last day, when we had 80 visitors and significant sales. Almost without exception our visitors spent a long time engaging with the work and really taking an interest. Though tiring, it was immensely rewarding to be stewarding for five days in a row. Through the big bay window is a view of Wells Cathedral.
I will end with a selection of verses from The Soul as a Bird, my erasure of the Psalms. I have made a PDF of the text and foreword, with notes and some photos. It is available free on request. Email me at barleybooks(at)hotmail(dot)co(dot)uk. […]
CXVIII
princes
like bees
are extinctCXLVI
praise the child
defend the upside down generationCXLVII
call them by name
cattle and ravens
make peaceAma Bolton, On Paper
I have a special fondness for poems about frogs, ever since reading Kobayashi Issa, who wrote hundreds of frog haiku, many of which can be found amongst David Lanoue’s wonderful archive of over 13,000 translations. The opening tercet of [Elizabeth] Jaeger’s ‘Croak’ also has a distinctly haiku feel to it;
When it darkens and rains
I am not anything human:
I am a frog.I have written a few poems about frogs myself. This is an old haiku from 2012 inspired by the work of Issa and Bonchō;
twilight frog it jumps i jump
And another from 2016;
moon frog moon frog
foreverAnd something new, written in late-2024, “after” Jaeger;
the frog i try becoming croaks
Dick Whyte, Elizabeth Jaeger – Croak (1918)
It was July of 2020, early in the pandemic, when I made up a form in homage to the classic gardening book, Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. The square-foot poem starts as a wordpool crammed into a small square—a 3 x 3 inch post-it note, for example. “Small, non-scary yellow squares filled with words seem almost playful, and are just as good at turning into sentences, stanzas and paragraphs as fully-filled sheets of paper,” I wrote back in 2020, and I still write square-foot poetry often. Many of my poems started out as little squares filled with words. If you feel like doodling, this is a good way to make poems out of your scribbles.
Erica Goss, Five Poetry Forms You May Not Have Heard About
fog, foge, fouge : (n) Grass or fodder left in the field during winter. SND
(v) Scottish. To pack or cover (a wall, roof, etc.) with moss. OED
Recently I visited a friend up in Aberdeenshire. She is an artist, a craftswoman and a natural gardener; the grounds of her house are full of interesting things. This time she took me off to the far corner where there are very old conifers. A recent storm had brought down one of the oldest; she’d used the timber, and the damp crater the root bowl had created, to build a fog house.
My first thought was that this was some Calvinist version of the summer house – where we sit all afternoon, freezing our brains out, waiting for the haar to lift. But no. The fog house, a popular feature of grand gardens in Scotland in the 19th century, is a round bothy made of any handy wood or stone and thatched and lined with turf and moss – as if it has grown out of the ground. Her husband had sawed part of the trunk into sections and up-ended these to create a row of stools, big and small, along the back wall. We sat and looked out of the door, smelling the new earth, listening to the wind and the birds in the trees while our heads filled with new, silvery air.
In In Praise of Shadows, Junichirō Tanizaki rejoices in the natural darkness of traditional Japanese houses – the unlit picture alcove, the sliding paper screen with its bamboo frame, the toilet at the end of a corridor, open to the trees. Sometimes there are long narrow windows at floor level: “there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth”. I love this idea of a room constructed to hold the sounds of the earth: wind soughts, the stirring and settling of small creatures, the quick whine of an insect ….
Lesley Harrison, THE FOG HOUSE
I have things I want to ask the monsoon
when it hits the west coast in June. It has
a comforting regularity, even in these
times. See, that’s what we do in the
summer, bury questions in the earth so
they will flower after the first rain.[…]
Somewhere in the jungle, peacocks will
spread their wings to welcome the rain –
nature needs the whole spectrum of
colours to paint hope. What about, and this
I want to talk about face to face, over
many cups of tea, why break ritual over
rhetoric? What about Bulwer-Lytton and
the pen being mightier than the sword?
Now that AI writes and AI fights, who
draws first blood? Who has the last word?
What is the antithesis of yet another poem?Rajani Radhakrishnan, Questions I want to ask the monsoon
Once again, my mathematician-poet-friend Sarah Glaz has carefully organized a math-poetry reading — this one to be held at the upcoming Bridges Math-Arts Conference, July 14-18, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Details concerning the exact time and location for the reading, scheduled for Thursday, July 17, will be announced here at this link.
Below I offer a sampling from the poets who will be reading at Eindhoven — a CENTO that I have built by inclusion of a phrase from a poem by each of the poets registered for participation in Bridges 2025. (Information about the poets is found here at this website maintained by Sarah Glaz._
WE CELEBRATE MATHEMATICS
The power of a theorem lies
with a diagram of clockwise arrows
hovering high over the town,
while infinite time is waiting
and triple sixes strive
in-between our beginnings and ends.Proof by example is extraordinary.
In the beginning, all is null,
Quaternions trampled on our norms,
spiroplots and tritangentless knots
spiraling toward the undefined.If my garden of numbers grows
Into systems richer than can be described,
Space cannot reduce the magnitude of errors.
The oldest puzzle ever told
defines the notion of time.The lines of the poem above have been selected — in order — from poems by these BRIDGES poets: Sarah Glaz, Madhur Anand, Marian Christie, Carol Dorf, Anthony Etherin, Susan Gerofsky, Lisa Lajeunesse, Dan May, Iggy McGovern, Doug Norton, Pedro Poitevin, Eveline Pye, Stephanie Strickland, Racheli Yovel, Kate Jones, Susana Sulic.
Information about these poets and about poetry at the BRIDGES Conference may be found at this website maintained by Sarah Glaz.
JoAnne Growney, 2025 BRIDGES–mid-July in Eindhoven, Netherlands
The final card in the spread was one I dislike the look of, with its flame-haired angel blowing a trumpet over naked gray people rising from their graves. (If there is a Rapture, I don’t expect to be one of the chosen.) But surrounded by other tarot cards about choices, Judgement suggests I’m on the right path.
It also speaks to an issue I’ve been reflecting on: the relation of my hyper work ethic to a childhood absorbing criticism from my deeply unhappy parents. What a moment for Judgement to come to the emotional fore, in this third month of a book launch, a celebratory time but also a rollercoaster of ups and downs: feeling elated when the room is full and embarrassed when it’s empty; noticing how and where the baby book gets reviewed; spending so much effort in promotion, worried that you’re being tedious and reminding yourself you owe the book this much. The centrality of criticism to my life–I AM a literary critic who spends a lot of time grading, secretly reviewing others’ files and mss, and reading for Shenandoah–means that the judgement reflex is extra hard to let go of. I see it as valuable, sometimes. I know I look “successful,” career-wise, in part because I’ve spent decades self-criticizing to head off criticism from others. It’s especially hard to root out a stubborn lifelong habit when you imagine it has some benefits.
I’m glad I pledged myself full effort in this book launch. No regrets. But I know it would be easier on mind and body if I could manage not to sweat the misfires and slights. Is it possible to deal myself better cards?
Lesley Wheeler, The Judgement Card
[W]hile I am happy to walk around my yard, woods, and neighborhood for 30-40 minutes almost daily, I can’t say I do it at a brisk pace. I get distracted and stop to look at things. Bugs. Worms. Toads. Birds. Flowers. New leaves. Nests. Spiderwebs… I loaf along, as Whitman claimed to do. Some days I start out with good intentions to keep up a lively pace, maybe even to the point where I can feel my heart rate going up. And then–was that a redtail hawk overhead? Did I hear an ovenbird? Oooh, the Solomon’s-seal is in bloom! […]
At my place, it’s feeder creeks I hear and think I may visit, not ponds, but I identify with the mood of this poem [“Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks” by Mary Oliver]. Walks offer me that joy, that unfurling of leaves, ferns, everything…time to reflect and feel gratitude. If I don’t do quite as well by my heart and muscles as I ought to, maybe my psyche or soul will compensate. If I loaf, it’s a purposeful, sweet loafing, the kind of activity that poets tend to do; it gives me energy of a non-physical sort. (And I think Mr. Whitman would concur.)
Ann E. Michael, Not a brisk pace
My time is being stolen and who knows anymore what is behind the inability of companies, retailers, local authorities, who take my money happily and with so many rules attached to how I must behave, but who have invented mazes, walls, invisible lazers, to keep me on hold, at bay, without speech, without the right to speak, without a person to speak to, without reason, without normal language, normal sentences, without engagement, without empathy. And if it’s not hard enough as a single human being, add to me another human who can’t do it for themselves. And then more than double the time, obviously, because they have even more needs than me and so add in the hospital, doctor, pharmacy time, the shopping, dealing with the council, the managing personal assistants time, the overgrown garden and trees time, the leaking pipe time. And whether it’s the gas company or the GP the language is the same, the hold time is the same, and sometimes I wonder how anyone keeps their cool which is why there are so many notices in windows about kindness and respect and of course everyone should be treated with kindness and respect, but me too, and those of us, all of us, on the other end of the line, email, on hold constantly, on hold, being given endless excuses, or not, on hold for an answer that is not coming but is promised anyway to get me off the line because I no longer have a right to reply, a right to an answer, a right even to ask why is this happening.
Jackie Wills, Time and its manifesto
Andrew Taylor’s There’s Everything to Play For is intended as a companion to the two-volume [Peter] Finch Collected Poems edited by Taylor and reviewed by me at the time. As such, the book is structured chronologically, with Taylor setting the work as it was published in a context of what Finch was doing and reading, who he was talking to and collaborating with, and what was happening in his own life and the wider world of writing at the time. […]
At the heart of all this is the question of Welshness, and of Finch’s place on a kind of margin. ‘A Welsh Wordscape’ articulates part of this by playing on both an English view of Wales and a kind of Anglo-Welsh poetic piety that serves to reinforce the stereotypes. It’s also present in the making of visual texts grounded in the Welsh language as an act of deviance against both Welsh parochialism and English condescension.
There was something of a shift in 1997, when the referendum on Welsh devolution was passed. Taylor quotes an email from Finch where he writes:
the establishment of A Welsh Assembly … marked a sea change in how many of us began to feel about our country…. Being a Welsh writer began to take on a new and considerably less down-trodden meaning.
Some of this shift is reflected in the psychogeographic writing in the Real Cardiff series of books where Finch takes slow looks at the city and its history.
Nevertheless, Taylor notes the paucity of critical work on Finch, which, he says, ‘can, in part, be put down to the outside nature of Finch being from Wales, and partly down to the British underground not knowing where to place him.’ As recently as 2022, Greg Thomas’s excellent study Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland explicitly omits Finch based on that geographical subtitle. The one major exception is Angel Exhaust 21, a special Welsh issue which includes a good deal of material on Finch, including Nerys Williams’ invaluable ‘Peter Finch: Make it New in Wales’. But this is the exception, not the rule.
Billy Mills, There’s Everything to Play For: The Poetry of Peter Finch by Andrew Taylor: A Review
the rust
on my poems
timelines
crack and overflow
with grief and blossoms*
I combine haiku and tanka with prose without thinking, because I don’t want to change the flow of my writing. Does the water ask where to, and how?
Kati Mohr, Summerheart
In the arts, friendships often develop from sharing a space in a journal, and recognizing a kindred or comrade in their publications or performances. ‘Transavanguardist’ artist Francesco Clemente met composer Morton Feldman through a mutual —Francesco Pellizzi — attached to a journal — Anthropology and Aesthetic.
Feldman dedicated his piano piece, Palais de Mari (1986), to Clemente. Appropriately, the piece made its debut at a intimate concert in Clemente’s studio. […]
An oil-on-linen painting by Clemente, “For Morton Feldman,” crosses paths with the time-signatures that mark duration, unfolding a way to think with the complexity that friendship occupies in the imaginary.
The subjects of Clemente’s image are two compositions: two texts delivered to paper, each leaving their own shadows on the pinkish-white background.
The crumpled music notation sits next to the crumpled star chart (one can discern the edge of Aries in the upper right corner).
Musical staves and constellations: two cosmologies, two ways of thinking and seeing.
Paper and paper: the flesh of two trees rendered as pulp.
Music and stars: paired infinities.
Linear and constellating: the binary that Critical Theory exposed (and why we cannot forget Walter Benjamin).
Aaron Schuster’s fantastic sidereal excavation, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, has been in my mind this week. At one point, Aaron says that “the construction of a work of potential philosophy takes its cue from the skewed way the mind works, how its functioning is undisturbed by a wayward drift.” In this way, the potential (or perhaps even projected) “starts from its own lack, its unsystemacity.”
How long should the resonance last?
I think Feldman presents this question as an opportunity to any pianist who performs his Palais. The rests resist the call of consistency and perfect repetition. Variance emerges within the rests, themselves, creating slight drifts in the duration of each. We are always ‘thinking-through’ the resonances and shadows of others. In a sense, resonances create their own rhythm: the possible may be forsaken for the impossibility that drove that Kafka’s epistemic dread. There is no way out of the present that isn’t a way of playing with the unpredictable and developing in relation to it.
Alina Stefanescu, In the airs.
The truth lies in the cracks of the wall,
the crosshairs of the present; but we are blind
before we’ve even torn out our eyes. Or we push,with all earnestness, against the idea of
a pre-ordained fate. If fate is real and we
have no choice, we want to feel that we at leastdared raise a voice, shake a fist against time’s
imperium. O, there’s no mistaking its scythe—
Because it sweeps close, we too shall sitand read to each other, eat and drink
around the table with our friends, until
the heart stops as if of its own accord.~ In memoriam, Delfin L. Tolentino, Jr. (1950-2025)
Luisa A. Igloria, Close Reading
The figure I thought about most while I was in Istanbul was John Chrysostom. ‘Chrysostom’ means ‘Golden Mouth’ in Greek, and John was a priest in Antioch, his home city, before the fame of his preaching saw him summoned to be archbishop of Constantinople in 397. Before long, he had offended the empress Eudoxia and got himself exiled. He died, while traveling to a still more distant exile, just a few years later in 407. And, as his name suggests, he wrote beautiful Greek. […]
I’d never visited Turkey before and I found it very moving to see Hagia Sophia, where Chrysostom preached, as well as so many other early church figures whose works I have been poring over for this annotation.
Touched by this experience, I have been rereading some Chrysostom to enjoy the lovely clarity of his Greek. But I also wondered whether there were any English poems about him. The only one I’ve been able to find — do write if you can think of others — is this poem by Richard Wilbur, which I found rather striking and provocative. It’s called simply ‘John Chrysostom’, and it’s from his 1956 collection Things of this World:
He who had gone a beast
Down on his knees and hands
Remembering lust and murder
Felt now a gust of grace,
Lifted his burnished face
From the psalter of the sands
And found his thoughts in order
And cleared his throat at last.What they heard was a voice
That spoke what they could learn
From any gelded priest,
Yet rang like a great choir,
He having taught hell’s fire
A singing way to burn,
And borrowed of some dumb beast
The wildness to rejoice.I’m a big admirer of Wilbur’s verse translations, which seem to me some of the very best translations of poetry into English of the 20th century. I don’t know his original poetry as well. This, I think it’s fair to say, is quite an arresting poem and it contains one indisputably excellent phrase (“the psalter of the sands”) — though even this very good line struck me as oddly vague. The desert saints and monks were of great importance in the fourth century church, and Chrysostom had himself spent several formative years as a hermit in the mountains near Antioch. (Including, apparently, two full years memorising the Bible without lying down, which unsurprisingly caused permanent damage to his health.) But the mountains around Antioch — now in southern Turkey — are not the desert. So what does it mean to say that Chrysostom lifted his face from the “psalter of the sands”? And why is his face “burnished” (which suggests the sun, but he spent years in a cave). Possibly an allusion to the gilded appearance of Byzantine mosaics?
Victoria Moul, Richard Wilbur’s “John Chrysostom”
Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi is both scholarly and highly accessible: it offers vivid narrative, clear accounts of changing cultural contexts, clear explanations of complex ideas and a light touch in using textual detail to illuminate broad points. Illustrating the richness of Dante’s work by showing how differently it’s been read in different periods and what diverse inspirations artists have found within it, the author is able to zoom in on particular episodes and passages, giving enough context for them to be understood in themselves without demanding prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Illuminating both the Commedia itself and the writers it has influenced, Luzzi’s ideas will interest both people who already know Dante and lovers of these other writers. Many of the latter, I suspect, will be drawn into reading Dante for themselves.
There’s something of a shifting balance between the two kinds of appeal. In terms of their basic subject matter, chapters 1 – 4 will mean most to people who already have at least some interest in the Commedia, whether from a literary or historical point of view. However, Luzzi’s gift for seeing facts and situations in terms of their concrete meaning for those involved adds a human depth that more narrowly academic studies can miss. So does the agility with which he moves among ideas and makes connections between them. For example, Chapter 1 – ‘Inventing “Italian” Literature’ – revolves round well-established ideas about Dante’s immediate impact and about how the vastness of his achievement influenced the subsequent development of the Italian language. However, I can’t remember an equally vivid presentation of the novelty and scale of ambition involved in his use of the vernacular when ‘Basically, he sought to forge, ex nihilo, a literary tradition [of vernacular love poetry] in an “Italian” tongue that did not yet exist’, and wrote his epic of unprecedentedly universalist scope in the Tuscan dialect rather than the Latin that would have made his work accessible throughout Europe. The decision to do this limited his contemporary readership even within Italy. In a deft application of anecdote, Luzzi tells us that ‘as late as the nineteenth century, Milanese nobles traveling to Sicily were mistaken for Englishmen, so incomprehensible was their dialect to locals’. Against such a cost, though, Luzzi sets the poetic and humane value Dante found in what he called the ‘lingua materna’: ‘In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante developed his views on the necessity of the vernacular by describing how poets preserve what is lasting and lovely in everyday speech …he knew that no mere scholarly or “dead” language could capture the intimate rhythms, cadences and meanings of everyday speech and, by extension, the resonances and experiences of everyday life.’ Reading this, we feel how Dante’s embrace of the vernacular gave his writing its astonishingly concrete, specific power of dramatic evocation. At the same time, I think, we feel how crucial it was to the power and poignancy of his religious vision that it brought together these evocations of concrete, local and ephemeral earthly life and the eternity such life confronts.
Amid the silica
sea glass
on its way back
from bottle
to being grains on a beachTowards the end
of this transformation
I hold it in my hand
and admire the ocean’s lapidaryPaul Tobin, SEA GLASS
When I think about my childhood of the dark spaces and stars I feel sad for those people who have never known that: the absolute dark of a country lane, the freeing feeling of being unobserved, unseen, free to exist in the blackness. I can’t help but feel the eradication of all dark by the power of human light isn’t always a good thing, that there should be places where we can’t quite see, places where we can’t always tell what is real and what is not. This is what to is to be human.
Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Star Carr at Night
For me, poems are like cats—they appear mysteriously and unannounced. I grew up with cats, and my wife and I are currently on our third and fourth cats, beautiful sisters, and I pay close attention to feline quidditas. Likewise, I pay attention when I feel a poem stirring in me: of course I try to coax it into being, but sometimes I have to let it emerge on its own terms and in its own good time. That being said . . . I’ve written poems in one sitting, and I have poems that have sat silently inside me for years, even decades, before they start to show themselves. […]
Robert Frost purportedly said: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.” In our politically, socially, and culturally fraught day and age the boundary line between grief and grievance seems not only blurry but perhaps fluid. But I worry that some writers (and readers) give too much credit to poetry’s capacity to redress the wrongs of the world. Airing grievances under the guise of poetry may get the blood boiling, but I subscribe to Zbigniew Herbert’s position: “It is vanity to think one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” […]
Perhaps this rationalizes my slow process of writing and my modest output, but I think often of the advice Czesław Miłosz proffers in a poem titled “Ars Poetica?” that dates to 1968: “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments.”
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Thomas O’Grady [rob mclennan]
on a chair
the cat is curled
like a commadeep in sleep
he makes a soundand one foot twitches
Bill Waters, 3 cherita
The contest model has always irked me in general, not least because of a built in bias I started sensing some time ago that was documented by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman in their article “Literature’s Vexed Democratization,” that awards an overwhelming number of career-making literary prizes to MFA-holders, with fully half of those winners having graduated from one of four schools: Columbia University, New York University, University of California in Irvine, and the University of Iowa. First-book poetry prizes, though, bother me for a different reason as well: the way they fetishize the first book. I read an essay a long time ago in which the writer, I think it was Eavan Boland, talked about what is lost when first books are expected to be perfect enough, whatever that might mean, to win contests or pass muster as MFA theses. She missed, she said, how uneven first books used to be (in whatever time frame she was referencing), the pleasure of watching from poem to poem as the poet tried different things, some of which would pan out and some of which would not. I don’t know if this is what I remember from the essay or if this is my own framing, but it seemed to me that Boland was talking about a level of vulnerable authenticity, or maybe authentic vulnerability, that the polish required to win a contest or pass muster as a thesis tends to smooth over. It’s an interesting point, but I wish I had the essay so I could say more about it. (If anyone reading this knows the essay I’m talking about, please let me know.)
§§§
I’ve never read Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, but, back when I was first learning how to be a poet, it was not uncommon to hear poets talk about poetry as being part of “the gift economy.” A poem, this way of thinking went—if I remember correctly—should be thought of not as a commodity, but as a gift given, freely given, with no strings attached, by the poet to the community. I really liked that way of thinking about the poems I was making, though I also remember wondering how that framework made room for the fact that a book of poetry was a commodity by definition. When I think now about this way of seeing poetry and what it means to be a poet, though, what strikes me is how at odds it is with the professionalization of creative writing that the proliferation of MFA programs has brought about. While I have my own opinion about that, I mean it here as a description, not a criticism. In an interview that I cannot find, Patricia Spears Jones talked about how relatively new it is to hear poets talk about and work at “having a career” as a poet and mean something that is different only in degree, not kind, from what it means, for example, to have a career as a teacher or a lawyer. I wish I could remember exactly what Jones said, because it was far more eloquent than how I am going to paraphrase her here: that she never thought of herself as having a career as a poet, she just made poems. I often wonder—and this has nothing to do with the quality of the poems that get written—what we have lost with the waning of that perspective.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #40
Alt text describes this week’s photo as a person holding books in front of a bush. This makes me laugh because it is exactly what it is, but it is also me with my three books which have been accepted into The Poetry Library at The Southbank Centre in London. I sent the books for consideration before Christmas last year and remember thinking it was good mission to complete before the end of 2024. This week I saw an email in my inbox relating to this and did my ‘I need to read this through half-closed eyes in case it’s not the news I want to see’ trick! Fortunately I could unsquint my eyes to read the words again when I saw that it was an email saying the books would be included in the collection there. I felt proud and marked the moment by heading out into the garden with the books for a photo. It is good to mark moments.
Sue Finch, POET FEELING PROUD
I’ve spent some time with Centaurea Montana this morning, taking photographs, enjoying its geometric shape, the bulbous sack at the base of its style. It feels resilient. The otherworldly petals are flexible and move with ease in the wind. The filament is tough to the touch almost, but not quite, a spike. This is a plant that would cope with a mountainside. Beyond this resilience, this stoicism, is Centaurea Montana’s mesmerising hue. Not quite purple, not quite blue – it hovers in between, changing as light shifts through shadows, peers between buildings and trees. […]
This blue that tolerates
confinement, scant nourishment, drought.
This blue that reminds me
how little I knew you. This blue
that was used to treat battle wounds.
This blue, this mountain lily, that spreads,
flourishes, becomes abundant, if it finds itself free.Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project – Centaurea Montana
Do you listen to music while you write? Or as a prelude? […]
Probably my most listened to writing music in the past is the Anonymous 4 — 11, 0000 Virgins Chants. A bit cliche maybe to listen to chants but this album is embedded in my first few books for sure.
Originally I was going to deep dive into Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt for this post but that’s for another time perhaps. I think a lot of people listen to Erik Satie as well. I often have Stephen Drury’s version of In a Landscape by John Cage in my rotation.
I know as soon as I publish this post I’ll think of 12 other pieces of music I’ve written to / with. But what I know is that if you use the same music for a piece of writing it does something to your brain — fast tracking you to the space of your work.
Shawna Lemay, Writing Music
There are many things to explain why I like this poem…The fact I’m about to go and try a new coffee shop near us (once Flo gets out of bed), the fact that it makes me think of the elaborate doughnuts that the coffee shop Flo works in has on display, it makes me think of the almond croissant I buy on Wednesdays when I’m in the office, and the fact that if I think about the past, I know the sort of coffee mentioned here is not what we had. […]
The poem hinges, for me, in the fifth couplet where it becomes something of an inter-dimensional, omni-directional portal (why yes, we are watching Foundation at present, why do you ask?). Then poem becomes, to me, about the weight of expectation of when you were young and looking forward to an exciting world, a “future full of these cakes and alpine vacations”, a future of love filled with wedding cakes (not all love is about weddings, obvs – Christ, does that need saying? Oh well, I’ve said it), but it also becomes about failed expectation, about the coffee being bad in either timescale, and that the present doesn’t marry up to the past expectations of the future…
Not bad for a poem about coffee and cakes. I wonder if there is something in the bitterness of coffee vs the sweetness of cake, and how the bitter tang of now competes with the sweet expectation of youth.Mat Riches, Undercoating the doors of perception
I am currently on a writing retreat at Galloway House Estate, thanks to the kindness and generosity of the poet Marjorie Lotfi. I arrived yesterday in glorious sunshine and am staying till Friday. I think the last time I did a solo writing retreat was probably about 15 years ago in Scotland. That week it rained all week, and the wind blew and I hadn’t brought enough books with me, and I sat around feeling miserable and unable to write.
This time I came with a bag full of books so that I didn’t slip into a dark night of the soul, but I have mostly been reading Marjorie’s books that she kindly left for me, and I have been writing this time. Last week, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to get done this week. I decided what I was most looking forward to was
1) going to the toilet without having to explain I was going to the toilet to my five year old
2) going to the toilet/bath/shower in privacy
3) eating when I wantedIf only the above is achieved I will be happy! But creativity wise, my plan is
1) Finish another draft of my collection
2) Start drafting a short story
3) Read lots of books.Kim Moore, What happens on a writing retreat?
I have had a heavy heart this week with the loss of my friend Martha Silano (I found another picture of her from 2023, at my reading at Open Books—see how she radiates joy?) It is always hard to lose friends, peers, and members of our local community, but this has hit me harder than I expected. It comes on the heels of losing my college roommate, Tara, who was such an amazing force, scientist, and friend. So senseless.
It occurs to me I don’t really have enough coping mechanisms for grief. I did the things that usually cheer me up—thought the weather has been miserable, cold, and rainy for this time of year, spending time outdoors when I can, going to bookstores, watching lightweight subject matter. One day I spent the entire day in bed with the TV on one station, and again I noticed the repetitiveness and lack of clarity in the local news, and almost all the programming, actually. This is pretty unlike me unless I have the flu or my MS is acting up. I’ve been trying to write about Martha as well as reading through an early version of her last book, Terminal Surreal, due out in September. I was moved by how she wrote about her circumstances with precision and a lack of self-pity and a continued joy in the nature and the outdoors.
As seems appropriate, with its teardrop flowers, the wisteria is in bloom, so we went to the Seattle Japanese Garden (who doesn’t feel at least a little better there?) and smelled the wisteria and observed the koi and water lilies, turtles, and I also got to follow the end of a tea ceremony. The rituals of the season—the rain, the blooms, the ducklings—reminds me that the world continues turning when our loved ones die, and when we die, it will continue then, too. Our small contributions—planting a tree, feeding pollinators, or writing a poem—can seem small indeed, but maybe better than the alternative—causing great destruction, which is far too easy to do.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rebecca Solnit and Journalism, Ducklings, Wisteria, and Struggling with Grief
“Everything happens for a reason“ is no comfort to the federal worker who suddenly lost his cancer research job.
“At least you still have…“: useless news for the woman who lost her home in a wildfire.
Meaning can’t always be stuffed into the shoe of human suffering. Gratitude can’t always snuff out pain.
Some feel their lives speed by so fast, they wonder if childhood magic ever existed.
When I was nine, I trapped fireflies in my heart.
The night flicker I experience from time to time reminds me I was once that young.
Rich Ferguson, Night Flicker
Since the Global Poetry Writing Month finished I’ve been keeping up my goal of writing every day. I’m trying to put together a small collection and this has been a good way to fill gaps, though I have no idea what I want to say when I sit down everyday or what is missing within the collection.
This is my current process. I open my journal, write the first word that jumps out at me from whatever I’m reading or looking at. Today the word is pronounced. I don’t know why it caught my eye from the screen, but I just go from there. I may not even use the word as I write, but it feels like an anchor to start with. Then I glance around wherever I am or at what I’m reading, scroll Insta or read a few Substack notes and just scribble down any image, phrase or word that appeals. I have no theme or direction, I am just a collector of scraps and details at this point.
When I have a page or two of notes, I go back and reread them. Sometimes the juxtaposition of phrases together suggests something or they take me in a particular direction. I rewrite phrases together or if nothing sings I go back and write more notes. Some days I get nothing but notes, other times I’m able to string them together into a rough draft or a few lines that I pull into another poem I’m working on. I’m enjoying the unconscious flow of my writing. I do have themes for my collection, my love and aging poems, but sometimes my brain takes me elsewhere. I’ve circled back for a few poems to my eternal themes of finding home and being lost as a choice, maybe they’ll have a place in the collection too.
This has been pretty much my process and how I’ve been able to write about 30 poems in 48 days. They may not all be good, but as I mentioned in another post, I’m currently in love with them because they’re fresh and speaking from where I am right now.
Gerry Stewart, A Collector of Scrap and Details
I don’t have many poems by heart, at least not as many as I’d like. I feel that especially keenly now that I’m a parent. But I do know this:
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief.
“The Trees” always arrives in my head this time of year, when London is lit up with gaudy chestnut candles. Partly, it’s that delayed rhyme, which isn’t as simple as it looks: it’s the same scheme as Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson haunts the whole poem. He’s there in the word “grief”, in the “greeness”, in those long, melancholy vowels.
But it’s the image that’s unforgettable. Like something almost being said is a line which feels like it was always out there, waiting to be found. That’s what buds are like. It is also something only Philip Larkin could’ve written. There is something unnatural about. Buds bloom. Surely, something will be said eventually?
Jeremy Wikeley, Like something almost being said
how strange that nowhere should be nearby :: like the wound in my sip of wine
Grant Hackett [no title]