Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 23
killing words, the task of silence, skies of spit, what the soil has seen, and more
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: killing words, the task of silence, skies of spit, what the soil has seen, and more. Enjoy.
My great-grandparents, my great-uncles and aunts, my many cousins woke up in their graves and dug their way to the surface. It had been so long that even their bullet holes had disappeared. They looked around the green earth—blossoms, unfurling leaves, birds. They looked at the poets.
—After what happened to us, surely writing poetry is impossible now.
—No, poetry continues because of poetry.
They looked at the soldiers.
—Then at least killing is impossible now?
—No, killing continues because of killing.
—And fear?
Then something like love or sorrow passed over their missing faces.
Gary Barwin, Somewhere in Lithuania, my Jewish ancestors consider the Modern World.
I’m Catholic and, today, Sunday 8 June, 2025, it’s Pentecost Sunday, when the first reading at Masses is from the Acts of the Apostles (2 : 1-11) which details the first time the Apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit and are gifted with the ability to be understood by people from different nations, speaking different languages. The Apostles are speaking Galilean but the “devout men from every nation” hear them in their own language, wherever they are from.
How amazing this would be, to be able to communicate to everyone without needing to learn other languages. Although this really would be the demise of university language departments, not to mention French GCSE. But I’ve been thinking not only of different languages today but of different ideas and viewpoints. One reason I’m particularly thinking about this is a poetry reading and Q&A event I went to last Friday by Palestinian American writer and translator Fady Joudah, who read poems from his 2024 book […] published by OutSpoken Press.
Many of the poems share the book’s title, […] which is best explained by the writer on OutSpoken’s website:
“I wrote the bulk of this collection between October and December of 2023. I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”
Therefore, on Friday, during an audience Q&A, it was more than excruciating when one audience member tried to correct Fady Joudah on his comment that the West is largely ignoring a genocide taking place in our time (“…but how can this be the case when me and all of my friends…”) and another wanted to hold him to account for the inaction of the Arab world (“…and what about…”).
I’m sure that both people, both white British, and many in the audience, would say the interjections were ‘well-meant’ and ‘not malicious’ – and I’m sure this is the case – but today I’m wondering if this is enough or is any kind of excuse for the words leaving their mouths. Is it enough to say we support a cause, and even to seemingly actively support a cause by attending events, donating to charities, marching, signing petitions, writing to our political representatives, making art in support – when we are nevertheless prepared to disagree, even gently, when someone, in this case a Palestinian, tells it like it is? Perhaps Jesus might say that what’s missing is the core message of the Gospels – love for our fellow humans. To love and respect someone is to be prepared to step back and listen – it might include the “task of silence” that Fady Joudah speaks about. But it’s clear that silence is hard for a culture used to doing all the talking.
Josephine Corcoran, Not speaking the same language
There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.
I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.
This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.
Chris Hedges, The Last Days of Gaza
For seven minutes, write about an encounter with soil or dirt in which you were reminded of its power. This encounter could be ecstatic, educative, emotive, painful – watching seeds grow, for example, or a painful face-plant on a muddy path. […]
Finally, whilst we might acknowledge soil’s beauty and fascination in poetry and creative writing, it can also be contested, fought over. It can be site of horror, a witness to terrible atrocities: the mud of the Somme; the slave villages unrecorded on maps and present in shards and organic traces; the mass graves and slaughter.
What a Gazan should do during an Israeli air strike
Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.
And it can be witness to acts of kindness, as in Naomi Shihab Nye’s famous Gate A-4 For your final exercise, write for ten minutes about “What has the soil seen”. Let your language be alive; let it find its own way. The earth is witness to horror, and also to life and hope. If you feel able, then allow your language to hold the pain, but in Naomi’s words, in seeds which continue to grow, in the diversity of life forms flourishing beneath your feet, remind yourself that Not everything is lost.
Clare Shaw, Making the Invisible Visible
Cows in blue harnesses attached to helicopters rotate in midair.
They are being airlifted out of the valley because a glacier
has just collapsed on an entire village in the Alps.There is logic to this, but what is the first point in
the syllogism? the last?I wish I could say How funny or How strange or even Words
fail me.In the yard, runways of mud. Evidence of tunneling. I suppose
it makes sense to try to live underground.Luisa A. Igloria, Exits and Entrances
Our weekend was graced with warmer weather, at last, but few could enjoy it. People were advised to stay inside their homes because of the high levels of particulate matter from the wildfires in Manitoba. The air quality index got as high as the 170s here. On Saturday the sunset was apocalyptic — a blurry orange sun burning in a grim, murky sky. This morning the air quality index is down to 97 and the severe alert has been cancelled, but looking out from my north-facing studio window, the low-lying smoke persists even though I can see faint patches of pale blue high above.
American friends in the Northeast also experienced some of this pollution, though not yet to the levels of last summer. I’m always taken aback when people say things to me like, “Yes, we had some of your smoke,” or even, “Thanks a lot, Canada.” Like casually tossed-off racist, anti-feminist, or anti-LGBTQ+ remarks, I experience these nationalistic comments as micro-aggressions. (I’m sure it would be far worse if I lived in Mexico.) Wildfires caused by climate change are happening everywhere, including the US and Europe, mainly originating in huge tracts of northern forest — but no longer confined to those mostly-unpopulated areas, as we’ve seen recently in Los Angeles. This is not “Canadian smoke” – it is our smoke collectively, caused by global behavior and governments’ refusals to legislate fundamental change. Clearly there have to be major changes in forest management, but if you really think about the extent of the boreal and northern forests, you will quickly realize what a daunting task that is. Canada shares in that responsibility, and its own climate record is not good. But shall we start blaming the Arctic and Antarctic for the melting ice and rising sea levels? […]
I’ve come to see the smoky skies as a symbol of a much larger obscurity — the ongoing obscurity of the truth about just about everything, and the accompanying refusal to admit cause and effect. There’s a great desire right now to assign blame for all the ills of our world, and to shift it away from ourselves onto other groups — which conveniently often end up to be the victims themselves. The most egregious and tragic example of this has been the blaming of the Palestinians for the horrific genocide of their own people in Gaza — blame that goes all the way back to 1948 when their land was forcibly taken from them.
Beth Adams, Obscurity
The following words
are no longer permitted:
Accessible. Affirming.
Bias. Cultural differences.
Environmental quality.
Inclusive. Mental health.
Prejudice. Trauma.The new head of FEMA
didn’t know America has
a hurricane sesason, but
I’m sure firing
a fifth of the staff
who launch weather balloons
won’t matter.We are also forbidden
from saying anyone is
underserved or vulnerable.
No person in our nation
is vulnerable anymore.
Immigrants and refugees
don’t count.Is hope still
at the bottom of the box
or was it erased
along with clean energy
and safe drinking water
and the history
of the Enola Gay?*
These words are disappearing in the new Trump Administration, New York Times [gift link]
“David Richardson, the head of the agency, said he did not know the United States has a hurricane season.” Heather Cox Richardson, June 2, 2025.
Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship, PEN.org.
Enola Gay Aircraft — And Other Historic Items — Inaccurately Targeted Under Pentagon’s Anti-DEI Purge, Forbes.com.
Rachel Barenblat, A partial list of losses
I am fairly sure that my understanding of Melanie Klein’s definition of humans as speaking beings is superficial, and I may well have taken it in a completely unwarranted direction, but the notion that humans are meant to communicate, that we derive our sense of purpose and direction and meaning from a dialogue with our fellow-creatures, and that we get our concept of identity by telling our story, and (crucially) hearing a response, is massively important to me.
There are times, of course, when silence, restraint, humility and compassion require that we don’t just blurt out what’s on our minds, but this too, can be a way of shaping a dialogue and building a story. What’s happening now is something else entirely. It is, of course, primarily about political control, and shutting down the kinds of conversation that unsettle power-bases. But it’s more fundamental than that. It is not just that corrupt powers want to control how the rest of us behave, or how we see the world. It is an attack on the very foundations of language itself, and therefore on what it means to be human.
The banning of specific words is mostly a device to enable computers to identify documents to delete quickly, without involving a human decision or understanding at any level. It leads to idiocy like the deletion of the account of Hiroshima, because the document referred to the name of the bomb, Inola Gay, and ‘gay’ is banned. But more than that, without awareness of nuance, context, emotion, humour, the development of language as a living thing, the way we often code our language to convey more than the dictionary can hold, AI destroys the very matrix of communication. The human is no longer able to exercise its power as a ‘speaking being’ and we are about as meaningless as a speak your weight machine.
Under the banner of language, I would also include art, music, and all forms of sensory learning, but as a poet, I find that words are really where this hurts. John Burnside, in his introduction to The Music of Time, points out how important poetry is. ‘Poetry refreshes the language, strengthening it against the abuses of the unscrupulous and the careless, and allowing it to retain its ability to enchant, to invoke and to particularise’ (p10). he talks a lot about precision of language preserving respect for truth, and the quest in poetry to widen our awareness of experience so as to name, understand and heal. For a poet, this attack on language is pretty drastic. We are your canaries in the mine.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Speaking Beings
Delighted to discover one of my favorite poems by James Schuyler in The Paris Review archives newsletter today. Sharing it because the “skies of spit” are real, as are the clouds between Frankfurt and Atlanta from the place where the wing meets the body of the airplane.
Speaking of wings, Schuyler’s line, “The sky is pitiless”, meets up later in the poem with those “skies of spit” and yes it seems quite likely that spit, pitted, and pity are consciously playing with each other at this point in the flight.
Alina Stefanescu, Schuyler’s dog.
But revelations are in short supply. As
if we have used up our quota of light.The biggest things are clear enough.
Everything existential unravels when
we let time spiral or feel the moving
edge of the universe. But try to
square these: the abundance of evil,
the precarious shifting — truth,
sand, cloud, love — why language
evolved if so many are so silent for
so long, if somewhere faith is waiting
– if faith is all about waiting.Rajani Radhakrishnan, Signs
I arrive at Poetry by the Sea in time to moderate and speak on a panel on Poetry and Politics: the organizer, Clare Rossini, had done a bang-up job, then went down with the flu and had to skip it. The panelists present some amazing poems I hadn’t seen before, including “I Woke Up” by Jameson Fitzpatrick; “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” by Muriel Rukeyser; and “Bioluminescence” by Paul Tran. For a while, though, our conversation dances around a hard question: does poetry matter now? A qualified “yes.” Julien Strong says that surely it’s good for us to write them; I comment that poems rarely change minds dramatically, but they can bring about small changes within us, and certainly they manifest us to each other. I wish I’d also said that they keep us tender, awake to feeling, when it’s easier to harden yourself. Someone in the audience raises his hand and declares himself a Trump voter. Afterward, I exit the room and rest my eyes on the steady blue of the Long Island Sound.
Lesley Wheeler, Itinerant Poet with Toadstools, Witches, & Shame
Fast on the heels of Parking Lot Horizon, I’ve got another book going on pre-order today. Travis is a collection of prose poems that “looks into the mirror of TAXI DRIVER’s Travis Bickle, presenting a montage of fact and fiction from inside the American nightmare.” Some excerpts recently appeared online at Blue Bag’s Resources, and you can find info about how to order on the bookstore page (you can also order by replying to this message). […]
In other news, on June 22nd, I will be giving a reading and talk with fellow poet and publisher Thom Eichelberger-Young, of Blue Bag Press. The event will occur online at 6pm EST and will be hosted by Rachel Lauren Myers (poet and editor of MEMEZINE) who pitched the event to me and Thom. We will be talking about imagination, state containment, countercultural publishing, and writing with urgency in the present. For more info, please see the flyer and sign up here.
RM Haines, Travis Bickle’s American Idol
Today it got up to 90°F—record-breaking heat—and the last three days have been almost as hot. This means the hummingbirds and goldfinches have appeared, usually for water, and I have been hiding from the sun. My MS symptoms have been acting up (not unusual in the heat, but still aggravating—fatigue, headache foot drop, and trouble swallowing—have all been taxing). Another day for an MS patient in summer! I feel like that Frozen snowman during the other seasons—imagining summer but not realizing how dangerous it is. Then I’m like, “Oh right, this is why summer is so tough!”
But I can still enjoy the beautiful birds and I’ve been busy with work—working on an essay, sending out poems, and working on another tutorial for Writer’s Digest. Soon I’ll be doing a class on writing essays and judging a poetry contest. I also need to get back to writing new poems and working on my next book. I just wish my brain and energy levels would cooperate. Meanwhile, any glance at the news and social media (my heart is with you, LA) just produces stress and feelings of helplessness and worry about our democracy in a country that seems obsessed with AI and not at all concerned about our dwindling constitutional rights. Trying hard not to feel trapped inside and trying not to doomscroll. Am I succeeding? Sometimes…
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Record Heat, Goldfinches and Hummingbirds, Busy Bee (Me!) and Feeling Limitation
I’m thinking about the way that June bowls into the year with an unapologetic opening up of itself, and how much I wish I could open myself up to the world like the heavy, over blown head of a peony, or be as delicate and yet as full as a verge of cow parsley or a hawthorn white with blossom or a rambling rose that scents the air for ten feet all round while clambering over a broken fence. I need something to remind myself that I am capable of that sort of opening up to possibility, life, experience. […]
This is my common place book that I keep upon my person and by my bedside at all times. It’s not a notebook exactly, it’s more of an archive of words that mean something to me. The book was a gift from my husband, given to me after I came off stage at Edinburgh book festival on the first leg of promoting The Ghost Lake. Like May dew enriched with spring, the notebook feels enriched with something powerful just from being gifted in that moment of celebration.
The first quote I copied into the book is Georgia O’ Keeffe
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
It’s a well known quote, has been on the lips of many people, has been copied, no doubt, into many commonplace books and diaries and journals. It’s a statement of self, about herself, but i want to make it a statement about me, about my self. […]
That Georgia O’ Keeffe, an artist who lived very much against the grain, would be frightened of anything is surprising to me. But then, why should she not have been? She struggled with her mental health, she went through painful break ups, experienced break downs, had to fight to have her work recognised. Had to stand her ground and push back against what was seen as the right kind of art, just to create in the way that she wanted to create. Just to do her own thing.
Perhaps to live an unconventional life is to use fear as a ladder to reach higher, to use fear as a place from which to see what is important, more, to use fear as the fuel to get to where you want to be.
Fear is the place at which the body and mind collude to alert us to potential danger. But that doesn’t always mean that the dangerous thing should be avoided. What’s on the other side of the fear. What is worth pushing through the fear for?
Wendy Pratt, June Mantra: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life…
June, the days still grow longer, for a bit. In the Place St Sulpice the antiques market will soon yield the space to the poetry market. I’ve been reading a lovely small book by Colm Toibin about Elizabeth Bishop. I actually finished it 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then began over. It makes it own special contribution to EB literature in its lovely clear simple prose. The chapter I read a couple days ago was about Bishop poem called ‘The Armadillo,’ and another poem not published in her lifetime with a line about touching the tip of a lightning rod on a steeple. I can’t find that line again, but my thought was, I think, about Marianne Moore’s Steeple poem and how I was sitting in my Ikea rocker looking across the street at the lightning rod on the church, and back to a year or so when I was walking past the back of the church, ‘the holy end’ as Larkin calls it, and lightning struck the rod and made a very scary boom.
Beverley Bie Brahic, 9 June 2025
This morning the birds have already sung in the new day. The air is still, and holds the scent of almonds.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a person standing in front of a sign. I say it is me behind the bannered and flagged railings of the bandstand at Oswestry Pride saying poems out loud.
I originally gave this post the same title as this time last year before realising I was repeating myself. Changing it to ‘That Bandstand’ instead of ‘The Bandstand’ reminds me of retitling one of my poems and how it brought the object closer. I feel I can bring Oswestry bandstand closer now because I have had the joy of standing on it to deliver poems twice. I have loved bandstands ever since watching Trumpton as a child many years ago. My local park didn’t have a bandstand and it seemed wonderful and slightly exotic to my younger self that some parks actually did!
When I first started sharing my poems at open mics I often used to choose the shortest poem possible so that I wouldn’t run out of breath before the end. I soon realised that my short poems often worked well on the page but didn’t always own their space out loud when read singularly – by the time the person had tuned in to my voice the poem could well be over. When it came to longer readings, I used to imagine that I didn’t have enough breath in me for a whole set of poems which I guess could actually be true if you don’t pause to inhale! It has been an interesting journey to outrun these thoughts and then reframe them.
Now when I am planning a set I have enough past experience to bolster me so that the process focuses on crafting the set not being distracted by thoughts of expiring through lack of oxygen. Last year at Pride I came in a bit short. I confess I might have had my head focused on completion rather than staying in the moment! There’s something rather nice about getting to repeat an experience. You can respond to your own what ifs. What if I had stayed in the moment a little more? What if I delivered the lines with slightly better pacing? What if I didn’t stand on tiptoe all the way through because I was too scared to alter the position of the mic at the start? So this week I planned my setlist on paper and then tested it out loud to make sure it lasted the required amount of time. It did, but it didn’t flow so I readjusted it and then invited Kath to Poetry Corner to hear the revised set. I had given myself the overarching theme of ‘Play’ which felt fun and is also a nod to this year’s National Poetry Day.
I am also very grateful to Caroline Bird for reminding me that no one expects a pianist to launch straight into their performance as soon as they arrive on stage so settling into the space and taking a breath before starting is a good and natural thing for poets to do. I had a few things to say to myself to ground me and I enjoyed adding to this the image of a pianist preparing to perform.
Sue Finch, THAT BANDSTAND
On the Wednesday of the writing retreat, the siren call of Wigtown lured me out of the garden. I’d tried to tell myself I didn’t need to go and buy more books – but how often do you get to go to go to Scotland’s national book town? I spent most of the afternoon in Wigtown poking around the bookshops, had some lovely conversations with friendly booksellers, and went back to the Galloway estate having supported the local economy (i.e bought loads of books). That evening, I finished another draft of a short story I’ve been working on and thinking about for a while.
The short story is based on a true story that someone else told me. It is a traumatic story, and I think I’m still trying to work out what I really want the story to say. I know that it has to do something more than just retell this story. In her essay “Kingfishers Catching Fire: Looking with Poetry’s Eyes” (taken from her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World” Jane Hirshfield writes that “A work of art is not a piece of fruit lifted from a tree branch: it is a ripening collaboration of artist, receiver and world”.
This book is specifically about poetry, but it’s interesting that she doesn’t use the word ‘poem’ – instead she uses ‘A work of art’ because I think this statement is one that we can transpose onto any art form – something has to be transformed, and this something has to be done in the space between the writer, the reader and the world or context in which they encounter the piece of art.
Perhaps my story is not about the story, extraordinary and terrible though it is, but our relationship with the stories of our lives, the damage caused by violence, not just the direct damage to a victim, but to those caught in the aftershock of violence, the spreading rings of its effects and consequences? But this isn’t quite right either, so I will keep writing and re-writing the story until the river of language washes away a little bit more silt and I can see more clearly.
Kim Moore, What happens on a writing retreat (part 2)
The pollen count is dropping so I’ve been working in the garden, mowing the grass, cutting dead branches, planting at the plot. I’m trying to make my allotment easier for my joints, so I’ve built lots of raised beds and am putting down bark mulch on the paths to try and keep the weeding down. I usually dig up a meter or two of the path at a time, clear the weeds, place down the fabric and the mulch. It’s slow going, but I’m seeing the results. A lot of what I try to grow doesn’t work or the slugs eat more than the kids and I do, but every year I dig in and plant with hope. […]
My poetry is going in a similar way at the moment. I still write every day, but am producing less poems. Slow writing, slow editing and I’m barely submitting to magazines or publishers. Little or nothing to show for all my work.
I keep seeing memes about ‘would you write if no one ever read your work?’ That’s what it feels like just now. No one really cares about my allotment, my poems or how I spend my unstructured time, but I’ve done it anyway. Occasionally my son will enjoy eating some courgette bread from veg I’ve grown or a distant editor will accept a poem and say some kind things, but for the most part they bring only me happiness.
I’d like to get one of my collections published of course, but after waiting over 5 years after my last acceptance that was never published, I’ve become mellow about it. It may never happen. I may leave a trickle of poems published in journals over my lifetime, hundreds of unloved poems and a humongous pile of notebooks behind when I die. So be it.
It doesn’t matter that no one is reading me, I will continue, filling my notebooks, writing my life. It gives me joy and purpose which is more than something.
Gerry Stewart, Lazy Days When No One is Watching
Here, I sat down and shared the palette of the present, all the brightest of my colours, my favourite flavours, some secrets and wishes and nightmares, the beat of this heart, the rhythm of this time. I revealed names of angels, then I drew faces of the demons fizzing inside this body, this space, this energy. Writing: It’s a generosity and a betrayal and a madness of sorts. It is so strange to share the intimate magic inside us. I do this for a living, I share the whispers I hear in the wind, in the water and the trees. Odd choice, to share the soul and empty the heart for your daily bread. But it is too late now, I have gone so far down this path that I made for myself that I cannot remember any other route, or way to be, and it was never about bread, not really. It was something I felt was necessary. This book is different from the others. I think that’s ok, but it scares me. I worry it will get bullied when it goes to school in a new shiny jacket. Mrs Death Misses Death gave me the same feelings, I think this fear is good.
Salena Godden, all barefoot and moss
Some years back I visited a writers’ group in Stratford (just the once) where people around the table gave updates on what they were doing or read out pieces of work. The woman sitting next to me said: ‘Nothing much new. Still writing the novel.’ In a break I asked her about the novel and was astonished to hear she’d been writing it for ten years. ‘Why don’t you take a break from it, write something completely different, or maybe throw it out and start again with something else?’ She looked at me in genuine horror. It occurred to me later that perhaps it was enough for her to be writing a novel, to be able to tell people ‘Oh, I’m writing a novel’ as if it were nothing more than a conversation piece. If she ever finished it, what would she do then? Alternatively, if she did genuinely want to finish it, would it be an accomplishment or a curse? Was she afraid to sit back from the keyboard and say ‘there, it’s done’ as if the completion would leave a scary hole in her life.
Anyway, once I’d cast Novel No.4 into the abyss, or wherever failed bits of writing go, I felt I needed some clarity on my poetry as well, so I set to work on assessing each and every poem. Consequently, a lot of stuff has been removed from this site.
The effect of this caught me by surprise. Suddenly, as the file of what I felt was good grew, another collection seemed as if it might be a sensible idea. I didn’t want to admit it but it continued to lurk in the back of the mind, hover on the shoulder. For years it has been enough to put poems on here. Emotionally, I didn’t need anything else from them. I haven’t done a collection since The Maker Of Glass Eyes in 2009 but that didn’t bother me at all. (I still have a few copies of that and Paradise Road from 2003 if anyone wants one – they’re long out of print.)
I’d always thought – ‘I can’t do the legwork any more that would do justice to the efforts of a publisher, therefore, even if anyone wanted to publish the poems, it wouldn’t be fair on them if I couldn’t work hard enough to sell the book’.
I think maybe the growth of the self-publication market has had an effect. Reading two books by an old friend, Peter Steward, to which I referred on a previous blog on here, and now a novel, Blue-Grey Island, by another old friend, Paula Burns, and talking to them both online about their experiences, has also caused a change of mind.
I’ve never shared the prejudice some poets have about reputations being forged by publication in a ‘major’ press. As in, you’re only a valid poet if a reputable press publishes your work. Well, it’s true if you self-publish, you aren’t eligible for the prizes the ‘establishment’ dish out, but I don’t give a damn about those anyway. In the end, how you get your stuff out there is your business and no one else’s. I’m happy enough to meet other poets here and there, would be happy to read poetry in performance in certain circumstances, but recoil from the flesh-pressing, ‘it’s not what you know it’s who you know’, world. I’ve seen it at work and feel it’s extremely unhealthy, as in bad for the soul. Clambering up the rungs of the poetry ladder isn’t for me.
Bob Mee, WHEN DESTRUCTION TURNS TO CREATION, or A HEALTHY CLEAR-OUT
When I write computer programs I use a free system (git with vscode) that with a click lets me save and recover versions. I can create branches – the diagram on the left shows how, from the bottom, a file evolved, splitting into branches then mostly merging. I can compare versions side-by-side, the differences colour-coded.
It’s possible (I haven’t done it, but I’ve seen it done) to analyse the development of a text, colour-coding the lines according to age or number-of-changes.
With a click I can back-up to the cloud (free – github). In my will I can leave the instructions to make the back-up visible to all. Nothing’s lost – even my mistakes.
I could use the same system for poems/stories too. Already I have long/short versions of a few poems. Because of the various word limits for prose, I have 3 versions of a few texts. One recent short piece had so many UK/US issues (gear-sticks, supermarket trolleys) that I keep 2 versions of it. But I’d be most interested in watching how a story develops – which paragraphs changed the most? which paragraphs never changed? when were the growth spurts? (I think there’s often an initial one, then I fiddle around, then I realise what the story’s about and quickly add many more words).
Tim Love, Text versioning
I read something about how the energy it takes for us to produce memories to preserve our rapidly changing lives creates heat that serves to hurry the entropy of the universe faster toward disorder. So as we seek to stay time, we just rush it onward. I may have seriously misunderstood the whole thing. But it gives me, but not time itself, pause. Stop stop, I say in my head, to time as it plummets as I whirl my mind around this idea, trying to do so coolly, so as not to further disturb the universe. Except some days I want things to hurry along so all the disasters I imagine will just arrive and I can just deal with them, and all the disasters that are currently playing out will have shifted on to different ones. Cuz these disasters are getting tedious.
Memories are strange things that get distorted as we stuff them into jars, their noses spread wide against the glass, lips squished like worms. Sometimes other things get shoved in, odd leaves, inexplicable insects. And then there’s the unseen — all we’ve forgotten, imagined, misremembered, things we’ve been told that get confused with things we experienced. Was I there? Did that happen? Who was that by my side? Or did I read it in a book?
I admire this poem [“Water Falling Down” by Christopher Citro] for its orderly disorder, its strange arrangements and inexplicable sidebars, how time is present and past and imagined. I fall down it like the water of the title, trickling one minute, cascading the next, to puddle in that lovely image from my own childhood: lost in a book sprawled across the bed.
Marilyn Mccabe, the fridge, don’t open it
I do like a sauna and I’ve been enjoying the new crop of seaside saunas that have popped up in the south west. I was sat in the Blackpool Sands sauna the other week and began to write this in my head.
The pop up sauna
is all varnished pine and dry heat
in truth it is a big barrel
laid on its side
near the tideline
I’m sat sweating inside
I look out the porthole
on what could be a moonscape
I think about Yuri
and Valentina
who circled the earth
in capsules the size
of a large washing machine
just to be the firstPaul Tobin, CIRCLED THE EARTH
Oh, a mere mortal; the hours I spent
on my couch, watching, not watching,
pacing, cleaning, anything to trim
the tension of watching the tennis godstwo bedraggled bodies wracking them-
selves senseless smacking the small ball
to new and giddy places. Mother,
if I had five ounces of that resilience…Five hours in, sports writers are sick
with praise. Even the clay, even the living dust
is whipped up, spent but glowing,
having witnessed magnificence.Jill Pearlman, Grand Slam at the Brink
When the world seems slipping out from under my control, lately the writing seems to calm me (or at least give me something to look forward that is less an obligation or “work” in the usual sense and more a daily bout of play). So the past three days I’ve been exploring this new project and I’m liking the results so far.
While I have written about bird women before, most noticeably in IN THE BIRD MUSEUM and GIRL SHOW, this one feels a little spookier and more grotesque. I was actually using a poem from the latter, “the bird girl of jackson county” as inspiration when I started. There are many characters in my books that may deserve a similar revisit (esp. GIRL SHOW, though there is a little of that in EXOTICA.) People whose lives deserve a little more fleshing (or in this case, feathering out.) Why birds? I don’t exactly know. But then, really, why anything? Lately I’m of the opinion that well-trodden ground is still sometimes the most fruitful if you learn where to look. But where those projects felt more whimsical or fantasy-laden, I want these to be a little more violent and body-horror-ish.
Kristy Bowen, the bird girls return
Today I begin Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), a part of the training of everyone who hopes to be a ordained into ELCA Word and Sacrament ministry. Think of it as an internship program for chaplains; some people do their training in prisons, but the vast majority of CPE training is done in hospitals. I will do my training at the Asheville VA hospital, which is much less of a commute than other parts of my life.
I don’t have much information about what we’ll be doing or what our schedule will be. I hope to get more details today when orientation begins. I don’t know who will be doing the training. I don’t have any information on fellow CPE students, although I assume there are some, because there were three other e-mail addresses on the e-mail that came last night giving us first day instructions.
I’ve packed a bag with notetaking supplies and paper for possible downtimes. I wanted to take a book, something that didn’t weigh much, so I chose a book of poems. I decided to go with one I’ve already read and loved, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Field Guide to the End of the World, which weighs less and takes up less space in the bag than her more recent Flare, Corona. I have some colored pens and a few pieces of better paper for sketching.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Hour Before CPE Begins
1 – How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure what you’d call my first book. Imistic Poems (2009), the chapbook of Nicanor Parra-inspired antipoems I printed one copy of when I was 23? O (2013) the concrete poetry “web book” released by Ugly Duckling Presse? The Nature Book (2023), my first supercut novel published by Coffee House? Everything always feels like the first time. This is in part because I keep starting from scratch in new genres. If my two books coming out this year–People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted & Unwanted Novels and Patchwork–feel any different, it’s because after writing one novel, I’m a bit more comfortable with the form.2 – How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, non-fiction or poetry?
I started my writing life as a poet, never imagining I would write fiction–a high school English teacher turned me off for over a decade. And yet, the first novel idea came, then the next. Eventually my brain could only think in chapters.rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tom Comitta
When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese poetry forms?
My dear friend and gifted poet Kristen Lindquist first inspired me to think about haiku. Years ago, I had enjoyed some of her haiku and haibun, and I knew she maintained a one-poem-a-day writing practice, which I also found quite impressive. Life busyness being what it is, I didn’t manage to find the time to invest in learning more about these fine forms until the pandemic erupted and I suddenly had the opportunity to plunge into anything and everything haiku-related. I joined Haiku San Diego and started writing in earnest in 2020. Two years later, Kristen was the first reader to take a look at my draft manuscript Upwelling, which was a deeply appreciated gift of her insight and support. She and Alan Summers very generously wrote blurbs for the book’s back cover when it was released in 2022, and Upwelling went on to make the shortlist for a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award.
What do you enjoy the most about haiku?
The enormous potential of less is more. Haiku practice invites us to create meaning through the subtle positioning of a few tangible reference points in a setting where words, symbols, and white space mingle voices. I’m fascinated by how this interplay of elements can yield deep and intangible resonance. There can be a whole world in a few simple words skillfully arranged.
I’ve heard fellow haiku poet Billie Dee use the word “velcro” to describe a poem that sticks with the reader, one that invites a pause, a second or even a third read—the poem becomes a contemplation that allows layers of meaning to emerge. Offering a reader that type of haiku moment is a marvelous challenge.
Jacob D. Salzer, Lorraine A Padden
The debut reading for Grieving Hope (ELJ Editions) is this Saturday, June 7 on Zoom. As I mentioned before, this volume is a collection of five mini chapbooks including mine, Offset Melodies. My chap is a hybrid mixture of memoir and fiction told in a young girl’s voice over the years between preschool and young adulthood. I’m in wonderful company with Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie whose chaps are extraordinary.
Despite the fact that in my past working life I was an occasional public speaker, I seem to have lost my poise in my older age. The last reading I did was not fun as I was nervous as heck by the time they got to me. Afterward, I said never again! Welp, here I’ll be….again. I do so envy teachers who do this all day, every day and think nothing of it. Send me some good juju!
Charlotte Hamrick, Debut Reading of my Debut Chapbook
Yesterday saw the first launch event for the book, at Doncaster Brewery Tap. It went as swimmingly as I could possibly have hoped for. My thanks to Alison Blaylock at the Tap, Tim Fellows of Crooked Spire Press who made the book happen, to a lovely and enthusiastic audience and to my two guest readers, Ed Reiss and Victoria Gatehouse, who both read beautifully. Greg Freeman has very kindly written an account of the event on the Write Out Loud website, here.
Matthew Paul, Launches
Judging by the social media feeds of many significant poets and prominent publishers, there seems to be a tacit admission that they both believe a full collection’s commercial life pretty much comes to an end on the day it’s launched. Or at most, the book’s life is drawn out till the appearance of any reviews a few weeks or months down the line, never again to be mentioned in commercial terms.
This attitude is patently leading to a lack of medium-term sales. A full collection needs exposure over a period of time so as to enter into a potential reader’s consciousness. From my own experience, for instance, I’ve witnessed the gradual growth of a vibe around a book if a continued effort is made to explain and sample it. I’ve personally sold over forty copies of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023), my second full collection, so far this year, a major chunk of them via social media, even though the book is now eighteen months old. But the most striking thing is that this interest has also generated a synergy with my 2017 first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, which has also contributed a further twenty copies to my sales figures.
The above-mentioned story leads me to believe that a full collection’s commercial life is actually as long as the poet and/or publisher wish to make it. By immediately moving on to the next creative project, poets lose out on readers for their previous work. And by concentrating on driving a constant churn of new titles, publishers miss out on sales.
Matthew Stewart, The commercial life of a full collection
I’ve written a few times about the importance of anthologies, and the point is hardly confined to contemporary verse: think of the Greek Anthology; the Subhāsitaratnakosha in Sanskrit or the Therīgāthā in Pāli; or the Carmina Burana. Anthologies are useful places to start for the reader: but they can also come to define a literature. This is true in English as well. Modern English lyric is often taken to begin with Tottel’s Miscellany — another anthology — first printed in 1557, and an instant publishing success.
Tottel is generally known and read today, when it is, for its canonical authors: it contains a significant selection of the poetry of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and of Thomas Wyatt, both of whom were writing in the 1530s and 1540s. Modern critical attention has focused especially on their sonnets and love lyrics. But a lot of the poems in the anthology are not love poems, but rather examples of that enduringly popular (if stubbornly unfashionable) genre of the ‘moralising lyric’. By this I mean poems like Kipling’s “If —”, constantly cited in surveys of people’s favourite poems, but generally beneath the notice of literary critics: the sort of poem that it’s easy to sneer at if you’re feeling sophisticated, but all the same tends to come to mind in a genuine tight spot. The poetry of the dentist’s chair, or an overcrowded A&E department in the middle of the night, or just an ordinary miserable day. The sixteenth century took it for granted that poetry was for just this sort of occasion.
Victoria Moul, Dazzled with the height of place
There’s not a lot of pattern to what paintings or poetry I like. I tend not to like high emotive lyric or chaotic visual poetry but then, sometimes it resonates.
I’m comfortable with things not fitting patterns, with ideologies in conflict held in parallel.
I don’t have to apply a matrix of meaning, shove things into significance, binary or otherwise. If I were to have a guiding principle it would be the buddhist parable of the farmer who received the wild horse on his property. Neighbours telling him, What good luck! And him non-committal. Much is contest and context changes. All things are all things.
This “wishy-washy” attitude of mine annoyed all the right people growing up who accused me of being so open minded as to be mistaken for someone with no mind at all. (Oh, bully uncles, I saw you as such then too. So afraid of so much, they wanted to be categorically superior. Who ground them down so hard?)
I get higher energy not just have tolerance for chaos as basic reflection of universe. Even Lauren Harris sort of excluding all but the primitive shapes, overly constrained, sits comfortably. I’ve thought of inserting into my novels in progress someone high on butting in chronically with IDIB (infinite diversity, infinite beauty) to riff off Gene Roddenberry. Perhaps it will make the cut.
The process though at its core is being alert, figuring out, curiosity, not the finite dimensions of book, as perishable as a conversation. Staying in the game. With people who also want to play the game. Books are sweet discrete outcomes, sure. Being present for each moment is valuable.
Pearl Pirie, Parallel Processes
I have been in a little funk—in my mind, not in my actions. Narrowing in on my shortcomings, all of them having to do with time or how I can’t do anything right. The futility of everything. What does a walk or insight matter? What does a poem matter? Very silly things that aren’t serious and are—in fact—against my grain. Because in my world, all those things matter immensely. But I am able to move my body—even though it sometimes moves a little funny—and so I do. Every wormhole into the woods. Every dark nook. Through the privet and briars.
Sarah Lada, Channels
I pick the local museum for a visit. The exhibits are in no chronological order, arranged according to fauna, flora, paintings, clothing, activities. There are mummies, the armour of a samurai, fossils, butterflies, paintings by Joseph Wright. I wander from room to room and decide on the spot whether to stay or move on, I don’t know how, what drives me. It all just happens, without a plan. I am glad I don’t have a plan. I’m branching out.
Lakes, old stone walls line
the narrow country road—
I watch the landscapes,
every thing,
pass.We drive to a forest that blends into the fields outside Derby. In the car I struggle with what I want to say, it seems to be stuck in my throat. Why is it so hard, just why? As we take a walk, our words and the low sun between the rows of trees soften, soften, soften.
Kati Mohr, Forest of Arden
an order means nothing
to the cat birds & so it means nothing
to me. an order means nothing to the
dandelions & so it means nothing to me.
i do not know if this is a litany or
a spell i’m casting. i become less & less
sure about who knits the world
the older that i get. i know & believe
in water & spiders. in the brief feast
the wild raspberries offer on the ridge.
i want to believe that we are enough.
we were not meant to live like this.
crouching inside words until they bite down.
i have seen friends lose limbs to
a word. swallowed by a chasm between letters.Robin Gow, executive order
In an old peat cutting nearby, the exposed face dried into rock hardness. The dry spell exaggerated the banded colours – from cappuccino to jet-black. Beyond simple descriptors of colour, scientific techniques can yield more information, chemical analyses can assess colour and composition in fine detail, while radiometric dating helps define timescales, and pollen analyses reveal the changing nature of vegetation communities over time. Yet even without advanced analytical testing, the story of our changing climate is there for all to see in exposed peat banks. The different coloured layers cover several thousand years of climate history. Lighter bands are indicative of cool wet periods, dark layers when climate was generally warm and dry. In warmer years, plant material is broken down more readily, becoming humified, more soil-like and dark. In colder, wetter years, bacterial breakdown is not as efficient so the peat is paler. It is even possible to match the bands of light and dark with periods of human history.
This year’s dry spell will add to climate stories held within peat bogs. In a distant future, scientists might investigate them and describe climate changes yet to come, changes only my grandchildren will experience, unless the peatlands themselves have vanished. Today, dry peatbogs and a barely-there Red River may be warnings, harbingers of a hotter future. They are certainly part of the topsy-turvy spring-into-summer weather of recent years here in the Highlands. […]
From my desk I can see the mountain ash in our garden. Like others around the valley, they are laden with flowers dying away; there are hints of the berries to come under browned petals and sepals. My maternal grandmother used to say that a rowan filled with flowers in summer and laden with berries in autumn meant a bad winter was coming. Degrees of severity predicted by the density of blossoms then fruit. Born into a farming life she had many such words of small poetry, pearls of wisdom. But in these days of strange weather patterns, how will the old sayings fare? We are going to need new rhymes, new poems, new tales and songs to tell our grandchildren.
Today, the peats are soaking up the rains. Sphagnum mounds are swelling with water and colour, and the meadows are beginning to bloom and flourish. The other day I found the rare white orchid again. It first appeared last year on a steep embankment and it is here again. Pseudorchis albida, the small white orchid, is classed as ‘vulnerable’. In many places across Britain, the small white has vanished completely, yet this year on our croft, it leads all the other orchids in the rush to greet the sun.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, Orchids in the sun