Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 24
the flower phone, the broken timepiece, World Early Stroll Day, the romantic lives of badgers, 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: the flower phone, the broken timepiece, World Early Stroll Day, the romantic lives of badgers, and much more. Enjoy,
Tell me of the things you love, I invite. Let’s let rest the things we don’t. And I say this to myself. Again. I offer this blog up week after week as a positive act, and hope you will forgive, and I will forgive myself for, well, all the other stuff.
And I think again, and mention again in this blog, this poem. Its capacity for gazing, unblinking, at guilt, and at the possibility for forgiveness, never fails to leave me gasping. The narrator seeing himself and his father with new eyes, the father’s angers, the son’s resentments, but the poem opens itself up to mercy: the son now sees anew the father, and the act of writing the poem opens the author too to forgiveness of his own callousness in the face of the complicated father’s acts of care.
And this is, again, what poems can do. They can walk beside us to whisper into our ear, through the din, messages we need to hear, always a little bit different every time, as are we each time. As am I. I hope.
Marilyn McCabe, fearing the chronic angers
I’ve done it. I’ve finished writing the book.
I Know What I Saw will be my fifth poetry collection with Bloodaxe, yet bringing this book to completion has been an unfamiliar process. Like never before, I’ve seen how the ordering of collection is its own act of creation – producing new narratives, new poetry even, as poems meet and synthesise. I experienced, to a new depth, how the extended process of drafting and editing – including experimentation with capitalisation, bold, white spaces, punctuation – is not just a matter of presentation. It is transformative, generative: it creates new voices and characters, new stories.
It’s been a time of great learning, and I will certainly write more about it. But for the last few months I’ve felt impatient for this stage of writing to come to an end. My mind was full of the next book, fizzing with green excitement. I’ve had my fill of ghosts – I want to write about moss and shards and trees.
This month, I’ve also been delivering 30 Days Wild Writing every morning with Miriam Darlington. You might think that delivering an hour-long workshop is a fairly undemanding workday – but alongside other tasks like organising the Mass Wuther on the Haworth Moors (more of that in the coming weeks!), I’ve often found myself up past midnight researching – amongst other things – the romantic lives of badgers, the motivations of sledging crows.
It’s a relief then, to come back to land, and specifically to my love of it. My as-yet-unstructured ideas for the next book cluster around my relationship with a small patch of forest in Calderdale – and in a recent Wild Writing session, I was able to express and explore this.
Clare Shaw, My Own Carrigskeewaun
Whilst not expressly writing an overtly ekphrastic poem, I did however want to use the opening few bars – “that watercolour opening” – of Debussy’s Claire de Lune as the main pivot of the poem.
It’s a magical start. That descending arpeggio. Those notes. It has a beautiful, ethereal quality that immediately transports the listener into an almost transcendental state.
I paid close attention to the choice of words ensuring they had comparable harmonic and sonic structures – almost seeing them as complimentary chords. I tried to use words that were phonemically soothing; that were syllabically compatible; and had the capacity to be discrete when internally rhymed.
In terms of the how the poem looked on the page, I used line breaks to enhance its visual appeal. I did not want all the lines to be anchored by the margin as I felt it would detract from the poem’s dreamy aesthetic. In some cases I allowed a line to contain just three to five words so as to re-imagine the soft notes being played from the opening bar.
In all, I wanted the poem to capture its flowing textures, its sensory mood and smooth rhythms. To be written as delicately as possible. To be reflective and respective of Claire de Lune’s Impressionistic roots.
A fleeting moment.
When we simply stop whatever we are doing and float.
Drop-in by Dorian Nightingale (Nigel Kent)
Musical refrains also run through my brain, evoking memories and nostalgia, or just being irritating “earworms.” At any given time such tunes may include Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, strains from a late Haydn quartet, one of many Springsteen songs, Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” or–most confounding of all–the Chock-full-o’Nuts jingle from the 1960s or some similar commercial sloganeering. Why such things wear a familiar groove in the gray matter I don’t know, though Oliver Sacks’ book on music (Musicophilia) and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music offer some insights, and I’m thinking of reading this one by Samuel Markind when it comes out later this year.
Alas, I’m not gardening because once again the garden is awash in mud, so I entertain myself with endeavoring to discover how/why my brain works (and yours, and anyone else’s), since that’s one of my favorite lines of inquiry when I can’t work outside. I will take a sodden walk later and dwell on possibilities while enjoying the scent of the invasives; I’ll work on some poetry revisions; maybe I’ll listen to music…and freely associate with any and all possibilities.
Ann E. Michael, Perfumes and tunes
As Ted Berrigan lay on his deathbed, Alice Notley said something to the effect of “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined.” She describes this in the poem “Point of Fidelity” in her book Mysteries of Small Houses:
when I perform your last rites sprinkling you with drops of gin & tonic and saying, “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined together” We laugh though you’ll die the next day Eleven years later I wonder at using such a fiction, a fetish of Egyptian exactly to be there, that moment.
And I’ve been thinking about how we use such fictions, such fetishes “exactly to be there, that moment.” How we use art.
Yesterday, Elee Kraljii Gardiner sent me a link to a recording of a boy from Azerbaijan singing a preternaturally haunting song. I found it very moving and so was inspired to respond to it. “Exactly to be there, that moment.” I downloaded the recording into software and “translated” the digital file into midi and orchestrated it. Then I improvised clarinet over top to make the piece below. It feels of the moment. That moment. Of this moment. One where I feel bewildered—the world seems mad—and could use inhabiting a song, could use being in dialogue with Elee and with Kenan Bayramli and, for that matter, Alice Notley. I could use, though without having to die, the fourteen pieces of my body to be joined, to be merged with the land. I could use the fourteen pieces of this broken world to be joined, healed.Gary Barwin, “exactly to be there, that moment”
Silence appears in the presence of the divine, as George Steiner noted. But 20th century silence includes the place where “language simply ceases.” It’s not soundless, entirely. The poet sinks into this thing with the abyss at its hem.
“Silence has invaded everything, and there is still music,” John Cage wrote in For the Birds.
There are variations within silence and I am obsessed by them, as, for example, when silence differs from itself when by gaining layers, bringing various silences into relation with one another.
Alina Stefanescu, “But it was never enough.”
I got to watch the full Strawberry moon rise and then fifteen minutes later disappear behind clouds, so I was glad I was outside to catch it. I had another crown sans novocaine and this one was pretty painful AND was wrongly fitted so had to be reglued a day later. These dental work things knock me out, and left me unable to even get out of bed—but I still had work to do—a tutorial to be recorded on Zoom, e-mails to respond to, an essay to finish, and submissions to send. So when I was so achey and couldn’t focus, I went out on my back porch. And guess what? I had the happy luck to see our first neighborhood Swallowtail butterfly on a neighbor’s privet, rufous hummingbirds, and even found that the fresh air helped my aches and pains. A reminder that getting outside even when you feel you can’t drag yourself out of bed is usually beneficial. And picking up the camera always brings some joy, especially this time of year—and surprises, like the Swallowtail.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Strawberry Moon, First Swallowtail, American Anxiety, and More Goldfinches on the Wing
Alt text suggests this week’s photo could be a purple ball on a gravel surface. I say it is a deflating balloon which I saw at the end of my early morning stroll on Saturday morning. I don’t always go for a stroll on a Saturday morning, but I remembered that it was ‘World Early Stroll Day’ and I was keen to find out what I would see in the new day. There was a thunderstorm as I was waking up, the claps of thunder were loud cracking booms and the rain was heavy, so I waited for all that to end before venturing out. Work in our road is being carried out to replace the gas pipes so the smell of gas infused clay was hanging thick in the humid air and my photo journey captured that work at first. I enjoyed ignoring the red light of the traffic light outside my house and walking on past it. I also found much to interest me in the lines and shadows of the holes that had been dug, but found myself beginning to wish for something different and colourful. Just as I was wondering whether to veer off to see if I could find flowers, I saw the balloon. It looked like it was having a rest after being well loved. There was a gentle poignancy to this thought that made me smile. […]
I enjoyed looking at all the different early morning strolls that were being shared on social media. I love the tingle of the joy of early mornings and the fresh potential of a day. Sometimes when I feel I haven’t seized the opportunity to note it or celebrate it in some way my heart sinks a little. There is an enjoyment to looking back on a day or period in time and reflecting on things that I am grateful for, but the feeling of looking forward is a hopeful kind of joy that shines in a different way.
On Saturday morning as well as my stroll I had treated myself to a ticket for the ‘Badger Saturday’ writing workshop with Clare Shaw and Miriam Darlington. I already had a lovely little kenning dedicated to badgers which I wrote in a workshop with Angela Topping, and I was keen to extend my knowledge and use the time to write what I was calling in my head ‘a full-on, solid badger poem’. That poem is emerging, it is indeed solid, and I look forward to spending time editing it into a finished piece.
Sue Finch, World Early Stroll Day
Across the street from my apartment there is a park, and in the middle of that park there are a number of logs, cluttered amongst the living trees which abut the eastern tip of Burrard Inlet. From time-to-time king tides or teenagers will lift them and deposit them a few feet away. Salt-hardened, they seem ancient. I wrote poems while leaning against the big ones or resting my feet on the smaller ones, over and over until I had a book.
[…]
I remind myself that positioning a certain type of traditional haiku as “faithful” pushes aside all the poets who have experimented with the form in the intervening centuries, be they Masaoka Shiki or Takayanagi Shigenobu or Marlene Mountain or Nick Virgilio. And it also suggests that “traditional” haiku was lowered flawlessly from the heavens, and not itself developed over many years of experimentation. Reviewing the history of haiku—and of poetic form in general—it seems clear to me that to honour a tradition you must be willing to break from it. If not, you are engaging in a practice detached from that of the poets you’re honouring. You become a parody. To honour someone you must be committed to being someone else.
*
Or, as Bashō put it, never “lick the drool of your predecessor.”
Rob Taylor, Some Notes on Writing Haiku
The temple at Sanjūsangen-dō […] features 1000 statues of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. The awe-inspiring gathering of statues dates from the 13th century and was a quiet antidote to the bustle of other temples. To encounter a battalion whose weapons of choice are mercy and compassion was an idea that appealed to me.
Holding a similar mystery were the Torii gates, placed at the entry to each temple. Particularly moving were the Senbon Torii (1000 Torii) Gates outside of Kyoto. Rather than entering with the masses, my husband researched and found a trail to enter through the forest where the gates have remained untouched. Some have fallen, some are rotting, some are being reclaimed by foliage. There were no other people in this section. All we could hear was birdsong. These testaments to a time-worn path to worship, their connections to the natural landscape, made of the forest a sort of cathedral without walls.
And, though one might think that visiting many temples and statues over the course of days would seem monotonous, the intimacy of each setting, the subtle differences in the faces and the materials, and the careful gestures of each Buddha or guardian or goddess made each one a figure worthy of awe. Iconography at its best should make the viewer feel something, even if that iconography is not necessarily connected to one’s own belief system. I can say that these encounters did just that. They gave me a sense of peace, of awe, of history, of joy, of possibility, of admiration.
Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part one
We did a self-guided walking tour through the Luberon region of Southern France, hiking nine to twelve miles a day through farms, forests and centuries-old hill towns. Instead of having to carry heavy packs and sleep in a tent, our bags were sent ahead to our next inn—a system we loved!
While the wilderness sections were beautiful, some of my favorite stretches of the hikes took us past stone farmhouses, olive and cherry orchards, lavender fields and red poppies.
white hill town
the herder shakes down cherries
for his goatsAnnette Makino, Fine art, feasting and footpaths in France
I lie on a narrow twin bed in a Paris hotel. Through the open window, there are indistinct voices, the low rumble of cars, distant sirens. Bjork’s kinetic “Hyperballad” wafts in from another room. It is summer in the 11th arrondissement near Place de la République. Across from me, on his own bed, a beautiful boy reaches out his hand, inviting me to join him. It is 1995, I’m 24 and my life is about to irrevocably change.
Behind me was America and its smothering morality, a string of shitty boyfriends, a file cabinet full of abandoned novels, short stories and poems. There was something about being abroad, out of comfort zones, six hours ahead of what I would soon realize was my “former life,” that liberated my voice and sexuality.
For years, I had read about writers and artists moving to Paris to explore their creativity and find a simpatico community. There was something about the air, light, and energy that seemed to infuse these expatriates with inspiration.
My first novel began as a poem written in that Paris hotel room, on a tiny side street called Rue Rampon. It would then transform into a screenplay that Jodie Foster’s now defunct production company would call a “beautifully written, but expensive art film.”
As the 90s ended, my agent suggested transforming the script into a novel. That’s when Conquering Venus was truly fleshed out. I’d spent the previous five years travelling back and forth to London and Paris for “research,” to soak up more of the locales and – frankly – the open-minded, easygoing sex.
Collin Kelley, 30 years of London, Paris and The Venus Trilogy
But what about the poems themselves? Well, to start with, the first letters of all their lines are capitalised. Apart from providing a harder line ending, this decision is a signal of intent, a pointer that they are not only anchored in the canon, but drinking from a very specific set of its wells.
Throughout the collection, Hinds’ invocation of the power of emblematic words is of special interest. He’s always aware of their allusions, connotations and ramifications, as in the closing couplet to ‘The Fifth Season’…
We will stand in the sand and glass of the broken
Timepiece and ask it to flow.
This poem offers us a terrific example of Hinds’ method at its best, marrying tradition with contemporary concerns (about climate change in this case), taking received notions and renewing them.
By taking a step back from everyday experience and viewing it anew via an esoteric literary filter so as to understand it better, he’s reminding us that other poetries are still possible in the contemporary landscape. As such, New Famous Phrases is a courageous book. It takes real guts for a poet to plough their own furrow in a first full collection, and Daniel Hinds is to be congratulated on his achievement.Matthew Stewart, Refreshing received notions, Daniel Hinds’ New Famous Phrases
The latest collection by Philadelphia poet, writer and editor Laynie Browne is Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), composed as a “response text” to the work of American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This collection follows a thread of response texts Browne has been working for a number of years, including: In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2018), composed as a response to Lawn of Excluded Middle by Rosmarie Waldrop; Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the book The Unfollowing by Lyn Heijinian; and Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the epic structures and purposes of Alice Notley. It has been interesting to really begin to see the range through which poets have been responding to the work of other writers over the past few years, from the ongoing poem-essays by Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall [see my review of one of his recent titles here; see a more recent interview I did with him here] and Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], to Montreal-based poet, writer and critic Klara du Plessis’ intimately-critical prose through the ten essays collected in her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. It is through the how of the response that provides and propels the possibilities of engagement, wending simultaneously through the deeply critical to the intimately personal to elements of the festschrift.
As part of an interview I conduced with Browne last year on this particular and ongoing interest in response texts, posted online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Browne responded:
I think it began with a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets. Unmistakably my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because of these female poets. The first homage text I wrote was for Bernadette Mayer. I was re-reading The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, as a young mother, and I was amazed. Thus began my book The Desires of Letters. […]
What becomes interesting, in part, through this collection is how she doesn’t overtly specify the approach or prompt of these poems, allowing them to speak on and through their own merit, allowing the response itself to be the response, and not her particular framing or starting-point. She offers acrostics, offers poems that begin with borrowed phrases, and other structures to work her way in, around and through her source material. As she writes mid-way through: “I seal my intention to think less poisonous thoughts by following / a path of letters [.]”
rob mclennan, Laynie Browne, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand
Let’s back up a minute, to before
my teachers did what Larkin said parents
do to their kids even if they don’t mean it,
back to pine woods and Zebco rods and reels
and perch ponds we claimed as public land,
possessing what we were still unpossessed by,
lacking even the language of belonging
to something larger than kin, congregation,
each other.Brian Spears, Reclamation Part 6
This 50th anniversary edition of the excellent Paideuma takes the form of a symposium on‘Poems We Live With’, with sixty-plus contributors (a smattering of whom I’ve reviewed in the past, as it happens) taking us through their own take on the theme. The contributions are ordered by surname of the author, which leads to some delightfully accidental conjunctions. As might be expected, the contributions range widely in tone, from the deeply personal to the carefully academic (and most of the contributors are academics of one sort or another), but what binds them all is an open commitment to poetry as something of importance, a thing that matters.
In his introduction, Roland Greene talks about two kinds of poems we live with, those which speak for us, expressing things we think or feel but could never express (or not as well as the poem does) and those that are ‘more oblique to our lives’, poems that open up new ways of seeing the world, poems that enlarge us. It’s a useful enough framework, but as I read through the full issue, I realised that it’s really more of a continuum than a binary, and the contributors frequently, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, have other ideas.
Billy Mills, Paideuma Volume 50: A Review
One of the main reasons for reviving this blog was so I could point anyone who might be interested in the direction of my latest discoveries, so here we go. […] First is a long and heavily academic article by James Paz: Storm-thoughts and ice-songs: A creative-critical response to Old English eco-poetry.
This is one for geopoetics people, eco-poets or fans of Old English poetry. It deals with the attitude of early English writers to the natural environment, pointing out that the modern division of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ didn’t really exist, and seeing the human psyche ‘imbricated’ in the natural world, shaped by it and responding to it in a way that is very different from our use of nature as metaphor. It reminds me of Lorca’s understanding of ‘duende’. For a working poet, it disappoints that he doesn’t make much comparison with the practice of contemporary poets, though Alice Oswald gets a mention. Susan Richardson and Jen Hadley have a lot to contribute to this topic – and of course, I’ve written relevant poems and discussed it a little myself! All the same, this article is grounded in a wealth of thinking and writing that I will be following up for a long time.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Some Geekery
Hawks, falcons and eagles have become a bit of a cliché of the contemporary nature poem: I seem to come across them a lot these days, and I wrote about Tyson Hausdoerffer’s poem in Nimrod, quite a good example of the genre, a few weeks ago. Growing up in suburban Essex, I knew my garden birds very well, and I lived in hope of finding an owl pellet to dissect (not as disgusting as it sounds) but other birds of prey were not part of my world. The first hawk I remember encountering was in Skelton’s beautiful and remote lyric, ‘To Mistress Margaret Hussey’, which was the first poem in a nineteenth century anthology of English lyrics given to me by the school librarian whom I wrote about in this post:
Mirry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as faucon
Or hawk of the tower:(You can read the whole poem here.)
Because she is like a falcon or hawk “of the tower” I understood these birds to be confined. I associated the Margaret of this poem, in her tower, with Tennyson’s Elaine, a poem I learnt because Ursula in The Rainbow recites it passionately to herself in the hayloft, where she has escaped for a chance to read quietly:
Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,
Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber in a tower to the east
Guards the sacred shield of Lancelot.‘Gentle’ in Skelton’s time meant, primarily, ‘noble’ or ‘high-born’, as in ‘gentleman’; but ‘gentle’ can also be what you do in taming a creature born wild, and ‘gentle’ (as a noun) was for some time used for a female falcon, or (later) for any falcon or hawk that’s been tamed for falconry. This second layer of meaning is particularly obvious in Wyatt’s famous lyric, included in fact in Tottel’s miscellany which I wrote about last week. The poem begins:
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.This motif of a creature that is only half-tamed, or which seemed tame but reverts to wildness, is found repeatedly in writing about hawks. Thom Gunn’s extraordinary early poem, ‘Tamer and Hawk’, transforms and expands upon Skelton and Wyatt’s “gentle”.
Victoria Moul, Ware the hawk! (and ban the biography)
My immersion into Paul Celan’s poems hasn’t been depressing; instead I’ve been following, with keen attention over the past weeks, a mind which has been where we are treading. Celan spoke of poems as being prophetic, that they “cast their shadow ahead of themselves: one must live after them. Life itself must pass through the poem.” Yes indeed!
I follow mindfully through his halting struggle to wrest language out of its abuse and false clarity. And darkness, I can’t help but feel the power of “living, creative darkness,” a human darkness which also seethes in poems. I’m thinking of Celan’s “From Darkness to Darkness.” Never would you find a deus ex machina, a miraculous light bursting into a scene in Celan. Instead a subtle light appears, throws shade ahead of the poet, onto a beloved, onto an empty field. There is trembling possibility – a breakthrough of recognition, across borders, time and self. (I’m drawing on a brilliant introduction by Susan Gillespie, who translated Corona, Selected Poems.) Through the obscurity, the poem carries forward, having been sparked with the light and coursing energy of human exchange.
I felt it when reading together with a group of smart folks who were listening as if a trumpet was sounding. And at the protest where a shared consciousness was erupting in the gray rain. It is a kind of faith, hope against hope in a dim world. A shared consciousness to observe the present and the unknowingness of the future. Rock on, Celan.
Jill Pearlman, Celan’s Prophetic Darkness
Given we spent a fortnight in a Scottish lighthouse overlooking the North Sea, I suppose taking Rajani Radhakrishnan’s wonderful Water To Water as first choice reading was appropriate.
Rajani’s 2019 collection of 60 poems is wise, enduring, meticulously crafted – in over-simplified terms, an exploration of how water of one kind or another accompanies us through life and into death. And perhaps beyond. […]
I could quote at too great a length from, or analyse this book from first word to last and, for the time being at least, still not quite do it justice. I’m still exploring its layers – and perhaps because of our contrasting backgrounds it’s as elusive as the water that is the running theme. I know, though, that I am reading the work of a fine writer who has the capacity to move and involve me on a deeper sense than many can. It has a firm sense of place – India, obviously, Rajani Radhakrishnan lives in Bengaluru – and also a reverence for an ancient culture way beyond anything in my restless, pretty much homeless experience.
Rajani’s work is widely available on the internet and there was a second collection, duplicity, published in 2021, centred on life and love in a city during the pandemic. I will buy this one too.
As an aside, Water To Water is also a superb advertisement for self-publishing. It’s a quality production through Notionpress.com that matches that of a major publisher.
At work, I wrote SARAH on a label on my mason jar of coffee creamer. First, I was stunned by the neatness of the letters. Next, I was intrigued by the word on the label. Its phonemes: both exhalations, one a hiss and the other a roar. Yet together, they are a flat field of long meadow grass, blowing in a breeze. I have been to the exact field it conjures. It is a memory that I do not want to fully remember, wanting to keep the mystery. The landscape of Sarah has a dirt road running through it. Some of the dirt is dust suspended in the air as if a pick-up truck recently passed but the truck is nowhere to be seen. A house is in the distance. Hills are in the farther distance. There are chicks roaming around somewhere, but they can’t be seen. The sun is setting and everything is illuminated in an hour of gilded light. Despite the beauty of clouds, the sky is cloudless and beautiful. In this field, I am a child unmonitored and ageless. I am alone. And you, adult reading this, are having a beer with the other adults in that house in the distance, the windows aglow. You’re not worried about me and unapologetically, I don’t care about you. […]
To be named is to be vulnerable. To be named is to be a conjurer of memories and associations. It is not uncommon to meet people and their name just doesn’t sit right. You meet a Heather and they’re not a garden of flowers or an Appalachian plateau. You meet a Kimberly and they are not a crow with something shiny in their beak. You meet a Chad and he’s not an empty parking lot full of puddles that reflect just him. You meet a Brad and he’s not a closet of baseball caps, rarely seeing light. In our age of careful curations of self—be it online or in “real life”—people have “dead names” sometimes carefully or not carefully choosing a new name or identity that reflects their selfscape. And we’re fluid, aren’t we, always changing, always defending and reckoning with selfhood. Always needing to know what we are. Always needing to be perceived how we desire. Protecting our egos. We are but taut strings being plucked into vibration and those vibrations change. And the songs of ourselves are plucked by absolutely everything.
Sarah Lada, I Am a Field
Poetry as proof of life.
In the hostage photo:
today’s paper.
At the bottom of the poem:
today’s date.
Poem as ransom note —
no amount specified.
Pay and pay until God
or fate or blind dumb luck
sets free the captive.
The sweet release of …
death?? life?
Graphite alone can’t say.Jason Crane, POEM: Field notes
I have hand-me-down facts from the women who came before me. I’m not sure if the sum of the material I’m working with is closer to legend, or to an archeological reconstruction. Like how the sparse dinosaur bones in the museum are scattered in the white plaster. Like all poetry, I hold that what I write is true, if not accurate documentation.
It is a leap of faith to trust that I will step out of the way of my own story, which is a bigger story, which doesn’t have a protagonist.
I’m toying with the idea of structuring the collection by giving each woman her wasp counterpart. One story at a time. Each in her own cell and only occasionally coming out to bash one another in the head with their antennae. I’m not sure that there’s a way to avoid the bashings. It is our nature. […]
I know that an academic approach to creative work feels artificial for many writers. I try to find a way to balance the structure with the free-flowing work. One of the things I like about poetry is the structure. And one of the things I dislike about postmodernism is the idea that the reader or audience can decide for themselves what the work means.
I write with intention. If nothing else, I want to avoid ever wallowing in my own drama again. I don’t want to use my story to appeal to pathos. It’s not something I condemn, but it isn’t what I want to do. I also know that appealing to pathos gets a larger readership that I get. I’m okay with that. But I want to communicate specific ideas. I want to know my whys—all the way down to the truth.
Why?
Because people pretend that they don’t see our true nature.
Why?
Because there is no good and evil. There is nature and we need to love it.
Why?
Because nature sustains us. Every aspect of it.Ren Powell, Not Playing to the Cheap Seats
As a child, my job was to carry the freshly cut portions to a farther spot where it could dry through the summer. Two or more families worked a bog. The men took turns to handle the spade, the children were harried to work faster since space was always needed for the newest clod. We tripped and stained our knees, we fought off horseflies that longed to bite the softest parts of our skin, behind the legs, or in the crease of the elbow. During a break, a bottle of lemonade would be passed around, its glass gaining the marks of all the muddied, sweating fingers. If it rained on this first day, it did not matter. It did not harm the peat and it kept the flies at bay. Our cotton t-shirts darkened, our wet hair shone, and the rain made buttonholes in the brown water that gathered at the bottom of the bog.
By the end of the day, the cutter’s work seemed almost like the activity of a primitive printing press. Their one black-covered book was repeated and splayed out in a huge perimeter as though we had excavated the island’s library from deep in its earth. […]
Later, leaving the bog and reaching home, we would strip at the door so as not to bring any ticks into the house. But before this, we sat around the bog site. And this is what I’m remembering now: the arms, stained and dirtied. We had time on our hands. Didn’t we just. Peat is moss, grass, flowers, collected and decomposing over thousands of years.
Niall Campbell, Life at a Distance
Time passes differently for children than it does for adults. It’s infinite, elastic, and disquieting. I’m saddened when I hear of kids who already have calendars full of activities; i.e., soccer practice, French lessons, SAT tutoring. To me, this goes against the major gift of childhood: vast stretches of free time. How can a child enjoy those beautiful summer afternoons with a cluttered agenda? Imagine if a school-aged Emily Dickenson, cramming for a chemistry test, had missed the day that brought us this poem:
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.Boredom is an important part of a child’s free time, especially the peculiar condition of summer boredom. […]
In her essay, “Derichment,” from Synthesizing Gravity, Selected Prose, Kay Ryan denounces our culture’s mad rush to fill every second with “enriching” activities. “Children, it is often maintained, must be enriched; bread must be enriched. Weren’t they rich already?”
Erica Goss, The Two Most Beautiful Words in the English Language
God, please let this baby live.
Let the heart blink back
at me bewildered on the screen
as distant as my own heart.If not, when
the doors to that small room
open into the future I dreadhelp me feel the June sun, help me
see the sky above me as infinite
and generous, even there.—
This week I experienced my third second-trimester loss—our son Hugo Adoniram, at 17 weeks.
We had never planned to have another baby—we’d been through loss enough times—but he was a surprise; and we hoped (cautiously) that this time, and on this protocol, and with this high-risk doctor, things may go differently.
As with all our losses, we prayed night and day. I wrote this poem about a month ago, when everything still looked wonderful, every ultrasound perfect. I was cautious, and I’m not prone to hope.
Renee Emerson, When there is no heartbeat
[T]he big news of the week has been the beginning of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), the process that trains chaplains to work in a variety of settings. My setting for this summer is the Asheville VA Hospital, and so far, it’s a great place to work. […]
My work this week gave me inspiration for possible poems. Let me record them here so that I remember. The most promising idea is Noah’s Wife working as a chaplain in the VA hospital. Hospital, ark, are they really so different? I also see some potential in putting Cassandra in CPE training–Cassandra who has spent so much of her life with people not listening to her. And now, she is training herself to keep silent, which she discovers is not a gift she has.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Whirlwind Week
She’s in the waiting room, where the large TV
monitor is always tuned to a channel where two men
go into falling-down houses. They rip apart rotting
floorboards and waterstained walls like they
were made of wet cardboard, toss out old bathroom
fixtures and hardware. They stop frequently to banter,
as the closed captions show. Later, a female realtor
will check on their progress; her clients are so
excited for open house. “Before” and “After” time
lapse pictures flash on the screen. When her husband
comes out of his procedure, on the show it’s time for
the big reveal.Luisa A. Igloria, Outpatient Procedure, with Home Improvement Show
When I was a microbiologist, more than ten years ago now, the lab I worked in was next door to the histology department. I am fascinated by the way biopsies are prepared for microscopic examination. Such precision. The embedding of the sample in wax, the turning of the microtome, the precision blade cutting the sample into a tissue-thin ribbon of slices, so delicate that they can’t be picked up by hand. Instead they are floated on water, fished gently onto a glass slide. I think about this a lot: the art of science, the behind the scenes dexterity of biology, the gentle precision and hands on skill that scientists perform that the public don’t see. Biology always felt more like an art than a science to me.
This is what history can be: a moment, or a series of moments, caught in the paraffin wax block of place, the thin slices peeled away to reveal something mid growth, mid life, mid moment.
Flixton island is a slight rise in the landscape, easily missed. Years ago, at a time in my life when the loss of my daughter had ground the old me out of existence, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do and volunteered on an archaeology dig.
The place is fixed with many moments. 12,500 years ago, a herd of wild horses moved through a post glacial savannah to the lake here. The horses were small and stout. They were hardy and shaggy. These are the sort of horses that the people of the time painted on cave walls.
There are two stories here, two micro slices of history. One is the horse footprints at the edge of the lake, where the horses came to drink. These are the hoof prints discovered at the site while I was volunteering there. The hoof prints are crescents and scuffs and sunk-in-the-mud hoof prints clustering at a point on the lake edge. 12,500 years ago a moment is caught: it is a moment of fly bites and twitching ears and one or two heads raised, then down. It is a story of water rippling out from the point at which a soft horse lip touches the lake surface. It is a story of a heron moving past on origami legs, and of the sound of geese on the other side of the lake, and a swish of tail and crick- crick-crick of crickets, and the wind blowing through the long grass. The other story is of butchered bones placed in a pile. These too were found at the dig at the time I volunteered. The other story is also a moment fixed in time: it is a moment of wooden spears zipping through the hot air and the whites of a horse’s eyes. It is the story of the violence of horse kicks, thrashing hooves and maybe a bruise or a break of an arm or a head. The ending is of blood in the grass, horse blood, and perhaps of a warm liver being eaten raw, and definitely of meat being carried away. It is a human story. It is a horse story. How long did those moments take? Half an hour, an hour? A morning? The peaceful horses, the horses at the point of death.
Then a great sleep of nothingness; a great embedding of time into wax until we appear, with our tiny trowels and our weather proof macs, and the slicing of the wax begins. So delicate are the slices that we float each on the liquid surface of the human desire to know ourselves, until we can see, wet to the touch, if we would dare to touch, horse hoof prints from horses extinct for thousands of years. And bones rusted to red by the peaty ground, and a horse skull.
Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Long Ago Horses
Sharing a peek at these new portraits for the Hastings Poet Town project taken by photographer Maxine Silver. We chose the Fire Hills for this shoot. This place is home to me, the smell of blooming yellow gorse, so glorious and coconutty, the greens, blues and turquoise of the sea and the sky, all the salt in the air and all those delicious colours and feelings. I love it up here.
Hastings is a seaside resort with an illustrious poetic history. Once a haven for Pre-Raphaelite poets and Victorian authors, it is still a hub of creativity today. It continues to be home to artists, musicians, and renowned contemporary writers. Edited by Richard Newham-Sullivan and with a foreword by Salena Godden, this new collection ‘Poet Town: Poets & Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts’ is an anthology that brings together the best classic, modern and spoken word poets, linked to this uniquely creative coastal town.
So far Poet Town has received phenomenal quotes and endorsements from the mighty poets, Joelle Taylor and Luke Wright, see below, thank you. The wheels are in motion now, and this fantastic crowd-funded Hastings poetry anthology and photography book, celebrating 200 years of poetry from Hastings and thereabouts will be launched by Moth Light Press on September 1st 2025.
Salena Godden, Poet Town
What little theatres are for actors, little magazines are for writers – you have to start somewhere. UK paper literary magazines have been struggling for a while. The Arts Councils sometimes support them, though the councils’ aims and objectives change over the years. e-publications and web magazines (often short-lived) have made readers reconsider their subscriptions. Rising postal charges, especially when sending abroad, have hit hard. While subscriptions have plummeted, submissions have soared.
In the States, magazines have been struggling too. Unlike here, many of them are based at universities, which protected them to some extent. But now that universities are strapped for cash and Mr Trump has slashed NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding, even some of the top ten impact publications are on the brink. The Paris Review lost $15,000 in funding. One Story had $20,000 terminated. These may not sound like huge amounts of money but magazines survive on a shoestring.
Tim Love, Magazine survival
Why do so many lit mags omit class as defining point of marginalization and underrepresentation?
Let me be clear: my questions are not an indictment of any lit mag that wishes to actively encourage more racial, gender, and/or bodily diversity among their submissions. As I’ve said many times before, editors have the right to operate their magazines any way they wish. Writers are free to submit to any lit mags whose guidelines appeal to them, and to avoid submitting to those that do not.
I am specifically focusing on what appears to be a curious omission in some journals’ attempts to be more diverse and inclusive. Do editors generally not consider poor people to be underrepresented in literature?
I’ve been reading lit mags steadily, one a month, for the past three years. I’ve read gorgeous poems, thought-provoking essays, entertaining and moving stories. They’ve covered a range of experiences—teaching, dating, travel, divorce, addiction, wanting to have children, taking care of an aging parent, healing from abuse, uncovering family secrets, political strife, communing with nature…
In my experience as a reader, rarely if ever, have I encountered work that highlights the day-to-day struggles of someone without means. These works exist, don’t get me wrong. But they are few and far between among pieces that largely focus on interpersonal dynamics—family and romantic relationships, emotional and psychological struggles.
There is generally one exception to this, and that includes work that has an international component. In the pages of lit mags, it actually is fairly common to encounter writing about a person who has left everything behind to move to another country, or who lives in poverty in a remote village, or whose life has been rent asunder by war, by genocide, by political catastrophe.
These are all critical stories, crucial to our understanding of the world, and often wrenching to read. It is commendable that lit mags seek out such works and make particular efforts toward including translations when necessary.
Yet what I am saying I rarely see in lit mags is the much more banal financial struggle with which millions of people contend every day. Working two jobs. Managing life at $7.25 per hour. Being evicted. Getting the electricity shut off. Living on social security income. Drowning in medical bills. The grinding work of caretaking for a sick relative. Credit card debt… Put another way: Stories of poverty and financial hardship would appear to be underrepresented.
Becky Tuch, Q: Is class a feature of marginalization and underrepresentation in lit mags?
The apple trees and plum are full of fruit. I’ll have to thin out the apples and pray foragers don’t get in again this year. Attempting to think positive seems a flimsy counterpoint to the machismo of world politics, clusters of white men in suits. But retreat to a garden feels like a responsibility in the absence of any other action. The poet Forugh Farrokhzad wrote a poem, I Pity the Garden, which explores the impact of living in a warzone.
What I do here in Brighton is of little consequence, perhaps, except I do believe the pressure of ordinary people can have an impact on politicians. And I do believe I have a responsibility not to turn away. Last year the Guardian wrote about a family garden in a Gaza refugee camp.
The Borgen Project has collected a few examples of gardening in warzones.
Jackie Wills, Gardens, responsibility and conflict
You know how I’ve often wondered what happens when we consider the opposite? It’s a bit of a thought exercise. And while whatever is the opposite to what you normally take for granted in your personal belief system, might not be the answer either, often pondering this might take you down other paths you wouldn’t ordinarily consider.
So this past week I asked myself, what if all of this appreciating beauty, and finding pockets of joy, and having walks where we cultivate awe, and listening to birds, and looking at paintings and sculptures, and touching grass, and looking at the sky, and breathing like a yogi, and counting our blessings, and keeping gratitude journals, and trying to save the environment, and eating our fruits and vegetables, and practicing random acts of kindness, and trying to do good in the world, and actually giving a shit, and feeling empathy, and listening to music, and cultivating compassion, helping others, and sharing your beautiful things, what if, what if, what if, that makes everything worse? What if we could forget about all these activities and ways of being and just get angrier and angrier and protest or disrupt or demand more and better from the powers that be?
So yes, like you, probably right now, I rejected that. (Not the idea of standing up for the rights of all people to live, to thrive, to have their basic human rights respected and needs met). Because we can’t live there, our minds will break down. We need beauty to help us weather out the storm.
It’s hard to think about how we could make a better good life for ourselves and others when we live in the traumosphere.
How do we want to communicate with each other? I was thinking about Jane calling out to Rochester over the moors. Or the flower phone in Frost, or Kerouac’s line, “Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
Shawna Lemay, Turning My Desk Around Again
just enough darkness to forest the world :: then light dawns in one leaf
Grant Hackett [no title]