Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 25
nights without boundaries, fireflies and bats, children in bomb shelters, burying a dictionary, 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: nights without boundaries, fireflies and bats, children in bomb shelters, burying a dictionary, and more. Enjoy.
Last night, I got to participate in a poetry reading and discussion with Thom Eichelberger-Young, as hosted by Rachel Lauren Myers. And my god, I had a fantastic time. Thanks to everyone who came out. […]
In preparing for the talk, I wrote a lot of stuff to clarify my ideas, and I figure some of this might be useful to share here. It’s basically a reflection on the aims and limits of writing about historical nightmare and disaster, the political life of imagination, and the need for an anti-establishment stance as both writer and publisher. […]
[A] form of life upholds the poem as a space of psychic freedom and discovery and truth, and which lives among dreams, among the dead and the immortal, among trees and animals, stars, pasts, futures, all of it. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t also donating to those in need, and educating yourself politically, and involved in protest and other organizing, and whatever beyond that. The poem does not exhaust the political, and in some moments, a poem does not need to actually be “about” political “content.” For me, it’s about psycho-political positioning just as much as anything else: you can have a position on this stuff—as in seeing where your imaginative work is situated, and how it stands up to the nightmare forces and the other lies that would entrap our efforts—and then write about whatever you want. Some may be compelled to do the writing of nightmare and political antagonism, some may find they are called elsewhere, but they do that work with clear awareness of the stakes and where and how the lines are drawn.
R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK: no. 4
Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.
A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”
Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.
Maria Popova, How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time
More and more I think that it is important to find roots, to buckle in and brace against the storm that is raging over the world. More and more I find that people want to do that with their landscape, with the places they feel pulled to. They want to honour the nature of the place, they reach for some simpler time that didn’t exist. I am doing it now. I am making elderflower wine from the trees in my own garden, and thinking about the common folk who foraged the hedgerows, the working class people whose voices are lost in the written history of place. I have no idea the religion of these people, or anything about them, only that their hands reached for the white flowers of the elder, as mine do. This is the lineage of place.
Right now, people want to turn away from the men who would bring this world to the edge of annihilation because of a belief that they, and only they, belong to one place. Belonging is not a single moment, it is the knowledge that you are a part of a longer story, and that story is not singular. Time is immense and the history of people in relation to place is one of change, constant, constant change.
Wendy Pratt, Where Time Becomes Thin:
I don’t want to think about poetry
I don’t want to relearn movement
I don’t want to see concrete shredding itself like cardboard
I don’t want to hear another question about another tomorrow —
the big that always hides behind something small.I must give in and let myself float:
heart and brain and inner ear in a quiet updrift.
I would surrender if I knew to whom.
I would disappear if I knew how to.
I would cry if sadness had remained sadness.
I would tell if you would only ask.The walls move like kaleidoscope
patterns, changing without colour,
everything, a house of cards,
the king and queen leaning in to
make a small steeple.
The big things have other plans.Rajani Radhakrishnan, Unsettled
At the beginning of spring, I started a practice during some of my leisurely walks. Every ten steps, I stopped and looked deeper at things. This is how I noticed a specific species of flyfishing insect hatching in the wetlands and how these insects preferred to perch on privet. This is how I noticed ways water is held. This is how I noticed the movements of animals that came before me. The small game trails, the broken brush. This is how I noticed signs of movement and desire. This is how I noticed the unnoticeable snails, small as seeds, scattered all over the wet road, being run over by people who do not see them. Small bits of calcium carbonate and tender flesh dotting the road. This is how I noticed death and its spectrum of decay. The beheaded cicada. The quartered doe. The pale, limp crayfish. The small bird, smashed so profoundly like a translucent, pressed flower on the asphalt. Almost invisible, absorbed. Fossil-like. […]
I don’t know anything, really, except that I want to keep doing this. I want to keep discovering the mundane. I want to continue being amazed by what I have always been looking at. So I will. Maybe someday when I bring my finger to the cucamelon’s tendril, it will touch me back.
Sarah Lada, Stopping & Looking
I love poems about flowers and gardens, they remind me of my mum and my nana, and their respective gardens. My nana, who died almost 15 years ago, features fairly frequently in my poetry, including one about her garden—in response to Nina Catherine Howe’s poem ‘Meditation’ (1926)—and another, which I am rather proud of, in response to Hart Crane’s ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’ (1920). Finally, here’s a short haikai sequence I wrote in her memory, using both tanka and haiku forms as its base:
under all that sky nana’s grave
*
the same flowers
which adorned
my nana’s
casket:spring morning
*
the last time
i sat in nana’s garden . . .
the last time*
ah nana
i remember you
today,
blue-skied
& garden-eyedDick Whyte, Amy Thornton-Swartz – 3 Very Short Poems (1926-27)
In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t the first time I have talked about it here – but I did think it would be my last. But no. There has been birdsong. And last week, after work, like someone asking us to enact our back-to-normal lives for a scene towards the close of a film, we walked ‘by the river’ and you were, in those lovely four words ‘a step from me’. I had noticed ‘this great kindness everywhere:/ now in the grace of the world and always’ before, but not ‘a step from me’. Four little, simple words, suddenly larger and more vital than the luminosity of those they set up at the poem’s close. A step from me. A miracle. Here you are. Here I am. Our routine was broken by carnage, and now we might be on the way to reclaiming it. A step from me, the evening ‘crepuscular and iambic’, by still waters seeming suddenly depthless though only yards from pebbly rapids splashed in by dogs. A step. The natural and essential gap between any two people at walking pace. You nearly went from me. But you didn’t. And now you are back.
Anthony Wilson, A step from me
–Last night was one of those nights where I couldn’t even focus enough to sew or sketch. Happily, I was still able to read. Usually I choose something light, but last night, I turned back to Mark Lynas’ Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It. I bought it a month ago, read the part that I read as the LitHub excerpt, and then put it aside, where it got buried under a stack of papers. It is one of the grimmest description of nuclear aftermath as I have ever read, even grimmer than the movie Threads. It was so grim that it was almost not scary. It’s not exactly new information–after all, we’ve known about the possibility of nuclear winter for decades now. But the book spells out in detail what that would mean in a way that I haven’t seen before.
–I was happy to turn my attention to Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, nominated for the Booker Prize in the same year as Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song.” Maybe I’ll spend the summer reading 2023 Booker Prize nominees. […]
–On Wednesday, I wrote most of my Noah’s wife (as in Noah and the Flood in Genesis) as hospital chaplain poem, again by hand during lunch. I am pleased with the draft, and here, too, I look forward to seeing how it holds together when I type and revise.
–Here’s one stanza of that poem:
She has already witnessed
the end of the world,
the disaster that destroys everything.
She can be a non-anxious
presence to everyone in the hospital.
She has seen worse.Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Saturday Snippets with Apocalyptic Reading
A few weeks ago, I ran a course at Ty Newydd with Roger Robinson called “Building a Sustainable and Authentic Poetry Practice”. Sometimes when I was thinking about and planning for this course, I felt like the worst kind of fraud. How could I talk to other people about building a sustainable practice, when often my life feels anything but sustainable?
I make myself busy all the time, and then feel really down if I’m not busy. I’m not sure that is particularly sustainable! For example, this morning I could feel myself really down and I think it was because I thought I had a quiet week – only to write that list of jobs out and realise I’m actually not quite right if I think this is a quiet week!
I think one of the ways of making any type of writing practice sustainable is getting to know our own writing process – what we think we need, and what we actually need (which might be two different things!). I know that writing all day on a Monday is working really well for me at the moment, that working alongside friends works, that I don’t like to ‘catch’ myself writing or admit that I’m writing, that I often have to pretend I’m doing something else or just messing about. I know that I need feedback from other people to motivate me to keep going, otherwise I get distracted and give up halfway through.
Kim Moore, A Poetry Survival Kit
In the afternoon Nina guided us through the process of making handmade brushes with unconventional materials. It proved to be habit-forming! […]
Since the meeting we have been using our brushes – and looking in a different way at plants, sticks and discarded objects, assessing their potential as ‘mad brushes’. Clare has painted a series of amazing self-portraits, using the thin tip of a pheasant feather for the fine details. […]
As a direct result of our recent exhibition I have been asked to give a presentation on ‘Using materials from the landscape in handmade books’ at the Midsummer Moot, a get-together for local poets at The Avalon Marshes Centre on 24th June, and to teach participants a couple of book structures at two Art & Poetry Days for Bath Writers and Artists, in July and September, at The Hive in Peasedown St John. This community centre has a large art-room which can be hired by the hour – ideal for this sort of activity.
Ama Bolton, ABCD late May
In difficult times people need poetry.
They need places where they can come together, express solidarity, make their voices heard, and feel empowered. One way poets can help build a better world is to offer each other our time, talent, and unity. Another way is to expand opportunities for people to hear each other and feel heard.
To that end, we are launching a new kind of poetry press that will act as a collective, where poets not only share their poetry, but also pool their talent, gaining skills for helping other poets to learn writing techniques, promote their work, inspire new writers, and bring more poetry into their communities. As always, I feel the best way for us to move forward is to collaborate, so as we work on this project, I want to hear from you how you want to be involved and what you most want from this endeavor.
If you are interested in joining us, please take a moment to fill out this survey and let me know what you would most like to learn from/ contribute to this project.
Tresha Faye Haefner, Do You Want to Start a Press with Us?
washing my poetry i sweeten the sea :: until the green of your island is saved
Grant Hackett [no title]
W. H. Auden said that “proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.” Names are the closest thing we have to magic: naming is an act of creation as much as an act of description. Names are also a kind of knowledge. When knowledge dwindles, or is transposed, it becomes obscure. I love ‘Adlestrop’, but the names have always been a problem. I can’t see the flowers. Willows, yes. Grass, yes. But what’s a willow-herb? Meadowsweet? A haycock is a small pile of hay drying in a field. When I first read the poem I thought it was another plant, maybe an early-flowering one that had already dried out. I still read it that way.
I suspect I am not the only one who can’t see what Thomas sees. Does this matter? Yes and no. The poet Dannie Abse, who was born in Cardiff and later lived in London, wrote two poems in reply to Adlestrop, which must have represented a version of poetry he felt alienated by. One of these, ‘Not Adlestrop’, was pretty awful: man stares at ‘very, very pretty girl’ in a train window. The other, ‘As I Was Saying’, is much better, much funnier, a defence of the residents of the ‘ignorant suburb’ against a culture which still expects poets to be in communion with nature. In reply to an imagined critic, Abse reels off a long list of names from a ‘W. H. Smith book’, mocking Thomas’s botanical precision: ‘Butterbur, Ling, and Lady’s Smock, Jack-by-the-Hedge, Cuckoo-Pint, and Feverfew, even the stinking Hellebore…’
Still, Abse is being too defensive. When Thomas launches into his list, he is launching into the names for their own sake. We don’t need to know what they are, because the words are poetry. It is easy to forget, too, that Edward Thomas was born in Balham, in the suburbs (which is near me in south London), and there would have been a time when he didn’t know the names either. Thomas’s names are a kind of invitation, one that feels all the more important now, when both the knowledge and the flowers are fading. Just hearing the word ‘willow-herb’ or ‘stitchwort’ can make you want to find out what it is, and knowing something’s name is the first step towards loving it. [link added]
Jeremy Wikeley, Remembering Adlestrop
As you may know, the word “anthology” comes from the Greek anthos “flower” + -logia “collection”. So it always seems appropriate that one of the reference works I consult most in midsummer — The Reader’s Digest Nature Lover’s Library Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of Great Britain (1983) — should contain a range of allusions to English poetry.
The lore of wildflowers is itself poetry scattered in waste places. Recently, for example, I learned that the yellow-flowered groundsel — a weed that gets everywhere — takes its name from an Old English kenning: groundswyle, “groundswallower”. And then there is the metaphorical vividness of folk names: the toadflax flower, for example, which opens when its sides are squeezed, has been variously called “lion’s mouth”, “devil’s head”, “weasel-snout” and “pig’s chops”.
But for this Pinks I thought I would pick some entries from the Reader’s Digest Field Guide which cite actual poems that, like wildflowers, might otherwise get overlooked. […]
Mugwort / Artemisia vulgaris
This dusty looking plant with its unromantic name seems ordinary enough, but it has often been written about by poets. For instance, Edward Thomas in “The Brook” described how “there was a scent like honeycomb / From mugwort dull”.
[…]
An old couplet tells of the plants medicinal properties:
If they’d drink nettles in March and mugwort in May,
So many fine maidens would not turn to clay.I’m not entirely convinced by the claim here that mugwort has “often” been written about by poets — a search in the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, for example, brings up nothing. (I suspect you might be able to find it mentioned somewhere in the prolific recent work of J.H. Prynne, which is absolutely abuzz with wildflower names. But I’m not combing through two dozen pamphlets to confirm this.) The proverbial couplet here, though, has a pleasing touch of Housman to it, and the Thomas poem, as always, is worth reading in full. In it, the “honeycomb” smell of the dull-looking mugwort marks a moment of imaginative transition into a more enchanted world:
There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.Read on here for the sound of “waters running frizzled over gravel”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53749/the-brook-56d2335518e67
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #33: The Tangled Vetch
What does it mean to bury a dictionary? That the words are silent, silenced? That they’ve been killed, assassinated, died?
Or is it more akin to planting seeds and, come spring, there’ll be sprouts? Is the language returning to the earth, to where it came from and then, after a length of decay, there is transformation, rebirth. The words becoming part of the larger ecosystem. Are they mulch? Or do they bear the trace of what they have been through, their struggle for air, for legibility, for communication?
It’s an old practice in traditional Jewish culture not to destroy books or papers that are sacred, that have the word for God written on them. Instead, they are stored (see the remarkable Cairo Genizah where a treasure trove of centuries-old books was found, saved from destruction for this reason) and then often buried in a cemetery with ceremony and prayers as if they had been a living thing. A sacred book as a living thing that needs to be treated with respect, dignity, and care.
Once I visited a Sikh temple while holidaying in India. We were shown what looked like a child princess’s bedroom. Beautiful pink bed, sumptuous carpet and tapestries. What was it? It was where they put their sacred book to sleep at night.
For the past several years, I have taken books and left them outside to experience the elements. I’ve hung them from trees. I’ve buried and then exhumed them.
The image above and the video below is of what’s left of a thesaurus that I put outside under leaf mulch and the open sky. It’s been a year or two. The action of burying evokes the slow passage of time, the processes of transformation of organic matter. It’s a very slow poem, a slow music, maybe a deliberate and unfolding parade that even snails would consider stately and sloths, if they knew what glaciers were were, would think to be glacial in its progress. (I do sadly note that glaciers now retreating due to climate change, no longer move “glacially.”)
Gary Barwin, Burying the dictionary
In the background of this poem:
Allegri’s Miserere.
The soft singing of five voices,
turned down too low to hear clearly.Moments ago in a book
I learned of the existence of this piece,
stolen by Mozart’s brain from the Vatican;
transcribed and given to all of usin a courageous act of defiance,
or perhaps just a thumbing of the nose
at the cassocked voices of denial.Now coming through a USB speaker
attached by light waves to a laptop
and, as has been previously stated,
turned down too low to appreciate.We shrink our miracles
until they no longer scare us.Jason Crane, POEM: Miserere
Cara-Lyn Morgan is a citizen of the Metis Nation and the descendant of enslaved people in North America. She was born in Oskana, the area commonly known as Regina, Saskatchewan, and her work explores cultural duality, decolonization, motherhood, and the historical and present-day impacts of colonization. She currently lives and works in the Greater Toronto Area. She is a wife, mom, gardener, and neighbour. Her first collection, What Became My Grieving Ceremony was awarded the Fred Cogswell Award for Poetic Excellence and was followed closely by her second collection, Cartograph. Her third book, Building A Nest from the Bones of My People, has been warmly received since its release.
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When I made my decision to go to art school and to study writing and visual arts, I had a foreboding sense that I had disappointed everyone. As the child of an immigrant, it can often feel like you are on a set path of success and there’s a great deal of anxiety that surrounds a life choice that threatens “security.” I had a feeling that my parents felt I was indulgent and somewhat petulant in my choice, believing that writing was essentially a “hobby” and that I should explore options that were much more stable, writing in my spare time. But I believed that I had a story to tell and that I was worthy of the investment to tell it, so when Thistledown accepted my first manuscript and my book was eventually published, I felt very vindicated and validated in my choices to that point. The physical book felt like proof that I was not just writing as a way to entertain myself.My most recent work is a complete departure in style and in content from the previous two works. This is because I am a completely different person than I was when I started telling stories, specifically ones about my family. Since I first published, I have become a wife, a mother, someone who understands the mechanics of editing, someone who understands colonization and intergenerational trauma differently—I simply navigate the world from very different eyes. I’m a matriarch, and I feel a greater responsibility to this current book because it is a new legacy for me. These family stories are uncomfortable and sad, so I have shifted from writing “love letters to the family” as my previous books have been described. But no, maybe that’s unfair. This collection is a love letter to the family as well, because it was written out of a deep love and loyalty. I wrote this collection because I love my children and I want them to know where they come from. […]
17 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, I spent 20 years as a uniformed officer with Canada Border Services Agency, and in fact, I wrote most of my first draft of my first book sitting in one of those booths where you show your passport. For some reason that is very funny to most people who know me only as a writer. And the fact that I write poetry is always so mystifying to anyone who knows me only as a law enforcement officer. These days, I teach police officers Indigenous culture and history and reconciliation. But I would have liked to have been a baker or a pastry chef. How different a person I would have been though.18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was taught to use writing as an emotional tool early on, to help process the trauma of my parents’ divorce and other adverse events. I journaled and wrote so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by things I was experiencing as I grew up, and now I use writing to process intergenerational trauma, and to send stories in to the world so that I do not carry them alone. I have always written, so I it doesn’t feel like it was ever a choice. I just did it.rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cara-Lyn Morgan
Intelligent, detailed, non-academic discussion of poetry remains a requirement. I’m yet to encounter a convincing argument otherwise– or rather, a convincing argument as to what might replace it. Some have suggested the only criticism poetry requires is poetry itself, but this stance overlooks the ways in which all art (even poetry!) enjoys an uneasy relationship with commerce and market forces and so is always in need of honest redress. Likely now more than ever. “Discrimination is needed,” as Michael Hamburger warned. “Without it, art succumbs to the randomness of commercialism, in which the shoddy product can displace the well-made and durable simply by being more effectively marketed.”
Paul Farley took the pulse at the turn of our millennium, when he half-joked that his ’60s-born generation hadn’t had criticism, they’d had marketing. He was referring to initiatives like the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets of 1994, a PR attempt to make a newly diverse wave of younger poets seem like the “new rock ‘n’ roll”. What these poets also had in new abundance was literary prizes, and these have only proliferated as the years have rolled on. A decade ago, I published a short piece wondering at the perils of being a poetry reviewer. (Spoiler: there are plenty.) In the end, as I reflected at the time, it isn’t occasionally upsetting folks– that happens to anyone who lives an honest life. Nor is it unwittingly shutting doors on yourself. It isn’t publicly broadcasting your opinions, however scrupulously worded, in ways that might make you wince years down the line. The real peril is more of a threat: that you work to become as astute a critic as possible, and the worst warnings still turn out to be true: the critical culture is forever losing ground to a fast-food one, and cash prizes, administered by a process marred with conflicts of interest, are the endgame of literary reception. So it seems to have proved.
What’s wrong with literary prizes, you ask? Nothing, in and of themselves. How ever misguided you might consider their aims, the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, to name two of the most well-known in these isles, stemmed in the ’90s from a broadly praiseworthy desire to promote excellence in new British poetry to the general literary reader, much in the fashion of the Booker Prize and the contemporary literary novel. A little glam and glitter, with the promotion afforded to shortlisted poets and the eventual winner intended to kick up a media fuss, and bring new readers to contemporary poetry. (No coincidence that the T. S. Eliot Prize was first administered by the Poetry Book Society, an organisation founded by Old Possum himself to build a wider intelligent audience for new verse.) But literary prizes have become a victim of their own success. Not, sadly, in reliably widening the audience for excellent poetry, but in their steady proliferation and growing influence in poetry circles as the main vehicle of literary reception. As Carcanet grandee Michael Schmidt once claimed, if you control the prizes, you control the culture of reception. Meanwhile, as Tim Parks lamented in a recent column for the TLS, reflecting on literary juries with an insider’s eye, “over the years there has been less and less media space for serious reviews. But the prizes multiply, as if the only thing that can fire up enthusiasm for literature is a narrative of winners and losers.”
Ben Wilkinson, Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic
“On Textual Violence: Cultural Imperialism and Monolingual ‘Translation,’” a conversation between Mona Kareem and Yasmeen Hanoosh:
I wanted to take the veil of innocence off of literary translation. The colonial nature of translation is widely discussed in translation theory and translation studies, yet it often focuses on colonial archives or dictionaries, to give some examples. Literary translation, however, has been able to maintain its righteousness and innocence, which is really an extension of white innocence. For a working example, I focused on what is referred to as “bridge translation” whereby a white poet and a native speaker co-produce a translation in which the latter is silenced while used as a bridge. The issues with such phenomenon are many: political, ethical, aesthetic. Yet it goes unquestioned, even encouraged.
As someone who was commissioned by a now-defunct Iranian cultural organization to produce more than one of these “bridge translations” from classical Persian literature into English—though my informants were (long-deceased) English-speaking Persian Studies scholars, not native speakers—I take the questions Mona Kareem raises here very seriously. I will tell the story of how I came to make the translations I have published another time. Here I will say only that I took pains to distinguish in a responsible way the work I did from the work of Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinsky, whose versions of Rumi and Hafez respectively are deracinating, appropriating, and, frankly, colonizing in precisely the way Kareem alludes to in her use of the term “white innocence.” (I will leave the degree to which I succeeded and failed—because I am sure it’s both—to readers of these works.) Reading this conversation also brought home to me both my own ignorance of contemporary Arabic poetry and the degree to which all poetic cultures, and all efforts at literary translation, confront more or less the same questions, though they may do so at different historical moments and with different cultural and political histories as context. Those differences, I think, are what make room for learning to take place.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #41
It is not literary citizenship as such that I detest (or detested in 2014, when I wrote this piece). When people refer to “literary citizenship,” what they typically mean is actively participating in the literary community that matters most to them.
For instance, if you are trying to break into literary magazines, being a “good literary citizen” would entail reading lit mags and talking about them, purchasing them, subscribing, promoting their contents, forming connections with contributors, interviewing fellow writers and editors, attending events, participating in readings, blogging for lit mags, learning proper submissions etiquette, helping other writers find appropriate lit mags for themselves, and so on.
Of course I do not detest any of these activities. I do all of these activities, many of them daily. I encourage others to do as much of them as they can.
What I am describing in my article is not so much the acts that constitute “good literary citizenship,” but rather the term itself. What does it mean? How did it originate? How does it undermine writers’ own best interests?
As I say in the article, “to understand the rise of the Literary Citizen, perhaps first we need to look at the meltdown of our economy.” The piece was written over a decade ago, but sadly the economic conditions that I describe still apply today. I discuss the closing of bookstores, newspapers laying off their review staff, and publishing houses gutting their marketing teams.
With the shuttering of all these services and spaces for writers, who then picks up the slack?
Certainly it’s not the owners and CEO’s of publishing companies who lend a hand to writers in times of duress (in spite of the fact that their profits are derived precisely from those writers). No, it’s writers who are expected to look after themselves and one another.
As one particularly blunt marketing executive put it,
“You can train your authors to handle more of the marketing efforts. Writers who become skilled at promoting books can produce thousands of dollars in extra profits for the publisher.”
…“[T]hese authors don’t require expensive salaries, office space, insurance packages, or retirement plans. Instead, the publisher just pays a small author royalty…It’s a win-win, right?”
Marketing, publicity, writing reviews, book promotion, interviewing writers—all these activities previously done by paid staff have increasingly been sloughed off to writers.
Now, though, it comes with a twist. This is not work. It’s literary citizenship!
Becky Tuch, Q: What exactly is “literary citizenship” (and what is wrong with it)?
When I began this blog in August 2020, I wanted to bring attention to debut poets and the sterling work undertaken by small poetry presses in discovering new talent. Today sees both those aims realised. Flight of the Dragonfly Press over the last couple of years has developed a small list of publications by new exciting writers thanks to the hard work of Barbara Mercer and Darren Beaney. The latest addition to that list is Dorian Nightingale with his debut pamphlet Songs from Last Imaginations, a collection of twenty-three poems interspersed with photographs, some accompanied by quotations. Like those photographs, the poems are snapshots of moments in time, capturing specific states of being, such as the threshold between life and death, the fledgling’s first flight, the pursuit of creativity, being speechless , enjoying a concert performance; all told in expertly fashioned verse, far more accomplished than one might expect from a debut publication.
Take for example, one of my favourite poems in the collection, words unspoken. It conveys that moment when one holds one tongue, when one decides to keep one’s thoughts to oneself. The moment is portrayed as a retreat, a ‘snap back/ to the place beyond the perimeter.’ The speaker withdraws from the conversation, but it is not an easy thing to do. This is vividly conveyed through the extended metaphor of words ‘dropping to the ground/ right there in front of me,/ buckling to their knees/ whilst beseeching their worth,/ offering me their terms/ from the wet, sticky earth.’ I loved the originality of this imagery that enables the reader to share the inner conflict of the speaker, his obstinacy (‘tight-lipped’ and ‘unmoved’) versus the desire to say something (‘beseeching’, ‘offering’, ’pleading’). There is something eminently relatable here.
As there will be for many readers, who are poets or involved in the arts, in the poem, sparks. which captures the essence of creativity, that desire for originality. In the poem Nightingale takes the cliché of the ‘spark’ of creativity and gives it a freshness and dynamism. The speaker symbolises the creative act as a way of lighting a fire. He dismisses the conventional approach, saying ‘i never wanted to light my fire that way./ the friction of sticks within textbooks and booklets, the instructions concurred by many teachers and tutors, conveying the way/ to fashion a flame.’ Note the punctuation, the use of lower case for i and for words following full stops, the speaker is clearly a rule breaker. He wants to find his own method, a unique, personal way: ‘to uncover such things in my own inherent manner.’ Yet as all fellow poets will know this is not easy, and Nightingale explores these difficulties. He talks of ‘the shyness of my instinct’, the search for confidence; of the need ‘to spend time on my insight, to find out if it works,’ the time-consuming labour of creativity;’ of the necessity of failure (‘to know that it hurt when alternatives fail,/ the setbacks of initiative that curtail a better trail’); and of the all-consuming desire to see the creative process through (‘i so yearned to spur a spontaneous nerve./ a lightning bolt moment.’
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Songs of Last Imaginations’ by Dorian Nightingale
As those who’ve been reading for a while will know, sometimes I like to think about just a single poem. A couple of days ago I recorded a podcast with Henry Oliver (of The Common Reader) — available to listen to next week, I believe — and one of the things he asked me was whether I was depressed by the state of contemporary poetry, and whether there are good poems being written now. Which of course there are! Then earlier this week a friend who’s also a substacker, Jem, recommended I had a look at a particular poem in the latest issue of bad lilies, a consistently interesting and still fairly new British online poetry journal. It does only poetry, no criticism, and the interface is a bit clunky and annoying, but it’s worth persisting with. […]
Leadbetter’s poem is truly strange as well as moving. I mean that its strangeness is worked out and through in the course of the poem in a coherent way, rather than being an instance of the apparently near-compulsory ‘touch of whimsy’ or ‘hint of the surreal’ that bedevils contemporary Anglophone poetry so tediously. (I wrote about that a bit here.) It’s a proper poem in which all the parts contribute to the whole.
Victoria Moul, A poem by Gregory Leadbetter
I mentioned Erik Satie in a recent post about music to write by. And then I came upon the book Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by the music critic Ian Penman. It’s just the sort of book I love. Written in three parts using three different treatments, the middle being in dictionary or encyclopedia format. It’s fairly well known that Satie was a bit of a weird fellow, what with his umbrella obsession, his proclivity for eating only white food, and his hoarding habit. […]
A while back I wrote about typewriters and pianos and the fact that the first prototype of a typewriter was made using piano keys. So I was delighted to read Penman: “Thinking about visual rhyme between a piano and the keyboard I’m typing this on.” He talks about how he is haunted by an Olivetti he used in his teens, how he prefers his keyboard to be separate from his computer. All of which I completely get.
Penman’s Satie book reminded me somewhat of books like Tim Carpenter’s book on photography, and Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity. Davey says at one point, “I am trying to find a new way to work.” And these books create an avenue for those of us who are wanting to try to write about things without being smoothed out in an ai world. They also quote, refer, acknowledge sources. They connect things that only a weird and engaged human mind will. They’re all a bit weird, I guess, and all I can say is, bring on the weird please, writers, artists.
Shawna Lemay, On Esoterik Satie
While meandering up and down the street with Radu, pausing at his usual pee-mail stops, even venturing to add a new box to the map of his scent-relations, a Carolina wren chirped my name and the world shimmered, froze, melted, became momentarily otherwise.
I thought about a nest I’d come across a few weeks ago, on a similar walk. Had I taken a photo of that fallen nest?
Winding through the image file, I found a photo of the fallen nest, the small blue egg crushed within it. The shell struck me as the broken skin of an origins. It urged me to play with the scraps and remnants, to make an alternate nest from the shadows of things that got cut from my conversation with Gabriela Frank, which will be published in The Rumpus next week. To Gabriela’s question about process, I mentioned fragments and pieces of sound, but there is, perhaps, another way of ‘saying’ the same thing, which is by enacting it.
In my fever for lost and fallen things, I created two structures composed from the cuttings of wood chips at the base of the interview’s final draft. . . Two fallen nests. In the first nest, I decided to frame the speakers by using quotation marks, despite the fact that these words have not or will not be published in an official journal, there is a thrill in according them the status of words that were scored and prepared for performance somehow. The second nest is composed entirely from words of my own, looking up at me from the cutting floor, asking to be placed in a relation that is not quite conversation with one another.
Alina Stefanescu, Playing on the cutting room floor.
The regional drought has officially ended, and the rain continues. Ironic, then, that the online site Feed the Holy just posted a poem I wrote near the close of a droughty August: “Zen Gold.” Fireflies and bats, while not abundant, manage to enjoy the recent dampness. The monarch butterflies have returned to our meadow, though I don’t catch sight of them on rainy days. But the moist conditions didn’t dampen the turnout or enthusiasm of local citizens who came out in droves for peaceful “No Kings” protests here…in a decidedly “purple-red” area of Pennsylvania.
Speaking of regional, this weekend I also attended the debut showing of a documentary film about the performing arts community in Bethlehem, PA, formerly famous for Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The film is titled “Rooted,” and it follows that “roots” idea with the planting of trees at arts sites, the metaphor of the mycorrhizal network (see my references to Lesley Wheeler’s latest book–so much overlap!) and the concept of community development. Especially through works of imagination. In the 1970s, when the steelworks was beginning to slow production and lose employees to retirement and business to competitors, small groups of young, talented artists in theater, dance, music, and puppetry started performing in parks, churches, etc…and gradually found inexpensive space in the city to establish themselves and pursue their dreams. Some of those little startups, such as Touchstone Theatre, have been operating, teaching groups of children, entertaining the community, and advocating for the arts for over 50 years.
Godfrey Daniels coffeehouse/listening room and The Ice House (home of Mock Turtle Productions) have been sites for poetry as well as for music and theater-craft. I have participated in and attended poetry and one-act play readings at both of those venues. I don’t live in Bethlehem, but it isn’t too far away from me–still in the Lehigh Valley region. And I deeply appreciate the work that pioneering arts-folks have done, and that arts advocates and teaching artists continue to do, for our area. The people behind the arts deserve recognition.
Ann E Michael, Behind the arts
I’m still on my go-slow summer, writing in the morning, working on the house or garden or doing something with the kids in the afternoon. Summer is fresh fruit and thunderstorms, always having dirt under my fingernails no matter how hard I scrub and the window open at night. It’s ice cream and sleeping in, museums and cafes, it’s writing when I want. Long days, nights without boundaries. I don’t want it to end, but I have my summer course in Scotland soon which follows midsummer and starts the descent back into the real world.
Gerry Stewart, Midsummer
Well that’s it, the thing that’s has been a long time coming is done (bar some last knockings). I am overjoyed, and already looking forward to the next one.
I know what you’re thinking…yes, I have finally finished painting our doors. The last gloss work went on yesterday…Only new door handles remain to be fitted —and that’s down to Rach deciding on them. However, no I am not talking about that.
I am talking about Matthew Paul’s second collection. It has been a very long time coming…8 years, in fact…But I would say it has been well worth the wait.
I was invited to read with Matthew at his London launch on Tuesday just gone. There were a lot of launches in London that night, as well as the London Lawyers Charity walk, so London was hot and heaving, but it’s fair to say that Matthew truly set his collection off into the world in style—ably supported by Vanessa Lampert, Ian Parks and myself.
It was wonderful to hear (and those noisy lawyers made it quite hard at some points) from all 3 poets. Everyone had something different about them in terms of style of delivery, poetic style (although everyone loved a detail, I think—I can’t/don’t want to do the analysis on it…I’m not an academic and no one would care anyway), and everyone had different themes and ways of coming at the world…I think this meant that the audience definitely got plenty of bang for their metaphorical buck.
Mat Riches, Punctured by Budleigh Salterton
The Solstice arrived here gloomy and rainy, which seemed appropriate for the day of Martha Silano’s Memorial. It wasn’t formal, but there was music and poetry readings and a tribute from her students. I also saw some old poet friends. I cried in the car on the way there. It’s still hard to believe she’s gone.
Cedar waxwings appeared in my neighborhood that day, which were one of her Martha’s favorite birds, and our friend Kelli has several poems that mentions a connection between grief and waxwings, including “When Women Die, Waxwings Appear” in her first collection, Small Knots. […]
In happier News, I have a poem in the new 75th Anniversary issue of Shenandoah, and our local Woodinville Lavender Farm had its opening weekend. The whole issue of Shenandoah is worth reading, and the lavender farm had good turnouts—it’s just down the street from our house, and we’re so grateful it’s there—a balm and a joy during these difficult times.
And I should say, we’re all in difficult times. I came home from Marty’s memorial to see that Trump has decided to bomb Iran, and that major cities should be on “high alert”—whatever that means, none of it good, I’m afraid. Today I spent the majority of the day dodging AI-generated images of nuclear destruction. Those of us born in the 60s and 70s remember the information we were given about what to do if hit by a nuclear bomb—at school, at home, and a cute (!) video about what we do if we’re in the playground. We need all the days in lavender fields we can get.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Solstices, Poem in Shenandoah, Memorial, Waxwings Appear and Lavender
Years later, I hear a New York poet read a poem about walking through a forest and hearing a sound—either a deer or a bear. There’s a difference, I thought, between prey and predator, and in the woods, you would know it, and that’s how you survive the apocalypse or the end times, but you wouldn’t know that coming from New York.
When I do finally run away from the cult, I walk down the road away from Mr. Whipple’s house with my sleeping bag, harmonica, two dollars, and my dog. I find a library. Someone takes me into her attic and gives me a job taking care of her son. She has a spinning wheel, a houseful of books. I eat honey at her house out of the jar. I’d been waiting for honey all my life.
I walked away with no driver’s license or social security number. I found my way to ASU, then California. Were there more drunken men? Reader, I tell you, they were everywhere. They came for me. What other models did I have? I grew up wanting to save. I had children with them. Raised children with them. Margaritas and champagne wash through all my fairytales.
I thought that anytime now, someone might kill me. But they didn’t. I lived.
Dr. Strangelove dreamed of women, of the bomb, of sheltering from the bomb. George dreamed of running his little world and the women in it. Mr. Whipple dreamed of a young girl’s hands opening the beer, morning after morning, until he died.
I had different dreams: Libraries, streams, books and sunlight between them. I dreamed of sitting in that sunlight. I dreamed of being my own strange love.
Kate Gale, I Dream of My Own Strange Love
I talk to the animals, but they don’t talk back. Research shows humans are terrible at understanding what their beloved dogs or cats are thinking, unable to identify what that body shift means, that shifty eye, the tightening of the nose. Talk to me, we say. There’s a lot of talking going on these days. Not a lot of listening, maybe. Or not a lot of thinking, at any rate.
There is so much I can no longer listen to. So many ways in which I feel unheard. So many things I don’t understand. What if instead of chanting louder as I passed by the guy giving a finger to the marchers, I stepped out of the throng and said, Hey, what’s up with you? Would we have had words? Or shared words? Hard to tell. Impossible to predict. Would we even be speaking the same language? I think of that Tower of Babel, how productive we were, all strategizing in a common language! Now we’re as puzzling to each other as I am to the ant I just bum-rushed off my pant leg. And vice versa. Where did he think he was going?
I like this poem for its plainspoken dealing with god, its plea for understanding, its plea for a common language. Because we humans are animals too. And we’re baying to be heard.
Marilyn McCabe, Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow in the air
The verse says “Jesus wept,” but
it’s in the wrong tense.
Jesus is still weeping.He takes turns with Rachel
still lamenting her children
and Shekhinah, perennial exile.This week they’re crying
for children in bomb shelters
and even more for children outside them.Rachel Barenblat, Jesus wept
First: the 75th anniversary double issue of Shenandoah launched this week! The website has been professionally redesigned, too (I’m so glad Beth secured funding for that just under the wire–universities are all belt-tightening now). I read and proofread the whole issue so I know for sure it’s terrific. I hope you’ll check it out. If it makes you want to join the party, by the way, the dates for submission windows are here. The number we can handle in any period maxes out fast, by the way, so aim to send early.
Otherwise, my central mission for the last two weeks of spring was to enjoy visits from my adult kids; rest; and read lots. More difficult aims I made some progress on: catching up on chores (the yard was egregious) and taking stock of the poems I’ve been jotting and forgetting so I could get some under submission at magazines. I’ve now read everything in my digital files, revising what seemed most promising and sending out a few (there are other drafts handwritten in notebooks, I suspect). Revision has been slow, partly because I’m legitimately tired, but partly because many of the poems I dug up are emotionally intense as well as wobbly in quality. It was hard to remember some of the occasions and feelings that inspired them.
Revision, for me, is a long process that requires critical distance I can only gain by putting work aside for a weeks or months. Often changes follow that classic formula of cutting the poem’s throat-clearing opener, its overexplained ending, most of the adverbs, and occasional moments of defensiveness or self-pity. Often there’s a governing metaphor with logic that doesn’t quite fly, so I have to re-enter the thinking and parse the poem logically. This sometimes involves expansion, too, especially if I realize I’ve been too oblique or have been dancing around the hard stuff. Those are the architectural moves, but the finishing work of strengthening diction, especially verbs, and trimming unnecessary words (my former colleague Heather Ross Miller called it “thattery and whichery”) also seems endless–I think of some new tweak every time I reread a poem. And some are beyond rescue. I can make them cleaner and craftier, but I’m not capable of rendering them genuinely powerful, the kind of poems a reader might fall hard for–at least, not now. It’s hard to pin down that quality, but often a poem with strong appeal conveys vulnerability or insight, or the language is especially surprising and sparkling.
Lesley Wheeler, Myco-outtakes
I drove my mum along the seafront on our way home from a trip out and found my mind flashing through memories. I revisited the taste of vinegary tomato ketchup on chips, the feel of the seam when wearing my rubber ring to paddle, the sound and excitement of bingo and slot machines. There was also the first time I ever drove my mum in the car and kangarooed it down her road and round the block whilst muttering a number of swear words and thinking she might need lots of persuading if she was ever to go for a drive with me again. And yet there we were decades later enjoying a smooth ride and one another’s company.
The sunny weather brings to mind the joy of simply lying down outside and watching the clouds. Here’s to moments like that and the thoughts that expand within them. This poem was first published by One Hand Clapping.
SKYLARKING
She searches the sky most days.
Never says skies;
to her that one vastness
holds so much.Sometimes she forgets
she cannot contemplate what exists above.There are days she wants to pull down the clouds
to build a maze.Days she wants to swallow the small ones;
their cold candyfloss hydration.Days she wants to lie down on the side of a hill
with someone she loves
naming every shape.Days she thinks she would be happy
just watching everything glide by
in the colour of swans.Sue Finch, Summer Solstice
Crows in the gardenia bush.
Driveways exiting onto asphalt.
One dark speck: a fishing boat;
early morning, the sea
clear as glass.Luisa A. Igloria, Black and White