Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 26
industrious bees, birds made of text, the rhizodont, International Pineapple Day, 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: industrious bees, birds made of text, the rhizodont, International Pineapple Day, and much more. Enjoy.
Despite being long removed from my teenage years, I still think of summer as a time of transition or growth. You return to school in the fall to find out who got taller, weirder, or cooler; what new experiences people had, or friends they made or lost. This summer, I’ve decided instead of discovering something new, I would reclaim something lost. And so, after 28 years, since I first left home for college, I have picked up my flute again.
Through high school, despite knowing that I had no long-term musical ambitions, I was quite serious about it and performed with the local college flute choir until I graduated. (I even have a flute performance to thank for connecting me with my now husband.) I am not sure exactly why I stopped playing, other than my singular focus and obsession with becoming a writer. But, as I remember it, I put my flute away after my senior year ended, and it sat in its case, moving with me from city to city and home to home for decades. Ocassionally, my parents or in-laws would ask if I ever planned to play again, and I have always thought that I would, perhaps in some old lady orchestra. Yet still, my flute sat on the bottom shelf in the basement.
And then, earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to see contemporary dance legend Twyla Tharp’s newest work, which is set to music from Philip Glass that features the flute extensively. I left the performance wondering—what did my middle-aged brain remember, and could I be nearing a tipping point where, if I don’t start to reclaim what it remembers, I might lose it completely?
And so, a few weeks later, on a night when I had the house completely to myself and thus could embarrass myself privately, I went down to the basement and dug out my flute and all the sheet music I could find. Nervously, I assembled my flute and brought it to my lips, which to my great surprise instinctively formed an embouchure. I then gathered my yoga breath and put my fingers where I thought they might go to play a D. And what do you know? It made the sound I remembered, vibrato and all.
Carrie Olivia Adams, Who will you be at the end of the summer?
I’m trying out my boundaries and saying yes to more opportunities. Who knows, maybe I’ll even teach again? I don’t want to live my life in fear anymore, especially when the world is so uncertain around us. I can’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, but I can stop letting fear make my decisions.
So, I am starting a new class on essay writing, and I may try to put together a manuscript of essays. I may even try my hand at YA fiction after many years of avoiding it.
It starts inside us. If we are afraid of everything, we will not act in the way that’s probably the best for our lives. And our lives are so short! If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been talking about the deaths of two friends in the last year. It made me realize that no matter how safe, how good, how many right things you do, you really can’t protect yourself, and in that case, why not: write the authentic truth about your life? Venture further out into areas that might not be exactly the best for your disability or food allergies but might be an excellent way to connect with a new community of writers? Why not try walking a little further every day in the lavender farm (or your local trail,) because maybe right now is the best my body will ever be? Why not stand up to bullies in politics, or befriend someone who is a little different form you, or read whatever books you like no matter who says they’re okay/appropriate? If I am a poet, why can’t I also write essays or fiction? Lots of my writer friends do this already. This made me think about the cages we put ourselves into, the prisons that are our routines or relationships that hurt us or a country that doesn’t value us, or people that don’t treat us with respect. Why not reach farther, try a little bit harder, face more risk?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New poems in Flare, Upcoming Appearances: Nature Writing Conference, Not Being Fearful, More Lavender and Hummingbirds
i tell my doctor that i don’t want him
recording any more information about me
being trans. i think of a running bible of
my body. what kinds of notes has he taken
over the years? did he note
when i first grew a full beard? did he record
the times i came in a dress & the times
i did not. i look up diy hormones.
one website has a list of rituals.
go out to the forest & perform one & feel
nothing has changed. what level of belief
do you need for a gender ritual to take?Robin Gow, 6/29
Michigan “writer, editor, educator, dancer, and, more importantly, learner” Leigh Sugar’s full-length poetry debut is Freeland (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), a collection that opens with the information that “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.” Framed as “an impossible love story,” Freeland “examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.” As the press release continues: “Drawing critical connections between personal and family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the racial imaginary of whiteness, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.”
I’m intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay, writing on loss, love, grief and language, wrapping in threads of family story, poetics and how best one might articulate across such potentially vast distances. As she writes as part of the extended sequence “FREELAND: AN ERASURE”: “Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon oof the punitive form. // In profile, I separate from this justice. // Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter. // Dear anyone.” Freeland exists as an interesting counterpoint to other contemporary literary titles that have explored the prison system, whether Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng writing her father through the poetry collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2017), or the collaborative study between photographer Deborah Luster and the late American poet C.D. Wright, One Big Self: an investigation (Lost Roads, 2003; Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007) [see my review of such here]. Sugar centres her specifics around the abstract of human space and interaction, connection and disconnection, composing a lyric of deeply-crafted lines that braid lived experience, whether by the narrator or her “beloved,” across a poetics around human connection, even and especially amid such punitive disruption. “A smile,” she writes, to open the poem “REPRESSION,” “when the officer commands I stop // touching you. The space between shame // and pleasure shorter than the scythe- // shaped stretch of shoulder // revealed when my shirtsleeve slips off // the me whose swift hands leave your neck to right the slip // then return to my own lap. I sag, // guilty, still, still under the camera.”
rob mclennan, Leigh Sugar, Freeland
I can’t think of two busy places that are more different. Even in the crowded, electric areas of Tokyo, even in Shibuya with its famous scramble, there was a sort of order, a vibe that was polite and even hushed in the train stations and on the streets. Nashville, on the other hand, was a cacophony. Neon signs announcing celebrity bars flanked both sides of Broadway. Each one had a band playing and, although I’m sure the bands could be distinctly heard inside the bars, outside on the sidewalk, it was an assault of drums and chords. Every inch of real estate around the Country Hall of Fame and the Ryman was filled with restaurants and retail stores, and there were apartment complexes with more retail spaces under construction everywhere we turned.
It made me consider how some words embody different meanings. Both of these places are tourist destinations and therefore are busy. Synonyms for busy fall into both negative and positive connotations. Negative? Strenuous, hectic, tiring, swarming, teeming. More positive? Energetic, active, lively, bustling, vibrant, buzzy. A few that could be either?Astir, thronging, eventful, crowded. (I just re-read what I wrote up above, and —order, vibe and hushed versus cacophony and assault — it’s pretty clear which experience of busy I preferred.) But even the most accurate words sometimes aren’t enough.
This is part of the difficulty of writing about a place that you do not claim as your own. Your biases come through in language, even when you are trying to simply convey, perhaps, a narrative or a description that struck you in your travels. I have traveled a lot, and well-meaning people always say, “It must give you so much to write about!” Not really. I find that I struggle to write in a meaningful way about travel much of the time. I started three pieces of writing while in Japan and decided to do what I do at home—let something in my surroundings serve as an entry point to a bigger idea or theme rather than to write directly about the experience of traveling. We’ll see how it works.
Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part 2
A couple of weeks ago I did a reading with Peter Kenny at at Arundel Arts Junction, a lovely eclectic event which also included a comic improv act, jazz for keyboard and sax, a photography presentation and more – it’s all happening in Arundel, people!
Peter and I are doing another joint reading at In-Words this coming Tuesday 24th June from 7.30 at West Greenwich Library, together with fellow Telltale Poet Sarah Barnsley. As well as reading our poems we’ll also be chatting & taking questions about Telltale Press. It’s free, and there are refreshments – come if you can!
Yesterday I was reading in the home of a very good friend. She basically asked me to come and talk about the book, and read a few poems, for a group of her friends. Susan’s enthusiasm and unwavering support for my work are both astonishing. So there I was with a small group of women, telling them a bit about the book, reading some of the poems and answering questions. It was a lovely intimate event. And I sold ten books! Much gratitude to Susan.
Robin Houghton, Book promo: readings, reviews, articles… plus other stuff
Bradford Literature Festival is my favourite festival. It’s immense – massive enough to have its own road signs – but at the same time it makes Bradford into a friendly literature village, where everyone knows everyone, including some of the biggest brightest stars in literature. Plus they have the best Green Room with the best buffet, and a free-to-passholders restaurant with the greatest curry and jugs of lassi.
The first time I worked at the festival, I sat in that restaurant filling my face and chatting to a lovely friendly woman. Eventually, I asked her name, and what she was doing at the festival – to my mortification she turned out to be the festival founder and director, Syima Aslam. Hundreds of events across the city, and an education and outreach programme running throughout the year – but she still has the time and grace to chat.
All of which is to say, that when they invite me to run discussion panels, I always agree.
Clare Shaw, Did The Great Gatsby change your life?
Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing. […]
On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures.
Matthew Paul, May and June reading
Sarah Imrisek and I exhibited an interactive video work (BIRD FICTION) at the recent Hamilton Arts Week. I wrote music and poems and Sarah worked her visual and programming wizardry and made a very cool and beautiful projection that responded to the audience’s hand movements.
Our installation also included the video that I’m sharing here. It takes a text about Hamilton, Ontario that I’ve posted below and turns it into the flight of flying birds—the birds are made of text. If you don’t want to watch the entire thing, you can watch a bit and then skip forward to past halfway where the way the birds are made of text changes.
Gary Barwin, THE SKY ABOVE HAMILTON, ONTARIO WAS EMPTY
Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.
I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.
It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.
Beverley Bie Brahic, California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025
All lines of the poem arrive, perfect in itself
except that it needs to be written. The gestalt
in a swift and complete vision. Start. Where.
So many words crowd the mouth. Also tongue-tied.Jill Pearlman, USHA
All poets/writers periodically hit a moment where things stall: you finish something, a poem, a novel, a piece of writing that’s taken as much energy as you can give it, and you sit back and it feels as if there’s no more to be done, nothing else to be dragged out of the mind and body and put into words.
When it happens to me, as it just has, I tend to read, explore the work of others more than usual, or just get on with life – the stuff without which I couldn’t write anything useful anyway. […]
The meadow is full of wild flowers, so I’ve kept the mowing to a minimum, just a strip by the blackberry hedge bordering the woods where the family can put their tents when they want to camp there. We also have a young male deer who has taken to using the cover as a suitable place to rest. Unfortunately, his self-preservation instincts mean if he spots us he jumps up and tears off in, it seems, any old direction, bounding through the pens where the bees and hens live. Still, he’s welcome for as long as he chooses to stay. As usual, there are always a host of jobs to do in the woods now the bluebells and orchids are over. The hide/ tree house needs to be repaired after some stray miscreants had fun trying to wreck it but I need one of my son-in-laws’ help with that. So much to do!
Apart from that, oh yes, poetry. I read a couple of dull books by what the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski called, in his poem Potato Thief, ‘cardboard cut-out poets’. Saarikoski interests me because he made enough noise to be famous young, was both a radical, political participant and a chameleon-like figure who played both the hero and anti-hero as he drank and partied his way through four marriages, and perhaps inevitably, died young. I suppose I admire poets who are confident enough socially to try to make a difference. I can only attempt to make a small difference, through the writing of poetry, given that I struggle more and more these days to speak when faced by groups of people (football excepted, but the vocal stuff I indulge in then is more often than not confined to howls of blue-and-white-striped dismay at the latest crazy, wrong, anti-Albion decision by an official…)
I also enjoyed a short poem called Temptation by the Romanian poet Nina Cassian in my ‘anthology of the moment’ from 2010, The Ecco Anthology Of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders. It’s fulfilling to explore its 500-plus pages and follow up on the poets I like. I have an anthology of Romanian poetry but Cassian isn’t in there, so I shall go off in search of more of her work.
Writing poems will come again, but not yet.
Bob Mee, OK, SO WHAT NOW?
I’ve had a mighty struggle this past few weeks to do even a minimum of writing (determined to catch up this week…we will see, and, after that, to begin blogging again). Reading obsessively about dementia, getting lost in political news…these things do not seem especially helpful to me.
On the other hand, reading poetry, and reading and listening to poets and creatives about their work is one of my go-to solaces. So here are two things. The first was shared by my good friend Francine, and I’m amazed at the prescience of this 2011 interview with Bill Moyers, who died last week at age 91. Though the news is dire, it’s good to know that such people have been walking this trail before us. It gives me hope.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/27/rip_bill_moyers
I’m also reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön — given to me by my friend Therese — and I highly recommend it.
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. (p. 7)
By “concretize,” I think the author means, don’t grasp, don’t turn it into thoughts or anything you can hold on to. Let it be as amorphous as it is. Just be with all of it.
The third source is the incomparable PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA from Poetry Unbound. Clicking on his name should take you straight to his most recent substack. Here are a few lines toward the end of Dunya Mikhail’s poem, which Padraig shares in full:
I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm…I don’t know why either, but when I’m outside, walking, at 6 a.m., I listen for them just the same.
Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading
This morning, I was walking and texting a friend who has been mostly homebound recovering from hip replacement surgery. We talked about 19th century writers who wrote in bed and wondered how they could do that. We talked about 19th century approaches to dental care.
But most important, we talked about the best ways to remain human in an age of AI and how to create projects for students that keep them embodied–and to create assignments that are more cheating resistant. I talked about Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and got the idea of having students compare them to Thoreau’s Walden Pond journal. I want them also to keep a journal to see what it’s like and then write about it all.
It was a good text exchange. Of course, we’re looking forward to a time when we can meet face to face, but that’s not this summer. I think it’s funny that we were texting about 19th century writers who kept painstaking journals. There might be a seed of a poem there.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sunrise Walks and Texts and Teaching Ideas
The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. […]
The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).
Martyn Crucefix, Katrina Porteous’ most recent Bloodaxe collection, ‘Rhizodont’, reviewed.
I think sometimes about how every “period” we perceive in history was a bunch of people’s present. How this period we are in will be parsed by some future historians who will be able to see a larger trajectory of time and circumstance that we cannot see, we here, inside this moving vessel of the present-that-will-be-history. Already people are positing just how we ended up here, in these situations we find ourselves in. But we cannot see what happens next, so can only understand the story up until now. Some of us will die without seeing how the next bit transpires — whenever it is, that next bit. We may not even understand it’s happening until afterward. When we look around and think wow, that was a wild ride. But we’ll, of course, also be caught up in the present of that present, unable to see how that unfolds. Here in this present, it scares me to read about other period in history and how long it takes them to shift to something else. Or I suppose it depends on the nature of the “something else.” Things could get worse. Things could get better. Only that bastard, time, will tell.
The thing is: we’re all in this together, we present-dwellers. I have a photo of my mother in Africa. The tour bus has gotten mired in mud or something, and she and the guides and some of the other old ladies on the trip are all muscling the bus, trying to rock it from its spot. It cracks me up, this photo. But it’s spot on. One minute we’re sitting all faced forward, stewing in our juices, and the next we’ve tumbled out to shove, we strangers and friends and enemies and fellow travelers. I wish we were all shoving in the same direction, though. That’s what I wish.
I found this wonderful poem on the recent issue of 2 Rivers. I love its quirky perspective, how the poem plays with the situation it describes, and enlarges it to encompass the whole world of life.
Marilyn McCabe, into a bottomless future, a cold ocean of absolute unknowing.
The opening anaphora — “Always” — commits the poem to a time beyond time, a claim of futurity. In the second stanza, the “But” seems to undo this commitment by suggesting we can never really speak to anyone except ourselves. Words, as Bachmann sees them, are useless communicative vessels. Or else: they are things which taste doubly, as sound itself does a thing to the mind.
Reading this poem for sound rather than meaning, I thought of the Greek word diaspon, which is short for diapason chordon (“through all the strings”). Diaspon refers to harmony, or a harmonious combination of notes, and it draws meaning from the Pythagorean system, which holds that the world is a piece of harmony in which man is the full chord.
John Dryden used this word in the first stanza of “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”:
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.After providing his song with seven stanzas, Dryden concludes it with a “Grand Chorus” that binds heaven and earth, or the visible and invisible, through chorale. The poem dresses up as religiosity but I think what it does is closer to the spiritual, or that metaphysical plane Dryden occupied. The “Grand Chorus” allows sounds to interpenetrate one another, diluting the sensed distance between one and “an other” in that “last and dreadful hour,” when time itself (that “hour”) “shall devour” “this crumbling pageant”:
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.Italic mine. How are we “tuned” towards making music that separates the seen from the felt? How is a poem “tuned”, so to speak, in order to articulate particular images or structure its desires through the deployment of rhetoric?
Alina Stefanescu, “It tastes of both.”
In Odes 4.2, Horace contrasts his small-scale, precise literary style with the grandeur of Pindar — one version of many similar statements in Latin literature of this period (also in Virgil and Propertius, for instance) about the choice between the grand style of epic and panegyric and the smaller or narrower style of elegy, lyric and epigram, associated particularly with Callimachus.
In the middle of Odes 4.2, Horace describes himself as a ‘Matine bee’:
Multa Dircaeum levat aura cycnum,
tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
nubium tractus; ego apis Matinae
more modoquegrata carpentis thyma per laborem
plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
carmina fingo.
(25-32)A great gale lifts up the Dircean swan,
O Antonius, whenever he makes for the lofty
tracts of clouds: but I, after the custom and manner
of the Matine bee,gathering the welcome thyme by constant
labour about the grove and the banks
of the watery Tiber, though small, I craft
highly-wrought songs.Horace’s meticulous bee is contrasted with the ‘full-flood’ style of Pindar — and of Iulus Antonius, the younger poet he’s addressing. (Although because the poem opens with a famously impressive imitation of the grand Pindaric style, Horace’s supposed disavowal is really an example of having your cake and eating it too: showing that he could do Pindaric style if he wanted to.)
Odes 4.2 was one of the single best-known Horatian odes in the seventeenth century, printed in every edition of Pindar as well as of Horace, and it is cited in pretty much every discussion, no matter how basic, of literary style. Marvell’s Garden and Hortus date probably from the mid-1650s, just exactly the time at which Cowley was writing his Pindariques and Pindaric form in both English and Latin was the height of fashion. Indeed, Cowley’s Pindaric Odes contains a partial translation of Odes 4.2. Here is Cowley’s version of the relevant passage of Odes 4.2, which he — like Marvell — makes the end of his poem (though in Horace it comes in the middle):
How th’obsequious Wind, and swelling Ayr
The Theban Swan [i.e. Pindar] does upwards bear
Into the walks of Clouds, where he does play,
And with extended Wings opens his liquid way.
Whilst, alas, my tim’erous Muse
Unambitious tracts pursues;
Does with weak unballast wings,
About the mossy Brooks and Springs;
About the Trees new-blossom’ed Heads,
About the Gardens painted Beds,
About the Fields and flowery Meads,
And all inferior beauteous theings
Like the laborious Bee,
For little drops of Honey flee,
And there with Humble Sweets contents her Industrie.This is such a famous passage that any poem ending with the ‘industrious bee’, as Marvell’s does — a phrase in fact very close to Cowley’s ‘laborious’ — immediately recalls Horace’s poem. This matters I think for two reasons that are often underplayed in discussions of Marvell’s poem. First, because the bee stands for the poet, and a poet adopting one particular style over another; and secondly, because Horace’s poem is specifically and explicitly about how to choose a style for political praise.
Victoria Moul, Who planted Marvell’s garden?
Last week I attended a candelight memorial for slain legislative leader, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, at the Minnesota State Capitol, in St. Paul. The next day I started working on an elegy in her honor, and began thinking about the etymologies of her first and last names : “honeybee” and “gardener”. Which reminded me of one of Osip Mandelstam’s most famous poems, written in 1920… and so my elegy grew into a kind of widderruf of Mandelstam echoes.
Henry Gould, Melissa Hortman : in Memoriam
The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
thickets sweat poisons
as well as fruits.Ann E. Michael, Blackberries
Sometimes the world seems like a dark circle within a dark circle within a dark circle forever and ever, amen. I think I have a story hunger. Stories that will make sense of the things I know.
Saturday I ran on the beach. Every beach run is a memento mori. I don’t know how to explain why it makes me feel calm. The beating of the waves. The screaming birds. The dead jellyfish, birds, crabs, fish.
And the absurdity! Saturday, a pineapple was left by the tide.
Funny that being that close to all the death, brings me back to life.
Ren Powell, Story Hunger
I had no idea it was International Pineapple Day until Kate mentioned it in her LinkedIn post and I loved the serendipity of the fact there was a poem on my desk with pineapples in it. I took this along to share, and I must say that being described as “The Perfect Guest”, was a wonderful comment to tuck safely in my confidence pocket. If I hadn’t had a poem I would have taken a tin of pineapple from the cupboard and celebrated that, but the poem was just the thing for a poet coach to take along. Kate and I had a wonderful chat about poetry and coaching and it put an extra sparkle into my Friday.
The poem was on my desk because Louise Longson had invited me to be one of her guests for her poetry event ‘Last Saturday’. This invite also widened my knowledge of celebration/commemoration days and I chose to follow up on the following themes that Louise mentioned when writing to me: World Sand Dune Day, Insect Week, Armed Forces Celebration Day and Pride. It felt good to put together poems to match the different themes and try them out together in a zoom room.
Sue Finch, A GREEN CARNATION
The main activity of the day was a game of Musical Inks. We had brought our brushes from last month, various inks and large sheets of paper. We splotched and doodled (and danced) until the music stopped. We passed our sheet to the person on our left, and began again. A wonderful exercise in spontaneity and non-attachment. I love making rhythmical marks to music. When twelve large sheets had been passed around the table we had a break for lunch, which was sumptuous and exotic as usual. […]
Then the inks and brushes were packed away and we went to work with white emulsion, blanking out parts of our own and other people’s sheets. Lastly we added to our own sheets a few more marks made with sticks, grass, feathers and so on. We’ll bring books made from these sheets to our next meeting, on July 19th.
On the way home, Jane and I stopped at the Somerset Rural Life Museum to see the current exhibition, entitled Tractored by Beetles: six artists display works inspired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Fugitives’ dedicated to the National Landscapes of the UK. It’s on until Sept 14th; do see it if you can. I love Fiona Hingston‘s work Petiole, a response to a particular woodland close to her home. I’d seen this work before, in her studio during Art Weeks. The way it was displayed in the SRLM, the archive boxes covering a table isolated in the middle of the room, gave the work the space it needed.Ama Bolton, ABCD June 2025
What are we trying to capture in our writing? A snapshot of the moment or something of the feeling connected to an event? I ask because on finishing the piece on peat-gathering I remembered an early comment from the poet Robert Minhinnick. ‘Even in your bad poems, there’s still the grit in the wash.’ It was kind, forgiving criticism to three underwhelming poems that I proffered to him on a writing retreat in the north of Scotland. A poem potentially having grit in the wash seems a lovely idea. The expression comes from the time of handwashing clothes, when you added grit to the water and lather so that its abrasiveness would help the removal of mud or stubborn grime. The phrase taps into something else a poet might capture or preserve: not the snapshot or the view or the observable but, instead, the texture of the moment. Writing, in this gesture, becomes an attempt to make some past world touchable again.
Niall Campbell, On Writing for the Hands
Many journals, even those that charge submission fees, have fee-free (and even deadline-free) options for reviews. Quite a few will send you a selection from their list of books they’d like to have reviewed. Once you’ve proven yourself to a journal, you might become one of their regular review-writers, a position that definitely improves your visibility. In my experience, journals will respond sooner to a review submission, since they want to secure a review of a new book ahead of others. Some journals even pay for reviews.
Believe it or not, writing reviews is – yes – fun. Or, it should be. To keep it fun for me, I choose books that I enjoy. I want my review to convey that enjoyment to the reader, not turn them off from reading the book. I look at reviewing as a way to open the book for people who might enjoy it, not turn them off. I avoid the negative review whenever possible. […]
The type of review I usually write is one I call “the exploratory review.” As I wrote in “Erica Goss’s Guide to Writing Poetry Book Reviews,” this type of review “combines elements of narrative, description, and exposition. In the exploratory review, the book leads the way instead of the reviewer.” (You can get the guide free with a subscription to Sticks & Stones, which is also free.)
As critic David Ulin puts it, “In the best reviews, the book is just a starting point, which is not an argument for self-indulgence but for its opposite: the deep dive, the conversation on which all literature (and yes, book reviews are a form of literature, or should be) depends.”
For more on these topics, see my blog post, How I Review a Poetry Collection.
I also wrote an article for the 2/3/24 issue of Funds for Writers: Expand Your Writing Practice With Book Reviews.
Happy reviewing!
Erica Goss, How to Become a Poetry Book Reviewer
I come to you on the other side of frantic and chaotic wedding planning. On the other side of a few weeks of daily poem writing feverishly to deal with the stresses of that, on a micro level, and the world around us on a macro level. While both the poems and the wedding celebration worked out well (even despite the extreme heat that forced us, very last minute, inside a bar/banquet hall for our woodland whimsigoth vibe picnic) this week has been about resetting, cleaning a chaotic apartment, and trying to get my ducks forever in a row on projects and layouts, as well as charting a path forward through the rest of the summer in terms of timelines.
And since it’s summer officially now, that only means that spooky season, the high holy months of September-November, are right around the corner. which I have many delights planned in the form of New Orleans vampire brides and dystopian robot women. But there is still some spooky left for summer in the form of cursed coastal towns and sideshow horrors in some upcoming e-zine action, so watch for those…
Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat
I’m hoping to get a load of new drafts out of this break – it does seem to be a time when I get lots done, so fingers-crossed the notes, and scraps turn into something. I’d like 10 -15 new ideas drafted, but let’s see. Writing has to sit alongside just relaxing, reading, consuming Efes, swimming, snoozing, eating, consuming Efes, etc.
I saw Robin Houghton, Sarah Barnsley and Peter Kenny read at West Greenwich Library on Tuesday. All were excellent. it was lovely to see Robin again, and to put bodies to the voices and emails of Peter and Sarah (Thanks again to Sarah for her kind words about CtD in The Frogmore Papers).I have to say a massive thank you to Kevin Scully and the crowd at Cowden Pound for having me three to read on Thursday just gone. It was a joy to read in such a lovely pub, with such a lovely crowd. The open mic part of the ending was exceptionally strong, and Kevin is a wonderful host. Note to self, if you want to sell books please remember to tell the audience you’ve brought some with you before the end of the reading…**Slaps forehead**
Mat Riches, I could do with an OOO (out of office)
I’m happy to (tentatively) report that my writing mojo has (shakily) returned. Maybe I needed the fallow time during the week I was bed-bound with my back to think, just think, without writing it all down. In the past week I’ve started reading and writing from Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy and started participating in Kathy Fish’s Flash Extravaganza workshop. So far, I’ve done one or the other every day.
June has been a month of changes and challenges for me, not all on the positive side, either. Reading, music, and, yes, TV have pushed me through it.
Charlotte Hamrick, June Listopia 2025
I realise I’ve not been posting many haiku recently, although I’m just about to submit some of mine to the British Haiku Society’s journal, Blithe Spirit. Contributors have also been asked to select a summer poem from the journal’s archive and I’ve chosen this one by by Matthew Paul:
BHS vol 63, Aug 1996
almost anonymous
yellow ladybird
in sun-dried grassI love the quiet simplicity of this poem, especially the word ‘anonymous’, which seems to suggest, both ‘unnamed’ and ‘overlooked’ – as insects often are, unless we come into direct contact with them.
Around five years ago, reading Matthew Paul’s collection, The Lammas Lands (Snapshot Press, 2015) inspired me to keep having a go at haiku (they were a diversion from writing more mainstream poetry at the time). Then Presence published a haiku of mine and I was bitten by the bug. Haiku took over, or rather my way of living altered slightly, and haiku became a big part of that.
My way of living has recently altered again. After Easter I took what seemed to be the momentous decision to retire. I handed in my notice – one month was the requirement – and suddenly, freedom. More time for dog walks, banjo practice, reading, writing, drawing, gardening, yoga etc. These are all things I was doing while I was working, so really there’s not much change, but I have more time now, and can do stuff in greater depth. That’s what’s been so satisfying, being able to take my time and do things properly. We’ve even fitted a couple of camping weekends in.Julie Mellor, Summer poems
What does a “metabolically literate” poetics look like in this time of deforestation, of plastic islands, of melting ice caps and wayward storms? How can we, as writers, readers, breathers, enlist the help of the four winds, which seem, at times, to have turned against us with their tornados and hurricanes, raging at our immaturity, our hubris, our willful illiteracy? This is a question I want to conspire around with you, with other poets, with the trees themselves. A question to breathe with rather than to answer. But from my explorations, I suspect this poetry is a poetry tuned into the breath, a poetry that moves like a steady wave, that doesn’t rush to declare itself, but that listens, and speaks, and then listens again. It is a poetry that may happen further from the click of the keyboard and the glow of the screen, and closer to the lungs, the trees, our shared body. A brave and humble poetics that–like the young heroes who find themselves at the house of the North Wind—is willing to offer itself in order to receive.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tree Conspiracy
i will know it
outside the dream
when it comes
behind the calm
because it breathesGrant Hackett [no title]
When my dad was entering what we now know, but didn’t then, were the last months of his life, we spent much time travelling between Scarborough and Hull for chemo appointments. I’d drive, my dad would talk. The further down the cancer route we got, the more his memories returned to the family farm, the route to the town, stories of what it was to live on the land and off the land and with the land. Stories from his own childhood. He himself, though he had run a small holding of his own, had not farmed since his mid teens when he’d left the family farm to become a Rington’s tea van driver. The narrative was so strong though, the stories like tethers that brought him back; the pull to place like the magnetic forces that bring geese back to their home grounds.
When the operation that he had ran into complications, and he was intubated and unconscious and we talked to him in the hope of calling him back, it was to the land and the work that still needed to be done – the apples ripening, the chicken houses in need of fixing, the sun pooling on the stone bench next to his fish pond awaiting his return there for his morning coffee. But we couldn’t bring him back.
When I wrote about it, later, in my poetry collection, I wrote of him being called back to a childhood in which he had to bring the cows in. I created a version of him that was too busy with farm chores to leave off and return to us. My mum, when she talked of him in the beginning of that most long and dark road through grief, talked of him as the tawny owl in the field that called and called and received no answer.
I wonder if he heard us, through the fog of induced coma, if he knew we were there, holding his hands, when the life support was switched off and he drifted away from us to wherever it was. When I think of those moments now, it is as an observer. As if I was taking notes on my own life experience, ready to create this new narrative, this continuation of a family narrative so attached to place. In fact, here I am, creating the narrative of this time, shaping and re-shaping and feeling the pull of something like home, but a home that has never really been.
When we came back from Thirsk and I dropped my mum off to their small holding and my dad’s grave in the field; the grave that he had specifically asked for, and which had been a nightmare of logistics, the last crazy dad request of his life, the last risk taken, the last fuck you to any sense of normalcy, I returned with a sense of peace and with a sense of gratitude for the stories, the history I get to travel on with.
Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: My Dad’s Last Days Spent Dreaming of the Family Farm
“The people of Israel, Gaza, and Iran are human beings. No one deserves to live under constant rocket, missile, and drone fire.” These are words from Standing Together / עומדים ביחד / نقف معًا that landed deeply in my heart. “This is not a football game. This is real life, and entire worlds are being shattered day after day.” How much more can our hearts take? And what can we do?
Standing Together is raising funds to bring bomb shelters to underserved Bedouin communities in the south of Israel. NATAL provides trauma support in Israel. The PCRF feeds and supports children in Gaza, and the Sameer Project provides food, shelter, and medical aid. And United4Iran has a fund for survivors of the Iran-Israel war, and their work is well-respected.
Giving tzedakah is meaningful, and in Jewish tradition all are commanded to give tzedakah, even we who receive tzedakah ourselves. But I know what I can afford to donate barely touches the ocean of need. Primarily what I feel able to do is internal. I pray for peace. I extend support to the human beings I know, and I try to extend compassion to the ones I don’t know. […]
I keep coming back to the Amichai poem about turning the swords not only into plowshares but into musical instruments, which I have on a poster on the wall in my office. As difficult as it might be to hammer an instrument of war into an instrument of music, I think it might be more difficult to hammer and reshape the human heart into one that truly beats for justice and for peace.
Rachel Barenblat, The Best We Can Be: Korah 5785 / 2025
On the eve of his execution in 1896,
he wrote a long poem which his sisters smuggled
out of his cell in a cocinilla: fourteen stanzas,
each with five lines. He called it his last
farewell— Mi último adiós. We had to memorize
at least half of it. It was so hot, and we
were tired of memorizing, so we thought
of going to the corner store to buy more
snacks. With a dramatic flourish, I called out, “Mi
último adiós!”— which made my mother and aunt,
making dinner in the kitchen, drop whatever they
were holding and shriek— Take that back,
take it back, don’t you ever say that again!Luisa A. Igloria, Very Superstitious
my favourite dream
blossoms falling and falling
on our riverboatJim Young [no title]