Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 27
singing bones, messages in bottles, the wind phone, the dark mist of America, 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: singing bones, messages in bottles, the wind phone, the dark mist of America, and much more. Enjoy.
There was a nest and then there was chirping and then Netanyahu was born from a little blue egg. His beak like an open pocket, a broken fortune cookie opened to the sky and his parents fed him. He had no feathers and then his feathers grew and soon he flapped his uncertain wings and then he was ready. He fell from the nest onto a nearby branch and within ten minutes he had invaded. What could he do? This is the way of the world.
Feathers fell from the sky the colour of ash. The sky filled with smoke the colour of ash. Children, aid workers, women, the old, medics, men, libraries, hospitals, underground tunnels, journalists and schools. What could he do? This is the way of the world.
Gary Barwin, Netanyahu was born from a little blue egg.
At one of our local used book stores, I found a copy of William Gass’ 1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Gass writes in a style one might term prolix; but if you are like me and sometimes appreciate lists, wordplay, allusions, lengthy sentences, and fine distinctions in your sentences–as well as humor–while exploring the limits and the stretches of words and language, this book-length essay on the word/concept/color/iconography/sexual innuendo/moody attitude and conflicting meanings of the word blue might appeal. I’ve been feeling a bit on the blue side lately, hence my attraction to the book (though I do like Gass as a writer, as long as I don’t have to read too much of him at one time). And guess [what]? It cheered me! […]
Granted, my feeling blue has a different tone from other uses of the word: blue postcards, sexual meanings of blue–I’m reminded of the movie “I Am Curious (Blue)” which was considered racy and given an X rating when I was a kid, though the blue in that title referred to the Swedish flag, apparently. My blue is the blue of songs like “Baby’s in Black” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album. Or just that classic music form, the blues.
Ann E Michael, Blue
A few years ago, a mass emergence saw clouds of butterflies travelling up the Thames. Many stopped off at the National Theatre roof gardens which opened in 2018. I was amazed to find out that painted ladies are some of the most well-travelled creatures in the world, capable of migrating across multiple continents over several generations. These fragile-seeming insects are incredibly resilient, even adapting to our warming climate by following the changing seasons. […]
Their lives are a constant journey
thousands of miles over their generations, compassingcontinents, strong-flying, paper-thin wings catching aair currents
undeterred while we who see ourselves as astridethe globe, no longer know who we are
or how to find our way in the worldRuth Lexton, Small wonder
I’ve been thinking about the question “What do you want” in conjunction with Marcus Aurelius’s lines about how we have it within our power every moment to be reverently content. And when I boil it down, when I really think about how my daily life happens to be, then mainly, I can say every day: I am reverently content. I can die tomorrow knowing that I’ve written most of the books I want to write. I’ve taken some beautiful photographs. Most importantly, my daughter is beautiful and my husband is beautiful and they are both making beautiful things. I get to help people at the library many times a week. Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever not precarious. And I want more. More. More tries at all of the above. And still I can be reverently content. I can call myself beloved.
Shawna Lemay, Blessings and Praise and What Do You Want From Life?
Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong
MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTSOne of the things that has kept me extremely busy this month is co-organising the Manchester Writing School Summer Festival, alongside some of my colleagues at the Writing School. This year the festival took place over four days – two of which were online and two in person. All of the sessions were taught in-house by our team of amazing writers at Manchester Metropolitan University.
One of the events was an in-conversation event with Professor Michael Symmons Roberts and I was lucky enough to get the job of hosting this. As the book has not long been published, I did a speed read over the weekend before hosting the event, and since then have re-read it at a much more leisurely pace!
Michael sets out to explore his lifelong fascination with Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and this is one of the threads that runs through the book. He delves into the mythology that’s told about the premiere of this piece – that it was first performed in a prisoner of war camp in 1941 to other prisoners, and the real story behind the myth. This is just one thread though – and woven within what you might call this musicological writing are other threads – there is a thread here about grief as the writer comes to terms with the death of his parents, a thread about place, and about how poems are written, a thread about doubt and faith. All of these threads are woven together in what I would call a beautiful braided lyric essay – except there is another facet to this. Each chapter uses as its title the name of a movement from “Quartet for the End of Time” – in lyric essay terms, this could be called a hermit crab lyric essay – so perhaps what this book is, is a cross between the two.
We talked a little bit about artists who create what they create despite what is going on around them and cautiously wondered whether Messiaen was one of those – despite the mythology of Quartet for the End of Time being so closely associated with the prisoner of war camp, a lot of the music was composed elsewhere. We hear the piece through the spectre of war, but perhaps he would have written the same piece if he was in Paris, though that of course is something we won’t ever know.
We also talked about artists who are affected creatively by social, political and personal events. Michael talked a little bit about the book he’d set out to write compared to the book he ended up with, and how Covid and lockdown and the death of his parents changed not just what he was writing, but how he was writing. I wonder now if the fragmentary nature of the lyric essay, and the shell of the hermit crab felt like a kind of protection when dealing with this material.
It is a wonderful book and I would highly recommend if you’re interested in how to combine poetry and prose, global and personal history, biography and autobiography.
Kim Moore, May/June Reading
I fell out of love with writing about two years ago. I began to despise my work, dislike the circus of trying to be heard, and feel I’d lost the sound of my own voice. I also lost my work as a copywriter including being ghosted by my most enduring client (why has this become a thing) which was really disheartening and odd. My dad’s death meant I experienced another shift in my familial role, and take on responsibility for my mum. I began to collapse under the weight of myself.
I’ve spent the last couple of months making my garden, nurturing seeds, experiment with yet another way to grow tomatoes, growing aubergines and slight obscene courgettes and finally feeling as though I can achieve something. It has been the first thing I think of when I wake and a place of calm when the outside world is overwhelming. A privilege that is out of reach for so many. My planner lay empty for the first time in many years – I took time out without really realising it and now I’m ready to respond to the desire to write and share. Courage has returned. […]
I’ve also noticed ideas for poems beginning to re-emerge. I have so many ideas for new books I’m not sure where to go next – my goal for next week is to try and pin one down. We’ll see. I may spend my time with the roses instead.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where I’ve been and where I’m going
[Michael] Vince’s syntax and metre don’t call attention to themselves but it’s through their subtle and continuous work that we come to share his vision. Throughout the book, most poems are written in short lines and long sentences. The poet uses this combination to achieve a double effect. The continuity of the sentences makes us feel the interrelatedness of the poems’ details and creates suspense as to what will come next. At the same time, by breaking the flow with line endings Vince frames individual details and emphasises words in a way that makes them shine out distinctly, not becoming subsumed within the larger movement. Complementing each other, these effects of suspense as to what will come and framing when it does give each detail a sense of emphasis. ‘Lamb’, for example, begins
In an island village, high up,
half abandoned, where goats perch
among ruined houses, we walk
along a winding street, watched by
suspicious cats, greeted by
the occasional dog acquainted
with tourists. On a doorstep
a young woman sits with her pet
seated beside her, a lamb
with a lead and collar.How much more circumstantial could writing be? But a striking part of the total effect is how unlocalized the experience is. We never learn who’s walking with the poet or which island they’re on, let alone which village they’re in. And so without losing their particularity the scenes and qualities Vince describes take on archetypal resonance and evocativeness, whether they be physical things like mountain, sea and sky, bread, animals or people; abstract but specifically named concepts like generosity, which is beautifully and playfully dramatized in the poem of that name; or still more abstract ideas tacitly suggested by the arc of the poem as a whole, as ‘Lamb’ suggests the ambiguity of our relation to the animal world by reminding us that the eating of lamb is a ritual of the Greek Easter.
Edmund Prestwich, Legwork by Michael Vince
夏野原ジュラ紀の骨が歌ってる 西池冬扇
natsu-nohara juraki no hone ga utatteru
summer field
the Jurassic bones
singing
Tōsen Nishiike
from Gendai Haiku, #718, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 1, 2025)
There are many portals into “the world of over-mind consciousness” and we must each find our own. Echoing Whitman’s insistence that “no one can acquire for another… grow for another” and Nietzsche’s admonition that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” H.D. writes:
My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.
All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:
Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.
Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.
Couple H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision with Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing and Iris Murdoch — whose over-mind was deeply kindred to H.D.’s — on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent living metaphor for unselfing drawn from the enchanted symbiosis of a jellyfish and a sea slug.
Maria Popova, Vision of the Womb and Vision of the Brain: H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind Consciousness
This, too, is the labor of poetry: to describe what feels incommunicable, and to imagine a world in which hope and vision are communicated. We of the 21st century are fluent in the art of the take-down but often afraid to express what we value or dream. “Perhaps” is my favorite country, the terrain of my fidelities, and the space from which I extend this invitation made possible by the brilliant Maya Popa — [Click through to view Zoom invitation]
In the darker moments of the 20th century, writers congregated around a notion conveyed in correspondence, lectures, and poetry—namely, the Flaschenpost, or “message in bottle,” described by Paul Celan via Osip Mandelstam, who imagined the poet as “the shipwrecked sailor who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment,” leaving the poem as a “testament of the deceased” that would find “its secret addressee.” This workshop will explore poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Rilke. Poets will be invited to develop their own Flaschenpost.
Alina Stefanescu, 10 tickets.
That little girl who scribbled nonsense in notebooks would be so surprised at the writer I am now and it makes my chest ache. For her, it was a just a tool to spend her days in a dreamlike state. And maybe it still is for me as an adult. And yet, when I am struggling, it helps me feel less adrift. Less apocalyptic (even if I am writing about the apocalypse.) I also think about how long it’s been getting even here, how much I invested in rather unimportant and frivolous endeavors. Struggling with the feeling that writing, especially poetry, seems to be foolish and self-indulgent in a world that presents new and very real horrors every day. Though, admittedly, even the jaded 14 year old who wrote poems in her dairy would be gobsmacked that it became a way of life and existing in the world she never would have imagined.
Kristy Bowen, poetry and past selves
Last week Henry Oliver posted Arnold Bennett’s 10-step plan for learning to appreciate poetry, which starts with reading Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Poetry in General’ twice, then some of the Bible, then Hazlitt again, and only then some Wordsworth. Much as I like Hazlitt (not to mention Wordsworth and Isaiah), this seems utterly insane to me. If you want to learn to read poetry, start with verse written for beginners, and most burnished by use. Luckily, we already have a whole vast library of poems of just this kind, in nursery rhymes, ballads and poems for children. You could do a lot worse than revisiting, to begin with, Robert Louis Stevenson or ‘À la claire fontaine’ [by Robert Desnos].
Victoria Moul, Edwin Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Desnos
The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) offers delightful and broad-ranging connections between mathematics and the arts. An article that I discovered recently considers ways to use poetry in mathematics classes. Found in the July 2023 issue, “Teaching Mathematics with Poetry: Some Activities,” by Alexis E. Langellier (an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Moraine Valley Community College and a graduate teaching assistant at graduate student in Mathematical Sciences at Northern Illinois University). Working toward a degree in Computer Science, Langellier has this intent: My goal is to get more women in STEM.
Langellier introduces her article with these words:
During the summer of 2021, I experimented with a new way of getting children excited about mathematics: math poetry. ”Math” can be a trigger word for some children and many adults. I wanted to find a way to make learning math fun — without the students knowing they’re doing math. In this paper I describe some activities I used with students ranging from grades K-12 to the college level and share several poem examples, from students in grades two through eight.
JoAnne Growney, Teaching Math with Poetry — Some Activities
comet viewing
as light as a feather
my thoughts of youJim Young [no title]
I’m writing to you as a person without words. Or, rather, as a person without the right words—the ones that might somehow say the thing. Maybe, like me, you don’t know how to wrap your head around the world right now, let alone find the language. Maybe, like me, you feel more than a little scrambled.
“The world is fifty percent terrible” feels like a very conservative estimate today. With so much cruelty and greed on display, I can hardly believe we’re still checking email, going grocery shopping, and watering our plants—business as usual. And yet, as soon as I’m ready to scream into a pillow, my son gives me a hug out of nowhere, or I look up in awe at the clouds, or I read a message from someone I love.
How not to feel scrambled? There is so much to marvel at and be grateful for, and so much to grieve and rage against. I keep coming back to Rilke’s “beauty and terror.” It’s not beauty or terror, it’s and. We get both, and I don’t know what to do except acknowledge both—call them out, loud and clear, when I see them.
I have seen plenty of terrible this week. So have you. I have seen cruelty and greed beyond comprehension. I have also seen and felt love, gratitude, generosity—and I hope you have, too. We need the beauty if we’re going to keep fighting the terror, and we have to keep fighting. What choice do we have?
I don’t have the right words, but I’ve been turning to poems to find them. That’s where I always turn. I’ve been reading this W.S. Merwin poem daily, a kind of secular prayer. Maybe you could use it, too.
Maggie Smith, Pep Talk
It is July 2nd, and I’m thinking only about my dad. And, of course, the death of democracy. Maybe there’s no room at this time for more grief.
Over (My Dead Body)
Where will they find the body?
They hardly knew the mind.
Beach motel, a scenic overlook,
fluffy rubble of a fallen sky?
Or god forbid a hospital,
eyebrows gone and metastatic
rage stifled by the drip drip drip.
Will I be clutching pills or pearls
of wisdom, photographs, a gun,
my chest, batman mask pulled down
B carved in my chest?
Will they find me slumped
across this poem, cobwebs
from my fingertips to pen
smell of long-extinguished
fire, sound of curtains flappingLeslie Fuquinay MIller, Dead to Me
My friend of about eight years, artist Philippa Sutherland, died last month. She’d been ill for some time and I’d been visiting her weekly for a year. We weren’t close friends, and Philippa had many friends from different places, particularly Ireland where she lived for many years, but we found lots to talk about, books, films, art, and music, just some of Philippa’s interests. She was fiercely bright and well-informed, right until the end. […]
When I was working on my poetry collection What Are You After? (Nine Arches Press, 2018) I met with Philippa to discuss a possible cover. In the end, after discussions with my editor Jane, we decided on an image by a different artist (my friend Mary Petrovska) but Philippa gifted me her painting and it’s been on my sitting room wall ever since. Philippa especially loved it when I told her my daughter, a teenager at the time, really liked the painting. Philippa was always interested to hear about my two children. She’d been an art tutor for many years and always cared about young people. She never seemed old and was one of those consistently young at heart and in spirit people.
Josephine Corcoran, Philippa Sutherland
It’s a year ago today that my brother died. If grief is love with nowhere to go, the wind phone can be a place for those feelings to land, even momentarily.
The initiative was started in Japan by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in Otsuchi Prefecture in 2010. Sasaki said: ‘Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.’ Hence the name Kaze no denwa’ – phone of the wind. The disconnected old-style rotary telephone allowed him to deal with grief after his cousin’s death of cancer.
Sasaki: ‘When your heart is filled with grief or some kind of burden, you aren’t in tune with your senses. You’re closed off like curtains have been pulled around you. After you empty your heart a little bit, you might be able to hear some birds singing again.’
The following year close to 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. In Tokohu 10% of the population died. Sasaki allowed local people to use the wind phone. Over 30,000 people have made the journey to this telephone since, and wind phones have been set up in other countries. The wind phone also provided inspiration for films and novels.
Amy Dawson (USA) lost her daughter Emily to terminal illness in 2020. She learned about wind phones and now devotes much of her time to maintaining a listing of wind phones worldwide, providing advice and resources. The current total is just over 400. Not all calls are to a deceased. People make calls about other losses. Go to her website for more information.
Fokkina McDonnell, Wind phone
It might be fair to say that animals do not realize that they must die. They know that they can and as the process begins, they know that they will. The ill cat seeks solitude under the bed. An elephant matriarch trumpets to the rest of the herd possibly to indicate that one of their own is dying. It is because of death and other circumstances that a group of elephants is called a memory. Death makes room for more life. Death promotes evolution. Because of death, this buzzing, feathered handful of life graces my morning.
So long ago (9,205,128 of my lifetimes ago), during the Carboniferous period, an abundance of plants and trees arose in a warm, tropical climate. However, there were not enough decomposers to break down the vast amount of vegetation—specifically the lignin (what gives plants their woodiness and structure). This led to a huge abundance of vegetation that would not rot. The wood piled up and up, was buried, and with heat and pressure became coal. This period prompted the evolution of white rot, the problem-solving fungi we see today. When I look down at a fallen mulberry from the mulberry tree, I thank white rot. When I look up at the mulberry tree’s wide-spreading crown, I thank white rot. When I walk over to my gardens full of lettuce, green beans, and tomato plants, I thank white rot. When I look at the border of woods near my home, I thank white rot. When I look at the wooded ridge on the other side of the highway in the distance, I thank white rot. When I walk along the river that is simply a channel of water following the easiest path, I thank white rot. When commuting on the highway to go to work and looking down at the hills and ridges and horizons, I thank the white rot that breaks down and renders vegetive life into ghost.
Sarah Lada, Everything is Ghosts
From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a title the acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens (above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement and haiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms while expanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notes and density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knows sweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’s problem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as if warmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost read accumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poem to exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, is Pirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own notes on the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex at fifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set of menstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and ends with the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”
rob mclennan, Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight)
As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.
Martyn Crucefix, Jeremy Reed’s ‘Collusive Strangers: new selected poems’ (1979-2016) reviewed
Last weekend, I went to Ledbury, Herefordshire for the annual poetry festival that’s been running there since the Nineties. It’s hard to think of an English town with more poets literally written into it. Not only do they have John Masefield High School, named after the long-running Poet Laureate (1930—1967) who was born in Ledbury in 1878; they also have the Barrett Browning Institute, built to honour the town’s most famous Victorian poet, and now known as The Poetry House; plus every other street name seems to commemorate a poet connected with the area, from The Langland (Piers Plowman begins in the nearby Malvern Hills) to Auden Crescent and Frost Close.
I did a double take, though, when I saw the Day Lewis Pharmacy, just down the road from the Poetry House — surely not the family business of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904—1972), who succeeded Masefield as Laureate? I began to feel as though I had slipped into the kind of dream I have after reading too many anthologies before bed.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #34: Midnight Snacks Filled with Passion
Let’s say a god led me here by the hand.
Or a goodness did. Or a goodbye.
At the end of a road that is not a road,
there is a fork. Both paths lead here.
Where you stand so close that the
distance between us can never be
bridged. Where do gods go, once
they are gone? Where do we?The crow bites into its
lunch. Looks around,
caws loudly.
Claiming. Warning.
Its beak is wide open, stained.Rajani Radhakrishnan, Of a hungry crow but no god
Later in the same poem, the speaker seems to be recuperating:
“I’m reading a book about thirteen geisha who boarded a steamer to America to attend the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, as part of the Japanese exhibit. One of them wore a blue kimono, carried a purse that contained a bar of soap, a muslin cloth, an incense bag full of chrysanthemum seeds, a reminder of her home. On the third day, she found a dead mackerel on the deck. She planted a seed in the gill of the fish and put it in a ceramic vase. A week later, a bud grew out of its mouth, the green stalk had reached its tail, overwhelming the rot with tender fragrance. They called her the girl who skewered the fish with a flower.”
The foreignness of the geisha’s situation leads her to do an apparently odd thing of placing a seed in a dead fish. The smell must have overwhelmed the soap and remnants of scent on the incense bag. Until the flower grows from the rotting fish. At least being known for doing something strange seems to have humanised her. She starts the stanza as an exhibit and becomes a girl.
Emma Lee, “Chronicle of Drifting” Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon Press) – book review
As a fairly frequent reviewer, I know how much thought and effort goes into attempting to produce a fair summary and consideration of a poetry publication. The reviewer has to be mindful that poetry books and pamphlets, whatever their quality may be, are, of course, the result of at least several years of writing, revising and constant striving for improvement – and debuts have a lifetime behind them.
For me, though, it’s marginally more nerve-wracking to be the reviewee than the reviewer. Twice in the last fortnight, I’ve been fortunate to read reviews of my new collection, and I’m very grateful to the editors of The High Window and The Friday Poem – David Cooke and Hilary Menos, respectively – for commissioning and publishing them. I say fortunate because some poetry collections receive no reviews at all, and others garner them belatedly, as I experienced: my first collection was out in the world for over a year before its first review appeared.
I’m even more grateful to Rowena Somerville and Jane Routh for taking the time and trouble to read my poems closely and attentively and then to write about them and how they cohere.
Rowena Somerville’s review can be read here.
Jane Routh’s review, plus a poem from the book, ‘Old Man of the Woods’, can be read here.
Matthew Paul, Reviews of The Last Corinthians
I read recently an author needs to have seven books published in order to make a living just as a writer. I don’t know how well those facts stand up. It was an insta reel I saw while procrastination-doom-scrolling through my own personal anxiety, tapping into a more generalised world-on-fire anxiety. Right now seven books (and I’m assuming poetry is not counted in this scenario) seems an impossible feat.
All this anxiety is sucking the joy from my writer life. How to pull myself back from worrying so much about the thing that I want to enjoy?
I return to the little book, and a new mantra to see me through July, to the self imposed deadline date, and beyond.
The word for amateur comes from the latin ‘amare’ meaning ‘to love’.
I don’t know where this quote came from. A strange quote for someone who wants to make a living as a writer. But what I want to do is uncouple myself from the awful ‘second album’ feeling of trying to make this new writing project perfect, and return to the unrestrained joy of following my brain down its burrows of interest. I think that’s what you have to do, as a writer. You have to be the professional, whilst holding onto the amateur, the love of the thing. In order to reach a point where I earn enough to not be worrying all the time about income, (is there such a place?) I need to be able to write well, and to be able to write well, I have to allow myself the time and energy to be free and joyful and in love with my project, without worrying whether it’s going to be published or not.
Wendy Pratt, July Mantra: The word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin ‘to love’.
I’ve always experienced acute issues with concentration and distractibility. I did very well at school up until the age of 11, when studying became essential to success, then I crashed and burned, scraping a handful of mediocre Highers, (enough in those pre-Free-Tuition-for-Scottish Students-Fiasco days to gain a University place) then dropping out after two years. I’d engage in what I termed tangential study – in the Literature section of the Library, intent on genning up on Pope or Milton or – God love him – the muddier Wordsworth, I’d veer off to one side, drawn by a brightly coloured spine, and find myself two hours later lost in Battiste Good’s Winter Count from Technicians of the Sacred or Bouttell’s Heraldry, Ancient and Modern. Sitting with a set text in front of me, and an exam looming, I’d be so overcome with anxiety I couldn’t take in any of the words. I didn’t consider it an issue – it was just my relationship with the world and the word. It’s no coincidence that most of my ars poetica poems are about butterflies. […]
In 2024, getting ready for a ten-day visit to Italy, I made a decision to take just one thin volume with me. I was going to try Slow Reading – spending significant time with each poem, living with the words rather than speeding through them; savouring the text, using the last line as an excuse to return to the beginning and read again. The book I chose was Nick Laird’s Up Late. I’d bought a copy when it won the Forward for Best Single Poem, and though I loved that poem, I found myself struggling with others. Many of them ran over into two pages – some three, even four, and long, determined lines – such a lot of words. A poem has to prove itself imperiously to me if I’m going to stick with it into page two. I coped with ‘Up Late’ itself because it’s composed of a sequence of brief, linked sadnesses, like Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’. I can handle that, where there’s a breather between sections. Just as I can handle the visual pandemonium of an art exhibition so long as I can go and sit in a quiet dark corner every now and again.
Don’t get me wrong – I could sense how good those poems were, how accomplished and confident, but my attention would drift as I read them, or leap towards the end, as if the poem was deeper than I’d expected. The poem which sold me on this book for slow reading, though, was the heftier bulk of ‘Attention’, which I came across first in The New Yorker. ‘Attention’ is an astonishing, long-limbed, gravitational descent from detached observation into rage and grief. He uses words in there as if they had no price attached to them. It is written in memory of Laird’s friend Martino Sclavi, the Italian film director who died of glioblastoma in 2020. The cancer ate away at the very part of his brain which processed the written word, so he couldn’t read. His memoir ‘The Finch in my Brain’ begins: ‘I have written this book without ever reading a sentence of it. Words do appear on the screen as I am typing away, but upon trying to read them, something funky happens.’ He would edit by listening as the computer read back his lines. A marble with a turquoise wave in it rattles downhill through the poem. I imagine the bird-like lesion in Sclavi’s brain, the sadness and anger held in the poem itself and my attention too, somehow or other, continuously held in the marble of the poem. I had no interest in pulling things apart to find out how it worked; I simply wanted to experience the emotional effect the poem was having on me again and again. So I spent a good portion of that holiday simply reading that one poem – how that marble rolled downhill, again and again.
John Glenday, Now Read On
Sometimes you lie dry.
Exposed furrows offer your mud
for footprints,
|mosquitoes create whirlpools in the air.When you are full
your burble and flow
are in the folds of my brain
filtering my thoughts.I lean over your bridge
for shadow photos.You are dark. You are sparkling.
You are an almost mirror,
a depth, an ebb,
an onward.Sue Finch, ENTERING MY BLACK AND WHITE PHASE
Here in Philadelphia, Independence Day is a huge deal. There have been fireworks going off every night this week. Last night, July 4th, the display was extraordinary and continued until nearly midnight. After watching the main show over the city’s art museum, we were trailed home by bluish smoke that filled the streets. There were police everywhere to protect the huge concert area, and their cars’ blinking lights were nearly blinding, mentally supplanting the bright dazzle we’d just witnessed up above.
I’m relating this partly to share a bit of my holiday experience with you all. (It was super fun! I am super exhausted!) But also, I think there is a metaphor here when we consider those lit mags and presses that do not serve writers’ best interests.
That is, such entities may look exciting. They offer something that dazzles. They promise to light up the dark expanse within us, that infinite sky where our dreams reside.
Once you start engaging with them, however, what they give you is far from awe-inspiring. They deliver smoke that makes your eyes tear. Blinking lights in no way matching the true thing. Crowds. Garbage. Cheap flashing toys. Bewilderment and exhaustion.
These scammy predatorial entities, we might say, are like the Fourth of July of the lit mag world. Only without the beer, music, family, friends and fireworks—just noise, chaos, litter and environmental damage.
Let’s not fall prey to these false lights, my friends!
Sadly, there is so much to say on this topic that I’m dividing this discussion into two parts. This weekend, the first part will focus on the letters that some lit mags send to submitters and people on their mailing list. Next weekend we will look at signs to look for on the magazines’ and presses’ websites.
Becky Tuch, Q: How do we spot scammy lit mags & presses (part 1)?
Coming into July of 2025, most of us in America are afraid. Sixteen million poor people just lost health insurance while the top 1% got a trillion-dollar tax cut. Unthinkable excess. Our country needs compassion, a just society for all of us who live here, available health care, food, shelter, jobs. Many don’t feel they can make a difference. But we in the 21st Century are the children of loss, and we must be willing to acknowledge the tragedy, rewrite the myth, become the heroes of our country.
Nelson Mandela and Gandhi changed history. Neither of them were rich or powerful. But they carried their country forward toward justice. They brought a commitment to reconciliation, peace, and human rights.
Every day, I ask myself, if I have the rest of my life to make a difference, what can I do? I am not here to breathe and pay the rent; I’m here to leave the world a better place. In 2025, I carry stories forward into the dark mist of America. We become the stories we tell ourselves.
Kate Gale, Of Loss and Light: Redefining the Myth of America
I’m not feeling the red-white-and-blue this year, so I hereby give you an image of the very pink Barbie pagoda mushroom–Podoserpula miranda–from New Caledonia, image drawn from The Global Fungal Red List. You’re welcome.
I found stories about its discovery when I was reminding myself of the names of mushroom morphologies for a novel I’ve been lightly revising. An interested agent told me to make the book weirder–a fun task that involved plenty of fungi. I finished this pass through the ms a couple of days ago, though, which dumped me back in the real world. The imminence of the Fourth of July somehow makes it all more awful: the big baneful bill stripping food assistance and health care from people who are barely getting by as the rich further enrich themselves. Unjust and violent deportations. Our funding of Netanyahu’s bombing and starvation of children. Obviously the list goes on. This country is harming the world and our own people in so many ways–as if the damage won’t rebound, as if all our fates aren’t connected. Not that there isn’t hope. I’m happy about Mamdani’s win. I appreciated the list in Rachel Barenblat’s blog post about where to send money to help mitigate the damage. But like so many, I’m frightened and overwhelmed, and I won’t be watching the fireworks.
One of my resources for calm is reading poems from the zillion books I purchased during the last several months at various festivals, conferences, and indie bookstores (I think supporting these efforts and authors is a good way to direct money, too). I’d never spent a lot of time with Marie Howe’s work, for instance, but her New and Selected, winner of the Pulitzer, is in fact a great pick for that prize. Sometimes I don’t enjoy the books that win the big accolades–which is okay, our tastes are allowed to differ–and in general I prefer individual collections over compendiums, but this one is worth a few days’ perusal. This review by Kevin O’Connor characterizes it well: “Howe offers poems both elegantly high-minded and unnervingly explicit and direct. Howe’s evolving style in her fifth collection reflects a willingness to question at each new beginning what poetry can be—to ask fundamental existential questions and to take seriously the essential mysteries.” I felt most moved by the poems from her 1997 book What the Living Do, but there are powerful poems throughout.
Lesley Wheeler, Instead of patriotism, fungus
So easy it was. A steady chipping away at one person one vote, a manipulation of the narrative through an entertainment channel well versed in hyperbole, a willingness on the part of many many people to turn general grievance into general hate, and then a death grip on each branch. Throw in a good dose of greed. Throw in the fact that it is not absolute power that corrupts absolutely but just a little bit. Put some in a uniform. Some weapons. The general decline of empathy. The rise of a sense of less-than, a vague idea of revenge. Of taking back. Of taking.
All this talk of polls, lawsuits, midterms, four years — people are thinking the tools of democracy will save democracy. But that’s like asking a burning house to shelter you from the flames. Like asking the deluge to hold on for a minute so you can make a cup of tea from the flood. So. Now what? Will I lay my body down in front of the oncoming tanks? I know myself to be cowardly. But if not me, who?
Here is a poem by Anna Akhmatova from 1914.
Marilyn McCabe, Not a soul you can tell has a notion
i come upon a house without any windows.
there are salespeople swarming it. some of them
have gone wild & decided to step inside. they lay
on day beds & let the wind blow through like a flute.
soon the police will come. they are
traveling salespeople too. they peddle silence
in exchange for guts. i get away. i plug my ears.
open my suitcase recklessly
& watch the birds fly into the tangerine dusk sky.Robin Gow, hope insurance
It is the kind of morning where I feel like I’m running behind. I was awake for several hours in the middle of the night, so I didn’t wake up quite as early as I usually do. I have to be at work at 8 for a morning huddle each day, so there’s not much flexibility as to when I leave. I can take my breakfast with me.
But it’s the kind of morning where I need to choose between a walk and deeper levels of writing. And since today is a day of more meetings and sitting, I need to walk early. Plus there are black raspberries to pick! I haven’t visited the hillside patch, which I call my secret garden, since Saturday.
In terms of current events, it’s a good day to walk instead of write. I don’t want to think about budget bills or Alligator Alcatraz or all the ways our research universities are being gutted. I am grateful to those who can fight day in and day out, especially to the ones who still have some power to make change (who are those people? judges perhaps).
I understand that there’s a time for picking black raspberries and a time for working to save the country. We’d likely all be better off if we took a morning walk to remind ourselves what we are saving.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing or Walking? Black Raspberries Await!
In the garden, everything seems poised
to ripen; but that means there is still
also waiting. If you walk around a treewhose foliage is so thick all its lower arms
are bending, you just might finda hidden opening. And yes there is war, there has
always been war; it is impossible to turnaway. Yet amid the unpruned rosemary, new shoots
of pine and even elm.Luisa A. Igloria, Short List of Transient Luminous Events
I always believed the woods were made up of alder and birch, grown for coppicing, felt familiar with their skinny, light-seeking trunks, the bounces left behind by squirrels in their high branches, the insistent knocks of woodpeckers.
Perhaps I have somehow missed running through them in early July, or if I did was more concerned with avoiding tree roots and the ankle-twisting hardened ruts of mud because I have never before witnessed this …
… what looks like, for the briefest of moments, thousands of hairy caterpillars draped over brambles, holly bushes, ferns, before they quickly reveal themselves to be the long yellow catkins from a mature sweet chestnut tree.
Running serves me well, my body and mind rebalancing with every stride, each deep breath, but this morning’s slow stroll is a gift from a friend searching for flowers and leaves she can press into eternity.
Castanea sativa, literally ‘brown chestnut’. The deception of the ordinary. The wondrousness of it all.
Lynne Rees, Prose poem ~ Slow