Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 3
Grand Theft Hamlet, a fountain dying of thirst, smeuses, the Poet Laureate of Pajamas, and more
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: Grand Theft Hamlet, a fountain dying of thirst, smeuses, the Poet Laureate of Pajamas, and more. Enjoy.
How does the writer’s brain work? It is a bewilderment to me, why it must be this particular word, or that particular image. How is it that now, in this time of several national and global crises, I emerge from sleep holding to this juxtaposition:
i wake
my face is wet
the blue heron stands
one foot
on a slate roof
Sharon Brogan, questions
On my way home from the office on Tuesday I was listening to an old episode of The Verb with Alice Oswald and Margaret Atwood. Alice read a poem called ‘Sonnet‘ from her collection ‘Woods, Etc.‘ The poem is about the Voyager Spacecraft, and it set me thinking about something that could become a poem. I made a voice note on the way home.
It’s something I’ve done a bit of lately, and while I have to remember to listen back to them, I find it interesting to see how/if the note captures an early rhythm for the poem, or if it’s just the sound of an old man out of breath. I tend to be making these notes while I’m running or walking up a hill.I’ve heard many a poet say they create work while running or walking, and it came up again in a recent Helen Mort newsletter where she talks about how “My own interest in running these days is partly selfish: it is how I get some of my best ideas for poems and stories”.
Mat Riches, Careful of Your (lighthouse) Keepers
I have motivated myself to get back into the swing of walking this week, and found joy in noticing the changes in the hedgerows and in the amount of light at different times of day. I have been amused by the sound of a squirrel warning off a dog from the top of a tree, and pleased that the days are increasing in length which widens my choice of when to walk. I thought I had a great video of the squirrel growling out its warning and then leaping from tree to tree until I watched it back and found I had held my phone upwards all that time and then actually pressed record as I walked away. So instead of punchy squirrel I have a five second video of my feet as I attempt to watch back my non-existent video.
My main walking motivation comes from my current mantra of ‘steps I take today are making future steps easier’, and I am enjoying tracking my progress. After a limited number of steps in December I can see that I am now building back up to where I was in November. The graph of brisk minutes, and the distance ring on my phone are useful tools in keeping me going me even though I pretty much do the same country road route each time at the moment! It helps to have the Snowdon goal in mind, but there is something really positive about it becoming habitually good for my mental and physical health beyond this. It is good to feel determined. It is also fun to remember the different times I have climbed the mountain or been up on the train in the past. All very different experiences, and each one special.
Sue Finch, TWELVESES
In her “Be Where You Are” Substack, poet and teacher Emily Mohn Slate explores the spaces where writing and mindfulness overlap, and many of the interviews she publishes have strong undercurrents of self-care. That undercurrent was certainly present in my responses to Emily’s questions when she interviewed me for a recent installment. I hope you’ll take a look at the interview, especially if you want to nerd out about Morning Pages, vigorous exercise, and writing prompts/challenges.
In the interview, I talk primarily about running and strength-training — activities that I consider to be about mindfulness (for me) and have, over the years, boosted my mental and physical health. In describing their contributions to my well-being and confidence, I realized how proud I am to have made them such a natural part of my week. Every week. Several times each week. I’m grateful to Emily for the chance to reflect, and I hope there’s at least a tiny bit of wisdom in my offering for her readers.
I haven’t always taken such good care. But now that I have, it’s non-negotiable. I struggle to function without it. It’s tempting to consider that a trap of sorts, but it’s not. I wasn’t functioning before I had self-care habits (not well, anyway). I just didn’t know it. At least not fully.
As a writer, however, self-care can be tricky because writing itself can be self-care and NOT writing can be self-care. It can be difficult to know what best serves our craft.
Carolee Bennett, Self-Care for Writers and Other Highly Sensitive People
All my life, I’ve loved the moors as great wild places I could roam and stomp and climb. Now I see them as places of immense detail, where the invitation is to look closely. They are not wild, nor bleak – they are tender, and delicate and full of life, and a proper sense of love for them, protective and almost parental. I’ve come to understand Patrick Kavanagh: that it’s not how many places you know, but how deeply.
“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience’
from ‘The Parish and the Universe’, by Patrick Kavanagh
In his seminal book “Landmarks”, Robert MacFarlane points out how much of a role language can play in the “knowing” which Kavanagh speaks of. He tells of the smeuse – an underused name for the small paths made by the passage of little animals under hedges – how, once we know the word, we begin to notice smeuses everywhere. If we lack the words, we don’t notice or value our lands … and this impact can be seen most clearly in the case of moors, and bogs which tend to be seen a great bleak, wild wastelands, and which, as a result, are incredibly vulnerable to development and exploitation. Despite holding more than four times the carbon held by the UK’s forests, over 80% of our bogs have been drained, destroyed or damaged.
It’s with this in mind that Anna Chilvers and are creating the Book of Bogs anthology, featuring writing by Rob MacFarlane, David Morley, Pascale Petite, Amy Liptrot, Gwyneth Lewis and many more, all finding language for, the incredible, rich and detailed landscape of bogs and moors.
Clare Shaw, January Places: exercises
I know a lot of writers hate the idea of writing every day—but with having five kids, homeschooling, and working online, my writing time is very limited. If I shoot to write every single day, even for a few minutes every morning, then if I miss a day or my time is cut short, I am still making progress. I don’t write a poem every day—I typically only write a poem every couple of weeks—but practicing my writing daily has helped me improve my craft over the years, and over time publish three books of poetry and complete a fourth manuscript. […]
I have been thinking through what would be the best way to grow as a writer the next year—a class? a workshop? a writing challenge? — and decided to do a self-guided study on sonnets. I’ll be reading through a book of Shakespearean sonnets, a book of modern sonnets, a few books on writing in form, and watching some Youtube videos or a free online course on sonnets if I can find one. Recommendations on books and resources are welcome!
Renee Emerson, Resolutions for 2025
The collection is coming along. First round of edits & comments received from publisher. I’ll be going through them very soon. We’re still hoping to hit a March launch. Let’s see! I’ve got a few readings set up now, but need to arrange some more. First of all I’m reading at Red Door Poets on January 21st in Covent Garden, as the guest of Gillie Robic. I don’t know yet who the other readers are but I’m sure it’ll be a good night, with an open mic too, so please come if you’re in London/willing & able.
One thing I plan to do more of in 2025 is writing poems. Sounds simple, eh? I’ve got an idea for a proto-pamphlet in the pipeline, which I’d like to self-publish in hand-made form and have it to sell alongside the ‘big book’ at readings.
I’m still fully committed to Planet Poetry, despite Peter and I missing out on any ACE funding. On the other hand, we’ve got a small number of people supporting us on buymeacoffee.com for which we are inordinately grateful as it helps to relieve the financial burden. And of course my quarterly poetry submissions spreadsheet, which I wonder how long I can continue with to be honest!
Robin Houghton, New Year, new book and other news
I am not big on New Year’s resolutions, but given the stress that the news has brought (along with increased feelings of helplessness) and the clusterfuck that is social media right now, I limited myself since Jan 1 to thirty minutes of news a day (television, newspaper, or online) and decided to cut my time on my phone and social media in half. And you know what? My terrible anxiety and depression have lessened. I’ve seen more people in person, gone out of the house more, read more books. I’ve written more poems in the new year than I had in the previous three months.
And I spent some time taking care of some physical things as well—getting an eye exam and getting new glasses made (aging and MS are hard on the eyes!) and getting the first of four front teeth crowned (without Novocain – ouch!) I spent time checking in on myself in terms of where I am in my life and what I want to spend time doing with it. I’m going through a whole house reduction in stuff—from little things like throwing out old makeup and bath products to reducing the number of items in my closets and helping Glenn get rid of worn-out items—a broken toaster oven, worn out t-shirts. We are donating, recycling, and even consigning to help reduce overall waste, but I’m telling you, this act of getting rid of stuff in general has given me a feeling of more control over my immediate environment. (Have I reduced books yet? The answer is, not enough, lol! And I got rid of expired sunscreens and lip gloss and found I had to replace them. On the positive side, I found that going to the mall once convinced me that the clothing I already have is better made and cuter than the stuff I could buy there. So has it been a perfect experiment?)
I am also looking at my network of friends and family—and my writing career/life, as it were—and seeing what I need to nurture both. If the last four years have been isolating for me, as they have been for many with poor immune systems, it seems time to start rebuilding networks of people you can care about and who care about you, strengthening bonds you want to keep. If I don’t know exactly why I write, and I’m a bit at sea about what to do next, so to speak—for the next section of my life—not exactly sure at my age what to even expect—maybe that’s pretty normal. I can prioritize things that matter and decide to get rid of things that aren’t aiding me in my life. I can’t control wars, or Presidents, or the environment, my health, or how many people read my work, but I can decide what I spend my time and energy on, and who, and what deserves that time, energy, and money.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Cold Wolf Moon, Changing Times with Fires and Social Media, Taking Better Care of Body and Mind in the New Year
There is a gap then, between what I profess in front of others, and what I face (demons, hesitancy, the prying eyes of certain teachers, even, occasionally, the odd burst of confidence) and the impact of those things on how I feel about actually doing some writing. Do [as] I say, not as I do.
Which leads me to think that Victor Hugo, via Adam Zagajewski, might be right. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is impossible. But what if we add into this equation the desire to write? I’d like to think I desire to write always. I also know that is balls (impossible). Sometimes it’s impossible because life intervenes, as we know, or we’re tired, or we’re not reading very much, or it’s January for goodness’ sake. But what if it’s impossible because we just don’t want to? I spent most of last year itching to but also knowing it was impossible (life, blah blah). And so sort of gave up on wanting to. Which hardened into not wanting to. Which hardened into not expecting to.
And then something happened, ‘a helping grain of sand,/ a wonderful gust of wind’ as Tomas Tranströmer (trs, Robin Fulton) would have it, out of nowhere, walking the dog was it, suddenly looking up in the woods, and thinking, maybe I could just see about that folder that’s been lying on my desk for six months, how about it?
Anthony Wilson, When you can’t, it’s impossible
Publishing a poetry book involves nourishing your work in what may feel like darkness, growing networks. It can take a long time until the mushroom-poems themselves burst into the light. And who knows if people will find them, devour them, and find them tasty.
Am I taking this metaphor a little far for you? Too bad! I started writing the poems in Mycocosmic in the late twenty-teens and placed them with Tupelo Press in April 2023, so the trope and its fruit are an extended obsession. Design and proofing finished in October and ever since, I’ve been working on making my long hard work visible to others. Publishing my last poetry collection in March 2020 taught me that the best laid publicity plans gang aft agley, so I keep telling myself, well, I’ll do my best while trying to stay mellow. The world is in bad shape in myriad ways. I write this on the eve of a different and terrible kind of inauguration. Fires, floods, mass deportation, hatred of many kinds: the health and safety of so many are precarious.
But I’ll repeat another thing I know I say ad nauseam: a poem is an alternate possible world in which you can experience a flash of solace, the self-forgetfulness that brings you back to yourself. It’s not environmental remediation, racial or economic or gender justice, a timely vaccine, or a legal stay against fuckery. But art is on the cosmic list of what we need in hard times. I want activists to keep the pressure on; I simultaneously want writers to keep writing and trying to find me.
While I know in my bones that books are important, I also take weird consolation in the very fact that my mushroom-poems are pretty small. Nobody’s life depends on whether I’m given a chance on a particular stage or how well I perform when I’m up there or whether people show up with a little book-buying money in their virtual wallets. A very good case scenario would be connecting with some people along the way but not taking it all terribly seriously. That would be a string of small delights. Being almost invisible can be downright okay.
Lesley Wheeler, Fruiting the substrate
Soon the cycle of endless grading will begin. Perhaps that’s why I’ve done more poetry writing, or maybe it’s my 2025 goal inspiring me. I’ve also made a few submission–that process, too, will get dropped as my schedule fills up with grading and work for seminary classes.
Occasionally I think about my book-length manuscripts. I am not submitting those–that process is just too exhausting (and likely too expensive) to contemplate. But I do think about new poems and old manuscripts, and the process of publication. If a slew of new poems got published, how would they fit with the older poems if ever I wanted to put together a manuscript?
I think about how I once believed that an individual poem could change the world–I still do, but I think many other objects and activities have a better chance of changing the world. I once believed that if a poem found its way into a published book, it had a better chance of surviving for future generations to see. I no longer believe that.
It’s interesting to think how the publishing world has changed, not only in my lifetime, but in the past 10 years. That knowledge, too, shapes how I use my time, as I realize how little we know about publishing and the future.
But I do know that I never regret having written a poem, in the way that I have some regrets about money and time spent on pursuing publication.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Cycles of Chores, Cycles of Writing
Christine [McNair] and I have both composed poems on and around this space, this place. we’ve an unfinished, untitled collaborative project, one we’ve barely touched since she was pregnant with Rose. I haven’t yet given up on the idea. We’re probably half-through a full-length manuscript, responding to each other’s poems in a call-and-response. I would write three poems and Christine composed three in response, as I would compose two or three in return, etcetera. We attended the language of the space, and the counterpoint of my unilingual self newly introduced to this geography against her perspective as a French-speaker in these Laurentides, from a family space she’s known since youth. From the poem “mantle,” as Christine wrote:
August stings, deceives, unravels. Under my feet the lawn corporeals, slides up and slips. It circles round and there are trees and they are around and the windshudders. The trees shudderflex. The rain bends the roof. Barely bearable, instep peels down onto cold grass moves imperceptibly. The deck sighs. My feet are on the grass. We labyrinth round. My buried dogs yip in the earth. They eye you cautiously. The deer eat the flowers. The rain buckets.
In an interview on collaboration American poet and publisher Jen Tynes conducted with the two of us for Horse Less Press back in 2015, Christine responded: “rob mentions it in his reply but it’s been an odd collaboration for me in part because it treads into private/familial/dream space of mine. So while he can find some connections to family history of his own (visits to the Laurentians by his grandparents for example) and in the historic presence of the place – all of my connections to the cottage and the town are childhood bred. As such they’re somewhat sacrosanct and instinctual. When I was young I felt a definitive pull to the elemental aspects of the cottage. The thunderstorms that almost shake the house. The number of stars visible at night. All of which seemed wild and perfect to my little suburban head, even if it was completely tame and cozy. It was a retreat for me. So to collaborate with rob in this project feels a little strange because it contextualizes my own psychic dream space into something more detached.”
Further through Maggie Nelson’s Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), I catch an interview she conducted with Eileen Myles, originally for a special issue on Myles’ work for Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal, in which they discuss “the activist campaign in which Myles has been involved to save Manhattan’s East River Park—along with its 991 trees—from demolition.” As Myles responds: “And a park is one of the many studios of the writer. For me that’s always been one of the puzzles about what we are and what we do. What is that place? It does and it doesn’t exist, because it’s language, but it camps out in the world in all these various places, and there are some places that are more conducive to that camping out that others.”
rob mclennan, the green notebook
Back in Los Angeles, I tried to decide what to take if we (myself, Mark, and the dogs) had to leave. Books? I wandered my house, unsure of what mattered. Everything or nothing. Was there any clothing I wanted? My art would be left behind. The art isn’t worth a lot, but it keeps me going. That and the books.
What did we want? What did we need to take? What did we need to stay alive once we were walking in the world away from our house? Especially if we did not know if we would be able to come back?
Many people have walked away from their homes in the last two weeks with their clothes, maybe a laptop. Holding the keys to their car, the phone number of their insurance. Or without insurance. It’s estimated that there are still 150,000 people displaced in Los Angeles, either because their homes are unsafe or because they no longer exist.
I sleep in my bed tonight, grateful to still have a bed.
This is past Day of the Locust and into an apocalypse of our own making. Too many houses built into the canyons. Too many trees without enough water. Too much. Too much. And then it is gone.
Many people are crowded into hotels.
Many people are leaving.
We who are left hold on here, at the edge of the world. What else can we do? Where I live is where the coyotes run. The kind of fringe along the wasteland area where you can hear Waits playing in your head when you get there early as the smoky dawn touches the skyline. Of course, it’s smoky; the whole city’s been on fire, the smoke hangs there behind the coyotes.
Los Angeles is settling back on its heels after this, trying to decide if she’s ready for more beach, sun, thrush of gold before this whole wild ring of fire. Los Angeles of the palm trees and scissored everything. Los Angeles chops away at you. First this, then that. Can I make it through this week? Month? This year?
I grew up in a dark green world, possums, porcupines. Sure, things went wrong. But slowly.
Los Angeles is the earth shaking.
The earth on fire.
I send a prayer for all those who have died.
I send a prayer for all those who have lost their homes.
Though it may take years, I hope we rebuild better. Safer. Los Angeles, we come up here with dreams, for shoveling sunshine, for wild possibility. We wanted the dream at the edge of the world. Now, L.A., city of my dreams, give us a moment to breathe.
We came for ocean. For stairs to the sky. Music.
Stories.
We’re still here. Threaded against what’s left. Threaded into sunshine.
Kate Gale, Dream At The Edge of The World
Uncertainty has a daughter whose body is smoke and ash. Her eyes, numb and numberless.
She tells me the heart is no place for a graveyard. Burned wires, no place for a bed.
Words spill out of her mouth like wilted lilies.
I gather the flowers and offer them as cold comfort to the ghosts that dress in the tangled bedsheets of these surreal days.
Let’s hope this cruel winter doesn’t last forever.
Rich Ferguson, An Ode to the Unforevering of Cruel Winters
Everything is changing. I mean that in every sort of interpretation. Every level of meaning. Whatever you’re thinking, yeah, that’s changing too. I take the big worldly view and quail at what I see. Try thinking the long game, but that’s too much too. Go big or go home? I’m going home. I shrink to what’s at hand: bird, leaf, river, someone else’s hand. In the rhythm of the human species, winter has been the time for the hearth, the story, for repairing the nets. It’s all down to the little knots we make, each with each other. The lines strengthened between.
Here is a poem by Irish poet Kerry Hardie. I think a poem of hers was one of the poem-a-day offerings, which made me delve a bit into her work. Found this one that matched my headspace at the moment. Tracing shapes. Taking the mole’s view.
Marilyn McCabe, Name families; count trees, walls, cattle, gable-ends
I’ve started my reading in this new year where I left it in the old, with the American poet Dorianne Laux. I’d first encountered Laux’s poetry back in September, when ‘The Shipfitter’s Wife’ was one of many poems I enjoyed in the Seren anthology Women’s Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, and soon after bought a secondhand copy of her 2000 collection, Smoke, published by BOA Editions., which coincidentally includes that poem (It’s available to buy on their website, here.) Laux’s poems are plain-speaking, but far from plain. Here’s the opening sentence of ‘Pearl’, a 38-line, block poem about Janis Joplin:
She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,
this moonfaced child who opened her mouth
to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced
daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Optis, and the booze-
filled moon, child of the honky-tonk bar-talk crowd
who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown
open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted
at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out
into the sawdusted air.I especially like that ‘gravel pit churning in her belly’, and the repetitions of ‘faced’, ‘moon’ and ‘belly’. Laux would’ve been 15 when Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Monterey Festival, and she must’ve been inspired by Joplin’s example of a young woman putting herself and her soul right out there. The poem is both a paean and an elegy for ‘this little white girl / who showed us what it was like to die / for love’; but beyond that, it is, like many of the poems in the book, an elegy for the wilder times of the late ’60s and the ’70s. I enjoy and admire Laux’s poetry in equal measure and have Only as the Day is Long, her 2019 ‘New and Selected Poems’ up next.
Matthew Paul, January reading (1)
Linda Gregg says her student’s journals “fill up with lovely things like, ‘the mirror with nothing reflected in it.’”
According to my journal, it is cold, the heater is broken, there is no repair to be had, and Dan Beachy-Quick believes a poem “reaches through the little hole in the eye and puts the thing in mind, that realm in which perception and forgetting are simultaneous, where every presence coincides with a corresponding absence, where experience, as in an old iconic painting, holds aside the breast of its garment to reveal not a burning heart, but a nothing that pulses and is on fire.”
Alina Stefanescu, “I want nothing of”
I made a resolution to write here more regularly, even if it starts to sound repetitive. I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, following reading (rereading?) one of Virginia Woolf’s essays about it in her Second Common Reader. DW has replaced Woolf for the time it takes on my bedside table, and its main effect is to make me want to spend some time in the Lake District reliving the cold winter mornings of 1801. Cold and frugal: they seem to be living off the land: apples and giblet pies (but where do the giblets come from?) When they walk (their feet are their only means of transport, aside from the very occasional cart) to the nearest town it is, it seems, mainly to collect their letters. It’s hard for me to gauge how long a journey that is, but they do spend a lot of time walking, in rain and snow and foraging for moss (?) Last night, when William returned from a few days away, Dorothy gave him a steak, presumably from a local cow via the farmer. I would like to know a little more about such household details. I do know a good deal about the weather, their health, often poor, it seems, though there’s no talk of doctors and going to bed and waking up feeling better, the same or worse, usually depending on the news from Coleridge and William’s struggles with his poems and the lovely Molly, the woman who helps with food and laundry.
Beverley Bie Brahic, Monday 20 January, Paris
I sat awhile on a tree stump.
Taking a life always matters,
always takes something
with it, from me, the killer.I listened to a woodpecker.
A blackbird.
A winter hare stared.
I heard a muntjac bark.
A breeze passed through.I felt myself slow,
become still.An hour or so passed.
I went back to the rest
of the hens.They were busy
scratching for bugs,
holding their strange
conversations.They ignored me.
The sun shone.Bob Mee, DIARY PIECE
On the detour I took to pick up the mics, I put on a podcast that was focused on intrinsic motivation and how fragile it is: how a college basketball player who is externally rewarded—or given incentives—somehow, is far more likely to quit playing the game right after the obligation to play is over. And on the other hand, the casual team player, who warms the bench most of the time is more likely to carry on a love for the game much longer into their busy, adult life. It’s a fascinating fact, and I have no idea what to make of it. My mind immediately goes to the yogic idea that there are only so many heart-beats per creature, and when we use them up, the heart stops. Tiny creatures with racing heartbeats don’t live as long as we do, and the slow tortoise lives so much longer. Is it that we have a limit to the number of joyful moments—if not overall, then in connection with a singular kind of joy? Is this nothing more than another form of a hedonic treadmill?
I think about how often I have picked up and put down writing. Often I’ve put it down after having received some kind of meaningful validation. Until today, I wondered if it were a fear of failure. The fear of not being able to meet my own or other’s expectations again. I’ve wondered if it were self-sabotage. You know, because I am broken in some way and have an unconscious identity as such to protect. I think now it’s because I temporarily forget why I am doing it. I need time away to remember the joy that is in the process of making a poem, or creating a whole world in a play.
Ren Powell, Questioning Intrinsic Motivation
In 2025 my plan is to take things slowly, to focus on my health, physical and mental, and that will involve being offline, picking up a book instead of my phone. I want to read more. In 2024 I started to rebuild my reading stamina and attention span which have both suffered from two decades of phone scrolling. I’m reading short stories and novels again, rediscovering the endorphin hit released in my brain when I lose myself inside the pages of a chunky book.
I’m scheduling in exercise sessions – last year, I signed up for swimming lessons and learned how to do the front crawl and backstroke after a swimming life spent exclusively swimming breast stroke. I tried Pilates but I seemed to aggravate an old knee injury because of too much kneeling. I want to continue to walk daily and to build in some cycling, on my static bike (a great place to catch up on radio dramas and arts programmes) and on a real bike.
I’ve started several writing projects. I’m not ready to talk about them yet, they’re still in development, I don’t want to put myself under any pressure. I can’t say that I’m not excited at the thought of a blank diary and the possibility that I will have time to spend with my own writing.
Last year I enjoyed working on a sequence of poems, working around a theme, and producing my own zine. I loved collaborating with a visual artist, Pauline Scott-Garrett, engaging with some of her ideas in her series ‘Borderland’ and extending my poems beyond that. I loved working with a translator, Lorena Pino Montilla. It was exciting to think of the possibilities for poetry beyond a collection, and bringing poetry, in English and in Spanish, into an art exhibition. It’s exciting to think about other possible spaces for poetry.
Josephine Corcoran, On Giving Things Up
Saying no imposes order into our lives. It reminds me of the negative space surrounding words on a page. That space holds the words together so they can form meaning in a reader’s mind. Without it, we would have a confusing bunch of ideas running from edge to edge.
Saying no is empowering. It gives you back your time. It’s wildly liberating. Now that I’m in my 60s, I am acutely aware of my mortality. I know I have far less time left on Earth to do the work I want to. I must say no. And mean it.
Erica Goss, The Notebook of Noes
I appreciate both the power
of restraint and the joy of
spontaneity, the frisson of a seductive
opening (perhaps like the title
of this poem). Once, I entered an epic-
poem writing competition, mostly
from irritation; some male poets I knew
were going on and on about how
it was all a matter of length and
endurance. Really. I scoffed. I could
tell you about endurance, and about how sexy
is perhaps one of the most
misunderstood of qualities we like to lob
around in this late-twenty-first-
century-nearing-apocalypse period.Luisa A. Igloria, Being told you can’t have sex
My friend and neighbour, Cathma, was dying. I had helped out where I could and hoped to do more. But, in the pre-dawn hours of January 5th, while I was away, she died. With her husband and children by her bedside she slipped away, pulled through her last deep sleep by forces beyond anyone’s control. This is the way we all want to die, isn’t it? In our own home, in peace, at peace with a long life well-lived.
Cathma’s passing was one more in a rather substantial line of family and friends lost to cancer. I found news of her death hard to absorb, for my days were filled with children and playtime, cooking and tending to the needs of little ones and poorly adults. There was simply no space to think let alone begin to grieve.
A mere five days later, we drove home through the snowfields of northern England and Scotland, a long and arduous journey, for Cathma’s funeral. The tiny church was packed. There was singing and memory-sharing of a happy life, of a woman well loved. Her grave overlooks the old Gairloch churchyard and through ancient trees down to the sea. She would be content with the view.
Since then, I have roamed about the valley seeing her in every nook and cranny of this complex landscape. She taught me so much and has been a part of our lives here in South Erradale almost every day. Both friend and neighbour, Cathma was also sister, mother-figure, advisor, crofting elder, Cailleach, teacher, mentor, purveyor of stories and gossip, and an archive of local cultural and natural history. I learned so much from her. She was an integral part of my book, Windswept, appearing in it often. Her knowledge and understanding of place are plain to see, threaded though the printed words.
Wandering around the crofting township I remember her tales of this or that, how such and such tried to grow potatoes here or barley there, which crofter had trouble with a bull here or lost a ewe there. Every single house in the village has stories, and every story has even deeper roots in history. Cathma would explain who was born, lived, married and died in South Erradale. There were tales of her own life, of going to school in nearby Opinan, running through the fields with bare feet, helping her father catch salmon at the Red River’s mouth. Almost every rock or pile of stones had names, lives or events attached to them; she knew which springs provided ‘good’ water for drinking, which were for animals, which sumps would be a problem in heavy rain, which would provide water for livestock in times of drought. And throughout the whole place, her words came to me in Gaelic as she tried to teach me the old ways.
Annie O’Garra Worsley, Endings and beginnings
Whenever I see a shortlist, I always feel the greatest insight can be gained by looking at who isn’t on it, rather than who is. As a consequence, in light of the T.S. Eliot readings last Sunday, I had a quick trawl through the PBS bookshop for releases in the four quarters of 2024 (the main chunk of books that might have been eligible) and noted that the following significant poets were all absent from the shortlist (among many others, of course): Ian Duhig, Ruth Padel, Niall Campbell, Kathleen Jamie, Rory Waterman, Claudine Toutoungi, Carrie Etter, Jamie McKendrick, John Burnside, Paul Muldoon, Jackie Kay, Imtiaz Dharker, Hugo Williams and Gillian Clarke.
The nature of a ten-person shortlist is that many deserving poets will inevitably miss out. However, all of the above might have hoped for inclusion on the basis of the C.V.s and/or the recent reviews in broadsheets, etc, of their eligible collections.
Some might say there’s a changing of the generational guard at play here, especially in terms of the likes of McKendrick or Burnside, who obtained significant success in this prize (and in the Forwards) in the past. Others, meanwhile, might suggest that the changing of the guard is more aesthetic.
It might well be that tastes are shifting at the top table of U.K. poetry prizes. This doesn’t mean, however, that younger poets are not emerging within a similar poetic profile to those older poets who’ve slipped through the shortlisting net. It simply means their work doesn’t fit with current trends. In fact, several of the poets on the above list are far from their dotage.Matthew Stewart, A changing of the guard…?
It’s difficult to believe that a pandemic can bring any benefits, but as a poet living in a rural location, I thank Covid for bringing Zoom into the poetry world! Without it I would not have been introduced to the work of many of the fine poets who have graced this website with a drop-in. It was at an online poetry reading that I first heard the work of Kelly Davis, and immediately I knew I wanted to get to know her poems better and review her first collection, The Lost Art of Ironing (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). It’s been a joy doing so.
The collection begins with a fine poem, To My Hands, in which she looks back at her life, through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and maturity, reflecting upon the changes that have taken place. Significantly the poem begins with a rich and telling image: ‘When I slid into the world,/ you came out clenched like two walnuts.’ The walnut simile says so much. Of course, there’s the appearance of the hands on birth, but it also suggests to me the need for a hardness and resilience, a tough shell, as it were. Furthermore, the idea of the seed within that shell, represents potential, both academically (the seed looks rather like a brain) and in terms of nurturing (the seed provides sustenance); both ideas being developed later in the poem.
To My Hands represents a woman’s life as a series of distinctive phases, one of constant change. This notion is one that permeates the collection. In If Emily Dickinson Were My Best Friend she imagines spending time with the poet: ‘We’d go to a bar in Montparnasse,/ drink gin and tonic from big glasses,/ talk about how women’s lives/ had changed – and not changed.’ This idea resonates through the work as a whole. It emerges most explicitly in the sonnet sequence which concludes the collection. In these five modern versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Davis explores the similarities and differences in life for women in the digital age. Take for example, After Sonnet 1: From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase. She writes: ‘In days gone by, the choice was very stark: you had your children young or not at all./ But now the test tubes wait in freezers dark/ and no one hears their silent, plaintive call.’ In addition, ‘The surgeon’s knife preserves the teenage grin, celebrity provides its own reward.’ Such choices are not presented as benefits: Davis’s tone is critical and almost regretful. She seems to be saying, the choice might have been ‘stark’, but do we really want a society in which ‘self-love is now our cult, our god, our lord’?
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Lost Art of Ironing’ by Kelly Davis
I have become used to failing as a writer – not getting the residency, the grant, the book prize, the reputed publication. These failures haven’t necessarily made me a better writer. Failure just comes with the territory if you are submitting work. These failures haven’t stopped from writing, however; they have instead been good for me in many ways. Mostly they have made me more realistic.
I don’t waste a lot of money applying for things that I have a slim chance of achieving. (I’d rather get an Air BnB with writing friends a couple of times a year than try to get into a residency that costs me $50 to apply with no guarantee of success, for example.) I am not a “big” or even recognizable name in poetry land, and no one is going to pay me money to speak at their college or run their prestigious workshop, especially since I do not hold an MFA. I am only the keynote speaker to the animals in my backyard. Poet Laureate of Pajamas.
I have learned to care less about those things and more about what matters to me: writing work that is true to me and not meant to please an algorithm or what is fashionable; building community; and promoting the work of others through my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and now, the new journal I am co-editing with Rachel Bunting called Asterales: A Journal of Art & Letters. In this way, you could say that failure has made me happier and more well-rounded in my writing life.
Don’t get me wrong; it sure would be nice for my next book to sell well or to receive some sort of recognition for my writing. But it wouldn’t change my writing itself or make the “po biz” aspect of writing any easier or more fun.
Donna Vorreyer, Failure is Always An Option
I spent my morning with high school students at Exeter Academy today, reading from my work-in-progress Home Out There. It was a joy, in particular, to discuss my research on Langston Hughes. Young people are very honest; if they aren’t interested, they don’t hide it. It meant a lot to see that they were so focused on what I had to share with them.
I understand there’s some kind of event happening in Washington DC today, but that’s none of my business. I have work to do, as do you.
I explained to the students that it’s hard work being a person and it’s even more difficult to be a human. That said, the work is always worthy and it’s absolutely possible for each of us to become ourselves via our thoughts, words and deeds.
With that in mind, I’m happy to share that I joined The Stacks podcast for a special episode about Toni Morrison’s lecture “Goodness and the Literary Imagination.” You can listen to it here. I hope our conversation brings comfort and clarity.
Saeed Jones, It’s Hard Work Being a Person
Yesterday, even as a new cold snap took hold of the city and shook, I ventured out for the first time in two weeks to catch a screening of Grand Theft Hamlet, a delightfully clever piece developed during covid when two actors and a filmmaker decided to stage a Hamlet production inside a video game. As auditioned actors /players and kept getting shot / blown up /attacked by the police, it brought to mind Station Eleven, which I read shortly after it came out and then loved the HBO short series a couple years back, which also involves a group of Shakespearean players performing under apocalyptic distress, so much so, I’ve suggested that J and I watch it this week. Mostly for that similar theme of making beauty, telling stories, amid the horrors of whatever your current circumstances happen to be.
Even as the nation teeters on much badness (someone on BlueSky just described it as that moment at the top of the rollercoaster where it quiets for a second and you can see for miles in the silence before the screams) there are things of beauty to be found.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 1/19/2025
Given Jo Davis’s background as a researcher and advocate in work supporting healthcare equality, particularly for invisible and complex-chronic illnesses affecting women, it’s unsurprising that “Fit to Work” explores aspects of illness and impacts on work. That’s not the collection’s only focus. In the opening poem, “Saint Valentine may have been two different men”, readers are reminded he’s not only the patron saint of lovers but also for beekeepers and people who have fainted. Observing that bees reacted to an invasion by a hornet by mobbing and stinging it until “They bake him dead with the heat of their love”, the poem goes on to mention that during the plague, the dead were buried in layers in pits “just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese” […]
“Fit to Work” is an empathetic look at chronic illness and disability, that dissects an exclusionary world where those with access needs are at best met with inertia, even after a pandemic which may have provoked compassion in those who do not have to navigate and negotiate barriers to participating fully in society. Jo Davis writes with intelligence and wry observation, using apt metaphors to illustrate an unequal and inhospitable world.
“Fit to Work” is available from Against the Grain. It is also Against the Grain’s final publication.
Emma Lee, “Fit to Work” Jo Davis (Against the Grain) – book review
I want to mention apparent allusions that have struck me in two recent poems.
One is in A Bird Called Elaeus, David Constantine’s brilliant book of versions from The Greek Anthology. The first quatrain in his Coda of Anthology-inspired original poems is called ‘Laws of War’:
We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.There are actually two apparent allusions here – one to Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s Cathedral, the other to W B Yeats’ ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, where he writes
We too had many pretty toys when young;
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays …Though Constantine’s last line, recalling Wren’s epitaph, is the most powerful and haunting in itself, it’s the reference to Yeats that seems to me most telling as an allusion. Minds will go in different directions, of course. To me, it implies a fierce indictment of the blatant double standards great powers bring to international affairs, the hollowly rhetorical way in which concepts like ‘rule-based order’ are applied, the way the objective application of international law is hamstrung by security council veto. In a larger way, Yeats’ despair at how the Black and Tans’ violence dissolves illusions about human nature resounds through the poem. And though Constantine speaks in a quieter voice than Yeats, I think it’s fair to say that if the destruction of olive trees, schools and hospitals is actually a systematic policy, as it seems to be, what’s being done in Gaza and the West Bank is a much more powerful cue to such despair than the atrocities of ‘a drunken soldiery’.
Edmund Prestwich, Enhancing allusions in two poems by Constantine and Holland-Batt
British Standards is the third volume in Sheppard’s ‘The English Strain’ project, following on from The English Strain and Bad Idea, previously reviewed here. This third and final volume focuses on the Romantic period and is structured as a number of sets of poems writing through well-known, and some not so well-known, sonnets of the era, much like a jazz musician reimagining standard songs (one of the layers on which the book title operates).
Sheppard opens with Wordsworth in a set of 14 poems, each with a title of one of his original sonnets, chronicling the adventures of Bo and Cum, PM and advisor, across February and March 2020. The tone is wildly satiric, as far from Wordsworth as one might imagine, setting the insanity of Johnstone and Cummings’ handling of Brexit and Covid in a pornographic landscape that echoes the obscenity of their rule, with its complete disregard for ‘the rules’:
They sing revisionary ballads, history scrubbed free
of pre-lockdown shame and Stay Alert shambles.
While millions mourned in self-enforced oblivion,treading customary pageant round the park,
dumb Cum drove virus to the pre-hotspot North,
tested his sick eyes: That’s Barney Castle…As I thought about it, it occurred to me that while the tone is radically different, Wordsworth is the most Brexit-emblematic British poet to start with, his political shift from French Revolution radicalism to Burkean conservatism being, in effect, a move from European to insular British values and standards.
Billy Mills, Two by Robert Sheppard: A Review
A couple of months ago I was rearranging some stuff in my office and came across some notebooks from when I was in my MFA in the early 2000’s and from my undergrad days. I looked back at some of those poems and felt the expected cringe but I also saw the origins of what would become my book and the poems that followed.
One of the most valuable things I learned early on as a student in creative writing was to look at writing as a craft. It happened in my first poetry workshop, as an undergrad, with Jack Bedell. He talked about how poetry comes from the Greek word poesis, which roughly translates to “the made thing.” We read from an anthology with that title, published by the University of Arkansas Press, but more importantly we talked about the importance of writing as practice, as something you can improve at, and moved away from the idea of poet as genius with some innate ability to organically blob words out onto the page.
Which is not to say geniuses don’t exist. It’s just to say that geniuses don’t start out there. Octavia Butler didn’t write didn’t write Parable of the Sower right out of the box. It took her years of honing her craft to get there.
It’s more important than ever to talk about this kind of work because the argument from many of AI and LLM companies, especially their CEO’s, is that these tools can let anyone become an artist, and it’s just not true.
Let me clarify. Anyone can create art and by extension become an artist. I’ll even go so far as to say that anyone can become a good artist, with the usual caveat that “good” is in the eye of the beholder.
What isn’t true is that those tools can get you out of the work it takes to get there.
Brian Spears, There’s no way to get out of it
Exhale Slowly
After the foot departs in their
Search for meaning and
A good woman done wrong,
The earth moves and five minutesAgo rain tapped out. Today’s lesson
Is humility. Up to down, right to left,
I follow. What is the color
Of love or a shadow’s weight?Above the sky or below the waves,
Some days pain drags behind me
No matter what. Exhale slowly that long
Tunnel ribbed in silence.In keeping with my intent to create something small every day and to resurrect my poetry practice, I plan to publish on this site one of my poems every few days. I won’t do it every day because I don’t want to inundate your in-box! Plus, I will no doubt skip a day or so during this effort.
This Cento was created from the first 10 poems in Robert Okaji’s beautiful book, In the Garden of Wind’s Delight. The poems and the hand-made book itself are extraordinary and I am enjoying every reread of every poem enclosed. I plan to create another Cento from the remaining poems so keep an eye on this page.
Thank you, Bob, for your talent and your friendship. Sending love to Stephanie, too.
Bob’s book can be purchased from Illuminated Press.
Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): Exhale Slowly
When I think back to those parts of the process where my latest projects/books – Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Poetry) and The Ghost Lake (memoir) were not yet books, nor were they cohesive arguments or themes, I find that the place from which the books grow is about a feeling, something that feels a little like a repeating dream, or deja vu. Something tugging at the subconscious. If I think about where poems come from for me, I can imagine something coming up from the ground, something that can’t be seen that you have to reach your hand into and pull at, until it emerges. When I think about where my non fiction prose comes from, that feels like the opposite, like something falling from the sky or a soft mist that must be captured in something like a moth net. I don’t know where these weird images come from, but they are the same images that happen whenever I think about the creative process. […]
A poetry collection is a series of individual art pieces brought together in an exhibition, a book. The process then is many small processes, each poem being pulled from the ground (in my case), each one having its own identifiable process. Poems always begin, for me, with the feeling of something settling, or falling into place. they begin with a moment of beauty in something ordinary. This process feels like my usually noisy and slightly chaotic brain sees through that chaos to the poem, like when you are in a busy cafe or bus station and you can’t see from one end to the other and then there is a moment where everyone, every person in their own little world, somehow shifts at the same time and a clear view appears all the way down the room, and there at the end of that view is the poem, and it is that view of, for instance, the skeleton of a blackbird looking like a neolithic burial, or something less dark, that is where the poem grows from. Though to be honest, not often less dark in my poetry. As I’m writing this I’m thinking about how much metal detecting is like poetry writing for me, and perhaps that’s why metal detecting, the process of finding stuff in the ground, features so much in Blackbird.
Wendy Pratt, What Arrives Before the Words Do
I think what happens is that after many, many years of writing poetry (or making any kind of art) one begins to feel a rhythm that is almost circadian–as analogy–that informs a person about flow. I ask myself, “Am I ready to write today?” The answer may not be yes. But if it is yes, then I can just write. No expectations, and it’s okay to use a prompt, or re-write an older poem, or just free-write about whatever moment I happen to be in. Usually, in this frame of mind, I don’t get concerned about writing well. I just start on in.
If the am-I-ready answer isn’t a definite yes, then I may procrastinate or distract myself by cleaning the house or reading a book. I can overcome the “maybe” by turning to work by a poet whose work I find interesting or by experimenting with a prompt. Sometimes, it helps to give myself a deadline of some kind–this is why workshops are often useful!
But the answer may simply be, “No, not today.” Sometimes we have those non-creative days. It is alright to have them. Art shouldn’t be about pushing out ideas to get to a “product.” I’m suddenly laughing to myself, thinking of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in the movie The Princess Bride: “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.”
At least with writing, one gets a chance to revise.
Ann E. Michael, Promptings
I believe strongly that this is a time for softening, rather than hardening, ourselves to the realities of this time we’re living in: its unfathomable losses and cruelties, and the greatness of heart that is required of us to meet it. Let’s keep our hearts open, friends, and take care of ourselves and each other so that we have the strength to do what is required and be ready to support those who are most vulnerable.
I will leave you with words from Naomi Shihab Nye. May kindness go with you everywhere. […]
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.Sarah Rose Nordgren, Fire
when we are done walking
our legs ache with achievement.
we lay in our beds of moss.
observe the silent hours.
fold our words into private poems
& swallow them each until
night comes to pull all language
from our bones.Robin Gow, monastery
there is always a voice drinking and dying
there is always a noisy fountain dying of thirstthere is the naked silence
of the friend who loves youa woman releases the raven’s feather
that whispers her namethis Ohio grows old within me
my body no longer dreams it is a riverGrant Hackett [no title]