Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 4
painful radiance, a bear-shaped shadow, the sound of the axe, a single brahminy kite, 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: painful radiance, a bear-shaped shadow, the sound of the axe, a single brahminy kite, and much more. Enjoy.
The dawn rouses so many creatures.
Watchful, they emerge from burrows.
If one sneezes, they scurry into shadow.
It’s us that award names to the nameless.
Our responsibilities stretch wide and far.And in the freezing wilderness of Wonderland
Alice clutches at the last straws of light.
Her mother has no idea where she is.
A dog with gravestone eyes lies at her feet.
The Mad Hatter is long gone, presumed dead.
The Cheshire Cat plays the saxophone, alone.Bob Mee, VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS
On the bus today, I watched a little boy in a stroller, whose mother was ruffling his abundant black hair. He turned his head and looked up at her with such a beatific smile, and she looked down at him the same way — a sort of Madonna and child moment — and I thought of what was going on in Washington and how little it had to do with that, with these most basic ways in which we are human. And of course, it has everything to do with it, if you are one of the unlucky ones caught in the crosshairs, like countless mothers and children in the world’s war zones, or those who fear deportation or persecution.
I’m not watching the news or reading it today. That’s a choice. We can actually limit the extent to which we allow ourselves to be invaded by negativity, threats and pronouncements that may or may not be acted upon, and the resulting stress and spiraling worry they create. I am not advocating putting one’s head in the sand, or failing to name, protest, and resist all the wrongs that we can. However, the period we’re entering is going to be rough and invasive, and our first responsibility is to ourselves and those around us: to be as strong mentally and physically as possible, and to remember and celebrate our own humanity in the face of a darkness in which it’s so easy to become lost.
My primary job, as I see it, is to be a person who carries, communicates, and encourages hope, joy, creativity, and a positive lifeforce — in spite of everything. And this IS a job – it takes work. What helps? Using my senses to pay attention, because there is almost always something life-giving to notice, like the mother and child on the bus today. There is color. There is music. There are words. There’s the smell of food being prepared, or flowers in a supermarket display. There is the cold of winter on my cheeks, and the warmth of the distant sun which can still be felt even in sub-zero temperatures. There’s the taste of coffee, salt, lemons, chocolate. We miss so much when we’re wrapped up in ourselves and our worries — and our screens — and we have to train ourselves to turn back to the actual world, which is right there, existing, waiting to be noticed — full of sorrows, yes, but also full of beauty, joy, and simplicity.
Beth Adams, How to Survive
Remember Spring my love,
hold tight with me.Look how the snowdrop
umbrellas lime-green down there.Remember Spring my love,
hold on.Let me show you sunrise
clementine the sky.Sue Finch, WHAT WAS I THINKING?
This week I received my PLR statement and it informs me that thousands of strangers have taken time to borrow my books from their local libraries. I am immensely moved by this and grateful. I had no idea. Thank you.
Here’s a picture of a happy day, this day in January in 2022, when the paperback was in the big window of the flagship store of Foyles on Charing Cross Road. This was a huge moment for me, I recall, I was very excited about it. I have never been in a big shop window before, and this is a particular favourite bookshop I love to visit all the time, especially as a baby poet when I worked and partied in Soho every night.
I always said ‘one day I will be in that window’ and back then this seemed like a big dream of a thing to say out loud. It was something I really fought for and believed though. I look back and love the punky baby poet who starved and fought for me.
I have to salute her. She, who is not me now. I think about that, how we have to thank our past self. The person who writes the first draft of the book may grow to feel differently about things than the person who signs the published article. The poet that started this WAITING FOR GODDEN blog all those years ago isn’t me now. We are all complex, multi-layered and messy human beings, and all of the eras of you being a human being get you to this place, which is always in the here and now.
I am inside these thoughts and memories and also in the here and now, January 2025, I’m in hibernation and buried in the darkness of January tasks, it is a sad mixture of death and taxes, virus and sickness, bereavement and deadlines, sorrow and bewilderment.
Salena Godden, Blue January 2025
the plant by my front door
blooms purple every spring
grown from a cutting
from my mother’s garden
who grew it from a cutting
from her mother’s garden
long ago i forgot its name
but never its provenanceDick Whyte, Nina Catherine Howe – Meditation (1926)
After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog that contains no commentary. That poem was Tollund, by Seamus Heaney. I felt I took a risk in not saying anything about it – I thought readers would be able to join the dots between political events across the pond and Heaney’s description of ‘low ground, […] swart water, […] thick grass/ Hallucinatory and familiar’ which culminate in the self-reflexivity of his final lines, where his group (of friends? family?) stand:
More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad
Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:
And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.Everything in that stanza fulfils what Heaney sets out in my favourite of his essays, ‘The Government of the Tongue‘:
In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.
I find it poignant to read it again today, not least because of the person who now occupies the White House, but also because Heaney prefaces his remarks with one of his grittier sentences: ‘Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.’ Again, the links to current events are there to see in plain sight.
The good news is that he does not stop there:
Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.
When you think of hope, what do you think of? I was asked this at about 11.00 on New Year’s Eve, and, introvert that I am, I went blank and have only thought of the answer now: the power of the imagination to strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life – even though no poem has ever stopped a tank.
Anthony Wilson, Ourselves again (again?)
Knee-deep in reflected gold, I wait
for news. Recently, there’s been nothing
but the wish to hang on. Overcome
by the shedding of everything familiar,
there’s nothing left; hope’s been and gone. News
will come, and the river will stop running;
everything familiar will be shed,
and each part will fall to meet its gold reflection.Karen Macfarlane, 6 TIMES (II)
We need to be careful with money. Go easy with food. Cuba is cut off from American banks. We have the money we came with.
But in Matanzas, our room is quiet, except for a bird singing. Tomorrow or the next day, we will swim in the Saturn cave, go to the Coral Beach, and we will see about writing.
I am blessed. Today, a man named Amed drove us here in a classic red ‘57 Chevy.
Despite the struggles of an isolated country, Cuba has light, magic, and music. Where we are sleeping has high ceilings, a blanket, nice towels, and in the morning, there will be Cuban coffee on the rooftop.
Tomorrow, we will swim, and then we will go to the coffee shop in the town square, and we will write!
I am ready for swimming. Writing. Cuban coffee. Cuban music.
In this adventure, I will polish this book, so it shines in the dark.
Kate Gale, I Can Sing for You: Our Adventure in Cuba
That we may escape this American psych ward; this red, white, and blue panic room; big-moneyed brotopia speaking in sieg heils and high-fives. This hot-wired joyride of a truly hot mess; PSA for DOA; all-night fear factory where vindictiveness hosts an open bar. This fork-tongued freedom machine; autonomous vehicle steered by the unseen hands of autocracy; this bad-rappin’ nation where the words ICE ICE baby take on chilling new meaning. This Guernica aneurysm; babel-mouthed alphabet of scrambled belonging. This burn church; this scorched land; this scorched psyche, a Rorschach posing the question, What’s next?
Rich Ferguson, Red, White, and Blue Panic Room
To live in a city of over ten million people, one bird in the formless murmuration, is to normalize erasure. How easily you stop hearing the noise – of people, of traffic, of need, of despair, of failure, of persuasion; stop seeing movement as individual action: not this person walking, not even that one running for a bus, not a car in a rush hour crawl, not a street dog marking corners and gates and curbs as its own, not the woman with two children, on a rickety scooter, doing a school run. Instead, they all merge into one still background: you disconnect from the city and walk between rickshaws and bikes, sidestepping footpath vendors and the sleeping homeless, brushing shoulders with shoulders and awnings and nameless hurry, comfortable with your thoughts, comfortable in your square of earth, ring of sky, wall-less silo, comfortable in your alone.
Here, in the city, poetry is birthed in imagined silences. On grey canvases. In the belch of trucks. In the queues. In the lifts. In the waiting. In the contrary being. In the pulse of a time that is both tomorrow and yesterday – the long monsoon days both relief and rhythm, the scorching summer both mundane and midwife, the muse as temperamental as the moon, the mind as unwilling as morning.
A single brahminy kite draws slow, taunting arcs over the frenzy. Loneliness, you learn, has nothing to do with the crowds. Clouds have nothing to do with ascent. Peace has nothing to do with chaos. The city, like the word, like the birds, like the night, like the solitude of the moving sky, is within you.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Imagined silences
It’s freezing cold again:
we leave the hot water tap on as a thin
drizzle. All morning, I have felt
the sort of heaviness that sometimes
remains, even after a long bout
of crying. I listen to a livestream
where the panelists speak of ways
we might lift each other up when we
feel like that. One of them says,
hard as it seems, we must laugh
together, even be silly. Feed each
other, come together, hold
each other up. We can still burn
bright as the burning hills. We
can burn even brighter.Luisa A. Igloria, Monday
I was playing around with the idea of titling a post, “What Will You Inaugurate this Year?” The idea came via my brilliant friend and piano teacher, Susan, who recently told me, Your year—your next 4 years—do not belong to any politician, they belong to you. Following this advice, however, is one of those “easier said than done” things (as a lot seems, lately).
And, as for the lofty title. I find I haven’t the heart to give anyone inspiring advice, not today. To keep it simple, a better title—maybe for my intentions this whole year—is simply, “What Bethany Is Reading Now.”
Of course I have been reading (reading has been my life-line!), but I’ve been too distracted to share on the blog. The main distraction: my 84-year-old husband fell off a ladder and down our front steps. (Throughout a hospital stay, follow up appointments, etc., he has insisted he is fine. No, he has not gotten rid of the ladders.)
Meanwhile…I had earlier committed to several local poets to review their books. Leaving aside large concepts (suggested by Latinate words such as inaugurate), spending some time on poetry sounds good.
Bethany Reid, Taking Leave, poems by Mary Ellen Talley
A friend sends me haiku most days, under the rule that I don’t comment on them because I do that for a living and it can wear me out–it’s a pleasure to just watch them float by. One of the latest was addressed to a black widow living near his bed, informing it that he wouldn’t yet oust the spider into single-degree temperatures. I did comment on that one, remarking that I would not be so compassionate, and then we had a brief conversation about feeling tender-hearted lately. It’s the cruelty of the world, we agreed.
The term is in full swing–W&L starts early so I’ve been teaching for more than two weeks now–and I feel the same way about the students in my introductory poetry workshop, whose first poem drafts I’m writing responses to today. Gentle, Lesley. People are fragile.
I feel some kindness beaming back at me, too, from other people. A former student is teaching Poetry’s Possible Worlds at a military academy (!) and just sent me the loveliest response paper his own student had written about it, commenting that I made myself vulnerable in the book and it touched her, made her feel connected. And then there’s kindness from the universe: a new poem came to me, which hasn’t happened much lately. A good EMDR session made my tense muscles feel softer, as if I am beginning to release that braced feeling I’ve experienced for as long as I can remember.
Lesley Wheeler, Tender and furious
i love that the word “hives”
for the rashes on my skin
is the same as that
of a thrumming hornet body.
i run my fingers
across the raised flesh.
never the same. sometimes
a bracelet. sometimes
just one like an angry lonely star.
my body rejects this world
so it maps others.
says, “here is where
our treasure is buried.”Robin Gow, hives
A couple days ago, J and I were talking about Dead Poets’ Society, which, to many people’s surprise is not a movie I am enamored with (in a similar vein, I prefer Mona Lisa Smiles so much more.) Once it was on video, I remember our sophomore year teacher rolling in the VCR TV on its cart and having us watch it, though I’m pretty sure I had already been writing poetry (or maybe quotes should be around the “poetry” part ) for a year. Since the end of freshman year when we were charged with writing them. I don’t remember what models were give us. Whitman? Dickinson? Frost? Either way I wrote a bunch–about flamingos, kittens, unrequited high school love. I wrote them out on notebook pages, on pen pal stationery, in the blue lockable diary a cousin gave me for my 14th birthday. They may have rhymed, but it got much worse later on in college. Beyond some Poe in Junior high, I wasn’t that familiar with poetry in general, so its no wonder I was clueless those first couple years. But I was also writing lots of other things–papers on UFO’s, essays on the 1st Amendment that won prizes, flawless 5 paragraph essays, a term paper on Shakespeare’s women, newspaper editorials on environmental issues. And I was reading–still lots of horror and some romance. I still have those early poems, what I’m guessing was most of them in a folder somewhere, though I threw a lot of things away a while back, mostly things that already exist in book form. But I kept all those early fledgling drafts, mostly for my own amusement.
Kristy Bowen, true north
Sunday morning was cold, and clear. I headed to the theater to help strike the Panto set. The day after a long process is something like the day after a binge. I walked up a narrow space between two office buildings and nearly stumbled on a little ceramic angel, sleeping, head rested on folded arms propped up by a ceramic tree stump. All around him were off-season rhododendron bushes and empty bottles: cheap whiskey, dark beer. He was sleeping. Passed out, maybe.
Is there a word for looking back on an earlier time in your life, not with a sense of loss and longing, but with an objectivity that has your mind bouncing between shame and pity for your former self? Compassion may be years away, but I am learning to stay in the difficult spaces when I stumble upon them: face-to-face with memories that are mine, but that haven’t been polished by my rumination—that haven’t been made familiar. That is what it means to tame something, isn’t it? To be made familiar to it. Can these memories, tucked into my being like parasites, tame me?
Will they break me?
Ren Powell, A Beautiful Life Story has More than One POV
I’ve lost count of how many pieces I’ve read about the powers of going local, connecting with community, continuing to create, not letting them steal our joy and attention, not letting them live rent-free in our heads, not letting them destroy our humanity, etc. and I appreciate the sentiments and where they’re coming from, I really truly do, but…enough, already. It feels a little too much like 2017 resistance to me, if that makes any sense. Like, it all sounds good, and there’s good in doing those things, for sure, but is it really going to do what we hope it will? Any more than our protests and postcards and phone calls and donations have? Does it acknowledge what’s really happening?
Reading these pieces has begun to make me feel not OK (because I really don’t want to go back to 2017 in any way), so I’ve mostly stopped doing that. I seem to have joined a church, despite my atheism, primarily because of their community-based activism and because it’s nice to meet with other folks once a week who share my values and learn new things about organizations doing good work in our city and just sit with it all for an hour in a safe, loving space. (The pastor says my atheism does not disqualify me for membership, so I don’t feel I’m there under false pretenses.) I start volunteering with the library this week and I’m learning how to get involved involved in the church’s projects. I’m greatly limiting my time with social and other media.1 I’m focusing on the day I’m in. I’m reaching out to my people. I’m doing my best to put healthy things in my body and to move said body. I’ve deep-cleaned our house and I’m back in therapy for support with my personal stuff.
These are all good things and I will continue to do them. And I’m still not really OK. Some of that is because I’m in the midst of a personal firestorm—and isn’t that true of many of us? We are still navigating all the hard personal things we always have, but we’re doing it on a foundation that is not what we’ve long known it to be. And yes, sure, the shifting has now been going on for a long time, but it’s suddenly accelerated and there’s just no denying what’s been happening any more.
I’m coming here just to say: We’re not OK. It’s not OK. Something has died or is dying and I don’t know much about grief but I do know that denial is the one sure-fire thing we can do to prolong it and make it hurt even more than it already does. I’m doing the thing writers are often advised to do: I’m writing the kind of thing I want to read. I don’t want cheerleaders right now. I don’t want false hope or platitudes. Don’t you dare tell me that this is all for the best in the long run, or part of God’s plan, or that we’re lucky to have had what we had for as long as we did. Don’t tell me that the country is rotten from the core and it all needs to burn down anyway. There are parts I love. There are ideals I love, as far short of reaching them as we have always been. And even if I can’t name exactly what it is, I know that something precious died this week. (And for the love of anything holy, don’t you dare tell me that it hasn’t. Don’t you even think about gaslighting me that way.) I need to mourn with those who are also mourning, and I want space for all the feelings that come with loss: anger, depression, sadness. I want to rage against the dying of the light. Don’t rush me and those who are feeling as I am to some false kind of feeling better. I’m holding out for the real deal, and the only way to get there is through.
Rita Ott Ramstad, I’m not here to comfort or inspire
Some will look for a way out, an end to history;
the woman who swallowed pills,
was rushed to the ER with an inked note
pinned to her sad, sallow blouse:DO NOT RESUSCITATE if Donald Trump wins.
That was November, 2016. My doctor-friend had
his orders: she won; she doesn’t have to relive
the second debacle. […]No reason to leave this beautiful world just yet.
The deep processes of awareness unfinished.
The blanks & pits & recommitment.
Painful radiance will survive.Jill Pearlman, ER & DJT
To the Little British Girl
on Gardener’s World who grew her first garden this year. Your tour of the garden was just what my tired and sad eyes needed this morning. Walking the garden in your pink wellies, you proudly showed the dahlias you grew from seed, the roses you rescued from black spot, tending them with care and fresh compost, the tomatoes (toe-mah-toes) and peppers bursting with life, and everything you declared as “lovely”. Little British girl, you are lovelier than the loveliest flower. Your delight is contagious and a reminder to observe the small things, to nurture the broken things, to share the beautiful things, when we can. Your corner wildflower patch feeds the bees and butterflies just as you, little girl, have fed me this morning. Stay wild, little girl. Stay safe in your lovely garden.
[…]
My garden today is under snow! New Orleans is forecasted to get 4-6 inches and it is coming down hard and fast as I write this. Since I moved here in 1978 we’ve had four previous snows but nothing compared to the forecast for today. The city is shut down including all the interstate highways coming in. It should be interesting and it’s certainly pretty but, oh, I’m worried about my garden.
Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): To the Little British Girl
I’ve now posted for 100 weeks in a row!
I’m seeing quite a few writer and poet friends arriving on substack from other platforms, hoping to build and audience here. It might be nice, on this 100 post milestone, to talk about what I’ve learned along the way. […]
There are all sorts of different writers on substack and all sots of different models for writers posting on substack. You have to find the one for you. […] My hot take here is to write what you are already writing. It is far more enjoyable than trying to be what you are not. Substack is a stall for your wares, or a museum for your writing artefacts. It’s another way for you to connect to people, your readers. It does not have to be a whole new fangled sparkly version of yourself, it just needs to be your passion. Look at what is important to you and write about that. I can see the irony in my saying this and then doing a ‘how to write on substack’ post.
Wendy Pratt, 100 weeks of posting on substack
Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical wobbling often made him have to take his seat again; but the humour and mischievous twinkle were as powerful as ever. Over the years, I have to admit it took me a while to really come to appreciate his work; I think I did not really ‘get’ the force of his brevity, his precision. If you have not seen it yet, do watch the brilliant, moving, inspiring BBC programme about him, his life and work here.
Martyn Crucefix, RIP Michael Longley
I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:
Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.
The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.
Matthew Paul, January reading (2)
The longer poems and sequences based on [Elaine] Randell’s social work experience (‘Along the Landings’, a late addition to the ‘Beyond All Other’ section, and many poems from Faulty Mothering and The Meaning of Things) also show an Objectivist influence, I think, but this time it’s the documentary poems of Charles Reznikoff that I sense behind them. However, she makes the method her own, partly because the documents she’s working with (I imagine a combination of case notes and memory) grow out of her personal experience but largely because she has grown completely into her own voice:
The boy looks at me for a long time studying me;
he says he knows why I have come today.
“It’s about the baby;
he’s cute” he says.
The boy’s long white thin arms are like glass
His face his face his face is totally opened to me.
Is the baby dead now, he asks.
I tell him so.The almost flat tone, the complete refusal of melodrama, is so perfectly undercut by that gut-wrenching ‘His face his face his face’ in a moment of genuine emotion. And yet, there is always hope, as in these lines from ‘For Andrew and Beatrice’, one of a number of epithalamia that appear in the uncollected poems, which also serve as an instance of the interplay between the human and natural worlds that is another thread running through this book:
We watch as two become constant against the ever changing sky.
Our hearts look up as skylarks greet your steps together.
They, knowing more
radiate their song, soaring evermore in tune.In her introduction to the 1987 North and South edition of her first prose collection, Gut Reaction, Randell wrote that the pieces in the book were a kind of record of 10 years working in childcare and mental health, and that the pieces are factually accurate apart from the removal of ‘identifying attributes’. She goes on:
The humour, courage, conflict and pain contained in the lives described is clear. The reader may be disturbed by the realities of the facts.
These prose pieces, and the ones that follow in the ‘Prose from The Meaning of Things’ and ‘Uncollected Prose’ sections defy easy categorisation; they are not fiction, not prose poems, not journalism. In a sense, they are like pages from the documents that the poems grew out of. And, as with the poems, Randell avoids the perils of anecdote; these are not neat little stories that point towards the snap closure of an easy moral, she has too much respect for the people she’s writing about for that.
Billy Mills, Collected Poems and Prose by Elaine Randell: A Review
The more you read of Swinburne’s poems to other poets, the more the relationship to Catullus emerges as a kind of model. Here for instance is the end of his poem for François Villon, who died in the mid-fifteenth century, addressed once again as a poetic ‘brother’ across the ages:
Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother’s name.When I read Catullus at university — memorably, we were supposed to prepare every one of the 108 short poems for our first tutorial, just a week into term — our prescribed edition still left some passages decorously unannotated and untranslated. Of course there’s nothing like a blank space in a translation to send readers straight to the original, suddenly filled with enthusaism for a spot of unseen translation.5 I was amused to find in my edition of Swinburne that — presumably in imitation of this practice — he does the same thing in the one of his Villon translations. Here is the seventh stanza of Villon’s ‘Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière’ (‘The Complaint of the Fair Armouress’), as she enumerates the physical beauties she has now lost:
Ces gentes espaules menues,
Ces bras longs et ces mains tretisses ;
Petitz tetins, hanches charnues,
Eslevées, propres, faictisses
A tenir amoureuses lysses ;
Ces larges reins, ce sadinet,
Assis sur grosses fermes cuysses,
Dedans son joly jardinet?And here is Swinburne’s translation, as it teasingly appears in my (admittedly pretty ancient) edition:
The shapely slender shoulders small,
Long arms, hands wrought in glorious wise,
Round little breasts, the hips withal
High, full of flesh, not scant of size,
Fit for all amorous masteries;
** *** ****, *** *** ***** **** ***
****** ***** ** **** **** *****
** * **** ****** ** **** *****?I love the way this asterixed-out version retains the punctuation and indicates the length of the missing words, so you can have a go at guessing what they might be! (Even if you don’t have a French dictionary to hand, you’ll no doubt have realised that the lines describe the woman’s genitalia.) I’m afraid I know nothing about the textual history of Swinburne’s verse, and my edition is an old one — but presumably he did actually write these lines, which have then been suggestively censored, just like so many school editions of Catullus down the years.
Victoria Moul, Swinburne, Catullus and expurgating Villon
Chopping kindling from
a knotty block … in each stick,
a part of its shape.James W. Hackett (Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson, Kodansha International, 1996)
The Yorks/ Lancs Haiku group met online yesterday for the first meeting of the year. The theme was ‘winter’ and there are so many good winter-themed haiku that it seemed to take me ages to select one to share with the group. In the end, I went with the above. It’s probably more heavily punctuated than is the fashion these days, plus the syllable count is 5-7-5, although unlike many poems that adhere to this, it doesn’t appear forced. I like it because it encompasses a complete idea – much harder to do, I think, than to juxtapose two images. It’s onomatopoeic too – I can hear the sound of the axe striking. Much of what I read these days is quite minimalist, even by haiku standards, so I’d almost forgotten how much I like these type of poems (fuller, more rounded somehow). So, I’m sharing it again here, in the hope that you like it as much as I do.
Julie Mellor, Winter …
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Most of my poems have written themselves, honestly. From the beginning it has flowed easily. I didn’t choose this shit, it chose me. I am just a monkey mouthpiece for the ghosts.
3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Oh no, no notes besides maybe an idea or a vignette. I will write myself a note or an email to remember for later. An example is last night my son turned in his sleep and said “read it.” I wonder what book he wanted read to him? There is a poem there I will have to sit down and write. Once I open up to the subconscious, I just let it go out and direct it a bit and maybe fix a word later. Most of my poems are first and final drafts. I don’t agonize over them at all. They are better when they are allowed to just spring out and splat!
4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
With the last two books I had an idea what I wanted to do from the beginning. Sapphires on the Graves was going to be a book of prose poems with very little punctuation and a cyclical and surreal feel. 500 Hidden Teeth began as a project where I was going to write 500 separate poems in one-line sentences. As the book progressed the sentences began to connect and waver and connect again and many of the sentences ended up as groups that could be seen as poems. Yet, my intent is that each sentence is still a poem and the whole book is one large poem. I like the last description best. […]
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Shit. Like I said I am here for the harpies and the shadows and the veins. I only tell what I have heard in trance. My job is to go into that broken avalanche of ribs and bring out spells and ash. I strive for magic. I strive for honesty. In that place it is all one water.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Scott Ferry
A secondhand bookshop here is selling recent issues of the TLS, North, Magma and Poetry Review for a quid.The’ve all been going for a long time. The TLS (weekly) has one poem and a few reviews. The others are leading UK poetry magazines with articles and reviews. I’ve not read them for a year or so. I found them all a worthwhile read.
The Times Literary Supplement (a tabloid newspaper) has reviews that always include some adverse criticism. The other mags’ reviews tend to avoid saying negative things.
Magma’s issues vary according to the guest editor(s) and theme. I read the Physics issue, which wasn’t one of the best. They get 5,000 submissions/issue.
The North has so much in it that there’s bound to be something to like. They have guest editors. They’ve rejected me the last few times I’ve tried. Decades ago, I used to have more luck – have they changed or have I?
Poetry Review is the Poetry Society’s magazine. If poetry is going to try to distance itself from prose, then the poems in recent Poetry Reviews show the way. Hit’n’miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn’t like were the discussions, interviews and joint reviews – too much waffle and mutual praise. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned essays?
Tim Love, Magma, North, TLS, Poetry Review
A few years ago I was contacted out of the blue by Michelle Moloney King, the founder of Beir Bua Press. She had read some of my blog posts on mathematical forms in poetry, and offered to publish them as a book. The result was From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry, which was released in autumn 2021, with stunning cover art by Moloney King herself.
Following the closure of Beir Bua Press in 2023 the book is no longer available in print, so I am now making it freely available in downloadable form. I’ve posted the Introduction below, followed by pdf versions of each of the chapters (including an additional chapter on geometrical forms). Enjoy!
Marian Christie, From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry
Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) — who, early in his career, was a math teacher — died just a few weeks ago. Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work. My first mention of Holden’s work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 — and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.
Two of Holden’s mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me — Strange Attractors, Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).
JoAnne Growney, Poet and Math Teacher Passes On
I’m not going to be all evangelical about handwriting vs typing. I have terrible, almost illegible handwriting, but I do both, although it’s probably more typing than handwriting nowadays. However, I still like to make notes for poems and works on paper with a fountain pen. I’d take a photo of my main pen (only because is came up in conversation at work this week), but a) I can’t lay my hands on it now, and b) there’s a purring cat next to me that can’t be moved. I think you’ll survive. It’s hardly a vintage one.
I mention this mainly because I read this interesting article earlier in the week about the apparent decline in hand-writing, or at last wonders if we are…It’s an interesting, c. 15 min read. The passage below was one that stood out
When we focus on making a physical object, or on playing a musical instrument, our concentration level is mainly self-directed,” the sociologist Richard Sennett argues. The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. This form of “situated cognition”, as Sennett calls it, takes time to develop. It also forces us to slow down, as we see when we study people who make things by hand. “Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labour,” Sennett told American Craft magazine. “Making is thinking.”
I’m mainly using this as an excuse to post a poem of my own this week. I’ve not got round to asking anyone for permission.
The poem is called Unlimited Texts. It’s taken from Collecting the Data (Copies left, folks…get ’em white they’re hot, etc).
Unlimited Texts, V19, 25.03.23What does your scrawl even look like these days?
No more chits or kites dropped. No more post-its
hidden in lunchboxes, or weakly glued
to flyleaves. No more doodles by the phone.
We’re pointing fingers and thumbs here and there
to jab and send, send and jab, send and jab:
Get bread. Love you…We need milk. XXX.
I want this written down.Mat Riches, Hand Wri(ti)ng(ing)
I had a dream in which I was writing the Psalms in uncial script in walnut ink with a reed pen. I had already made ink from black walnuts fallen from a tree in the Bishop’s Palace Garden in Wells. Jane had recently given me some reed pens harvested on the Somerset Levels. I’m using these and a couple of steel-nib dip-pens to write a brief erasure of each of the 150 Psalms, one per page on heavy handmade paper. I’ve progressed as far as no 28. The writing improves as it goes on! […]
drawing with smoke
ten words
found in a puddlelike a magpie
looking for shiny things
in St Cuthbert’s GospelAma Bolton, ABCD January 2025
This has been a busy week: I got a crown in my front teeth (sorely needed,) tore my rotator cuff (a first for me,) got new glasses, and did my first live in-person reading in a very long time with three other lovely poets at the brand new reading series at J. Bookwalter’s Winery (fourth Thursday every month, includes features and an open mic, plus wine!)
The reading was Erika Wright, Catherine Broadwall, Michelle Schaefer, and myself, as the featured readers, with John Campos as MC, and a very civilized open mic afterwards. There must have been fifty people in the audience, and I didn’t know many of them, but did get a see a few familiar faces, and met a lot of new ones. It seems there is, after all, an interest in poetry in Woodinville! Catherine, who has two books already, and I both sold multiple copies of our books (which seems miraculous these days) and the energy in the room (as you will be able to tell in the video) was just joyful and energetic. It was such a relief after the relentless bad news (I’ve been trying to avoid it, but it is difficult to avoid it all) to have a moment like this of happiness and wine and friendship and, um, dare I say community?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, New Glasses, Changes Coming and Looking to the Future
In three out of four ways
this is normal rain
and all its bombs
raindrops.
But I’m pulled as Yeats predicted.
Holding on for dear, dear life.
Deaf to the need for the sure untrue,
the caught-on-a-tide, the do-not-do
of Lao Tzu, the impossibility
of joining minds with a family
sinking in an ancient
boat.
When the word comes down
for opinion forming,
pressure applied
to voteit’s not the politician in my soul
I fear as I scratch out my x
but the imperfect rhymes
of the poet.Chris Edgoose, A Political
In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”
What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.
So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.
Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.
I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.
Ann E. Michael, Curriculum vitae
As artists, I think right now there is the inclination to just disappear for a while. And that’s understandable. But also: Shine. Do your work. Share it when it feels good to do so. Put your energy in the right places for you. Go where the love is. Take up space. There’s no one right way to do things. But I do think we have to insist on our presence. We deserve to exist and we make the world a better place. We’re even good for the freaking economy.
Keep making your art, and writing your books. Each thing you make is a lamp.
I re-read Li-Young Lee’s words on writing a poem:
“A poem is a lamp, and it’s got just enough oil to last for you to write the poem down. And when that oil is gone, the lamp disappears, and you can’t translate it to the next poem. There’s just enough oil there to guide your way through that poem — that’s it. The next one you start from scratch.”
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Shine with Strange Courage
The wonders of modern marketing means the word Epicurean brings an instant association with food and that unique scent of fancy delis which in many ways is an ideal backdrop for thoughts around happiness. Steer your mind from delicious cheeses and odd things in pretty jars for a moment. I’ve discovered something else about Epicurius. Amongst his many concepts and theories is one that seems particularly prescient in the age of social media – a content life can be best attained when one seeks to live without being known.
This idea is often misconstrued as seeking to live in isolation. It can be better described as seeking to live without craving the validation of strangers – a direct contrast to our modern cult of celebrity, influencers and the lure of the like. Understanding that the drive to appeal to whims of those who do not know me can only cause anxiety puts the pull and power of social media into sharp relief. Using this media to gather support for that which I cherish is a risk and one that needs to be handled with care. I am not advocating the abandonment of the internet, or the abandonment of open mics, live readings and performance. I am suggesting that perhaps this is not the way for every poet to be. Of course, publication houses need a writer who is marketable and being an engaging, likeable person who can sparkle at will (however much that exhausts them) makes it much easier to sell books, which is a pretty essential part of being a publishing house.
Despite this economic necessity, a swift glance through the works said publishing houses share shows there are those who do not follow this path and are just as loved and cherished. The pull for external validation has diluted both work and pleasure in equal measure and seeking to shoehorn myself into being someone who sparkles means a detrimental diversion of energy. In a world where everything, from what we grow in our gardens, to our favourite pet to what we’ve had for tea is so very public, making the decision to seek to live unnoticed, to live free from the validation of strangers feels like a kind of freedom.
Connection with others is important to our wellbeing, but contrary to the nature of our ever homogenised world this connection looks different for everyone. Platforms like Substack, where one can choose to sparkle or not, where one can have 20 subscribers or 20 million and still publish are helpful, if used with care. The pull of the like is still there, the articles about how to make your fortune still create the feeling that there’s something else to be done other than enjoying writing, but if those of us who need to can just hold fast to the essence of building a community of like minded readers, of people who know us, then this platform can offer way to connect without sacrificing authenticity. Now I just need to be brave enough not to sparkle and quell the need to see those little hearts light up.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, No need to sparkle, no need to hurry, no need to be anyone but oneself
I saw the sign early,
walking by flashlight, startled
by my bear shaped shadow.
In the summer, I scrambled up the rock face
to gather berries. In the fall,
I fight the urge to hibernate.We will comment on the coldness
of this winter. I struggle
to stay awake. In my sewing
basket, a small ball of yarn.I think of my grandmother
who knitted socks of all sizes,
her form of resistance.
I prefer scarves. I have always chosen
long lines: poetry or code or check out line,
a chain to connect us all.Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem Made of Abandoned Lines