Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 7
dwelling in the underworld, writing with children, drilling holes in logs, dancing with a blank canvas, rolling around in the dirt, 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: dwelling in the underworld, writing with children, drilling holes in logs, dancing with a blank canvas, rolling around in the dirt, and more. Enjoy.
I have no photos of my grandmother’s whitewashed house with its blue-trimmed door and windows, no visible proof that her luxuriant garden ever existed, but in my mind I clearly see the twelve rows of grape vines vying for space with the potatoes, the beans, the corn, the handful of squat fruit-bearing trees: apple, pear, plum, sour cherry, all their flavors bursting on my tongue. As I write this, I watch the grapes growing from seed to fruit, filling up with light, rolling into a child’s hand–my hand. And there’s the mămăligă (hominy), freshly turned over onto a cutting board and sliced cleanly through with a piece of string–be careful, it’s still hot. These images are so vivid, so tangible, that I can feel the pull of that vanished reality as if it were still here, and I in it. One step–and I could inhabit it again, I could feel what my twelve-year-old self felt, all that desperate longing to grow up, not knowing that she already lived in a temporary world. For lack of time-traveling abilities, I write–it’s the only way I know how to keep my past alive. And sometimes my mother’s tongue gives me the only words I can use to make that past, if only for a moment, present.
Romana Iorga, Inimă / Heart
Some days, poems come like gifts at dawn, fully-formed, demanding I write them, not allowing a single edit. And then there are days when they just sit on a fence, vague, cold, mocking, refusing to let me approach. I love the easy poems. The reluctant ones, I love even more.
This poem came on a nothing-day. When no word could stand another. As if the morning had swallowed every verb. As if the tongue rattled in a mouth full of consonants.
But then, there was a lone bird in the cloudless sky. And then there was a single word. And then there was a pause. And then there was this poem.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Black kite, circling
The weeks have a way of getting away from you when you find yourself trying to bear down and be productive amid a whirling mass of shit and nonsense non-strop, 24 hours a day. During all the covid lockdowns everyone kept remarking it was strange how the world could be ending and we expected / were expected to just keep going. Doing our jobs and making work and the days-to-day of grocery shopping, running errands, etc. Democracy is failing and part of it is the government but also largely greedy business interests and the spineless media. The terrible machine keeps turning and spitting out receipts I cannot function if I stay there amidst it for long lest I doomspiral into oblivion.
It does not, of course, help that it is February, and the days are still shatteringly sort and abysmally gray. Today, there was a little sunlight, and I felt a little less likely to crawl back into bed to depression nap. Yesterday, there was also snow, not a huge amount, but enough to have to be careful on the sidewalks when we went downtown for Pinter’s Betrayal at the Goodman. Saturday, we drove out to Woodstock for a production of Groundhog Day: The Musical, whose soundtrack, its darker second act at least, I’ve been listening to on repeat since. […]
I started a new series of poems the other day and am already five in. They are loosely affiliated with some collages from 2023 that feel like they are begging for language. Not sure of they are ready to share, yet, but perhaps in the next month or so. I also got a nice acceptance from a journal for some of the NOLA vampire girl poems, which felt good after that last small batch of submissions from fall mostly went unnoticed or rejected.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 2/13/2025
Call me old-fashioned, I’ll readily admit to it; but lately I have decided that the most efficient way for me to keep track of my own writing is by using a physical filing system. I have experimented with various spreadsheets (I have no patience with Excel, however and alas) and computer folders. I do use the latter for a year-by-year archive of my work, but I cannot easily extract what I am looking for that way. Now that I’ve retired from my 40-hour work week, I have wanted to manage my creative work better and keep track of what needs revision, what seems finished, what has been submitted, what’s been published. That strikes me as a necessary part of tending to myself as a writer. The past year has been a time of working through options, with accompanying irritation and tedium.
After years of endeavoring to use electronic files, it came to me that there’s nothing wrong with old-fashioned paper systems, organized alphabetically by title, with the computer-file names and draft number at the bottom of each poem. This is how I think about the poems when I want to work on them or submit them, so it feels natural to me. Why operate against one’s own operating system?
I suspect one reason (oh, there are many, but let’s start with one) I am so angry about Elon Musk’s “DOGE” initiatives is that efficiency is never all it is cracked up to be and is also not the be-all and end-all of any society’s best organization. Of course those who push AI believe that algorithmic calculations can make the world run smoothly, but said people are egregiously uninformed about human nature and the myriad forms of individual thought processes. We are non-standard. Averages account for almost nothing, really. We do not think the same thinks. (And yes, I meant thinks not things, autocorrect). Diversity is what keeps evolution going. There is no change without it; and without change, we die.
So: I’m inefficient, to a degree, when it comes to keeping my creative work in order. However, the paper filing system, with a notebook and index cards and files on my hard drive, assisted by my still-useful memory (a human brain!!), have so far been working pretty well. It has taken me several weeks to put my stuff together, but now it’s far easier to fetch what I want to work on, send out, or collate, which I need to do to prepare for upcoming reading [I have two online readings coming up–one on Feb. 18 and one on May 2]. I’m also grateful that the task kept me busy while I was anxious and worried and grieving over recent not-so-terrific experiences in my (physical, real) life. Real life, which is not averaged. Seldom predictable. Inefficient. And something to celebrate for all its strangeness.
Ann E. Michael, Paper files
I have felt myself in the underworld this winter.
I feel, therefore I am.
There is richness here, and discovery. There are people to meet, a mycelial network of seekers, resting travellers offering stillness, wisdom and quiet hope. In therapy, I have felt the presence of new parts of me too, and they need attention. I have had to absent myself from some of what has being going on above ground. […]
Gabriel and I saw Rene Descartes’ tomb in the Abbey of St Germain des Pres last summer. We were exploring Paris according to a map of its philosophers. Parts of Descartes are missing from this tomb, taken when he was moved there from his original grave. Part of him, a piece of his skull, is, apparently, in Sweden, where he spent important years of his life.
I’m going to Sweden too, all of me. I’m going to come back, all of me. Do not worry about me – I’ll be in good hands there, among old friends and yet-to-be friends, taking part in a grief ritual to which I’m taking loss in all its forms, and hope in all its forms. There’s a sense of purpose – the welcome information begins: Grief dares us to love once more (Terry Tempest Williams).
Liz Lefroy, I Prepare For Burial
“The Twice-Turned Earth” is an apt title for this pamphlet from Siegfried Baber. It suggests poems written with due care and attention, poems nurtured with an observant eye and attention to craft from a poet who cares about the state of the soil as much as the resulting crop. The natural world is touched on, but Baber’s primary interest is human nature. For example in “Gökotta”,
“This is a poem about making coffee
in a quiet kitchen before it really gets light
and thinking about your favourite word,
which is Swedish, and according to various sources
expresses the act of waking early to hear
the birds singing at sunrise.”The poem is set in the liminal space between dreaming and waking, between night and day. A simple morning routine is so familiar it can be done while thinking about a word, because the person making coffee has some time and space to ponder. But the Swedish word has no equivalent in English, it has to be described rather than translated. The poem concludes
“It’s a poem like any other; how everything waits
to be noticed. And your favourite word
which is Swedish and has no translation.”Emma Lee, “The Twice-Turned Earth” Siegfried Baber (Poetry Salzburg) – book review
I had three nights in the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel – a county house hotel which looks and smells like an Agatha Christie novel and has a loyal clientele which includes me and probably several members of the gentry who have fallen on hard times. It has a special place in my writing heart, not just because of the climbers’ bar, and the folk night, and the woodchip and pine-panelled corridors, and the deep sofa and log fire, and the deep ghylls with their streams of moss pouring from every crag and stunted tree – but also because it was where I first realised that place of Monkey in my last book, Towards a General Theory of Love.
And love took me back to the Lakes this week. Or at least, I wrote about love – and animals – with the youngest children in a Cumbrian primary.
Writing with little children is its own creature. Little children are completely unforgiving. They cannot be ordered about or distracted or manipulated. They will not be reasoned with, and dialogue is useless. They can only be engaged and interested and comforted and entertained and delighted. Every single time I work with a class of children under the age of eight, I am immediately asked whether I’m a boy or a girl. It’s not bad manners. It’s curiosity, and it has to be met with respect.
There is no let-up in a class of five year olds. No moment where you can set them to work and take a breather. And every exercise has to be different, and to follow swiftly on the next. We start with striking the poet’s pose, which five year-olds are very good at – staring into the mid-distance whilst thinking wise thoughts, stroking our imaginary beards and muttering “interesting”. And we shared ideas about what poetry is (a song without music, said one little boy), and who writes it, and how.
Clare Shaw, Love, and other stuff –
I looked at the old Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive – can’t believe that’s 23 years old now, but no matter – and early on there is a page of statements by poets on what poetry is. Some are glib, some blather, some just sound-bites but it was the offering by T S Eliot that made most sense to me, or maybe best reflected how I often create what I feel to be poetry.
Eliot wrote: It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences.
This is a brief excerpt from a longer statement, of course, but it fits the way I prefer to concentrate, observe, dig into my experience, which may be a physical or emotional memory, a single moment that might stand alone with no apparent significance or a formative feeling that developed over many years, and then write in a burst of words that I trust to convey whatever ‘meaning’ is attached to or a result of what, in effect, is a meditation. It draws on immediate sounds, memory, observation, external interference, internal anguish, sorrow or soaring joy, an image that might be beautiful or might be horrific, and somehow is pulled together into a whole. It might be short, or it might be long and complex. Of course, as with anything, this is not universal – there are times when I just want to have fun, or record something as plainly as it has just happened – but I think more and more it is an accurate assessment of my method.
It’s only one way of working, of course, and each must find their own. Some want – demand – end-rhyme, even when history rejects it as a necessity. I don’t reject rhyme, just prefer to use it wherever it fits. Some reject rhyme but still demand a proscribed rhythm. All I can say to that is that very often I don’t hear the same rhythms in the music of words that others seem to hear. If our ears differ in what they decipher, it is inevitable that we will write in rhythms that others don’t hear in the same way. This might be a problem, but if poems were all expected to conform to a set pattern, whether rhyme, rhythm, or some other technical form, then poetry would never change or vary.
As to the multitude of technical forms, yes, they can be fun to mess around with and the end-product can be admirable (very rarely in my case) and to some immensely satisfying, but I’ve found that if I become absorbed by the requirements of a form then usually something – I hesitate to say the essence of what poetry is, but it’s as close as I can get – becomes lost in the technical exercise.
Which brings me back to Eliot’s statement of ‘a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences’. While this statement does strike home for me, I differ from him in that he also said he saw poetry as an escape from emotion and personality, while I see it as inevitable that if I draw on powers of concentration, meditation, observation, and the use of experience, then emotion and personality will be an integral part of the process. If I tried to avoid emotion and tried to escape personality, then the result would be just as arid and barren as if I stuck rigidly to a particular form, or pattern of rhythm or rhyme.
Bob Mee, THE OLD ‘WHAT IS POETRY?’ QUESTION FLOATS TO THE SURFACE AGAIN
I am sharing this poem ‘Book Mother’ today because I listened to this podcast, we go pretty deep into the writing of this subject in my poetry and the state of being child less or child free. I’m genuinely moved by our honest conversation. It isn’t often one is permitted or invited to talk about the big things, these huge challenges and choices that we all must navigate. Thank you Samia.
It has been a while since I had time and head space to make you a Substack post. I have been a hermit, and just got back from the most wonderful Arvon week ever. I feel so lucky to meet you all — A group of glorious and intuitive and inspirational writers sharing beautiful books and conversations and poetry and stories and tea and cake and bonfire and songs of resilience and resistance, tears and laughter, love and courage. Blown away at the talent and all the new voices we heard all week. Big skies and big hearts. Thank you.
Salena Godden, Book Mother
Sad to hear through Vancouver artist Pierre Coupey that BC poet David Phillips, who turned eighty years old last August, died on February 10 in Sechelt, after a brief stay in hospital. Born in 1944, the same year as his pal Barry McKinnon [see my obituary for McKinnon here], his selected poems, The Kiss: Poems 1972-77 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), “seen through the press by bpNichol” (most early photos of Toronto poet bpNichol were taken by Andy Phillips, David’s brother), was his only full-length collection, although it followed a flurry of chapbooks and pamphlets, including those published through Talonbooks and McKinnon’s Caledonia Writing Series. Phillips’ other titles include The Dream Outside (Coach House Press, 1967), Wave (Talon Books, 1970), The Coherence (Talon Books, 1971-1972), The Book of Snow Poems (54 40 Press, 1972) and Wild Roses (Preston John, 1976). With Hope Anderson, he edited the anthology The Body (Tatlow House, 1979). His poems appeared in The Capilano Review, Iron, Ant’s Fore Foot as well as the chapbooks, WAKE ME WHEN TH DANCING STARTS (Caledonia Writing Series, 1978) and Wild Roses (Preston John, 1977).
On my overflowing shelves, Phillips’ Talonbooks titles are so early they were stapled, most likely done by the cast iron Talonbooks stapler that rests in our basement. “what is this / writing / written toward, attempting.” he wrote, to open the poem “fragments: the broken passage.” Further on, “hand on my wrist, soft voice / in my ear / guiding this to a completion / an ending / only you know/ the way of, / out of // there is no way / out of it // i could simply get up / & walk away [.]” He wrote poems that questioned the poems and the writing of poems, offering his own self-aware step after step through the process. Through my years of reading tours and scouring used bookstores, I most likely picked up my copy of The Kiss through Janet Inksetter’s Annex Books, back when she had her storefront on Toronto’s Bathurst Street, just south of Dupont. Her familiar handwriting, the pencil-mark of price and publisher notation, on that first page. For years, she was my best source for early Coach House titles, as well as lively conversation. I looked forward to our visits.
There is such an immediacy to Phillips’ poems; poems aware of themselves as poems and held to a high standard of placement, breath, even through such casual tempo. “teach me / what i know // i have / forgotten,” he writes, to open the poem “the teaching,” dedicated “for bp,” the first poem in his collection the coherence (1971), “forgiven myself / so many times // the trying / is harder // the forgiveness / less than [.]” Oh, his pacing, his pacing. I attempted a stretch of my thirties to echo his timbre, his tone, with only minimal success. There is something of Philips’ pacing that really struck, and one comparable to what David Bromige was working during the same era, such as his Birds of the West (Coach House, 1973), another title I know I picked up from Inksetter’s shelves. Across my early thirties, attempting poems, The Kiss became one of my touchstones, heightened through conversation with McKinnon and others on his work.
rob mclennan, David Phillips (1944-February 10, 2025)
I. M. Danielle Legros Georges
Grief splits me: a multi-headed creature
casting in all directions for answers.
I rage and cannot understand;
Though enough to know my reach is futile,
She is beyond. It will pass; all things do.After a meditation, I settle into a small cave
of acceptance; rain pings as I sit on a warm
radiator; the space dark and empty,
neither me per se or her,
a cave of cupped hands.Jill Pearlman, Dear Danielle (link added)
No one asked me what I would miss about this life; it was a question I wondered about to myself: What will I long to hold onto, aside from the people I love, when it’s time for me to go?
My answer surprised me: my body. Or, rather, the way it’s allowed me to move in the world and have sensory experiences. Seeing clouds. Smelling salt air. Kissing and being kissed (etcetera, etcetera, ahem). This answer inspired me to create a “you” in the poem that the speaker could address and bounce these ideas off of. Many of the poems in A Suit or a Suitcase show me grappling with these body/mind (or mind/heart, or body/soul) questions.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “A Suit or a Suitcase”
I had thought about requiring all of my English 102 students to make Valentines this week, but I decided to make it an optional extra credit daily writing grade. They could use as much paper as they wanted, and they had to include 4 lines of poetry. The poetry could be theirs or someone else’s.
Some of my students responded with delight and took so much paper that I worried I might run out. I needn’t have worried–not everyone had the same level of enthusiasm. So far, I’ve seen a variety of approaches. One student took some red construction paper, drew some hearts, and wrote a few lines of poetry composed in class. One student made an elaborate folded envelope for the Valentine inside that contained an original poem. […]
I got to my afternoon class to discover that the English teacher before me had also brought art supplies. The students were making posterboard infographic kinds of projects. I thought about past places I’ve worked, places with people who would have sneered at these approaches, who wouldn’t understand how these creative approaches can lead to richer writing. I am so glad to be at a place where people react with delight when we develop creative approaches.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Valentines Poetry Project
Most things we love have both of these “something mores,” we see the love object as connecting us with another person and we see it as part of our identity. —- Quora
For no good reason this thought came into my head the other day: Why do we love what we love? Although it’s probably because Valentine’s Day was coming up, it wasn’t a question about romantic love but a question about why we love the tangible things we love. Like our homes, the accoutrements of our hobbies, things we collect, food. I Googled it which brought up article after article about romantic love but only the above quoted article about why we love the things we love. But that one sentence makes perfect sense; that the objects of our love connects us to others and to our own identities. I had never given it much thought before but, thinking about it, there are a few things I know for sure:
I love everything about nature because I was taught about flowers, birds, the woods and it’s creatures as a small child. So I think I connect all those things with the love and security I felt at that time and, by continuing to observe and spend time in it, my love and appreciation for the natural world grew.
I love photography because it’s mindful, it slows you down. I particularly like photographing small things or small parts of big things in the natural world (see above.) My first camera was a Polaroid Land Camera and I photographed as many landscapes as I did people. I still have it. I’ve tried to donate it over the years but I end up taking it out of the donation box every time. It feels like an early part of me, a piece of the foundation for who I am – someone who looks for the small things that really aren’t so small.
Charlotte Hamrick, Why Do We Love What We Love?
Just today, I spotted something that I need to give to many of the people in my life. It’s being sold on Kickstarter: a Star Wars replica Obi-Wan lightsaber. I know a lot of people who would appreciate a lightsaber for fighting off evil or working on the lines, “May the force be with you” or “Those are not the droids you’re looking for.” In concept, it sounds epic. But do we need a lightsaber? Is this one of those things that will give most people about thirty seconds of pleasure? […]
We don’t need most of the stuff that we have. As I learned in my recent travels, Cubans stand in line for the groceries that we walk into Vons and buy without thinking. They stand in long lines for eggs, milk, and onions.
If you can only be happy if you have certain clothes and shoes, get to go to a certain concert, or get a raise, then you might be unhappy. If you can only be happy if your kids/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/boss is nice to you, you’re waiting for an external force to hand you happiness.
My goal in 2025 is to get up early, write in my journal, and do my exercise before the day starts. Every day, I remind myself to live my life with joy because I am blessed. My trip to Cuba was a good reminder that I can be without this, that, and the other thing, and still find joy. No Wi-Fi. I live. Bowl of rice a day. I live. No fruit. I live.
I don’t need a lightsaber. (But if I end up fighting any Storm Troopers or Sith Lords, I’m going to wish I had one.)
May we all learn to breathe. I am decluttering my space. Every week, I get rid of ten things. By the end of the year, I will have a zen abode. I want to have my mind, space, and life clear, clean, and ready to invite in the imagination.
Kate Gale, To Lightsaber or not to Lightsaber?
When my angled knife cuts through
the air smells sharp and clean.
Shreds of cabbage pile up.
Fennel, apple, scallion, celery.
Lemons, olive oil, kosher salt.[…]
SomeoneI don’t know yelled at me
recently on Facebook that there’s
“no standing together with evil,”
which is what he said “all of them”
are. I hear this from both sides.I wish I could set a banquet with
no chairs empty. This is medicine:
like the first shoots of spring
that I believe with a perfect faith
(though it tarry) will someday come.Rachel Barenblat, Green
Two weeks till Mycocosmic launches! In the meantime, I snuck in a four-hour Sunday workshop run by two mycocologists and foragers about an hour away in Churchville, Virginia. They stuffed my head full of information and my body full of mushroom soup, mushroom hand pies, and pieces of shiitake, maitake, and lion’s mane sauteed in butter. Also cheesy mycology jokes: “Any mushroom is edible…once.” I feel much more confident about what I can forage for safely nearby, even though I’m still learning those spectacular terms for mushroom anatomy: ovate, depressed, umbilicate, infundibuliform… We also took turns drilling holes in logs and inoculating them with spore to bring home. If I do it right, the log will erupt in shiitake this fall. That’s a long time, but the book took WAY longer.
I’m still getting ready, but I have my giveaway book stickers, my shroomy cocktail napkins for the launch party, and multiple thematically decorated clothing items. I don’t have a playlist of different lengths worked out, although I learned some things about which poems work aloud at fall readings. Some review and thank-you copies are in the mail; more to go. Above is the updated spring event list; I have a big grading push ahead since I frontloaded assignments. Everything is semicolons; I’m dwelling in the pause between this winter’s linked clauses.
Lesley Wheeler, Myco-local
A book that you should own immediately—I promise, it will make you feel better, even as it tears itself apart—is Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic, which explores the family, the world, and the body in metaphors of mushroom, her most direct and moving piece yet. I loved her fiction, Unbecoming, and I think this book will actually finally get her into the light where she belongs. […]
The whole book, like the mycological systems it describes, has an underpoem that runs underneath the individual poems. It’s such a unique and moving book, whimsical and witty. It’s ecological in a way that makes you believe again in the superpowers of nature and feminist in a way that makes you examine your own behaviors and shames. It’s hard to explain, but you should get yourself a copy. Lesley is the kind of writer that you must respect, one whose work ethic puts others to shame, and the kind of friend who tells you that you can get through anything. Not just a great writer, but an exemplary kind of human.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Valentine’s Day But Did You Notice We’re All in Hell?, Lesley Wheeler’s Newest Book Mycocosmic, the Full Snow Moon
No, the dark hasn’t lifted yet.
But here in this coastal part
of the south, the daytime hours
are still streaked with rain,
meaning snow never crystallized
enough to make the thickest,
whitest blanket that might obliterate
reminders of the crudeness of the world.
No matter, it’s good that we can see
the ribs of trees, damp bucket seats
in the park like empty egg trays,
the future leaking out at the edges.Luisa A. Igloria, Wine-Dark, Gold-Dark
On the front of a church I pass when I’m driving back from my mother’s house is a blue banner that reads, Try Praying. I see it as I turn left down the main road towards the sea.
Every time I see the sea, I admit, it is different but when this banner is in my head and I look at the horizon, something in the line where water and sky merge makes me think, why not? […]
My problem with it is the dot I’ve just noticed. It’s a website. Of course it is. A place to make a donation and read stories of people who’ve connected with god.
I’m always drawn to signs, road names, posters, public invitations to engage in some way. I love the best graffiti, the wit of a random person with spray paint or a permanent marker. I love what are now called interventions – unexpected text in surprising places. The poet Matthew Sweeney was commissioned once to write a poem to be pulled behind a light plane. He wrote three stanzas, each for a separate banner. The poem was called ‘A Smell of Fish’.
I think of Barbara Kruger’s Your body is a battleground, I think of the artist William Kentridge.
But with the appropriation of art and poetry by brands, with the idea that we can all call ourselves artists and poets, I guess I could ignore the link that Try Praying is trying to lead me to and just enjoy the philosophical meandering it provokes. The old definitions have gone. So it leads me to the wind farm on the horizon on a clear day, or at night, flashing red and to wonder if artists have had their day. But for daydreaming purposes it could be worse.
Jackie Wills, Try praying
When I was finishing my most recent poetry manuscript, I was drafting poems about my name and my nicknames and how we come to know and love (or sometimes, know and loathe) different aspects of ourselves. I knew that a good path into this work would be to check out the poems that have, in recent years, come tumbling out of a line by Frank O’Hara. In “Katy,” he writes, “Someday I’ll love Frank O’Hara.”
A New York School of Poets interpretation of that poem and its famous line indicates O’Hara wrote the line as Katy, the speaker in the poem. She, not O’Hara, is the one saying, “Someday I’ll love Frank O’Hara.” But I really dig how other poets reposition it, how they use it to mean someday I’ll love myself.
Part of the reason I gravitate toward these poems with the poet’s own name in the title is the word “someday.” By definition, it means the poets’ self-love hasn’t happened yet. They’re not there yet… but aren’t we all trying?
At the moment, I don’t plan on ending up with a “Someday I’ll Love Carolee Bennett” -titled poem, but I do plan on using the idea as a generative writing prompt to see where it takes me and what fodder it may give me.
Carolee Bennett, “Someday I’ll Love” Poems After a Line by Frank O’Hara
I attended recently a reunion of people whom frankly I barely really know, more on the left side on that acquaintance/friend spectrum, but with whom I share a love of place, a love of a particular place, a fondness for the man who brought us together, and a love of winter and its glorious activities. If you are a member of a club, or a team, or a pleasant workplace, you may know what kind of casual community I’m talking about. An easy congeniality joins us. A history of tales told and retold at the bar, songs sung, trails taken. In the realm of people-I-could-ask-to-drive-me-to-my-colonoscopy, these are not they, for the most part, but this kind of community is also important. The hey-nice-to-see-you, even if they (or you) fumble for names. A community of shared appreciation, of readiness-to-laugh, of shared comrades and readiness to raise a glass to the fallen. It’s a particular kind of warmth that comes from that kind of union, loose, easy. You walk away smiling, humming, maybe, in our case, “He didn’t have a bend in his knees.”
Here’s a poem by Matthew Lippman on the spectrum of friendship and the particularities of connection and how it manifests. A chorus joined in with gusto. A phrase taken up as a — what is that word? metonymy? synecdoche? I don’t know — that thing that stands in for a larger other thing. A phrase that carries with it an entire history. Speaking of shared history, I think I read somewhere that Matthew Lippman and I went to the same college, although not at the same time. So. Small world. Here is his tender consideration of the large small world.
Marilyn McCabe, because you are fireflies in Ohio at dusk
streaming down
the mountain face
a brilliant sunrise
on my mind
the otherness of meKati Mohr, Upside-down, But Make It Make Sense
I’ve been taking part in an online project, Februllage, probably a little too enthusiastically.
‘Februllage’ is an inclusive, international, collaborative collage project with daily prompts every February, started by the Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandinavian Collage Museum, which showcases submitted collages on Instagram, although they also appear across social media, including on Bluesky. […]
It is satisfying and enjoyable to cut up lettering and pictures from magazines and paste them onto paper, don’t ask me to explain why. But it is a distraction from what I feel I ‘ought to be doing’, which is writing. How to return to that and stop the distraction activities? Or are these part of my process?
Josephine Corcoran, Not blogging, or writing, but…
The focus this year is all-in on a new project emerging from an ongoing, overarching art-poetry-sound initiative called ART IS INTEL.
Last year, we found ourselves in a multimedia universe of AI HALLUCINATIONS, which included a month-long gallery showing and live performance + published, limited-edition chapbook + collaborative website in which the public could participate (add their own poetic ‘hallucinations’ to the Lina Language Model / poetry generator).
This year, the growing collective (Founders: Lina Ramona Vitkauskas and Ben Turner) will be exploring how to articulate SABOTAGE in our video poetry and music, and further, how SABOTAGE can become a unifier among the US & Canadian left so they may feel empowered with useful art-tactics / tangible disruptions in response to growing / rising fascism.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, 2025: Sabotage
I’ve made a small edition of my Ten Words book of ten-word poems (reverse piano-hinge binding.) The covers of these two are recycled doodles over old life-drawings on watercolour paper from St Cuthbert’s Mill. In the third photo you can see the fold at the centre of the cover-strip that locks the text-block and cover together.
And I’m pressing on with writing my erasure of the Psalms on 90-lb handmade rag paper from a local mill (see previous post.) Over half way through now! I will bind the folios in a Coptic sewing, a simple and flexible binding that originated in Egypt in the 2nd or 3rd century CE. A European example from the early 8th century is the St Cuthbert Gospel in the British Library. My script is loosely based on the Northumbrian letterforms in that manuscript.
Ama Bolton, ABCD February 2025
Let Go with the Lights on by Lexi Pelle (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023) is a fine collection of confessional poetry by a young emerging poet which examines frankly the transition from adolescence into womanhood.
The poems are intimate and anecdotal, grounded in the ordinary and familiar. Yet at the same time Pelle skilfully manages to deal with universal, enduring themes, such as beauty, desire, family, identity and faith. Take for example, Pelle’s Ode to Applying Slightly Expired Mascara. As the title suggests the poet describes an ordinary moment: applying mascara. The well-observed detail gives the account authenticity and makes it relatable: the speaker describes herself breaking up ‘the clumps with a whirl// of the wand’, leaning over the sink in front of a ‘tooth-paste speckled mirror’, a scene that must be repeated in millions of households. The familiarity draws the reader in to be challenged in the second half of the poem. The poet describes the appearance of the mascara on her lashes as ‘flecks gathered like fruit/ flies around my eyes.’ The image is a telling one: the appearance is frustrating, annoying even, like fruit flies can be. Yet the eyes, like fruit, are attractive in their own right: the mascara is a distraction and mars the appearance. However, the narrator is blind to this and continues with this ‘ritual’, this homage to the false god of imagined, manufactured beauty, which she subsequently describes in the following way: ‘Every morning/ the decimal point of my mistakes// moves a little to the left and I let it.’ This is typical of the imagery in Pelle’s poetry: totally in keeping with the speaker’s world view and experiences: in this case from school mathematics. Although the narrator carries on making mistakes, there is the beginning of a new awareness, a realisation: ‘Lately my life’s felt like// the stye my friend Lisa eyelinered over for weeks in sixth grade.’ The masking of the stye represents an unpleasant, potentially painful reality that is beginning to impinge upon the speaker’s consciousness and which is articulated in the final two verses of the poem: ‘If your beauty/ isn’t truth, what else is there.’ The poem has become so much more than a description of a familiar feature of an adolescent girl’s life: the poet has used it to raise universal questions about the nature of truth, of beauty, of identity, of body image.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Let Go with the Lights on’ by Lexi Pelle
Last week I mentioned in passing that people who have been bilingual since children often report finding conscious translation between the languages quite difficult. My eldest son is in the ‘British section’ (for bilingual children) at his collège (secondary school) and I had an interesting conversation last year about this with his teacher, who, like her pupils, grew up as a French-English bilingual. Coincidentally, just after I wrote last week’s post I saw Michael Schmidt’s editorial for the latest issue of PN Review in which he describes just this phenomenon from his own perspective:
I can’t translate between my languages because each one speaks differently. When one acquires a new language, translation is natural, but when one inhabits two languages as a birthright the exercise is different. They are not interchangeable, there are no dependable equivalences and the approximations one achieves at some level falsify or compromise. One never quite says what one means in the first in the second, and vice versa.
This raises very interesting questions about what it might mean to be a bilingual poet — I mean not just a poet who happens to be bilingual, but someone who writes poetry in more than one language. Languages and cultures have their distinct literary conventions, forms and styles as much as they have different ways of doing grammar and syntax. (And a language’s grammar and its poetic conventions are closely linked, of course, inextricably so in the case of most lyric poetry.) There are literary things you can, at any given point, do in one language but not in another — but I say ‘at any given point’ because learning from other languages, other literary cultures, is also one of the main ways, if not the main one, by which a literature evolves. Roman poets like Horace and Catullus learnt from Greek poetry; English poets learnt from French and Latin; Russian poets from French and Greek, and so it goes round. There was one point when you couldn’t, say, write in sapphic or asclepiad metre in Latin, because no-one had done so successfully; and then, after Catullus and Horace had shown the way, you could — these metres had become a Latin form.
This is one of the things I find most fascinating about literary history — the process by which a new form or style becomes, first, possible, then perfectible, and then (often) dominant, and finally, perhaps, either exhausted and over-used, or permanently assimilated. Why do some forms make this transition successfully and others do not? It’s hard to imagine English poetry now without the sonnet, but rondeaux, villanelles and ghazals, for example, have not made the same transition.
Victoria Moul, How epigram became English
Like a lot of English teachers, I find myself having to contend with AI and its impact on student writing. We’ve always dealt with plagiarism such as the good ol’ copying-passages-from-books and the more recent copying-and-pasting-from-the-web, but what generative AI produces is even harder to come to terms with.
I often have my students write a quick 1-paragraph response to what they read. It allows for a quick assessment for me and a memory tool for them as well as possibly the basis of a longer composition. I got to wondering how well ChatGPT could handle this assignment. We had recently read and viewed “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty, so I figured I’d start there. […]
I gave ChatGPT the following prompt: “Write a response to the poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty” and got this:
The poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty is a powerful and emotional reflection on the impact of mass incarceration and absent fathers on Black children. Through the metaphor of a knock on the door that never comes, the speaker conveys the deep longing for a father’s presence and guidance, highlighting the pain of abandonment and the systemic barriers that contribute to such absences. However, the poem ultimately transforms this sorrow into resilience, as the speaker learns to find strength within himself, carrying forward his father’s wisdom despite his absence. Beaty’s spoken-word style and raw emotion make “Knock Knock” a moving tribute to the endurance of love and the power of self-determination.
While the content is disturbingly spot-on, the writing gives itself away. Anyone who’s been teaching English a while quickly gets to where we can identify student writing. This would set off my plagiarism alarm because it’s too perfect. Too high-level. And most significant, and telling of AI, is the lack of affect, the voicelessness that’s reminiscent of corporate mission statements and HR policy documents.
James Brush, AI-Generated Poetry Responses
This morning I noticed a downy woodpecker hanging from the side of our porch rail, unmoving. I kept an eye on it as I made a second cup of coffee, fed the dogs, and stirred some flour into Vern (our sourdough starter). It was still there, puffed up in the cold, when I rinsed sprouting beans and defrosted some tomatillos from last autumn’s garden. I needed to get to my desk. Editing deadlines do not stretch well. But I couldn’t stop watching this little beauty who may have been in trouble. Maybe he had suffered a blow to the head from hitting a window? Maybe been attacked by a cat? Maybe gotten into the poison some people in our rural community (very unwisely) leave out to control rodents in their barns?
Mark and I both ended up at the window, just watching. Mark keeps multiple feeders stocked with seed, suet, and raw peanuts. It’s a ridiculous cost, but then we don’t buy fast food or go on vacation, rarely even go to restaurants. This is the main line item in our entertainment spending. […]
On and off, for close to an hour, Mark and I kept stopping by the window to check on the little woodpecker. Finally he moved as if waking up. He looked around, then lifted into flight. It seems he’d only been napping! His presence gave us a wondrous reprieve, letting our concerns narrow to this one precious life. We didn’t dwell on our fears for this climate, this democracy, this world. We just watched and cared. Thank you, little downy woodpecker. You helped restore our spirits.
Laura Grace Weldon, A Reason To Pause
Interrogate is a brutal word, but when I interrogate the world, however naively, I break down my experience into singular events for examination. And since I don’t believe anything in isolation is meaningful, I can create new meaning from pieces of the past.
We can talk about subatomic particles without attributing meaning to them. And these tiny things can take on entirely new identities when they are no longer isolated: subatomic particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become apples.
But what do any of these things mean? The apple is only meaningful in combination with or in a confrontation with an existing meaning. A few years ago I was talking to my students in Norway about what an apple symbolized. I assumed everyone would think of Adam and Eve. But that wasn’t even their third suggestion for an association. 1. computers 2. health 3. lunch. (This made me very sad. Do we really live in such a story-poor society?)
I’m finding it increasingly difficult to believe that anything has intrinsic meaning. And that the idea that people are functionally damaged by trauma, and unable to correctly interpret the world, is absurd. Our ability to interpret is fine; the problem is that the context and the attribution of meaning are outside of cultural context we call the norm.
There are endless constellations of context, and we construct meaning for ourselves and for one another.
Ren Powell, Writing in a Meaningless World
In pinstripe, in lacquer, stock-still or in motion,
wearing as crude neck jewellery
one bloodied arrow or a bag of ammunition,part blizzard, part dog, cop-bandit-boss fusion,
beard a smear of iron filings and fury,
he rips at shadow and earth and fortification,drags a belt of beaten silver bullion
through bristling rain to the mouth of the sky.
He’s tarsmoke. Sword a fresh-plucked pigeon pinion.Jon Stone, Mifune!
“Two Harbors” is the latest in an ongoing series of diaristic occasional poems (ie. the occasions of the day), which is provisionally titled Memorial Day. It follows three consecutive book-length endeavors, written over a 3-year period (2021-23): Restoration Day (self-published), The Green Radius (Contubernales Books, 2024), and Parmenides in Minneapolis (forthcoming, Contubernales).
One of the thematic elements shared by all these books, and treated in different registers, is a meditation on American democracy, democracy in general or self-governance itself, and what I at least think of as the spiritual ground or sanction for same. Fused with this, in all three books, is a sense of foreboding about the approach of Trump, Trumpism, and related autocratic/plutocratic forces. Perhaps needless to say, this same dual focus is pervasive in this current project (Memorial Day), which I began writing a few weeks ago.
I have the perhaps foolish habit of posting my work (most of the time) directly online, on social media. I think the main reason I do this is that the poems are, precisely, diaristic, occasional, and ongoing. No doubt there are other motives, conscious or subconscious! But this is my basic rationale, or excuse.
Henry Gould, Two Harbors
I’ve felt immense shame that the books I’ve published have been published by my own fair hand, rather that the ink-stained hands of a lauded publisher. This has come entirely from me. The impact is that rather than telling booksellers about my amazing book and the amazing journey it’s had to come into existence, I shuffle in, gabble that it’s self-published and scurry out. It means I feel unworthy to sell this piece of carefully created art, unworthy to dream of putting my work forward as being of any value, monetary or otherwise. Something is changing though. I’m beginning to hear the things people say. I’m beginning to feel proud of what I have done, rather than shame at what I haven’t. During a recent radio interview, I talked with real joy about my work, about what I’ve done and what I have planned for the future. Naturally I had a flush of “I wish I’d said that” afterwards, but whilst talking I know I felt genuine pride.
I’m not sure this feeling will ever leave me – I’m on new medication for Bipolar II and this may have an impact in time. I’m consciously seeking to challenge the litany of negative self-talk that is the soundtrack to every day. I hope to be free of this, but until then I need to accept and work with this emotion and the feelings of vulnerability.
The reason I write is to connect with people. I wonder if by embracing this vulnerable emotion then I can foster a new depth to my work that will resonate more strongly. I wonder if these feelings of shame and worthlessness will chime with people who read my work, and bring a sense that even though you feel pretty awful at the moment, at least you know you’re not alone.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, The paralysis of shame
my father used
to lament my uncle’s lack of painting.
what is an artist that does not make art?
i used to join my father. it did not make sense to me.
what were the canvasses for if not to create?
sometimes we need a vessel for our wanting.
to make a portal even if we know it will
not open. sometimes i buy notebooks
just to leave them empty. i visited again
a week or so ago. stepped through my uncle’s side
to see the canvasses still there. still dormant.
i want to ask him if he has ideas for them
or if they are mirrors. if he ever takes one
& waltzes with it in the dark.Robin Gow, blank canvas
When I started my newsletter, Sticks & Stones, in 2018, I decided to include one poem in each issue from a poet who’d shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s a way to honor these writers, many of whom were not celebrated, who didn’t appear in Poetry, who worked in relative obscurity but deserve to be read by more people. In my search for poets to feature, I’ve come across names that were new to me, such as Wendy Battin, Nagase Kiyoko, Matthew Henriksen and Oscar Venceslas Lubicz-Milosz.
My bookshelves hold many more poets who have left us: Marvin Bell, Denise Levertov, Wanda Coleman, Seamus Heaney, Donald Hall, Wislawa Szymborska, Tomas Tranströmer, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke. I’ve found solace, insight, and inspiration in these pages. Their poems are so vital, so alive with imagery and emotion, that I must remind myself that while their work continues, the poets themselves are gone. No more will come from them.
The best way that I can think of to honor these dead poets is to crack open those dusty books and read the poems they left us. By doing so, we enter not only into their hearts, minds and imaginations, but into the historical periods they inhabited. Through the poems and essays of Nagase Kiyoko, for example, we absorb joys and frustrations of a woman living in 1940s Japan, while Wanda Coleman shows us the struggles of a single mother. Seamus Heaney writes of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Rilke tries to “reconcile beauty and suffering.”
As Irina Ratushinskaya (Russian, 1954-2017) wrote in “Pencil Letter,” “The page will be / In shreds as soon as I have scribbled it.” Life, and paper, are short, but poetry lives on.
Erica Goss, Honoring Dead Poets
Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is a good place to revisit these days. In the foreword to the third edition she says, “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” Solnit reminds us of what hope is not: “it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.” Hope, she says, “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
A couple of posts ago I wrote about emergence, murmurations, and how if we do what we can where we are, that that can be some of the way forward, (with reference to adrienne marie brown and Robert Macfarlane). Returning to Solnit, she says: “Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”
I keep trying to run these words together: emergencemurmurations, emer-murations, e-murmuations, emergency-ations, emurmencyations. And then one’s thoughts must turn to possibilities, re-inventions. Emergency inventions. Inventioncy. Well, we could go on in this vein, fashioning new words.
Can we locate hope in the adjacent possible, too? Anne Bogart talks about the work of Steven Johnson who is interested in the “preconditions for invention.” He says “The adjacent possible, is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
In his book, To Breathe with Birds, Václav Cílek talks about gathering strength from the landscape of home. He quotes a painter, Václav Rabas, who would say, “it is important to find one’s own square kilometre of landscape and try to understand it.” It’s not necessary to travel to see beautiful or thought provoking things. We could let go of the notion that “beauty and truth must be somewhere else.”
We have our three meters of influence; we have adjacent possibility, murmurations, emergences, and we have our dreams. These things are not nothing.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Hope
Near the end of his too-short life, Barthes was emphatic about “the right to digress” in text and thought, a right he defended on the basis of how much is happened upon in a digression, how much is accidentally discovered on a discursive path that isn’t entirely sure what it wishes to prove—- a path that doesn’t know its end, a way that doesn’t seek to demonstrate.
The digression, like the road or the trail less traveled, doesn’t appeal to simply because it promises a destination. The appeal of the digression lies in what it may suggest. In taking it, we might see things that we have not yet seen, or things that we did not plan to see. The unexpected. These unplanned things ask us to approach them in a different spirit. A spirit that is curious or perhaps more generous than the spirit that wants to get somewhere.
We forget that the poet’s job is to taste the world. We forsake our duty of stumbling, fumbling, rolling around in the dirt trying to find words for it.
Alina Ștefănescu, Writing prompt from a detail.
Thanks Dave! Great selection as ever.