Poetry Blog Digest 2026, Week 1
wolf moons, egg-life, the voice of a middle-aged witch, a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker, 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: wolf moons, egg-life, the voice of a middle-aged witch, a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker, and much more. Enjoy.
I feel the call of a deeper quiet.
A vibration. A murmur. If I stay still
and silence every thought, maybe
it will speak to me. If I dig my toes into
the soil, maybe tiny hyphae will tell me
secrets. If I learn to let go and rise in
the air, maybe I can test my ambivalent
faith. A pigeon with an iridescent green
neck is watching me watch it through
the window. As if we are both trying
to figure out who is on which side.Rajani Radhakrishnan, Window strike
On the first of January this year I did something that was very rare for me in the whole of 2025… I read a book from my ‘to be read’ pile from beginning to end. It felt good to make the conscious decision to slow down and devote time to simply entering the world of a book, and it also felt fitting given that 2026 is The National Year of Reading. I had already decided that as a nod to this year’s celebration of reading I would re-embrace the joy of reading song lyrics whilst listening to songs I loved. Often, I know parts of songs, but not the whole and I miss out on that full immersion. My ear buds help because they put the music right into the centre of brain (that’s unlikely to be scientifically correct, but that’s what it feels like to me) and I can hear things more clearly. But there’s something about reading the words at the same time as hearing them that sets them down for me.
When January’s wolf moon was nearly full I went out late at night and howled at it just because I could which made me laugh. It was standing under the wolf moon in January 2022 which had me scuttling off to my writing desk to form a poem which was brewing in my head. This then led to my desire to learn the names of each full moon throughout the year and a resolution to stand under each one before writing a poem for it. There was no poem in me asking to be written for this year’s wolf moon, but I took time to admire it rising and setting. Perhaps this is the year in which I just howl under each full moon, and embrace the moment.
Here’s to all the ways we find of being full, complete and whole.
Sue Finch, WOLF MOONS
2025 cost us so much. I almost gave up on writing this blog post—what has become my annual check-in to keep Chicks Dig Poetry from going dormant—but then that felt like just one more thing to be lost. So: hello! & Sal the Wonder Cat says hello, posing on the couch of my home office. (To be more precise, he offers his diffident gaze while awaiting kibble and pets.)
Here are some things that brought me joy:
-Reading at Bowling Green State University (making it despite blowing out my tire en route on the Ohio Turnpike—and using my extra day in town, once my car was repaired, for a quick sidetrip to Toledo), and as part of the Nantucket Poetry Festival (where I experienced the most welcoming, fun home-hosting of my life, and enjoyed a sandwich on the beach + unforgettable light). […]
-Having Made to Explode included in the inaugural selection of LitBox, a vending machine dedicated to books by D.C.-area authors. Though it has been a tough year to live in D.C., I am continually inspired by the makership of this community. I’m also thinking about American Poetry Museum, 804 Lit Salon, the Arts Club of Washington’s Queer Lit Salon, the mothertongue anniversary celebration, and the anthologies put out by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and Grace and Gravity. A huge highlight was the symposium on the life, work, and legacy of Sterling A. Brown, this city’s first poet laureate. Not to mention beautiful, unique acts of protest—from a “Free DC” message crocheted on a Southwest park bench, to the melting “D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y” staged in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Sandra Beasley, Farewell to 2025
2025 has ended up as another amazing year for my videos! Overall, 22 different videos have been shown in some way in 17 countries around the world for a total of nearly 60 screenings. Four videos – Eviction, DEADEYE, WHY-EEELA and The Exclusion Principle – won awards or were short-listed for awards at international festivals.
The year began on a big note with The Taken Path, a 6-screen installation made in collaboration with Catherine Truman, exhibited at Carrick Hill as part of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. A different single screen version was exhibited later in the year at the ANAT SPECTRA conference in Queensland.
While most of my work is shown internationally, it has been especially gratifying to have videos screened at different short film festivals around Australia this year, since it is rare for local festivals to encompass experimental film as part of a general program. I will continue to support these events, even if my work does not get selected.
Most of the videos deal with the state of the environment in some way or another: climate change, habitat destruction, and the consequential effects on the survival of plants and animals, many of which we do not fully appreciate. So the videos variously give voices to birds, fish, jellyfish, microbes or plants. An on-going interest of mine is the limits of language: in generating these new voices, I have invented codes, dialects, grammars and more. Nearly all of these works are informed by science.
As always, I’m deeply grateful to the organisers, curators and judges of these events for the opportunity to present my work to a wide audience. Even more importantly, I appreciate the incredibly supportive international community of video poets and experimental film makers that I am a part of.
Ian Gibbins, 2025: Another amazing year for my videos!
Happy new year everyone! I spent new year’s day working on this beautiful jigsaw depicting some of the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. I love fairytales, of course, and they recur throughout my books and poems – in many ways because they are full of such powerful and resonant symbols: towers, fur, hair, glass slippers, fairy fruit, poisoned apples, mirrors, houses with chicken legs, spindles, frogs, wolves in grandmothers’ clothing, tangled roses, spun straw, blood on snow.
I’m very excited to be going to see Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale musical Into the Woods next week at the Bridge Theatre, and will also be teaching a workshop called Into the Woods for the Poetry Business next Tuesday 13th Jan 11-12.30am online, if you fancy it. It’s £25 or £20 concession.
I’ve been looking at my favourite fairytale poems in preparation. What are your favourites? I adore Anne Sexton’s 1971 collection Transformations where she retells fairytales in the voice of a ‘middle-aged witch’, subverting them and bringing suppressed sexuality back to the surface. It must surely have influenced Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber? The poems certainly influenced me deeply – Sexton can’t resist witty, deliberate anachronisms for example, and they have littered my own work ever since. Here is Sexton’s deeply disturbing ‘Briar Rose’, that suggests a darker reason for Sleeping Beauty’s catatonic sleep.
Clare Pollard, Into the Woods
I’m trying to figure out if I need to revamp my current manuscript with the new bunch of submissions. Does it need to be re-written? I am suffering, if I’m honest, with self-doubt and self-criticism. I thought this was a really good book, but have rejections hurt my confidence? For sure. It’s also a book that’s squarely about disability, feminism, and survival. That may not be what all editors are looking for. Urgh. I hate the part of writing – and it’s a large part – that is rejection, doubt, insecurity, poverty, obscurity. The waiting. The thinking “Maybe I should quit. Maybe I should write detective novels or advertising copy.” One of my goals for 2026 is to find the right publisher for this book, along with maybe a little more travel and (hopefully) better health. Think good thoughts for me!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! A Poem in the Final Issue of The Pedestal, New Year’s Celebrations but I Guess We’re in a War Now?
Today, CLOVEN drops into the world officially. You can get your copy HERE…
I have always been slightly obsessed with the Greeks. It probably stems back to a period of time in childhood, before horror films claimed the top spot, when I fervently loved Clash of the Titans on repeat (we didn’t have it on tape, but it was a popular film in HBO in the years we had cable. ) Later, we would learn about the ancient world in history classes, but the details of the culture were never as interesting as the mythology. By the time I got to college, I had a reasonable working knowledge of major myths and stories, but a burgeoning interest in theater and a many drama/ theatre history classes (where, of course, we spent multiple weeks on the origins of theater.
One of the things we spent considerable time on was Agamemnon, when I first learned of the doomed daughter who was (or was not) sacrificed to Artemis to grant easy passage to Troy in a war spawned by the famously beautiful Helen. It’s something that stuck in my head like a kernel I would run my fingers and tongue over occasionally. The years passed and I wrote many Greek myth and legend poems, addressing many figures, either directly or indirectly. Daphne. Calypso, Cassandra, Mnemosyne. Ariadne. I even wrote occasional modern retellings, like my taurus project. which was another re-imagining of the minotaur story, but set in the rural midwest.
I got in my head that I wanted to write a more female-focused epic shortly after leaving the library, at a time when much of the freelance work I was doing was centered on the humanities, including many lessons on theater, mythology, folklore, and Greek culture. GRANATA was born from that in the summer of 2022–what was initially intended to be just a bunch of poems about Persephone, but which snowballed to include her unfortunate cohorts, the sirens punished for her abduction, It also grew to encompass visual art–over two dozen collages in 2023. When I released in in 2024, I had a vague idea there might be more books–perhaps an interlocked series. There were already a couple of collage series with mythological leanings, including several that dealt with Iphigenia’s story., something that was heavy on my mind, not just becuase of the Greeks, but we’d been re-watching Game of Thrones, and the tragic character of Shireen Baratheon. The young girl sacrificed for men and their wars. It was also on my mind because of, you know, rampant pedophiles in politics and the general disregard for the safety of young girls and women.
The treatment was, of course, different. While Persephone and the Sirens would eventually embrace their darkness and monstrosity, Iphigenia is fixed in place. She can move a few inches either way and the outcome may be different, but it is still somehow the same. (ie even if Artemis swaps her for a deer, she is still endangered for a hist of other reasons–arranged marriages, childbirth hazards, ongoing wars. And yet she is also rife with power even in her powerlessness. That was the story i set out to write earlier this year, as I added a few more collages to the project and enough poems to turn the whole shebang into the next volume of what I am calling my Antiquities Series.
Kristy Bowen, myth and the female epic
A poem by Basho
(tr. RH. Blyth)
Toshi doshi ya
saru ni kisetaru
saru no menYear after year
on the monkey’s face
a monkey face“Mask” some have translated that second monkey face, and yes, sure, but I like the helplessness of that there-I-am-again-in-the-mirror sigh. The slight recoil from an unexpected self in the plate glass window. For are we not unknown even to ourselves?
Walter Benjamin sees in Klee’s “angelus novus,” its nervous eyes, an angel with the past wrecked at its feet, its back to the future. Because who can look at what the face becomes, the one coming, not the old frown-worn, judgey-mouthed, jowly-throated, the Dutch cheekbones broad as a tidal flat, mustache of my black-Irish aunt, but the wide-eyed terrored face of tomorrow, how the world leans on the face, making it a rumpled pillow, and then whatever’s next and its imprint.
Angel, don’t try to hide it with your infernal flapping wings. Step aside so I may see tomorrow’s monkey face, the past reflected behind me in future’s terrible mirror. We will laugh and laugh.
Marilyn McCabe, Toshi doshi ya
Lyn and I seem to have spent a large chunk of our Christmas evenings this year in the north of Ireland, Belfast to be precise, courtesy of watching Say Nothing (Netflix), the film Good Vibrations (2013, on BBC iPlayer) and Trespasses (Channel 4). All three are set during the Troubles; the series both star the brilliant Lola Petticrew; and Good Vibrations is a biopic of Terri Hooley, who founded the legendary Belfast record shop of the same name, starring the equally brilliant Richard Dormer, who was also so impressively fine in the first series of Blue Lights. It seems as though after years of neglect by television and film drama, aside from Kenneth Branagh’s dreadful Belfast, the Troubles have at last become a subject worthy of dramatic portrayal, and of exploring the question of whether all, or any, of that killing was actually worth it. Novelists, notably Anna Burns and Paul McVeigh, and poets got there first, of course.
Anyhow, all this got me thinking about – or, rather, even more about – my years, from 1985 to 1991, living in Portrush and latterly Coleraine. My first published poem, in Poetry Ireland Review in 1987 (I have eternal gratitude to the late, great Dennis O’ Driscoll), was set in Dundonald. My first collection included five poems directly, and two indirectly, about those times, and The Last Corinthians included three more. Of those 10 poems, one, ‘Pietà’, first published in Magma, dealt head-on with the killing of two RUC men in Portrush in April 1987. I’ve written others but never submitted them. I’ve got plenty more to say, if I ever bother to turn the tap back on – a visit over there would no doubt do the trick.
Matthew Paul, A Twixmas Meditation
We’re not robots. We can identify
traffic lights, cars, motorcycles,
stairs, the darkness that wraps
even obstinate monuments in burial
cloths when the sun goes down.
We get a scrambled-up word, a code
to authenticate in at least two
ways and we comply. But in this
kind of darkness, we’ve come to know
the difference between the explosion
of fireworks and that of vessel
strikes in open water, the heat
signatures of drones, their high-
pitched buzzing.Luisa A. Igloria, Leaps of Faith
This year has been filled with its tender moments and quiet delights. 2025 has also been grindingly awful. Every day’s news packed with official lies, cruel slurs, new atrocities, more bridges to a bright future burned. Still, I am grateful for fervent and often playful resistance, brilliant science, awe-inspiring art, nature’s constant teachings, compassionate people everywhere. And of course for the way books help hold me together even when so much is falling apart. Thank goodness for the restorative, mind-stretching, soul-rejuvenating power of books.
Laura Grace Weldon, Favorite 2025 Reads
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?
I think writers help people feel invested in the world around them. It can be easy to develop a sense of apathy in our day-to-day lives, especially when living under the economic, social, political, and environmental conditions we are living in. It can be easy to feel like there are few individual actions we can take, or that those actions won’t matter in the face of large-scale climate disaster, fascism, genocide, and colonization. I think writers help us to be present. Even when we read books that take us out of our present reality, that are escapist or feel “light”, the act of reading and thinking helps us return to ourselves and remember how implicated we are in everything around us.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vera Hadzic
My eldest child embroidered their way through this hard year, so for Christmas they gave me some of my favorite poetic lines on a little panel of violet cloth. They’re from Dickinson’s “Let Us play Yesterday.” “The o’s kill me,” Madeleine remarked about the difficulty of embroidering round letters. This detail seems poetic in its own way. Rhetorical apostrophe–address to someone or something absent or inanimate, sometimes marked by the letter O–can seem, as Jonathan Culler wrote, “embarrassing” and “pretentious” because it marks “invested passion,” an emotional intensity that can make readers and listeners feel awkward about listening in. (You can read his 1977 article “Apostrophe” on JSTOR–it’s worthwhile as well as clearly written, even if you’re not generally a fan of criticism and theory.) Apostrophe is also, he writes, “a fundamental gesture of lyric poetry.” It “makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself.” It presumes to invoke something or someone Other.
This puzzle of a poem by Dickinson apostrophizes someone (lover, friend, reader, god?) through second person pronouns; takes a left turn through politics; and ends in what’s certainly a species of prayer, apostrophizing “God.” The term from “Let Us play Yesterday” that I love most, “Egg-life,” comes to suggest, through a digressive meander of stanzas, imprisonment, perhaps slavery specifically as well as metaphorical captivity in nineteenth-century womanhood, silence, and other states of unfreedom. I’ve nonetheless persisted in taking “Egg-life” personally. I’m always falling out of reserve’s shell into writing what troubles me. I usually feel like a baby bird even at work I’ve been practicing for most of my life, weak from ignorance though ready to squawk. That’s one of poetry’s best qualities, after all. No one can “master” it. Hallelujah!
Lesley Wheeler, 2025 in reading (playing Yesterday)
On the 3rd day of the new year, we wake to sun glimmering snow and the neighbors next door are one part shoveling out the cul-de-sac, one part giving their young daughter time and space to run after days of cold snap and heavy snow. This is kindness in action, not to mention wise parenting. Soon after this post, I’ll venture out and clean my driveway as well in preparation for the scuttle of Monday’s anticipated storm dropping another 6-12″ on this outer coast.
Though my blog has been sorely neglected for several months, my writing has been prolific this year. There are copies of journals and anthologies on my desk from a year’s worth of publishing. Quick glance at my Excel doc shows I sent out work to 57 different submission calls and have placed work with 30 (so far) and received 15 rejections (so far). 47 poems were published in 2025.
One year ago today, I learned that Sheila-Na-Gig Editions had accepted my manuscript, The Ordering of Stars, for publication in 2025. This was wildly exciting news. Not only do I love publishing with Sheila-Na-Gig and its family poets, but the manuscript emerged over the course of two different residencies: Storyknife (2021) and Jenni House (2024). It will warrant its own posting once the copies land, but editing on the final proof was submitted New Year’s Eve and my launch via Zoom is scheduled for January 29th. Please attend!
Kersten Christianson, 2026, Snow, Much Writing
This morning is the time for me to set intentions. I have four. Careful readers of this blog might say, “Didn’t you have three intentions that you couldn’t keep for 2025?”
I appreciate the power of New Year’s Day intentions that tug at me all year long, even if I’m not entirely successful. This year, I’ll have 2 writing intentions and 2 health intentions.
Writing Intentions
–I’m going to keep one of my intentions from 2025. Here’s what I wrote last year: “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”
–Always hopeful about having a book of poems with a spine, I also plan to create a new collection of poems, with the title Higher Ground.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Intentions for 2026
I didn’t submit much this year, but publication schedules are on their own timelines, so I did have 14 poems appear in 12 different journals, had one poem accepted for the Stevie Nicks anthology White-Winged Doves, placed a favorite hybrid essay in Whale Road Review, and a piece of flash in Milk Candy Review made the longlist for the Wigleaf Top 50. And, of course, my fourth poetry collection Unrivered was released in October from Sundress Publications.
I placed visual art at Gone Lawn, Doubleback Review, Thimble Lit, orangepeel magazine, and San Pedro River Review. I sold my first piece at a gallery show, which was exciting and a little nerve-wracking.
I have completed hosting and curating the fourth year of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey reading series, although this year’s schedule was a bit more sporadic due to other commitments and responsibilities. We will ring in the start of Year Five on January 8 with Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Kathleen Flenniken, Nathan Spoon, and Cindy Veach.
Rachel Bunting and I completed editing the first year of our journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters. We are so grateful to all of the talented folks who took a chance and sent work to our new labor of love, and we look forward to starting Year Two with the launch of Issue Five on January 20. […]
I have placed no pressure on myself to take on a new writing project for the new year or even to increase my number of submissions. For now I am enjoying reading from Unrivered, trying new things in drafts, and not worrying about whether or not they fail. One goal I do have is to go back to pieces I love that have never been published and take a serious look at revision. What will happen will happen. (And, I will try to be here more regularly, even if it’s once a month… I can do that if I put it on my calendar…)
Donna Vorreyer, Out with the Old and All That
I’ve never seen her land, always moving as I do
from painting rooms and finding flooring
to battling sugar ants who found the kitchen
years ago and like it there. She is a friend in this city
where my children move at a tempo not my own.The butterfly’s time is short, as mine will be—
just enough to make this last place home
until the day when decisions are made for me.
I’ve promised not to fuss when that day comes.
For now, with the butterfly, I’ll follow the breeze,
feel sunlight and dew, live free.Sarah Russell, Butterfly
The complement to mindful living is mindful reading.
I want to learn from what I read. I want to see what others have seen. I want to consciously read what is not standard culture fare. Something more offbeat or deep. I want to learn storytelling and cultural terraforming.
I leaned more into sci-fi this year. Shocking no one, over half of titles read were poetry but less science and less memoirs, more novels this year. I completed none in French but 9 in translation.
I think I mentioned 49% of what I finished reading was free by library, little free libraries, free downloads, gifts or review copies. This tracking takes credence from the theory that elves sneak books in while I sleep.
Pearl Pirie, 2025 Self-Audit
I started this Substack over a year ago with a poem published by Ink, Sweat & Tears.
I had a second poem published there in September. “Watching, January 2021” is a pandemic poem, written as the second lockdown began to bite. I didn’t deliberately wait until January to post it but things have recently got in the way of doing much writing, so somehow it’s ended up here, now, almost exactly five years after I wrote it, just as the Wolf’s Moon makes another appearance. Looking back at this poem, the cyclical nature of time — especially the Groundhog Day aspect of the lockdowns — seems more evident than ever. A new year is often thought of as the chance for new beginnings, but the old habits are hard to break.
Ruth Lexton, Watching, January 2021
I was lying on my back on the steel table of a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker at the hospital on Christmas Day, looking up at the red laser projecting from the ceiling to align one of my four most recent tattoos with the treatment head, when I had the second auditory hallucination of my life. (I wrote about the first one here.) This one may well qualify as a memory rather than an hallucination: it was, unmistakably, the beloved voice of Philip Levine, speaking the last two sentences of “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”: “No. Not this pig.” I’d wager I heard him, live or in recording, read this poem at least once, but who can say; I know I first read it twenty-five years ago. I can say with certainty that the words came back to me when I may have needed them the most.
This is an unexpected opening for this publication, I guess. I certainly did not expect, when I last hit publish on December 19, that I’d be in the hospital and undergoing urgent radiation therapy five days later, but here we are; having been treated for cancer once, in 2011, the shock wasn’t that it was happening so much as it was that it was happening now. I’ve spent the last seven months learning, on a somatic level, the meaning of now, and the last five relearning my love of poems, and in some ways the timing is exactly right. Before this year I never so clearly understood how little we can control, nor how much we can do in the face of that fact, how simple it is to be present in our lives even if we feel them slipping from us, how meaningful it is to connect with each person we encounter, even when it feels too hard. This is what poetry, I understand now, has meant to me.
What’s to love about “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”? It’s a dramatic monologue in the voice of a pig, for one, and not just any pig, but a pig of absolute conviction in the face of what’s out of his trotters. He knows where he is headed, yet what pleasure he takes in the movement of his piggy toes and muscular body. He is fully awake to sensory experience, the olfactory imagery conjuring his grim surroundings and his dream life similarly clear-sighted. He knows as well what is expected of him: terror, denial, rage, violence. What he does instead is very simple: he claims his authenticity, he decides to be himself in his own time. In the world according to Garp, after all, all pigs are terminal cases.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives” by Philip Levine
When I first read “Lamb,” I was immediately drawn to the juxtapositions and associative leaps in this poem, which feel close to the child’s mind to me. The line breaks and use of punctuation in this poem slow the poem down, so the details unfold bit by bit. This feels intuitively right to me. When children tell stories, sometimes the relationships between details—the causality—isn’t clear. Near the center of the poem, for example, are these three lines, all and-stopped with punctuation, which slows the reader down:
My dad had a beautiful overcoat.
The lamb’s white fur got smudged.
My brother was a baby,
Here we get three statements, all simply structured (subject/verb: my dad, the lamb’s fur, my brother), but all are possessive, and a closer look reveals the links in the chain. In the speaker’s memory, the father’s “beautiful overcoat” is linked to the lamb’s coat getting dirty. The lamb getting smudged links to the baby brother being passed around to strangers. There is so much vulnerability in these images and scenes. The “one eye” brought up in line two is circled back to toward the end: the child putting his finger into the socket of the missing eye as he would fall asleep. Talk about a vulnerable image! (It’s interesting, too, that the advice about pickpockets in the second sentence of the poems, lines three through seven, is about being stripped of things that are conventionally valuable—money, a watch—but what the child is most concerned about is something sentimental and therefore priceless.)
Having a beloved doll or blanket as a child is visceral—we hold them close, and we remember those smells and textures—and it’s that is made clear in the final line of this poem. Here the lamb is nearly resurrected—brought back from the overhead bin, where we are told her had to go. (Certainly the child would have preferred to keep him close.) The lamb is returned, freezing, but safely back in the arms of the child, who kisses him. Not it—him. There is something so lovely, nearly romantic, in the closing. I’m relieved for both the lamb and the child, that they are reunited. The subtle end rhyme of “bin” and “again” is such a beautiful touch, too.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look
In Delmore Schwartz’s story, “The World Is a Wedding,” there is a moment when the protagonist, Jacob, thinks something during the course of an interior monologue that can be applied to poetry as well as fiction, namely: “You have to love human beings . . .if you want to write stories about them. Or at least you have to want to love them. Or at least you have to imagine the possibility that you might be able to love them.” Drawing that out a bit, I would argue that this pursuit of the imaginary conditions (whether accidental or contrived) for loving others that shapes our choices about speakers in poems.
Alina Stefanescu, For Lynne.
There’s a story about Steve Jobs meeting with an ad executive. Steve wanted an ad that highlighted a number of his new product’s new features. This was against Steve’s otherwise-firm commitment to simplicity as a guiding value. To talk Steve out of this idea (no easy task), the exec crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at Steve, who caught it. “That’s a good ad,” he said. Then he crumpled up five pieces, and threw them all; Steve caught none. “That’s a bad ad.” The story has a wider moral. Great Art is supposed to have a bottomless complexity, and Great Poetry is supposed (by some) to be characterized by neutron-star-level densities of meaning: more significance-per-syllable than any other form of writing. I admit to being against this. Put too much in, and all of it is lost. I’m against poetic compression, as a general rule, with exceptions as needed. Thus, the appeal of thought-rhyme, whose repetition is the opposite of compression. (In fairness, parallelism at its best is repetition without redundancy.)
Compression in poetry sometimes entails grammatical contortion: leaving words out, putting words in the “wrong” order (adjective after noun, say). These are sometimes done, I suspect, in response to a felt need to “signal” that one is writing poetry, a need one may feel when writing free verse. In this way metric poetry can be more freeing than free verse: if you’re writing iambic pentameter, then whatever else it is, it’s certainly poetry; you are therefore at liberty to sound as pedestrian, or as conversational, as you like. No need for fancy words, or to make everything a metaphor for everything else. This was Wordsworth’s idea, though he lived up to it poorly—Shakespeare is often better at ordinary-speech-in-blank-verse than Wordsworth. But it was Robert Frost who was truly devoted to this paradoxical ideal, of un-poetic poetry. While there’s a lot of Robert Frost’s poetry that I don’t like, this ideal I do like. It, and his insistence on writing in meter, while living in what he called “an age of mere diction and word-hunting.”
Brad Skow, Found / Things
While the shift from formal rhymed verse to ‘free’ and unrhymed verse in the late-1800s and early-1900s was important, even more significant was the shift from the ‘statement’ as the basic unit of poetry, to the fragment. In a poetry of statements ‘meaning’ resides in the poet, already completed, and it is the reader/critic’s job to decipher the ‘true’ meaning of the poem, in accordance with the poet’s ‘intentions’ (ala biblical exigesis). In a poetry of ‘fragments’, on the other hand, there are always multiple possibilities, di-verse potentials, and no one singular meaning. Sensible signification is abandoned in favour of suggestion. A fragment is always in-between and partial, and can only be completed by the reader in collaboration with the poet. A statement is already finished: a fragment invites the reader to continue, without stopping.
As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1958): “Make of the reader a poet… the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost. At least the reader participates in the joy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation.”
Dick Whyte, Mary Brent Whiteside – 6 Short Poems (1925-28)
Lures by Adam Vine
Alabama Seamus Heaney. Need I go on?
I recently had the privilege of hearing him speak at a local writer’s weekend, and he told this story behind his poem “Coursing the Joints” (and how he wrote 20 drafts over years and years, burnt them all, then went back to the burnt down cabin to see it himself and try again). The dedication to craft shows – I associate him with Heaney because of his tilt toward formalism and love of where he is from, even though it isn’t a perfect place. I guess also the Southern in me connected with this to some degree – hearing him read reminded me of my MawMaw, and the stories his book tells are the kind of stories my dad and all those Tennessee and Mississippi aunts and uncles and cousins would tell – stories worth telling again.Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars
I really enjoyed this debut poetry collection, a coming-of-age story set in NYC. It delves into love/relationships/mistakes, and the “thin glass” between us and others. That metaphor carries throughout the collection, as the speaker is watching and wondering about people she sees through the window, the separation between herself and others. I liked how her metaphors were often surprising and interrupted the typical narrative. This was my favorite poem in the collection – a fairytale-like poem about her father becoming a fish.Renee Emerson, Lures, Tigers, Bears, oh my…
Kirsten MacQuarrie’s book Remember the Rowan published by Red Squirrel Press was unexpected. I’d heard of the book Ring of Bright Water, but knew nothing about its author Gavin Maxwell and I knew of the poet Kathleen Raine and had read a few poems, but her life was not something I had heard about. The book charts their volatile relationship. Raine was in love with Maxwell who was a homosexual. He became her muse for much of her poetry and she was involved with the Maxwell’s first otter which was the focus of his most famous book. Remember the Rowan is a big read, well-researched and covering decades of their inspiration and arguments. I enjoyed it, it’s very well written.
The book is a real insight into the life of a woman who plays a midwife to an artist, not a muse, similar to Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, a woman who makes it possible for a man to succeed, even to the detriment of her own work and well-being. For that reason, I couldn’t feel good about the story. I felt caught up in Raine’s life and turmoil, so much so I wanted to take her for a drink to tell her to get out of the toxic relationship. It shows how intimate and believable a writer MacQuarrie is. […]
Poyums Annaw by Len Pennie is the second poetry collection by the Scots Word of the Day internet sensation. I first stumbled upon her during our Covid lockdown where she shared a new Scots word with a hint of humour and honesty. I love her poem ‘I’m not having children’ and her poem about the Daft Days, but I hadn’t read her first collection or her other works. Len Pennie is now an Scots language advocate, but she also has become a voice for survivors of gender-based violence after facing a lengthy court case of her own and constantly facing internet trolls on her various social media platforms. Her poems cover her own situation and fighting the patriarchy in general, mostly in Scots. They are honest and acerbic, sometimes tinged with humour. They do not bury the punchline in metaphor, instead they often pack a mean punch. While the rhyming sometimes gets to me, I’m a free verse kind-of-gal, the poems carry the reader along without feeling they are reading literature with a capital L. They are the kind of thing you’d share with your non-poetry pals and the two poems above have been passed on to me from unexpected places. Len often shares recordings of her poetry on social media and her genuine joy of Scots and poetry are infectious. Her poems are really meant to be heard, so if you can get the audio book read by Len herself, I’m sure it’s worth hearing them in the author’s own voice.
Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour 2025
Literature works through a special force of language.
When he travelled the world on the Beagle, Charles Darwin’s favourite book was Paradise Lost. He thought of Milton as he watched the sea at night. The way the dark materials of creation are described in the poem echoes in The Origin of Species.
The theory of evolution owes an influence to Milton’s poetry, which inspired Darwin to reimagine the universe.
As Samuel Johnson said, poetry is a “force which calls new powers into being”.
Henry Oliver, Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026
as I pick up
winter wreckage
from our yard, it sinks in
no card from her
this year
I’m trying to remember why I started this blog in 2011. I’m pretty sure it was because of meeting Ian Pindar, a poet, at the Bridport Poetry Festival in 2010 when one of my poems was given a prize (runner-up) by Michael Laskey and was published in that year’s anthology. Ian was the person who recommended having some sort of online ‘home’, although I can’t remember the exact reasons for this recommendation – perhaps to create an online presence and a means of showcasing work. Anyway, with my one published poem and a desire to engage with other writers online, I set about creating my own blog. WordPress’ interface seemed delightful to use in those days. […]
Them was the old days, folks. Blogging was fun and interactive. I shared posts on social media and people read my posts and chatted to me about what I’d written. Social media was sociable in those days, and more than a means to promote a book, reading or workshop. But most of us know the adage about all good things coming to an end – and I’m probably only peering at the past through rose-tinted specs, in any case. Eventually, I ran out of blogging steam. And now I’m once again trying to write prose, rather than poetry, and I’ve become older. Time is running out! I’m trying to put my writing energy into something other than blogposts.
Josephine Corcoran, Hello, China
I read a ton, stayed off social media for significant amounts of time, and no big surprise, feel better. That said, I watched this reel on IG of Freya India where she talks about the idea of online communities being a joke. Certainly it’s an important moment to reconsider the idea that social media is social. It feels generally that we’re just unpaid employees, sharing our content for others to profit from it.
It’s no wonder that I’m re-thinking the whole idea of the blog — maybe it’s so old fashioned that it’s worth hanging onto. Or maybe it’s so old fashioned that it’s ridiculous. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about when I started blogging — the idea was to take up space, to connect with like-minded people, and to share things in the mode of the gift — we often spoke of “amplifying” each other, our work, of building community. (Weren’t we all excited by the ideas in Lewis Hyde’s book then?).
Looking for a link to the Hyde book, I come across Margaret Atwood talking about the book in The Paris Review back in 2019. She says, “One guarantee: you won’t come out of The Gift unaltered. This is a mark of its own status as a gift: for gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.”
I’ve generally thought of blogging as something that you give away. You share for free, and then the gifts magically return. And this is so often the case. Writing in this space has given me so much. But as I mentioned in my NY post, it’s time to re-think the enterprise, and probably most everything else we do online. What do we want to give up, and what makes sense to keep? Like, honestly, I’d miss saying, hey, read this you’ll love it!
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Two Books
The boy stomps in his boots
in his serious play as he destroys
snowballs as he lands two feet on one ball
spraying his lone lotwith his snow-dusted gusto
his own top spins so futile so fun
as the adults inside
huddle rubbing their so-so headsJill Pearlman, New Year’s Spin/Reboot
I’m working to find more time for my inner life. My New Year’s goals include reconnecting with writing and reading. The creative arts help us engage with reality. Writing a book is real—composing music, creating a film, choreographing a dance, penning a play or an opera, painting or drawing.
When we have our adopted grandson in the summer, we take him on outings and try to find ways to stimulate him creatively. We’ve taken him to the LA Zoo because he wanted to see the snakes. He’s at that age when he would like to wander from screen to sugar, but we intervene with books, and once he does a deep dive, he will read for hours. I believe this urge is in all of us.
I am going to remind my body to limit the doomscroll, to live in books, to write often. To remember that this is my one wild and precious life. I don’t eat much jam, but when I do, I plan to get a little jam on my journals, to lean into fig jam on my poetry or marmalade on my novel or honey on either.
I like new beginnings. Every morning. Every step outside. Every “hello”. For the long, linear song of life to be broken up into acts, chapters, narratives, breaks, intermissions, etc., keeps things interesting and novel. Some folks don’t see it that way. “It’s just another day” and its ilk is very well true but also such a yawn. Yesterday, severe winds led to a power outage that rendered everything dark and quiet in my house for several hours. Snow buzzed in the air and the wind droned on through the valley. But eventually the winds will settle. The snow will melt. The song will laze longer and higher in the sky. I like living in seasons. I like the season of beginnings. The season of hunker down. The season of barefoot in the garden. The season of salty skin. The season of the hummingbird. The season of walking in the river. The season of eating straight from the vine. All of those seasons have a beginning, middle, and end.
Happy beginning and ending to you.
Sarah Lada, Annus difficilis
Let time begin again
this one not a river
but a fountain
pouring in every direction
into a pool of itself
at the center
of the sunlit plaza
of the possibleMaria Popova, Cover Song for the Second Law: A Poem for Beginnings
On this New Year’s morning, everything feels metaphorical. The crisp cold air I feel as I stand on the porch waiting for my dog to pee. These sticks. Even this being awake. Awake. In the new year. My wife, asleep. The dog now having assumed my place in the bed. Last night, I figured out if I live to 90, I’ll live into the science fiction time of 2056. It might be science fiction. Hard to tell what it might be like then. And my son (who was with us) would live until the even more science-fictiony date of 2086. Those are “star dates” rather than William Blake dates, or Adrian Rollini dates.
Also, I thought of my daughter, already in the future. She was in Budapest, and entered the new year hours before us. Or Bob and Anne in Cambodia, 12 hour ahead of us. These are new year’s we measure in planetary rotation. Of course, it all is movement. Earth spinning, orbiting. The universe itself making room for itself. Expanding. Time expanding.
The universe writes time as time writes the universe. Or more exactly, the stuff of the universe is both time and space as we know. Hard to conceive of our bodies as both time and matter. A body doesn’t exist except in time. Which means change in some Ship of Thesean way. Is it the same time if each moment is substituted for another? We are make of stardust, but also of the time that stardust exists in, that makes stardust possible. I would say “each shining moment” but that would be eternally cheesy.Gary Barwin, On the New Year: Four sticks and a band-aid
One thing I ask —
ten minutes to pray
the afternoon prayer
into this poem
while snow falls outside.
Let me look away from the news.
Let this imperfect prayer be.Rachel Barenblat, A prayer for the first Monday of the secular year
Thanks, Dave! Hope to see you eventually.
Thanks for the quote/link!