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: plastic dragons, writing for the bees, earwig spiracles, the planet as a prayer wheel, and much more. Enjoy.
I found a forked willow twig whose shape seemed to suggest a sail.
I had a bundle of offcuts of heavyweight handmade paper from making “The Soul as a Bird”.
On waking one morning this week I had an idea for putting them together.
The upper strips were briefly dipped in walnut dye, the lower ones in diluted blue ink. [image]one step
from shore to ship
and everything
has changedThis is one of the ten-word poems from my little book “Ten Words”. The prompt-word was liminal.
Ama Bolton, A sculptural book
Being a classicist I went with the literal meaning of the Latin word limen, a theshold.
This piece is for our exhibition in Wells Museum next month.
The first panel of Day 3, “Future Forms: Inventing Literary Forms for the Twenty-First Century” (Kai Carlson-Wee, Kate Folk, Alexandria Hall, Keith Wilson, Hua Xi) was a wonderfully creative and eccentric take on poetic forms. In fact, the moderator, Kai Carlson-Wee, termed it “the spirit of the weird,” which I resonated with immediately (I’m always urging my students to get weirder in their poetry). Forms shared included the “palindrome poem” (watch this poetry film based on Carlson-Wee’s poem “Nomad Palindrome”), “Magic Eye” or the stereogram, where if you stared hard enough and in just the right way, a poem would rise from a block of text (like the Magic Eye posters), a poem written completely in symbols which captures what it feels like to have a psychotic break, and some text-based pieces from Kate Folk and Alexandria Hall.
I gave this panel high marks for its fearless and imaginative transformation of forms, for the energy of the panelists (especially for an early-morning, last-day panel), and for the fun they managed to inject into a category that includes traditional forms such as ballads and sonnets.
Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 3
I had a hectic week, but this morning—with nowhere to go, no errands, no doctor appointments—I decided to read a book of poems. I cheated, perhaps, by picking up a small book.
But, oh my. Mostly I am here to tell you how exquisite and inspiring I found this “small”—only 30 poems, printed in a 7 X 5 inch format—but powerful book, produced by Empty Bowl Press. The original Chinese of the poems written by Li Qingzhao, a Song dynasty poet (1084-1151) faces the English translation by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei. I don’t read Chinese, and have, really, not a clue about it, but there’s something about seeing (and almost feeling) the weight of the original characters that deepens the experience.
I remember the January day when I picked this up, from a book display at Book Tree in Kirkland. Despite my resolution to buy fewer books, I couldn’t resist it. (Just look at that cover!)
James and Xuepei explain in the introduction how in their partnership they tried to honor the original spareness and artistry of the poems. They do a brilliant job. They add titles to the poems, but preserve the poet’s habit of naming the song each poem honors. (Alas, the music is lost.)
Their introduction also succeeds in briefly sketching for us the life of Li Qingzhao, a rare woman poet of her time, lucky enough to be educated, and to have married a husband (also a poet) who valued her voice. When exiled during a time of war, she lost almost everything, including her husband. Her poetry persists. Even writing of despair, her lines sing.
Bethany Reid, Plum Blossom Wine
We cannot walk backward. We can only walk forward. Like Wangari Maathai, we can create great visions, work towards a sustainable future. Plant trees. Save animals. Protect our communities. Keep literary culture, art, and the humanities alive.
With billionaires controlling the supply chain, there isn’t room to breathe. But every day, I hope that Red Hen will receive a transformative gift that will allow us to keep publishing books in this inhospitable climate. We ride the train of risk and believe in magic. In the thrum and haul of it, I wake early. Walk to the green, breathe into the sun.
The struggle, glory, and wild of it is every day. Books, literary citizenship, uplifting marginalized voices: our smudge of resistance against erasure.
Kate Gale, The Alert Circle: Who Will Lead America?
As a poet, the modern real-life parable of aquatic Lego lost at sea and still being routinely found on beaches was hard to resist. But I have a lot of ambivalence about this poem. Almost ten years ago, I remember reading the words of Robert Macfarlane on the meaning of a new coinage to describe our era, the Anthropocene:
Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the “Plasticene”. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
Robert Macfarlane, “Generation Anthropocene”, The Guardian, 1 April 2016Somehow the thought of discarded plastic making its way into the geological layers that will define our era in the future is even more shocking to me than the terrible images of wildlife suffocating in a world of plastic waste. Several years after this article was published, a wave of anti-plastic action swept through the UK, fuelled in part by the 2019 BBC mini-series “War on Plastic”. The programme documented the infiltration of plastic into our homes and everyday lives, followed the trail of recycling to rubbish dumps abroad, and challenged ordinary residents to reduce their plastic waste. There was a sudden and visceral reaction in our local community which led to the formation of a voluntary not-for-profit group advocating for a plastic free community and various efforts by many of us to reduce our single-use plastic waste, including switching to refillable products. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As we all reached for something, anything to combat the virus, plastic made a comeback, perhaps most painfully represented by the suddenly ubiquitous (and, as it turned out, money-wasting) PPE, but also in household items that went from unnecessary extras to routine items on the shopping list like anti-bacterial wipes. Those of us with young children stuck at home were also buying Duplo, Lego and other plastic toys to keep them amused while we tried to work or manage day-to-day life. The tide of plastic washed back and kept coming.
The last line of my poem riffs on Macfarlane’s powerful rewriting of Larkin. It feels bleak hence, I think, my ambivalence about publishing this piece. I’d like to think that change is possible, that solutions will be found to the overwhelming prospect of an Anthropocene climate changed world but it’s getting harder and harder to hold onto that hope. In the meantime, it must be said, that the dragons are rather beautiful.
Ruth Lexton, Legacy of a Container Loss
Oh, let me out of here now, let me walk in the woods. Thud.
Bob Mee, TRYING TO READ EXCERPTS FROM RANDOM BOOKS AND THINK WHILE A TALL BUILDING IS BEING DEMOLISHED ACROSS THE ROAD
The first bluebells. Primroses in full bloom. Thud.
Celandines. A few violets. A wood anemone. Thud.
Bumble bees in tall grass. Thud.
Let me peer Thud.
into the darkness Thud.
of the pond. Thud.
Harpocrates, it seems, was adopted from the Egyptian pantheon – the God Horus manifested as a child, with a finger to his lips representing the hieroglyph for ‘child’. This was misinterpreted by the Greeks as an injunction to haud yer wheesht. So he became the god of silence and secrets.
In his 1911 painting ‘Silence’ Odilon Redon’s subject is Harpocrates holding two fingers to their lips. The figure is enigmatic, eyes downcast like a Flemish Christ from the Middle Ages as they peer out from wherever into wherever; from darkness into light, from silence into uproar, as if language were a place they dared not enter.
There’s a careful balance in poetry between what we say and what we don’t. Silence is there for at least two reasons – as a means of avoiding saying what needs said, or of saying what needs said. Every word comes bedded in silence – we know that – there’s a tiny silence between words; a wider one between verses; a huge silence surrounds each poem – just look at all that white paper and imagine what I’m not saying. […]
One of the crucial decisions a poet must make is how much to say and how much to leave for the reader to say for themselves. An unemployed reader is a bored reader. My early drafts are usually far too pretentious and blethery – they butt in before the real poem has had a chance to speak – a sort of linguistic warming-up exercise – and then keep on talking long after the poem has run out of things to say. I then spend days, weeks, longer, taking out most of the things I want to say, so the poem ends up as a sort of epitaph to itself, if that makes sense. A gravestone with no grave beneath it.
John Glenday, The Harpocratic Oath
Beautiful youth on red rocks,
PF Anderson, Mitzvah 300: Not to Sell the Fields #NaPoWriMo
rough dimpled, smooth skinned, muscles
curved as old sculptures, hands full
of panpipes. Wrap the sky’s heat
around you, and answer this:
what have we lost by selling
off science, the living seas?
Bee lore escaped me until I entered the world of poetry. “Tell it to the bees” is a tradition that’s both ancient and modern, built from ancient Greece and at home in the most domestic of settings. The tradition rests on the idea bees can slip between the living world and the world of the dead, that they are messengers, predictors and vessels for our secrets. […]
This idea has got me thinking. Over the past few weeks, during those liminal moments between waking and sleeping I’ve been jotting thoughts about what I would write if I had no name, or how I would talk about all the decisions I’ve never made. I have begun to crave anonymity, to see it as freedom and realise the constraints that writing in public brings. I have so many snapshots of poems on my notes app, the things that come in the middle of the night (with various degrees of sense) and so many of these are words that could become something that resonates and that I’m proud of.
Here lies the conundrum. To write to be read means being comfortable with people knowing what’s inside. Being comfortable with people knowing what’s inside means being comfortable with yourself, and with the story that got you to this place of needing to put it down on paper. It also means being comfortable with the fact that people may be angry or upset about what you write.
Or does it? the brilliant thing about being a writer is that it allows us to use metaphor as a means of expression. It allows us to create scenarios that are close enough to the truth to feel like our story, but not so close as to be recognised.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, How do you go about writing for the bees?
Flowers love this spring,
Sarah Russell, New England Spring
but worms sprawl helpless on sidewalks
and die in the first patch of sun. The dog
comes home bedraggled from his walks,
happy and shaking on the stoop. I drape
my slicker over a chair with a towel beneath
to catch the drops, brew some tea, open
my journal.
I’ve been working for over a year with Thoreau’s ‘Walden,’ and enjoying it so much. I’ve tried to avoid classic books but somehow I just got into it and couldn’t extract myself. It’s been wonderful reacquainting myself with Thoreau.
Unfortunately I haven’t worked on this project in some time, starting with when my mother fell in early December. Now that I am finishing up with her paperwork I hope this pause will soon end.
In the meantime, I’ve got visual poems from ‘Walden’ in Amsterdam Review, Moist, Sixth Finch and Fugue. Click on the journal names to read the poems.
Sarah J. Sloat, Bucolics
Three collections I read recently have got me thinking about the grittier sonic elements in poetry; the use of scientific, foreign, antiquated, and invented words; wordplay in general as a poetry component; and how sound can push both experiment and meaning in a poem. I’ve been mulling about the task of writing anything that feels “new,” to me or to my readers, and about the challenges more sonic wordplay would mean for me as a writer. I’m saying here I think it would be difficult to do, because it differs from my long-accustomed voice and style. I’m also saying I like a challenge in creative work, and that my style(s) go though changes always, so why not? In creative art of any kind, the passing of years makes a difference in many things. Content (because: experience). Situation (because: life happens). Methods (because: technology and materials). And influence–what I was reading in high school vs. grad school vs. today–though some favorites will always hold a place in my creative mind.
My poems tend to be plain-spoken, although I’ve never been shy about going beyond the standard vernacular to employ a geological term, a botanical name, or a somewhat archaic noun or adjective when it suits the feel and sound of the poem. Most of my poems don’t fall under the description of experimental or edgy. I’m not making waves with language, but some poets are. And my recent reading has me wanting to experiment more. It will mean failing a lot, because I’m working against my habitual methods of composition. I won’t be as good at it as these poets (below) are. What I’m hoping, though, is that the practice of trying more sonic wordplay in my work implants a tracery of that practice onto my poetic voice.
Ann E. Michael, Reading my contemporaries
One might think that, unlike an actor, the writer’s over-intellectualizing would be an advantage: being able to really dig down into the motivations and cause and effect progression of a narrative. But an intellectual presentation of a scene can be as cold on the paper, as it is on stage.
On the other hand, no one wants to read a text that is flooded with adverbs or takes colorful or obscure verbs to an extreme, tipping into unintentional melodrama, or bathos.
A writer can find the middle ground by utilizing onomatopoeia, which I believe is a form of physical action. Even when we read silently, our body is anticipating performance and has a muscle memory of the spoken word.
We have a hard-wired relationship to our mother-tongue. The plosives (b,p), the fricatives (f,th), the afficates (ch), the nasal stops (m,n), and the glottal stop (in American English it is the silent t in oral contractions like moun’ain), all carry prelinguistic meaning.
Sounds, which I’m asking you to think of as a form of gesture, will always pull up emotional memories. Of course we can override those memories, but as writers, we can also choose to utilize them in our readers.
There’s a difference between the words rip and tear. Don’t think about it. Feel it in your mouth, and listen. Rip starts as a growl and stops with sudden explosion, as though the speaker is spitting. Tear, on the other hand, begins with a plosive effort, slides through a dipthong, and ends with a growl.
Ren Powell, Writing with the Body
The traditional tannery workers in Fès seem to be the ultimate act of immersion: could they be more immersed in color? Could they put their whole selves into their craft, crawling into vats that fill entire planes with dyes once and often still of turmeric, indigo, pomegranate, mimosa flower, saffron and indigo? Sinewy limbs stripped to the waist, having cleaned skins with limestone and softened them with pigeon guana droppings. The radical ‘70s artists who dipped their naked bodies in paint, then rolled on canvases had the same idea. To be one with. Saturate. With not an ounce of doubt or self or restraint. They are beautiful in a way that horrifies us – how is their health? Their pay, their hours? But they uphold long cultural tradition that dovetails with seeking union, here with color. I’m in.
Jill Pearlman, To Be Immersed in Color
So if an ode or praise poem can be anything, what’s their magic? “Focusing the poetic lens to dissect, understand, and communicate the beauty and mystery of life.” (That’s Writers.com again.) For me, much of that “beauty and mystery” can be found in odes’ ability to go deep, deep down into the good, bad and ugly while still holding the spirit of appreciation or homage.
Writing for the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Stacey Balkun describes it this way: “I’ve been drawn to the ode because this world needs some celebration in it, and yes, there is much to celebrate. But even more interesting is the intersection between the light and dark, and contemporary poets are using the ode’s form to explore that space.” Balkun crystallizes this even further when she says odes “imbue praise with complexity,” which 100% explains my attraction to them.
That vibration between praise and complexity gives odes and praise poems an abundance of energy and tension and makes the style terrific for poems of witness. In a description for a class on writing the ode, Brooklyn Poets expounds on this communal and political role: “The praise poem, in light of recent global atrocities, is perhaps more necessary than ever before. … The power of praise poems [is how they help us] heal and bear witness in this present moment.”
Carolee Bennett, 40 Odes and Praise Poems
I don’t seem to be able to let this poem be. I’ve had a couple of goes at writing it over the years but a definite version seems to allude me. It is based on the conceit that an avatar of mine is conjured in the head of the man who sold us all down the river with all the horror that comes with the phrase.
INSIDE THE HEAD OF THE MAN WHO SOLD US ALL DOWN THE RIVER
His weasel words of self aggrandisement
Paul Tobin, WEASEL WORDS
once again conjure me into existence
and I am told where to stand and what to say […]
I wanted to let him speak for himself, to express his own anger. To me he is one of the many voiceless dead, resulting from Covid, especially those in care homes (both my parents ended in such a place and died there), those who could not be visited by relatives and friends due to contact restrictions:
and in the quiet I’d hear ashes stir
a murmuring of lips beyond cracked
and inaudible though I know the gist
that I was let down—they’re slow to actletting people come they let people go
running it’ll be fine! up their fucking flagpole
then backhanding fat cat chums
with a hundred and fifty thousand lives
a fire sale fobbed me off with shit dealseven dangling one last Christmas before me
only to shove it—old ashy whisperer—
folded into yourself a dishcloth
on the drainer—a hiccupping cough
into your pillow—a last companion—too old to ventilate . . .
We all read the stories of deaths of this sort. None of this is ‘true’ to my own experience (or my parents) but this is where the ‘larger’ truth surfaces, and this was my own way of trying to say something about it. The poem ends very emotionally (for me) because it returns again to autobiographical details. I DO have this picture on my mantlepiece (behind me as I type this out). I’m drawing on my own sense of loss, but I hope the dovetailing with what is fictional (for me) is effective enough. People wrote indicating their compassionating sense that I had indeed lost a parent during Covid and I want to again take this as a compliment to the technical success of the poem in its final state.
Martyn Crucefix, ‘I am not I’: the Slippery First-Person in Poems
It takes tenderness to peel away
what held you so long in the dark.
And so, much as I admire the self-
containment of the daikon, also
I can’t help loving how it’s blushed
with the palest stroke of green.
Luisa A. Igloria, Wearing the Skin
National Poetry Month is wrapping up, and it turned out to be a little more hectic than I expected. Wonder & Wreckage turned one year old, so I celebrated with fellow poet and sister/friend Karen Head with one of our “Call & Response” round-robin-style readings at the Georgia Center for the Book. Thanks to the folks who came out to listen.
I also had the pleasure of reading at the Cecilia Woloch & Friends virtual reading today, along with the fabulous Brendan Constantine, Carine Topal, Carol Muske-Dukes, Yona Harvey, Kevin Prufer, Lynne Thompson, Pam Ward and Francisco Letelier. It was wonderful to hear these poets and see that so many people from around the world chose to spend their Sunday afternoon with us.
Megan and I continue to steadily work on the Stevie Nicks anthology. We’ve got a working manuscript together and are polishing off an introduction, so we’re still on track for a Spring 2026 publication.
Collin Kelley, A National Poetry Month recap
I have not posted anything here for quite some time. As I’ve said before, that is why I will never monetize this space. I’ve been reading a lot of your posts, learning from you, taking notes, finding new things to read, new music to check out. I’ve been working with my editors at Sundress to be sure that my fourth collection Unrivered is ready for layout/cover design. But I haven’t had much of anything to say, so I’ve let this platform be the thing that fell off my plate. So I’ll share today some things that have brought me joy/energized me/kept me writing over the past couple of months.
Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters
It was exciting and exhausting for Rachel Bunting and I to work through our first open submissions cycle as co-editors of our new journal, but the second issue arrived on April 20. We are so proud of the variety of writers and artists that are represented. I invite you to dip in — 5 poems, 2 essays, a very manageable read—and if you like what you see, share it! We are still new and want to grow our audience for our contributors the best we can. (And if you’re a writer or artist, subs for issue three open on May 1!)
Hundred Pitchers of Honey Reading Series
I cut the reading series back to four larger readings this year due to some upcoming travel and commitments to getting Asterales off the ground, but April’s Poetry Month reading was a reminder as to why I love to host this series. You can click on the link to the title above and watch the April reading (as well as all the previous readings) on YouTube anytime you need a little poetry fix. Next year, I hope to return to a more regular format, perhaps six readings a year.
30/30 for April
I haven’t felt very connected to my writing self, so I decided to do a 30/30 this year, loosely using the forms calendar provided by poets Taylor Byas and Seamus Fey. I’ve tried to stay open to whatever comes, to not force any sort of theme or “project”, to just go with whatever comes out. And it’s been working. So far, 22 days in, I have at least 5 pieces that I like, that I think are worth revising. (Yes, I revise. Obsessively. I know some poets who don’t, and that idea gives me the heebie-jeebies.) I won’t share any of the drafts here, as they are all in VERY rough places, but I will share some of the titles, my least favorite part of writing a poem.
Donna Vorreyer, Back in the Saddle
- It Doesn’t Have Feathers, Emily
- Self-Portrait as Juliet with Insects
- Self-Portrait as Virginia Woolf Thinking of Frost As She Walked into the Ouse
- Sestina Where I Keep Asking Neil DeGrasse Tyson the Same Questions Over & Over
- When the OED Fails, I Seek Definitions Elsewhere
- Body, Don’t You Owe Me Something Good?
I’ve written before that April is the loneliest month. As a poet, you would think it would be a celebration, a month of revelry and readings and reaching new readers. Aprils are always an unusually packed month, not just when I was still working at the library. There I blamed the rise and fall of the semester, which, last couple weeks of April was reaching a head before finals, meant we had a last chance for exhibits and programming that people would actually be likely to attend. Wait too long and everyone was immersed in papers and projects. This was also my experience too as a student, when the deadlines loomed just over the end of the month. This was also typically when I was in rehearsals in collage for the spring show. While May was a bump and then an unraveling to vacation, April was always a little more demanding.
As a poet from around 2004-2018, I tried unsuccessfully to do NaPoWriMo, and mostly failed. In 2018, having started a year where I was climbing out from under the grief over losing my mom, I was already writing daily in the months before, so trying it in April seemed a fair bet. That was the first year I ever succeeded, having gotten down a writing routine that worked. Mostly it was just switching trying to write at night to writing first thing over breakfast in the studio. The only thing that changed each April was I included weekends . For a few years, this continued. I had a great slew of projects that had their origins in April’s past (I’ve been sharing peeks of them over at IG this week.) including memoir in bone & ink, a project about wanting to run away from poetry like a child wants to run away from home. They also include series about The Shining, about Walter Potter dioramas, about Alice in Wonderland.
While my writing process has a changed a little this past year and I tend to write a few poems a couple times a week instead of one poem daily, my focus is much more narrowed and intentional than it was prior. Nevertheless, I considered mixing things up and doing back to daily writing. Only then I remembered how lonely writing and sharing daily makes me feel during this month of all months. So I decided not to.
On one hand, this may just be a continuation of years feeling lonely about poetry. I remember being younger and engaging in the online and in-person communities with relish and enthusiasm. Those communities don’t always exist, or they break apart and form anew. Every once in a while a poet will ask me where they should send work or where they should do readings when they are in Chicago, and sometimes my answers are incomplete or wholly disappointing. I am not sure I know. Most journals and presses have dissolved over the past two decades, reading series have come and gone, bookstores have risen and fallen. All that’s left are the poems.
Kristy Bowen, only the lonely
I always look forward to a new collection from Pascale Petit, and this one [Beast] didn’t disappoint. It also, I realise now in writing this post kind of dovetails nicely with the reading I’ve been doing in Art Monsters – ideas around monstrosity, beastliness, female creativity, excess etc.
Transformation, metamorphosis and the body as a place of unstable ground is always central to Pascale Petit’s work. The speaker of the poems, and family members often shift into the bodies of animals, birds, insects and plants to reveal emotional truths about power and the way we relate to each other, and sometimes fail each other.
Much of Pascale’s poetry is concerned with trauma, abuse and violence […] but she is a poet who writes about multiple places and brings that fascination with transformation into her writing about place. I really enjoyed two of the Odes in Beast: one is called “Ode to a Cornish Hedge” and starts:
Thousand-mile-long rainforest, shaggy remnant, where I slow to hear air pass through earwig spiracles, and bumblebees are thunder-loud in foxgloves
and a little earlier in the collection we have “Ode to the Camargue” which starts:
Your waterlilies are wings of rosy flamingos opening their dawns. You are imparadised with mornings of wild blue iris skies.
Both poems continue with this richness of detail. Writing just those opening couplets out now I can see how ‘“Ode to a Cornish Hedge” is concerned predominantly with sound, whereas “Ode to the Camargue” uses colour to focus on vision. Both then open up to incorporate dazzling writing using all five senses.
Kim Moore, April Reading
It seems the poem’s speaker’s father was simply continuing the abuse he endured on his own children, repeating the cycle. So the speaker is asking if the father’s memoir will be a hagiography or honest. Does saving the family image matter more than speaking the truth. Or is the father just talking about writing a book because he knows his daughter is a writing and she can’t be allowed to celebrate her success. Readers effectively come full circle to the writer’s dilemma about how she can be authentic in her writing.
It doesn’t end on a downbeat though. The final poem “Hope, the Everlasting Sacer” talks of possibility and ends, “The kind people I will meet,/ And the things I will write./ I am set free.”
“I Wish I Could Write” explores intergenerational trauma where abuse repeated instead of the cycle being broken, and the issues that a family member who wishes to write honestly about their life (and abuse) faces. The dilemma is whether to keep up the expected family image or risk being ostrasized for telling the truth. Widner sees this from both the point of view of the adult child facing the dilemma while acknowledging that her parent was damaged. The tone is hopeful, writing the past will free the poems’ speaker to write what really matters to her, overcome that block and fulfill her wish.
Emma Lee, “I Wish I Could Write” Katherine Widner – book review
Rosie Johnston’s previous book, Six-Count Jive was a study in domestic abuse and escape presented in sets of haiku-like poems. Her new publication, Safe Ground sets that experience, ‘a bad case of bad, bad husband’, in a wider context of trauma and recovery that reaches back to a troubled Belfast childhood, with a much-loved womanising, hill-climbing, opera lover father and a mother whose resentments ruined her relationship with her daughter, and forward to a happier present in poems that are baggier, more discursive, than those in the earlier book.
These personal troubles are set in a background of the Troubles, and at moments the public and private seem to overlap, as in this poem on the Abercorn bombing in 1972:
Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.Her escape was, and remains, the sea, right from the very first poem here, ‘Carnlough Bay’:
I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size. I’m
tallest in bare feet, on sea-rolled shingle, back
heavy in my heels, cupping the weight of
whelk shells in my pockets.
Constant in it all, so
many years, the
need of
sea.We see the breakdown of that bad marriage and the speaker’s fraught relationships with her children, but in the end, in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea:
We run, crabs loose from a spilt
green bucket,
back to the best of childhood.Content with plastic spades,
we burrow
where our simplest selves can find us.On Margate Sands songs and laughter
ride the winds,
connect us all with all.That ‘loose’ brings us back to the Abercorn poem, but the worst we can be is transmogrified into the simple best in an echo of marvellous deftness.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading April 2025: A Review
Rebecca Goss is a poet whose work I have hitherto been unfamiliar. Regular readers may recall that I wrote a brief post, here, commending the podcast Goss recorded last year with Heidi Williamson about poetry of place. Like Adrian May, she lives in the middle of East Anglia, in Suffolk. I suggested her most recent (2023) collection, Latch, published by Carcanet and available here, as the book for next month’s poetry book club. It concerns her return, with her husband and young daughter, to the area she was raised in, after living for a long while in Liverpool, and the memories it sparked. At times, it felt like the rural feel had transported me back to the prose of Ronald Blythe in his unclassifiable classic Akenfield. (Though when I think of Suffolk and writers, Roger Deakin, Michael Hamburger and WG Sebald, all of whom I’ve written about on here, also come to mind, as does George Crabbe.) Three poems from Latch were first published in Bad Lilies in 2021, here. As you can see, Goss writes beautifully about a country upbringing. I’ve also now read – in one sitting – her very moving and transfixing second collection Her Birth, about, principally the birth and death of her first daughter Ella. […]
Now I’m working my way deliberately slowly through Jane Hirshfield’s amazing set of essays, Nine Gates, subtitled ‘Entering the Mind of Poetry’, published by Harper Collins back in 1997. As you’d expect from Hirshfield, it’s immesely thought-provoking; the best book I’ve read about poetry in a long time. It would be very difficult to try and summarise Hirshfield’s ideas. If I were the sort of person who’s deface books by using a highlighter pen to mark the best bits, then my copy of Nine Gates would like an Acid House night had been held within it. This sentence is typical of Hirshfield’s Zen-infused (cliché alert, sorry) insights: ‘Originality lives at the crossroads, at the point where world and self open to each other in transparence in the night rain.’
Matthew Paul, April reading
It’s official news now, but a while back the excellent poet and person that is Matthew Paul told me that his long-awaited second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was coming out soon via Crooked Spire Press. I am enormously pleased for him, having loved The Evening Entertainment.
Mat Riches, Corinthian Spirit
He has also very kindly invited me to read with him at the London launch in June (17th, from 7pm) alongside Vanessa Lampert and Ian Parks. I can’t wait.
Denver, Colorado poet and editor Wayne Miller’s sixth full-length poetry collection, most recently following We the Jury (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here] is The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025), a collection that continues his lyric explorations at the collision between the dark realities of American military culture and the intimacies of home, family and childhood. “My best friend’s older brother had posters // of nuclear explosions all over his bedroom.” he writes, as part of the poem “THE LATE COLD WAR,” “At night they became the walls of his sleep.” There’s a sharpness to his lyrics, his lyric turns, able to change course mid-thought, allowing the collision of ideas or troubling connections.
The End of Childhood is a title, of course, that provides layers of possibility, from the complicated and naturally-human simplicity of emerging out of childhood thinking, from discovering that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist, to the realization of the failings of trusted adults, into further shades of darkness of human possibility. These are poems on multiple levels of realization, and a broadening scope. “Last week, a violent mob / of thousands stormed the Capital. // They wore sweatpants and flags,” begins the second part of his three-part “ON HISTORY,” “puffer coats and tactical gear. // If I ignore the details of their chants / and the silliness of their face paint, // they become a historical form. / That policeman on the television // being crushed in a doorway / over and over is trapped inside // of history. If you feel nothing / for him, then you are inhuman. // Yet all of us were pushing / from one side or another.” His title allows for a further suggestion of innocence, in thinking that such could not happen, could no longer happen; could not happen here. Through his articulations, Miller knows full well that he and all around him live deep within history, from the best moments through to the worst. The storming of the Capital Building, or a teenager felled by a bullet while waiting for the bus. These are poems that meet the present moment, even amid the intimacies of home and memory, children and those recollections of childhood that becoming a parent can so often prompt.
While, for the most part, these troubling elements of “America” sit at the background, almost as a shroud, they are still deeply present, even as the book as a whole writes around childhood, from his to that of his children, offering moments that stitch together that accumulate into narratives with the lightest touch across lines, one phrase carefully set upon another. Whatever the subject matter, there is such a lovely slowness to his lines, a deliberateness, offering hush and a halt amid such careful measure. “My grandfather—just a boy— / discovered his father’s body,” Miller writes, as part of “ON VIOLENCE,” “the trauma of which is why, / my grandmother would say, // he never aspired to more / than basic, menial work. // My grandmother’s father / drowned in Sheepshead Bay // after a night of heavy drinking / with the fishermen // he so admired. Foul play / was suspected, but never proved. // This was in 1920. Back then, / my grandmother told me, // things like that happened / all the time.”
rob mclennan, Wayne Miller, The End of Childhood
While I haven’t properly written poetry for eons, I’ve been reading it all through. Once you start reading poetry you’ll never stop. It gives so much. Life feels weird without reading poems. I’ve been lately reading a couple of books written for poets but I also think that anyone could stand to read them who might like to infuse poetry into their lives and those around them. A book I’ve talked about before here is We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher.
On a chapter on W.S. Merwin, Teicher says:
“Major poets make themselves, with effort; they are not born. I would argue that many major poets begin minor, though the best of them begin with the promise of becoming important voices for their time. They begin weird, out of step in some fundamental way, esoteric, in their own heads. Eventually, their strangeness comes to shape the poetry around them. They give voice to the poetry of their time, and one can no longer understand it without understanding them.”
I like thinking about this even if I’m not sure the world, poetry world, still works that way? Maybe it does. I’m at a distance. Which is to say, can you in this time make an effort, and alter the major / minor situation? Who gets to be the voice of their time? What are the factors, the conditions? What are the obstacles?
The average enjoyer of poems likely just wants to get to the poems. For the average reader, all the poets are minor, perhaps.
Shawna Lemay, Ode to the Minor Poets
Convention has it that Desnos wrote this poem about music-hall singer, Yvonne George, whom he met in 1924. In this story, she haunts his dreams here and returns in the poems of Ténèbres. It was a case of unrequited love, unsuccessful love, or unrealized love, depending on the narrator. By ordinary standards, it was a ‘failed love’— though writers must amongst themselves as to whether the poems realize a love that is perhaps more ‘real’ than a romantic relationship.
Desnos’ poem gives life to the dream, an eternity of life. Yvonne is also said to be the person invoked by Desnos’ haunting final poem (though I’m inclined to suspect Louki deserves consideration).
Born in Brussels in 1896 as Yvonne de Knops, George began her career on stage, where she met Jean Cocteau. In 1922, after being discovered by the influential Paul Franck, Yvonne George moved into a nice apartment in Neuilly that became a hub for meeting artists and writers. Last FM offers a brief history of George’s life, including the following statement: “In 1924, well-known in Parisian intellectual circles as a charming singer, George became the subject of a passionate love affair with the French poet Robert Desnos, who wrote her numerous poems including the famous J’ai tant rêvé de toi (I have dreamed so much about you).”
It is well known that Desnos introduced George to opium, or that opium was in the background of their encounters, as written in Desnos’ novel, La Liberté ou l’Amour (Freedom or Love), a book that received the honor of being condemned for obscenity by the tribunal de la Seine.
Styled as an emancipated woman by her peers, George died of tuberculosis in a hotel room in Genoa on May 16, 1930. Like Jesus of Nazareth, she was 33 years old. “Weakened by her the excesses of her lifestyle, George fell ill with tuberculosis,” says Last FM, leaving us with exemplary palaver of the sort slung at artists and bohemians who died young from tuberculosis or Spanish flu. Ode to the heavy lifting done by “excesses of her lifestyle” here! I say this with sarcasm dripping from my fangs.
Last year, I had the pleasure of being consumed by Desnos’ novella, The Die Is Cast (1943), published by Wakefield Press in Jesse Lee Anderson’s translation, and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in Desnos’ relationship with Yvonne George and the perfusion of deliriums wrought by opium. Desnos published the book in occupied Paris a year before the Gestapo arrested him for his Resistance activities. The Die marks “a shift from his earlier frenetic surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as from his career as a journalist,” a realism that happens to include his opium experimentation “and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George” in the 1920’s. It may be “junkie literature.” Certainly, Desnos marks an end to utopias “in a distinct break from the ‘artificial paradises’ explored by his predecessors, moving towards “a new era of ‘artificial hells.”
Novella aside, in Desnos’ poetry, the dreaming continues. The poem gives us a world in which the dream, alone, is an honest or decent guide to what could possible. The world is a wreck, a failure; the dream reimagines what it cannot rescue.
Alina Stefanescu, Desnos forever.
But the greatest achievement of The Golden Gate is, I think, its mastery of tone and tonal transitions. [Vikram] Seth himself said that this was what particularly attracted him about Johnston’s (verse) translation of Pushkin which initially gave him the idea for the book, which he wrote while a PhD student in economics at Stanford:
I found in the poetry section [of a bookshop], two translations of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s great novel in verse. Two translations but each of them maintained the same stanzaic form that Pushkin had used. Not because I was interested in Pushkin or Eugene Onegin, but purely because I thought, this is interesting technically that both of them should have been translated so faithfully, at least as far as the form goes. I began to compare the two translations, to get access to the original stanzas behind them, as I don’t know Russian. After a while, that exercise failed, because I found myself reading one of them for pure pleasure. I must have read it five times that month. It was addictive. And suddenly, I realized that this was the form I was looking for to tell my tales of California. The little short stories I had in my mind subsided and this more organically oriented novel came into being. I loved the form, the ability that Pushkin had to run through a wide range of emotions, from absolute flippancy to real sorrow and passages that would make you think, during and after reading it.
It is the combinations of such transitions — as he says, from ‘absolute flippancy to real sorrow’ — with passages ‘that would make you think’ that really mark out Seth’s own achievement. There are many straightforwardly ravishing passages in The Golden Gate, as well as dozens of genuinely funny ones. Seth isn’t afraid to be serious.
Victoria Moul, He left irregular (moronic) / Sentimentality behind
It’s only been a few days since the Supreme Court Judgement, but it feels like a decade. It’s as if one sunny April day, I stepped through time, back into the atrocious overt everyday homophobia of the eighties, the days of protests and marches. With each headline and every piece of guidance from the EHRC, the world gets darker.
This time, of course, it’s trans people – specifically trans women – at the centre of the storm. But we are a community, and we are in it together. In the 1980’s, as gay men were demonised in newspapers and hospitals even as they died, lesbians and trans people were alongside them. LGBTQ+ people are united by the anger and hatred directed at us through the decades. It echoes around us, it lives within us. I have been spat at, shouted at more times than I can count. I’m scared for myself, but I’m more scared that that we will lose more people, that the damage it does a person to be told that the identity they have painfully built for themselves is over. I’m scared that it will be too much for some people to bear.
And because of that, I want to think of joy. Queer joy, and queer hope. Because by its very nature, being queer – even, or especially, at the darkest times in our shared histories – has joy at its core. After all, our desire for love and freedom is what brings us together. To come out, to transition; to love when you’ve been told you cannot; to be yourself when the cost is horribly high – you have to be hopeful. You have to be deeply committed to joy.
If you want to celebrate queer lives and queer poetry, you could start with 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022). Edited by Andrew Macmillan and Mary Jean Chan, it gathers together queer poems from across the last century, from Charlotte Mew to poetry so fresh it feels like it was published five years in the future. Good poetry is rarely all light or all dark – and this anthology takes in the pain and violence of queer lives – for example, in Jay Hulme’s In the Future:
In the future people like me
will not be able to distinctly describe
the scent of the floor in the men’s toilet
that time they were slammed into itBut at the heart of the anthology is the fact that queer people walk over hot coals just to love, to live honestly, to be happy. We are hopeful.
Clare Shaw, Queer joy, queer hope, and poetry
In the future
Sarah Rose Nordgren, bright shards of sea-worn credit cards
insects will sing their vast
chattering wave, and the waves
will crash in rhythm until,
eventually, time dissolves
the poisons. Bright shards
of sea-worn credit cards
mosaic the beach in unintelligible
patterns. The future knows
no center, no margin, no page.
The headless table will seat
no king. Take heart, my love,
for the glaciers grow back also.
Newly ancient and clean.
In a desert, there is a rain puddle that refuses to die.
In a cemetery, there is honey on the tongue of a tomb that will forever taste sweet.
Winds, waters and ruins press against us, break us to rubble, then build us back up.
A kiss can be a planet, a planet can be a prayer wheel, a prayer wheel can be a shiny coin in a pocket.
When is that moment during the day we live and love our brightest?
Rich Ferguson, The Currency of Certain Occurrences
This year Ali, who I chatted to about poetry last time, was there again and I was delighted when she came over to say hello and let me know that she was still enjoying dipping into my poetry book. Other conversations from new people I met included the joy of dawn chorus, the wonderful Dolly Parton, and finding time to treat yourself as kindly as you do others. I love all these things and it was good to converse with so many like-minded people.
The lodge we stayed in was in a wooded area and I was able to practice using my new head torch (perfect for watching the rabbits in the fields) as well as being immersed in the sound of dawn chorus each morning. I have been thinking about dawn chorus a lot lately. The beauty of this moment in each day, the way it becomes so magnificent at this time of year, how wonderful it feels to stand in the start of a new day or a new venture, and how it feels when darkness breaks. In celebration of all of that I will share ‘It is Not About Dawn’ from my first collection Magnifying Glass.
IT IS NOT ABOUT DAWN
It is about that moment
before the dark time breaks,
being present in the silence,
standing still in an exact moment.It is all about when that first bird sings,
first light,
the fact that there is an order
that layer upon layer
sculpts the day’s beginning.It is about discovering how long it takes
Sue Finch, HAIR BUNS AND PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES
before the crow starts to echo back
with his rough
cruck, cruck.
It seems we’ve moved from spring directly into summer, rain evaporating, temperatures rising. The tulip fields have bloomed and ended in what seemed like two weeks—cherry petals litter my lawn as lilacs bloom. It’s a topsy turvy gardener’s problem, because two weeks ago it was too cold to plant seeds and now we have to wear sunscreen when we go out to water.
This last week marked the 30th anniversary of Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, so we visited, picked up a few books, got to talk to Billie and Gabrielle and John (if you know, you know!) and after they closed, went to Seattle’s Japanese Garden to watch birds sing on top of flowers and observe summer flowers—azaleas, rhodoendrons and wisteria—taking over. […]
You may have noticed, with the return of nice weather, came the return of bird pictures to the blog. And the time has rolled around to my birthday once again. It always makes me introspective, and though I’m happy I’m getting another year on this earth (never guaranteed), the first four months of 2025 have been awfully challening, personally, financially, health-wise, and even poetry-wise. And that’s not mentioning politics or world news. It’s tough to feel like celebrating.
I did sign up for a class on essay writing and got some tickets to see Rebecca Solnit when she comes to Seattle. I’m also starting to meet with other writers again to talk about work. I’m trying to be pro-active, doing positive things with my money—choosing new charities, looking at (gulp) retirement accounts, and trying to bring in more with my writing—and trying to make new friends and build more community around me. I don’t want to ignore that I’m getting older and be too resistant to change to miss the signs that I should be doing something different.
In the meantime, I will try to pay attention to the singing bird next to me, the timing of the stars and flowers, and some of the gifts that aging brings.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Springing into Summer, Open Books, Japanese Garden, Spending $11,000 on Book PR, and Birthdays Coming Up
The poems I’ve been working on lately are about love, but also growing older. Loving the person I’ve become. Aging has never really bothered me, but I can see how the world glances side-eye at me now that I look older, for not dying my graying hair or wearing makeup to hide my wrinkles. I feel as if I’m not allowed to age as I see fit, to be menopausal, hormonal, irrational and maybe in love with all of it. Luckily, I and my poems don’t care how the world sees me and though I may complain about the aching joints, I am celebrating my newly crazy middle age.
These themes have also been popping up in my GloPoWriMo poems, the write a poem a day challenge for April.
Gerry Stewart, Aging and Love are Involuntary
The poem? I opened the trapdoor and let
the birds fly out of the poem. Not one turned
or sang goodbye. Their silence shocked the
poem. The sky shocked the birds.Then I threw the flowers out. Turned the
poem upside-down, let the water run into
the sink. It smelt of rot, of displacement.I drew clouds over the moon, unwilling
to wait till morning. Dark, smothering.
Now the poem must, perforce, find a
new source of light. Cast a new shadow.And I struck out every reference to
Rajani Radhakrishnan, It all ends at line fifty
food and drink: The poem must starve
till it becomes a tree. It must grow
roots and finds sustenance in the soil
beneath my feet. Or pray for rain.
first day of life
Grant Hackett [no title]
the moon counting
its delicate birds