This week: yellowing pears, oleander petals, the rattle of swans’ wings, the engines of our envy, and much more. Enjoy.

Last weekend at Lumb Bank a butterfly came into the cottage after dark and settled on my skirt, refused to fly away even as I walked around. Finally, it startled into a corner of my bedroom where it spent the night.

Next day I found it in the window above my writing desk. By the evening there was no sign of it.

I first came to Lumb Bank in 1998. I was in the dining room when it was announced that Ted Hughes had died. All morning, the door to the outside world kept blowing open and shut. This house has been far out at sea all night, I thought.

At Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in the early 2000s, I heard Christopher Reid perform extracts from the book of Hughes’ letters he had just edited. It was a chilly November morning, sober skies. Reid was reading a piece (from memory, I think it was a letter from Hughes to Ben Sonnerberg about the composition of Hughes’ The Jaguar) and as he got to the point in the letter where Hughes describes a bluebottle irritating him mid-poem in his room, those of us sitting close to the stage noticed a black butterfly circling Reid’s head. Very lightly, very deftly, it settled on the page of the book. A collective murmur rose from the crowd.

A black butterfly is thought to symbolise transformation, endings, and – in some traditions – a message from someone who has died. Readings vary slightly by culture: ominous in parts of Europe and Central America, auspicious in Japan, China, and the Philippines. Most modern interpretations read it as a phase closing rather than a warning (much like my understanding of the ‘death’ card in a tarot deck).

The night the Lumb Bank butterfly stayed in my room it rained with peculiar gravitas and I couldn’t sleep. It seemed as if the whole valley had been struck by something and it was ringing. The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills / Winds stampeding the fields under the window….

As I waited for morning, I thought about Hughes’ ‘blade-light…. Flexing like the lens of a mad eye’.

Helen Mort, A house at sea all night

i.m rachel blau duplessis (1941-2026)

/ i cannot face it: the diligent and scheduled day.
/ between endeavour and divide.
/ my cup runneth over. my cup becomes accustomed, is an eye.
/ what fresh hell is this? inside of which we recognise and formulate, traverse entrapment sadly.
/ a poem, aye. envoi of exhaustions. envoi of extremes.
/ to strive inside the limit and the light of it.
/ to swallow it, horoscope and gospel, down in one.
/ what is it – the necessary defect in our nature, a mercy owed to ignorance.
/ that keeps us here, softly espousing? […]

Fran Lock, AGLÆCA #2

At the Museo Nazionale Romano at Palazzo Altemps, we spend an entire slow afternoon with the Gods. There are sun-drenched terraces adorned with saffron murals of birds and plants; the sculpted stone limbs of Demeter and Apollo lounging in the high noon sun; amphorae and funerary reliefs and bones.

I am particularly drawn to Dionysus/Bacchus—always have been, with his pinecones and staff and grapes. I linger in rooms with him, wishing the sculpture would talk back to me. Like a child I covet his attention.

I have always longed for and feared the ecstatic. As a Scorpio, as a writer, I am always tugging at the precipice of ruin, peering behind its delicious curtain. I want the rush of abandon, and then I run from it. An erotic push-pull, where the threshhold is my kink.

Dionysus is the embodiment of The Me that Stretches Beyond Fear, into an erotic expanse that verges on the divine. It is the part of me that eats to excess and drinks and dances and gets lost in beauty and uses my sensuality as currency and lets go of expectation and order. Dionysus tells me to write poems, to lose my fucking mind. But it’s less about the wildness itself and more about what it takes to get there.

In Rome, the closest I get to bacchanalia is staying up late, laughing with my friend and the ghosts, drinking dark, thick wine and smoking a dozen slim Vogue cigarettes. My friend called our last night a “loopy giddy fever dream.” Dionysus would approve.

And then when things feel too heavy, I pull back on the ecstatic, march down the hill, pass through the scrim, and become good again.

Lisa Marie Basile, Missives from beautiful, bloated Rome

The academic whirlwind yanked me up into its funnel cloud this August with extra force, or so it seemed, after a sabbatical’s saner pace. Struggling with the workload, I thought with surprise, I do not want this. I definitely do not want to go to these endless workshops on how AI can help improve faculty efficiency. I want to take slow, inefficient walks in the woods, looking at mushrooms.

I was relieved, after that rush of meetings and paperwork, to settle into teaching. Preparing for class–reading, reconsidering old lesson plans (recently Rukeyser, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Plath)–I lose track of time. Running a discussion about literature or writing is all about giving texts and other humans the respect of unhurried attention.

Yet administrivia keeps pouring in, with deadlines that put firm boundaries on how much time I can give my students or my creative life. The latter involves its own administrative tasks, too: slipping a few submissions in before the windows close, checking proofs, booking a hotel for that writing festival, etc. When you get to the events, they’re often great. I LOVED the thoughtful conversation at the ecopoetry panel and reading I was a part of recently at Stone Soup Books. Blockage on the interstate, though, meant I broke speed limits getting there.

The unhurry-able process of writing, revising, and working to get poems in front of audiences has fruited lately, as a reminder of where rumination can lead.

Lesley Wheeler, Snailing along in the moonlight

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my Substack” if I’d get a different reaction, as that seems to be where the cool kids blog, at the moment. I had a podcast for a while, and a friend actually jokes about NOT listening to the podcast, as if I’d think that was funny, and I do fake-laugh just to make it okay. (But you know what, it’s not really okay.) In spite of this particular long-winded all-about-me blather of a post, some of my best works comes out on this blog: mini-essays, some, or prose poems, others. Not all of them, by any means. But as it turns out, this is my writing practice, this blog. Much to my surprise. And it won’t make me known to the world and has not garnered me many readers and will not turn into a published book, and I can’t turn around and try to publish these mini-essays/prose poems in lit mags because this blog is considered a published thing, and therefore no longer shiny new for most lit mags. I’m just pausing here to give myself credit for this practice. Turns out practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes purpose. It makes sanity. It makes a small grace. And I pause to thank you for reading.

Marilyn McCabe, It may be that when we no longer know what to do

A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:

thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl

In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:

The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.

As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.

[…]

I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.

Matthew Paul, September

As I was reading blog posts from past Septembers, I came across this fascinating poem possibility in this post from September 18, 2024:  “As I’ve been puttering this morning, I thought, I should write a poem with the title “Hildegarde of Bingen Forgets Her Feast Day.” The poem could go in several possible directions: she forgets because she is busy, she forgets because it no longer matters, she forgets because she has dementia.”  I went back to my files, and if I composed this poem, I didn’t do it on the computer.

Chances are good that I did nothing with this idea because a few days later, I was dealing with the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which left us without power for roughly 9 days, without internet for roughly a month, and boiling water until early December.  Again and again, I am a bit whipsawed when I think about all we have managed to survive.

Deep breaths–let me do something with poetry before it’s time to get ready for church–or just sit here and breathe deeply.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Guardians of Lesser Galaxies

At the beginning of 2023, I had my gallbladder taken out due to the presence of a stone so impressive that a someone from the surgical team came to find me afterwards to tell me she’d never seen anything like it. Naturally, I asked to keep it. They said no, but left it in a tube within my reach for a suspiciously long time. That same week, I discovered the poetry of Irish poet Eavan Boland. What a pair of gifts that week gave me. One of them looks better on the shelf, though. [photo]

The poem I came across first was The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me, and it stopped me in my tracks. For context, I read a lot of poems. Like, a lot. I’m also relatively easy to please, poetically speaking, which means that I read a lot of poems I like, like, a lot. It’s lovely. But very occasionally, I read a poem I can’t get out of my head, that I am compelled to play on repeat for weeks or months like I did in 1992 with my cassette of the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack (Jason Donovan version, obvs). I assume this happens to everyone (the poetry thing, not Joseph). I can never figure out exactly what the magic is that makes a poem shoot into my favourites like this, but maybe it’s more poetic that I don’t know. Either way, I fell hard for this one. […]

It’s possible that, in 2023, having had a small object recently removed, I was more than usually open to the idea of the enormity of tiny things. But I’m no less enchanted by this poem now than I was then. This collection, by 1990 already something like Boland’s seventh, is teeming with objects and specifics – her mother’s stockpot, a mug with a hunting scene, the ‘sugar-barley iron of a garden chair’ – which ground and colour the broad profundities and classical allusions that lie in seams in these poems. You won’t mistake this for cosy, domestic poetry. It uses those themes to tell us about women, and writing, and Ireland, and love, and the past, and the now. It’s remarkable writing, and I’m so happy to have spent time with it this week.

Eavan Boland only died in 2020, after a stellar career. I wish I’d found her earlier. But I’ve been making up for it and she’ll be making more appearances on this Substack. The gallstone, thankfully, will not.

Nia Broomhall, Week 27: Outside History

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away.

Ann E. Michael, Re-reading, re-learning

For Rachel Blau Duplessis,

Blue, legion. Drafts. A polyvocal entry. One’s ear, to lend. A visual, daily practice. Days and works and days. Cartographic, the position of collage. This vanishing point. A sure cure, applied. Categories. So necessary, membrane. How big a threat? What, temporality. How grand, this arrangement of stars. Encompassed. The onset, journey. Heart, and blood, and facts. An ocean. The structural divisions of trees, thin lines of fence. How redundant the aesthetic. Leaves tarnish, fall, and then. Thus, exegesis. These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus.

rob mclennan, seven poems from a new project,

“Up//Roar” is the follow up to “Joy//Us Poems of Queer Joy” also published by Arachne. Whereas the latter celebrated, the new anthology encompasses poems for bleaker times, although that’s not to say the poems are bleak or full of doom and gloom, there is a celebration of allyship and resistance. As the introduction points out even in 2026 some families still cannot welcome the spouse/partner of departed loved ones because they’d prefer to erase the departed’s love life. […]

“Up//Roar” brings together a wide range of queer voices, all celebrating resistance and strength gained from being true to oneself however that may to look to other people. It’s a timely reminder that currently there is still discrimination and exclusion faced by LGBTQ+ communities. But here are also glimmers of light within the darkness that come from shared experiences and ways of owning being the outcast. Humans should not be forced to pretend to be something they are not or suppress major parts of themselves to “fit-in”. Let the hyenas not change their spots, “Up//Roar” is a necessary demonstration that hyenas should find their pack and not shiver in isolation.

Emma Lee, “Up//Roar Poems of Queer Resistance” edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon (Arachne Press) – book review

The publication of Path means that, at last, the entire body of [Chris] Torrance’s 50-year engagement with The Magic Door is now available. Sort of. Unfortunately, the Test Centre volume is out of print with the occasional copy being sold online at funny-money prices, and the original individual volumes are collectors’ items, rarely surfacing at any price. And even the Test Centre edition excluded The Book of Heat, as it was originally written for performance. The inclusion of performance pieces here (RORI and Frinite) in Path would seem to indicate a change of heart on that front.

The Magic Door/Path is one of the most important long poems in British poetry of the last 50 years, and needs to be available to readers in its entirety. Now that we have the conclusion, we really need a reprint of the full pre-Path text, including The Book of Heat. Meanwhile, I urge you to read this book, whether you are familiar with the earlier parts or not. Torrance is quite simply a vital, important, dare I say major poet. We owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Maillard for keeping his work alive and to Aquifer for publishing this book.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

In an excellent prefatory essay to the Clay Sanskrit Library edition of the Gitagovinda (translated and also introduced by Lee Seigel), Sudipta Kaviraj very neatly summarises what Jayadeva achieves in these songs:

Jayadeva composed in an astonishing form of Sanskrit in which the visible marks of its complex grammar are so minimally used that it became intelligible, almost without residue, to a much wider audience of vernacular readers. Literary skill obliterates the formal boundaries between different natural languages. It is an ironically democratised Sanskrit which can be read and enjoyed by those who do not know it. It is a strange bridge language and it is a text that lies at the crossing and therefore joins the literary world of Sanskrit and of several vernaculars.

I think it’s fair to say that none of the translations I’ve quoted so far really come anywhere close to suggesting this extraordinary blend of tradition and innovation: a newly transparent and accessible style which nevertheless draws upon the long history of kāvya. Recently I received a review copy of Inderjeet Mani’s new version of the Gitagovinda. This is a very different approach to the text, which draws in particular upon a long-standing tradition of understanding the Gitagovinda as a kind of drama. Mani’s version isn’t a close translation at all but I admire the way it incorporates elements from the long tradition of commentary on and performance of the poem into the English text. 

Victoria Moul, Translating and re-translating the Gitagovinda

(Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)
The three peaks stand like flags piercing the sky.
Forested landscapes hide ponds, and streams
breathe a mist of autumnal clouds.
In the dense undergrowth, oleander petals
sequester light. He pauses, wondering how different
the smell of the earth is—the wild fragrance of long pepper
from coiled creepers. Purple Chironji berries
crunch under his feet, squishy pulp
yeilds crisp kernels his family cherishes.

(From Sarga 2)

I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.

Uma Gowrishankar, What the Land Unfolds

Readers familiar with these reviews will be aware that Indigo Dreams Publishing has established a strong reputation for poetry collections of consistently high quality. Zoe Brooks’s Something in Nothing (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2026) is a particularly compelling addition to its list, and one that is likely to stand among the most significant collections of the year. In this highly original volume, Brooks recontextualises figures from traditional fairy tales within contemporary social and political landscapes, using their familiar narratives to examine brutality, misogyny and the forms of violence that remain embedded within modern society.

One of the central figures in this reworking is Bluebeard, whom Brooks presents as a serial predator targeting vulnerable women. In Bluebeard’s Girls, she writes: ‘The first was a stepdaughter/ that nobody wanted. The second was a girl/ who knew how to give but not to take./ The third was a girl/ arms as wide as Clapham Junction. /The fourth was a girl/ you would step over quickly.’ The women are characterised as isolated and socially marginal, their vulnerability rendering them susceptible to exploitation. Brooks’s use of the phrasing and rhythms of nursery counting rhymes is especially significant: a form conventionally associated with childhood innocence and play is placed in tension with Bluebeard’s predatory violence, producing a chilling effect. At the same time, Brooks resists any tendency to blame the victims. Instead, she exposes the social attitudes that enable their erasure. In Bluebeard Likes to Entertain, these women are described as ‘like puppies/ that need drowning./ The sort of women/ that no one will miss.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Something in Nothing’ by Zoe Brooks

Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival is compulsively readable, if overly speculative. I’m glad to learn more about Marlowe’s love life and spy activities. Some of the comparisons between him and Shakespeare are telling. One was so reckless by temperament, the other so cautious. One became a gentleman via university education though from the working class; the other never went to university but managed to buy a title from his theater earnings. Because so little is really known about Marlowe, the book is as much about his contemporaries as him.

In The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, Nicholas Jenkins makes a convincing case for how the early Auden was preoccupied by the place of national belonging in modern identities. The impact of WWI and its aftermath on young Auden is nicely documented, as is his complicated desire to heal and restore English culture and tradition (Edward Thomas, Hardy, Graves, Owen). Jenkins’s writing is somewhat repetitive. The 537 pages could usefully have been reduced to 400, but the book is a hoard of striking details and insightful criticism of Auden’s major early poems.

Jee Leong Koh, Two Biographies

[Walter Savage] Landor was an interesting figure — a man as definitively out of time as any in English literature: an 18th-century Augustan, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his talent constrained.

One sign of the genuineness of the talent is the fact that other poets have always appreciated his work. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the industrial remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, or “Mild is the Parting Year.”

And then there are the two verses by Landor we look at today: “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and “Dirce.” A strict cataloger might argue that these are not precisely epigrams but simply brief poems, lacking the teaching element of an adage. Our sense of poetic brevity, however, has been shaped by centuries of epigrams. We read these verses from Landor in an epigrammatical way, and rightly so, as both have the power to stick in memory, which is the first quality necessary for a well-made epigram. And they have the second necessary quality for a satisfying epigram, which snaps closed like a well-made box.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The English Epigram

For Persuasion, I wrote about the recent brouhaha over the Princeton English syllabus. Yes, the syllabus has a lot of socialism, but the real problem, to my rather antiquated mind, is what it doesn’t have. The trend in so many places now is to require English majors to take only a single course pre-1700. So almost everything from Beowulf to Absalom and Achitophel becomes optional.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

Henry Oliver, My plea to English students.

Before I made the long, agonising (!) move into academia I worked as a court transcript editor in London for nine years. I actually trained as a stenographer, on a Kombu-green antique steno machine which stamped letters onto a roll of paper, like a silent miniature typewriter. Stenotype is machine shorthand; each keystroke completes one syllable of a word. Your left fingers, in combination, produce the beginning consonant, your thumbs the middle vowel sound and the fingers of your right hand the ending consonant. So ‘crossfire’ would be two strokes: ‘K R O S’, then, on the line blow, ‘T P AO EU R’. There aren’t enough keys for one per letter, so ‘tp’ represents the ‘f’ sound, whole ‘AO EU’ is a long ‘i’.

Anyway, I switched to editing transcripts because it meant more money in the short term (far less in the long term, but I hadn’t planned to stay on the job quite as long as I did). As an editor, I worked alongside some of the best stenographers in the world — that is, I literally sat next to them in court — and cleaned up the transcript as it emerged on my computer screen, typing in sections that had been missed due to mumbling or over-speaking (of which there is a lot in UK trials and tribunals), sorting out the spellings of names and specialist terms, and keeping a log of anything we would need to ask about or research in order for the transcript to be as accurate as possible. It was surprisingly gruelling work — often upwards of 200 pages a day — and I permanently damaged the nerves in my arms doing it, because most of the courts and rooms we worked in were not designed with ergonomic seating in mind.

I collected dozens of poems about or inspired by aspects of the cases we covered, and published hardly any of them. There’s one about the usefulness of the en-dash that appeared in Asterism: An Anthology of Poems Inspired by Punctuation, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut and published by Laudanum Books. And then there’s this, which was published in the first (and, thus far, only) issue of Cambridge Poetry, edited by Dan Leighton — which, by the way, is as comprehensive a snapshot of the current Cambridge poetry scene as you’re likely to find in print.

Like many other poems from that era, it’s about 96% collage. All of the questions are questions which were asked in various court cases, and all of the answers are taken from newspaper reports on accidental fires, with the word ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ substituted in for ‘fire’ and ‘fires’. ‘Cross’ is short for ‘cross-examination’ in lawyer parlance, so ‘Crossfire’ (with an implied colon between the two parts of the word) would mean cross-examination of fire. The plan is to collect these and other court poems up into a little zine at some point. That zine will be part of a series of zines that collect and organise work from the unpublished book I mentioned back in this post from October.

Jon Stone, POEM / Crossfire

Dear poets and friends. Most of you know that I am still “young” by some standards. Last February I turned 42. My husband and I live together with 2 cats, but no kids. We are childless by choice and this has given us a certain level of freedom that some people give up as they age. For example, a few years ago, we sort of spontaneously left our apartment in Los Angeles to go live in Costa Rica for 3 years.

Still, time and family obligations have caught up with us. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time care-taking for my aging parents, helping them make and keep dr. appointments, do their laundry, and trim back some of the trees in their beautifully overgrown front yard.

This has all gotten me thinking about both my relationship with my parents (naturally) and also my own mortality. I always knew that I was going to get older, in theory. . . but now it’s starting to feel real. I could go on about that (and I will in my own poetry-writing), but for now I just want to say that the 2 poems below really hit me where I live lately. I’m extremely grateful to each poet, Amy Small McKinney and Susan Michele Coronel for giving me a kind of language to use to start addressing these issues.

Tresha Faye Haefner, 2 Poems I Needed To Read Today

To be found as a shiny coordinate in the star-chart for lightning bugs on summer nights.

To be found and saved from the searing screech of sirens.

To be found as an escapee from an oracle hushed into tremble.

To be found sleeping in a calm so deep you can hear the trees breathe.

Rich Ferguson, To be found

[T]his week has been somewhat knocked off kilter by having my phone stolen in Shoreditch on Monday night. It’s partially my own fault for being too trusting, but some cheeky fucker ran off with my phone…And I couldn’t catch them. I don’t know what I’d have been able to do even if I’d caught them, so it was perhaps a pointless pursuit.

Not much more i can do, remind me to take out the phone insurance next time, yeah.

Anyhoo, this week has also been buoyed up by reading my copy of Andrew Jamison’s Swans We Cannot See  (You have sighed up for his newsletter, yeah? Go on. I’ll wait, etc). If I had a phone I’d take a picture of the folded over corners of pages for all the poems to come back to..And look, I’ve rattled through the book a bit quicker than usual this week without my phone being present, so perhaps a digital detox is on the cards, but take my word for it..I’ve turned over a lot of corners in this book. […]

Andrew writes movingly about being a parent, a husband, he writes beautifully about place, and to my mind a bit about being/feeling out of place back where you originate from…perhaps it’s displacement??? Perhaps it’s just me. NB You should also check out his epic potato poem in the book.

Mat Riches, A Drunk Octopus Behind The Pink Doors of Perception

[James] Dickey makes two big choices in the title and the first line. As titles go, “Adultery” is anything but subtle, regardless of where you feel it lands in the pantheon of sins. It’s jarring because it’s unexpected as the subject of a poem, especially if you’re not a wide reader. When I’ve taught this poem in the past, students have occasionally asked why write about this. They’re used to less messy love poems, or at least they think those other poems are less messy, but that’s another conversation.

The second big choice Dickey makes is to implicate the reader in the first lines. “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad.” My first thought when reading those lines, even now, is no we haven’t all been in those rooms. It’s the way he’s so casual about assuming that which carries the force for me, the way he reduces this sin of betrayal to something everyone has done, how he’s so matter-of-fact about it before going into this description of the bland, unchallenging cheap hotel room art that’s there mostly to fill space on the walls.

But it’s in that description where we first get to see some sense of guilt, which is the emotion that will drive the rest of this poem.

Brian Spears, “Adultery” by James Dickey

Do you know the long poems of David W. McFadden? I’ve always loved how they ramble, surprised at how they unfold and where they go. How strange, ironic, intelligent, tongue-in-cheek yet profoundly moving they are. They understand affect and composing with connotation, sentiment, form, narrative, beauty, and surprise. Over the last few days, I somehow felt compelled to write this sad poem about two brothers in a horse costume and I was thinking of David’s long poems.

Gary Barwin, Lament for Horse Costume: Tragic Novel in Two Parts

The Ancient Futures issue of Sage Magazine, a print publication from Yale’s School of the Environment, recently arrived in the mail as a beautiful, stitched book containing my poem, ‘The Woolly Kind,’ following an open call last autumn. The unique formatting in the pages below was done by the graduate students on the magazine’s design team. It’s a bit hard to read on screen, so I’ll include a plain text version at the end.

I wrote this persona poem several years ago after Colossal Biosciences announced it was planning to bring the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), back from extinction by 2028. In August, the company revised its timeframe, stating it might take until the 2030s. My poem imagines life from the perspective of this future creature.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Ancient Futures, Recent News

My bottle of ‘Glimmers’ pills came the other day and I was truly filled with joy at the sight of this little prescription with its contents of glimmering moments. What an honour to be one of the 26 poets selected to feature in this small but powerful collection.

Each morning for the past week I’ve been tipping out one at random and every single one has been a gorgeous gem (and a super way to start the day!). You can get hold of a bottle of ‘Glimmers’ through The Poetry Pharmacy’s website Here.

And if you’d like to have a little peak at some of the poems you can find out more about the project and read some editors picks in The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’ Newsletter.

Here’s my Glimmer

Branches raise fingers to sky—ask for a blessing of leaves;
ground is still wet with winter, sun rests her hands on my
shoulders, and a warbler hymns from the silver birch. Dear
Spring: eat me, swallow me whole, a seed into moist earth.

Rachael Hill, A Glimmer

The poems in “The Basement Stacks” have been about memory from the beginning of the series. An image or phrasing or action from one poem leads to the next piece, and so on. Part 10 helped me as a writer make some discoveries about myself, or at least remember things I’d forgotten. Writing, in any form, can have that wonderful outcome.

This new poem grew from my thoughts about the boxes in the stairwell in part 10. In the new piece I was following the imagery as I’ve done with all the pieces. There are many possibilites with each poem that could lead to any number of new pieces, but my process is to follow the first moment in a poem that speaks to me in a direct way, and the next poem find its own way.

“The Basement Stacks” is projected as one section of a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled “Portraits”. That’s an extremely uncreative title, but it does, in its own way, reveal clearly the subject matter of its pages. In the series and ms, most imagery and action originate in reality, but some have worked their way into the pieces by necessity, by a kinship to or a reflection of the truth. Even those few parts that are fictional are connected to the truth in some way. And here I’m thinking of Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 11”

Tradition offers explanations for why this piece of Torah is written in this way. To me what’s striking is the visual prosody — the way the shape of the poem sings a particular kind of song in my consciousness. The open space gives each line a caesura, a pause. I read the words differently, and feel them differently, because of the space between them. So that’s how I wrote this week’s poem: with pauses in each line. More white space / white fire, imbued with silent meaning, holding the words’ black fire.

This one’s kind of in the same vein as the poems in Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda). When I shared my new year’s poem just before Rosh Hashanah, my friend Mary Ann — who has known me since we were in seventh grade — said, “You always could write a hell of a love poem.” The older we get, the more (I think) we become ourselves. It’s funny, and sweet, and a little poignant, for me to see reflected in her eyes the fact that this isn’t new. This is how I am, maybe even more so in my 50s than I was before.

Rachel Barenblat, For Ha’azinu

‘John Rae and the Northern Telegraph’ was part visitation, part rethinking of his expedition. Music was commissioned from Scottish composers Stuart MacRae and Ailie Robertson, Eli Tausen á Lava from the Faroe Islands, and Arnanguaq Gerstrøm from Greenland. We worked independently and were given an open brief. Stuart MacRae considered the conflicting thoughts that might have filled Rae’s mind, a bit older now, leaving his new wife. ‘I imagine the form of the music as a line of communication,’ he said; ‘one idea suggesting another, passing on its energy to a different musical expression, in one direction, always transforming but never returning to the source.’ Ailie Robertson intertwined the ends of the route in a back-and-forth of laments and melodies based on Greenlandic beaded yokes. Arnanguaq Gerstrøm structured her piece around the breathing patterns and ornamented tones of traditional singers, with the mechanical pulse of the telegraph’s clicks and codes rising and fading like static. To prepare to compose, Eli Tausen á Lava walked the Faroese section of the proposed route, south to north. John Rae walked many thousands of miles on foot and in snow shoes : ‘Through this cold, unromantic labour, there comes some kind of understanding of the world’. Eli’s piece became a contemporary meditation on pilgrimage, of undergoing a hard physical journey in order to bring on an inner transformation.

In his substack last week, Don [Paterson] talked about the process of collaboration, in all its nitty gritties: ‘Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air’. On the night of the performance, yes: the poems, at a practical level, created distance, carrying the audience from one deep auditory reverie into the next. In these beautiful pieces I heard skeins of geese and the rattle of swans’ wings, foot crunch, threads of singing, odd strings of Morse. All art aspires to the condition of music, said Walter Pater: there is an immediate intuition of (some kind of) meaning, an immediate impact on the emotions. In between, the words, gleaned from real people and real places, pinned us back to our place on the planet : here, in these north islands, in this old kirk, watching the weather coming. ‘It seems to me,’ said Mann’s Dr Faustus, ‘that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits … I am devoted to it with all my heart’.

But something else happened too. In the St Magnus Cathedral, this continual transformation that Stuart described was vivid, almost tactile. Music in a mediaeval Romanesque/Gothic cathedral was intended to overwhelm, in the best sense of the word. The building’s internal proportions – the high, tiny windows, the placing of its columns, galleries and vaults – were intended to amplify unaccompanied voices, and create a rolling sound that would wash through its spaces like waves in the sea. Standing in the transept below the high central tower, it was as if we were placing the words and music into the air, letting them swell and breathe on their own.

Lesley Harrison, The Northern Telegraph

As part of the UEA Welcome activities last week, I led a “Word Walk” around campus, where we stopped to consider the roots and history of nouns we encountered, guided by Emerson’s observation that “Language is fossil poetry”. The walk zig-zagged interdisciplinarily between architecture (“concrete”), natural history (“butterfly”, “birch”), maths (“extrapolation”), and chemistry (“gas”, “helium”), before ending up at art history, with an Ancient Egyptian carved figurine of a frog in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Looking up the etymology of “frog” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I learned a new word: “hypocoristic”.

Ultimately related to Old English frosc and its cognates in other Germanic languages, although the nature of the relationship is uncertain; the present word was probably originally an alteration of frosc as a result of association with docga dog n.1 […] in which the geminate consonant perhaps originally had a hypocoristic motivation (< Greek ὑποκόρισμα, ‑κορισμός pet-name, < ὑποκορίζεσθαι to play the child, use terms of endearment)

The OED entry on the mysterious origins of “dog” is a lesson in philology itself. What I understand from the above, though, is that the written words “frogge” and “dogge” (the vowel-shortening double “g” is the “geminate consonant”) began as spoken terms, for which the “hypocoristic motivation” was that of the pet name: the playful diminutive applied to the familiar creature. And “frog” perhaps — though this is my own speculation — was an association formed through the rhyme it makes with “dog”.

For Gertrude Stein, this is the felt life of language and naming that eventually becomes formalised as poetry. In her essay “Poetry and Grammar”, she writes:

Think of how you talk to anything whose name is new to you a lover a baby or a dog or a new land or any part of it. Do you not inevitably repeat what you call out and is that calling out not of necessity in short lines. Think about it and you will see what I mean by what you feel.

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.

That’s not exactly how I put it below, in 2005. But it arrives at the same idea via a different route: that to read poetry, you start with the words, and listen for the feeling. To quote the epigraph from Nijinsky’s diary that begins “Friends”, the John Ashbery poem that I discuss here: “I like to speak in rhymes, because I am a rhyme myself.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Frog and Dog

I’m editing, editing. What could I do for break? I know…word games. There’s re-w-or-d-a-ble. (Not a sponsorship endorsement but word geek fun.) What else?

What do I like? Let’s see, poetry, remixing, chance operations, corpus studies, Good Omens and making stuff.

I have 5 sets of magnetic poetry. What if I made a Good Omens one? Which words are keyword bingo troped? I brainstormed some.

I have a base set, a gardening set, a CanLit set, a French base set, and some yellowed ones that I’m not sure what they were from. One of the sets came with blanks. And I have a labelmaker. We have a plan. 

So I made a thing. 

Pearl Pirie, Good Omens Magnetic Poetry

On the evening of the day we move I have to teach a step class and Nick has to take a choir rehearsal. So no putting our feet up that evening!  Then waking up the next day, clambering over boxes and hoping the boiler/shower/hob are all working…. wish us luck!

Obviously I don’t have a lot of time to noodle around on the blog. But I did want to mention these literary hoaxes that are doing the rounds. Maybe I’ve come late to this particular party. A few months ago I got an email from someone claiming to have read ‘The Golden Rules of Blogging’ and asking if I was up for any other projects with the publishing house she claimed to represent. I confess I fell for it rather stupidly – I looked up the sender on LinkedIn and she appeared to have a legitimate profile there, but I did think it very odd for her to pick up on a book that’s over ten years old. So I replied, albeit in a cagey manner. That’s when the penny dropped – another gushy email came back right away, and I recognised the purple prose of a crude AI bot. I’m happy to say I’m not the first to fall for it – for example here’s Julie Broad of Book Launchers telling her story. 

A week or so later came another similar email, this time allegedly from a professor at a West Country university who claimed he ran a literary festival and would be honoured to have me featured there! Woohoo! Except the ‘festival’ was starting the very next week, and the professor turned out to be a real person, but actually a professor of engineering. Since then the emails have arrived on a regular basis. It’s the present-day version of those misspelt email scams from twenty years ago. 

Robin Houghton, New beginnings and literary hoaxes

For the uninitiated, here is a quick overview of how publishing a book of poetry works:

Most poets don’t have agents (unless you are Billy Collins or James Franco and already important OR independently wealthy). The vast majority of poetry books are published via Book-Length Contests or Open Reading Periods, and even the biggest poetry press is typically a small indie or university press with only a few people running it and even less money keeping it afloat. Sending in your manuscript may happen in April, with nothing but crickets until Christmas, and the contests aren’t free – most charge $25, with the most expensive running around $35.

What do you get if you win? Maybe a $1000 prize, a few poetry readings, or free copies of the book, distribution to some indie bookstores, some universities inviting you to come give a reading.

No one will stop you on the street for an autograph – even the most famous living poet is not famous outside of poetry circles, and likely your book will be forgotten in a month or, worse, never even heard of. Ever.

Yet, the competition is steep – which makes me love Poets all the more. We are such a ridiculous, starry-eyed set! […]

The numbers can seem daunting, but, as I let my fourth-collection drift around the contest circuit, what all this tells me is that one rejection means basically nothing, that I need to be sending more places, and that I must persist.

Those numbers also remind me that every poetry book I adore came from the efforts of a poet who kept sending out their work despite the tiny odds and minuscule rewards because they believed their poems needed to find their readers.

Renee Emerson, Poetry Manuscript Contests

I remain the sort of poet who doesn’t get asked to do paid gigs, has never been published in reputable literary journals and has no book deal, but now I am the sort of poet who is resigned to that fate, and is enjoying a presence on the internet, and occasional publication in fabulous mags and websites that admittedly might not be quite as reputable as the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. As a consequence of that resignation, I am a lot less worried about reading at open mics. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to get up from time to time, and I still want to make an impact on the occasions when I do. But I have developed some strategies to avoid getting my knickers in a twist about it. Sometimes they actually work. I am not suggesting that they would work for anyone else. But they help me. Here they are.

One. I try hard not to care about how my reading will be received. I’m not going to put myself into that position of worry. When it’s my turn to read, I’m going to get up, say a few words, read my piece and get off.

Two. I’m going to do one, and only one poem, no haggling over a second, third or (God forbid) a forth one. I’ll save those for the rare occasions when I am actually asked to do a set. People haven’t come to see me at an open mic – I should have a bit of humility.

Three. When I am done, I should sit down, still my beating heart and do my best to forget about it. I can save the in depth analysis with Gary Lineker and Ian Wright for when I get home.

Four. I try to listen properly to the other readers. Not using them as yardsticks to compare myself to, but for who they are.

If you are a poet who regularly attends open mics, perhaps you do all of these things naturally. Perhaps you have always approached open mic in this manner. If so, I salute you. It’s hard work for a big headed egotist like myself to cultivate such an attitude. There is also the attendant worry of appearing arrogant, as if open mics are “beneath me” if I don’t get up, or appear too flippant when I do. Perhaps I overthink everything, but I don’t think that I am alone in such mental struggles.

Mike O’Brien, How to Enjoy a Poetry Open Mic

We read our work at the open mics, and this past Saturday I shared “Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan” for the first time. I didn’t realize how well it would play to a live audience, and I think it may become part of my memorized rotation for readings. After the event, Midge Goldberg and I were trying to describe to Tom the Aussie the tradition of singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” in the middle of 8th innings at Fenway Park.

I remember workshopping this poem during my residency, and someone complained about how many baseball references there were. Now that I’ve read it out loud I think I have regrets about not mentioning something about my mother bringing us home. I see a revision in the future! Good idea? Bad idea? Please be opinionated in comments.

I’ve pulled the poem out of the drawer every so often for over the past year, but 2026 is the 20th anniversary of my father’s death and September would have been my parents’ 53rd wedding anniversary. I decided that it was a good time to fly it out to journals, and it landed on the very first try.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan

The bookshops that impress me have “Short stories” sections. They’re mostly in Dublin, though the Amnesty International shop in Cambridge and Saffron Walden’s Oxfam shop have story sections. The Oxfam bookshop in Islington doesn’t have one, though it has a section for “Literary Magazines” – Acumen, Pennine Platform, etc.

Blackwells in Oxford has a “poetry pamphlets” section.

“Poetry” shelves often have an “Anthologies” section. The Islington bookshop has that, and also has a section I’ve never seen before – “Contemporary Poetry” – which includes pamphlets and many slim volumes. It makes sense to display the spineless pamphlets in boxes – it makes browsing easier, like fingering through LPs in the olden days.

Tim Love, Bookshops – specialist shelves

The CBe edition of Testimony by Charles Reznikoff, all 608 pages of it, has gone to print. A longish piece by me on Reznikoff will be in the imminent new issue of The Little Review (£5 for 176 pages: ridiculously good value). For a reading of the whole of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London next spring I applied last June for funding (for costs including gallery hire, video-recording, etc.), and I learned this week I didn’t get it. I spent a long time over that application; it was a beautiful application. But the reading will happen.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter September 2026

The neighborhood paper, which has little to report beyond the struggles of the city council, school board, and high school sports teams, informs us of an upcoming event: a tour of the city’s fanciest houses, built by men of wealth and ambition at the turn of the previous century. Why we tour such places—to gawk, to lust, to covet—is a mystery I’ve contemplated more than once. Here is one such contemplation.

[…]

Guidebooks lapse into silence on the sins
that undergird their granite disciplines:

the dark red sandstone brooding on the hill
over the history of a steel-spiked will
that built and built and never had enough—
a public treasure now, it rules the bluff
and makes us marvel at our rush to own
the memory of the men it turned to stone.

Which we preserve, the robber baron’s guilt
being gilded by the loveliness he built.
As for a feast day, every year we come
to hear the engines of our envy hum,
sighing for beauties, knowing what they meant.
Not quite complicit. Not quite innocent.

Maryann Corbett, “to hear the engines of our envy hum . . .”

Had you heard of “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” when you were eleven? I had not. I’m not even sure I had heard of Keats. My main poetry experience was Pam Ayres’ “I wish I’d looked after my teeth” (which I still think is wonderful, whatever the poetry overlords say) and a smattering of Patience Strong. My old and very posh art teacher was astonished at my ignorance. The memory of her astonishment pops into my head as autumn tiptoes in. Light recedes day by day, the air I breathe when I let the cat out (and in and out and in) in the morning has a faint chill, the smells change from sun warmed jasmine and barbecues to damp leaves and bonfires. Mists begin to wrap the morning, and supermarkets proclaim the arrival of “British season apples” which implies mellow fruitfulness exists somewhere. I’ll miss the light of summer but autumn brings the gift of time. The garden takes less attention, people stop having barbecues and other social excitements, trips out are replaced by staying in and watching Ludwig. More than anything, it brings me the time and energy to write. If you’re familiar with Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory you’ll know exactly what I mean. […]

Poetry has slipped to one side for a while. I’ve a new Poetry School course starting soon which I know will spark the poetic light again, but overall I’ve found I’m just not as excited as I was. I’ve reached a point of stasis. The giddy excitement of being selected to be one of Nine Arches Press Dynamo poets, learning that I could have work published and actually seeing my words and name in print has moved to one side. I’ve reached all the goals I set myself way back in 2018. I’m published in magazines including my goal of goals which was to be in Under the Radar. I’ve published two books, entered and been shortlisted for various prizes and I’m not sure where poetry will take me next. I’m not putting poetry aside forever; notes are still being made, the mysteries of the sestina still thrill and baffle me and I’m still writing poetry for wedding readings, which brings a joy all of its own.

As well as travel writing I’m dipping back into short fiction. I love creating worlds inspired by a photograph or picture (old postcards are especially exciting) and am acutely aware of the place all those poetry skills have in creating them. It’s a genre I haven’t worked in since my first forays (back) into creative writing and I’m hoping the quiet months of autumn and winter mean I’ll have time and energy to rejuvenate my skills.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Shine the sun and rain the rain

When I have seen jays before I have often caught of a glimpse of them as they have flown across short spaces within forest areas and I have always felt lucky to catch this rare flash of their distinct feathers. The one this week, in my own garden, caught my attention as I was settling to work at my laptop. On being observed it flew from the wall and thudded to a stop on the roof above me. I went outside to take a closer look, but it had already moved on by the time I got outside. The ginger cat had been watching me one night as I was unloading the tumble dryer in the back porch. I felt that wonderful sense of being lifted from my own world because I was being observed in a kind and curious way. And there studying me was the lovely solid looking cat that has recently been sleeping in a sheltered spot in our garden. We blinked at each other and then, as I smiled at the thought of being noticed whilst doing a boring but necessary job, off he went.

I am sort of making a note to self to notice more things on my daily walk and this brings to mind the fact that it feels like a solid fitness thing to do at this time of year when compared to the lightness of taking the same walk in spring when the daffodils are emerging. Photos at this time of year also seem to be of solid things like tree trunks against the sky or cows so maybe I will look for the light as I stroll out and see where it is that I find it in this new Autumn. I know it was in the sunrise and sunset of Saturday into Sunday, and I know those two studied views gladdened my heart.

Sue Finch, GLANCES, GLIMPSES AND OBSERVATIONS

This is our life, made of small
moments. Hearing the call

of a bird, resonant
as a bell, longing

and desire become
indistinguishable.

Luisa A. Igloria, Occasional

“I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” This was Annie Dillard quoting Vincent Van Gogh. Even though VVG said it, I’ll always connect the quotation to her. The way that a person looking at the intricate beauty of the world and interpreting it in the way only they can, is also an act of heartbreak. And for credibility’s sake, there is always bad news right beside the news of the beauty of the world. Thus heartbreak. Thus utterly.

Shawna Lemay, Because it is September

I had just been talking to a friend about how our social habits changed during the pandemic, and how I was so much less social than I used to be. Well not this week! Besides visiting with my farmer friends at the various pumpkin farms, we also had our Bookwalter’s Wine and Book Club, where we discussed Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. People were really taken by it, and I noticed this time around (I hadn’t re-read in a little while) the huge Bowie connection in the poems, and listened to the songs that were referenced. I was aware of Bowie as a kid but I think I mostly remember a couple of his later songs, but of course my main crush was Prince, who wasn’t quite as interested in space. Then the next day we had our poetry group, which was wonderful as usual and we talked about submission opportunities and shared poems and Glenn’s gluten-free red pepper and goat cheese pizza, and pumpkin cheesecake, and I ate more than my share of Witch’s Finger grapes (another seasonal favorite! And we’re even coordinating a pumpkin farm visit and maybe movie get-together. After being so sick back in 2016-17 and then the pandemic, this feels more like my life used to be. Did I mention I have updated my resume and will be job hunting as well?

Good News to Share…Soon

Do you hate when people in the writing world tease good news they can’t share? Me too. That’s why I’m definitely not saying that I got good news that I can share soon, and I have to say that after a period of discouragement with the poetry world, it’s nice to have a little good news in a while, right?

I’ve also been writing more poems and sending out more work. That’s September’s magic – unwrapping new pens, setting up new spreadsheets, a little more motivation to keep going, especially on the days when it’s in the sixties and sunny and the hummingbirds are still busy at the last burst of September blooms.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! And How Many Pumpkin Farms, Social Week, and Good News to Come!

糸瓜忌の紅茶に消ゆる角砂糖　秋元不死男

hechima-ki no kōcha ni kiyuru kakuzatō

            Shiki’s Death Day
            a lump of sugar disappears
            into tea

                                    Fujio Akimoto

from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006

Fay’s Note: Fujio Akimoto (1901-1977). Shiki Masaoka (b 1867) died on September 19, 1902.  Because his death haiku was about ‘hechima (gourd),” his death anniversary is called “hechima-ki.”

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 19, 2026)

The poet called this morning. My electricity had just gone out and I was plotting my next move in the dark. “Is it a good time to speak?” he said. I ran through a quick itinerary of pressing issues in my head with a rotating leaderboard of the top three items that consisted of: crippling existential loneliness, Chelsea Football Club’s current defensive frailty, whether rhyming ‘apothecary’ with ‘apology’ in a poem I’ve made about Keats was absolutely necessary or just plain clunky.

The poet was waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” I said as my phone pinged a notification from my bank. I’d exceeded my overdraft limit. Again. “It’s a great time,” I said.

I put the poet on loudspeaker and used my phone’s screen to light up the electric meter, to see if I had any emergency credit left. I didn’t. I gave the junction box a gentle tap, the analogue approach, hopeful I may nudge the circuitry back into action. Short of resorting to a hammer or a high kick, blending a lightness of touch with a belief in magic has never yet produced satisfactory results in terms of getting the power back on but this is not to say it wouldn’t work this time. I am not conducting the same experiment expecting different results, I am manifesting forces known only to the practitioners of poetry where subtle fluctuations are at play, creative oscillations that can produce unusual conclusions. We may sit at our desks at the same time of day, open the same note book, use the same pen, the same ink, the same laptop and software but different poems will appear. The outcome is always unique.

I reach out, focus, make a connection, I might, just might, channel enough energy to transfer some Wattage through my fingers and feed the supply. I feel alive. I summon my inner electricity. The spirit of Walt Whitman is here, with me, in a damp subterranean flat in Hackney. But I am all volt and no current. The lights do not come back on. I remain in the dark.

“What’s happening?” I ask the poet, “Talk to me.”

Jan Noble, N°82 How Swan made it to San Francisco

day is a long journey
to the field at night
empty as good fortune

to see pretty well
who is a little lame
on one foot

and who has an owl
ready for supper
in her heart

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 21 September 1663.

what wing broke
a pinion in the garden

before war
the proclamation against it

after a word
the uncouple of us

the itch on each side
to be a good mutt

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 20 September 1663.

a stake in the wind
I stay in the woods

and drink to the river
behind my house

my trimmed light
a hole in the dark

my joy
an impossible horse

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 19 September 1663.

a beggar in the library
dry old manuscripts
of hands

in the church of thin chance
we find him telling stories
to the spirits

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 18 September 1663.

a fat night
to fit in the belly

heathen like a barn
or a bawdy song

the whole company
of supper people

inwardly
was not mine

a person used to his bed
and the sad kiss of gnats

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 17 September 1663.