Woodsmoke and First Fog

Out here the forest starts the shift before the calendar does. The bracken along the driveway has browned at the tips, the big-leaf maples are dropping their first yellow hands onto the gravel, and the last blackberries have gone hard and seedy. You walk out at seven and take a spiderweb across the face, and the fog is sitting on the water where it was not sitting a week ago. Barbara Crooker calls this season a departure gate in And Now It’s September, everyone standing in a long line with a boarding pass in hand. The afternoons are still warm. The mornings are not.

So what do we read as the days grow shorter?

The book. Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence, Martin Willitts Jr. ($19.99, 116 pages)

A father loses his hearing when his cannon backfires in the Second World War. His son loses his own hearing years later, under shelling, working as a field medic in Vietnam. Between them sits a lifetime of lip-reading, fingerspelling, and words that never quite arrive. Willitts follows silence through war, through a mother dissolving into dementia, through a son lost to addiction and a phone that stops ringing. Then he turns toward sign language, weaving, sheepherding, snow: the hands that keep speaking after the voices stop. Read it in a still house.

The chapbook. Wildlife, Amy Wright ($5, XPRESS digital chapbook)

Wright is a seventh-generation Virginia farmer, and these poems walk her Century Farm pastures and the 25,000 acres of the Clinch Mountain Wildlife Area. Deer on logged trails, windfall apples, coyotes at work, newborn calves, frost-silvered mornings giving way to nights full of fireflies. She writes about land stewardship with both hands on it, the labor and the beauty together. Five dollars, downloadable tonight.

From the POETICS Bookstore. Killing Orpheus, Forester McClatchey ($20, Carnegie Mellon University Press)

A first collection that hands the poem to whoever stands closest to death: an aging Penelope, Frankenstein’s monster, Isaac under his father’s blade, an elephant marching with Hannibal. Sonnets and other received forms, and the forms hold. McClatchey writes about dying with his whole attention fixed on being alive. Alligators, snakes, sprays of flowers, a baby’s first breath. Read it while the blackbirds are still in the trees.

The workshop. POETICS Summer Workshop 2026 ($750, five sessions)

Session one meets next Wednesday, September 9, and the series runs five Wednesday evenings on Zoom through October 7. Twenty craft terms, one teaching poem apiece, thirty minutes of small-group breakout, and an open mic to close. Every poem you submit comes back with an individual feedback letter before the following session. Twelve poets, and the cap does not move. Standard registration is open now.

The podcast.

Something to listen to while you pull the tomato vines, drive carpool, or sit in the ferry line.

The flex. XPRESS Black Glossy Mug ($10 for 11 oz, $12 for 15 oz)

Ceramic, glossy black, weighted enough to feel like a real object in the hand. The 15 oz is the honest choice for a September morning. Cool with the dishwasher, friends of the microwave.

Good books, one more warm afternoon. See you next Thursday.

Bainbridge Island Press

There are five poems in the poetry section of my dissertation that I do not like. I wrote all five. They are finished, they hold up on the page, they have been through readers, and every time I come back to them I feel like I am reading a competent forgery of myself.

They’re fine. But I just hate them.

Last week I finally worked out why, and it took about ten seconds once I had the right word for it. Everything else in that section is discursive lyric: a mind talking to itself, qualifying, digressing, doubling back, arriving somewhere interesting and new. Those five are narrative. They tell what happened. They are running a different engine at a different register, and the section reads like an album with five tracks mastered in somebody else’s studio.

Nothing was wrong with the lines. Something was wrong with the job.

The dog thing:

I have started thinking about this the way I think about dogs, which is to say constantly and with insufficient discipline.

(I don’t have dogs anymore, but I did and he was a Pomeranian named St. Sebastian and he was wonderful)

Nobody asks whether a Great Pyrenees is a better dog than a golden retriever. The question is silly on its face, because the two animals were built for different afternoons. The Pyrenees was bred to stand in a field all night at the edge of a flock and be large and unbothered and occasionally terrifying. The golden was bred to bring back a shot duck without putting a tooth through it. Ask the golden to guard your sheep and it will happily introduce itself to the coyote. Ask the Pyrenees to be delightful at a dinner party and it will lie across the doorway and go to sleep. After eating your dinner.

And the Pomeranian, which looks like a dandelion with opinions, comes down from sled dogs (believe it or now). Somebody bred a working spitz smaller and smaller until it fit on a lap, and the job is still in there, running a very short distance at high speed across the kitchen floor.

Poems are like this. An epigram and a verse epistle are both poems the way a Pomeranian and a Pyrenees are both dogs: true, useless as guidance, and likely to end with something eaten. (The limerick, since somebody will ask, is the designer crossbreed. Everyone insists it is easy and hypoallergenic. Everyone is wrong on both counts.)

Mode is the job. Form is the shape:

Here is the distinction it took me an embarrassing number of years to hold steady.

Form is how the poem is built: free verse, meter, syllabics, prose poem, sonnet, villanelle, ghazal. Rhymed or not. Sonnet is a shape word. Formalist is a shape word. Neither one tells you a single thing about what the poem is doing while it sits in that shape.

Mode is the job: the poem’s basic rhetorical action, the engine that gets you from the first line to the last. The two axes run independently, so you can write a discursive sonnet, a narrative prose poem, an epigrammatic villanelle. Keeping them apart is what stops “I write like her” from sending you after entirely the wrong models.

One question, asked of a draft: what does this poem do to get from the first line to the last?

There are five answers that cover most of the territory.

Lyric feels and perceives. A single voice registering a moment. No plot required, no argument required, and sound carries most of the weight because the mode is descended from music. It has become so dominant that “poem” and “lyric” are now near-synonyms, which is most of the confusion right there.

Narrative tells what happened. Events in sequence; something is different at the end than it was at the start. The test is not whether a story gets mentioned. The test is whether the story is what moves the poem forward.

Dramatic puts a mask on. Someone who is not the poet speaks, in a situation, to an implied listener, and gives away more than they mean to. Your job as reader is to know more than the speaker does.

Discursive thinks. It reasons in public, at speed, and it keeps all the connective tissue that lyric poets are trained to cut: but, and yet, of course, which is to say. Usually long, usually in a speaking register, very often in meter, because meter is what keeps an argument from becoming an essay with ragged margins.

Epigrammatic says one thing, perfectly, and shuts. Maximum compression around a single turn. It is carved rather than spun. The last line closes it like a lid.

Every breed has its own disease, and the diseases are useful for diagnosis. Lyric evaporates: feeling with little under it. Narrative goes slack, because the story supplies momentum and the lines stop earning themselves. Dramatic becomes ventriloquism, a costume with the poet’s own voice inside it. Discursive dies two opposite deaths, sagging into prose or hardening into cleverness. The epigram lands its joke and nothing stays.

Why I actually needed this:

None of this matters until you are sitting in front of a draft that is wrong. At least, it feels wrong to you.

Narrative asks you to get somewhere. Discursive and meditative poems ask you to go deeper into where you already are. Revise the second kind as though it were the first and you will cut the best lines in the poem, every time, because in a thinking poem the best lines look exactly like delay.

That is what I had been doing to my five. I kept pushing them toward sequence, tightening the middles, hurrying them along, and they got worse in a way I just could not name. They did not need to move faster. They needed to stop reporting.

I know how to fix them now. That is the entire argument for learning this vocabulary: it turns “something is off” into a repair you can actually make on a Tuesday. Or today!

So. Over the next five essays I will take the modes one at a time, with their kin, their canon, and their characteristic ways of failing. Bring your drafts. We will find out what they were bred to do.

And we will finally figure out what Pugs are. Together.

Warmly,

Ben & Tamarah

A Sunday afternoon dispatch from Bainbridge Island Press August 30, 2026

Baltimore in October

I have been holding this one close for a few weeks, and it is time to say it out loud. This October I will be presenting at the twenty-ninth annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, October 22 through 24 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The invitation came from , who is convening a seminar called “The Golden Mean: How Mid-Length Poems Sustain Lyric or Narrative Momentum.” I want to spend a minute on that title, because it is the best question anyone has asked me all year. We talk endlessly about the lyric moment and about the long poem’s architecture. The middle distance gets almost no attention: the poem of forty or eighty or a hundred and forty lines, long enough that momentum becomes a real problem to solve, short enough that the solution has to be invisible. Sunil saw the gap and built a room around it. That is what good editorial instinct looks like, and it is no surprise coming from the editor of The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse and a critic whose reviews have run in the Washington Post, The American Scholar, and The New Criterion.

Eight of us will be in that room, and I am the least credentialed person on the list by a comfortable margin, which is exactly how I like it:

• Sunil Iyengar, seminar leader

• Rachel Hadas, Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, and a poet whose work has been shaping this press’s taste longer than this press has existed

• John Talbot, Brigham Young University, classicist and translator

• Paul Franz, editor-in-chief of Literary Imagination

• Brian Brodeur, poet and founder of How a Poem Happens (and a million other awards and professorship, etc)

• Michael Theune, Illinois Wesleyan, whose Structure & Surprise changed how a generation of us reads the turn

• Mary Finnegan, deputy editor at , who is also one of our own As of Fire poets

• and me

We each send a completed paper by mid-September, then spend a month reading one another’s work before we ever sit down together. Two hours, eight precis, and then the floor opens. I have been to conferences where the discussion is the leftover twelve minutes. This is the opposite of that, by design.

Come to the conference. I mean this. ALSCW gathers university academics, secondary school teachers, working poets, independent scholars, editors, and students in the same rooms, and asks all of them to leave the jargon at the door. This year’s seminars include Milton, Poets as Critics and Critics as Poets, Experimental Forms, Poetry and Philosophy, and Teaching Literature and Writing in the Age of AI. Plenary panels and seminars each run a full two hours. Nothing is rushed.

Membership is required to participate and comes bundled with a subscription to Literary Imagination: join or renew through Johns Hopkins University Press. Conference registration is here, and it includes catered receptions Thursday and Friday plus the Saturday banquet, which people talk about for months afterward. The full program circulates in early September. Say hello if you come. I will be the one from the island.

On the Calendar

Wednesdays, September 9 through October 7: The POETICS Workshop

Five live sessions, 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific, capped at twelve poets. Twenty craft terms across five weeks, a written feedback letter on every poem you submit, and readings from Keats, Donne, Roethke, Hayden, Olds, Glück, Bishop, and Stallings. Tuition is $750. Write to hello@bainbridgeislandpress.com with a short note about your work. We start in ten days and a couple of seats remain.

Saturday, September 12 · 11:30 AM: Sibyl James signs Dizzier Than Gillespie

Barnes & Noble, 520 Pike Street, downtown Seattle.

Saturday, September 19 · 6:00 PM: Sibyl James reads in Bellingham

Village Books Fairhaven, 1200 11th Street.

Saturday, September 19 · 7:30 PM: Matt Butler’s Reckless Son at BPA

Bainbridge Performing Arts. Matt is a contributor to As of Fire. Ages 14 and up.

Monday, September 21 · 6:30 PM: Sibyl James at Creative Colloquy

New Frontier Lounge, 301 East 25th Street, Tacoma.

Tuesday, September 22: Tim Mayo in Putney, Vermont

Tim’s first reading of the fall. Venue and time to come.

Saturday, September 26: Bainbridge Island Book Festival

We will be there with a table and a great many books. Come find us!

October 22 through 24: ALSCW at Johns Hopkins

See above. I will be insufferable about this until at least November. I am so excited.

News Worth Cheering!

Sibyl James takes Dizzier Than Gillespie on the road. Three stops in ten days, Seattle to Bellingham to Tacoma, all listed above. Sibyl read on Bainbridge earlier this month and it was a genuine pleasure to be in that room. Her Persephone’s Testimony is in our XPRESS series if you want more of her on the page before you hear her out loud.

Rachel Hadas, matchmaker. Rachel put me in touch with Tim Hunt at Illinois State, who has edited a new edition of Robinson Jeffers’s Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. A review copy is on its way to the island. More once I have read it.

Send Us Your Itinerary

Are you a BIP poet, a POETICS workshop alum, or a friend of the press with a reading, launch, or festival appearance coming up? Reply to this email with the date, time, venue, and a line or two about the event, and we’ll add you to the map. If you mentioned something to me in a comment thread and I told you to send the details, this is your reminder. I meant it.

Until next Sunday,

Tamarah & Ben

Bainbridge Island Press

It is the end of summer, and the air is filled with a mixture of scents: sunscreen and freshly sharpened pencils. The seasonal fruit is still in stock at the market, and yet you have already pulled the thick socks out of the drawer for these cold mornings. Now is the perfect time to find a new poetry book to curl up with.

Here are a few ideas.

The book. POETICS: Grain ($19.99, 162 pages)

Nearly ninety poems following grain from soil to table, in four movements: Field, Harvest, Bread, and Communion. Poets, farmers, bakers, priests, and mourners all get a turn. If your September runs on bread and patience and inheritance, this is the one to keep beside the kettle.

The chapbook. Labyrinth, John A. deSouza ($5, XPRESS digital chapbook)

deSouza hands the microphone to everyone the myth forgot to ask. Apollo, the Minotaur, Ariadne, King Minos, each speaks in turn, and none of them agree. The Minotaur watching ships through his narrow window will stay with you. Sonnets, long poems, and a closing piece about garden maintenance that earns every bit of its feeling. Five dollars, downloadable tonight.

From the POETICS Bookstore. The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney ($22, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

We are in a very large Seamus Heaney mood over here, and this is the book we keep pressing on people. “To redress poetry is to know and celebrate it for its forcibleness as itself,” Heaney writes, “as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul.” Criticism written by a poet, with a poet’s ear working the entire time. Good company for the first genuinely dark evening of the season.

Something to listen to while you rake, drive carpool, or stand in the kitchen waiting on the oven.

The flex. POETICS Black Glossy Mug ($10 for 11 oz, $12 for 15 oz)

Ceramic, glossy black, sturdy in the hand. Fill it with the morning coffee that gets you through the first week of the school schedule. Microwave and experimental poetry safe.

Thick socks, sharp pencils, one more peach.

See you next Thursday.

Ben & Tamarah

Bainbridge Island Press

Registration for the POETICS Summer Workshop closes in two weeks! The room holds twelve and I have a few spots available.

POETICS is a craft class, and that makes it a different beast from most workshops you have sat in. In an MFA-style room, you put a draft on the table and eleven people tell you how it sounded for them. That is useful! It also assumes everyone already shares a vocabulary for what went right and what went wrong. Most of us do not, or we did once and it has gone soft since graduate school, or we learned it by ear and have never had names for any of it.

So we start with the names. Five Wednesday sessions, 120 minutes each on Google Chat (I’ll send the link), working through the four master tropes, Aristotelian foundations, turning points, lyric figures, and the sonic and structural tools: enjambment, caesura, anaphora, refrain. Every session pairs the terms with poems that use them well.

Here is what you walk away with:

• A working vocabulary you can actually use at the desk, so you can name what a poem is doing while you are still drafting it.

• The ability to diagnose your own poems. When a draft stalls, you will have a better guess than “something is off.”

• Sharper reading. You will know why a poem you love works, and why a bad poem is bad when you meet one.

• Five new poems, one per session, and a written feedback letter from me on your work.

• Full-room discussion the entire time, no breakout rooms.

Why do we need to know metonymy from synecdoche? Because we are writing anyway. We may as well know what we are doing while we do it.

Come at any stage. First poems or fortieth year, both belong in the room. Every participant receives a written feedback letter.

Begins September 9.

Register here

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Every house has one room the visitor cannot see from the front door, and in most houses it is the room with the good quilt on the bed and the sewing machine beside it, the exercise bike nobody has touched since March, four boxes with somebody’s name written on the side in marker, and a laundry basket that has been half emptied for a week. The living room has been arranged with guests in mind, because that is its purpose. There are places to set a mug, places to sit easily, framed pictures, decorative vases, and if you are really lucky a shallow bowl filled with M&Ms. The (perhaps misnomered) guest room has been arranged with the family’s actual belongings in mind, and a bed put in among them. Nobody is shown this room on a first visit. Visitors are led to the guest room when the visit has changed category, because they are staying the night now, and the welcome that follows is warmer than the parlor and considerably less comfortable, those being the same fact rather than two.

Long stanzas are the guest room room, and the discomfort readers feel at the edge of a long poem is the discomfort of a guest who has been taken further into the house than she was expecting to go.

As with all poetry, we will begin with what happens to the ear. A quatrain is a shape a reader holds without effort, four lines arriving and closing while the sound of the first is still available to her, which is why the ballad has survived every change in literary fashion for hundreds of years and why a hymn can be learned by a congregation that cannot read music. Past four lines, the reader hesitates. To see how this works, read the following stanza by Keats once, at the speed you would ordinarily read.

 A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
       All garlanded with carven imag'ries
       Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
       And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
       Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
       As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
       And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
       And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

What survives that reading is the tiger-moth and the scutcheon and the cold blaze of the window. What does not survive is the rhyme, even though the rhyme is the most disciplined thing in the stanza. Its pattern is ababbcbcc; Spenser built it for The Faerie Queene and it has carried his name ever since; every line of it answers to a scheme that took Keats considerable trouble to satisfy. A reader comes out the far side holding the images and having lost the architecture entirely, which could not happen in a ballad, where four lines close while the sound of the first is still standing in the room.

Nine lines lie past the reach of the ear, and so the reader of a long stanza finds herself in a room she cannot survey from the doorway, obliged to take the poet’s word that a plan exists and that she is inside it.

Everything that makes long poems intimidating follows from this condition, and so does everything that makes them worth the trouble. A poet who understands that his reader cannot see the shape of the room stops tidying it. What accumulates in the space is precisely what a short lyric would have swept out before company arrived: the digression, the aside, the qualification that occurred to him on the way, the thing that wandered in and was allowed to stay because there was room for it. Consider what Keats is doing above. Nine lines, and the subject is a window. He is describing stained glass and the description simply continues, gathering fruits and flowers and knot-grass and moths and heraldry, and in a quatrain this would be an embarrassment, and here it is hospitality, because you have been taken past the room where the house was performing and into the one where the family keeps its things.

Notice, too, how he lets you out. There is no closing couplet to announce the exit; instead the middle of the stanza is braided, the doubled rhyme in the fourth and fifth lines drawing the two halves together until the seam between them disappears, and then the final line runs long. Five feet govern the stanza all the way down and the ninth line takes six, twelve syllables where the ear has been trained to expect ten, a line the prosodists call an alexandrine. Read it aloud and your foot finds one more step of floor than it had planned on. Keats is not walking you to the door. He has decided that you are staying, and a host who has decided that stops announcing himself.

Byron, working the same problem in the same period, arrived at the opposite solution. He had spent most of this canto at a country-house weekend, and a long stretch of it on the dinner, turbot and soup and dindon à la Périgueux, with an aside in the middle wondering how he was ever going to get the gourmand stanza through. Then, late in the same canto, this.

XCIX.

Between two worlds Life hovers like a star,
‘Twixt Night and Morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be![766] The eternal surge
Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of Empires heave but like some passing waves. [767]

This Italian form is ottava rima, eight lines rhyming ababab and then cc, and the first six of them alternate between two sounds in a pattern with no natural stopping point, so that the reader moves through them unattended, hearing the same two sounds return like faces she has already been introduced to. Then the seventh line rhymes with the eighth and the room closes. That couplet is footsteps in the hallway and a voice at the door telling you there are clean towels in the cupboard if you should need them, and it arrives every eight lines, reliably, for sixteen cantos. Byron uses it here to bring down the graves of empires, and rather more often to puncture whatever he has spent six lines constructing, since the same two lines that can be grave can also hand you sermons and soda-water the day after. Grave or comic, the couplet performs one office, which is to look in on a guest who cannot find the exits by herself.

Both poets are solving for a reader who has lost her bearings. One of them keeps checking. The other has concluded that she is family now and can find the bathroom on her own.

But, look at what the Keats stanza cost him. Four of its nine lines have to end on the same sound, and the words he came up with were imag’ries, device, dyes, and heraldries. Two of those are archaic, one is squeezed into a contraction to make it fit, and device is carrying an older sense, closer to design or emblem than to anything a person means by the word now. English does not hand a poet four rhymes. Italian does, by the handful, and both ottava rima and the Spenserian stanza were built by people working in a language where the endings come free. In English the poet has to go hunting, and you can see what he shot. Spenserians reach backward, toward emblazonings and its like, because the old vocabulary rhymes where the current one will not. Byron reached in the opposite direction and made the hunt part of the joke. Twenty-two stanzas into Don Juan he rhymes intellectual with hen-peck’d you all.

A guest room exists because somebody is staying the night, and so do these forms. Nobody finishes The Faerie Queene in a sitting. Nobody finishes Don Juan in a week. The stanza is where the reader stops, and it is also where she comes back in the next morning, with the book cold on the nightstand and the thread of the thing gone out of her head. The pattern she could not consciously hear is what tells her she has found her place again. A host who puts someone up for the night has already thought about the morning.

So if a long poem looks forbidding, the size of it is telling you something before the first line does, which is that you are being taken further in than a lyric would take you. The shape lies past your ear and was built to. Follow the sound that comes back instead, and let the room be untidy. The laundry in the corner means you are being trusted.

Next Monday: Onto the next! Seven poetry modes, seven ways of keeping time, and why the mode a poem chooses decides how long its reader navigates the room on their own.

Warmly,

Ben & Tamarah

Bainbridge Island Press

2026/07/07

A Sunday afternoon dispatch from Bainbridge Island Press

August 23, 2026

This Week

Tuesday, August 25 · 6:30 to 8:00 PM: Tim Mayo at the Grafton Public Library

Grafton Public Library, Grafton, Vermont

Tim Mayo (Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, BIP 2026) closes out his summer with an evening of three Vermont poets, part of the library’s ongoing Neighbor-to-Neighbor Discussion Series. Tim reads from Muscle Memories, on grief, loss, mortality, the suffering and hopes of the mentally ill, and the rebirth of falling in love late in life.

He shares the evening with Grafton poet Nancy B. Richardson, whose An Everyday Thing, about the shootings at Kent State, was named one of the 100 best independent books of 2018 by Kirkus, and with Bill Toomey, a Grafton man who offers his own invitation: “Bill Toomey has been writing what he thinks is poetry for all his life. But is it? He invites you to judge. Come and listen!”

Q&A follows the readings, signed copies will be for sale, and there will be light refreshments.

Registration is strongly suggested. Seating is limited and the program will not be recorded. Email librarian@graftonpubliclibrary.org to reserve a seat, or call (802) 843-2404.

On the Calendar

Saturday, September 19 · 7:30 PM: Matt Butler’s Reckless Son at BPA

Bainbridge Performing Arts

Matt Butler, a contributor to As of Fire, brings Reckless Son to the BPA stage. Ages 14 and up.

Tickets and details Watch the 90-second trailer

Tuesday, September 22: Tim Mayo in Putney, Vermont

Tim’s first reading of the fall. Venue and time to come, and we will post them here as soon as we have them.

Wednesdays, September 9 through October 7: The POETICS Summer Workshop

Five live sessions, 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific, capped at twelve poets. Twenty craft terms across five weeks, a written feedback letter on every poem you submit, and readings from Keats, Donne, Roethke, Hayden, Olds, Glück, Bishop, and Stallings. Tuition is $750. Write to hello@bainbridgeislandpress.com with a short note about your work.

A few seats are still open.

News Worth Cheering!

A.S. Aubrey’s Hide & Seek has arrived. We told you it was coming, and now it is here: Hide & Seek: Poems for Being Found in a Lost World, from Finishing Line Press. In her own words, “this little book holds a lot of me, heart, hurt, questions, humor, longing, and hope.”

The presale window runs through October 18, and this is the part worth understanding: with Finishing Line, presales determine royalty rates and how many copies get printed. Ordering now is a vote for the book’s print run. Presale copies are $15.99 and ship from the publisher by early December.

Order from Finishing Line Press or through www.aspages.com

Wally Swist, twice over. Wally’s translations of two odes by Pablo Neruda are up at La Piccioletta Barca, and he is the subject of Your Impossible Voice‘s Found in Translation series, which invites translators to talk about the work behind the work. Two different windows onto the same craft, and both worth your time.

Tim Mayo’s August 17 reading is now online. David Banach of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire recorded Tim’s virtual reading and posted it to the PSNH YouTube channel. If you missed it live, here it is.

Watch the reading

And more from Tim. His application is in for the University of North Texas Rilke Prize, and a local bookseller will be nominating him for the Vermont Book Award. We will keep you posted.

Recently on the Road

The Robert Frost Farm Poetry Conference, Derry, New Hampshire.

I came home from Derry with the phrase “a vortex of inspiration” stuck in my head, which is the only honest way to describe four days of formal poets talking shop from breakfast until well past dark.

As of Fire came with me, and a great many copies went home in other people’s bags. There is a particular pleasure in watching an anthology find its readers in person, one conversation at a time. Thank you to everyone who picked one up, and to the poets who pressed it into a friend’s hands on our behalf.

I also met poets whose manuscripts I am now reading, which is how these things tend to go. More on that in the months ahead.

Sibyl James at Eagle Harbor Book Co.

Sibyl brought Dizzier Than Gillespie home to Bainbridge Island on August 12, and it was a joy to be in the room. Her Persephone’s Testimony is in our XPRESS series if you want more of her on the page.

Send Us Your Itinerary

Are you a BIP poet, a POETICS workshop alum, or a friend of the press with a reading, launch, or festival appearance coming up? Reply to this email with the date, time, venue, and a line or two about the event, and we’ll add you to the map.

One housekeeping note before I go. Things have been busy here, between Derry, the workshop opening, and five books in motion. I think I have caught up with all of my email at last. If I have not gotten back to you, please tell me. I would much rather hear from you twice than miss you once.

Until next Sunday,

Tamarah & Ben

Bainbridge Island Press

#1 in Poetry, Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers 2026

The end of summer rolls in gentle waves. Schools are already starting, before we have picked all the plums from the tree in the yard. The bathing suits are still wet in the laundry room while we are already out shopping for new backpacks. There are still watermelon popsicles in the freezer, yet the onslaught of pumpkin spice looms any day now. This is a liminal season, the small unnamed stretch between summer and work, when the days do not yet know what they want to be.

The best thing we can do in a season like this is read more. Read on the ferry. Read on the porch before the kids get up. Read in the kitchen while the coffee is still hot. Read while you wait in the car line to pick them up. The reading you do now is the reading that will carry you into fall. Here are some books, and one very free public art project, to help us through this end of summer time.

BIP Public Art (free poetry, placed on the island)

New this year, we are placing free printed poetry across Bainbridge Island in Free Little Libraries. Scotch Broom is our monthly broadside series (the August broadside is my own poem, “The Sex Lives of Trees,” if you happen upon one in your neighborhood). POETICS Zine is our free, downloadable magazine, and Issue 01 (July/August) is up now. All of it is free to read, free to share, free to leave for the next reader. If you have poems you would like to see placed in the wild, submissions are open too.

https://publicart.bainbridgeisland.press/

POETICS Summer Workshop 2026 (LAST CHANCE)

We start in September. This is your last week to sign up. Five live Zoom sessions, twelve poets, taught for the craft itself: meter, rhythm, form, image, sound. If you have been sitting with this on your desktop for weeks trying to decide, this is the moment. You will not have another chance until next summer. Come learn what makes a poem a poem.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/poetics-summer-workshop-2026

POETICS: Corvids

The first volume of our POETICS anthology series, published before POETICS: Grain. Sixty poems from contributors worldwide, all on the same subject: ravens, crows, magpies, jays, and the rest of the corvid family. Tricksters and prophets, harbingers of transformation, symbols of death and of wisdom. The book is grounded in Aristotelian poetics, which will feel familiar to anyone who has been reading along with us this summer. Eighty-four pages, $14.99. A good companion to autumn, when the crows come back to their loud committees in the trees.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/poetics-corvid

time marches on by Michelle Trantham

Michelle Trantham’s XPRESS chapbook, five dollars. Backyard storms and studio apartments. A grandmother’s basement. A Midwest inheritance carried forward: doppler radar, black-eyed peas, warning systems learned as kids and now applied to the newer weather of rejection emails and doomscrolling. Wry, plainspoken, unafraid of both bad news and small comforts.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/time-marches-on

POETICS Podcast Episode 48: The Art of the Book Industry

Ben’s third episode in his ongoing “Art of…” series, this one on the part of publishing that writers almost never see. What the Big Five actually do. What a hybrid publisher is and how to evaluate one. How a manuscript actually travels toward a yes. What a book sells in a bookstore once it arrives. Ben’s central argument is that most people in this business are acting in good faith, and that the small fraction who are not get far more attention than their numbers deserve. If you have been trying to figure out how publishing works from the outside, this is the episode.

From the POETICS Bookstore: Intruding Upon the Timeless by Gregory Wolfe

This week from the POETICS Bookstore, Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery (Square Halo Books, $22.99). Gregory Wolfe founded and edited Image journal for nearly three decades before starting Slant Books, one of our very good friends and neighbors right here in Washington. This collection gathers his essays from those decades, on Christian imagination in modern literature, on beauty and meaning in art, on why we still make and read serious writing when the culture keeps trying to tell us not to. If you have been following our summer thread on craft and orthodoxy through Myers, Wilson, and Wiman, this book is the wider frame.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/intruding-upon-the-timeless-meditations-of-art-faith-and-mystery

I am out of the state on very important business right now (poetry conference, the.best.) and this article is….delayed!!

But fret not…I have been working on the outline/drafts and it’s almost ready.

Cheers,

Tamarah

A Sunday afternoon dispatch from Bainbridge Island Press

What our poets are doing, and where they’re going to be

Welcome back to The Itinerary. This week: a full house at Eagle Harbor, a five-day workshop at the edge of the Salish Sea, contest results, and a Zoom reading tomorrow night that anyone anywhere can attend. First, the photo.

Sibyl James Book Reading at Eagle Harbor

Sibyl James brought Dizzier Than Gillespie home to Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Wednesday night, and we were thrilled to be there supporting her. A warm island crowd, a stack of books, and a reading with all the panache the novel promises. Thank you to everyone who came out, and to Eagle Harbor for hosting our neighbors so well. Sibyl’s Persephone’s Testimony remains available in BIP’s XPRESS series.

Poetry on the Salish Sea hosts its first-ever five-day poetry workshop this fall, October 21 to 25 at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, and we cannot recommend it warmly enough. Kathryn Hunt, curator of the series and a contributor to As of Fire, leads a faculty that includes Rick Barot and Melissa Kwasny. Five days of generative workshops, craft lectures, readings, and thoughtful responses to your work, in one of the most beautiful places in the Pacific Northwest to put words on paper.

Over the last three years, Poetry on the Salish Sea has hosted more than seventy poets across Port Townsend, from Wilderbee Farm to the downtown dock to Finn River to the water’s edge itself. This workshop is the next chapter: instead of coming to hear poems, you come to write them.

Seats are open now. If October and a dazzling place to write new poems sound like what your manuscript has been waiting for, this is it.

Details and registration at Centrum, or write Kathryn directly at kathryn@kathrynhunt.net.

News Worth Cheering!

Martin Willitts Jr. has won first place for his poem “Instillation Piece.” The judge was Jose Hernandez Diaz, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow and the author of The Fire Eater, Bad Mexican, Bad American, The Parachutist, and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man, whose own poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, and The Southern Review.

Some of you will recognize Martin’s name from his BiP collection, Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence. He served as a field medic in Vietnam, he has spent decades writing about what silence holds, and this month he is also judging the Comstock Review Chapbook Contest. A review, a win, and a judgeship in the same month. Congratulations, Martin.

Rachel Hadas recommended As of Fire on the podcast Robinson Jeffers Now. In conversation with Jeffers scholar Tim Hunt, Hadas read and discussed Jeffers's "Animals," two Frost poems, and her own new poem "Cryptozoology." While talking through the bodies of living flame in the Jeffers poem, she told listeners that contributing to As of Fire: Poets and Pentecost had sent her down a Pentecost rabbit hole that shaped her reading, and she recommended the anthology by name. Hadas is a contributor to As of Fire, and if you don't know her work yet, start anywhere: she is a poet, essayist, and translator with more than twenty books, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a long career teaching at Rutgers University in Newark. Her newest collection, Pastorals (Measure Press, 2025), is written in prose poems that carry you through a Vermont of meadows, barns, and the people no longer in them, and it stayed with us long after the last page; we reviewed it this spring for New Verse Review. We will post the episode link when it goes up.

This Week

Monday, August 17: Tim Mayo reads live on Zoom

7:00 to 8:30 PM Eastern (4:00 PM Pacific) · Free, online

The Poetry Society of New Hampshire hosts Tim Mayo (Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, BIP 2026) in their Virtual Series. He will read from the book and share new poems as well. No travel, no gas, no excuse; West Coast friends, this one starts at 4 PM our time.

Register free here

Thursday, August 20: Amy Wright reads online for the Emily Dickinson Museum

Amy Wright reads in the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Phosphorescence series, live online and free to attend with registration. Two virtual readings in one week; your living room has never been so literary.

Register free at the Emily Dickinson Museum

On the Calendar

Saturday, September 19: Matt Butler’s Reckless Son at BPA

7:30 PM · Bainbridge Performing Arts

Matt Butler’s nationally acclaimed solo show, grown from more than a hundred concerts performed in jails and prisons across the country; think On the Road meets “Folsom Prison Blues.” Butler is a contributor to As of Fire. Recommended for ages 14 and up. Trailer and tickets.

The POETICS Workshop is still open

There are still seats in the POETICS Workshop. If you’ve been circling it, consider this your sign; come write with us.

Looking Ahead

The 25th Brattleboro Literary Festival, co-founded by Tim Mayo, lands this October, the same month as the Poetry on the Salish Sea workshop above. In November: Jonathon Medeiros joins the faculty of the Kaua’i Writers Conference (November 6 to 8, lunchtime reading on the seventh), and A.S. Aubrey’s Hide & Seek arrives in the world.

Send Us Your Itinerary

Are you a BIP poet, a POETICS workshop alum, or a friend of the press with a reading, launch, or festival appearance coming up? Reply to this email with the date, time, venue, and a line or two about the event, and we will add you to the map.

Until next Sunday,

Tamarah & Ben Bainbridge Island Press

#1 in Poetry, Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers 2026

Inspiration does not fall upon us like a wet cloth, but it arrives through the body, through the small activities of being a person in a world. Eating something familiar over the kitchen sink, breathing at the edge of a lake at first light. Running until your lungs remind you that you are made of muscle and bone, or laughing until your ribs hurt. Perhaps, talking to a stranger long enough to learn one thing you did not know; Singing alone in the car; Walking a familiar block and noticing the wildflowers have bloomed today. Inspiration begins with observing, which is the most active verb of all.

Reading is, most likely, the best active verb, which asks us: What have we read this week? What line has stayed with you? What did you see this week and then need to quickly write down before it slipped away? I can tell you what we have been making and reading and wearing and listening to. Any of these might be the thing that sends you to your notebook.

POETICS Summer Workshop 2026 (a few seats left)

If you are interested in joining a end-of-summer poetry workshop, I need to be clear: POETICS workshop is the only poetry workshop we know of that teaches craft. Prosody and craft are the heart and soul of poetry, and it is what separate a poem from a paragraph broken into short lines. We will have five virtual sessions starting in September, capped at twelve poets. There are a few seats left, so if you have been meaning to sign up, this is the week.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/poetics-summer-workshop-2026

POETICS: Grain

Our new issue of the POETICS:Grain Is out now! Ninety poems following four movements: Field, Harvest, Bread, Communion. If you have ever thought that the farmer and the poet were doing something similar, this book is illuminating.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/poetics-grain

Orchard Crown and Orbital Crows by George Naranjo

George Naranjo’s XPRESS chapbook, five dollars. Nineteen poems that keep one foot in the garden and one eye on the sky. Madre and Papi’s tended plot, the myths of Demeter and Icarus, crows standing watch over grief and addiction, a father’s rotting machete handle. Spanish endearments beside cosmic imagery. A supernova’s slow collapse that starts to sound like a family coming apart.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/orchard-crown-and-orbital-crows

From the POETICS Bookstore: Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman

This week from the POETICS Bookstore, Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $19). Every Riven Thing is Christian Wiman’s first collection in seven years, and rarely has a book of poetry so borne the stamp of necessity. Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startling new truths within. The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time, abrasive and beautiful, densely physical and credibly mystical. They attest to the human hunger to feel existence, even at its most harrowing, and the power of art to make our most intense experiences not only apprehensible but transfiguring.The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time. Read alongside Benjamin Myers and James Matthew Wilson if you have been following our summer thread on craft and faith.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/every-riven-thing

The Podcast

POETICS Podcast: Episode 48 - The Art of the Book Industry

Tamarah Rockwood

·

8:16 PM

Most writers learn the publishing industry through rumor: a bad experience relayed at a conference, a thread about an agent, a sense that the doors are locked and someone is holding the keys.

Listen now

Merch (for when you want to rub it in a little)

We also have merch! If you have reached the point in your poetry life where you want to signal to the people around you, subtly but with verocity, that you take this stuff seriously, we have a shirt for that. POETICS unisex t-shirt, black. Wear it to your book club, wear it to the poetry section at the used book store, to the family reunion where someone will ask you about it later. Twenty dollars puts a shirt on your back and a small contribution in the pocket of an independent poetry press.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/poetics-unisex-t-shirt

Most writers learn the publishing industry through rumor: a bad experience relayed at a conference, a thread about an agent, a sense that the doors are locked and someone is holding the keys.

This week Ben Rockwood makes a different case. Ben is COO of Bainbridge Island Press, which means he has spent years on the side of the table writers rarely see. His argument is that almost everyone in this business is acting in good faith, and that the small fraction who aren’t get far more attention than their numbers deserve. What looks like a closed door is usually arithmetic.

We get into how the Big Five are structured, what hybrid publishers do and how to evaluate one, how a manuscript actually travels toward a yes, and what a book sells in a bookstore once it arrives. Then we talk about what running a press has taught us that no article about publishing ever did.

I also ended my intro by saying “okay now off to bed” and that…was me in a rush, and I’m too far away from my microphone to fix it. So, take it as you will.

Last Monday, the couplet played us a polka and the tercet asked us to waltz, and I left you with a promise: the quatrain, and what happens when a room gets big enough to hold an argument. Here it is. Four lines, four walls, the most familiar room in the whole house of poetry. And, now…consider what the extra line buys. The couplet shows you the door every two lines; it has room for a claim and its echo, and no space to reconsider. The tercet leaves something unbalanced on purpose, forever leaning toward the stanza coming next. Four is the first number that gives a pattern space to establish itself and then argue with itself: a claim and its answer, a question and its consequence, two pairs, a breath out and a breath in, twice. Carpenters know four as the table that doesn’t wobble. Musicians know it as the 4/4 bar, and it’s no accident that most of the songs you carry around run on four-line verses laid over four-beat measures. If the couplet is a polka and the tercet is a waltz, the quatrain is a square dance: four figures, four corners, and everybody back where they belong by the end of the call. You’ve lived in this shape forever. It’s where you learned to speak, singing nursery rhymes about spiders, waterspouts, and twinkling stars. Whatever strange directions poetry has taken you since, this is the room you know by heart, the one that still feels like home.

⁂

What separates one quatrain from another is mostly where you hang the rhymes, so come take the tour, and let me hand you the shorthand at the door: each letter stands for a rhyme sound, so in an ABAB stanza the first and third lines rhyme with each other, and so do the second and fourth. ABAB is cross-rhyme, the workhorse: windows on facing walls, air moving through the whole room. Thomas Gray built his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” from nothing else:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

When the lines stretch to five beats like this, the room grows into a name, the heroic quatrain: high ceilings, evening light. A Shakespeare sonnet is three of these rooms with a couplet for a hallway at the end.

Next door, AABB pushes the furniture into pairs, two couplets sharing one room, twin beds side by side. It’s the layout of the nursery, and the nursery has always known it:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

Blake’s tiger, who visited us last Monday, burns in exactly this room; that’s the joke of it, terror set loose in the nursery layout.

Across the hall, ABBA is the envelope. The outer rhymes fold shut over the inner pair, and the room closes around whatever you carried in with you. Tennyson chose it for In Memoriam, his book-length elegy for a friend who died young, seventeen years of grief kept in sealed rooms:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Listen to the door swing closed: “befall” waits three lines for “all” to answer it. And notice what this room is big enough to hold, which no couplet could manage: a thesis, stated and then defended. Four lines, one whole argument. That’s the promise kept.

Then there’s the plainest room in the house, ABCB, the scheme the old ballads actually use, whatever our schoolbooks implied. Only the second and fourth lines rhyme; the other walls stay bare plaster, and the bareness is the point. One rhyme in a plain room glows like a hearth. Listen to “Sir Patrick Spens,” the old Scots ballad of the doomed voyage, laying its fires:

The King sits in Dunfermline toun,
Drinkin the blude-reid wine
‘O whaur will A get a skeely skipper
Tae sail this new ship o mine?’

O up and spak an eldern knight,
Sat at the king’s richt knee;
‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sailt the sea.’

A skeely skipper is a skilled one, blude-reid is blood-red, and the Scots carry the rest themselves. Two rooms, one hearth apiece: wine finds mine, knee finds sea, and nothing else in either stanza rhymes at all. The ballad room even comes with measurements.

The old hymnal names are dimensions, syllables to the line: common meter runs 8.6.8.6 (”Amazing grace! how sweet the sound”), long meter squares it off at 8.8.8.8, short meter tucks it in at 6.6.8.6. Dickinson built nearly her entire house from common meter and then furnished every room strangely, which is why her poems notoriously sing to the Gilligan’s Island theme (try singing “Amazing Grace” and “Because I could not stop for Death”). There are odder rooms too: the clerihew, a four-line comic biography built with deliberately crooked walls; the sapphic stanza, Sappho’s ancient shape of three long lines and one short one, a room with a low doorway; and the funhouse of AAAA, all four lines on a single rhyme, mirrors on every wall. But save your attention for the last room on the tour: AABA, which leaves a single line unrhymed. A door standing ajar. Frost understood what that door was for. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” each stanza’s third line becomes the next stanza’s rhyme sound, so every room opens onto the one after it:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

“Here” is the ajar door; walk through it and the next stanza rhymes queer, near, year. A floor plan, it turns out, is how you find your way around a poem.

⁂

And the door stands ajar for a reason: this room was never only ours. The quatrain is humanity’s default architecture. Persian poets perfected that AABA room a thousand years before the Victorian translator Edward FitzGerald imported it wholesale as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Spain raised the same four walls and called them the redondilla. The ballads carried the quatrain through centuries of people who couldn’t read, because four lines with one rhyme is a room the memory can hold; the hymn-makers Watts and Wesley built whole hymnals out of it; Nostradamus delivered his prophecies in it, which tells you something about the form’s authority: even the end of the world sounds plausible in four lines. Every pop verse you hummed this week is still paying rent in it. And twelve centuries ago, Tang dynasty poets cut the form down to four lines and called the result jueju, or “cut-off lines.” In the most famous of them all, the poet Li Bai wakes in a strange bed, far from everything he knows:

Moonlight pools before my bed,
I take it for frost on the ground.
I lift my head and watch the bright moon,
I lower my head and think of home.

⁂

Then he lowers it, and thinks of home. That’s the poem: four lines, one turn of the head. The oldest use of the world’s most familiar room is missing it.

So the quatrain is hospitable for the plainest of reasons: we grew up inside it, and a familiar room is precisely what lets a poet set something strange on the mantel. Dickinson understood that a reader at ease in the hymn stanza will follow you anywhere, even into the carriage where Death himself holds the reins and the horses’ heads point toward eternity. The form does the welcoming so the poem can do the work. A quatrain is a room you can find in the dark. You always know where the light switch is; it’s the rhyme, and the rhyme is what walks you home.

And, finally, for those of us who adore lists:

1. The ballad stanza — ABCB, four beats then three (”Sir Patrick Spens”)

2. Common meter — 8.6.8.6, rhymed ABAB (”Amazing Grace,” Dickinson)

3. Long meter — 8.8.8.8 (the Doxology)

4. Short meter — 6.6.8.6 (”Blest Be the Tie That Binds”)

5. The heroic quatrain — ABAB in five-beat lines; also called the elegiac stanza or Sicilian quatrain (Gray’s “Elegy”)

6. The Italian quatrain — ABBA in five-beat lines (the front half of a Petrarchan sonnet)

7. The In Memoriam stanza — ABBA in four-beat lines (Tennyson)

8. The rubaiyat stanza — AABA (Khayyam via FitzGerald; Frost’s interlocking version)

9. The ruba’i — the Persian original of the above

10. The jueju — Tang “cut-off lines,” four lines of five or seven characters (Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei)

11. The redondilla — Spanish, eight syllables a line, ABBA (Sor Juana)

12. The sapphic stanza — three long lines and one short (Sappho, Horace)

13. The alcaic stanza — Horace’s other four-line room, from Alcaeus

14. The englyn — Welsh, strictly syllable-counted

15. The pantoum stanza — ABAB, lines two and four return as one and three of the next stanza

16. The kyrielle — French, eight syllables a line, refrain last line

17. The clerihew — AABB comic biography, lines any length (Bentley)

18. The monorhyme quatrain — AAAA

Next Monday: the bigger rooms, and what happens when they start joining into houses.

Warmly,

Ben & Tamarah Rockwood

Bainbridge Island Press

August 9, 2026

A Sunday afternoon dispatch from Bainbridge Island Press

Before we embark on the roads travelled by our poets, we have a very exciting housekeeping note to share:

Our Substack page has been tidied up! Every Stanza, every article, and every Itinerary now has a room of its own. They are all sorted, dated, and nothing you have loved reading or links you were looking for will be lost to the scroll. Please feel free to look around and revisit articles or look up books we have featured!

And a word about why this newsletter exists at all: Helping each other helps poetry maintain a healthy voice, and that is what Bainbridge Island Press endeavors to do. Every reading you attend, every book you buy at a merch table, every open mic you sign up for keeps the voice strong. Here’s where to do that this week.

This Week

Monday, August 10: Tim Mayo at Phoenix Books, Rutland, Vermont

6:30 PM · Phoenix Books, Rutland, VT

Fresh off yesterday’s festival in Greensboro, Tim Mayo (Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, BIP 2026) reads Monday evening at Phoenix Books. In his words: shake away your Monday blues, breathe in, breathe out, and listen.

Wednesday, August 12: Sibyl James at Eagle Harbor Book Co.

6:30 PM · Eagle Harbor Book Co., Bainbridge Island

Sibyl James (Persephone’s Testimony, BIP XPRESS) brings Dizzier Than Gillespie home to Bainbridge Island. This one is in our backyard. We will see you there.

Friday, August 14: Jonathon Medeiros at the Kaua’i Writers Garden

Jonathon Medeiros (Mostly Water, BIP XPRESS) leads and reads at the Kaua’i Writers Garden, as he does every second Friday of the month.

On the Calendar

Thursday, August 20: Amy Wright reads online for the Emily Dickinson Museum

Amy Wright reads in the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Phosphorescence series, live online and free to attend with registration. No travel required for this one; poetry comes to your living room.

Register free at the Emily Dickinson Museum

Saturday, September 19: Matt Butler’s Reckless Son at BPA

7:30 PM · Bainbridge Performing Arts

Matt Butler’s nationally acclaimed solo show, grown from more than a hundred concerts performed in jails and prisons across the country; think On the Road meets “Folsom Prison Blues.” Butler is a contributor to As of Fire. Recommended for ages 14 and up. Trailer and tickets.

News Worth Cheering

Martin Willitts Jr. (Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence, BIP) will judge the 2026 Comstock Review Chapbook Contest. Poets, polish those manuscripts; you could hardly ask for a more attentive reader.

Tim Mayo has a poem from Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster forthcoming at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. We’ll share the link when it runs.

And contributor copies of POETICS: Grain are landing in mailboxes across the country this week. If you’re holding yours, we’d love to see it out in the wild; tag us.

Recently on the Road

Tim Mayo read in the afternoon open mic at the Poetry Society of Vermont’s Summer Festival in Greensboro yesterday, capping a week that also included a reading at Chesterwood in the Berkshires on August 5 with Pamela Wax (Every Single Beast of My Heart), sponsored by the New England Poetry Club. He reads again tomorrow; see above. The man is a fleet unto himself.

Looking Ahead

The 25th Brattleboro Literary Festival, co-founded by Tim Mayo, lands this October. Poetry on the Salish Sea with Kathryn Hunt (including an October workshop) is still coming into focus; details soon. In November: Jonathon Medeiros joins the faculty of the Kaua’i Writers Conference (November 6 to 8, lunchtime reading on the seventh), and A.S. Aubrey’s Hide & Seek arrives in the world.

Send Us Your Itinerary

Are you a BIP poet, a POETICS workshop alum, or a friend of the press with a reading, launch, or festival appearance coming up? Reply to this email with the date, time, venue, and a line or two about the event, and we will add you to the map.

Until next Sunday,

Tamarah & Ben

Bainbridge Island Press

When we published Tim Mayo’s Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, we knew we were sending something rare into the world: a collection that carries a whole life, with its losses, its recoveries, and its stubborn tenderness, in the body of its poems. It is a gift when a reviewer meets a book like this with real attention, and that is exactly what happened at South Broadway Press.

In her review, Eden Heffron-Hanson reads the collection the way we hope every reader will: without hurry, and with an ear for what the poems are actually doing. She writes of “poetry that feels dragged from the ends of the earth,” and she notes that any reader interested in survival after survival will find refuge in these pages.

Refuge is the right word. These are poems about confronting mortality, about grief that does not resolve on schedule, about memory as a way of keeping what the world takes. Tim writes without artifice or pretension; the poems live in their feeling line by line. If you have heard Tim read this summer at his events across New England, you already know the steady, heartening voice at work here.

We’re grateful to Eden Heffron-Hanson and the team at South Broadway Press, a fellow small press doing beautiful work for poetry, for spending real time with Tim’s book.

Read the full review at South Broadway Press: https://southbroadwaypress.org/2026/05/27/book-review-muscle-memories-of-love-and-disaster-by-tim-mayo/

Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster is available now from Bainbridge Island Press: https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/muscle-memories-of-love-and-disaster

When you read a poem on a page, there is no recording, no accent, and no face, only text on a page. Then, a few lines in, a distinct human voice walks right into the room.

I do not think I will ever get used to that. It happens whether I am reading a submission from a living poet I have never met or someone who died four hundred years ago. The mechanism is identical: someone arranged words in a specific order, and that arrangement holds onto their sound.

To me, that is the real point of poetry. It is our oldest tool for keeping a voice alive long after the speaker has gone quiet. Keats is still talking. Demeter is still grieving her empty fields. A grandmother in the Midwest says time marches on, and her granddaughter puts it in a poem so the line outlasts them both.

Some of the voices in this week’s issue come from three miles down the road, while others come from three thousand years back. Here are four ways of listening to them.

POETICS End of Summer Workshop

The POETICS Summer Workshop begins Wednesday, September 9 and runs through October 7 (five live Zoom sessions, 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific). Enrollment is capped at twelve poets.

Each two-hour session includes 60 minutes of close lecture on four craft terms, 30 minutes in small breakout groups, and 30 minutes of full-group discussion or open mic. Across five weeks, we will cover 20 terms—moving from master tropes and Aristotelian foundations to lyric figures and sonic structure—studying work by Keats, Donne, Roethke, Hayden, Olds, Glück, Bishop, and Stallings.

The core of the workshop happens between sessions: you submit a poem before each class and receive a detailed, written feedback letter from me before the next one.

Tuition is $750. To apply, write to hello@bainbridgeislandpress.com with a short note about your work and circumstances. Open to poets 18 and older at any experience level.

Register for the POETICS Summer Workshop

POETICS: Grain

Our newest journal volume is out in the world. POETICS: Grain follows one seed the long way into bread, gathering nearly ninety poems from poets, farmers, bakers, priests, and mourners across four movements: Field, Harvest, Bread, and Communion.

These are voices from very far back. Manna in the wilderness. Demeter’s grieving fields. The earliest writing we have on clay tablets, which turned out to be a count of bushels. The book is dedicated to the men and women who labor to feed our bodies and our imaginations, and it is about patience, inheritance, and the smallest unit of attention any of us can name.

162 pages, $19.99.

Order POETICS: Grain

time marches on

Michelle Trantham’s XPRESS chapbook moves between backyard storms and studio apartments, between a grandmother’s basement and a Boston fern that has outgrown its pot. She carries a Midwest inheritance into adult weather: doppler radar, black-eyed peas, the vocabulary of warning systems learned as a kid, and then rejection emails, doomscrolling, a cat’s absence still fresh in an apartment built for two.

There are small superstitions here against a world moving faster than anyone can steer. There is real grief for a grandmother whose one remaining lesson was the title. Wry, plainspoken, unafraid of bad news or small comforts.

Digital edition, $5.

Read time marches on

Call This Room a Station

And then the voice from a few miles up the road. John Willson’s Call This Room a Station is on the POETICS Bookstore shelf, published by MoonPath Press, and it is a book about paying attention for a long time to the same birds, the same skies, the same handful of people.

That is a harder discipline than it sounds. A far-off voice arrives with novelty doing some of the work for it. A near one has to earn its hearing on a landscape the reader already thinks they know. Willson keeps looking anyway, and the poems reward it.

Naomi Shihab Nye calls them “guides for wanderers”, which is exactly right for a collection that maps ancestry as a set of directions: the people who gave us our bodies, the poets who gave us our souls, and a compass with more true points on it than anyone told us to expect. bainbridgeisland

$16.

Order Call This Room a Station

Listen close this week. Some of the voices worth hearing are shelved in your own house.

The Stanza is a weekly newsletter from Bainbridge Island Press celebrating poetry, the poets who write it, and the readers who make it matter. Subscribe at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com.

Biweekly means twice a week. Biweekly also means once every two weeks. The word carries its own opposite around with it, nobody has ever fixed this, and every editorial calendar in the English-speaking world has suffered for it.

Prosody has the same problem, and fewer people recognize it. A couplet is two lines. Ask what kind of two lines and the answer splits in your hands.

Last time I said the stanza is a room, that the poem is a house, and that everything you do on the page after the reader arrives at the door is hospitality or the withholding of it. The comma is mind the step. The period is we’ll stop here a moment. Conditional hospitality, the only kind anyone can actually practice, requires a host who stays master of the house and tells the guest where the bathroom is.

Which brings us to the rooms themselves, starting with the two smallest. They are the ones people get wrong most often, and the difference between them is the difference between a marriage and a marriage with a witness standing in the corner.

Line count is tempo. Change the room and the poem behaves differently; the voice shifts, and what is said lands in a new key. The couplet is a polka. The tercet, a waltz.

First, the couplet

A couplet is two consecutive lines of verse that belong together. That is the definition, and it is doing two jobs at once, which is where the trouble begins.

Sometimes the couplet is the stanza. White space above it, white space below it, and the poem comes down the page as a series of two-line islands. Williams’s red wheelbarrow is built this way: four two-line stanzas, sixteen words, not a rhyme anywhere in it. The pairing is accomplished entirely with air.

so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow

Sometimes the couplet is a rhyme pair living inside a larger block. Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” breaks into just three long verse paragraphs, following its famous three-part logical argument, and rhymes in couplets the entire way down:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,

Marvell’s poem has no stanza breaks at all. However, Blake’s “The Tyger” is the case worth pausing on, because it gets filed under couplets constantly and it is printed in quatrains. Look at the white space and you see four-line rooms. Listen to the rhyme and you hear pairs, AABB, two couplets sharing one room. Both descriptions are accurate. They are answering different questions.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

So, for anyone who gets lost: spacing tells you the stanza, rhyme tells you the line pattern. A Shakespearean sonnet closes with a couplet that has no white space around it at all. It is a couplet by covenant rather than by architecture.

Types of couplets

Rhyming couplets (AABB). The simple machine. Bind, release, bind, release.

Heroic couplets. Iambic pentameter, rhymed, and closed.

Free verse couplets. No rhyme at all. The pairing is done by white space and by image, one thing set beside another thing and the gap left open between them. A red leaf on wet asphalt. The city humming its morning noise.

The epigrammatic couplet. A self-contained thought with the door already closing behind it. Pope, in An Essay on Criticism:

Good nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human; to forgive, divine.

Here is what all four have in common: two lines are bound to each other. They are in covenant. They speak together or they speak against each other, and either way there is nobody else in the room to appeal to. Rhyme is the ring on the finger. Even with no rhyme, the second line answers or completes or refuses the first, and the white space underneath closes the door on whatever the two of them settled.

This is why the couplet reads as a polka drumbeat. Two, and two, and two. The reader learns where the floor is after the first pair and never has to look down again. That certainty is hospitality in its simplest form: the host has told you where everything is, so you can stop attending to the house and attend to what is being said inside it.

It is also why the couplet is the traditional vehicle for the maxim, the epigram, or the closing turn. A form that guarantees the floor can afford to say something that would otherwise knock you over.

Now, tercets

Three is an odd number, and odd numbers cannot pair off.

Put a third line in the room with a couple and you have introduced a witness to the marriage. That third line can agree, in which case it functions as chorus. It can dissent. It can ask the question neither of the other two would have asked. It can stand there and look, which is its own kind of pressure. What it cannot do is make the room balance.

The imbalance is the point, which is why I love tercets. A couplet has settled its rhythm before the reader arrives. A tercet leaves the arrangement unfinished, and the reader is drawn in to finish it, or at least to lean. Hospitality again, in a different key. Instead of telling the guest where everything is, you have left something in the middle of the floor and trusted them to walk around it.

The rhyme schemes make the argument literal.

The triplet (AAA). All three lines chime together. Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes” is built of two of them:

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!

Within each room, two lines would have satisfied the rhyme. The third arrives anyway, unnecessary and lavish, and the excess is the effect. Six lines, two chimes, and the whole poem is one long look held a beat past politeness.

The enclosed tercet (ABA). The outer lines close around a middle line that belongs to nobody yet. This is the engine of the villanelle, which is why Dylan Thomas can drive two refrains through nineteen lines without the form coming apart.

Terza rima (ABA BCB CDC). Dante’s invention, and the most interesting room in the house. Shelley:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

That middle line is a rhyme waiting for the next room to be built. No stanza is finished on its own terms; each one hands you forward. Dante needed a form that could descend without stopping, and he built a room whose door will not shut.

Free verse tercets. Contemporary poets group in threes to pace the breath and to hold each image at arm’s length for a beat. Wallace Stevens does this in “The Snow Man,” where the three-line units set the cold winter landscape against human emotion without letting either one relax.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Now you: when do you break?

You have your lines. The question in front of you is where the white space goes, and the honest version of that question is what you intend to ask of the person reading.

Try this. Does the unit want an answer, or does it want a witness?

If the second line settles the first, break at two. Couplets are for verdicts. They are for the thing you are prepared to stand behind, the observation that closes, the joke that lands, the bound pair that speaks with one voice or argues to a finish.

If there is a third thing in the material, the qualification, the doubt, the person watching from the doorway, break at three. Tercets are for testimony. Testimony is unfinished by nature. Somebody heard it and has not yet said what they think.

Both are hospitality. They are different offers. The couplet says: the floor is solid, I have told you where everything is, listen. The tercet says: I have left the room a little off balance and I would like you to stand in it with me.

The reader interacts with the poem differently because the form behaves differently, the voice shifts, and what the poem says is received differently. Stanza length is part of the saying. The couplet is a polka. The tercet is a waltz.

Next: the quatrain, and what happens when a room gets big enough to hold an argument.

Warmly,

Ben & Tamarah

Bainbridge Island Press

August 2, 2026

A Sunday afternoon dispatch from Bainbridge Island Press

What our poets are doing, and where they’re going to be

Welcome back to The Itinerary. Today we have something brand new to show you, a festival this Saturday, a homecoming reading next week, and a big night in Maine to report. Let’s get to it.

Introducing: BIP Public Art

Poetry belongs out in the world, so we’re putting it there. Today we’re launching Bainbridge Island Press Public Art, free printed poetry made to be found, read, and shared.

Scotch Broom is our new monthly poetry broadside, printed and placed in Free Little Libraries across Bainbridge Island. One poem, one poster, once a month, hiding among the paperbacks. If you find one, it’s yours.

POETICS is our free poetry zine, collected work for readers across the island, yours to read online or pick up and pass along.

Want your poem out in the wild? The site has a submissions page. Go find the August broadside, and tell us where you spotted it.

This Week

Saturday, August 8: PSOV Summer Festival, Greensboro, Vermont

10 AM to 4 PM · Highland Center for the Arts, 2875 Hardwick Street, Greensboro, VT

Tim Mayo (Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, BIP 2026) reads in the afternoon open mic and extends an open invitation to poets everywhere to come participate. Free admission; lunch is $18, pre-ordered online.

Full festival schedule Sign up for the open mics

Hide & Seek presales are open now

A.S. Aubrey’s debut chapbook, Hide & Seek: Poems for Being Found in a Lost World (Finishing Line Press, November), is in its presale window at Finishing Line Press. Presale orders set the print run, so this is the moment your order counts most.

On the Calendar

Wednesday, August 12: Sibyl James at Eagle Harbor Book Co.

6:30 PM · Eagle Harbor Book Co., Bainbridge Island

Sibyl James (Persephone’s Testimony, BIP XPRESS) brings Dizzier Than Gillespie home to Bainbridge Island. This one is in our backyard. We will see you there.

Friday, August 14: Jonathon Medeiros at the Kaua’i Writers Garden

Jonathon Medeiros, whose digital chapbook (Mostly Water, BIP XPRESS) is available in BIP’s XPRESS series, leads and reads at the Kaua’i Writers Garden, as he does every second Friday of the month. If your August includes Kaua’i, you know where to be.

Saturday, September 19: Matt Butler’s Reckless Son at BPA

7:30 PM · Bainbridge Performing Arts

Matt Butler’s nationally acclaimed solo show, grown from more than a hundred concerts performed in jails and prisons across the country; think On the Road meets “Folsom Prison Blues.” Butler is a contributor to As of Fire. Recommended for ages 14 and up. Trailer and tickets.

Recently on the Road

A.S. Aubrey took the stage at the Camden Opera House last night with her father, Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, for Listening for the Notes, an evening of his songs woven with her poems. Every audience member will receive a mailed copy of Hide & Seek when it arrives this fall. What a night for the family, and what a night for poetry.

Sibyl James read from Dizzier Than Gillespie at Elliott Bay Book Company on Thursday, the last Seattle stop before she brings the book across the water to Eagle Harbor on the 12th.

Looking Ahead

The 25th Brattleboro Literary Festival, co-founded by Tim Mayo, lands this October. Poetry on the Salish Sea with Kathryn Hunt (including an October workshop) is still coming into focus; details soon. In November: Jonathon Medeiros joins the faculty of the Kaua’i Writers Conference (November 6 to 8, lunchtime reading on the seventh), and Hide & Seek arrives in the world.

And One More Thing

POETICS: Grain arrived in the world on Friday. Poets from across the country on wheat, rice, sorghum, harvest, and the hands that bring it all in. $19.99 at bainbridgeisland.press. More on this soon; for now, go meet the newest member of the family.

Send Us Your Itinerary

Are you a BIP poet, a POETICS workshop alum, or a friend of the press with a reading, launch, or festival appearance coming up? Reply to this email with the date, time, venue, and a line or two about the event, and we will add you to the map.

Until next Sunday,

Tamarah & Ben Bainbridge Island Press

#1 in Poetry, Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers 2026

Last weekend Ben and I ran a booth at White Rabbit Book Co.’s book fair in Bremerton, and we asked everyone who came to our table the same question. “So, do you read poetry?” What surprised us was how many people said yes, and how many of those said yes for the same reason. My grandfather did, and when he passed, he left his books at my house. My mother read them out loud when I was small. My father kept a shelf of them by his bed. Poetry arrives in our lives through the people we love, and it stays after those people are gone. It becomes part of the house. Part of the room a child grows up in. Part of the world we hand down.

This is why we make books. Because books are as necessary as sunlight. They keep us alive and they keep our words alive, and we live with them and through them.

Here are the books that are breathing life into us right now.

BOOK: Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster by Tim Mayo

Tim Mayo’s Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster is out from BIP this year. Fifty-five poems that trace catharsis in the classical sense, meaning the clarification that comes only from having lived through something. Tim has been on the road with the book all summer and has more readings coming, all tracked in every Sunday’s Itinerary. If you have not picked up the book yet, consider this your reminder!

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/muscle-memories-of-love-and-disaster

Three XPRESS Chapbooks (that are wildly popular right now)

Three XPRESS chapbooks, five dollars each, all three of them moving off our digital shelves this month.

Orchard Crown and Orbital Crows by George Naranjo.

Nineteen poems that keep one foot in the garden and one eye on the sky. Madre and Papi’s tended plot, the myths of Demeter and Icarus, crows standing watch over grief and addiction. Spanish endearments beside cosmic imagery, and a supernova’s slow collapse that starts to sound like a family coming apart.
https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/orchard-crown-and-orbital-crows

time marches on by Michelle Trantham.

Backyard storms and studio apartments. A grandmother’s basement. A Midwest inheritance carried forward, doppler radar and black-eyed peas, warning systems learned as kids and now applied to the newer weather of rejection emails and doomscrolling. Wry, plainspoken, unafraid of both bad news and small comforts.
https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/time-marches-on

Mostly Water by Jonathon Medeiros.

Poems written from Kaua’i through the strange stillness of the 2020 quarantine. Rivers, lemon trees, bike rides through childhood, mountains that vanish in the rain and come back changed. Medeiros pays attention the way a teacher does, patiently and with the understanding that noticing is itself a kind of care. Warm, grounded, honest.
https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/mostly-water

From the POETICS Bookstore: The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking by James Matthew Wilson

This week from the POETICS Bookstore, James Matthew Wilson’s The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood Books, $22). If you have been following our summer thread on craft and orthodoxy through Benjamin P. Myers’s A Poetics of Orthodoxy (which Wilson blurbed) and Black Sunday, this is the next book to add to the pile. Wilson is one of the finest formalist critics working today, Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine and Poet-in-Residence at the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music. His argument, in short: that Modern and Post-Modern criticism, free verse, and political ideology have gradually starved contemporary poetry of what makes it poetry. The final chapter is a tour de force defense of meter. It will change the way you read every poem after it.

https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/the-fortunes-of-poetry-in-an-age-of-unmaking

The Podcast

POETICS Summer Workshop 2026

Five live Zoom sessions starting in September, capped at twelve poets. This week I wrote out an invitation on Substack — why we are doing the workshop, what to expect, and who it is for. If you have been on the fence, this will help you decide.