The first trees that often come to my mind are the trees of my childhood. There was the maple tree in my parents’ front yard, where we used to tie the dogs’ leashes and run circles around the driveway and street. There was the beautiful Japanese Maple tree in my grandmother’s yard, which grew taller than the roof of her house through my father’s childhood and then through my own. Its leaves were a vermilion that covered us all year-long. In my other grandmother’s yard, my sisters and I ran the trees, three perfectly spaced friends that created a triangle track to race each other. The biggest in her front yard was the tree that held a swing, where we’d kick our legs out into the sky, over the trickling creek.

Most of my childhood trees are gone to memory, but their roots (even when dug from the ground) still stretch through my mind. For many poets, these early trees are the jumping-off points for beautiful reflections on youth, family, and memory. We’ve collected some of our favorites below to guide you along your own tree poetic journey.

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Some stories and legends are foundational. Many of them emerged from the oral tradition and found their first forms in poetry. Ancient and Classical poetry are works from hundreds of years ago that still exist with an almost timelessness in our current poetic canon. In Occidental poetic tradition, these works are often drawn from Ancient Greece and Rome. With heroes, gods, tragedies, and love all captured in tales and poetic verse, these poems and stories have developed alongside poetry to the modern day. There is a deep richness that can be found in reading these works in their original forms, and in translation, for both the beauty of their text and the deeply human nature of the works. By becoming familiar with ancient and classical poetry, you’ll be able to find the threads of it that still exist in the poems and stories written today.

Later, I aim to dive into non-Western classical poetry, go further into epics like The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Mahabharata, and I’d love to know any requests you all have as well! For a quicker summary of some of the poets we’ll be diving into today, check out our post, Poetic History: 6 Ancient Poets to Appreciate.

A note on translation: the translation of poetry and differentiating between different translations can sometimes create a limitation in feeling like you’ve been able to experience the poem as deeply and truly as in its original language. While it’s true that it’s a different experience, I do not personally believe that what is lost in translation is not then balanced out by what is gained. What a gift to experience these epics from centuries ago and engage with them in different ways based on the focus and relationship to the text held by the translator. With that being said, different translations often can lead to a different reading experience of a text as it has in some ways been curated and transformed through the translator’s own process. Below, I’ve recommended translations that are either my personal favorites or that I’ve heard very good things about. They go along with what I enjoy and hope to get out of poems I’m reading in translation, but I highly encourage you to explore translations in everything you read, especially for texts like these, which we are lucky enough to often have many options on how to read them.'

Homer

Homer, the poet himself, is a bit of a mystery. Not much is known about him, and it is not certain whether or not he was himself an individual existing poet. Often he is depicted as a blind oral poet who lived in either the 9th or 8th century BCE. The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed to him and considered two of the most foundational works of Western Civilization. What is captured in those epics became incredibly influential on Greek culture, oral storytelling conventions for epic poems, and a central text for education in Western literature.

Both the Iliad and the Odyssey tell a story of the Trojan War. The Iliad comes first, with the war between the Greeks and the Trojans unfolding throughout it. The Odyssey follows with the tale of Odysseus, whose journey back to Ithaca, his home, after the end of the Trojan War is endlessly fraught.

The Odyssey has recently had a resurgence in popular culture with the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the 2018 release of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. Both works have reenlivened the classic for modern audiences, breathing fresh air and understanding into the ancient story.

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, is the first full translation of the epic into English by a woman. Wilson’s work in the text stripped away misogynistic interpretations and additions she’d found in prior translations and also offered an adept and nimble retelling of the tale. Her prose bounces with a liveliness and delicate touch that perfectly illustrates the art of translation.

If diving into the full story of the Odyssey leaves you hungry for more or wondering how the tale would look woven into modern contexts, there are so many brilliant adaptations waiting for you. In the poetry sphere, Omeros by Derek Walcott reimagines the Odyssey in the post-colonial Caribbean. For more prose and the Odyssey in an Irish context, venture into James Joyce’s Ulysses. Novels often offer a deeper look into the Odyssey from other perspectives as well, with works like The Penelopiad by Marget Atwood and Circe by Madeline Miller spinning the tales of the women of the Odyssey. In film, epics like Nolan’s Odyssey offer close re-tellings, whereas other movies like the Western O Brother Where Art Thou take a fun spin on the hero’s journey.

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad also stands apart in its sound and uniqueness. However, if you’re looking to explore another translator as you dive into the Iliad, I recommend The Iliad of Homer by Richmond Lattimore. This translation is deeply rooted in the Greek, trying to stay incredibly faithful to the context of Ancient Greece. For a modern adaptation, Madeline Miller’s work in The Song of Achilles retells the Iliad from the perspective of Achilles’s companion and lover Patroclus. In film, Troy and Helen of Troy offer fun cinematic takes.

Sappho

Sappho is known for her lyric poetry written to be sung while accompanied by music. She is best-known for her love poetry, and was one of the most renowned female poets. If Not, Winter by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, picks up the fragments left of Sappho’s verses and weaves through them. Only one poem of Sappho’s nine books of lyrics is said to have survived, but through the fragments Carson’s melodious translation presents the scraps in both English and Greek, allowing spaces for both discovery and interpretations that bring the vividness of Sappho’s work to life. Sappho’s work has endured in modern culture for its resonances in the queer community and early depictions of a woman’s love for another woman.

Ovid

Ovid was a Roman poet who is known as one of the canonical poets of Latin literature. His Metamorphoses is his most famous work, a revered poem of transformation and love. His early poetry was very concerned with love, and by using poetic forms like dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter conveyed an intensity that captures love and desire’s feeling in the heart on the page.

Metamorphoses contains many Greek and Roman myths, centering around themes of transformation and metamorphosis. I recommend the translation by Stephanie McCarter, where the concept of change, both physical and emotional, shines through the original myths with the same kind of captivating metre. Similar to Emily Wilson, Stephanie McCarter was the first female translator of the epic in over sixty years when her translation was released in 2023. Her translation focuses on accuracy in converting the representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in the original poem.

Virgil

The Aeneid by Vergil is a Latin epic that tells of the founding of Rome. Aeneas, a Trojan who fled after the fall of Troy (as captured in the Iliad), is the central figure in this epic. Much like the Odyssey, the first parts of the Aeneid are spent wandering the seas after the fall of Troy. Where the Aeneid charts its own course is the person of Aeneas, the creation of Rome after the Trojans wage a victorious war upon the Latins. I recommend the translation by Shardi Bartsch, which confronts contradictions of the text and the unique approach the epic takes to storytelling. Vergil’s work captures the mythology of heroes and the societies built around them, but also gestures to the stories lost to history.

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin (2008) picks up on these threads. By telling the story of Lavinia, the King’s daughter with whom Aeneas is destined to found an empire, Le Guin gives voice to a woman left in Virgil’s margins.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article. This August, we’ll be highlighting a theme of myth & legend.

Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros
By: Anne Carson

I. GERYON

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red
How stiff the red landscape where his cattle scraped against
Their hobbles in the red wind
Burrowed himself down in the red dawn jelly of Geryon’s 
Dream

Geryon’s dream began red then slipped out of the vat and ran
Upsail broke silver shot up through his roots like a pup

Secret pup At the front end of another red day

II. MEANWHILE HE CAME

Across the salt knobs it was Him
Knew about the homegold
Had sighted red smoke above the red spires

III. GERYON’S PARENTS

If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table
Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up
Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms 
To the ticking red taxi of the incubus
Don’t want to go want to stay Downstairs and read

IV GERYON’S DEATH BEGINS

Geryon walked the red length of his mind and answered No
It was murder And torn to see the cattle lay
All these darlings said Geryon And now me


V. GERYON’S REVERSIBLE DESTINY

His mother saw it mothers are like that
Trust me she said Engineer of his softness
You don’t have to make up your mind right away
Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see
Coil of the hot plate starting to glow

VI. MEANWHILE IN HEAVEN 

Athen was looking down through the floor
Of the glass-bottomed boat Athena pointed
Zeus looked Him 


VII. GERYON’S WEEKEND
Later well later they left the bar went back to the centaur’s 
Place the centaur had a cup made out of a skull Holding three
Measures of wine Holding it he drank Come over here you can 
Bring your drink if you’re afraid to come alone The centaur 
Patted the sofa beside him Reddish yellow small alive animal 
Not a bee moved up Geryon’s spine on the inside

VIII. GERYON’S FATHER 

A quiet root may know how to holler He liked to 
Suck words Here is an almighty one he would say
After days of standing in the doorway
NIGHTBOLLSNORTED i


IX. GERYON’S WAR RECORD

Geryon lay on the ground covering his ears The sound
Of the horses like roses being burned alive


X. SCHOOLING

In those days the police were weak Family was strong
Hand in hand the first day Geryon’s mother took him to
School She neatened his little red wings and pushed him
In through the door


XI. RIGHT

Are there many little boys who think they are a 
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the 
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully



XII. WINGS

Steps off a scraped March sky and sinks
Up into the blind Atlantic morning One small
Red dog jumping across the beach miles below 
Like a freed shadow


XIII. HERAKLES’ KILLING CLUB

Little red dog did not see it he felt it All
Events carry but one




XIV. HERAKLE’S ARROW

Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made
The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a 
Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze


XV. TOTAL THINGS KNOWN ABOUT GERYON

He loved lightning He lived on an island His mother was a 
Nymph of a river that ran to the sea His father was a gold
Cutting tool Old scholia say that Steischorus say that
Geryon had six hands and six feet and wings He was red and
His strange red cattle excited envy Herakles cam and 
Killed him for his cattle

The dog too


XVI. GERYON’S END

The red world And corresponding red breezes
Went on Geryon did not



Until next week, 
Happy writing!

Claire

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Slam poetry is a powerful way to channel both the meaning and emotion of your poetry, and to do so in a vibrantly engaging and alive community of poetry lovers.

I have truthfully only been to one poetry slam in my life, and was too intimidated to take the stage myself. Instead, I watched in wonder from a dark row in the Nuyorican Poets Café as one of my professors took the stage and quieted the room with the even-tempered emotion in her voice. The winner that night was a man who performed a silly poem about a toothbrush. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but I remember it brought the room down. The audience judges held up 10s all around, and my poetry classmates and I laughed our way all the way back out into the night.

Hopefully, through this post and learning the history and rules of slam, you’ll feel even more excited and knowledgeable as you join your first or get ready for your next poetry slam.

Origins of Slam

Though poetry’s roots in the oral tradition are well-known, the unique nature of modern spoken and slam poetry can be traced to Chicago in the 1980s. The structure of Slam contests emerged from a Chicago reading series begun by Marc Smith, a construction worker and poet. Within the walls of Jazz Club, Smith and those who performed worked to take poetry readings from quiet and formal spaces to something interactive and alive with energy. Combining elements of poetry, theater, performance, and storytelling, Slam is a genre that welcomes many kinds of poetic and performance practices.

As Slam grew, it also began to take on some of the characteristics of the poetry movements of the ‘90s, specifically the Beat and Negritude movements. Poets of both movements were dedicated to performance and spoken poetry as vital parts of their practice. From poet Amiri Baraka, a leader of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, slam gained much of the musical, theatrical, and political intensity that shapes the form today. The principles of self-affirmation and self-knowledge central to Negritude were also a part of Baraka’s practice. When combined with the free-flowing and free expression tenets of the Beat Movement, Slam became a vital, raw, and democratizing form of poetic expression.

The Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City also became a home and leading influence on the Slam poetry movement. Founded in 1973.

Structure of a Poetry Slam

The room quiets, and someone takes the stage. An introductory welcome by the host begins the night, maybe electing audience judges, maybe explaining the rules of the space to newcomers, maybe outlining the flow of the night.

Those who signed up begin to take the stage. Either in the order they signed up, or something determined just before the start of the slam they begin to perform their poetry. It’s a performance in the best way, coming from the body’s presence on the stage, the way the poet’s voice can carry the beats and emotions of the poem. After each poem, the judges will hold up the score. The highest score at the end of the night will be the winner, but the experience overall is electric for every poet and audience member involved.

How to Hone Your Poetry Slam Performance

It is a specific skill in itself to not just write a poem, but perform it. Performing a poem means you want to be able to channel emotion in your words, voice, and body. Start by being specific. Choose a topic that you can really evoke and write as close and deep into it as you can. By using strong imagery in the poem, you can take the audience with you into the poem instead of just telling them where you’re going. And like anything, practice. Practice finding the delivery that works best for you and for each poem. Learn from the community members and performers at your slams and watch videos and listen to some of the great slam poets. I recommend Andrea Gibson as a favorite of mine!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article. This August, we’ll be highlighting a theme of myth & legend.

“Conriocht [Werewolf]”

By Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh

Chonac smólach marbh sa choill
é seargtha ar an screablach.
Bhíos ag déanamh trua de
nuair a tháinig madraí de rúid
is thugadar ruathar fúm
ag snapadh, ag glamadh
agus drant orthu.
Uaimse do tháinig liúbhéic,
gach bagairt is buille coise:
Bhí ina bhúirchath eadrainn.
Chorraigh na ba sna goirt
is chuireadar leis an gcór allta.
Theith lucha is dallóga fraoigh
isteach faoin doire donn,
sheas madra rua ar shiolpa,
a cholainn iomlán righin.
Chuimhníos ar mo choisíocht;
bhí ceithre chrúb fúm.



I saw a thrush-corpse shriveling
on the woodland’s scrabbly floor. 
I was busy pitying it
when there came a harrying pack 
of strays that set about me;
they bayed and snapped,
growling bare-toothed. 
From my throat such roaring: 
my every curse and foot-swing
made a bellow-war between us. 
Fields of agitated cattle
augmented that wild choir. 
Mice and shrewmice shrunk back
into the oakleaf brown interior
as a fox reared upward on a stony ridge, 
its stance utterly rigid. 
I remembered to run, 
felt the four paws under me. 

Translated from the Irish by Billy Ramsell

Until next week,

Happy Writing!

Claire

These selected verses from selected poems create a soundtrack to writing about and living with water. From the crashing destruction of the ocean winds, the deep history of a swirling river, to the serenity of a sparkling expanse on a warm day, water is captured here in its many faces.

Rain

Rain feels to me like the most cyclical and luck-based part of the water cycle. It comes when it will, based off atmospheric conditions, water levels, a continuous loop from the sun evaporating the water on the ground. Harvests, drinking water, water levels depend on it. Yet, in many ways it disappears and appears of what seems like its own wiles. Joy Harjo’s “Praise the Rain” below celebrates the necessity of gratitude for the natural things and those that are out of our control.

“Praise the Rain”

by Joy Harjo

Praise the rain; the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk—
Praise the hurt, the house slack
The stand of trees, the dignity—
Praise the dark, the moon cradle
The sky fall, the bear sleep—
Praise the mist, the warrior name
The earth eclipse, the fired leap—
Praise the backwards, upward sky
The baby cry, the spirit food—
Praise canoe, the fish rush
The hole for frog, the upside-down—
Praise the day, the cloud cup
The mind flat, forget it all—

Praise crazy. Praise sad.
Praise the path on which we're led.
Praise the roads on earth and water.
Praise the eater and the eaten.
Praise beginnings; praise the end.
Praise the song and praise the singer.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.
Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

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This week we have a special post from award-winning poet and illustrator Lauren Haldman. In this post, she explores her poetry career and how illustration, instead of being a separate passion entirely, became an essential part of her practice.

Lauren Haldeman is the author of three books of poetry, including Instead of Dying, winner of the Colorado Prize, and one graphic memoir, Team Photograph (Sarabande 2022), which Rachel Yoder called “a brilliant and original book from a wildly creative voice.” Her previous work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Colorado Review, Fence, The Iowa Review, and The Rumpus. Lauren is a recipient of the Iowa Artist Fellowship, the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious writing programs in the country.

Her latest book, Wild That We’re Alive, features diary-like comics that depict the artist and her family living through both the strangeness and wonder of the everyday. With the poet’s distinctive voice and emotionally resonant illustrations, these comics are a beautiful look at the mundane and extraordinary of the daily world. Wild That We’re Alive is available to order now!

Poetry vs. Comics: Nobody Wants this Fight

By: Lauren Haldeman

When I was younger, I loved drawing, and I loved writing. I loved them equally. It never occurred to me that I would have to choose between them. But as I grew older, the world seemed determined to ask the question: Are you a writer or an artist?

In high school, I moved back and forth between those identities, but poetry eventually won out. I came to Iowa City for college, following the path of becoming a writer. Art became a side project: something I did for band posters and small creative experiments while my primary focus was poetry. When I got into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the emphasis was even more firmly on manuscripts, books, and literary craft.

At the same time, though, I was involved in puppetry. I spent time at Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, and saw how they merged text, visual storytelling, politics, and performance in ways that fascinated me. Watching them combine the text of Bertolt Brecht, for example, with giant puppets and visual symbolism opened up a new possibility for me. I began incorporating puppetry into poetry readings, and audiences responded enthusiastically.

This was the entryway. I skirted the line between visual performance and poetic grounding. And what came out of these trials was a new sense of accessibility. How could poetry reach people who didn’t normally read it?

Part of my interest in that question was personal. I came from a family that wasn’t literary in the traditional sense. My brothers had learning disabilities that made reading difficult, and poetry could feel especially inaccessible, you know? And I wanted to share what I loved with the people I loved. I wanted to build a bridge.

So, I started illustrating some of my poems.

It was a type of trial run. I wondered if the visuals would make a difference, if it would even work, if it would degrade the initial poem. I started with a poem titled “Jealous” from my first poetry collection Calenday. I sent it out for publication, mostly out of curiosity. I was expecting the same long waits and frequent rejections that characterize much of the literary world. Instead, it was picked up almost immediately. It surprised me.

Yet, I began to realize that people are increasingly drawn to visual storytelling. I don’t have a particular opinion on whether this is good or bad - I’m simply observing it. Literature is leaning toward the visual.

I started noticing how my daughter would come home from elementary school carrying stacks of graphic novels, tear through them in a night, return them, and immediately check out more.

And I wondered: could graphic novels be considered literary? Is this really reading?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was. The same interpretive skills, emotional intelligence, and narrative understanding required by traditional novels were present in graphic novels. The only difference was that pictures were participating in the storytelling.

That realization challenged my own assumptions.

When I was a kid, comics weren’t generally considered literary. They were often dismissed as pulp entertainment or superhero stories, not “serious” art. Letting go of that bias took time. Eventually I recognized that comics could be both artistically sophisticated and widely accessible. Better yet, they were something I genuinely loved making.

Deep down, accessibility has always mattered to me as a poet. My goal was never to confuse readers. I wanted to connect with them. And as I continued making comics, something unexpected happened.

The work began to connect more.

Little by little, I started drawing things I was embarrassed to admit. Vulnerabilities. Fears. Awkward experiences. It was terrifying at first. But every time I shared one of those comics online, people responded. Not with judgment. With recognition. They would say, “I feel that way too,” or “OMG I do that too!”

That response became a kind of antidote to loneliness. Through comics, I started noticing the common denominators that connect me to other people, even people who intimidate me. And subsequently, through this openness, I began the long process of dismantling my own shame.

Being human is messy, right? It’s the worst! We all have strange habits, embarrassing thoughts, and moments we’d really like to hide away forever. And somehow, comics gave me a way to talk about those things.

A lot of the comics were about lighter subjects: farting, misspelling words, being late. Somehow this tiny, ridiculous thing became a point of connection.

Other comics explored much harder subjects.

There was a period of about nine months after the COVID pandemic when I was experiencing relentless panic attacks and depression. During that time, I cried in a lot of public places. I felt weak and ashamed. Drawing those experiences felt risky, but I shared them anyway. And then later, during a reading at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, someone in the audience asked, “What’s your favorite stall in the Iowa City Public Library to cry in?”

It was a hilarious question, but it was also meaningful. I said, “the second stall on the left.” And someone else immediately chimed in and said people are always crying in that bathroom.

I remember thinking: When I was going through that period, I felt completely alone. That loneliness intensified the anxiety and depression. Yet here were all these people acknowledging a shared experience.

That comic had opened a window. It allowed me to see that what I thought was pathetic was actually deeply human.

There is something profoundly comforting about discovering you’re not the only person crying in a public restroom. So much anxiety comes from the fear of being different, of being excluded, of somehow falling outside the village. Being cast out. Sent into the wild woods. Vulnerability is a fairly new technology. It works against that fear. It reveals that many of our private struggles are surprisingly common.

That’s what comics have taught me.

The more vulnerable I am, the more people respond. The more honestly I tell the truth, the more connection I find. What began as a way to combine my love of drawing and writing became something much deeper: a practice of connection, empathy, and self-acceptance.

So, it turns out I can write and draw as a combined practice. We all can. We can do both. The two mediums complement each other in a way that invites people in. We don’t have to choose!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article. This August, we’ll be highlighting a theme of myth & legend.

“A Myth of Devotion”

by Louise Glück

When Hades decided he loved this girl, 
he built for her a duplicate of earth, 
everything the same, down to the meadow, 
but with a bed added. 

Everything the same, including sunlight, 
because it would be hard on a young girl 
to go so quickly from bright light to utter
darkness

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the
night, 
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. 
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no
stars. 
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it 
comforting. 

A replica of earth 
except there was love here. 
Doesn’t everyone want love? 

He waited many years, 
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow. 
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought, 
you have them all. 

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night 
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says 
I am alive, that means also 
you are alive, because you hear me, 
you are here with me. And when one turns, 
the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness, 
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed
his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here, 
certainly no more eating. 

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them. 

He dreams, he wonders what to call this 
place. 
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The 
Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood. 

A soft light rising above the level meadow, 
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. 
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt
you 

but he thinks 
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him 
a more promising beginning, more true. 

Until next week,

Happy Writing!

Claire

There are many notions that interest poets — a hope to capture certain feelings or experiences that either get to the heart of something deeply personal or deeply human. The concept of the sublime in poetry is no different. Many poets, especially since the Romantic era, have attempted to capture the experience of the sublime in their work. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the sublime as “Set or raised aloft, high up.” It further describes the feeling of awe created by the sublime as crushing and engulfing, awe-inspiring, but terrifying.

The sublime, in its very definition, operates outside of reason, and thus defies easy definition. The origin of the theory traces back to the third century, when Longinus defined the idea as something that describes the extreme heights of language and thought. In all its definitions since, the sublime has maintained the central component of something beyond reason; thus, poets have long been fascinated with capturing the experience of it. For this post, we’ll be focusing on how the sublime was understood in the nineteenth century, when writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charlotte Smith were striving to capture it in their work.

Edmund Burke and the 18th Century

The sublime was a general aesthetic concept explored in art, science, and literature in the Romantic era. In 1757, writer and politician Edmund Burke wrote a treatise entitled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment, and astonishment is the state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason upon that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.”

Burke’s definition conceives of the sublime as an experience with terror and horror at its center, emotions that confound classical reasoning and create a basis for modern sensitivity — the sensitivity poets of the Romantic era sought to evoke in their poetry. Terror is a crucial component added by Burke to the definition of the sublime. He wrote about it as the feelings of awe, horror, and beauty entwined to create the most intense emotion the mind could be capable of.

Immanuel Kant wrote a few years later in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime on the same subject. According to Kant, the human capacity for imagination fails when overwhelmed by a feeling of vastness of power.

When the Romantic poets picked up the notion of the Sublime, it was with the hopes of capturing this feeling of awe, of being overwhelmed in nature that was both beautiful and terrifying and incomprehensible to the human mind. Poetry was a unique space where something “incomprehensible” could try to be described.

Percy Bysshe Shelley “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”

Mont Blanc is a mountain located in the Alps, one that Percy Shelley and many of the Romantics encountered in their travels and were fascinated by. In this poem, Shelley compares the mountain’s overwhelming scale and power to the human imagination.

He opens the poem with the universe, and with movements like water. The poem is written in five parts, where Nature (the capital N is an important signifier that what Shelley is considering is of greater significance than just the natural world) and mind meet, moving in similar rhythms. The poem evokes splendour and captures human thought as deriving from nature. Nature is alive; it “bursts and raves” as something dark, powerful, and wild. Shelley’s mind in turn does the same.

“The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—”

In the next section, the landscape is personified a little, the image full of bursting life. Something awful but beautiful. They are fascinated by poetry itself and things that seem both eternal and beyond understanding.

“Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-colour’d, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,”

Awful is an essential word in this part of the poem, and understanding the sublime as Shelley evokes it. It is something beautiful and deeply awe-inspiring. It’s not awful just as we understand the word now, something horrible, but something horrible that inspires and strikes almost an overwhelming reverence and terror in the mind of the poet.

Charlotte Smith “Sonnet 59”

Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet 59” was written during a thunderstorm, and is in turn a tumult of a poem. The displays are beautiful but loud and destructive. Smith plays with the Sonnet form in this poem, both subverting the power of poetry and the conventions of the male-dominated poetry scene she was writing within. The sublime in this poem is embattled and terrifying, while the moon stands above it all, serene.

“WHAT awful pageants croud the evening sky!

The low horizon gath’ring vapours shroud,

Sudden from many a deep embattled cloud,

Terrific thunders burst and light’nings fly —”

Later in the poem, Smith calls the moon “Night’s regent — of her calm pavilion proud,” and the moon above the storm has been understood in different ways. Perhaps it is the ruling class above the fighting that rippled through the nineteenth century, a commentary on the French Revolution. Or perhaps, it is a commentary on the sublime as defined by male poets as a concept with domination at its center — but here is something which cannot conquer the even more awe-inspiring moon above the tumult.

William Wordsworth “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,”

“With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.”

In this poem, again Nature offers access to the sublime. The speaker in this poem is writing of his encounter with the countryside, and it offers him insight into links between humanity, the natural world, and the universe. The beauty of the environment and the power it holds make him aware of the place of people within it all.

The sublime has evolved since the Romantics, since their poetic contexts and concerns. Yet in their contentions with the sublime we can find how poetry has always been deeply involved with connecting the natural world to human emotion, how societal unrest can find a place in the tumultuous skies of writing. The American sublime is a beast all its own, as is every understanding of the Sublime which has contended with the literary traditions of the nineteenth century and also uniquely emerged from its own national and poetic traditions.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This July, we’ll be highlighting a theme of music & dance.

“Dance, Dance, While the Hive Collapses”

By: Tiffany Higgins

Oh my, oh my, I lose myself
I study atlases and cirrus paths
in search of traces of it, of you


	  of that thing, of that song
	  I keep pressing my ear to the current
                  of air to hear …
		      I hear it and it disappears
		     It was all I wanted to do in this life 
		     to sense that phantom tap 

on my nerves, to allow myself
to be hit by it, attacked, aroused
until, as if someone else, I arise

	I dance my part in paradise
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I read that bees who’ve drunk
imidacloprid 

	     can’t waggle to indicate 
	  to others where the best
	  nectar is located


(you and I also long to map
for each other the sweetest
suck of sap)

	   Workers carry far less food
	    back to the waiting hive. 


		            They wander, wobble
		            can’t bring their way 
		            home alive


The imidacloprid-imbibed
can’t bring it back 
to the colony. 
	      Some hives collapse
	      entirely. 
		        I desire to say that I, I 
		         would do it differently


			I would be the bee, bloomed 
			with pesticide. 


that still would shake out a wiffle
like the finger’s signature
on the iPad at checkout:

     not quite you, but still identity
     more like a wave that solid you 
     yet enough to signify: 


	    There, there, in the far off field
	    spiked acanthus, trumpets of datura


		in the abandoned lot
		on the corner of International and High

		         the mystic assignation
		          the golden throat of light:

			  gorge, gorge, take
		                  your fill, I would cry

		before I too failed
		and my bumbling body lay down to die


I’d dance my last dance
to rescue the hive
yes, I’d carry the amber whirrers
out alive			~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


          Or not. Perhaps I too would succumb


to the corn syrup, chemical 
piped into our supply. 

      (I, too, longing to find my
       way to you, 
       would go off course.)

	Alas. There is still melody, 
	Rhythm, someone is streaking 
	out in air, droning


	     around the phonograph, which is the grooved
	     heart valve of the black vinyl
	   divine who is winding this universe. 
	    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Someone is dancing us. 
Will it be you? 			~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dance, dance, as the hive collapses
Dance, dance, while the colony disassembles
Dance the occasion
Dance the gorgeous design 	   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



inside the honey
of our lit up veins 	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
between the stripes and streams
of these swift rays

Until next week,

Happy writing!

Claire

Zines (pronounced “zeens,” short for magazines) are one of the most accessible DIY forms of publication that exist. Often made by individuals or small groups, they prioritize sharing culture and ideas over profit. They are fun, collaborative projects, simple ones are easy to make at home with the iconic 8-page mini-zine style. Or can be as expansive or digital as you wish!

Born of fan culture and DIY/punk cultures, zines often prioritize the freedom of expression and the accessibility of sharing information. They are often given away or made available for free online. If looking for a place for your zines, or to find zines local to you, first places to check should be independent or second-hand bookstores, coffee shops, or wherever your local artistic/writer community gathers.

Zines have limitless potential — perhaps as a passion project, an accessible way of sharing information and resources, or as a form of artistic or political expression. Poetry is a popular subject matter for zines because it captures many of the similar themes or creative impulses behind zine-making.

Riot grrrl and Queer Zines

The cultural importance of zines is in part due to their ties to countercultural movements. Manuscripts and printings of poems weave through this radical history, ideas and communities formed and traceable through the pages of zines people created.

Poetry is a place for self-disclosure; all of it, authentic and independent, is accessible to anyone. An avenue to expression of selfhood and a freedom of being, it tied perfectly to the art and political productions being made and channeled through zines by countercultural communities.

Riot grrrl was an underground feminist punk movement that emerged primarily in the early 1990s in the disparate Washingtons — in Olympia, Washington, and in Washington D.C. The movement was targeting sexism and sexual assault, mixing punk music with political activism and a strong emphasis on DIY. Zines were a dominant form of expression for this movement, a channel for the music, literature, and ideas the Riot grrrls were building. Refusing to assimilate to anyone else’s creative or social standards, zines were the perfect outlet. Fanzines were a place for interviews and feminist topics and for expression of personal experiences with sexism. A form of writing instruction, they also encouraged women to dive into literature, essays, and poetry.

Many of the punk bands, such as Bikini Kill, started creating zines and DIY flyers for their shows and fans. But the art took off in the movement as a whole.

“Evolution of a Race Riot” was a compilation listing resources and compiling zine projects for people in the punk rock and punk culture, with an emphasis on helping women of color navigate the punk scene. Poems were included alongside these resources, such as “all mixed up,” in which a writer reflects on her parents and her mixed black/jewish identity. Poetry was an essential undercurrent and place for the movement’s ideas to flourish through personal expression.

Chelsey Minnis is a poet who emerged post the height of the Riot grrrl scene, but whose work was deeply invested in third-wave feminism and ideas of the movement. Her Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetices (2010) exhibits witty and “unladylike” behavior that challenges social norms of how a woman should be and should write.

Zines are a permanency. When a reader returns to them, they remain the same. They become a living archive of an idea, or a place to save and share your poetry as it was when you wrote it down.

Modern Zines

If this post excited you to start your own zines, or to begin reading more, check out our 9 Poetry Zines to Make Your Indie Heart Sing and this recent collection from Button Poetry for further inspiration on modern poetry zines. Or, follow this guide from the Barnard Zine Library on how to create your own Zine. Begin writing poetry, and know no one has to approve it for publication other than yourself! Find a like-minded artistic community, and put it out there!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This July, we’ll be highlighting a theme of music & dance.

“Dancers Exercising” by Amy Clampitt

Frame within Frame, the evolving conversation
is dancelike, as though two could play 
at improvising snowflakes’
six-feather-vaned evanescence, 
no two ever alike. All process
and no arrival: the happier we are, 
the less there is for memory to take hold of, 
or—memory being so largely a predilection 
for the exceptional—come to a halt
in front of. But finding, one evening
on a street not quite familiar, 
inside a gated 
November-sodden garden, a building 
of uncertain provenance, 
peering into whose vestibule we were 
arrested—a frame within a frame, 
a lozenge of impeccable clarity—
by the reflection, no, not 
of our two selves, but of 
dancers exercising in a mirror, 
at the center 
of that clarity, what we saw, 
was not stillness
but movement: the perfection
of memory consisting, it would seem, 
in the never-to-be-completed.  
We saw them mirroring themselves, 
never guessing the vestibule 
that defined them, frame within frame, 
contained two other mirrors. 

Until next week,

Happy Writing!

Claire

We are firmly in the dog days of summer. With that in mind, I wanted to think about how to capture an element in poetry, in all the ways it feels, all the ways it has formed our lives. Fire is fundamental to the human experience. From origin stories of humanity’s creation to the necessity of fire for light, cooking, and warmth, fire can be found at every point of human evolution. Its importance in our lives hasn’t decreased with time; instead, it’s taken on different spiritual and religious associations along with deep personal connections to the flickering of flame.

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Medieval poetry is known for its alliterative verse and for its vernacular and regional nature. Themes of faith, courtly love, and heroism weave through its verses and stories. Drawing on formal influences from French and Latin, the language leans into the romantic and religious due to emphasis on courtly proceedings. The poems paint epic tales and the hardships of everyday life, capturing both the lives and legends of the Middle Ages.

Most Medieval poetry was written in Middle English, the vernacular spoken and written in England from about 1100 to about 1500, with Old English preceding it from around the 5th to 12th centuries. Though Modern English evolved from these two forms of the language, they are illegible to most modern readers without translation. The difficulty and obscurity of the language make these texts feel inaccessible, but also ripe for translations and adaptations in modern poetry. Though the original language might make medieval poetry feel distant from the realities of writing poetry in the 21st century, there are merits to understanding the themes of the texts, the beauty of its technicality, and how it set a standard on which English poetry as we know it today was formed.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The original medieval tale of “Gawain and the Green Knight” is of unknown authorship, but it is a well-known poem from the second half of the 14th century. Following Sir Gawain (or Gwayne) the tale is a chivalric romance that unfolds in the setting of King Arthur’s court and Britain.

In a chivalric romance, a hero goes on a quest to test his prowess. Less about an actual romance and more of a hero’s journey, this form of story sees Sir Gawain accept a challenge from a “Green Knight” and then undergo a series of tests of his chivalry and loyalty as the challenge is born out. The poem is a technical feat, with 2,500 lines broken up into irregular stanzas by short rhyming passages. It’s an alliterative poem. The poems’ descriptions are stunningly rich, influenced by the French language in court scenes and stories from Wales, England, and Ireland.

The text was first translated into Modern English at the end of the 19th century, and then was published in a scholarly edition translated by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1925. Many editions are illustrated as the original manuscript was, and it is known for the vivid descriptions that fill its scenes. In 2021, A24 released a film adaptation starring Dev Patel that, while containing deviations from the original text, brought the tale to life for modern audiences. The story has also found its way into opera, television, and theatre, and the larger canon of Arthurian legends. With its technical skill and evergreen central themes of heroism, love, and honesty, the poem has maintained its relevancy in modern poetry.

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales are one of the most widely recognized poems in the English tradition. An anthology of twenty-four short stories written in verse, the work is written in Middle English and the common vernacular of England at the time of its writing. The tales are presented in the context of a storytelling competition between pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury on their way to Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine.

The story captures many fundamental themes and traditions crucial to English poetry’s formation. Its use of iambic pentameter creates the story’s rhythm and helped popularize the meter. A written embodiment of the oral tradition, each story told in verse captures one of the pilgrims’ experiences, perspectives, or known stories. They tell these stories to each other in contests, but also as a way of connecting to pass the time on their pilgrimage.

The context of the tales within the English canon has also evolved throughout the centuries. During Victorian England, Chaucer’s tales were utilized as an imperial text, as a way to spread the English language and as a form of English nationalism. In the last few decades, the stories have evolved into an emblem of a refugee story and have often been adapted to represent the modern-day struggles of migrants in the United Kingdom and beyond.

Highlighting the necessity of movement embodied by the pilgrims’ journeys and the themes of stories such as the “Wife of Bath,” as done in Zadie Smith’s 2021 play The Wife of Willesden, the stories continue their relevancy to modern struggles.

Beowulf

From the early end of the Middle Ages — in a time following the fall of Rome and the following rise in feudalism and the Christian Church — Beowulf is an Old English epic poem. An elegiac narrative of a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from a monster named Grendel, and then later in the narrative from a dragon who ultimately slays Beowulf.

Attributed to another anonymous author, it’s unclear whether the poem began as an oral story or was composed when the original manuscript was written, around AD 975. Though first told or written around 1000 years ago, the story remains an important part of the English tradition for its use of elegy and for its religious themes and for how it captures the effects of warfare and fractured politics. One of the first translations in Modern English was done by J.R.R. Tolkien, in which he discussed the difficulties of bridging the language differences from Old to Modern English. In 2000, Seamus Heaney translated the poem to Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, emphasizing both the remote and uncannily familiar events of the tale in the context of the twentieth century.

There are many other poems and tales that emerged into the English tradition and created what is now commonly recognized as Medieval poetry. Hopefully, this dive into some of the notable works gives you an idea of the themes and types of verse common to the time, and excited to dive even further into the genre!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This July, we’ll be highlighting a theme of music & dance.

“Lullaby of Jazz Land: A Found Poem Comprised of Titles from the American Songbook”

By: Carole Boston Weatherford

It was written in the stars:
A child is born. 
From that moment on, 
I only had eyes for you. 

What a diff’rence a day made. 
Since I fell for you, 
Zing! went the strings of my heart. 

You’re so nice to come home to:
Make believe. Tea for two. 
Magic moments. 
I’m glad there is you. 

Just a-sittin’ and a-rockin, 
Swinging on a star, 
I could write a book
Too marvelous for words. 

I see your face before me. 
How my heart sings!

Do I love you? ’Deed I do. 
Fidgety feet, I get a kick out of you.

Let’s take a walk around the block
On the sunny side of the street. 

Come rain or come shine, 
My funny Valentine, please be kind. 
The best is yet to come. 

Jeepers, creepers, 
Time after time, you go to my head. 

Cheek to cheek, dancing in the dark. 
Love is the sweetest thing.
What a wonderful world!

Countdown. Stardust. Close your eyes. 
Hit the road to Dreamland. 

You’re my everything. 
What is there to say?
All I do is dream of you. 
There is no greater love.

💌 P.S. Do you have a favorite medieval poem or story?

I didn’t dive into it in this post, but I think Dante’s Inferno is one of the most enjoyable medieval poems to read as well!

Until next week,

Happy writing!

Claire

Beginning in early modern Europe as street literature, chapbooks were adopted into the poetry and DIY scene as an accessible and innovative way to share poetry. With the proliferation of low cost printing and digital technology, along with the advent of zines and poetry slams in the poetry scenes in America, chapbooks have become a mainstay in how poets produce and share their work.

Short and pocket-sized chapbooks are meant to make literature something that can easily be created, shared, and read. Similar in form to zines and short paperbacks, they’re a small printed booklet that are often vessels for emerging and non-mainstream poets to publish their work. Chapbooks can vary in form. They are, however, always a work of art. They allow authors to share their work with readers and fellow writers in a way that is accessible to both parties.

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Sometimes, the hardest part of writing poetry isn’t finding the perfect words for a feeling, but instead the true bones of the poem. It can be daunting when starting to try and wade through all of the different terms and rules for different types of poetry. Though never beholden to following them exactly, familiarizing yourself with the fundamentals can be crucial in strengthening your poetry practice.

One of the most essential building blocks of a poem is its meter. Meter (or metre) is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as “the pattern of measured sound-units recurring more or less regularly in lines of verse.” It’s what you recognize when feeling the rhythm of the syllables in a poem, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a verse.

The descriptive words we use for meter have been inherited from Greek and Latin quantitative systems, and therefore are very different from how we think of measurement in the metric or imperial systems. For example, a foot is the unit of measurement used to measure accentual-syllabic meter. Typically containing one stressed and at least one unstressed syllable, the feet are how the types of meter are defined.

A poem is typically written in one of four principal metrical systems:

Quantitative meter

In this meter, the rhythm is based on the length of time it takes to pronounce syllables, rather than how the syllables are stressed. Syllables are long or short, instead of varying in pitch or stress. The distinction of “long and short” is harder to identify in English, but in Classical Greek and Italian poetry, such as the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid, are easier to determine from the rhythm. The rules are complicated for determining the length of a syllable, but as it doesn’t translate well to many languages — so it should likely not come up in your poetry composing!

Syllabic meter

The meter is determined by the number of syllables per line, as opposed to the number of stresses. This meter is very natural to languages like French or Japanese, which place more emphasis on sound weight than on stressed beats in speech. The haiku and tanka are common forms of this meter.

Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October” is an example of syllabic verse in English. In the beginning lines “It was my thirtieth year to heaven/Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood” the syllabic meter gives the lines a rich musicality.

Accentual meter

Determined by the number of stressed syllables in each line — but not determined by the total number of syllables. This form is most common in Old English and later English, with works like Beowulf and many traditional nursery rhymes.

Accentual-syllabic meter

Accentual-syllabic meter is likely what you think of first when you think of meter in poetry. It is the meter most commonly found in English verse since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The number of stresses determines what type of accentual-syllabic meter you’re working in (a dimeter is two stresses, a trimeter is three, a tetrameter is four, and so on). Within the accentual-syllabic, there are a few forms of meter that are the most common and accessible to learn.

• Iambic meter

Typically associated with William Shakespeare, who wrote all his plays and poems in the meter. It is one of the most commonly used meters of the accentual-syllabic. It’s a rhythmic pattern consisting of “iambs,” or metrical feet made of two syllables, the first being unstressed and the second being stressed.

• Trochaic meter

Each line in trochaic meter consists of “trochees,” or two-syllable feet with a stressed syllable and then an unstressed syllable, creating a rhythm that sounds like falling. This meter was favored by poets William Blake and W.B. Yeats and in such works as “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe.

Meter is complex to understand (as are many of the rhythmic structures of poetry), but by learning some of these basics, you’re ready to dive into structuring your next poem.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This June, we’ll be highlighting a theme of community.

“About Standing (in Kinship)” by Kimberly Blaeser

We all have the same little bones in our foot
twenty-six with funny names like navicular.
Together they build something strong—
our foot arch a pyramid holding us up.
The bones don’t get casts when they break.
We tape them—one phalange to its neighbor for support.
(Other things like sorrow work that way, too—
find healing in the leaning, the closeness.)
Our feet have one quarter of all the bones in our body.
Maybe we should give more honor to feet
and to all those tiny but blessed cogs in the world—
communities, the forgotten architecture of friendship.

💌 P.S. What’s your favorite meter to write in?

Not my favorite, but a friend recently wrote a poem in dactylic tetrameter (dactylic meter is a form of accentual-syllabic where a foot is made of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed), and that was quite fun to read! I think personally I am a sucker for trochaic meter.

Until next week,

Happy writing!

Claire

With the World Cup in full swing this week, the world is filled with fervor and celebration for the teams taking the field. On this stage, the game becomes a space for transcending language and cultural boundaries. Fans and onlookers can partake in a shared love and pride for the passion displayed in the matches. For fans of poetry, this event offers a mirror to a global art form that possesses the ability to become almost a language all its own.

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Queer people have always existed, and have always been writing about their experiences and their love in their poetry. From Sappho to Shakespeare, to more modern poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, queer love and identity have always been woven, even subtly, into the works of queer poets. In 1999, Pride Month was established at a national level to take place in June. However, the tradition of celebrating Pride in June stems back 30 years earlier, to the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, and has grown into a global time of celebration for the resilience, love, and culture of the LGBTQ+ community. In the wake of the Stonewall Riots, and since the establishment of Pride Month, poetry has been an essential space of expression and a tool for visibility and representation for the LGBTQ+ community.

The Stonewall Riots & the 1970s in LGBTQ+ Poetry

Around the time of the Stonewall Riots, towards the end of the beat poetry movement, queer poetry performances in New York City could most often be found in countercultural spaces, in radical zines, and small-scale literary publications and presses. Poetry from the LGBTQ+ community could most often be found through activism and community groups that sponsored readings in bookstores, community meetinghouses, church basements, political rallies, arts festivals, college campuses, and public parks. Post-Stonewall, a lot of these literary efforts further solidified with increased activism from LGBTQ+ groups offering publications and venues. As older poets such as Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg joined the movement, the liberation movement sought to break from the confines of the past, and poets sought to save lives and foster resilience through artistic and cultural creation.

A few months after the Stonewall Riots, Come Out!, the first post-Stonewall newspaper published by the gay and lesbian community, was published. Spearheaded by The Gay Liberation Front, a prominent activist group in NYC after Stonewall, the magazine became a place for journalism, political thoughts, and poetry, such as:

“Roots” by Martha Shelley

We grow darker, 
          turned back in the earth
Forbidden to pierce the ground
      and see the sun:
Denied the fruit of love, 
We are not what we could become. 
Entrapment is no hamfist vice squad cop
But rigid cages of your words. 
Philosophies imprison thought:
Our voice has been unheard.

This poem by Martha Shelley was included in the first issue of Come Out! and follows similar themes to poems found throughout the issues. Often, writers were exploring belonging, a desire to be able to love openly, and identity.

Counterculture papers, such as Los Angeles’s Lesbian Tide and Chicago’s Lavender Woman also offered spaces for poets to publish their work and share it with the broader LGBTQ+ community in a time of widespread censorship for LGBTQ+ writers.

The first anthology of gay male poetry, The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology, emerged from Crossing Press in 1973. The collection represented a chance for gay poets to discuss potential poems for the collection and also the publication rights, access to gay literature, and life as gay male poets. Very few poets who reached out to Ian Young, the editor of the collection, included biographical information or opted for their poetry to be published. But the collection represented a revolutionary moment of representation and an assertion of gay identity in literature.

The AIDS Crisis & LGBTQ+ Poetry of the 1980s

From the 1960s and 1970s, there was an exponential growth in poetry of liberation and love from the LGBTQ+ community. However, the turn of the 1980s saw these communities and poets come to face the onset of the AIDS crisis, and the poetry reflected the tragedy that followed for LGBTQ+ communities, especially in cities such as NYC and San Francisco that had been the heart of the communities’ cultural production a decade prior. Poems such as John Ashbery’s “How to Continue” and Thomas Gunn’s collection The Man with Night Sweats captured the pain and tragedy of the AIDS epidemic’s early losses in mournful elegies, while others aimed to combat the villainization from political structures and to humanize those lost and suffering.

Franz Lebowitz, an author known for her commentary and iconic New Yorker personality, has spoken about the influence AIDS had on general culture, how “the first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were also the most interesting people. I know I’ve said this before, but the audience for the arts […] the knowing audience also died […] It decimated not just artists but knowledge.”

Very rarely in LGBTQ+ poetry from the 1980s is the threat of AIDS named outright. Often it is a sensation of looming death, of a cleaving trauma which has led to large-scale and personal trauma. Many of the poems were not published until posthumously, as the stigma and fear-mongering were so intense. With a disease that’s magnitude (by 1990, deaths attributed to the virus had reached nearly 90,000) and wasting power felt as if it defied sense, community and poetry as a survival tool became all the more important.

The last 30 years of LGBTQ+ poetry have been shaped by resonances of Pride, of activism and resilience from the poets who have come before. Each of the papers and publications from small presses represented a step forward for the voices of LGBTQ+ poets to be represented widely in American literature. Every poem saved and read in the years after Stonewall was a poem pushing for survival and representation, the influence of which can still be found weaving through the poems and collections LGBTQ+ poets are producing today. These writers create a rich landscape of poetic history to draw from this Pride month.

This Pride, celebrate the history of poetry as a space of expression for the LGBTQ+ community. Maybe that looks like penning your own poem, following the form of the poets writing post-Stonewall, or maybe it’s showing up to spaces in your community where poetry is freely shared. It could also look like supporting a local bookstore and purchasing collections by LGBTQ+ poets, or showing up to modern-day poets’ readings. However you choose to celebrate, I hope it is a month full of poetry and pride!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This June, we’ll be highlighting a theme of community.

“A Second Train Song for Gary” by Jack Spicer

When the trains come into strange cities
The citizens come out to meet the strangers.
I love you, Jack, he said
I love you, Jack, he said
At another station.
When passengers come in from strange cities
The citizens come out to help the strangers.
I love you too, I said
I love you too, I said
From another station.
The citizens are kind to passing strangers
And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.
I walk the unbelieving streets
I walk the unbelieving streets
In a strange city.
At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers
Achieve in memory the city's promise.
I wake in love with you
I wake in love with you
At last year's station.
Then say goodbye to citizens and city
Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.
I leave my love with you
I leave my love with you
In this strange city.

💌P.S. Do you have any favorite LGBTQ+ poets you would recommend checking out this Pride month?

Until next week!

Happy writing,

Claire

In times of stress or slowness, it can be easy — almost instinctual — to fill the time with social media or screen time. For Mental Health Awareness Month, we wanted to look at ways to weave poetry into your daily routine to limit doomscrolling.

Redefining Your Approach

Reading can be a visceral experience in a time where it is common to feel a little disconnected from our own body. Many of us find we’re falling down the rabbit hole of staring at our phones for hours. But it can be hard to get to the point of picking up a poetry collection, even if you know that spending time reading is something you enjoy and that makes you feel fulfilled. It’s important not to get lost in seeing reading poetry as an academic or assigned task. It’s not homework, how it might’ve been in high school, nor is it something you should feel pressure around or shame about not doing! Your approach to poetry shouldn’t be stressful, but instead a part of your day that feels like a break or reprieve.

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Designed to rebel against mainstream American cultural values and writing, the Beat poets were a generation of radical poets who sought to be unfettered in their lifestyle and in their verse. As a group, the Beat poets were interested in defying the conventions of traditional poetry and embracing wild and free style, from their lives to the page. Centered in New York City & the West Coast, the movement evolved in the 1940s and fully took off in the mid 1950s, with their first major public poetry reading held in San Francisco in October of that year.

The Beat poets were at once an entirely new form and a reaction to their cultural moment, but the poets leaned heavily on inspiration from Eastern religion, such as Buddhism and hallucinogenic drugs. They also took inspiration from the jazz musicians and poets of the Harlem Renaissance, with such influences as the cadences of Billie Holiday filling their verse. Many poets moved in and out of identifying with the literary community and modes of the Beats, but the culture and poetic trends of the time were highly influential for decades to come.

This post highlights a few of the Beat poets and the places that were central to the counterculture movement of the time and inspired their writings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti & City Lights Bookstore

San Francisco is often the city most associated with the Beat Poets, with the heartbeat of the movement centered there beginning in the 1950s. City Lights Bookstore and its owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, played a large role in giving a home to the movement. An independent bookstore-publisher, Ferlinghetti launched the press with the Pocket Poets Series, an essential collection of Beat poets he was writing alongside and who gathered within the bookstore walls. Howl by Allen Ginsberg was published through City Lights in 1956, as were many other leading works of the beat movement.

Ferlinghetti consistently challenged convention in his life and work. His poetry defied popular political movements and embraced the influence of modern Jazz and the language of the streets he walked. He wanted poetry to be something not constrained to the world of academia, but something accessible to everyday people.

His A Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti’s most popular collection, was published in 1958 and is remembered for its “themes of anarchy, mass corruption, engagement, and a belief in the surreality and wonder of life,” as Larry Smith wrote in his biography Lawerence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large. A collection of lyric poetry, its movement and freedom of self-expression are deeply emblematic of the heart of the Beat movement.

City Lights is still in operation today, a literary landmark to the movement and the writers and beatniks who used to fill its walls. Check out our post about San Francisco as a literary city for more about the bookstore and to see how the legacy of the Beat poets is still interwoven there today.

Allen Ginsberg & the Early Beat Poets

In the disillusionment that followed World War II, many poets were left questioning the culture and politics that could have led to such horrifying atrocities as the Holocaust, widespread death, and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time the paranoia and political and cultural repression of the Cold War were in full swing in the 1940s and 1950s, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Gregory Corso were firmly committed to challenging mainstream culture and traditional writing in their work. Allen Ginsberg was often seen as a leader of this movement; his spearheading of just philosophies of writing in a manner he called “first thought, last thought,” his literary work and advocacy shaped both the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s and the resulting poetry scene.

Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” as published in Howl and Other Poems, is perhaps the most famous poem to emerge from the Beat generation. Full of a fervent energy and a call against the ills of modern American civilization, Howl exemplifies the anti-authoritarian politics and intellectual curiosity of the Beat generation.

In the 1960s, he was closely associated with opposing the Vietnam War, both the deaths abroad and the draft at home. His “Wichita Vortex Sutra” was an anti-war poem that reflects Ginsberg’s relationship to America through the lens of Wichita, Kansas. With vivid imagery, he challenges modern conceptions of war and the social landscape as conveyed in the media and politics. His poetry and activism set a benchmark that many of the Beat poets were drawn to and emulated.

Diane di Prima & the Poets of Greenwich Village

Diane di Prima was a poet and revolutionary activist writing during the heyday of the Beat movement in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She was in community with such poets as Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and Audre Lorde. Her Memoirs of a Beatnik documented her experiences in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s.

Her work was a frank exploration of sexuality, class, and counterculture. Her feminism and unwillingness to shy away from depicting her experiences made her a target by the FBI for radical content. Her poetry plays between stream-of-consciousness and more traditional form and dives deeply into worlds of politics and spiritual practice. She refused to exist in one category as a poet or in her life as a writer, a mother, and an activist. Her work leans into pleasure and revolution, with food, sex, love, and activism intertwining through her pages.

Like many Beat poets, her work was heavily influenced by Buddhism. The use of hallucinogenic drugs to achieve higher consciousness and the practice of meditation and Eastern religion (especially Buddhism) was highly influential in the themes and poetic practices of the era.

Though loose with their conventions and formally informal, the styles innovated by the Beats would become essential foundations for poets to come. Poets writing in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Patti Smith and June Jordan, took inspiration from the spirit of the counterculture, embracing ideas of freedom from oppression and formally experimental poetry.

💌 P.S. Do you have a favorite beat poet? Share a piece of their work or your thoughts with us below.

If you couldn’t tell a little from this post, di Prima is a favorite of mine. Each time I read about her work and life, I’m inspired by her tenacity in holding her own as a woman in the male-dominated Beat scene and the richness and uninhibited nature of her verse. I recommend her collection Revolutionary Letters as a whole!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This May, we’ll be highlighting a theme of change.

“Transformation & Escape” by Gregory Corso

1

I reached heaven and it was syrupy.
It was oppressively sweet.
Croaking substances stuck to my knees.
Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest.
I grabbed him and pasted him on my head.   
I found God a gigantic fly paper.
I stayed out of his way.
I walked where everything smelled of burnt chocolate.   
Meanwhile St. Michael was busy with his sword   
hacking away at my hair.
I found Dante standing naked in a blob of honey.   
Bears were licking his thighs.
I snatched St. Michael’s sword
and quartered myself in a great circular adhesive.   
My torso fell upon an elastic equilibrium.
As though shot from a sling
my torso whizzed at God fly paper.
My legs sank into some unimaginable sog.
My head, though weighed with the weight of St. Michael,   
did not fall.
Fine strands of multi-colored gum
suspended it there.
My spirit stopped by my snared torso.
I pulled! I yanked! Rolled it left to right!
It bruised! It softened! It could not free!
The struggle of an Eternity!
An Eternity of pulls! of yanks!
Went back to my head,
St. Michael had sucked dry my brainpan!
Skull!
My skull!
Only skull in heaven!
Went to my legs.
St. Peter was polishing his sandals with my knees!   
I pounced upon him!
Pummeled his face in sugar in honey in marmalade!   
Under each arm I fled with my legs!
The police of heaven were in hot pursuit!
I hid within the sop of St. Francis.
Gasping in the confectionery of his gentility   
I wept, caressing my intimidated legs.


2

They caught me.
They took my legs away.
They sentenced me in the firmament of an ass.
The prison of an Eternity!
An Eternity of labor! of hee-haws!
Burdened with the soiled raiment of saints
I schemed escape.
Lugging ampullae its daily fill
I schemed escape.
I schemed climbing impossible mountains.
I schemed under the Virgin’s whip.
I schemed to the sound of celestial joy.
I schemed to the sound of earth,
the wail of infants,   
the groans of men,   
the thud of coffins.   
I schemed escape.
God was busy switching the spheres from hand to hand.   
The time had come.
I cracked my jaws.   
Broke my legs.
Sagged belly-flat on plow
on pitchfork
on scythe.
My spirit leaked from the wounds.
A whole spirit pooled.
I rose from the carcass of my torment.   
I stood in the brink of heaven.
And I swear that Great Territory did quake   
when I fell, free.

Until next week,

Happy writing!

Claire

Poetry can be a place to turn for solace and for guidance. It is an assurance that others have been through what you are going through now. If you have been feeling a little lost or adrift recently, poetry can be a guide, a lifeboat in the sea of uncertainty. Perhaps the state of the world feels overwhelming, the lack of clarity about the future making you feel frozen in place. Or maybe there are relationships or life changes that are weighing on you, and you’re not quite sure of your path forward. By reading and writing poetry, we are able to feel the resonances of the art in our own lives.

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Writing on a theme can be an easy way to break out of writer’s block and spark inspiration after a slump. It can also be a chance to interrogate a specific feeling, relationship, moment in time, or event in your life. Writing poetry can flow easily when it’s your own muses or thoughts plucked from the air — but sometimes it’s necessary to sit down and focus on something that doesn’t draw immediate ideas. Whether it’s for an assignment, a specific call to action for a literary magazine, or a self-pursued challenge to write outside of your comfort zone, a basic introduction to themed writing may be just what you need.

For this Classroom Series, we’ll be taking Mother’s Day as our inspiration and seeing all the different ways a poem can approach this holiday or the theme of motherly love.

Writing Themes

Themes are meant to be broad. They are umbrellas under which poems can be understood, so that a vein of the poem can be examined and understood. If your starting point is a theme, you’re starting your poem at a doorway of opportunity, and you will be guided by the specificity of your own experiences. What makes your approach and understanding of a theme unique in your poetry is the exactitude of how it has existed in your life and mind.

There are unique senses and visuals that only you have access to. Write a few words at the top of a page and then take a moment to think of the first images, sensations, and feelings they bring up. Now interrogate them a little deeper.

Every year, it may feel difficult to express unique experiences with our mothers, the loss of not having a mother, or even being a mother. Maybe you’re overwhelmed with love and appreciation, or you are turning to literature as a guide through complicated feelings.

Take Julia Kasdorf’s “What I Learned From My Mother.” It approaches the theme of a mother-daughter relationship in a traditional way, with the framing of knowledge imparted from the older to the younger. What makes it unique is her voice and the form— the falling lists that fill the single-stanza poem. From “peonies cut from the lawn,/black ants still stuck to the buds” for loved ones in the hospital to offering every house you enter “ a chocolate cake you baked yourself,/the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch,” each lesson Kasdorf evokes is colored in her own memories. Though the theme is universal, a child learning from their mother, it’s the unique details, the peonies and ants, the evocation of her mother’s voice, that make Kasdorf’s poem shine.

Subverting Themes

If a theme feels worn out, or it feels too simple or cliche when you begin approaching it, think about what it would mean to you to turn the theme on its head. Though every poem you write will be unique, because only you can write from the source of your own life and experiences, veering the writing into that requires leaning away from the easy options of what a theme could be presented as. By subverting the reader’s expectations, and maybe even your own, your poem can offer a sparkling new interpretation of a universal and common theme.

Write a list of all of the images or ideas that you feel are essential to the presentation of a theme. Now, what would it look like if those were corrupted, opposite, or absent?

Weaving Your Themes

Poems are not simple creatures. One will rarely have only one theme. With motherhood, there are never-ending intersections. Love, identity, family, and growth all immediately intertwine. But in your own experiences, or in the specific moment or relationship you are trying to depict, other themes might quickly rise to mind. Maybe you’re depicting a scene of your mother outdoors, and you watch the flowers bloom, suddenly, the details of the scene allow you to weave images and themes of Spring together with the themes of growing to know your mother.

In this selection, “From ‘understory’” by Craig Santos Perez, he weaves the beauty of watching his wife and daughter together with the legacies of colonialism in Oceania. His love for the two women weaves with his fears born of the history of a landscape and the legacy of women who’ve been scarred by colonization and violence.

For more poems to read this Mother’s Day, check out our 6 Poetry Collections for Mothers, 6 Poems to Celebrate Mother-Daughter Relationships, and Poems that Showcase the Strength and Nurturing Power of Motherhood.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This May, we’ll be highlighting a theme of change.

“Vita Nova” by Louise Gluck

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,   
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother   
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age   
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green   
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time   
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet   
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

Until next week,

Happy Writing!

Claire

Family, community, history, and change. Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month reminds us more than ever of the crucial contributions of AAPI poets to U.S. literature and the need to support contemporary writers. Organizations such as Kundiman and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop can help readers discover the ever-growing wealth of AAPI poets in contemporary literature.

To kick off this month, we’ve compiled a few recommendations for recent collections from Asian American and Pacific Islander poets. This list is not exhaustive, but instead a launchpad to return to all year long.

West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal

On the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station is an elegy carved in Chinese, written during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The poem is a memorial for one of the many detainees during this time who committed suicide when denied entrance. Rekdal’s collection weaves poetry and essays through the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the majority-Chinese labor force that was essential to constructing the transcontinental railroad. The poem journeys across the history of the transcontinental railroad’s construction for its 150th anniversary, and chronicles the losses and labor that laid its rails.

Ask the Brindled by No’u Revilla

An intergenerational reclamation of the narratives imposed on Indigenous and queer Hawaiians, Ask the Brindled is a collection of stories, traditions, and legends. This collection holds the Hawaiian word “mo’o” at its center, Revilla’s definitions and engagements with it shaping her verse. Preoccupied with the body, with skin, and with family legacy, these poems flesh out the connections that tie sovereignty and self in a decolonial critique. This collection glimmers with the mythos and material culture that weaves the history of the Kingdom of Hawai’i with contemporary experiences of queer love and grief.

To Compare by Xuela Zhang

Released on April 28th this year, this collection from Xuela Zhang is a contemporary meditation on translation and home. With vibrant prose, this debut explores the age of globalization, social media, and Chinese-American relations. Born and raised in China, Zhang received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, writing both in English and Chinese. In this collection, Zhang maps a course through transnational life, where one’s existence must be navigated and re-navigated in the contexts of both here and away, of the home of one language and the home of another.

Amphibian by Joseph O. Legaspi

In Amphibian, Filipino American poet Joseph O. Legaspi searches for the meaning of home and the landscape of his own identity on a journey through the elements and time. Legaspi’s poems in this collection explore the idea of “amphibious living,” the ability to adapt and flourish in varying geographies. In the context of immigrant and queer experience, these poems draw on amphibious living to map a landscape of belonging.

Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang

Beginning with the image of a eucalyptus street on Victoria Chang’s street being felled by the violent ripping of a chainsaw, this collection reckons with what is lost and what is left behind. In the heart of this collection is the long poem “Eureka,” which examines the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from the California town by that name. This book refuses to forget, with images tracing through like ghosts un-silenced. Chang’s collection engages with ideas of selfhood and loss across nature and art. Tracing through the words and works of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Hilma af Klint, and Joan Mitchell, Tree of Knowledge engages deeply with art and the world.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This May, we’ll be highlighting the theme of change.

“First Light” by Chen Chen

I like to say we left at first light
        with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car,
my father fighting him off with firecrackers,
        even though Mao was already over a decade
dead, & my mother says all my father did
        during the Cultural Revolution was teach math,
which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe
        around Piano Island, a place I never read about
in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family
        says they took me to, & that I loved.
What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved?
        To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?
They ask if I remember them, the aunts, the uncles,
        & I say Yes it’s coming back, I say Of course,
when it’s No not at all, because when I last saw them
        I was three, & the China of my first three years
is largely make-believe, my vast invented country,
        my dream before I knew the word “dream,”
my father’s martial arts films plus a teaspoon-taste 
        of history. I like to say we left at first light,
we had to, my parents had been unmasked as the famous
        kung fu crime-fighting couple of the Southern provinces,
& the Hong Kong mafia was after us. I like to say
        we were helped by a handsome mysterious Northerner,
who turned out himself to be a kung fu master.
        I don’t like to say, I don’t remember crying.
No embracing in the airport, sobbing. I don’t remember
        feeling bad, leaving China.
I like to say we left at first light, we snuck off
        on some secret adventure, while the others were
still sleeping, still blanketed, warm
        in their memories of us.
What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me
        for being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils,
a dirty, bad son, I cried, thirteen, already too old,
        too male for crying. When my father said Get out,
never come back, I cried & ran, threw myself into night.
        Then returned, at first light, I don’t remember exactly
why, or what exactly came next. One memory claims
        my mother rushed into the pink dawn bright
to see what had happened, reaching toward me with her hands,
        & I wanted to say No. Don’t touch me.
Another memory insists the front door had simply been left
        unlocked, & I slipped right through, found my room,
my bed, which felt somehow smaller, & fell asleep, for hours,
        before my mother (anybody) seemed to notice.
I’m not certain which is the correct version, but what stays with me
        is the leaving, the cry, the country splintering.
It’s been another five years since my mother has seen her sisters,
        her own mother, who recently had a stroke, who has                          trouble
recalling who, why. I feel awful, my mother says,
        not going back at once to see her. But too much is                              happening here.
Here, she says, as though it’s the most difficult,
        least forgivable English word. 
What would my mother say, if she were the one writing?
        How would her voice sound? Which is really to ask, what is
my best guess, my invented, translated (Chinese-to-English,
        English-to-English) mother’s voice? She might say:
We left at first light, we had to, the flight was early,
        in early spring. Go, my mother urged, what are you doing,
waving at me, crying? Get on that plane before it leaves without you.
        It was spring & I could smell it, despite the sterile glass
& metal of the airport—scent of my mother’s just-washed hair,
        of the just-born flowers of fields we passed on the car ride                over,
how I did not know those flowers were already
        memory, how I thought I could smell them, boarding the                  plane,
the strange tunnel full of their aroma, their names
        I once knew, & my mother’s long black hair—so impossible              now.
Why did I never consider how different spring could smell,              feel,
        elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost
country. First & deepest severance that should have
        prepared me for all others.

Until next week,

Happy Writing!

Claire

The Renaissance into the Enlightenment gave way to modern ways of thinking, emerging from times of plague and catastrophe. Literature became a place to explore this turmoil, but also ideas of love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and the relation between the body and soul.

The cultural revival of the Renaissance inspired a revolution in literature and poetry. Shakespeare is, of course, often the most noted poet of this time, his innovation of the sonnet and plays marking a shift in English literature. However, many other poets were innovating poetic form in their verses and contemplating the religious and social contexts they were writing within.

In this post, we’ll highlight a few key Renaissance poets and themes to help you discover the wonders of Renaissance poetry and how it still influences the way English poetry is written today!

John Donne

John Donne’s work delved into the paradoxes of human existence, in faith, human and divine love, and questions of salvation. Donne’s poems about love were written in the late 1590s and in the early part of King James I’s reign in England. Though now written 400 years ago, his love poetry resonates with an urgency and a depth of passion that remains universal. In his elegies, lovers mourn being separated and share intimate moments and hide away together from the world.

Donne’s Holy Sonnets were likely written between 1608 and 1610, during a difficult period of his life, when he had no employment and was suffering from depression. Donne’s poetry was originally circulated in manuscript to admiration and then he gained recognition and fame for his sermons. With lyrical grace, expanding metaphors, and a vibrant sexuality, Donne’s poetry is for those concerned with the affairs of body and soul.

In his “Of Air and Angels,” he contemplates the weight of both the love between two people and how it compares, or can’t compare, to the experience of divine love. He opens the poem, “Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,/ Before I knew thy face or name;/ So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame/ Angels affect us oft, and worship’d be;.”

Reading Renaissance poets, like Donne and those who follow, is a deeply enriching experience. But due to changes in the English language, it can sometimes feel like trying to piece together a puzzle without a guide. Finding scholarly editions of poems in anthologies can be a very useful way to read alongside notes and annotations that help unpack the work! Using the Oxford English Dictionary can also be a fun way to see how a word has changed from a poet’s usage to how we understand it now.

Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, and the Pastoral Tradition

Ben Jonson was one of the most influential writers of the English Renaissance, known for his commitment to classical Greek and Latin thinkers and for his reputation as a bold, aggressive, and erudite thinker. His influence on English poetry comes most from his emphasis on form, his desire for critical learning and strict artistry to be reflected in verse. Like Shakespeare, he was most known for his dramatic works and plays, but his poetry was also unique in how it developed the pastoral tradition in English poetry. His “To Penshurst” became the model of the “country house” poem, a poem in praise of the landscape of the English country home and the way of life and landscape to which it was central. This type of poetry was deeply revealing of how English society existed in relation to the nature that surrounded it and the role of the poet as an honored patron or guest in these courtly spaces.

Aemilia Lanyer’s volume of poetry, Salve Dues Rex Judaorum, was the first written in English by a woman to be printed and receive patronage. Born in part of the community of women she existed within and assisted in creating, her work was uniquely concerned with relationships between women and largely supported by her patron, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, and her daughter, Lady Anne Clifford. With the injunctions of protestantism in early-seventeenth-century England, the traditional expectation of women as silent and subservient persisted, but was now challenged by a belief in individual conscience, even in women.

Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” was the first country-house poem printed in English, one that highlights the world of women in the landscape of the country-house and weaves descriptions of the English landscape through pastoral allusions to classical poetry.

Poets like Robert Herrick, who trained under Ben Jonson, were also essential in shaping what Renaissance verse would come to be known for, and for the further development of the pastoral in English poetry. With poems like “To Daffodils” and notable pieces of verse (such as “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), Herrick’s lyric poetry often nodded to classical Greek poetry deeply and contemplated love, life, and nature. One of the first poets to collect almost all of his verses into one volume, he intentionally designed it to be read as a collection and see it through the presses; his work is also a notable marker of poetry’s shift from the oral tradition to print.

John Milton

There is a sense of the old and the new colliding in John Milton’s works. Adapting biblical and classical stories in the political and social context of the 17th century, his characters represented both large religious struggles and those that Milton witnessed in his own life.

His poems were deeply influenced by his experiences during the English Civil War and the subsequent Restoration. The strife between the Church of England and reformist groups such as the Puritans, and between the monarchy and Parliament, colored his depictions of Satan and led to essays such as Areopagitica, which argues for free speech and freedom of the press. These concerns filled his poetry, allowing him in verse to take these ideas into genres such as the psalm paraphrase, pastoral elegy, English ode, and canzone. Contemplating Christianity and revolution, these poems would lead to his eventual great work of Paradise Lost.

In Paradise Lost, Milton expands on the parable of the “original sin,” the few verses of Genesis that depict Eve’s first eating of the apple. He fleshes out the story in lines of blank verse that expand on the central characters of Satan, Adam, and Eve. The poem is remembered for both its achievement in beauty and language, its sublimity and grandeur, and for its theological and philosophical ideas that would set the stage for many other poets, especially the Romantics, to play.

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This April, in honor of Earth Day later this month, we’ll be highlighting ecopoetry — poems about environmental activism and resistance.

“Some Effects of Global Warming in Lakwanna County” by Jay Parini

The maples sweat now, out of season. 
Buds pop eyes in wintry bushes
as the birds arrive, not having checked
the calendars or clocks. They scramble
in the frost for seeds, while underground 
a sobbing starts in roots and tubers. 
Ice cracks easily along the bank. 
It slides in gullies where a bear, still groggy, 
steps through coiled wire of the weeds. 
Kids in T-shirts run to school, unaware
that summer is a long way off. 
Their teachers flirt with off-the-wall assignments, 
drum their fingers on the sweaty desktops. 
As for me, my heart leaps high—
a deer escaping from the crosshairs, 
skipping over barely frozen water
as the surface bends and splinters underfoot. 

Until next week,

Happy Writing!

Claire

Earth Day is a favorite holiday of ours at read poetry — a day for celebrating the environment and finding new ways that poetry can be a tool to advocate for environmental justice and its protection.

Poetry and literacy are crucial for expanding awareness and empowering individuals to take action. By capturing their own experiences, poets are able to write about the reality of climate change while also depicting the beauty of their natural surroundings.

Celebrate this Earth Day with ecopoetry — either by picking up a new collection or composing your own. Dig into how the environment is interconnected with your life and how poetry can be a bridge between the self and nature.

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