I loved reading about what you do with your rage (and other strong feelings) over the last week. What tempests we can be. In every group facilitation I participate in or run, I feel the power of sentiment in the room and wonder how — given that we will never “solve” everything; nor is it the job of group facilitation to do so — we can harness the dynamic for something creative, both for individuals and as a collective. Such work is as much about my failure as any achievement. We all bear so much.

So, thank you.

In your Poetry Unbound feed, there’s now an interview with the great Canadian poet Don McKay. (We featured his poem “Neanderthal Dig” on the podcast last year.) When I interviewed him a few years ago (in fact, coincidentally, it’s exactly two years ago today: 17 May 2024), he spoke of some great conversions in his life, one of which was to geology. This has influenced his poetry, his relationship to landscape, his free time, his intellect, and much more. He lives these days in Newfoundland, from where he writes poetry, writes letters, participates in community gardening, and calls around to his neighbour’s house to join in a Zoom interview by me.

Don pays attention to time through geology — you can hold a stone in your hand or touch a cliff or a rock, and be in touch with something that makes the span of even a long human life seem like a mote of dust. At one point in the interview, he says:

“Newfoundland is like opera for geologists. It’s … fantastic, partly because thanks to the glaciers, which the Ice Age, which scraped all the topsoil off and put it, deposited in the ocean as the Grand Banks, so the rock is here, is extremely visible and extremely, oh, eloquent. And so you have way more access to that temporal, that deep time than than other places. I know, once I get started into rocks, you have to shut me up. So, go ahead. Tell me.”

I did not shut him up, and he spoke of rocks in a way that has deepened my appreciation since I interviewed him a few years ago. I keep thinking of that descriptor he used: “eloquent”. “Face like a stone” is a common enough phrase, implying zero communication, but Don McKay helps us hear that stones have always been shouting out, always been noisy about their histories, always been communicating and changing.

With all of this in mind, my question this week is about rock. What is a rock that you’ve got a memory with?

I can think of a few: a small reddish rock I’ve carried for a few years, even though I’ve forgotten where I got it and why I carried it; a time walking around Uluru with my friend Cheryl, feeling the pulsing energy of that sacred site in the heart of Australia; my father clinging to a rock in order not to swept away by waves; the rock a boy in school threw at me from a great distance and which — I wish I did not know his skill — hit me; and the primal need I feel, when back in Ireland, to touch rock, to be in contact with the land my forebears walked on and which, even now, supports the earth in which they’re buried.

I’ll look forward to reading your words, friends. And enjoy the episode.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Don McKay

You can also listen at poetryunbound.org or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Rhinebeck, NY; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.) And if you can’t join it, you might enjoy Orion’s Environmental Writers’ Workshop, taught by a team that includes past Poetry Unbound poet Michael Kleber-Diggs. Learn more about the Environmental Writers’ Workshop — which takes place at Omega from June 14–19 — here.

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

I loved reading your poems — and your reflection on each other’s poems — this last week. Thank you for sharing and for the landscapes of green and dark and feeling you shared.

It’s been a week of news in the world of poetry — congrats to Raúl Zirita, winner of the lifetime recognition award from Griffin, and to Marianne Boruch, winner of the Jackson prize. I’ll be interviewing them both for future episodes of Poetry Unbound In Conversation.

Speaking of which, we have a new season of Poetry Unbound In Conversation starting later this week. On Friday, my interview with Don McKay (remember him from the episode “Neanderthal Dig”?), recorded a few years ago, will be released. And then interviews with Fady Joudah, Yomi Ṣode, and Rachel Mann, will follow, along with a two-episode revisiting of hell in the company of the brilliant Kimberly Campanello. They’ll be released every other Friday, and I’ll keep you updated here.

So often a good idea for a poem comes at a bad time: you’re in work, or in a conversation, or in a moment of shock or grief. The more you practice making space for these ideas — even in strange moments — the more you’ll find they occur. The first draft is only the first draft, of course, and it is often the later editions and editing where the real writing happens, but the particular moment is potent, like a small seed frozen in frost that will later turn into a snapdragon.

Once, I was infuriated at something someone else did. I felt righteous in my anger — a dangerous energetic stew for me. What could be done with the energy? In that particular moment, I wrote a poem I’m still pleased with, 10 years later. I often do not find the capacity, try as I might, to turn from the enraging to what will engage.

I think I believe that every poem is about time, even its composition is a demonstration of that. What in the writing of a poem could have drawn attention away? What perversion of language is occurring that could be like quicksand for your imagination? What is that attention-giving doing to us? Is there something else possible, even in the midst of crisis? Even in times of distress, can we give our mind and language and landscape to something that might endure rather than decay? It’s not easy. But it feels worthwhile.

The question this week is the following: How can you take the energy of rage and turn it into something creative? A poem is creative, of course. Other things also: a protest; a policy written or promoted. (Things that don’t begin with “p” are permissible as well.) I look forward to your replies.

Here’s the poem I wrote those years ago. These days, I forget what the original anger was because the poem takes me somewhere else.

Makebelieve

And on the first day
God made
something up. 

Then everything came along:
seconds, sex and 
beasts and breath and rabies;
hunger, healing, 
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind 
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the tree trunk 
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars, 
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us 
with all our viruses, laments and curiosities;
all our songs and stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten.

God looked for something 
to hold it all together. Nothing
came to mind.

From Love Between Men, coming September 2026 from Copper Canyon Press and CHEERIO

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

May 11, Manhattan, New York

For those of you in New York City: Join poet, playwright, and actress Amanda Quaid and myself for a live recording of Poetry Unbound In Conversation at The Morgan Library & Museum, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.) And if you can’t join it, you might enjoy Orion’s Environmental Writers’ Workshop, taught by a team that includes past Poetry Unbound poet Michael Kleber-Diggs. Learn more about the Environmental Writers’ Workshop — which takes place at Omega from June 14–19 — here.

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

I am writing this on May 1st — May Day, not to be confused with mayday, which has entirely different connotations. Happy May Day to you, friends. And, for those of you who are in mayday, may days be better for you.

Thank you for your glorious replies to last week’s question about being fully alive. I have tuned into the comments a few times this week to read the continued conversation.

A few weeks ago, while speaking at the University of Notre Dame’s Raclin Murphy Museum, I was kindly invited by the University’s Institute of Social Concerns to offer a class to women in a nearby jail. I was pleased to. In the class, I offered a prompt that I’ve done a few times before and was moved by the replies.

The prompt is this: What’s something nice that someone said to you?

You don’t have to think of a hierarchy of the most beautiful thing anyone ever said to you in your life. Just something nice.

And then, populate that sentence with the environment within which it happened: Where were you? What time of day or night was it? Were you inside or outside? What could you see, feel, smell, hear, or taste? What were you wearing? (if anything!) What happened right before the nice thing being said? What happened right after? What, or who, else was in the room? What thought occurred to you, perhaps unbidden? What was the light doing? Or the dark?

That’s the question this week, by the way: Respond to the prompt above, write a poem, and share it in the comments.

In the jail, we took about 10 minutes to write, and then a few more minutes to edit and arrange things. The nice thing doesn’t have to be right at the start or at the end. The idea is that to write a poem about a single thing, you can also use the single thing — the nice thing you heard — as a way of looking, a way of observing.

I know I’m a tired record, but the Irish word for “poet” is “file” (pronounced like fill-a), which shares etymology with the Irish verb for seeing. To poem is to see. Or, to use more accessible language, to perceive. The arrangement of the objects or the description of the details forms a kind of map of a phenomenon. Especially if you don’t try to force poem-y metaphor into the objects and observations — just let us be with you in the experience.

My advice is to take the nice thing you remember and then free-write for 10 minutes, populating a page with everything that comes to mind in the environmental prompts that surround the event. And then to choose from your free-write 9, 10, or 11 lines that you think work, and make this the shape of your poem. Nothing too long, no need to tell us what it means, or to push any metaphor or simile. The event itself is enough; the map of the place where the nice thing happened is a poem, whether the place was nice or not.

In the jail, the observations were moving and memorable: how the light during a conversation shone on prison scrubs making the ugly colour look nice; how the brown eyes of a friend’s teary smile makes more teary smiles occur; how the memory of a warm word is a comfort in sleepless nights; how the sound of a bird outside a window made a poet think of the colour red or maybe yellow. The room was generous, specific, supportive, funny, interrupting, engaging, intelligent, articulate, critical, and unforgettable. The poems were fantastic. I hope to find ways to get permission to share some of them.

Speaking of poems, I’ll look forward to reading yours, friends.

PS: My old friend Jonny Clark is now presenting The Corrymeela Podcast, featuring conversations with peacemakers about how they use their courage, language, and action for social change. You can find it wherever you subscribe to podcasts, or you can listen to it online here.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

May 11, Manhattan, New York

For those of you in New York City: Join poet, playwright, and actress Amanda Quaid and myself for a live recording of Poetry Unbound In Conversation at The Morgan Library & Museum, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.) And if you can’t join it, you might enjoy Orion’s Environmental Writers’ Workshop, taught by a team that includes past Poetry Unbound poet Michael Kleber-Diggs. Learn more about the Environmental Writers’ Workshop — which takes place at Omega from June 14–19 — here.

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

Your musical memories were so moving last week — thank you. Someone said to me the other day that this Substack is the kind of newsletter where they come for the poetry, but stay for the comments. Biased as I am, I am inclined to agree.

This week, I will start with the question, one that has guided me for years.

When do you feel most alive?

Years ago, my job involved running dialogue groups for a bunch of men. This was the 1990s, and ice-breaking games were all the rage. I hated them: I disliked the metaphor that implied groups commence with ice. My experience was that many people wanted to find avenues to talk to each other; they just needed a good question. So, before every group — there were three, maybe four a week — I’d think of a question. There was a graveyard near my work, so I’d walk there for the group prep, and try to come up with something that might help us get to know each other more.

I’m sure I heard it from someone else — it’s too good a question for it to have come to my then-19-year-old mind — but the question of aliveness came to me one day, and the group had such an enlivening time that I’ve stayed with it since. That day, someone spoke about music, someone spoke about meals with friends, someone spoke about reading. In the years since, I’ve heard people talk about sex, surfing, learning, baths, court-case victories, achieving resolution in a violent conflict, ER nursing duties, walks alone, staying up all night, and sleeping with fresh sheets on the bed.

Often, I think of a gorgeous line from Tony Hoagland’s poem “Grammar”. In it, he describes a character, Maxine, who is fully alive with herself. “Some kind of light is coming from her head,” he says, and then, in the final stanza of the poem he concludes:

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

“Grammar”, from Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel (Graywolf Press, 1998); the good people of the Library of Congress have the full poem on their website

I love this poem: I can see Maxine, I can see the joy, I can see the attraction of seeing someone fully alive. The call to see this fully-aliveness in life is not just a private pursuit. It’s something I think can guide a civic life — how can education lead us to being fully alive, a foreign policy, a healthcare system, a job. I’m not looking for an easy life, and I know you’re not either, but I think the imagination of what fully-aliveness can look like can guide our lives together. Many of you already do it, and may more of you do it too.

So, how about you? When do you feel fully alive?

I’ll see you in the comments, friends.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Cambridge, MA; Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 29, Cambridge, Massachusetts

I’ll be reading a few poems from Kitchen Hymns and joining Bishop Julia Whitworth for a conversation at Christ Church Cambridge, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 11, Manhattan, New York

For those of you in New York City: Join poet, playwright, and actress Amanda Quaid and myself for a live recording of Poetry Unbound In Conversation at The Morgan Library & Museum, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

Your rhyming lines last week were a delight to read. The ways those musics have remained with you is contagious, and I’m sure plenty of us were repeating your shared lines to ourselves while reading the comments.

Musics. Yes, I meant that. Fifteen years ago, I met an extraordinary man, Paul Aleu Dau, who had survived being one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. For a number of years, moving from refugee camp to refugee camp and sometimes fleeing from attacking militia, he found sustenance in church services. When he settled in Australia, he pursued ordination. I asked him what had drawn him to those services in the camps. He, fluent in multiple languages, looked at me, paused, and said, “The musics.” It was deliberate. I have never forgotten it.

Music in poetry is a variety of metre (or meter, depending on your Englishes). And any metre recalls the sensory memory of the heartbeat: what we felt in the womb, what we hear and/or feel in our own bodies after exertion or shock or fear. In her “Alaskan poems you didn’t write”, Kimberly Blaser asks, “What is meter but another word for memory?” (from her book Ancient Light). I love that question, how she enters through the door of literature and opens to a spacious question about the human condition.

Music, metre, memory. Heartbeat, feeling, bodies. This may explain why music and poetry are so elemental to all human communities, and why we have found ways to build rhythm — in different cultures and in different ways — to turn to that which was among the first things most of us sensed. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

In a poem of religious devotion, written in 1623, John Donne projects a re-joining of the person and music into the hereafter (you can read the full poem here):

Since I am coming to that holy room, 
         Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore, 
I shall be made thy music; as I come 
         I tune the instrument here at the door, 
         And what I must do then, think here before.

A friend of mine was at a New Year’s gig in Dublin, back in the 1990s. Sinéad O’Connor was one of the musicians singing as part of a cornucopia of instrumentalists and vocalists on stage. As the instruments built up a crescendo, Sinéad held a long, steady solid note, eyes closed, no vibrato, just a music that was in the now and the now and the now and the now. My friend stood, arms outstretched — to life, to death, to the universe, to its expansion and collapse — and let the music do in him what it was doing in him. I wasn’t there, but I feel like I was. In this way, music is another kind of memory too: a shared one.

And another time, freshly back in Ireland after having lived in Australia for four years, I decided I was finally going to join a poetry recital group. I went, fresh and green and nervous, but determined that I needed to put my name in the hat to read. That night, a Canadian woman read a beautiful poem, in which she detailed how sometimes she sets a kettle on a low heat overnight on a wood-fired stove and and places lavender the water, so that when she rises early the next morning the house will smell of that soft, woody aroma. Her poem was music to me then, and it still is. I have no idea who she was — I think she was just in Ireland on a holiday and joined an open-mic poetry night — but I have remembered the content and recitation of her words for over 20 years.

Two years ago, I saw a video of children playing on a makeshift seesaw in Gaza, a beam balanced on bricks. Up-down. Up-down. A kind of music with their movement and bodies. Mohamed Abu al-Qosman, who was 14 at the time, entertained the other children with a drum. It was Eid. “As you can see,” he said, “children are playing on the rubble and rocks. I’m entertaining them.”

O God — the places music goes, the things we ask it to do, and the things it gives us.

So, building on the rhyme of last week, here’s the question for this week: Where has music found you? And what did it give you in that moment?

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Notre Dame, IN; Cambridge, MA; Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 29, Cambridge, Massachusetts

I’ll be reading a few poems from Kitchen Hymns and joining Bishop Julia Whitworth for a conversation at Christ Church Cambridge, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 11, Manhattan, New York

For those of you in New York City: Join poet, playwright, and actress Amanda Quaid and myself for a live recording of Poetry Unbound In Conversation at The Morgan Library & Museum, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

Your spring thoughts last week were delicious: those who love the season, those who don’t, those who’ve changed their approach to it, those in other hemispheres … All magnificent. Thank you.

I have a friend who — when I tell him I’ve written a new poem — asks: “Does it rhyme?” He’s old school and can recite rhyming poems from memory 30 years after having learnt them off by heart. I tell him that my poetry often features internal rhyme, and he gives me a scoff that I find very funny.

End-line rhyming is just one of ways that music shows up in a poem; there can be alliteration, assonance, syllabic count, repetition, internal rhyme … Most poetries have a way of featuring musicality and rhythm, and in different times and in different places, those rhythms have been in or out of vogue. Rap and song lyrics often feature extraordinary rhyme. (Joni Mitchell rhymes “good omelettes and stews” with “my heart cried out for you” in “California”.)

Contemporary poetry isn’t always in the kind of rhyme we might have learnt in school. But I can list off a few poets who regularly write in formal rhyming sequence quite easily: Patience Agbabi, Mimi Khalvati, Don Paterson, Marilyn Nelson, Wendy Cope — all acclaimed poets whose interests sometimes are found in lines with the predictable ABAB or ABBA patterns that might have been part of your early education.

A rhyme can make a line lift. Think of Molly Bloom’s couplet about Leopold in Ulysses:

We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky. 

To recite those lines almost always brings me an element of happiness — the pitter-patter of syllables, the rhyme of “I” and “sky”, and the luxurious liquid of the “l” after the plosive “B” leading us to the vowel-grounded sound of “Bloom”. Formally, only 4 of the 16 words are longer than a single syllable: “capital”, “couple”, “brightens”, and “polish”. (You could make an argument for the contraction of “We’re” too, but in the vernacular of speech, it probably veers to a one-syllable word, no? But then I look at “Bloom” and think of how it asks for an elongated music.) The single-syllable words provide a percussion that is counterpointed by the others, especially “capital couple” with its pleasing 3-2 beat and its sharp “c” alliteration.

I can think of other rhymes that give pleasure too; I recommend you give yourself the unabashed delight of watching a video of (my good friend, I’m biased, but I’m right to be) Patience Agbabi introduce her Canterbury Tales prologue in the voice of the innkeeper, or host, Harry Bailey in gorgeous couplets:

When my April showers me with kisses
I could make her my missus or my mistress. 

Later, Patience has Harry Bailey say: 
May the best poet lose, as the saying goes.
May the best poet muse be mainstaying those
on the stage, on the page, on their subject:
me and April, we’re The Rhyming Couplet.

It’s just over two minutes long, and you will be glad for the joy, and you’ll feel the audience’s infectious joy too. The full book, Telling Tales, is published by Canterbury Press and is bawdy, raucous brilliance (with plenty of need for warnings about saucy language).

What is a rhyme that you recall? It might be from a poem; some old family proverbs rhyme too. In honour of my formal-rhyme-loving friend, let’s keep the rhymes fairly true. There’s a trilling half-rhyme in this: “He that lives wickedly / can hardly die honestly.”

It’s good to be talking with each other, friends. / It keeps the heart warm, while much else ends.

(see what I did there? there are rhymes in the air)

PS. If you’re in Manhattan this week, I’m giving a reading of new work on Thursday night at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (see below). Come say hello!

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 12, Online

Interfaith Alignment is collaborating with On Being and The Luce Foundation for an event in celebration of National Poetry Month. I’ll read poems on prayer and protest and hold a brief Q&A, beginning at 5 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 16, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. This event is in-person only, it won’t be recorded or Zoomed. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 29, Cambridge, Massachusetts

I’ll be reading a few poems from Kitchen Hymns and joining Bishop Julia Whitworth for a conversation at Christ Church Cambridge, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 11, Manhattan, New York

For those of you in New York City: Join poet, playwright, and actress Amanda Quaid and myself for a live recording of Poetry Unbound In Conversation at The Morgan Library & Museum, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

Thank you for your beautiful, heartfelt, distinct, and particular responses to the question last week (and for your well wishes!).

I grew up in the countryside. There was a farm nearby, and I took the sounds and scents and sights of the seasons for granted. I remember taking a walk one April, down the hill to take a left turn toward the estuary I liked to visit. I didn’t feel like I lived in a beautiful place, my friends all seemed to have more money, and the part of the village where we were was the back-of-the-beyond (or so it seemed). But that warm day, I realised that where I lived was beautiful: the narrow road; the unkempt hedges; the sounds of crows, robins, wrens, blackbirds.

The road has been improved now — of course I use “improve” with caution — and when I visit my parents, I miss what I knew.

During Covid, I was living in the countryside in the northwest of Ireland and was, once again, next to a field filled with sheep. Over the course of one miraculous weekend, it seemed like they all produced lambs. The population doubled, and the patient parents were surrounded by rambunctious, deliciously frenzied offspring.

I watched them for hours at a time: tearing around the field, bumping into each other, crying for their mothers, sheltering from the occasional rain, and generally being the kind of inspiration that gives rise to this poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Skilled as a draftsman and artist, Hopkins’s acumen in the visual arts influenced his work in poetry, where we are overwhelmed with an onslaught of sounds and images and luscious turns — all in sprung rhythm that allow his spectacular lines to evade the predictability of other forms of the poetic line.

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –          
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;          
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush          
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring          
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; 
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush          
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush          
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.          

What is all this juice and all this joy?          
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning 
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,          
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,          
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,          
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.    

[All of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems are in the public domain and you’ll find collections of them online and in your local bookshop.]

Standing for hours, looking at a field of what he calls “racing lambs”, I repeated “What is all this juice and all this joy?” to myself and was lost in the delight of the question. Is it a question? Yes it is, of course, but a question whose answer was not linguistic but observation. “This!” is the response I wished to give to our friend GMH.

With my apologies to our friends who live on parts of the planet where seasons other than spring are currently in the turning, I have a spring-based question for us all: What are the senses of spring for you? Is it the sound of lambs? The smell of a flower? The touch of returning sun on your skin? April showers? An anniversary? If you feel like quoting your favourite line from Gerard Manley Hopkins, you can add that in too — it’s a gorgeous poem to say aloud to yourself; the demands on the tongue make it a physical experience.

I’ll look forward to hearing how spring springs for you, friends.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 12, Online

Interfaith Alignment is collaborating with On Being and The Luce Foundation for an event in celebration of National Poetry Month. I’ll read poems on prayer and protest and hold a brief Q&A, beginning at 5 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 16, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. This event is in-person only, it won’t be recorded or Zoomed. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

Thank you for your responses to the Rilke poem last week (and apologies for the mixup in sending the newsletter — all sorted now). Reading your replies makes the poem come alive in the today of your days.

I have been quite unwell this week. I needed to cancel a few events and spent most of the week shivering and fevering my way through the days. My apologies for not meeting up with any of you who were going to those events. I’m on the mend! But this winter infection is brutal.

This week, for many of the Christianities of the world (but not all), it is Holy Week, a week commemorating the senseless execution of Jesus of Nazareth by Roman authorities. A few years ago, I made a video of reflections on those stations. You can watch it here. It’s a video meditating on the life and death of a revolutionary whose action was nonviolent, not a devotion to a birthed god. This, for me, is an inheritance: having been brought up in a religion that proclaimed certitude about life after death, I now live without certitude about life after death, but with a conviction that our stories need to be good enough to inspire courage while we live.

I wanted to write a poem about my relationship to religion, not a traditional believer but not unaffected by belief, either. This one is from Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon & CHEERIO, 2025).

Do You Believe in God? 

Though I’ve lost God, God is
the only language that I speak. 
I need to describe this loss. 

I thought he appeared
and disappeared. Now God’s
nowhere, though this loss

is like memory carried in a gust
of air, a scent. I make myself
describe what I have lost

with attention to the yearning
I still have. But I fear 
God became a word 

to bear all I could not bear. 
God bore it well. No
containing now. An empty shell. 

I have a need, or grief, 
for what was never there. 
I have lost God. God
is the only language I speak.

It’s a loose villanelle, this poem, with the first and third lines repeating in alternating patterns as the final line (or lines) of the subsequent stanzas. I liked the idea of the word “God” being lost, but the language of the question that God contains — “the only language I speak” — being fundamental. I liked the idea, too, of the image of the empty shell: when you hold a shell up to your ear, you hear … the sea? the sound of your own heart echoing back to yourself as if it’s new? a memory of a childhood? a first wondertaste of mystery? Yes.

My question is: What changes have occurred in your feelings about religion as you’ve gone through your own decades and experiences? Which of them have been planned? And — especially — which have been surprising or unexpected?

I’ll look forward to reading these, friends.

PS: Recently, I was interviewed for Pam King’s With and For podcast — you can find the episode on their website or on any podcast app.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 1, Online

Join Eddie Gonzalez and myself for a free virtual celebration of National Poetry Month hosted by The Well World, beginning at 3 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 12, Online

Interfaith Alignment is collaborating with On Being and The Luce Foundation for an event in celebration of National Poetry Month. I’ll read poems on prayer and protest and hold a brief Q&A, beginning at 5 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 16, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. This event is in-person only, it won’t be recorded or Zoomed. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

I was glad for us to spend time with Rumi last week and to consider the question of organic growth in the face of destruction.

Listening to The Rest Is Politics podcast this week, I heard Karim Sadjadpour say that a city is built over decades but destroyed in weeks. It’s depressing, yes. It’s also an indication of the predictability of the destructive plotline and the demand — fruitful, worthwhile — in the creative enterprise.

I do not know how to resist the aggressions, broadcasted and more local, of our world. But I do know how to look for surprise. Creativity is not just confined to those who are painting, or dancing or making poems or music. It is also the making of a community: a health care system; an education; a way of keeping people sanitised; a way of keeping people sane.

Art is found in made things and in many made things — a transportation system in a city; a living wage for workers; negotiations to make border crossings safer; putting garlic in olives; sprinkling sea salt on fresh bread — and it is in the vulnerability and risk of cooperation that we find ourselves alive. I continue to hold to the idea that speaking words of beauty reminds us of the possibility of language. And especially in weeks when we hear the impoverishment of speech from many quarters, it is good to bask in something uplifting, to remind us of the power of language to do that most risky thing: to make something new.

So, here by Rainer Maria Rilke is poem 59, Book I:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
 then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
 go to the limits of your longing.
 Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

I.59, translated by Joanna Macey and Anita Burrows and collected in their Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead Books, 2005)

This week I’m curious to find out: Which line is working something in you? Is it “Nearby …” or “Give me your hand.”? Is it “God speaks …”, or something else?

Vulnerable language can help us find space to address the threats in our lives. I wish I knew how to scale this up into the furies of the world, and I honour all truth-tellers who speak against the pandemonium of propaganda and distraction. From where I am, I try to do my bit to address the frailties of the human condition with courage rather than rage. May we be nurtured by the kind of presence that gave rise to Rilke’s language.

I will meet you in your reflections, friends.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 1, Online

Join Eddie Gonzalez and myself for a free virtual celebration of National Poetry Month hosted by The Well World, beginning at 3 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 12, Online

The Charter for Compassion is collaborating with On Being and The Luce Foundation for an event in celebration of National Poetry Month. I’ll read poems on prayer and protest and hold a brief Q&A, beginning at 5:30 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 14, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. (Registration details are not yet available but will be coming soon.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

I was glad for us to spend time with Rumi last week and to consider the question of organic growth in the face of destruction.

Listening to The Rest Is Politics podcast this week, I heard Karim Sadjadpour say that a city is built over decades but destroyed in weeks. It’s depressing, yes. It’s also an indication of the predictability of the destructive plotline and the demand — fruitful, worthwhile — in the creative enterprise.

I do not know how to resist the aggressions, broadcasted and more local, of our world. But I do know how to look for surprise. Creativity is not just confined to those who are painting, or dancing or making poems or music. It is also the making of a community: a health care system; an education; a way of keeping people sanitised; a way of keeping people sane.

Art is found in made things and in many made things — a transportation system in a city; a living wage for workers; negotiations to make border crossings safer; putting garlic in olives; sprinkling sea salt on fresh bread — and it is in the vulnerability and risk of cooperation that we find ourselves alive. I continue to hold to the idea that speaking words of beauty reminds us of the possibility of language. And especially in weeks when we hear the impoverishment of speech from many quarters, it is good to bask in something uplifting, to remind us of the power of language to do that most risky thing: to make something new.

So, here by Rainer Maria Rilke is poem 59, Book I:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
 then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
 go to the limits of your longing.
 Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

I.59, translated by Joanna Macey and Anita Burrows and collected in their Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead Books, 2005)

This week I’m curious to find out: Which line is working something in you? Is it “Nearby …” or “Give me your hand.”? Is it “God speaks …”, or something else?

Vulnerable language can help us find space to address the threats in our lives. I wish I knew how to scale this up into the furies of the world, and I honour all truth-tellers who speak against the pandemonium of propaganda and distraction. From where I am, I try to do my bit to address the frailties of the human condition with courage rather than rage. May we be nurtured by the kind of presence that gave rise to Rilke’s language.

I will meet you in your reflections, friends.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

April 1, Online

Join Eddie Gonzalez and myself for a free virtual celebration of National Poetry Month hosted by The Well World, beginning at 3 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 12, Online

The Charter for Compassion is collaborating with On Being and The Luce Foundation for an event in celebration of National Poetry Month. I’ll read poems on prayer and protest and hold a brief Q&A, beginning at 5:30 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 14, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. (Registration details are not yet available but will be coming soon.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

Thank you for your comments last week and for your generous responses to my call for support. All of us on the team really appreciate it.

The text known as The Epic of Gilgamesh is a favourite of mine. I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but it’s worth repeating. The original version of the story is almost 4,000 years old, and it’s a tale of a tyrant king of Babylon — part-god, part-man — who imposes his terror on all, with particular terror meted out upon women. The Babylonian gods intervene, inflicting the crisis of friendship, grief, and the fear of death upon Gilgamesh. It’s one of the oldest works of literature, and the drama of it stages true reciprocal friendship as the thing that shocks a war-maker into moral consideration, eventually causing him to face his own grieving, hollow heart.

Another place, another time, another form of writing: 800 years ago, Rumi — the 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic preacher, and legal scholar, and Iran’s most beloved poet — also addressed warmakers. He called them men who set “farms on fire” and challenged them about their refusal to pay attention to the far more demanding offices of love. Amassing riches, these cowardly leaders refuse flowers; Rumi pits their deathly pomp against beauteous growth.

I do not believe that either Rumi or the writers of Gilgamesh were naive about interventions, even though they used the language of love and flowers when speaking about war. Those writers, known and unknown, learnt how state horror directs its violence against things that are vital — horticulture, organic growth, creativity, ideas for mutual flourishing. We destroy that which we feel may destroy us: Beauty has a power to challenge brutality, because beauty has an ontology of invitation, whereas brutality’s macho mercilessness is fundamentally threatened by mutuality.

I admire the insight of these agents of art and story. Their myths and hymns recognise that while we feel pitifully small in the face of war, we know something that war seeks to destroy: the tide of love is always a vulnerable risk. We hope it is a power more powerful than destruction. And even if we’re unsure, we will keep faithful to the penetrating question.

Here, in Haleh Liza Gafori’s wondrous translation, is challenge and insight from Rumi:

Man, man, man,
what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire? 
What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones?

What kind of hunter?
Caught in your own trap—
a thief stealing from your own house.

You’re sixty years old, you’re seventy years old, 
and you’re still uncooked?
Still won’t let Love’s flames near, 
won’t let them burn you up?

Enthralled by stuff and status, 
the crown, the turban, the king’s beard—
thorns pricking your hands,

but where is your flower?

Gazing in the mirror, 
you tilt your hat like a crescent moon—
but where is your light?

Haleh Liza Gafori: Water — published in 2025 by NYRB

This week I’d love to hear: How do Rumi’s questions land for you, friends? It could be in your own community, in your reading of wars and regimes, in your political action, in your public engagements.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Bonus: Walter de la Mare

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

March 24, Manhattan, New York

Peter Constantine, Joseph O. Legaspi, Daniel Simon, and myself will be reading to celebrate 100 years of World Literature Today, hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport, beginning at 7 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Calvary Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 1, Online

Join Eddie Gonzalez and myself for a virtual celebration of National Poetry Month hosted by The Well World, beginning at 3:00 p.m. EST. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 14, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. (Registration details are not yet available but will be coming soon.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

October 13, Online

I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6:00 p.m. EST . (For more info, click on the date heading.)

When I was a child — maybe seven, maybe eight? — I heard my older sister recite Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”. She was learning it for school, and the sounds, the music, and the drama of it transfixed me. It’s a ghost story essentially: A man is compelled to ride his horse to an old house, he knocks on the door, with an urgent message — however, “only a host of phantom listeners” listen to his plea. I couldn’t wait until I, too, was old enough to learn that poem. I read it until I was 11 and so knew it before we turned to it.

It’s been a lifelong love, for me, poetry; in it, we find lines that know us by heart. This last season, we had Dante Micheaux’s “Theologies for Korah”. I have repeated his line “There is no miracle / in an instrument of death” since a sunny morning in New York City 10 years ago. And yesterday, walking through a park in a wintry Glasgow, I stopped to look at snowdrops and crocuses. “Praise here all fabulous unwritten”, I thought, Kimberly Blaeser’s magnificent line coming up from the unconscious like a flower, too. And as the terrors of war and war-making were broadcast to us on our televisions, phones, and radios this week, I reread Okzana Maksymchuk’s poignant and tragic “Arguments for Peace”.

I love making Poetry Unbound, and I love meeting people who tell me that they have deepened their love of poetry through listening to it. And hearing stories of how a person has brought their life into conversation with a line of poem moves me enormously. Thank you to all who share their love of poetry with us at Poetry Unbound and On Being.

Our episodes — and our Substack — will always be free and fully accessible to everyone. We work hard on fundraising (and special thanks to the Henry Luce Foundation and Liana Foundation for their significant support this year). Special gratitude, too, to those of you who already support us: Your generosity is so appreciated — thank you.

Once a year, I make an ask, and this is it: Will you consider making a monthly — or one-off — donation to Poetry Unbound? It can be of any amount; everything helps. And, again, to those of you who already donate, my very deepest thanks.

If you are able to contribute, it’s easy: You can sign up to be a monthly or annual subscriber (or a founding member) via Substack. Or, you can make a tax-deductible donation (monthly or one-time) via On Being, and direct it to go specifically to Poetry Unbound. You can pause, or cease, your monthly giving whenever you want, and if you opt for annual giving, you will get a reminder in March to allow you to amend or end your donations.

Season 10 of Poetry Unbound has just finished with a poem of pure glory from Leonard Cohen. I learnt of this work from Dave Clare in a café in Dublin in 2003, and I have bought many copies of the crooning Canadian’s Book of Mercy since (I keep giving them away).

This week I’m curious to know: What’s a story about how a particular poem came into your life? It might have been by hearing it on the radio. It might have been a recommendation from a friend. You might have learnt it at school. Or, you might have found it, unexpectedly, while leafing through a book.

I look forward to hearing your stories of poems, friends. Thank you for your support of Poetry Unbound, and thank you — as always — for listening, reading, sharing, responding, contributing, and making the Poetry Unbound podcast and Substack the thoughtful, welcoming community that they are.

PS: The penultimate Poetry Unbound episode this season highlights Billy-Ray Belcourt’s “Subarctica", a work of beauty and power. And, specially for you, we have a brief bonus episode coming out tomorrow (Monday, March 9). You may just hear a bit more of that fantastic “The Listeners” poem that I referred to above.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 15: Billy-Ray Belcourt — Subarctica

Episode 16: Leonard Cohen — Book of Mercy “I, 8”

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)

March 24, Manhattan, New York

Peter Constantine, Joseph O. Legaspi, Daniel Simon, and myself will be reading to celebrate 100 years of World Literature Today, hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport, beginning at 7 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 14, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. (Registration details are not yet available but will be coming soon.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

Many years ago, I taught a weeklong course on a small boat off the south coast of France. If that sounds idyllic to you, you’re half right. The people were lovely, and the setting was gorgeous: 15 or 16 students in class (the topic was reconciliation) for four hours a day.

I love being on boats, but I do get a little motion sickness. As the week went by, news of an incoming storm came through. And we — in our seagoing sail training ketch — needed to move from where we were moored to somewhere else. At night. During a storm. I was anxious about keeping up a teaching schedule and keeping my food down. It was a small vessel, so on the night of the storm I went and chatted to the guy who was captaining us until I was so tired I was falling asleep on my feet. Then, sometime around 2 a.m., I lay out on a bench in the galley (someone had told me it was the place least likely to experience too much turbulence). I woke a few hours later and realised I was warm — someone had placed a heavy woolen blanket over me. I can still feel the rough fibres of that covering, navy blue, smelling of land and lanolin.

“Love is a blanket on a stormy night,” I thought.

What is love? It is many things. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s beautiful poem “Dukka” says it like so:

… Love
is paying attention, I remark, and you
repeat it to me. Love is also the father
who plants an olive tree for every newborn
trusting they will grow up to harvest it. Love is
the elderly woman who stood inside
Damascus Gate knowing the settlers
were on a rampage, knowing
what her body would have to endure. Love is a story 
we never tire of telling, just as Shireen
told it with a microphone and a camera

From the book Something about Living (University of Akron Press, 2024)

Love is action, the poet tells us: action for the future, action in the moment of noticing, action of protection or challenge or exposure, action of bearing witness. Shireen Abu Akleh — the Shireen mentioned above — was a Palestinian American journalist who was killed by the Israeli military in 2022 while covering a raid in Jenin. In this way, the poem is saying that love is also telling the truth “with a microphone and a camera”.

What else is love? Love is asking. Or, as Rachel Mann’s poem “#TDOR” from last week reminds us, it may be in silence or, at least, in learning to ask better questions.

Where has love been an action for you? In your own life, yes. But also in your civic life. In 2019, at the Belfast funeral of another murdered journalist, Lyra McKee, I listened to a mild-mannered priest address the gathered politicians (and there were many), noting that they were all in the same room, finally, and then asking, “Why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman with her whole life in front of her to get to this point?”

The congregation — it was a funeral for a Catholic journalist in a standing-room-only Protestant cathedral — did the most unusual thing. We rose to our feet clapping, clapping, clapping. The British government had been posturing in the post-Brexit lunacy, and here at the funeral were many British and Irish politicians, including the UK Prime Minister. What could people do? Very little, it seemed. But we could make noise, and in a cathedral, we did. It was just applause, one small gesture among many actions. It did something, though — a message was delivered and heard. Politicians heard a people's mandate through the sustained rage of our sound. Hands clapping and clapping and clapping — in a cathedral containing the body of a 29-year-old journalist in a coffin — like an exorcism, like a shout at the meaninglessness of it all, like a call to love in action.

So here is this week’s prompt: Tell us about an action of love you’ve seen lately. That is our poem. As Lena Khalaf Tuffaha says, “Love / is paying attention, I remark and you / repeat it to me.”

PS: Season 10 of Poetry Unbound ends this coming week. However, there’ll be a little bonus episode the week after, with teasers of what else is to come for 2026. And — Krista has a magnificent new season of On Being airing at the moment — and this week featured her conversation with poets Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 13: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha — Dukka

Episode 14: Ruth Irupé Sanabria — Carne (click on the poet’s name at left here to access the episode via Apple Podcasts)

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Glasgow and Iona)

March 5, Glasgow, Scotland

Join me at the University of Glasgow Campus Bookshop for a reading and conversation, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 24, Manhattan, New York

Peter Constantine, Joseph O. Legaspi, Daniel Simon, and myself will be reading to celebrate 100 years of World Literature Today, hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport, beginning at 7 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 14, Manhattan, New York

Save the date for a special event to honor and support the work of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. I’ll be reading new poems from my next collection; join me there at 7 p.m. (Registration details are not yet available but will be coming soon.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

A friend of mine once said that she was “religious, but not spiritual”, playing on idea of the opposite (“spiritual, but not religious”). I don’t know how I’d state it for me — neither and both at the same time, but I do know that there are certain days of the year I like to make religious observances.

This week was one of them: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the annual time of Lent (a word that comes from the Latin for spring), a six-week season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving among many of the Christianities of the world. I went to a parish around the corner from me in Hell’s Kitchen on Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. and sat in the pew for 20 minutes. The priest was a no-nonsense New Yorker — here’s some ideas for prayer; here’s some ideas for giving to the poor; here’s some ways for the moral life. I wouldn’t say he was warm, but I would say that he was a man attuned to practice and action.

I went, then, to see a friend and then onto a book launch (for R.A. Villanueva’s gorgeous new book, A Holy Dread), with ashes on my head. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return” is one of the incantations said when ashes are put on your forehead: a taste of the sober truth we all know and will know at different stages throughout our lives.

I can think of a few people I wish would wear ashes on their forehead. The Babylonian king Gilgamesh saw himself as invincible and was so arrogant he thought he owned every woman of Babylon. He terrorised his own people, and when, eventually, the gods heard the cries of the people, they taught Gilgamesh a lesson.

The lesson? It wasn’t a cut-down takedown. Instead, they sentenced him to have a friend, followed by grief, and then — finally and in a way that seemed to fundamentally petrify Gilgamesh — he had to face his own fear of death. He who thought he’d live forever found himself in the grip of time, embodying the very fear he’d previously been spreading around. The story of Gilgamesh, which is so old, is revealing; we have been wondering how to live under the reign of leaders who think they’re eternal for a very long time.

This brings Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War” to mind too (we made a Poetry Unbound episode about this a few years ago).

We Lived Happily During the War 

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. 

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf Press, 2019)

What I admire so much in his poem is that it asks questions of personal responsibility too. I do not know how to end wars or to change government tactics or to make big civic change. But just because I don’t know how to do those things, it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t ask myself the questions of complicity. Seasons like Lent and Ramadan — and many other seasons, secular and religious — ask us to take sombre views of ourselves, ask us how we help, what we do with our money, what we give our attention to, and how we act.

My question today is: What do you do to take sombre stock of yourself? I will look forward to hearing. For me, sometimes, it’s by asking john a. powell’s questions of myself: Who decides? who wins? who pays?

Our episodes this week are ones of taking stock: Sanah Ahsan brings us into culture and celebration and eros and creativity in their gorgeous “Ramadan’s Greetings” poem; and Rachel Mann invites attention to language, directionality of power, exhaustion, and demand in “#TDOR”. I’ll look forward to hearing how you take stock.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 11: Sanah Ahsan — Ramadan’s Greetings

Episode 12: Rachel Mann — #TDOR

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Orlando, FL; Kingston, Manhattan, and Rhinebeck, NY; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Glasgow, Iona)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

March 5, Glasgow, Scotland

Join me at the University of Glasgow Campus Bookshop for a reading and conversation, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 24, Manhattan, New York

Peter Constantine, Joseph O. Legaspi, Daniel Simon, and myself will be reading to celebrate 100 years of World Literature Today, hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport, beginning at 7 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

Thank you for your comments last week. It was moving to read the moments when you have been borne witness to.

Last Saturday, I hosted a meal at my apartment. It was a working meal; I was paying friends with stew and homemade bread. I’ve got a new book of poems coming out later this year, and I wanted to get feedback on the content and ordering of the manuscript. A few couldn’t make it, so they phoned or texted with ideas. Five came and made magnificent chaos of my flat and my poems: interruptions, ideas, queries, gossip, pushback, more interruptions, food, pass-the-butter, edits, excisions, occasional praise, radical revisions, reordering, consensus, diverging, and constructive critiques.

Tidying up afterwards, I was buzzing with ideas. I knew I’d need to take a day or two to let the energy of the possibilities settle down.

It’s one of the things I love about poetry friendships: how we turn to each other for support, knowing that our friends can tune into our voice. My first experience of being edited was when I was 11 and my older sister Áine found a poem I’d written about a dog. “It’s pretty good,” she said, “but I made it better.” I looked at her edits, and my god, she had improved it. It started a lifelong love of editing and being edited for me. Few read more closely than a good editor.

The etymological roots of “edit” imply “to bring forth” or “to bring about.” To be edited can, of course, have a connotation of being silenced or misrepresented. But the sense I am extolling today is the one where some careful companion has helped you bring forth your own words in your own voice, not by silencing you but by amplifying your true message. My sister did that for me — the poem itself was a fairly typical example of what an 11-year-old would write — but she tuned me to the possibility that my voice had something to say. Within a few weeks, I was writing poems that were, for me, daring: putting language on paper that even I couldn’t bear to say aloud, but needed to see in front of me.

Work in conflict resolution can, at its best, be a process of helping disputants to feel the best side of editing, where they are supported to convey their message without confusion, instead feeling carried in the vehicle of their own language to communicate something vital about their experience, survival, story, change, assertion, or learning.

Have you had a good experience of being edited? Whether in writing, or in person-to-person communication, what did it do for you?

Looking at my manuscript last weekend, one friend said, “You could get to the main point more speedily,” and another said, “I’m not sure these words help." Someone said, “Can you bear to hear a major critique?”, and another said, “How about you divvy this one up so it’s easier to appreciate?” Someone texted and said, “Surely this is a typo.” Messages for life, not just for writing. Paid for by soup and gratitude. Afterwards, I cleaned each cup with a happy heart.

I’ll see you in the comments and meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the delicious episodes from this week, from innuendo and erotics to prayer and yearning. Yes!

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 9: Harryette Mullen — LUVTOFU

Episode 10: Kevin Hart — Prayer

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Kingston, and Rhinebeck, NY; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and the UK (Iona, Scotland)

February 18, Brooklyn, New York

Join me in celebrating the release of R.A. Villanueva’s newest collection at Liz’s Book Bar at 7 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 19, Manhattan, New York

I’m giving a lecture on storytelling and narrative poetry at The Morgan Library at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 21–22, Houston, Texas

Christ Church Cathedral has invited me for two days of events — there will be a retreat exploring conflict, an evening reading and book signing, and a talk on belonging the following morning. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

March 5, Glasgow, Scotland

Join me at the University of Glasgow Campus Bookshop for a reading and conversation, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 24, Manhattan, New York

Peter Constantine, Joseph O. Legaspi, Daniel Simon, and myself will be reading to celebrate 100 years of World Literature Today, hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport, beginning at 7 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

The two poems from this week’s Poetry Unbound episodes have been with me for years. I first read Dante Micheaux’s “Theologies for Korah” when it was published in Poetry Magazine 10 years ago, and I have had Stewart Henderson’s “How To Speak Love In A Storm?” in my heart since the sunny springtime of 1997, when I bought the book where it’s collected at a festival in Ilfracombe, in the southwest of England.

Both of these poems are attentive to presence. Dante’s lines are addressed to a child at a baptism, and his invitation is to the life of the mind: “Seek you first, girl, the kingdom / of my love, with all your mind. All your mind. Do not / forget your mind.” I love the fire of his address, how he — with “heretic / theology” — speaks through religion to the ways a person can be alive in the world with their intellect, their attention, and their language.

Stewart Henderson’s poem is not tied to a particular ritual. Instead, it is tied to that experience we all know about: the storm, the pain, the grief, the burden. When “there is only chaos” and things collapse on top of us. All of us have experienced this — after a shock, after grief, because of what we carry. The poem does not propose “words and hollow prayers”, but rather accompaniment: “walking backwards with you / into your abandoned years.”

Each of these poems bears witness: Dante’s to a ritual of initiation; Stewart’s to presence in desolation.

My question this week is about bearing witness. Who has borne witness to you, whether in a moment of initiation or joy or pain? Is there something of what they said that remains with you? Or was it more about what they did or didn’t do, or how they were with you? Unfold your story poems of witness in the comments.

I’m sure I’ve told this before, but it’s worth telling again. Fifteen years ago, I was revisiting Australia, where I’d lived in my 20s. I'd loved living there, and on this trip, I felt the connection strongly and could imagine an alternative universe where I’d never left. I was happy, I was sad, and being back in Melbourne came with an ache: Should I ever have left? What would life have been had I stayed there? Two countries, two homes, two sides of the planet, one man.

I was giving a retreat on poetry, and during coffee, a participant asked, “How is it to be back in Australia?” She was in her early 80s, had cornflower-blue eyes I can still recall, and took notes in a small black notebook. I told her I was feeling torn: I loved Australia; I also loved Ireland. She put her hand on my arm. “Being torn isn’t a bad way to live,” she said. And something was recast; what I had thought would tear me apart was reshaped as a way to hold myself together. I do not remember her name, but I remember her.

So, friends: Who has borne witness to you? Tell us — not only the event, but also the weather, the smells in the air, the touch you remember.

I’ll see you in the comments.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 7: Dante Micheaux — Theologies for Korah

Episode 8: Stewart Henderson — How To Speak Love In A Storm?

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Kingston, and Rhinebeck, NY; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and the UK (Iona, Scotland)

February 11, Online

I’m directing an evening workshop on lyric address through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (for more info, click on the date heading.)

February 13, Manhattan, New York

Ada Calhoun and myself will be discussing love in action at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

February 18, Brooklyn, New York

Join me in celebrating the release of R.A. Villanueva’s newest collection at Liz’s Book Bar at 7 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 19, Manhattan, New York

I’m giving a lecture on storytelling and narrative poetry at The Morgan Library at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 21–22, Houston, Texas

Christ Church Cathedral has invited me for two days of events — there will be a retreat exploring conflict, an evening reading and book signing, and a talk on belonging the following morning. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

March 24, Manhattan, New York

Peter Constantine, Joseph O. Legaspi, Daniel Simon, and myself will be reading to celebrate 100 years of World Literature Today, hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport, beginning at 7 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

This week — a poem from the Twin Cities.

Michael Bazzett is a Minneapolis-based poet, translator, educator, and all-around wonderful person. Back when I was more active on Twitter, I shared a photo of one of his poems. He replied, said thanks, and suggested connecting the next time I was in Minneapolis. So, a few years later, we met for a drink and have stayed in touch ever since. I love his work: the choice of language, the wide areas of his interests, the way he can be serious and humorous at the same time; and the way sometimes — like this poem below — he can be just serious.

Last week, he sent me a new poem asking if I knew where might be a good place for it, and he was kind enough to give me permission to reproduce the poem in this Substack. Here it is.

From Minneapolis in January
by Michael Bazzett

We live in the numbness 
of an occupied city 
where every story has another 
story curled inside its labyrinth—

and when Sleep reads 
to you at bedtime, it is 
the nested one that comes 
slinking out to sew you, 

with tiny stitches and 
scarlet thread, to the mattress. 
It is a story that believes itself 
to be permanent (an odd word, 

because nothing is), 
a story that is somehow 
made of white light 
bent and glaring to illuminate 

what happened, then tell you 
it did not happen. Dawn 
slowly washes every face  
sleeping in the pale grey

mop-water of its light. 
Yet nobody awakens 
and we cannot say why. 
The answer is simple. Death 

has come here on holiday 
from the coast, yet its cousin 
Sleep remains in charge. 
Our nightmare is the waking.

There are many things I like about the poem: the depiction of the macabre character who comes “slinking out to sew you, // with tiny stitches and / scarlet thread, to the mattress”; the intelligence of time; the way something that promises to be illuminating is lying; that description of “the pale grey // mop-water of its light”.

“It is a story that believes itself / to be permanent (an odd word, // because nothing is” is the line that sticks to me over and over as I’ve read it this week. The self-belief that a worrisome ideology has can be one of its most pervasive characteristics. The full wrapped-up permanence of it all. It can overwhelm.

The poem is a call to awaken. It is not a poem with an easy resolution; it stays in the tension of itself. “Death // has come here on holiday” — a magic-realism languaging from Michael Bazzett: a little bit of levity but definitely not funny.

I am sure that many are overwhelmed. Death and Sleep are characterised in the poem to great power. Michael Bazzett’s poem does not provide a solution, but I read two imperatives in it: Live. And Awaken.

I’d love to know: What do you take from the poem — its poetics, its message to you, its form, its craft, something else?

I’ll see you in the comments, friends.

PS: If you quote this poem, make sure that you credit Michael Bazzett — and you can read more about him and his wonderful books on his website here.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 5: Armen Davoudian — Coming Out of the Shower

Episode 6: Oksana Maksymchuk — Arguments for Peace

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Washington, DC; Manhattan, Brooklyn, Kingston, and Rhinebeck, NY; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and the UK (Iona, Scotland)

February 2, Washington, District of Columbia, and Online

Join poet Marilyn Nelson and myself for a conversation at the Washington National Cathedral at 7 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 11, Online

I’m directing an evening workshop on lyric address through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (for more info, click on the date heading.)

February 13, Manhattan, New York

Ada Calhoun and myself will be discussing love in action at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

February 18, Brooklyn, New York

Join me in celebrating the release of R.A. Villanueva’s newest collection at Liz’s Book Bar at 7:00 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 19, Manhattan, New York

I’m giving a lecture on storytelling and narrative poetry at The Morgan Library at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 21–22, Houston, Texas

Christ Church Cathedral has invited me for two days of events — there will be a retreat exploring conflict, an evening reading and book signing, and a talk on belonging the following morning. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and then I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

Thank you for your kind replies last week — to the question and to each other. The comments on this Substack are so engaging and engaged. Thank you!

This week, I’ll lead with the question straight off: What is a word that occupies some of your attention? It might be a word that everyone else seems to love but you don’t, or one that you can’t quite wrap your head around even though it takes some of your attention. Maybe it’s a word you used to like but are now less sure, or it’s a word you used to be wary of but now really like. Tell us about it, and share some of your mullings.

I have many such words. One of them is “resilience”. I don’t hate it, and I think that most people who use it are probably using it in very fruitful ways. But sometimes I worry that it asks too much from those who’ve already been failed by a system that now asks them to be the ones manifesting strength.

Another word (apropos of this week’s Poetry Unbound episode on Orlando Menes’s poem) is “grace”. I’m sure it’s a lovely word, and it’s also a gorgeous name. I think I have too many memories of being slammed by this word as a young Catholic who was too often seen as a “needs to be converted to true grace” experiment by evangelical missionaries. I know people who love the word, and I have tried. I can’t rid myself of a flimsy definition of it, though (my problem, not the word’s). However, lately, I have been thinking of the antonym of “grace”: “disgrace”. I have known disgrace, and I have seen others disgraced. Whatever a positive definition of grace is, I can find a strange gate into it through the idea of disgrace.

I don’t know that I ever disliked the word “romance”, but I assumed it wasn’t for me. In my mid 20s, I read Niall Williams’s Four Letters of Love and was transfixed by the way he makes the natural world a place for romance (in my recollection, a character stays on an island … the islanders all smell lavender in the air, so they know someone must be heartbroken). Cyrus Cassells’s Poetry Unbound episode this week is an example of a gorgeous romantic language about being in — and open to — the world.

So, once again: What is a word that occupies some of your attention?

For the sake of safety, I’ll say it here, even though I know it’s probably unnecessary: If the word you’re referencing has been a slur to a community you’re not part of, it’s best to find a different word for reflection here.

I look forward to encountering your words in the comments, friends.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 3: Cyrus Cassells — Jasmine

Episode 4: Orlando Ricardo Menes — Grace

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Berkeley and Palo Alto, CA; Washington, DC; Manhattan, Kingston, and Rhinebeck, NY; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Memphis, TN; Notre Dame, IN; Santa Fe, NM) and the UK (Iona, Scotland)

January 29–31, Berkeley, California

I’ll be joining the Center for Faith and Justice for three days of events, including readings, book signings, and workshops, held at First Presbyterian Church. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

January 31, Palo Alto, California

I’m participating in a morning retreat and evening keynote address at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, held at 10 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., respectively. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 2, Washington, District of Columbia, and Online

Join poet Marilyn Nelson and myself for a conversation at the Washington National Cathedral at 7 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 11, Online

I’m directing an evening workshop on lyric address through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (for more info, click on the date heading.)

February 18, Brooklyn, New York

Join me in celebrating the release of R.A. Villanueva’s newest collection at Liz’s Book Bar at 7:00 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 19, Manhattan, New York

I’m giving a lecture on storytelling and narrative poetry at The Morgan Library at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 21–22, Houston, Texas

Christ Church Cathedral has invited me for two days of events — there will be a retreat exploring conflict, an evening reading and book signing, and a talk on belonging the following morning. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

March 25–26, Memphis, Tennessee, and Online

I’m delighted to be returning to Cavalry Episcopal Church for this year’s Lenten Preaching Series. My good friend Marie Howe and I will be in conversation at 6:15 p.m. on March 25, and I’ll give a talk the next afternoon. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)

“Praise here all fabulous unwritten” is one of the lines in Kimberly Blaeser’s “my journal records the vestiture of doppelgängers”, which we released this week as the first episode in the new season of Poetry Unbound.

The magnificent irony! To use writing to praise all that is not written. “Nature writing” is a broad term that sometimes implies it’s doing just one thing — writing about what’s natural in front of us. But what is natural? It’s physics, for one (our English word comes from the Greek word “phúsis” meaning “origin/nature”.

But nature is not just “red squirrel swimming (yes! swimming) across a small channel”; nature is also the person writing the poem, the person who is part of a species who derive pleasure and message and purpose in observing. Nature is not always pleasant and some things in nature (think of philosophical discussions about whether it is natural for people to fight) deserve to be queried and undone. Nature, then, is worth observing, and — where we think we can or even if not, where we want to — attempts at modification may be worthy.

Whose nature should be modified? Well … me. Maybe you? Maybe us. Yes yes. You know what I mean.

“We do not tell stories as they are, we tell them as we are” is a line Anaïs Nin ascribed to the Talmud (although famously there is no such line in the written Talmud). And this truism can be apportioned to nature too: We do not tell nature as it is, we tell it as we are. This, then, leads me to the question of what nature is revealed in any nature writing.

Kimberly Blaeser’s poem reveals a powerful desire to notice and deepen the connectivity between observer and observed, poet and “blissful beaver /devouring each water lily”. Twenty-five years ago, after a grief, I couldn’t stop looking at birds. Crows, magpies, rooks, ravens. They circled above the hillside where my now-dead friend had lived. Looking at them one afternoon as I walked away from visiting his mother, I felt a physical lurch in my chest. I, too, wanted to fly, to be above — if only for a few minutes — all that was weighing me down.

Another time, in another place, I was giving a retreat. I was facing the group, and behind me was a wall of glass showing a wooded area. Something happened, and the response was not noise but a deeper silence. In the trees through the window — maybe only 15 feet away — was a red-shouldered hawk: beautiful and light and still. It stayed for five full minutes, and so did we. The precision of attention was met by a strange combination of alertness and rest. We had gathered for a retreat; it was the hawk that brought us there.

So this week’s question: In the nature writing that you have turned to, what has been revealed to you? About the observer/writer, about the world, about you?

I’ll see you in the comments, friends.

PS: As well as being a renowned poet, Kimberly Blaeser is the executive director of Indigenous Nations Poets, a community committed to raising the visibility of Native writers that was founded in 2020. This work is important and fantastic.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Episode 1: Kimberly Blaeser — my journal records the vestiture of doppelgängers

Episode 2: W.S. Merwin — For The Anniversary of My Death

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Saint Paul, MN; Berkeley and Palo Alto, CA; Washington, DC; Manhattan, Kingston, and Rhinebeck, NY; Orlando, FL; Notre Dame, IN) and the UK (Iona, Scotland)

January 18, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Join me at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, where we’ll be reading, writing, and discussing poems together beginning at 3 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

January 29, Berkeley, California

I’ll be presenting an evening keynote at The Center for Faith and Justice. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

January 31, Palo Alto, California

I’m leading a morning retreat at All Saints Episcopal Church, beginning at 10 a.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 2, Washington, District of Columbia, and Online

Join poet Marilyn Nelson and me for a conversation at the Washington National Cathedral at 7 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 11, Online

I’m directing an evening workshop on lyric address through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (for more info, click on the date heading.)

February 19, Manhattan, New York

I’m giving a lecture on storytelling and narrative poetry at The Morgan Library at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

I enjoyed your pantoums so much — thank you for writing and reading and commenting on them. Forgive me for repeating myself, but I find that poetic forms can be a vast repository of psychological containment: Their patterns and demands reveal unseen patterns back to us when we put language in their constraints.

The next season of Poetry Unbound starts tomorrow. We’ll have eight weeks of episodes, Mondays and Fridays. Making episodes of Poetry Unbound is a joy for us, and any time any of you writes to us, or comes up at an event and shares how you met a poem with your own life, or wrote a poem inspired by one you heard, or have begun reading poetry more regularly, or — as someone wrote the other day — found the doors of poetry open to them, it makes my day. Thank you.

I am lucky to have grown up in a culture where poetry was marked as a way of speaking to questions of culture, history, power, independence, nature, language, resistance, joy, and grief. I didn’t know that this was what I was learning, but I was. The poems we’ve chosen for you in this new season of Poetry Unbound go across a wide variety of tones and topics, some very well-known poets and others who deserve to be well known.

One of the episodes this coming week is on W.S. Merwin’s poem “For the Anniversary of My Death”, where he recognises that in all his years (and he lived into his 90s), he has passed by what will be the anniversary of his own death. He, a man with longstanding Buddhist meditation practice, takes the opportunity to look at this. He writes:

“...Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment…”

From “For the Anniversary of My Death,” W.S. Merwin from The Second Four Books of Poems published by Copper Canyon Press

It’s a moving meditation, one written from the vantage point of not-knowing and trying — with his punctuation-free language that became a hallmark of his mid and late career — to look at time and dates and place, knowing what he can see and seeing all that he cannot know.

It’s impossible to think of this poem today and not consider Renée Nicole Macklin Good who was killed this week in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. As a younger person, she’d travelled to Northern Ireland on church trips; she was also a poet. In 2020, she won an award from the Academy of American Poets for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” the last lines of which are:

“…now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like 
mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.”

Like many people, I have read these lines this week, thinking about how Renée Nicole Macklin Good spoke for herself. Her own words, her own consideration about religion, life, meaning, importance, the memories she used, “sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to,” to guide and make meaning and art and message.

This, too, is a poem about how we live, “how often and how well,” and also “what dies there.” It is brutal to think of her life — and the lives of many others too — so viciously taken from her and them.

It is a sombre time to think of poems of life and death. And poetry is capable of carrying us with sombre language. Poetry does not make promises, and it does not seek to solve. Poetry is a place where sharp turns of language can exist alongside metaphors of sweet love. Poetry changes time and time changes poetry: We read both of these poems differently now that we know both poets have died, though the death of one was merciful, and the other was merciless. We see that clearly too.

What can we say to each other today? Let us share moments of power that you saw in the life of another: courage, compassion, creativity, resistance, truth, dismissal, refocus. It seems to me that this is one of the things Renée Nicole Macklin Good inferred with those lines: “life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there.”

I’ll see you in the comments, friends.

PS: Our first episode of this new season is by the magnificent Kimberly Blaeser and is titled “my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers” — I’ll look forward to writing about that wonder-filled poem next week.

The Latest from Poetry Unbound

Bonus Episode: “Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Marie Howe”

You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.

Poetry in the World

A list of my events: Online and in the US (Minneapolis, MN; Berkeley, CA; Washington, DC; Manhattan, Kingston, and Rhinebeck, NY; Orlando, FL; Notre Dame, IN) and the UK (Iona, Scotland)

January 12, Online

Save the date for an online conversation between me and poet and novelist Reshma Ruia. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

January 16, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Come join me at the Hope Arts Center, where I’ll give a reading followed by a conversation with poet G.E. Patterson and a book signing. It all begins at 7 p.m. (For more info and to secure your tickets, click on the date heading.)

January 17, Minneapolis, Minnesota

I’m leading a generative workshop on the space between poetry and prayer at The Loft Literary Center at 10 a.m. (For more info and to secure your tickets, click on the date heading.)

January 18, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Join me at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, we’ll be reading, writing, and discussing poems together, beginning at 3:00 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

January 29, Berkeley, California

I’ll be presenting an evening keynote at The Center for Faith and Justice. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

January 31, Palo Alto, California

I’ll be leading a morning retreat at All Saints Episcopal Church, beginning at 10:00 a.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 2, Washington, District of Columbia, and Online

Join poet Marilyn Nelson and me for a conversation at the Washington National Cathedral at 7 p.m ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 11, Online

I’m directing an evening workshop on lyric address through Poets House, beginning at 6:00 p.m. (for more info, click on the date heading.)

February 19, Manhattan, New York

I’m giving a lecture on storytelling and narrative poetry at The Morgan Library at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 24, Orlando, Florida

I’m giving a keynote address at Training Magazine’s annual exposition. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

February 26–March 1, Kingston, New York

I’m leading a weekend retreat workshop called “Poems of Longing”. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

April 23, Notre Dame, Indiana

I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York

This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)

June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland

Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on a waiting list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)