Weird Girl Lit is now a marketing category and reallllly popular one. Which is…weird. But I don’t feel bad about it (mostly because there are Actual Things in the world to feel about it and people finding more books they love isn’t one of them even if it’s intrinsically linked to capitalism).

In case you don’t know what Weird Girl Lit is, loosely I’d say it involves a female (or female-adjacent) narrator (or main character) whose relationship to the world has gone a little awry. Perhaps she’s alienated from her own body, domestic life, her language, or some combination of all that.

The prose tends toward the uncanny rather than the realist, though this isn’t a rule in any way. There’s often an interest in the grotesque, the abject, the hungry, the dissociative. Familiar things will often stop feeling familiar and vice versa. At its best it’s a contemporary inheritor of the Gothic, surrealism, and a specific strain of twentieth-century modernist interiority. At its worst it’s a girl being sad in an apartment, though one can argue that’s more, well, Sad Girl Lit which I wrote about here:

Reader Poll

In any case, if you go online elsewhere you’ll easily find lots of Weird Girl Lit reading lists, so why do I need to put one together? Well, I think a lot of the stuff out there is repetitive and overwhelming of a certain kind/type/culture. It’s also super American and often gender-exclusive. There’s so much fantastic literature out there once we let go of certain bounds, primarily for many of us these are genre and country (when it comes to books and the authors we’ll read).

So this reading guide hopes to be a bit different. Besides novels, I’m also sharing poetry and short story collections that, to me, fall under Weird Girl Lit, as well as hybrid words. Aaand you’ll find some books below that aren’t strictly by female-identifying authors because why should something like Weird Girl Lit be inhibited and encumbered by societal constrictions or even, by the supposed limits found in its own name?

Alright, here we go! And of course, please feel free to add your own in the comments and let me know what you’ve already read, loved, (or even, gulp, disliked!

Novels

☆ Pre-1950

• The Book of Margery Kempe — Margery Kempe

• Nightwood — Djuna Barnes

• Good Morning, Midnight — Jean Rhys

• Tropisms — Nathalie Sarraute

• Two Serious Ladies — Jane Bowles

• Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier

☆ 1950–1980

• The Naked Woman — Armonía Somers

• The Vet’s Daughter — Barbara Comyns

• Cassandra at the Wedding — Dorothy Baker

• The Woman in the Dunes — Kobo Abe

• The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector

• Ice — Anna Kavan

• Dark Spring — Unica Zürn

• The Wall — Marlen Haushofer

• Malina — Ingeborg Bachmann

• Sula — Toni Morrison

• The Lesbian Body — Monique Wittig

• The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington

• Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones

☆ 1980–2000

• Cassandra — Christa Wolf

• The Piano Teacher — Elfriede Jelinek

• Sphinx — Anne Garréta

• The Notebook — Agota Kristof

• Poor Things — Alasdair Gray

• Sexing the Cherry — Jeanette Winterson

• A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There — Krishna Sobti

• Hotel Iris — Yoko Ogawa

• O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker

• I Love Dick — Chris Kraus

• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid

• Amulet — Roberto Bolaño

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☆ 2000–2021-ish

• Fledgling — Octavia Butler

• My Heart Hemmed In — Marie NDiaye

• The Vegetarian — Han Kang

• The Seas — Samantha Hunt

• Frontier — Can Xue

• The Hunger Angel — Herta Müller

• White is for Witching — Helen Oyeyemi

• Our Lady of the Nile — Scholastique Mukasonga

• The Taiga Syndrome — Cristina Rivera Garza

• Pyre — Perumal Murugan

• Untold Night and Day — Bae Suah

• Annihilation — Jeff Vandermeer

• Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin

• Memoirs of a Polar Bear — Yoko Tawada

• Little Star — John Ajvide Lindqvist

• Hurricane Season — Fernanda Melchor

• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl — Andrea Lawlor

• Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi

• Pink Slime — Fernanda Trías

• Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree

• The Employees — Olga Ravn

• Sorrowland — Rivers Solomon

• Sterling Karat Gold — Isabel Waidner

• Ultramarine — Mariette Navarro

• Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch — Rivka Galchen

• Slewfoot — Brom

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☆ Current

• Lapvona — Odessa Moshfegh

• Bunny — Mona Awad

• When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

• Monstrilio — Gerardo Sámano Córdova

• Big Swiss — Jean Beagin

• Hunchback — Saou Ichikawa

• Discontent — Beatriz Serrano

• Mary — Nat Cassidy

• State of Paradise — Laura van den Berg

• Audition — Katie Kitamura

• Thirst — Marina Yuszczuk

• Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte

• Goddess Complex — Sanjena Sathian

• Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico

• Midnight Timetable — Bora Chung

• The Hounding — Xenobe Purvis

• Tetra Nova — Sophia Terazawa

• She Made Herself a Monster — Anna Kovatcheva

• The Lamb — Lucy Rose

• A Good Person — Kirsten King

• Hexes of the Deadwood Forest — Agnieszka Szpila

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Short Story Collections

☆ Pre-1980s

• The Lottery and Other Stories — Shirley Jackson

• The Street of Crocodiles — Bruno Schulz

• Panics — Barbara Molinard

• The Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector

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☆ 1980–2000

• A Kitchen in the Corner of the House — Ambai

• The Bloody Chamber — Angela Carter

• Thus Were Their Faces — Silvina Ocampo

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☆ 2000–2020-ish

• Skin Folk — Nalo Hopkinson

• Magic for Beginners — Kelly Link

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves — Karen Russell

• Mouthful of Birds — Samanta Schweblin

• The Complete Stories — Leonora Carrington

• Vertical Motion — Can Xue

• The Visiting Privilege — Joy Williams

• Fen — Daisy Johnson

• Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings — Kuzhali Manickavel

• Apple and Knife — Intan Paramaditha

• The Most of It — Mary Ruefle

• What is Not Yours is Not Yours — Helen Oyeyemi

• Where the Wild Ladies Are — Aoko Matsuda

• Cursed Bunny — Bora Chung

• Daydreams of Angels — Heather O’Neill

• The Doll’s Alphabet — Camilla Grudova

• The Houseguest — Amparo Dávila

• Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado

• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky — Lesley Nneka Arimah

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☆ Current

• Gods of Want — K-Ming Chang

• Evil Flowers — Gunnhild Øyehaug

• A Kind of Madness — Uche Okonkwo

• Shit Cassandra Saw — Gwen E. Kirby

• Entry Level — Wendy Wimmer

• The Girl Who Cried Diamonds — Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

• White Cat, Black Dog — Kelly Link

• Ghostroots — Pemi Aguda

• Mouth — Puloma Ghosh

• Ninetails — Sally Wen Mao

Poetry Collections

☆ Pre-2000

• Collected Poems — Chika Sagawa

• Ariel — Sylvia Plath

• Extracting the Stone of Madness — Alejandra Pizarnik

• Transformations — Anne Sexton

• The Descent of Alette — Alice Notley

• Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

☆ 2000-2020-ish

• Alphabet — Inger Christensen

• Dark Matter — Aase Berg

• Ossuaries — Dionne Brand

• Ban en Banlieue — Bhanu Kapil

• Given — Arielle Greenberg

• Flemish — Caroline Knox

• Autobiography of Death — Kim Hyesoon

• Measures of Expatriation — Vahni Capildeo

• Discipline — Dawn Lundy Martin

• Someone Else’s Wedding Vows — Bianca Stone

• Arrow — Sumita Chakraborty

• Sea and Fog — Etel Adnan

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound — torrin a. greathouse

• God’s Green Earth — Noelle Kocot

☆ Current

• Mirror Nation — Don Mee Choi

• Perverts — Kay Gabriel

• And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight — Lynn Xu

• Villainy — Andrea Abi-Karam

• Judas Goat — Gabrielle Bates

• What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium — Kim Simonsen

• Iguana Iguana — Caylin Capra-Thomas

• Oracular Maladies — Sophia Terazawa

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you all like to read and write poetry. I do too. I’m also an editor of poetry as well as prose, as some of you might already know, and just today we announced a close-reading session over on Strange Pilgrims which has filled up within minutes of opening:

Strange Pilgrims

Introducing Strange Pilgrims Club

Hello fellow strange pilgrims…

Read more

a month ago · 38 likes · 8 comments · Strange Pilgrims and Shannan Mann

In there, I talk a little bit more about the reasoning behind wanting to do a reading club as opposed to a workshop on writing or submitting or anything else. Of course, I do those also, and ONLY POEMS, our poetry magazine, regularly runs some kickass workshops. You can check them out here!

But as a lifelong reader, I’ve always felt the lack of spaces dedicated purely to reading and understanding a creative text, without any desire to bring our own writerly egos in to it (well, as much as that is possible). So, while the Strange Pilgrims Club will be for prose, I’d like to try out a Beautiful Losers Club dedicated to close-reading poetry.

Just as I mention in the linked post above, this is indeed an experiment, and I’d like to keep the space intentional and intimate. For this reason, enrollment will be first-come-first-serve and there will be a waitlist. I will share the recording later on, but if you’re interested in joining in live, please sign up here:

Sign up for Beautiful Losers Club!

During the session we will:

• Do quick introductions

• I’ll share a brief presentation to assist our close read

• We’ll read each poem in full and unpack different elements of what makes it work, what stands out, even what you might not necessarily enjoy or understand

• Participate in open yet structured conversation

I want this to feel like the best kind of workshop classroom. The part I’m most looking forward to is where it opens up into everyone talking about poetry, and about what literature is doing right now.

The session will run for about 60 minutes. If the conversation is thriving I won’t end it prematurely, and anyone who needs to drop off at the 60-minute mark is free to do so (ought to go without saying that I won’t hold you captive before this either, but I want to nurture a sustained space for conversation and analysis, so I’d encourage you to stay for the full 60 minutes at least).

Alright, that’s all from me. Not sure how many folks we’ll get for this man, but I’ll most likely cap this at around 15 people, so it really is first-come-first-served. Please note, that I will keep a few spots reserved for ONLY POEMS Members!

May your life be full of poems,

Shannan

Bore Yourself!

I don’t usually send out two things in a week, but then again…I don’t usually follow a set pattern of any sort sooo….here’s my best creative advice free of charge: go be bored.

I mean catastrophically bored. Sit on your couch and stare at the wall until you feel a little unhinged. And don’t ya dare journal about it afterwards!

Every writer I know is drowning in inputs. Podcasts while cooking. Newsletters on the train. Someone else’s gorgeous sentences at bedtime. We consume craft content about writing with the same compulsive energy we bring to everything else, and then we sit down at the desk and all that comes out is a vague echo of someone more interesting. Of course it does. Your brain will not give you anything new if you never shut up at it.

(I include myself in this, obviously. I have seven tabs open right now. One of them is a craft essay I saved three weeks ago and will never read. It’s fine. We’re all doing this.)

That’s where the weird stuff lives, though — in the sweet dull dark nothing of it all. It’s a thing you’d never find on a “best of” list because it came from your specific, unrepeatable boredom as opposed to someone else’s curated inspiration (no matter how tasteful and elegant.).

So! Please give yourselves like 15 MINUTES OF NOTHING so brutally dull that your imagination has no choice but to save you from it.

Byeee!

S 💙

Hey everyone, I’ve been sick for quite a while (just a cold but it never feels like just a cold does it?) after my daughter got over an ear infection the past week. On top of that, we’ve been back and forth between places and are also packing to go to different places. I’m also just a few weeks away from my 31st birthday as well as my first ever short story published in print (Island Magazine thank you!!).

And yet, I feel sort of creatively stuck. I’ve been wishing (like I used to when I was a kid) for a writerly anti-mom (uber-mom?? ultra-mama!) figure who’s part witch and all librarian to go all tough-love on my ass and just…kind of magic away my problems. Since I don’t have this (quite the opposite, alas), I decided I’d just do it for myself. What else is being a writer for, after all?

And because I hadn’t sent y’all something for a while, I thought I’d share it with you too! Here goes:

1. Writer’s block is real and you should respect it. Toni Morrison said this, and she’s smarter than whatever productivity bro told you to push through. Sometimes it’s blocked because it’s not ready. Walk away. Read a book. Stare at the ceiling. The thing will come when it comes.

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2. Reading counts as writing. I’m serious. If you spent six months doing nothing but inhaling novels and poems, you’d come back to the page a better writer than if you’d forced yourself through six months of joyless morning pages. Stop feeling guilty about the book in your hand.

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3. Finish the bad thing. I know it’s gone sideways. I know you’ve lost the thread. But if it flows when you sit down, freakin’ finish it anyway. A drawer full of half-drafts teaches you less than trying to fix a finished mess.

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4. Your jealousy is useful. When you read someone and feel that specific sting in your chest — hey, that’ s a beautiful thing, ya goon. That’s your taste showing you what you want to do. Don’t you scroll past it! Sit with it, with them, those gorgeous unattainables. Figure out what they did and how they got there. Emulate the shit out of good stuff.

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5. Nobody cares about your routine. The cabin, the special pen, the 5am alarm. Process-fetishism is procrastination in a pretty cardigan. You can write on your phone in a parking lot. Write with your mascara-tinged tears, for all I care.

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6. Most writing problems are structure problems. You’re fussing with sentences when the real issue is that your piece doesn’t know where it’s going or the form it wants to take You’ve got the wrong entry point, or you’re burying the thing that matters on page five, or you’re circling the same idea three times without realizing it. Zoom the fuck out.

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7. Write the thing that scares you. The one you keep circling. The one you think about in the shower but won’t put on paper because wHaT wOuLd PeOpLe ThInK!? Ugh, that’s so never ago. My dear, people rarely think. Who are these people anyway? I can bet you they’re not thinking about you, at the very least.

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8. Your first draft is supposed to be humiliating. If you’re not a little embarrassed by it, you’re probably editing while you write, which means you’re not actually reeaalllly drafting. Let it be bad. Let it be real reaaaal nastay. That’s it’s whole existential purpose.

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9. You don’t need permission. No, really. You don’t need an MFA or even a publication credit, not a single byline my friend, and nor a mentor tapping you on the shoulder (though this right here could be that if you need it!). You just decide you’re a writer and then you do the work. It’s unsatisfying and it’s true.

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10. The publishing industry’s opinion of your work has almost nothing to do with its quality. Books get rejected for market reasons, timing reasons, vibes reasons, reasons that have nothing to do with whether the writing is good. Some of the best books I know took years to find a home. Some of the worst sold at auction. This industry is chaos. Write anyway.

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Note on Art: This painting1 by Hwang Hyeyoung shows a girl who becomes her own house, or maybe the house becomes her—legs sprawled on the grass, eyes peering out from the rooftop. I found this while looking for something that felt like the inside of a writer's head. I love also the concrete letters above the doorway: DREAM. The dream is real and alive and mysterious and a kind of warning yet also a promise. Be the dream itself, dear writer.

Every poet who’s thought about writing a novel has heard the same advice: slow down, add more, learn to plot. Some of the best novels, though, often work the way poems do—through rhythm, image, compression, obsession.

So below I’ve got just that for you. Beware, though, this isn’t a list of “lyrical” novels—that word has been used to death and means nothing anymore. You won’t find craft books here either. I truly feel that the work of learning to write a novel doesn’t primarily occur by reading about how to write a novel. We learn, most foundationally, by reading other books and talking about them.

So, dig into any of these and tell us if we missed some that should be here! And if you’ve read any of the books on this list, tell us what you thought?

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1. Beloved — Toni Morrison ✦ Repetition and refrain used the way a poem uses them, to haunt.

2. The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector ✦ A novel that thinks the way a poem thinks, in beautiful spirals & streams.

3. Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys ✦ Lush, furious, every image packed with beauty. Shows how to write landscape like a stanza.

4. Human Acts — Han Kang ✦ Second person, shifting POV, the body as subject.

5. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf ✦ Interior consciousness rendered in real time. The longest poem ever written in prose.

6. Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo ✦ A short ghost story told in fragments. The novel as séance.

7. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino ✦ Practically prose poems pretending to be a novel. And gets away with it completely.

8. Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston ✦ Music, reverence, turmoil.

9. Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez ✦ Obsession sustained across half a century. Teaches you that a single feeling can be the plot.

10. Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler ✦ World-building through voice.

11. Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi ✦ Multiple selves narrating a single body. Voice as multiplicity.

12. The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin ✦ Proof that speculative fiction can be written at the sentence level of poetry.

13. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro ✦ What’s unsaid does all the work. Poets who write by omission—this is yours.

14. The Stranger — Albert Camus ✦ Flat affect as style. Proof that emotional distance is its own intensity.

15. Hopscotch — Julio Cortázar ✦ Read it in any order. The novel as open field composition.

16. Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov ✦ A novel disguised as a poem with commentary. Poets, this is literally about you.

17. As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner ✦ The novel as polyphonic poem.

18. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke ✦ Wonder as a narrative mode. A poet’s sense of awe stretched across a world.

19. Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree ✦ Partition, gender, language bending & blending. Hindi lit’s first Booker winner.

20. Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee ✦ The novel every poet ought to read in order to learn what sustained literary discipline looks like.

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Look, I love Plath. We all love Plath (probably??). She’s sort of the gateway drug of serious poetry and deserves to be so. & yet if the shining beacons of your “dark female writer” shelf are The Bell Jar and Ariel, my friends, come on over here. The tradition Plath belongs to is so much wider and wilder and weirder than the culture lets on, and you deserve it ALL!

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If you love Plath’s rage — that oh so agonizingly controlled fury:

• Anne Sexton ✦ Plath’s literal workshop buddy, but messier, more confessional, less interested in impressing you. She’s an enigmatic witch who’ll pull your heart out (yes, that’s a compliment).

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• Louise Glück ✦ Moves through rage, grief, love, nature, tragedy, and a kind of seething power that both laughs at your face but also appears to kiss you—capeesh?

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• Bhanu Kapil ✦ Born in England, rooted in the Indian diaspora, writing at the intersection of trauma, migration, and the body. Her work is formally radical — part poetry, part essay, part ritual.

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• Lucille Clifton ✦ Wrote about being Black, being a woman, being in a body with a seething yet gorgeous ferocity that hits harder than most people’s screaming.

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If you love the precision — that feeling that every word was placed with tweezers:

• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) ✦ Can make a Greek myth feel like it was happening in your living room.

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• Wisława Szymborska ✦ Polish Nobel laureate who wrote about ordinary things — a cat, a photograph, a number — with surgical philosophical precision and sly humor.

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• Eunice de Souza ✦ Goan-Indian poet who wrote sharp, wry, devastating short poems about Catholicism, family, and being a woman in Bombay. Totally underread outside India.

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If you love the darkness — the depression, the obsession with death, the void:

• Ingeborg Bachmann ✦ Austria’s great postwar poet. She wrote about the violence embedded in language itself, in love itself. Devastating and prophetic.

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• Sarah Kane ✦ A playwright, but her final work 4.48 Psychosis is essentially a long poem about the mind consuming itself. Not for the faint of heart.

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• Alejandra Pizarnik ✦ Argentina’s answer to the confessional poets, writing tiny, devastating poems about silence and annihilation. Wildly underread in English.

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• Han Kang ✦ The White Book is grief rendered through a catalog of white objects — salt, snow, blank pages — each one circling the death of a sister who lived two hours. I fucking adore this book which feels so weird to say, considering the book, but goddamnit that’s how I feel!!

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If you love the mythology — Plath turning herself into Lady Lazarus, Medusa, Electra, the moon:

• Marina Tsvetaeva ✦ Russian poet who lived like a myth and wrote like one. Passionate, excessive, and absolutely uncontainable on the page.

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• Olga Broumas ✦ Rewrote fairy tales from inside the women trapped in them. Feminist mythmaking at its finest.

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• Anne Carson ✦ Autobiography of Red retells a Geryon myth as a queer coming-of-age story, The Beauty of the Husband uses Keats to autopsy a marriage. She makes mythology feel like something that’s happening to you right now.

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• Joyelle McSweeney ✦ Contemporary poet doing something genuinely new with the grotesque, the baroque, and the necropastoral. Plath through a funhouse mirror.

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• Lucie Brock-Broido ✦ The most maximalist poet of the last thirty years. Every poem is a gothic cathedral of language. She makes Plath’s imagery look minimalist.

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• Meena Alexander ✦ Indian-American poet who wrote about displacement, memory, and the fractured self with lyric intensity. Illiterate Heart is a good entry point.

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• Maria Zoccola ✦ Helen of Troy, 1993 drops Helen into the American South — Appalachian housewife, Piggly Wiggly shopper, woman who leaves and comes back on her own terms. Affairs start on the internet and end in a Perkins restaurant. It’s mythmaking in reverse: epic scaled down to domestic, and more deliciously dangerous for it.

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• Ariana Reines ✦ Poet, playwright, and practicing astrologer. Mercury and A Sand Book treat language itself as a divinatory act. If Plath’s Taroc pack came to life and started writing poems, it might sound like this

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If you love the autobiographical daring — the feeling she’s telling you something she shouldn’t:

• Mary Karr ✦ Memoirist, but Viper Rum and Sinners Welcome are poetry collections that bring the same ruthless self-examination. She’s funny about it too, which Plath rarely was.

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• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ✦ Dictée is a Korean-American masterpiece that mixes memoir, history, and myth in a way that refuses to be any one thing. Formally the most radical book on this list.

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• Jenny Zhang ✦ Her poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find is messy, bodily, immigrant, funny, and disturbing — confessional writing that doesn’t care about being elegant.

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If you could just eat up all the damn(ing?) vibes om nom nom:

• Ada Limón ✦ 24th U.S. Poet Laureate writing about the body, nature, and grief with Plath’s intensity but more warmth. A perfect next step.

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• Natalie Diaz ✦ Language that moves between English and Mojave, between the body and the political, with a physicality that pins you to the wall. Also, damn sexy at times.

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• Victoria Chang ✦ Obit is a collection of poems structured as obituaries for everything she lost during grief. Formally inventive and emotionally devastating. Also The Trees Witness Everything is to die for.

The Lie

Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie!  
It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. 
   
Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do  
with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. 
   
This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The woman who bares   
her wrist like a rumour. Nothing will change. Try it—kiss, kill, scold the lie. 
   
I fear I will turn to maggots swelling in the rain. I run from clouds  
caging your form. I have lost, though once I thought I controlled, the lie. 
   
“No one can see us.”—“The sun is smoke in my city.”  
You do not need eyes for (there is no blindfold!) the lie. 
   
Most of the time I laugh at misfortune. I am mad, you are mad—come,   
are we both not too old for the leash? For once, with me, uphold the lie. 
   
Day breaks, night falls, time eats itself like a cannibal in heat. You will burn to black  
in the Universe’s marriage with Nothing. What ever remains but the cold, the lie? 
   
Am I forgiven, my Lord? Place the gun on my cheek like a mother’s hand.   
I begged at your feet for the fortune of faith. You, Dear One, sold the lie. 
   
It writhes in my gut, a worm in my blood, a bird in my groins.   
No, no! A song, a scarf, a horse, milk, the sea, a marigold—the lie. 
   
Tonight, I will leave for the mountains, I will leave for the river. I will leave,  
Shannan. Stay a while in the thirteenth hour of memory, please—hold the lie. 

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Note on Art

Joyce Lee’s artwork1 felt like the perfect visual companion to this ghazal2. The skeleton draped in ribbon, bursting with pearls, caught mid-laugh or mid-scream, crowned with golden teeth—it’s got that same energy of ornamentation over emptiness, beauty as a kind of defiant costume we wear over the truth of our bones.

There’s also something in particular about that pink bow—so delicate, so deliberately placed—that echoes for me the form of the traditional ghazal itself as an obsession with transformation and disguise. We’re all chimeras, all impossible composites, are we not? The skeleton knows it. The speaker knows it. God, too, must be aware. As well as Death, and the devil, and all that is dark and holy.

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There was a moment, around 2016 or so, when something shifted in how we allowed women to suffer in public. The girlboss era had exhausted itself—all that leaning in, all that shattering, all that corporate feminism that promised liberation through hustle. And in its place emerged a different figure: the woman who was simply (and sometimes spectacularly) failing. But there was a catch: she wasn’t learning from it… oh no. Forget the fuck about some normative version of growing through it. She was just sad. She was a sad girl, even if she was, by all accounts, a woman.

You know the canon even if you haven’t read the syllabus. Phoebe Bridgers singing about motion sickness and wanting to be embalmed. Fleabag breaking the fourth wall after doing something unforgivable. Sally Rooney’s heroines drifting through Dublin in a haze of text messages and borrowed flats. The Moshfegh narrator medicating herself into oblivion. Lana Del Rey—really the proto-sad-girl, the Tumblr patron saint—crooning about being someone’s kept woman in the Hollywood hills. Later: Billie Eilish, Mitski, Clairo. Hell, even Swift plays with the same boohoo-core. The aesthetic had its theme songs before it probably even had a name.

That these women weren’t role models was kind of the whole point. They offered permission to be broken without a redemption arc, to sit inside damage without metabolizing it into a TED Talk. After decades of empowerment rhetoric, here finally was an acknowledgment that sometimes you just fall apart and there’s nothing much aspirational about it.

The sad girl lineage, of course, runs deep if you want to trace it. Sylvia Plath, obviously. Anne Sexton. (Virginia Woolf—though I feel she’d be turning in her watery grave being referred to as a “sad girl”.) The confessional poets who made female suffering into art before the second wave told them that was reactionary. All of this is to say: the sad girl has always been with us. What was new was the mainstreaming of her—the way she suddenly became a market category, a streaming genre, an algorithmically-enhanced vibe, yo.

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But something’s curdled. You feel it, right?

The confession has become a costume. You can buy it at Target now—sad girl as aesthetic, dissociation as personal brand, depression as a kind of alt-lifestyle. This is what capitalism does to everything genuine, of course. The system has a genius for metabolizing its own critique—for finding the thing that feels like resistance and selling it back to us as product. And there’s something uniquely grim about watching female interiority disintegrate or rather glaze over in this way.

So what comes after all this?

I think of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, where a woman’s maddening (from the perspective of those around her) refusal to eat meat becomes something cosmic, mythic—her suffering estranges rather than invites identification. Or Samantha Harvey's Orbital, where six astronauts circle Earth sixteen times in a single day and their interior lives dissolve into something luminous and planetary—consciousness unmoored from gravity, suffering rendered small and radiant against the blue curve of the world. In the realm of genre (and yet still often more literary than lit fic), there are writers like Silvia Moreno-Garcia whose latest The Bewitching navigates three different women in three different timelines—women whose power and choices ripple across decades.

Maybe that’s the turn. Away from just confession and toward story. Away from the self and toward the world?

The confessional mode has been the dominant literary register for women’s writing for decades now. What would it mean to write female interiority as mystery rather than confession? To let a woman be opaque, even to herself? To build a narrative that doesn’t resolve into self-knowledge but into something stranger—a house with no exit, a body becoming tree, a world that doesn’t care about your feelings and yet is beautiful anyway?

I don’t know. But I’m tired of wounds as content. I want literature that makes me look up from myself. That gives me a story with a spine, somewhere to go, a reason to keep turning pages that isn’t just the pleasure of recognition. The sad girl made us feel seen. Maybe the next thing makes us see. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Can I tell you a secret, I ask him, and he turns around. In the darkness, his head appears to float midair, the slivers of his half-open eyes searching for me. I find his hand under the sheets and squeeze. I think I’ve known for a long time, I say, my words a register above whisper. He leans closer.

You know, I go on, like the way you always knew you were an artist, and that’s what you were made to do. I know it’s not the same thing, not even close probably, but I just know it in the same way. All it took was coming here, and meeting that crazy neighbor, who, as it turns out, isn’t that crazy after all. I wish I’d thanked you sooner, for moving us, I mean to say, for moving here, like for moving, oh God, my words are coming out wrong, I’m too excited. Feel!

I bring his hand to my chest, and a tremor goes up his fingers, so quick I don’t think even he’s noticed, but I have, I’m noticing it right now, every drop of blood in his veins is a singing bird. I wipe sweat from the back of my neck and try to just focus on his hand on my chest, so cold and rough. I can still feel the blue acrylic paint that splashed the space between his forefinger and thumb that morning after we had another fight, this time because there weren’t any eggs despite my having asked him to bring them. But that was before I knew.

I mean, I always knew, like I’m trying to explain to him now, but I mean knowing in the way of conscious knowing, I guess. I consciously only knew after I got back home from next door with the one blue what I thought was a duck egg like a perfectly polished sea stone in my palms. I went to the kitchen sink and set it inside, letting the water wash over its speckled, oval body. I stared at it for so long I didn’t realize when the sun went down and everything was dark.

He’s moved his hands to my left breast now, squeezing over my t-shirt and trying to wriggle inside through the neckline. I wonder if he’s even been awake this whole time. I really need you to hear this, I tell him, and curl my shoulders inside to nudge him away. His hand flops between us like a dead fish. His breathing grows lighter, and his eyes are almost fully open.

Outside, night is giving up. I turn over on my back, dragging his arm with me to rest on my stomach. I’m going to tell you now, but you need to promise you won’t run away. He raises himself on his elbow and I look through the triangle created by his arm at the egg I kept next to the bed after he’d already fallen asleep.

I think about the egg as an another planet, with waves inside it, the yolk a bloody sun, and inside the yolk a yellow sea filled with boats made of leaves, of the women that inhabit that world, long twisting hair braided down their back shimmering like eels below the water, and the water around us, in the room, bursting from the egg, but also the walls, the oak floors, the earth outside, with the worms and the bones buried underground long ago. What have you done, he says, clutching my body like a child. Above us, the ceiling begins to crack and I feel my body fill with light and float.

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Notes on Art

I paired this story with Kremena Chipilova’s “Caged”1 because it captures that strange, heavy tension between being held and being trapped.

In the painting, the hand can be viewed as the cage, yes, but you see that it’s also adorned with rings and fine nails, suggesting a kind of “beautiful” or “domesticated” restraint. I love the surreal touch of what appears as the bird having a human finger for one leg.

To me, it mirrored a moment in my story where the boundaries between the protagonist’s physical body and her internal world start to blur. I’d like to think that both the painting and the story are about that exact second when the “conscious knowing” finally breaks through or beyond the surface.

As I bid adieu to 2025 and try to feel like a grown-up learning ice-skating for the first time on the shining glittering liminal rink that is 2026, there are few things of which I feel certain.

One big one, however: loving literature is plain tough. It’s always been tough, I suppose, being a cerebral person, feeling alien even when not alienated per se. Thinking differently, loving strangely, on and on. I saw in these last weeks so many year-end wraps, new year predictions, all sorts of scares, dares, nightmares.

Specific to publishing, the consensus seems to be both that it’s doing better than ever (self-publishing is no longer “shameful”! Positive win!) and that it’s in dire straits (we all knew publishers were just glorified gamblers right, come on, was this truly news for anyone?). One thing I noticed: none of these…shall we say…editorials, seemed to talk about lit mags. A lot of them, though, did have opinions about Substack. And what Substack publishing means for writers, gatekeepers, editors, and so on. Some of these opinions were less than rosy:

I gave an official statement of sorts to Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg. Here it is in full:

What I mostly sense here is the gatekeeper’s anxiety. Gatekeeping has its functions, of course, but this concern that editors/agents/publishers are framing as being for the writer is likely faux-concern. Take for example the magazine editor worried about half-baked ideas going out for free, ideas they would have apparently “paid for.” This assumes a world where editors see raw potential and develop it. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Magazines don’t have the mandate for that kind of mentorship. No one is sitting around going “ah this is the next Joan Didion if only I could help them fix their mixed metaphors and concretize their obscure pop culture references and add a bit more Americanah.”

Chalk that up too many writers or too few venues/overworked editors, whatever. The thing about people in traditonal publishing is that they’re married to traditions, so anything that challenges the status quo destabilizes them. I imagine some agents and editors are afraid that they might become irrelevant as more and more people continue to find an audience. Substack lets people do that while potentially getting paid. The alternative isn’t “that writer gets properly developed by gatekeepers,” it’s “that writer never gets any feedback or develops an audience at all and ends up doing odd jobs without any health benefits.”

And then, almost more egregious is that distraction line. How hilariously paternalistic. Some people’s Substacks are their next book. Some people’s newsletters are how they connect to readers. Some people use it as a workshop space. The idea that there’s one correct path (write book → get agent → get editor → get published → repeat) and everything else is “distraction” serves institutions, not writers. The most interesting thing perhaps is that much of the same people who are saying this kind of stuff to unpublished writers are saying the exact opposite to trad-published ones: get on Substack, dance on Tiktok, put pre-order links all over your online creative spaces — it’s obscene.

And I say all this as a writer who desires to “traditionally” publish a book. I do agree that not every writer needs to be on Substack (or any social media for that matter). But an intellectually and artistically free society necessitates the ability to choose without feeling belittled or cornered.

That the kind of editors, agents, publicists New York Magazine might anonymously interview for these clipped hot-takes would think that Substack is, decidedly, *bad for you wittle writers*…well…again…this isn’t a plot-twist, my dear Watson (sorry not sorry but we’ve been delightfully drowning in Sherlock Holmes this holiday season). And of course, let me be kind and say that these are snippets. Certainly if one spoke in confidence, there’d also be nuance, understanding, acknowledgement of the specific as opposed to judgement of the general?

Thing is, bring yourself face to face, heart to heart, with any individual person or their creation and you’ll quickly see that nothing can truly be boxed in. We are not copies of copies of copies as the so-called art and literature produced by AI. We are, inconceivably, utterly, hopelessly unique despite being borne of the irreproducible self-replicating mechanism that is…humanity and civilization.

How is that possible? I’ll leave that to the scientists and theologians. For me, the realization has been thus: so what if Substack will be set on fire or sink to the bowels of Enshittification? So what if the rate of reading declines grows yet steeper and by the end of 2026 no one, not a soul, not you nor me nor anyone, is truly reading anything, merely scanning and scrolling? So fucking what, I say, if the words upon words we write throughout this year and years past, reach no one but the space just beyond our lips, hanging there in an abysmally illiterate universe?

What’s the alternative? Don’t write? Don’t think? Don’t try and uplift other writers and thinkers? Don’t try and create new ways to reach outwards in the darkness? Don’t do what it is that you can’t live without doing?

I suppose. But this is true insomuch as you might think death to be alternative to living. And those of us who’ve felt aflame with life at some point or another will be able to uproariously yawp that no, indeed, death of the body is not the perfect opposite of life, but rather death of the soul. And what do we say to killing that deepest, most beguiling, truest part of us that goes on in this world despite it all?

Not today. Or, in other words: fuck that.

It is in that mood, then, that both (my we’ve-been-reincarnated-together-for-a-hundred-years husband) and I are deciding to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” that might be portended by all the doomsdaying that goes on here, there, everywhere.

Practically speaking, we’re juggling several projects. Our poetry magazine, ONLY POEMS, is 2.5 years old and growing more beautifully than we could have ever hoped for. I wonder if anyone ever predicated that in circa 2023. That over 50,000 people would fall in love with a poetry magazine started by two grad students while their toddler slept. No, probably not.

I say this not to gloat in anyway. I’ve laid my heart at the same altar as Leonard Cohen’s music and can earnestly say when I sing along in my broken voice to “If It Be Your Will”, I feel the truth of universe singing with me.

Rather, I say this to prove a little point. None of your creative ideas need to be the ones that “everyone’s” talking about and predicting, and trend-charting and so on and so forth. Do the thing you can’t help but do. That, in and of itself, is success.

Besides OP, we’ve also launched Strange Pilgrims, a literary magazine for prose seeking to publish the most “real, surreal, & brutally beautiful writing.” This one went viral on Substack and we received over 7000 submissions in our first ever call. It’ll be interesting to see how that momentum continues and how, inevitably, things stabilize and what beautiful strange stuff emerges from that.

Other than this, on a more personal level, we are writing, if you’ll believe it or not. Beyond Substack, beyond editorials, opinions, and so on, we are at work on first books. Karan’s just gotten an awesome book deal for his debut poetry collection and I’ll share more about this in the coming weeks (perhaps get him to come out of his shyness and share the process of it himself!).

As for me, I’m still writing that horror-magic realist novel. Writing short stories that blend fantasy and meta-modernism and the mundane with a bit of sci-fi. Writing poems about being the only person after the end of the world left alive.

A confession, so often this year I’ve pulled myself from trying to even indulge in thoughts of “gaming the system.” Let me be frank, with the level of publishing research and insider insight I have right now (which isn’t as much as say a Big 5 editor or top agent would but is quite a bit more than someone not so entrenched in this space as me would), do I think I could vomit up a cozy-romantasy with the just the right selling-points and land some kind of solid deal?

I bloody well think so.

Do I want to do that?

Oh, sigh, don’t we all want to sometimes betray our souls and be positively beleaguered with tons of fuck-you-money?

I’d say so.

Have I (or, let’s face it, Karan) pulled myself away from that ridiculous precipice and come back to the page, the blank page, the blinking page, my page, my words, myself, every single time?

Damn right.

My friends, you are the best person out there for the job. And the job is, quite simply, to be yourself. Be more and more of who you truly are ever more and more as the months and years pass. And by the end of this ride, you will have found the truest self.

I’ll leave us with these words of a literary master I adore, Ursula K. Le Guin from A Wizard of Earthsea:

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”

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Good morning (or evening, or ever-after),

Sometimes I send you poems I’ve written here, because they tell me that’s originally what Substack was for. Incidentally, creation too. Was/is for poetry, that is. Though, Capital-P poetry. Which is not limited to written poetry. The below, though, is just that: written poetry.

May you be uplifted and uplift others!

S

Little Blue Dot

by Shannan Mann

My favourite mountain is a volcano. The way   
it just blows up whenever it’s had enough.  
When asked my influences, I say Eyjafjalla.
Though I am not hiding from anyone, I am  
also not making myself any easier to find.  
Smog has made the stars obsolete. No one laments   
Orion or Andromeda. Rivers are frothing   
tar, but since we are looking at them through  
Instagram filters, they look pretty cool. Really,  
the planet is falling apart. As am I. Most likely  
you too. Isn’t it right, then, that our home mirrors  
our cracks? How cruel the gavel of time: I melt   
at the sight of hummingbirds and blue whales  
but they go on dissolving and unforming, faster  
than ever before. Yet sometimes I admit   
I’m seized by the guitar  strings of wind   
on an unnaturally snowless winter morning.   
Spying birds migrating away to warmer   
mountains, I can almost fool myself  
that there is such a place for me too. Not heaven,  
but the ladder to it. Not God, but a glimmer  
of the Self mustanging along pastures, wild,  
rough light of the unified theory of the multiverse.  
In other words, an impossibility, like earth.

First published in The Missouri Review as Poem of the Week (Nov 25, 2024)

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My friends, it’s the end of the year, winter has its soft paws in our souls, and we’re all—in some small or large capacity—about to have a change of pace for the next little while before we greet 2026 (in terror or a flurry of excitement…that I leave up to you!).

All in all, it’s a good time to write and an even better time to write more. If you’re a poet or dabble in poetry, perhaps you might naturally gravitate towards slower poems right now, akin to contemplations or prayers. Slow doesn’t always mean sad, of course, and sad isn’t necessarily even tragic. In anycase, poetry in and of itself has some kinda magic that wrenches out the saddest songs from our hearts and forces us to somehow try and commit them to paper (or, you know, the screen).

Now, you might be writing more journalistically (as in, poetry is a way to beautify the diary entry for you), and I promise you, there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, if that is primarily the case, this post/email probably isn’t for you. You may even be offended by it. For that, I sincerely apologize in advance.

If, however, you—like me—enjoy critique, revision, and have a desire to publish your poetry, then below, I’ve share some observations to help you avoid certain pitfalls that can come with, what I’ll simply call (and hope for you to understand in all its glory and variegatedness) the Sad Poem.

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First, though, some examples of some of the best sad poems I know.:

• Ghazal for Dida by

• Michiko Dead by Jack Gilbert

• Leave a Message by Bob Hicok

• Elm by Sylvia Plath

• [All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] by Alejandra Pizarnik

• Gently, Gently by Bert Meyers

• As Ever by Agha Shahid Ali

And now, in connection with the poems I shared above, some observations, organized best I can, to help you stop writing bad sad poems, and…start writing good ones.

On repetition and form as containers for grief

Karan’s ghazal ends every couplet with “god,” creating this incantatory rhythm where the word becomes more complicated each time it appears—blessing, question, threat, absence, and so on. Agha Shahid Ali (my most favorite poet) does something similar in “As Ever,” where the ghazal form holds the desperation:

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So I’ll regret it. But lead my heart to pain.
Return, if it is just to leave me again.
...
An era’s passed since the luxury of tears–
Make me weep, Consoler, let blood know its rain.

Pizarnik repeats “All night” until it becomes a kind of madness:

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me. All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.

That repetition mirrors the very human experience of insomnia and obsession.

Bob Hicok uses anaphora too: “When the wind died...When the maple tree died...When the roses died...When the child died.” Each “when” is a small funeral, and the structure lets him build to that devastating final line about calling the dead even though “The dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of.”

On getting weird with your sadness

Plath’s “Elm” never once says “I’m sad” or “I’m depressed.” Instead the speaker is a tree, or maybe possessed by a tree, and the imagery gets visceral and strange: My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires” / “I am inhabited by a cry.” That’s so much more unsettling than any direct statement of pain could be.

Pizarnik gives us “feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.” Anatomically impossible yet emotionally nothing could be more honest in that space. Likewise, Bert Meyers writes:

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And you, mad as a clarinet
where the street divides;
a city of raindrops in a bush;
the slow honey that drips
from the sky’s old ladle…

See how the surreal blends and folds and opens up. As when Hicok writes “the father dug a hole in his thigh / and got in,” — the surreal folds right back into the self, the physical, the tangible, and for a moment they are one.

On the physical manifestations of grief

Bad sad poems work mainly with the psychological (without much depth and mostly through cliché) . Good ones can be felt in the body. They yank you into their world. Note in Karan’s Ghazal for Dida: “You blew on the first morsel, then offered each idol” / “she weighs the beads of her rosary to seduce god.” Those are hands doing specific things, rituals you can picture…enact…be possessed by as you read.

Agha Shahid Ali: “Shouting your name till the last car had disappeared, / how I ran on the platform after your train.” Here’s an action anyone who’s been left can see themselves doing. Or “To find her, ‘round phantom-wrists I glue bangles”… the physical is invaded by the psychological, and in that act there is horror…because grief inevitably leads to some form of horror, terror, dread.

And see Meyers, here:

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At night, I was the one
who became a cello,
strung with all our roads,
where memory hums
to itself like a tire.

He’s not saying “I wept from sadness because of stuff I remembered,” but rather gives us the metaphor of becoming an instrument, the image of memory as a humming distended tire.

And of course, Jack Gilbert’s poem in its entirety is sadness made physical. “Michiko Dead” is about carrying a box that’s too heavy, adjusting one’s grip as different muscles tire. He never says “grief” or “I miss her.” Instead, he describes arms underneath, thumbs shifting, blood draining from a raised arm, going numb, finding a way to keep carrying without ever putting it down. Fucking brilliant piece of writing, man.

On sound and music and pain

Bad sad songs often make me cry if I’m in a crying mood. Bad sad poems make me mad, often. Music has the boon of, well, music…whereas poetry’s just got words.

Notice Pizarnik’s syntax, how it gets tangled and frantic:

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All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.

Please, read it aloud, and feel it for yourself, the painful music in the language, the sobbing, ringing loud and clear.

Or dear Sylvia here:

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All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,   
Echoing, echoing.

Those hard consonants, that repetition of “echoing.” The sound…harsh and relentless.

Meyers uses music explicitly—cello, clarinet, tuning fork—but he also makes the poem itself musical:

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Gently, gently,
through anger and pain,
love justified itself,
like the nails in the house
during a storm.

Feel that softness in the repetition against the hardness of what he’s describing?

On refusal to comfort

None of these poems offer resolution. Plath ends with the tree/speaker still “inhabited by a cry” that “flaps out / Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.” That’s terrifying, not comforting.

Pizarnik: “All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.”

Karan Kapoor: “Your name is her offering, Karan. The day she dies / you will lose your name, and you will lose god.” The poem doesn’t say “but then I found meaning” or “but love remains.” It ends with that double loss.

These poets trust readers to sit with discomfort, weep, be transformed, mourn, linger on the page…live with the grief and let it leave you silently, perhaps when you’re least expecting it to.

On beginnings

I’ll end with this one. Just look at this utterly heartwrenching yet beautifully simple opening from Bert Meyer's “Gently, Gently”:

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We, too, began with joy.
Then, sickness came;
then, poverty.
We were poor, so poor,
our children were our only friends.

I wish more poems started like this. Not just the sad ones, all of them, happy ones, weird ones, funny ones. So damn simple, yet so transcendental. My whole being feels these opening lines…I want to hug the poet, I want to love the world, I want to hold my daughter forever.

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I must confess, I don’t use Spotify much. I’m kind of big on self-hosting, so I have my own music (as in, artists and albums I’ve handpicked for myself) on Plex and audiobooks on Audiobook Shelf and that’s where I get my creative auditory stimulation from, so to speak. But another place I do spend a lot of time on is, well, right here—Substack!

For better or worse, a large part of my life is linked to Substack. Through work, personal projects, and the magazines I edit, I sort of live here (or so it feels sometimes). So, I thought I’d try and do a Substack Wrapped for myself, looking back at 2025 to the best of times and the worst of times.

Well, a note on the worst. I don’t like ripping on other folks’ work…ahem…publicly. If we hang out in person and pass some tea and snacks around, I promise you’ll get my entertaining oft-cynical ass to fess up and drop a bunch of hot takes, but let’s just say I believe in some type of old-school class and a sense of grace and just plain old social decorum. Plus, why spend time riffing on what you hate when you can glorify what you love! (Okay, sometimes the former’s more fun, but you get what I mean).

Still, as far as the “worst” goes, I’ll say this: it’s been increasingly difficult to find work that feels genuinely exploratory, that takes real risks, that exists outside the algorithm’s preference for easily digestible takeaways.

I know a lot of folks also hate Notes on here, but I do understand why Substack implemented them. And yet, the obviously AI-gen’d Notes that masquerade as human thought on here are just…ubiquitous and annoying. Don’t get me started on the generic “great post!” comments and the clawing-at-the-metrics-ladder nature of some of the interactions.

Then again, so much of this just comes with being on a social platform, and though many of us might have forgotten, it also just comes with coexisting…on a planet…with other individuals. Some of us are weird, some of us are stupid, some of us are annoying, some of us are all three or some combination of the three plus any number of other descriptors at some time or another. So…I guess I wish more of us could adapt (adopt??) a more balanced, “middle-way” type approach when it comes to such things. And then, you know, move on to the good.

Let’s do that, then. Move on to the good.

Total posts read ✦ 339

This one’s easy to calculate for me, and I’ll explain why. Last year, I jam-packed my saved posts folder for Substack app, utterly overwhelming myself. So, at the beginning of 2025, I decided I’d read one at least Substack post everyday. Just this morning, I finally got around to reading this lovely piece:

SubMakk

You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.

We’re in a golden age of TV (if not quite a golden age of full-blown cinema), so I don’t blame anyone for consuming a vast proportion of their narratives on screens. But so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page…

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6 months ago · 1233 likes · 24 comments · Rebecca Makkai

5 Favorite Substacks

I’m a bit of a sucker for rankings but I feel like they ultimately play to our lower desires (not meaning sexual here haha, talking in a more spiritual sense I suppose). So, while these are the five Substacks I definitely read the most this year and thereby one can reasonably say they are my “favorite” Substacks on here, please know I’m not ranking them from best to least or whatever. Each of these is phenomenal and you should spend time with these writers words!

Dear Head of Mine

An editor's weekly newsletter about books and other things

By Sean deLone

I’ve said it before and I'll say it again, how doesn’t have thousands upon thousands of readers is beyond me. Well, I guess I can surmise why — he doesn’t pander or speak down to you and he definitely doesn’t try to be flashy and trendy. His Substack is deeply valuable to any writer at any stage of their career, and yet it isn’t just teeming with useless AI-gen’d advice posts and hacks. Honestly, I wish more of Substack was like this!

How to Glow in the Dark

Book publishing advice and community for authors of fiction and nonfiction, written by the agents at Neon Literary.

By Anna Sproul-Latimer

has got such a stirring and charming voice that I’d probably read a the recipe for making gray rocks from her. Alongside that, she delivers no-bullshit posts full of useful information for authors with insights into the publishing world (something I’m actively researching myself, as some of you already know).

Counter Craft

fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books, other things

By Lincoln Michel

For all the conceit of Substack being a home for writers, it’s actually been quite difficult for me to find writers on here whose Substacks aren’t…sigh…boring? ’s Substack is the opposite of whatever kind of boring Substack you can conjure in your head. With each post, one thing is shiningly evident: he really gives a fuck about literature. And I like that. I like when people don’t just come on here to bitch and snitch…when they genuinely, deeply fucking care.

Footnotes and Tangents

Slow reads of great books. Book guides and a reading community to help you get more from the best stories.

By Simon Haisell

I’ve never met in person, but I feel like I know him for some reason. And I sense he might be one of the nicest British dudes around. Plus, it makes me super psyched to see him as one of the top 10 Literature Bestsellers here on Substack because what he’s offering is something very close to my own heart: a way to read beautiful literature slowly and thoughtfully.

ONLY POEMS DAILY

Wake up to a poem every day & slip into a slower, sweeter life.

I can’t help it if the newsletter of the lit mag I created is also one of the best ones on this platform, okay? Every single day, we send out a beautiful poem into the world…and I feel like that’s one of the noblest ways to start a day…open your eyes, take a breath, read a poem and enter the world.

11 New Substacks I’ve Discovered

Perhaps like any other art-obsessed writing and reading fiend on here, I do a silly dance in my head whenever I find a particularly striking, new (to-me) writer on here. So, below (and again in no particular order), are some of the posts I came across on here that led me to discover more wonderful Substacks:

Tumse Na Ho Paayega

How to live an intellectually rich life

Go to the main page of Wikipedia…

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a year ago · 8676 likes · 279 comments · Utsav Mamoria

Lurker

A Folk Horror Crash Course

What could Yellowjackets, Florence + The Machine’s upcoming album Everybody Scream, and the Christmas special of Detectorists possibly have in common? Beyond release dates within the last five years, each seems to indicate something of folk horror’s trickle down into more mainstream media. No longer, it seems, is the genre confined to art house producti…

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7 months ago · 629 likes · 38 comments · Lizzie Bickerstaff

Derek Thompson

Everything Is Television

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples…

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3 years ago · 4866 likes · 64 comments · weird medieval guys

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Hi friends,

As you might have guessed based on how I look, I don’t exactly celebrate Thanksgiving. To be very honest, I don’t know much about the holiday outside the fact that there are turkeys involved and that Black Friday comes afterwards. Being a vegetarian since I was 7, when people do invite me to Thanksgiving feasts, I generally stand around awkwardly. However, I do enjoy appropriating the spirit of certain capitalism-washed holidays, so I’ve decided to actually think about the things I’m grateful for, consciously.

It’s an easy list to begin. I’m grateful for my daughter not dying when she was born. Below is a flash essay that won me a little scholarship for my undergrad and also helped me get into a fully-funded MFA.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

Seven seconds old Ana resembles storm-clouds, midnight seen through insomnia, branches of veins under skin, blue-whale flesh. Babies are not meant to be blue. Anasuya is blue because she is struggling to breathe. Her eyes are open — black and alive.

I am alone, blue-gowned, in a small curtained space. Both my hands are needled with IV tubes. A heart and oxygen monitor whimpers beside the bed.

A deep stirring movement where the uterus lies, like ladle scrapes in a pot. An absence of sensation below the abdomen — akin to hunger, a cousin to frostbite, beginning blue around the toenails and fingernails and radiates outward in a compass of colour — white, smoke, ash.

I want Anasuya’s body on my body, skin to skin, blue or pink. After five hours and thirty-two minutes I am sanctioned to see her.

A yellowed hand attaches a fluorescent pad to a bouquet of cords in her belly button. I am jealous of the hand. I want to gnaw it away. My baby. Your baby is very sick, a doctor tells me with clinical dispassion.

So I hold her with my eyes — twin moons, fish fins, dark as doubt. I tell her it’s going to be alright because this is the unedited script given to all parents with dying children.

They take her to a hospital nine miles away. The sky outside is blue and yellow and not the least bit aware that it ought to be crackling and black.

I experienced her first as a ClearBlue flash, then a wild-horse heartbeat on a doppler, bone and pixel diagram on ultrasound, widening birdwing-beat against ribcage and bladder, a name sung in a dream, and now as a blue child with black eyes.

That pain in itself is not painful — but the impatience that comes with it, the desperation for it to pass, the unknowing, the wolf-eaten calendar, the dream-drawn hourglass.

No suffering lasts. Either the sufferer will die, or the suffering will. Anasuya and I are home in a handful of days as though nothing happened. And maybe nothing did. Birth, after all, appears inconsequential in the face of death. Yet, the horror of those first seconds lives in our dual-dreamland. We weep together. Then we rescue each other, her nine-day-old palms in my nine-thousand-day-old palms.

By month’s end, I take her to the coast. I whisper into her small conch shell ear that the ocean is not really blue, but only appears so because it reflects the glimmering sapphire sky in its watery heart. Like water and light, we can also reflect within us all the hope and beauty of the world and cascade, beat, wave, blue and brilliant against the pale, cold, white, harsh, immeasurable truths of the ceaseless world. Ana chortles, as if in agreement.

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This post has taken way longer to put together than I expected. (All in all, I think I probably spent two weeks piecing it together…) But honestly, not sure why I keep assuming anything involving thinking and writing will be quick and easy—ha!

In any case, I want to welcome around 600 new folks to Beautiful Losers today! My middle-school-sitting-on-the-portable-steps-and-reading-Plath-and-Woolf-at-recess self is gobsmacked and delirious with gratitude.

I’m also happy to report that I feel zero imposter syndrome. I know I was always meant to read and write and share what I read and write. On that note, I’ve been working on several new essays for Beautiful Losers, and I’d love your opinion on which one I should refine and edit next!

Alright, what follows is the second lesson of sorts in the free poetry curriculum I’m developing here. I very much intend today’s post to be kind of a living reference for y’all to return to as and when you may need it. I’ll also update this document every few months or so and if it grows unwieldy, I’ll think of a better place to host it.

And of course, it goes without saying, included here are only terms that I consider essential. An essential thing, however, does not strip significance from anything that might be non-essential. Often, “non-essentials”, in any field or work, can be more enjoyable or interesting. And, what is non-essential to me might be the most essential to another. So it goes with humanity and individualism!

These terms and examples should help open doors of curiosity and get you started in putting language to concepts and ideas you come across in your own poetic practice.

Here are the last two posts in the curriculum:

Introduction (or why I’m doing this and what this is)

17 Essential Craft Books ✦ FOUNDATIONS I

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⟡ Sound & Music ⟡

ALLITERATION ✦ Repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words. Overused in bad poetry, powerful when subtle.

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The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew 
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea

from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

ASSONANCE ✦ Repetition of vowel sounds within words. Creates internal music and cohesion.

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Drift-Raft
by Atsuro Riley

Some nights, blank nothing:
The ice-box, milk-purling in the kitchen.
The eye-of-pine floorboards ticking, clicking, planking themselves cool.

CACOPHONY ✦ Harsh, jarring sounds. Deliberate ugliness for effect.

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I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It’s worse than a barnyard.

from “The Colossus” by Sylvia Plath

CONSONANCE ✦ Repetition of consonant sounds within or at the ends of words.

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

from “The Tyger” by William Blake

EUPHONY ✦ Pleasant, harmonious sounds. Smooth combinations of consonants and vowels that flow easily.

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Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

from “To Autumn” by John Keats

SIBILANCE ✦ Repetition of ‘ssssss’ / S sounds! Can create softness or menace depending on context. Can also be really horrible audibly speaking if done too much or without intention.

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Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

SLANT RHYME ✦ Words that almost rhyme but don’t quite. Creates tension, feels modern.

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I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

from “I heard a Fly buzz” by Emily Dickinson

⟡ Line & Syntax ⟡

ENJAMBMENT ✦ When a sentence or phrase continues from one line to the next without punctuation. Creates momentum, surprise, controls meaning.

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It’s not metaphor that bees make honey 
of themselves while language only dreams 
the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little 
while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.

from “Wound is the Origin of Wonder” by Maya C. Popa

You can see more of the wonderful right here on Substack!

DISJUNCTIVE ENJAMBMENT ✦ Extreme enjambment that breaks at grammatically weird places, fighting syntax.

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The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

SYNTACTIC FRAGMENTATION ✦ Deliberate sentence fragments. Incomplete thoughts that force the reader to fill in the gaps. Lends itself well to the aphoristic in poetry.

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Fragment 
by Ezra Pound

I have felt the lithe wind
  blowing
    under one’s fingers
sinuous.

⟡ Figurative Language ⟡

METAPHOR ✦ We should all be familiar with this one (as well as a few others in this section) but it’s important to include these in an essentialist’s glossary! So, on with it then… a metaphor is when you say something IS something else. That is, direct equation without “like” or “as.”

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Our love is an abandoned fair:
the lights all broken on the midway,
some glitter still hung in the air.

from “Abandoned Fair” by Amy Newman

SIMILE ✦ Saying something is LIKE something else. Comparative, using “like,” “as,” “than.” Oftentimes, poets might feel confused whether to use a metaphor or a simile. In such moments, I always feel one should read the line out loud as both and then, well, go with your gut, feel how it tastes (not your gut, the line!).

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The plumber has to pull out the sink to get to the pipes in the walls. The pornographer has to adjust the bodies to catch the slant of the light. He moves them like furniture. In the barn, the rancher spreads a blanket and their clothes fall off considerably. They are technicians. It is a compliment. They clock and clam like eels and the night goes mink. I want to be them.

from “Pornography” by Richard Siken

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE ✦ External objects that evoke a specific emotion. Show don’t tell, but formalized. In “Hamlet and His Problems”, Eliot writes:

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

ZEUGMA ✦ A single word (usually a verb) governs two or more other words, but applies to each in a different way—one literal, one figurative, or two entirely different meanings.

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Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.

from “The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3” by Alexander Pope

⟡ Structural Concepts ⟡

VOLTA ✦ The moment a poem pivots—changes direction, argument, or tone. Sonnets traditionally turn after line 8 or 12. But a volta need not be just reserved for a sonnet. Most poems will have a turning point intuitively.

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Dusk 
by Rae Armantrout

spider on the cold expanse
   of glass, three stories high
   rests intently
   and so purely alone.
   
 I’m not like that!  

CLOSURE ✦ How a poem ends. Can be emphatic (strong ending), circular (returns to beginning), or open (unresolved).

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Circles 
by Karan Kapoor

I do not want my mother to die. My mother does not want her mother to die. Her mother does not want her husband to die. Her husband does not want his son to die. His son does not want his daughter to die. His daughter is too young to pronounce death, let alone decipher it. Three days later, when her grandfather will die, she’ll be braiding her doll’s hair. Thirty-six years later, when her father will die, she’ll be looking, with ocean eyes, at her six-year-old daughter braiding the hair of her doll. Three days later, tired of the doll, her daughter will ask her the question she did not ask her mother: where do they go? She won’t know what words to put in her mouth, so she’ll leave her mouth open. She’ll chew on it all night. Nobody wants to go somewhere they can’t return from, do they? But then, who wants to go so far only to return? My father cuts the strings of kites when they’re way up in the sky. The world is full of kites like these.

WHITE SPACE ✦ The silence around and within the poem. Strategic emptiness that controls pacing and emphasis.

from “River of Milk” by Kaveh Akbar

JUXTAPOSITION ✦ Placing two things side by side for comparison or contrast, often without explanation.

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Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?
That is hot ice, and wondrous strange snow!
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare

⟡ Traditional & New Forms ⟡

SONNET ✦ 14-line poem, traditionally in iambic pentameter. Two main types: Petrarchan (octave + sestet turn after line 8) and Shakespearean (three quatrains + couplet). Contemporary poets fuck with the form constantly to wonderful results.

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Cum Sonnet
by Gray Davidson Carroll

This is why we don’t need more gay poets.
All those fags ever write about is cum.
Cum in your sheets, cum on the streets. 
Cum in my mouth, now cum in my mouth 
again please. Come outside and watch the sunset. 
Come inside and watch the rain. Cum inside 
of someone but only if you’ve both been tested
and have clearly defined agreements around 
consent and only if they have access to any 
contraceptives you both need to feel 
comfortable, and only if you’re into it. 
Then cum your little heart out.
The days I remember to give thanks for my life,
I open my mouth and it catches in my throat.

VILLANELLE ✦ Traditionally a french form about sheep (or you know, a pastoral of sorts) composed of 19 lines, two rhymes, specific repetition pattern. Refrains at lines 1, 6, 12, 18 and lines 3, 9, 15, 19. Obsessive echo and music and beauty and an odd sense of peace.

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Diocletian Upon Being Asked to Return to Rome 
by Kate Deimling

You should see these cabbages of mine
fan their generous green leaves…and their size—
massive, stretching in an endless line.

I’m aware an emperor is divine,
and it’s kind of you to call me wise—
you should see these cabbages of mine.

Oh, yes, how the city did shine,
her marble monuments reaching to the skies,
massive, stretching in an endless line,

but here, since I have resigned,
I have secured a valuable prize:
you should see these cabbages of mine,

as plentiful as grapes on the vine,
as big around as one of your thighs—
massive, stretching in an endless line.

I’m afraid I must respectfully decline
to return as emperor, but please, come, rise,
you should see these cabbages of mine,
massive, stretching in an endless line.

SESTINA ✦ Provençal troubadour form, 12th century. 39 lines, six 6-line stanzas + 3-line envoi. Same six end-words spiral through in a fixed pattern. Obsessive, hypnotic, like being trapped in a beautiful maze of your own making. Creates a mystical, incantatory effect for the reader.

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Sestina for Darkness and First Light
by Dick Westheimer

“What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.”

—Robert Frost

Time had a beginning when even darkness
did not exist—when the universe was so small
that it fit on the sharp tip of a pin and was really nothing—
except for everything and all that now delights and appalls 
(stars and dark matter, gentle caresses and men ungoverned
by right and wrong) — is this what is meant by “design”?

I am not superstitious but I see signs
everywhere: deer scat, fallen limbs, the dark
stains coffee leaves on my shirt. I am not governed 
by the gods of rabbis and priests, but believe in the small
ones of dust mites and quarks and shadows—these appall
and thrill—like bits of ink, sprouting seeds—simple things.

Hydrogen, helium, black holes accreting gas, this thing
we call light from the beginning of time—who could design
the line from then to us myth-making machines, apple
eating, Eden leaving creatures who learn more from darkness
than a god would want us to, who feel large and small
at the same time, who suspect that we alone are love?

Ask my wife, she’ll find what you’ve lost—like that one glove
I tossed off picking through parts, looking for the thing
I needed to fix our pump. It was a spring, so small
I needed bare fingers to pick it from the bin. You should design,
she said, a tool to keep you from dying of lost things. Her dark
humor kept me alive when death visited and left its pall.

And yes, death has stopped by—in the way only it can, pale
and needy. The neighbor boy, my son’s best friend—governed
by doubts, possessor of guns—was overcome by a darkness
only he could see. And there was me, my beating heart, a thing
so clogged with rust and and crud. It gave me one clear sign—
that the cosmos is inside us all—infinitely large and small.

The night sky and its stars heal the wound of me feeling small.
Yet, the strip-mall’s lights casting their bile-spun pall
bury me. I’ll often stay inside even on clear nights, resigned
to let universe expand without me, to waste the awe I’ve been given.
In my room with books of poems, fingering my wedding ring, I think:
Before the florid light, there was all that could be made by darkness.

Inside us is something so small—all the goodness given
and all that will appall. This is the singularity—the one thing,
the universe, a sign—that the dark embraces all that shines.

GHAZAL ✦ Form from Arabic/Persian poetry: couplets with repeated end-words/phrases. Each couplet stands alone thematically. The repeated refrain creates longing, magic, grief, and so much more! Here’s my favorite one:

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Tonight
by Agha Shahid Ali


    Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
                         — Laurence Hope


Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”
“Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar—
All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities
multiply me at once under your spell tonight.

He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.

The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.

My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

PANTOUM ✦ Malaysian oral tradition, adapted by French poets in the 19th century. Repeating quatrains: lines 2 and 4 become lines 1 and 3 of next stanza. Creates obsessive echo, great for trauma/memory.

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Pantoum from the Window of the Room Where I Write
by Alison Townsend

At sunset the russet oak turns into a lamp.
Each polished leaf glows amber, lit by sun.
As a child, I raked leaves with my mother each fall.
We burned small pyres, their flames the color of loss.
 
Each polished leaf glows amber, lit by sun.
I could not know my mother would die young.
We burned small pyres, their flames the color of loss.
I stand here watching, older now than she ever was.
 
I could not know my mother would die young.
The tree is a galleon, its sails coppered by light.
I stand here watching, older now than she ever was.
I raked leaves into rooms and houses as a girl.
 
The tree is a galleon, its sails coppered by light.
I’ll always be a daughter, part of her body’s bright map.
I raked leaves into rooms and houses as a girl.
Death is a lit tree, its amber walls falling in pieces.
 
I’ll always be a daughter, part of her body’s bright map.
As a child, I raked leaves with my mother each fall.
Death is a lit tree, its amber walls falling in pieces.
At sunset the russet oak turns into a lamp.

HAIKU ✦ Japanese 3-line form: 5-7-5 syllables. Moment of perception, seasonal reference. In English, “haiku” often means any short 3-line poem, which purists hate but poetry is hardly puritanical, so feel free to write your heart out in 3-line chunks!

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Haiku 
by Namratha Varadharajan

road trip —
whiff of marigold
before the marigold

ODE ✦ Ancient Greek form, think Pindar singing about Olympic victors. Elevated lyric poem, often praising or addressing something—love, grief, a nightingale, your favorite pair of socks. Permission to get big and earnest and weird about what you care about.

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Ode to Hands
by Tim Lynch

What I know is once your mother pushed 
& now she cannot hold you.
What I believe is hands are the real windows
fogged by what breathes in us, who we keep. 
What I want to know is, lost 
in her house as her body 
led her nowhere, did you house her
hands in yours? There, there, 
you know, are no doors.

ELEGY ✦ Greek origins again (elegiac meter), though every culture mourns in verse. A poem of lamentation, often for someone recently passed. The form that holds you when nothing else can—grief given shape and breath.

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Elegy Owed 
by Bob Hicok

In other languages
you are beautiful—mort, muerto—I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
was sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cellphone—picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin—what I hate
about stars is they’re not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you,
you’re not those candles either, how often I realize
I’m not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I’d be cancer, if you
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say

PROSE POEM ✦ Poem in paragraph form, sans line breaks obviously! Still a poem because of compression, imagery, lyric intensity.

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How to Build a Thirst Trap
by Leigh Chadwick

Refill your prescriptions on time. Trade in your quilted blanket for a pair of heels. Trip down a flight of stairs. Drink Cabernet Sauvignon straight from the bottle. Never wake up before your alarm. Wear your hair long. Wear your hair short. Shave off all your hair and learn how to play poker. Buy a bra that makes your tits look like Daytona Beach in the spring. Forget you bought the bra. Breed dinosaurs so you have a reason to hold hands and run through a forest with Jeff Goldblum. Go to Starbucks and spill coffee on every man peppered in salt. Touch their wrists. Look each of them in the eye and say, Oh, my my. Go to bed with rug-burned knees. Keep your phone charged. Briefly date a man who speaks in semicolons and traces rollercoasters down your spine. Make out on a park bench seventeen minutes before the start of fall. Buy a removable shower head. Buy a yoga mat. Drink eight glasses of water every day. Stop lying to your psychiatrist and actually take the prescriptions you refilled on time. Replace your shoulder blades with a pair of wings. Fly directly into the sun.

FOUND POEM ✦ Poem made from non-poetic source material. Can be documentary, legal documents, overheard speech, spam emails.

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Found Lines for a Ghazal on Water 
by Kimiko Hahn

her family avoids any contact with the water. 

Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater

enforcement of water

strengthening water

untreated human waste has flowed into rivers and washed onto beaches. Drinking water

Jennifer knows not to drink the tap water 

The liquid in those lagoons and shafts can flow through cracks in the earth into water

decade ago, awful smells began coming from local taps. The water

put their house on the market, but because of the water

reinvigorate the drinking water 

cavities until the family stopped using tap water.

violated water



Note: All lines are quotes from “Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering,” Charles Duhigg, The New York Times, 9/13/09.

CENTO ✦ Latin for “patchwork.” Roman poets stitched together lines from Virgil and Homer. A poem made entirely of lines borrowed from other poems or creative works. Literary collage, remix culture before we had a name for it—theft as tribute, mosaic as meaning.

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Wolf Cento
by Simone Muench

Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf
at a live heart, the sun breaks down.
What is important is to avoid
the time allotted for disavowels
as the livid wound
leaves a trace      leaves an abscess
takes its contraction for those clouds
that dip thunder & vanish
like rose leaves in closed jars.
Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
crystal bone into thin air.
The small hours open their wounds for me.
This is a woman’s confession:
I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

---

Sources: [Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaux, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joyce Mansour, William Burroughs, Meret Oppenheim, Mary Low, Adrienne Rich, Carl Sandburg]

ABECEDARIAN ✦ Poem where each line/stanza begins with successive letters of the alphabet.

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Baltimore Pride Abecedarian 
by Yasmine Bolden

An ancestry of belonging to anyone but ourselves ends here.
Bends beneath my binder and swells into a syncopated
call and response that begins: all Black trans survival is improvizational jazz. Nearly
dies on my lips while I’m singing with sapphics
entering the Pink Pony Club. Is made a deer in headlights by
faces that can Anansi spider, sliding between boy
girl boy girl. Whatever we do, we know we
have to remember everything. We could be tipsy
indolent after sad twerking to Southern hip-hop or
joaning in a way that’s code for: I love you pink-soft and red-hot. Several
Konas and bisexual cocktails in, we’d still
look for the wide-eyed form of our
most hurting histories. Bless the homegirl whose purse pockets
naloxone, water, and grandma candies. Who
opens her palms, taking her
place on the right hand side of the road, waiting. Who takes being the
queer salt of the earth seriously. Whose
rage could rival God’s. Whose pride holds my
sweaty hand in the hospital where I misgender myself, at
the parade where everyone knows and
understands both of my names: the one I was given and the one I wasn’t allowed to have. Voracious is the only word to describe the
way my ancestors must’ve felt. I know it from the way I’ve got to be capital
X xtra as soon as May and June kiss again.
You can feel a hunger that ripples through my lineage. A
zest wild and horned and all our own.

LIST POEM/CATALOGUE ✦ Ancient as Homer’s catalogue of ships, biblical as psalms. A list. Can be inventory, accumulation, or obsessive enumeration. Whitman made it sing. The form that says: look at all this, all of this, let me show you everything I see.

ARS POETICA ✦ Latin, from Horace’s manual on craft. A poem about poetry itself—“the art of poetry.” Can be earnest manifesto or ironic meditation on the impossibility of writing. The snake eating its own tail. The mirror looking at itself. Sometimes the only honest way forward is to interrogate the tools in your hands.

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Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash
by Katherine Irajpanah

lounging in your maroon dress at the end of my sentence—
your sweaty hand reaching out into the silence, always 
sipping on the hush of a lover who swears off erotic 
pleasure—the split between poplar & tree—the pressure 
to live off the surface of your cold, cold knees. Because
my loaded, rupturing heart sinks down in reflection pools 
at the center of that old cemetery—now, bird sanctuary.
Come with me & whisper conspiratorially—the only
way I know how—to the red cardinals writing poety 
on the burial site of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—
he has rested long enough—so long we have arrived 
at that terrible precipice, again. Say we live in his death 
box with the third wall cut out like a diorama, & we are 
made of clay—remade by something traceable—not dust
but the curvature of your pursed lips. You are the line I
hold in my chest with too much certainty—I cannot 
release you without this pause about how I am angry 
with the gentleness of your teeth—the stinger to your 
bee—boomerang of history—O, how we threw it—
throw it all back to the sky—

PERSONA POEM ✦ Latin “persona” means mask—actor’s mask in ancient theater. Poet speaks through an assumed character/identity. Browning perfected the dramatic monologue. Permission to inhabit anyone: the drowned girl, the murderer, the saint, the myth. Sometimes you have to become someone else to tell the truth.

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Rejected Persona: Patron of the Arts
by Dorsey Craft

At the poetry open-mic, I watch a woman
flirt while I drink water in my fox fur coat
and think Jesus is it almost February
already? To psyche myself up, I did black
winged eyeliner, wine dark lips. Still 
this beige, this nude nothingness buzz.
I try to metaphor desire, but it’s just
a thin veil for “I want—”: Desire is
a pair of leather pants. Desire is a throat
full of come. Desire is the endless scroll
of videos, the stretch marks un-stretching 
from my stomach. A man presses his face
into the woman’s abdomen below her breasts. 
He thumbs her ear next to the jukebox. 
When he gets a drink, she swears she’s not
feeling him. Lately, I am having a hard time
feeling anything. I am one of my son’s plastic
balls rolling down its track, the hollow clatter
that repeats, repeats, repeats. My need 
used to pulse and ripple the surface of me—
a bulging, hungry, thrum waiting to combust. 
Now, the me that wants is down a deep well, 
Silence of the Lambs-style. I follow them home
and she clutches his arm and I want to stop
and spin her around and say, You can’t do this 
to me, I am in my fox fur coat. The sidewalk 
is cracked and the streets are dark and the week
is only beginning to unfold its ugly efforts. 
The cold raws my cheeks with its quiet, little beat: 
just me, just me, just me.

ZUIHITSU ✦ Japanese form meaning “following the brush.” Fragmented, associative, essay-poem hybrid. Sections accumulate by intuition rather than argument.

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Zuihitsu
by Jenny Xie

Sunday, awake with this headache. I pull apart the evening with a fork. White
clot behind the eyes.
 
 
Someone once told me, before and after is just another false binary. The
warmed-over bones of January. I had no passport. Beneath the stove, two mice
made a paradise out of a button of peanut butter.
 
 
Suffering operates by its own logic. Its gropings and reversals. Ample, in ways
that are exquisite. And how it leaves—not unlike how it arrives, without clear
notice.
 
 
These days, I’ve had my fill of Chinatown and its wet markets. Gutted fish.
Overcooked chattering. The stench making me look hard at everything.
 
 
Summer mornings before the heat has moved in. Joy has been buried in me
overnight, but builds in the early hours. My attention elastic.
 
 
The babbling streets of Causeway Bay, out of which the sharp taste of the city
emerges. Nothing can stay dry here. The dark cherries of eyes come and go,
as they please.
 
 
Let there be no more braiding of words. I want a spare mouth.
 
 
My father taught me wherever you are, always be looking for a way out: this
opening or that one. Or a question. Sharp enough to slice a hole for you to slip
through.
 
 
Long car trips where I sat in the back of our family’s used Nissan. The stale
odor of plush seats and sun-warmed cola. My parents’ and my words do not
touch. I grow adept at tunneling inward, a habit I have yet to let go of.
 
 
I am protective of what eyes cannot pry open. The unannounced. The infinite
places within language to hide.
 
 
A Zen priest once told me that without snagging on a storyline, the body can
only take loss for ninety seconds. The physical body has its limits, is what I
heard. The imagination can break through them.
 
 
Boiled peanuts. Leather of daybreak. Cotton thinning out into thread. Dried
vomit. Ice water from the spigot. The sacred and profane share a border. In the
desert, small droppings of unknown origin.
 
 
Even when I was young, I loved peering at faces in films. The pleasure of
watching and of not being watched.
 
 
Black koi fish open their mouths at the skin of the pond for oxygen. At the edge
of the water, I hold two lines from Ikkyū in my mouth. Make my way slowly.
 
 
Nights when I shared a bed in a small room. Another’s body to the left, hooked
by a heavy dream.
 
 
Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it.
 
 
I can shake out the imprint of my body on the sheets each morning. But the
mind–the mind is a different matter.
 
 
When I was four, I ate spoonfuls of powdered milk straight from the canis-
ter. The powder was sweet. There wasn’t enough money for fresh milk. Seven
hundred years ago, Chang Yang-hao wrote, All my life seems / like yesterday
morning. 

⟡ Modes & Approaches ⟡

LYRIC ✦ Short, personal, emotional/meditative poetry. The dominant contemporary mode. First-person, focused on voice and feeling.

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Syntax
by Carol Ann Duffy

I want to call you thou, the sound
of the shape of the start
of a kiss - like this - thou -
and to say, after, I love,
thou, I love, thou I love, not
I love you.

Because I so do ―
as we say now - I want to say
thee, I adore, I adore thee
and to know in my lips
the syntax of love resides,
and to gaze in thine eyes.

Love’s language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

NARRATIVE ✦ Poem that tells a story. Can be short or book-length. Has plot, characters, sequence of events.

Some recent examples that sprint to mind:

Water Look Away by Bob Hicok

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Couplets by Maggie Millner

CONFESSIONAL ✦ Extremely personal poetry about intimate/taboo subjects. 1950s-60s movement but the mode persists.

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The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
by Anne Sexton

The end of the affair is always death.   
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   
out of the tribe of myself my breath   
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.   
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.   
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,   
that every single couple puts together   
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   
the abundant two on sponge and feather,   
kneeling and pushing, head to head.   
At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,   
an annoying miracle. Could I   
put the dream market on display?   
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.   
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,   
a piano at her fingertips, shame   
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes   
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.   
Today’s paper says that you are wed.   
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.   
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

HYBRID ✦ Poetry that incorporates essay, memoir, criticism, visual art. Refuses categories.

Some examples off the top of my head:

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

The White Book by Han Kang

ECO-POETICS ✦ Poetry engaging with ecology, environment, climate. Don’t just think of it as poems about trees, though…these is poetry that truly interrogates and excavates and holds us accountable!

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Anxious Behavior
by Jarod Povanda

The way blackbirds solve for
winter. How upset I am
without feathers. No black collar, no tailwind. On the floor,
regardless, crying. Health insurers hate me. I hate me too,
I tell Denice from Toledo, so who wants me
in the divorce? My days are all light haloes and
automation. I don’t look at sunsets like I used to. Honeybees mob
in flung distance; worries oxen the sky across my forehead, owl down inside the
dales of my cheeks. Charred land and brawny newscasts
tracking Canadian wildfires from helicopter. New York stained tangerine
in June. Below
my bedroom window, coyotes harangue. I imagine they’re wolves when
I’m scared. I don’t know what that says
about me. It means I want
a wolf. I want to know enough to name
the way wolves scent along the wind with senses so superior
they stir storms of electrical signaling after every inhale. And the beaver,
how her teeth curve against different kinds of trees. I also crave
empty spaces. Hunger
gaps. The sensation
of biting a male spider raw. To lick a bear cub’s paw after a thorn. I catalog
the underside of a tern’s upturned wing, a pair of gulls, a brown bat’s sewing
flight. Swifts spend so much of their lives planning
around incoming storms. Anxious
behavior? We’re similar animals: ozone
stung and afraid
of the horizon. My mind,
a fishing net. Too many holes; the trout swim
through. Off the path
white bones lance a village of mushrooms. The blackbirds have been
and gone. What I know
I know without help: By now
the dead carry different names.

WITNESS POETRY ✦ Poetry bearing witness to atrocity, war, violence, injustice.

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Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air,
a story sung by those who danced before the Lord in quiet.
Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that rise
with no protection but each other’s ears.
We are on our bellies in this silence, Lord.

Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.
Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand.
For the secret of patience is his wife’s patience
Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat,
he who loved roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and her     
     forgetting,
a man with a fast heartbeat, a woman dancing with a broom, uneven breath.
Let them borrow the light from the blind.
Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.
There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
Let them speak of air and its necessities. Whatever they will open, will open. 

from “Deaf Republic: 1” by Ilya Kaminsky

⟡ Rhetorical Devices ⟡

APOSTROPHE ✦ Directly addressing something absent or unable to respond—a dead person, abstract concept, object. Adds intimacy and urgency. Makes the abstract tangible by speaking to it directly. Can heighten emotion or become overwrought depending on execution.

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I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. 

...

And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. 

from “Grace” by Joy Harjo

ANAPHORA ✦ Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines or clauses. Builds momentum and intensity. Has a ritualistic quality. Hammers an idea into the reader through accumulation.

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Dream Journal
by Kareem Tayyar

If you’re swimming
then you have lost something important.

If you’re flying
then your heart’s been broken.

If you sit at a table before a deck of cards
then you are afraid of getting older.

If you undress beneath a single spotlight
then you are about to commit a crime.

If you are singing while holding a Spanish guitar
then someone you know has passed away.

If you are preparing to leap from a balcony
then you are mourning the loss of your childhood.

If you place your lips to the breast of a cloud
then you have forgotten to say your prayers.

If you run three red lights in a row
then there is a lesson you still haven’t learned.

If you pull water from an old well
then your father is preparing to call you long distance.

If you hear music playing from another house on your street
then your sister is about to come back from the dead.

If you cup your hands as a hard rain begins
then you are days away from falling in love.

If you find that you cannot run when you want to
then there is a book that you need to reread.

If you awaken in a field of strawberries
then a long  journey awaits you.

If you eat the strawberries
then you won’t be going alone.

EPISTROPHE ✦ Repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses. Drives a point home through emphasis. Creates a sense of inevitability or conclusion.

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I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman

ALLUSION ✦ Reference to another text, myth, historical event, artwork, etc. Compresses entire contexts into a single reference. Depth through layering… has the potential to enrich meaning or can also just feel like showing off.

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Intimacy
by Paisley Rekdal

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its fly in the corner, I mean

the fly that’s left its body, recalling too
that medieval nightmare, Resurrection,

in which each soul must scurry
to rejoin the plush interiors of its flesh,

pushing through, marrying indiscriminately
because Heaven won’t take what’s only half:

one soul blurring forever
into another body.

If we can’t know the boundaries between ourselves
in life, what will they be in death,

corrupted steadily by maggot,
rain, or superstition, by affection

that depends on memory to survive?
People should keep their hands to themselves

for the remainder of the flight: who needs
some stranger’s waistline, joint problems,

or insecurities? Darling,
what I love in you I pray will always stay

the hell away from me.

POLYSYNDETON ✦ Using many conjunctions. Slows the pace, makes each item feel weighted and considered. Creates a sense of accumulation or abundance. Can feel biblical, exhaustive, or suffocating depending on context.

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Master Song
by Leonard Cohen

I believe that you heard your master sing
When I was sick in bed
I suppose that he told you everything
That I keep locked away in my head
Your master took you travelling
Well, at least that’s what you said
And now, do you come back to bring
Your prisoner wine and bread?

You met him at some temple
Where they take your clothes at the door
He was just a numberless man in a chair
Just come back from the war
And you wrap up his tired face in your hair
And he hands you the apple core
Then he touches your lips, now so suddenly bare
Of all the kisses we put on some time before

And he gave you a German Shepherd to walk
With a collar of leather and nails
And he never once made you explain or talk
About all of the little details
Such as who had a word and who had a rock
And who had you through the mails
Now your love is a secret all over the block
And it never stops, not even when your master fails

And he took you up in his aeroplane
Which he flew without any hands
And you cruised above the ribbons of rain
That drove the crowd from the stands
Then he killed the lights in a lonely lane
And an ape with angel glands
Erased the final wisps of pain
With the music of rubber bands

And now, I hear your master sing
You kneel for him to come
His body is a golden string
That your body is hanging from
His body is a golden string
My body has grown numb
Oh, now you hear your master sing
Your shirt is all undone

And will you kneel beside this bed
That we polished so long ago
Before your master chose instead
To make my bed of snow?
Your eyes are wild and your knuckles are red
And you’re speaking far too low
No, I can’t make out what your master said
Before he made you go

Then I think you’re playing far too rough
For a lady who’s been to the moon
I’ve lain by this window long enough
You get used to an empty room
And your love is some dust in an old man’s cough
Who is tapping his foot to a tune
And your thighs are a ruin, you want too much
Let’s say you came back some time too soon

I loved your master perfectly
I taught him all that he knew
He was starving in some deep mystery
Like a man who is sure what is true
And I sent you to him with my guarantee
I could teach him something new
And I taught him how you would long for me
No matter what he said, no matter what you’d do

I believe that you heard your master sing
While I was sick in bed
I’m sure that he told you everything
I must keep locked away in my head
Your master took you travelling
Well, at least that’s what you said
And now, do you come back to bring
Your prisoner wine and bread?

ASYNDETON ✦ Omitting conjunctions. Creates speed, urgency. Makes the language feel stripped down, breathless. Things pile up without pause…unshakeable, wild, glorious OR could become overwrought.

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Metaphors 
by Sylvia Path

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

PARALLELISM ✦ Repeating grammatical structure. Creates balance and rhythm. Makes separate ideas feel equivalent or connected through their structure. Can feel formal, ordered, or relentless.

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He has left the village and mounted the steep
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

from “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

⟡ Critique & Theory ⟡

A note before I begin this: this part of the glossary fucking killed me to compile it took so motherfucking long what the fucking hell no fucking wonder critics are so fucking miserable but also this was the most fucking interesting enriching part to think about, discover, distill and bring to you so fuck me for being such a fucking nerd arghhhhhh

INTENTIONAL FALLACY ✦ Core to the New Criticism’s methodology: judge the work by what’s actually on the page, not what the author says they meant. W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s 1946 essay argues:

The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology or morals.

AFFECTIVE FALLACY ✦ Judging a poem by its emotional effect on you rather than by the poem’s actual construction and meaning. This one’s also Wimsatt and Beardsley (1949) as above, essentially warning that you can’t say a poem is good just because it made you cry, or bad because it bored you. That conflates your emotional response with the poem’s achievement. But of course most readers commit this “fallacy” constantly, and contemporary criticism often argues the affective dimension is precisely what matters. The tension between close reading and felt experience. The aforementioned scholars write:

The report of some readers, on the other hand, that a poem or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague

ORGANIC FORM ✦ Form grows from content, emerging from within rather than imposed externally. You might think of “form follows function”, but this isn’t exactly what this concept means. Rather, think of it as “form and function/content are one and the same.” Coleridge writes:

The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material—as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward Form. Such is the Life, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.

TENSION ✦ Allen Tate’s term for what holds a poem together. He pulled it from logic terms—extension (literal meaning) and intension (metaphorical meaning). The idea: good poetry works on both levels at once. The poem’s literal language has to mean something concrete AND carry figurative weight. Without that dual pull—that tension!—the poem either collapses into vague sentiment (all feeling, no precision) or becomes impenetrably obscure (all abstraction, no anchor). Examining “The Vine” by James Thomson, Tate writes:

Now good poetry can bear the closest literal examination of every phrase, and is its own safeguard against our irony. But the more closely we examine this lyric, the more obscure it becomes; the more we trace the implications of the imagery, the denser the confusion. The imagery adds nothing to the general idea that it tries to sustain; it even deprives that idea of the dignity it has won at the hands of a long succession of better poets.

AMBIGUITY ✦ William Empson catalogued seven types of multivalence, so to speak. Multiple meanings coexisting productively. Here they are:

1. The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.

2. Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.

3. Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.

4. Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.

5. When the “author is discovering his idea in the act of writing...” Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.

6. When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.

7. Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author’s mind.^[2]

INTERTEXTUALITY ✦ How texts reference, echo, and speak to other texts. Every text is in conversation with what came before it—sometimes directly (allusion, quotation), sometimes through form, sometimes through subtle echoes the writer might not even be conscious of. Writing is always a response to other writing, even when it’s trying to break from tradition. Julia Kristeva writes:

The word’s status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is oriented towards an anterior or synchronic literary corpus) . . . each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read . . . any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.

MISE EN ABYME ✦ French term from heraldry (a shield containing a miniature of itself). In literature, it’s when a text contains a smaller version of itself—a story within a story that mirrors the larger structure. While we could conceive of it as a nested tale, more accurate would be a narrative that reflects or comments on the work containing it. Think of the play within the world of Hamlet. Borges, too, does this constantly—stories that contain versions of themselves, libraries containing all possible books including books about those libraries. The effect: you realize the text is aware of itself as a text, and that recursive loop pulls you into infinite regress. It’s dizzying, vertiginous. A mirror facing a mirror. André Gide elucidates:

In a work of art, I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself. Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately.

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY ✦ Keats’ term for what separates great poets from the rest: the ability to remain in doubt and uncertainty without needing to resolve it into clear answers. Most people get uncomfortable with ambiguity and rush to explain, categorize, make logical sense of things. Poets with negative capability can sit in that discomfort. They let contradictions exist. They don’t force meaning or tie everything up neatly.

This brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise

Additionally, I’ll give you Keats’ entire letter here, which is brilliant:

[On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, ?27 December 1817]
Hampstead Sunday
22 December 1818

My dear Brothers

I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this [ . . . ] [T]he excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness—The picture is larger than Christ rejected—I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment—These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter—They talked of Kean & his low company—Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on wednesday—Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

DUENDE ✦ Lorca’s term for the dark, irrational force that separates art that matters from art that’s just technically good. It’s not talent or training—it comes from somewhere deeper, older. The earth. Blood. Death. The duende shows up when a performer abandons safety and control, when they risk breaking. Flamenco singers strip their voices raw for it. Bullfighters put their bodies against the horns. It’s what makes an audience lose their minds even when the technique is rougher, messier than a polished performance. You can’t manufacture it. Lorca writes:

“These ‘black sounds’ are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: so said the celebrated Spaniard, thereby concurring with Goethe, who, in effect, defined the duende when he said, speaking of Paganini: ‘A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain.’ The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept.”

I also want to share this lovely poem:

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 Lorca's Duende
 by Ursula K. Le Guin

 The duende got into my head
 by the back staircase,
 a gypsy girl- child dressed in red
 with an old mans face.

 My bedroom turned bitter cold.
 There were banging noises,
 loud knockings in between the walls.
 Things left their places.

 My comb crawled across the bureau,
 clicking like castanets.
 My grandmother's ivory-backed mirror
 cracked itself into bits.

 Get out of my head, old child.
 Te exorcizo!
 Take your tricks and your wild ways
 back to Andalusia.

 Go home, poltergeist,
 and do Spanish damage.
 I have my own bad guests
 that speak my own bad language.

DEFAMILIARIZATION (OSTRANENIE) ✦ Shklovsky’s term for what art does when it works: it makes you see things you’ve stopped seeing. Habit turns perception into recognition. Language becomes automatic. Experience gets flattened into shorthand. Defamiliarization breaks that. It describes things as if you’re encountering them for the first time, strips away the familiar names and frameworks, forces you to actually see. Tolstoy does this constantly—describing an opera as if he’s never seen one, flogging as if the practice is brand new and horrifying, having a horse narrate a story about property ownership so the concept looks insane. The goal is restoration as opposed to mere cleverness. Shklovsky writes:

And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

THE SUBLIME ✦ Edmund Burke’s term for the experience of confronting something so vast, powerful, or terrifying that it overwhelms you. And also anything that makes you feel small and mortal. The key: terror mixed with awe. You need some distance from actual danger to experience it and obscurity amplifies it; the less you can see or comprehend, the more overwhelming the effect. Burke writes:

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

I am also keenly reminded of the eleventh chapter in the Bhagavad Gita entitled Vishwarup Darshan Yoga or The Universal Form. I quote part of the relevant sections here:

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II

Thus as you have described
this about your Self,
O Highest Supreme Lord,
I desire to see your
supremely powerful form,
O Ultimate Person. 

III
If you think it is possible
for me to see you
in this way, O Lord,
O Supreme Lord of Yoga,
then reveal to me
your everpresent Self.

IV
The Beloved Lord said:
Behold my forms,
O Prtha,
by the hundreds,
or by the thousands—
Divine, of various types,
and of various colors
and appearances.

V
Behold the dityas,
the Vasus, the Rudras,
the two Ashvins,
also the Maruts.
Many of these never
have been seen before—
behold these wonders,
O Bhrata.

VI
Before you, in one place,
behold now
the entire universe,
with every moving
and nonmoving being
Within my body,
O Gudkesha,
and whatever else
you desire to see.

VII
But you are unable to see me
with only this, your own eyes.
I [therefore] give divine eyes to you—
behold my supremely powerful yoga!

VIII
Sanjaya said:
Thus having spoken,
O King, the exalted
Supreme Lord of Yoga, Hari,
Then revealed to Prtha
his supremely powerful
majestic form:

IX
Of numerous mouths and eyes,
of numerous extraordinary
appearances;
Of numerous divine ornaments,
of numerous upraised
divine weapons; 

X
Wearing divine garlands
and garments, with divine
perfumes and ointments;
Consisting of all wonders—
the Divinity, endless,
facing in all directions.

XI
If a thousand suns
were to have risen
in the sky at once,
Such brilliance as this
might resemble
the brilliance
of that supreme Self.

XII
There, in one place,
the entire universe
was unlimitedly divided.
The Pndava then
saw this in the body of
the Divinity of divinities.

XIII
Then struck with amazement,
the hairs of his limbs
standing on end,
the Conqueror of Wealth,
Bowing his head
to the Divinity,
with palms joined
in prayerful gesture, spoke


from Bhagavad-gita transalted by Graham M. Schweig as The Beloved Lord's Secret Lovesong

THE UNCANNY ✦ Freud’s term for the dread that hits when something familiar becomes disturbing. A childhood doll that now feels sinister. Your own face in an unexpected mirror. A word repeated until it sounds alien. The feeling comes from repression: something once known gets buried, then resurfaces distorted. You half-remember it and that’s what makes you uneasy. The German word reveals this—heimlich means both “homely, familiar” and “concealed, kept secret.” The familiar contains its opposite. What was home becomes unhomely. Freud writes:

This unheimlich is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light.

DEEP IMAGE ✦ A term coined by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, it refers to those images that reach down into the unconscious and connect the physical world to something spiritual or psychic beneath it. Alongside being inspired by Lorca’s “deep song”, the idea comes from the symbolist theory of “correspondences”—a belief that concrete images can tap into deeper, hidden realities. Kevin Bushell writes":

Deep image poetry, however, is not without merit, and has contributed to the advancement of American poetry in several key ways. It is the first attempt in American poetry to incorporate fully the theories of Freud, Jung and other depth psychologists into the poet’s expression, although as I have argued, its over-reliance on these theories is its failing. In addition, Bly’s unwavering dedication to breaking down old systems of thought and poetic technique has resulted in greater freedom than in the Modernism of Pound and Eliot for intimate and confessional expression in poetry, a style which Pound had dismissed as “the mere registering of a bellyache and the mere dumping of the ashcan” (PW 42).

In posterity, deep image poetry may be regarded as a counterbalancing force to the technique-oriented craftsmanship of the great modern writers, and later the Black Mountain Group. In this regard, Bly helped open the door to an era in which the imagination is more readily accepted as one of many forces shaping and contributing to the poem.

ASSOCIATIVE LOGIC ✦ Connections made by intuition, image, and sound rather than linear argument. How the poem thinks through leaping rather than stepping. In his essay “Looking for Dragon Smoke”, Robert Bly writes:

My idea, then, is that a great work of art often has at its center a long floating leap, around which the work of art in ancient times used to gather itself like steel shavings around the magnet. But a work of art does not necessarily have at its center a single long floating leap. The work can have many leaps, perhaps shorter. The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem. A poet who is ‘leaping’ makes a jump from an object soaked in unconscious substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance. What is marvelous is to see this leaping return in poetry of this century.

…

Thought of in terms of language, then, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great ancient or modern poem, the considerable distance between the associations, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed of the association increases the excitement of the poetry.

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I’m going to say something that might make writing coaches hate me: most days, you shouldn’t write at all.

There. I said it. Let the productivity gurus come for me. Though, just know that you’ll also be coming for Toni Morrison, who puts it far more eloquently than I ever could:

When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.

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For years, I tortured myself with the bullshit “write every day” mantra. I set word count goals. I tracked my streaks (god save us from all these gamified apps for every single aspect of our creative and personal lives!).

Things got so bad that I even felt guilty every time I chose to read a book instead of drafting a new poem or story, felt like a bad “writer” every time I stared out the window instead of opening my manuscript, every time I went to bed having produced a whole lotta nothing.

The cult of productivity in writing wears a very specific uniform: wake up at 5 AM, write before your day job, hit your word count, never break the chain. It speaks in the language of discipline, consistency, and output. It measures success in drafts completed, not in understanding deepened. It values showing up over knowing when to walk away.

This cult borrowed its doctrine from the factory floor and the startup grind, then convinced us that art could be optimized the same way you optimize a sales funnel. Write every day and you’ll finish your novel. Write every day and you’ll get published. Write every day and you’ll finally be a real writer.

And yet…writing was never just about typing or scribbling away.

Most of the best writing I’ve ever done happened when no sane person would see me as say “yeah, that woman’s writing something, I guess.”

Think: long walks in solitude on quiet, rainy evenings thinking about my characters like they were memories from another life, crossing over. Soaking in the shower, letting the right metaphor rise like steam before me, mine to curl my fingers through and make real.

And how can I forget the countless instances of reading another’s poems or stories, allowing their words to wash over me, run through me, utterly changing my brain chemistry, like a drug where the only side effect is that it kicks you in the butt to write something just as good, if not better.

A metaphor for the writing process that I much prefer to the assembly line is the mind as a heap of beautifully grotesque compost.

You throw everything in there: the conversation you overheard at the coffee shop, the way light fell through your kitchen window, that article about octopuses you read at 2 AM, your mother’s hands, the smell of rain on hot pavement, a line from a poem that’s been haunting you for months, your ex’s voice, the taste of blood in your mouth when your kid accidentally clocked you in the chin while playing…

And then…you let it fucking rot…slowly, allowing for the creep and the sink and the curdling…the crackling coolness to settle over that burning ash of life. Let it all grow dark and rich and strange and maybe even glow and pulse and fill with imperceptible light. Let the worms of wisdom do their work.

And, remember these words of Leonard Cohen, always:

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

This kind of…composting of the creative process requires patience. It requires inactivity. It requires faith that something is happening even when you can’t see it.

The best poems and stories rarely come from daily excavation, least of all in the beginning. They come from fermentation. They come when the thing you noticed three months ago finally collides with the dream you had last week and the childhood memory that surfaced while you were doing dishes. They come when disparate elements have been sitting together long enough to ache into something new.

Here are some things I wish someone had told me ten years ago:

1. You are allowed to have fallow seasons.

2. You are allowed to read for six months without writing a word and call it work—because it is!

3. You are allowed to lie on your sofa and stare at the ceiling while your subconscious solves the problem your conscious mind has been strangling.

4. You are allowed to go months without touching your manuscript because you’re not ready yet, because it’s not ready yet, because the compost needs more time.

5. You are allowed to write three pages in one fevered sitting and then nothing for weeks.

6. You are allowed to be a writer who doesn’t write every day.

7. You are allowed to give the middle finger to a traditional publishing journey, and then actually kind of want it again years later.

8. Feel free to contradict yourself. You’re a motherfucking writer.

Farming wisdom tells us that land needs to rest. A field that’s forced to produce year after year without pause becomes depleted, the soil thin and exhausted. But a field left fallow for a season comes back stronger. The ground replenishes itself. What looked like emptiness reveals itself to be a silent act restoration all along.

I truly feel our creative minds are not much different.

Some writers do write every day. Good for them, for real! Still, here’s something we perhaps miss when considering such creative productivity:

They’re not always writing new work. They’re journaling. They’re freewriting absolute garbage. They’re doing writing exercises. They’re rewriting the same scene for the seventh time. Many of them are deeply anxious people using the daily practice to manage that anxiety, which is beautiful!

What I want to get across, though, is that the myth of constant productivity serves capitalism, not art. It serves people selling courses and productivity apps and coaching packages. It serves the publishing industry that wants a steady stream of content. It serves everyone except you, the actual writer, trying to make something real and honest, arrived at through a sheer inexplicable mix of desire, faith, and fate.

There’s something radical about refusing to be productive. Every day you don’t write is not a day wasted, but rather a day spent adding to the compost pile. A day of decomposition…where the soil of your mind (or soul, if you want to get woo-woo with me, why not!) is healing itself.

Your worth as a writer is not determined by your daily word count, nor by how much and where you’ve been published. Hell—it’s not even determined by whether you showed up to your desk this morning.

Your worth as a writer is determined by whether you’re paying attention to your life, and whether you’re brave enough to wait until you have something worth saying.

So let it rot.

Your words will grow when they’re good and fermented.

And they’ll be worth the wait.

✦ What’s your relationship with productivity culture in writing? Have you given yourself permission to slow down, break free of it…or maybe it’s working for!? I’d love to hear about it in the comments, if you’d like to share. ↓

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I wanted to share a poem of my own today (since this is a personal blog of sorts after all). “In Hell” was originally published in Strange Horizons, but it was written about two years before that, and rejected countless times from different literary magazines.

I’ve written about 40 ghazals so far, and have been lucky enough to get over half of them published, but honestly it’s been much harder to place poems that use a strict traditional form as opposed to my other, free-flowing work. I’m not sure if that’s everyone’s experience, but that’s what I’ve found over the last half decade of submitting seriously.

I also wanted to share this photo of mine that took when we were in Canada and I was wrapping up my undergrad at the University of Toronto. When he showed it to me, I kind of jumped because I thought it made me look like a witch, but then pretty soon I fell in love with the photo because, well, I guess I am some kinda witch. 🤷🏽‍♀️

It’s funny how you can go so long in your life hating the way you look in this or that angle, blaming the light, your own face, the pimples on your face, your clothes, how bad they fit, but then someone who loves you can make you love yourself too…sappy and weird, I know, but it’s true. Hopefully some of you can resonate!

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Alright, here’s the ghazal. I hope it brings you a modicum of the delight I felt in writing it. And for those of you who’d rather hear it…well, I did try to record something a few nights back. Enjoy (or be annoyed or despise it, whatever works, I’m happy for my art to evoke strong reactions either way!).

In Hell

Who conjured dreams for the devil when he fell in hell?
He slept well because he knew there is no hell in hell. 
 
I do not know how I am cold around your burning 
violin—a song is but fire for those who dwell in hell.  
 
You are glowing like an angel lit by a red-light district.
Beg, borrow, bribe, or steal—prayers do not sell in hell.
 
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Yell 
for California when there’s fire in heaven, call to book a hotel in hell.
 
Moon swells silver tides, a ventriloquist of the night. You aren’t able 
to recall slivers of our dream? Don’t worry, it will ring a bell in hell. 
 
Could you love a shell to death so it bombs in benedictions?
Kill the infidels if that helps you sleep, they will live well in hell.
 
An illusion is truth untouched of pain. Inside how many names can I lose
myself? Eventually all words waste magic—no one can spell in hell.
 
If I choose to be a prisoner it would be as the hum of your lungs.
Dying is not music nor god, the dead warn from their cell in hell.
 
I dried up your body’s water, so why are you compelled to forgive rivers?
“Your white womb, wet poems, it’s all here—including your smell—in hell.”
 
I live between sacrifice and shelter, come out when it’s dark enough
for sunrise. Convince me to leave. No, Shannan, there is no farewell in hell.

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Last week I shared this:

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And frankly, I’m surprised that over half of you didn’t just fuck right off. I’m so grateful for the wonderful response and that you’re still here. In fact, 743 more of you now than when I sent that post. Which is insane to me.

I’ll kick off the first section of The Only Poetry Curriculum: FOUNDATIONS by sharing an annotated guide to the best poetry craft books for anyone at any stage of their poetic practice.

I do want to share, for those of you who’re new to Beautiful Losers, that this Substack is a mix of my essays, poems, lists and now this curriculum. You can learn more about me here, or take a stroll through my notes.

TWO SHORT NOTES

✦ On Acquiring These Books:

While I’ll always encourage that we support writers and presses as we indulge in tangible literary pleasures by purchasing physical copies of the books we wish to read—I do understand that for some people this can be impossible. You might suggest, then, a visit to the local library and, yet again, I’m all for that….

However, let’s not forget that even this is a luxury and not readily available for everyone in all parts of the world. In the interest of my desire to make this course as accessible as possible, then, I’ll offer the following: if anybody would like any of the books here but cannot either a) afford to purchase their own copy or b) borrow from their library, please just email me here: shannan@onlypoems.net and let me know which book(s) you want—I’ll send you the relevant e-books.

✦ On Studying These Books:

Again, I’m still figuring out how to structure this curriculum, but here’s something that suggested I do, so I’m going to try it. Alongside other posts, every month I’ll choose one of these books and send out a lesson tailored around it. I’ll discuss my own insights from it, key quotations, as well as poetry exercises based on the book’s pedagogy to help your writing and reading.

Alright, on with it!

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The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens | Poetry’s relationship to reality and imagination. Stevens argues the poet must “move constantly in the direction of the credible” and “create his unreal out of what is real.”

The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry | Composition as intellectual labor requiring formal discipline. Valéry insists great poems emerge from practiced exercises. And yet I love Valéry’s famous quote: “Poems are never finished—just abandoned.”

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder | A very accessible refutation of the idea that poetry is difficult and inaccessible. “Poets are alchemists of nothingness,” Zapruder argues, “they aspire to turn silence, nothingness, absence, into something palpable.”

The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach | Close readings of canonical poets showing how notions of excellence are fluid, never fixed. Longenbach critiques how “accomplishment in our poetry has been signaled most often by manner—as if it were the job of artists not to engage the most potent aspects of Dickinson or Eliot but to sequester themselves in one or another schoolroom.”

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke | A touchstone! Spiritual and artistic development is inseparable. Reread this one throughout your life while you “love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.”

Proofs & Theories by Louise Glück | Rigorous yet intimate. On ambition, fear, and the examined poetic life. Essential counterpoint to more prescriptive approaches. Glück suggests “the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing” and that “to perceive [art] at all is to be haunted by it.”

The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness & Imagination by Carl Phillips | Seven essays for poets afraid of their own boldness. Phillips posts on how the “poet possesses … an ability to be in the presence of troubling questions without giving in to the need to resolve them.”

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver | Perhaps you think it might be a cliché to include this one, but truly a foundational education in poetry is incomplete without Mary Oliver. Here, she proclaims that “the poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely.”

The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky | A short guide on how sound creates meaning. Comparing poetry to dance, Pinsky posits that “the medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth.”

A Poet’s Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie | Comprehensive, encyclopedic volume chock full of lessons, descriptions, and definitions for all the technical elements that may make up a poem.ma

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand & Eavan Boland | Anthology with craft notes; shows theory through example. Excellent for seeing how formal choices work in actual poems. “Form, in history and society, is not just a series of masterpieces. It’s also the reflex, the song, the choice, the backhand practice, the joyous enterprise of all poets at all times.”

The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo | Generative writing advice that feels like you’re listening to your favorite old professor. Give yourself permission to write badly and follow obsessions! “In the world of imagination,” Hugo declares, “all things belong.”

Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts on Prosody by Donald Justice | Aphoristic, gathered thoughts on prosody and composition. More reference than cover-to-cover read, I’d say, but something would be amiss here without this one.

The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov | Poetry’s political and social engagement and the poet as witness. Essential for understanding poetry’s civic function. In the titular essay, Levertov explains that “when words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.”

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle | Playful, digressive, profound treatise on the mystery and (un)mastery of poetry. She shares: “I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, ‘I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say;’ but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays & Interviews by Harryette Mullen | On language, race, identity and experimental poetics as political practice. Mullen also has a keen eye on the future of poetry in connection with the powers that continue to recklessly shape our world.

And now, tell me:

Are there any books here that you’ve already read? If so, what are your favorite insights? Or things you disagree with? Perhaps you have other craft books you feel should have been included here. I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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I’ve seen a lot of personal curricula out there but none (that I’ve come across) have covered poetry. I think I know why. It’s because most people (god bless their souls) don’t give a flying fuck about poetry. And you know what? Just as well. Why do we think that numbers ought to have something profound to say about words? Or that more people equals more value?

Honestly, if you were walkin’ on down the street and spotted a massive throng of people resembling a blob of arms and legs and crazed heads sticking out trying to get inside a building…would you want to join them and get inside there too? Hey—maybe you would, I don’t know and I’m not quite judging. I know though that my introverted ass would be outta there.

Which is all to say, sometimes it’s more pleasant to hang out with the loner beneath the maple tree. And in a world of dragon-fucking riding fantasies and enemies-to-lovers romances and superhero reboots and superhero fatigue and fatigue in general and arthouse cinema with cult followings and Oscar-bait and pop divas crooning about the ChatGPT version of Ophelia…poetry, real poetry, is the loner beneath the maple tree, waiting for you…and it’s not to kill you, but maybe, just maybe, to sit and talk for a while, or soak in the silence and the music of it all.

On that note, then, I want to develop a fully free, accessible, in-depth, fluff-and-frills-less, poetry curriculum for anyone anywhere at any stage of poetry appreciation or practice.

Maybe it’s a stupid task and maybe I should just focus on writing a viral Substack post or creating longform video content, but sooner or later we all need to face up to the biggest truth in life: you are who you are, at any given moment. (Okay, it sounded more profound in my head).

I don’t promise this is what I’ll exactly stick to, but for now, below is what I’m thinking to do on a bi-weekly or monthly basis for the next little while.

Here, I’ll cover some of the core elements of what makes a strong poetry practice and will, hopefully, help you enhance or elevate your poetry reading (and writing) experiences.

You can expect things like:

• Craft books that don’t suck and are actually helpful for fuck’s sake

• A glossary of poetic terms, both obvious and wait-what-that-too? explained in a lucid way with actual examples

• Some favorite quotes and micro-lessons from other influential and way-better-than-me poets and professors

• Core habits that make life a little easier and more poetic, potentially

• And an introduction to the different modalities of poetry (think spoken word yes but also lyrical dialogue, surreal prose, temporal ethereal music, etc. which recreates the poetic experience through language paired with another art-form or two…this is so we can learn to recognize the poetic in the mundane as well as realize the prevalence of poetry in our lives, even when we doom-scroll).

  ---

If you’re into anything rooted in literature (which, you probably are, if you’re on Substack in the first place), then I bet you’ve read a little bit about what the hell literary or artistic style is. I do feel strongly though that style, when it comes to poetry, is an entirely differnt beast than with novels, short stories, film, etc. So, I’ll try to expand on that while also touching on:

• Traditional forms and why it can be fun to “bring them back” so to speak

• Contemporary and hybrid forms

• Developing mood and focalization

• Establishing context, defying the barriers of genre, and playing with theme

• VOICE (because god damn it, someone has to set the record straight)

No, I’m not going to just hit you with a list of dead dudes and dusty timelines (though of course there will be some dead dudes because man they were good poets). I’ll also try to share what I think it means to be part of a poetic lineage of sorts and how that’s shaped by time, culture, language, war, longing, exile, sex, faith, love, power…you get the point.

I’ll try to elucidate the following:

• The multiplicity of the “canon” and what’s worth knowing about it (and also doing away with)

• Global traditions you probably weren’t taught in school but should’ve been — poetry of the Vedas, Sufi mystics, Chinese hermits, Aztec priest-poets, Bhakti saints, and so many more.

• The modernists, the meta-modernists, Beats, Confessionals, Postcolonialists, New Formalists, the what-am-I supposed-to-call-these-beautiful-weirdos-ists

• How to read across centuries without getting bored or feeling dumb

• A few guiding questions: Who are your poetic ancestors? Who are your estranged cousins? Who do you wish you’d been born alongside? Who is doing the work you want to do?

I’ll be honest I don’t quite know how I’ll shape this fourth part and maybe it’ll break up into many parts later on, but I do know that I want to talk about:

• the present culture of poetry

• current poetry publishing dynamics

• viral/popular poetry

• how to edit your own poems

• how to tell if a poem is good or bad

• poetry communities

• how to write better poems

• a bit about submitting

• what you can do to enjoy reading poems again

• and then my own favorites and recommendations of the best of the best in poetry in the here and now

Alright, that’s all for now. I don’t know if any of you will be into this, maybe I’ll get a bunch of unsubscribes, but with all my heart, I don’t care. Writing, any kind of writing, ought to be an expression of our innermost desires as well as the momentary fleeting joys that stir us like the passing train did Marilyn’s skirt (iconic image she chose to do it don’t come at me).

I wouldn’t say teaching is my innermost desire, but I did want there to be something entirely free for other wanderers and beautiful losers in the recesses of the internet searching for some kinda literary nourishment without a price tag or a paid subscription or what-have-you.

Till next time, friends.

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Stop trying to squeeze your writing into current trends, and for fuck sake stop trying to predict the next ones. Maybe you were meant for fame—moderate to grand, or maybe you were meant for obscurity, or any of the valences in between. It really doesn’t matter. Write because you can’t help it, because it’s a haunted house you keep volunteering to go back into. On a long enough timeline, we all fade away. Trust that your words will find their readers.

If you’re waiting to feel inspired, you’ll be waiting for a long time.

Write in the notes app while crying. Scribble in a physical book. Bang away on your poor keyboard. Write on the fucking walls, literally (there’s a reason all kids feel the compulsion to do this). Write in a meeting. Write when you’re tired, bored, deeply unlovable. Write sentences you don’t understand yet.

Drafts aren’t precious. Your neuroses are not sacred. No one cares about your perfection. They’ll care though about what if anything you made them feel.

Why do you think you need to get published by a certain date or age or arbitrary deadline? Time is obsolete in the face of art. When it comes to literary ambition, at the core of it, all that should matter to you is your craft. The rest, as they say, goes with god.

All your favourites wrote absolute trash at some point. You’re not special, nor above revision.

Write badly. Read good books. Write a little better. Read better books. Keep going.

What the hell are you doing reading so much writing about writing (yes, including this right here)? Go engage with some real literature, enter the worlds, stop trying to decode what works and reverse-engineer it or some such, just live inside those books for a while, and then get to work.

You’ll never write like anyone else, thank God.

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