❤️ We will never forget those who tragically lost their lives on this day 56 years ago. Our thoughts are with the community of #Aberfan

Poetry is hard work but can be ecstatic: I try to teach my students making as/is an ongoing act that extends far off the page and into and out into the daily world. It is collecting. Noticing. Gathering. A few words. Something heard. A slip of memory. Shards of verbs.

I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetration for all.

In the blue night frost haze, the sky glows with the moon pine tree tops bend snow-blue, fade into sky, frost, starlight. The creak of boots. Rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know.

a cricket singing defiantly in the frost Issa

❄️Natalie Shaw x

Great radio. Important, eye-opening, entertaining. Who knew that Swansea was a base for jazz women ?!

Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. I am still in love

I hold the most archaic values on earth... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

New poetry, from me ❤️‍🔥! Avail to pre-order now V. Press 💙

Elegiac, nostalgic, summer bright with autumnal comfort. You might have a tear, you will have a smile. A lovely book from Vanessa Lampert.Seren Books.

“She wakes to the nudge of morning, feels the bedclothes trap her skin, remembers all the bones of her real feet and hands. Today, she will try again to go outside.” from Dancing in Babylon by Elaine Baker Elaine Baker vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/p/dancing-in-b…

#OnThisDay 1938 Dylan: ‘I think a poet today or any other day is most pleasurably employed writing his own poems as well as he can’

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Crux’ by Vanessa Lampert from her debut collection ‘Say it With Me’ serenbooks.com/2023/12/friday…. We recently interviewed Vanessa about the book on the #SerenPoetryPodcast. Listen & subscribe on your favourite podcast app.

Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. a hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.

Tower from Vanessa Lampert's Say It With Me Seren Books LOVE that opening line...

This week’s writing tip comes from the legendary Yusef Komunyakaa, our 2021 Lifetime Recognition Award recipient. It is excerpted from an interview with Alan Fox, for Rattle magazine: rattle.com/a-conversation… How do you decide on an ending for your poem?

Winding grain Of twisting outer spiral shell Stubby broken limbs at angles Peeled off outer layers askew; A big rock Locked in taproot clasp Now lifted to the air; Amber beads of ancient sap In powdery cracks of red dry-rot fallen away From the pitchy heartwood core.