Dear Friends,
First, hello from Ledbury, where I gave a reading and moderated the discussion between the three prizewinners of the Ledbury Poetry Prize. In lieu of the usual totes or notebooks, festival speakers were gifted Oak saplings. I know: delightful. It also means that, by the end of the festival, I had several live trees in my hotel room. Pretty sure Homeland Security would have flagged this, so I ended up donating mine to the hotel, which had a lovely back garden.
Since last week was full of travel (seriously, five cities in one week), I didn’t have a chance to put Poems for Your Weekend together, but hope you will, instead, accept these Poems for your Week.
They are largely inspired by poets I heard from or met over the last week, or from lovely readers who came up to me at the festival with their own suggestions of works I should include in future installments!
Before we get going: I’m in conversation with the lovely Alina Stefanescu (a fellow Romanian poet!), who will be leading a session called “Flaschenpost" in the Present: Sending Poems Across Language and Time.
In the darker moments of the 20th century, writers congregated around a notion conveyed in correspondence, lectures, and poetry—namely, the Flaschenpost, or "message in bottle," described by Paul Celan via Osip Mandelstam, who imagined the poet as “the shipwrecked sailor who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment,” leaving the poem as a “testament of the deceased” that would find “its secret addressee." This workshop will explore poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Rilke. Poets will be invited to develop their own Flaschenpost.
Free for CWC members, $50 for non-members.
Now, on to our poems.
I do hope some of these poets will, especially for US readers, be new discoveries! Let me know which most spoke to you.
xM
Doors to my writing community Conscious Writers Collective open again on August 1. Poets, essayists, and fiction writers meet five times a month for classes and coaching by me, publishing experts, and some of the best writers in the world. All classes are recorded + membership gives you access to 150+ hours of curriculum. It’s a uniquely supportive, life-changing community. Enrollment is limited. Join the waitlist here. ✨
"Wild Honey" and "Of Mutability", both quite relevant just now, struck deep chords in me, resonating in ways that guarantee a spot in my memory.
“winter softened in the tropic of his strength” On the Poetry Foundation website there is a recording of Declan Ryan reading “Rope-a-Dope” and I can still hear him reading it here. Such a wonderful poem, as are all the rest.