TS Eliot was wrong: May is the cruellest month. It took Kathryn Bevis away. She was a beautiful human, a gifted poet and a close friend, and I don’t yet have the words for her loss. A week ago, I took the decision to go on compassionate leave. Grief is exhausting, and so is the life of a freelance poet.

Hello and thank you for joining me here at Patterns In Repeat. My name is Laura Marling and I’ve been writing songs and putting out records for nearly 20 years. Recently I’ve felt the urge to talk about the practice that has been the central preoccupation of my adult life - in some ways, as an attempt to explain it to myself.

NB: This essay was originally commissioned and published by The Dark Horse for its Autumn/Winter edition in 2020. I republish it here to complement my contribution to the recently published The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Frontline of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights. (London: Constable, 2024)

What I’m Discussing Today: Kareem’s Daily Quote: Don’t understand art? Maybe this quote will help. The Looming Danger of Justices Thomas and Alito: This man is morally and intellectually unfit. What can we do about it?

( image by Ramon Gonzalez Teja, ca 1980) “Enforced presentism is a term coined by anthropologist Jane Guyer during the pandemic to discuss the experience of being dislocated from linear time, yet stuck in the present moment without recourse to imagine a future or romanticize the past. Events that disrupt our …

THE WHO: The Poetry Edit is a weekly poetry newsletter promoting proper recompense for poets and creating opportunities within the poetry industry. The Poetry’s Dead Podcast is a weekly poetry podcast exploring the work of poets old and new, with an “Agony Poet” and a little bit of craic mixed in!

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that needs to take a little trip - thankfully a rare occurrence - to Corrections Corner. I appreciated the response to last week’s newsletter on the Ressence ‘catalogue raisonné’ but as several people pointed out (among them, awkwardly enough, people who had worked on it directly) a…

[A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595, in the National Portrait Gallery, London; image in public domain] "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”The Priory is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

FIRST, A NOTE I grew up on the Mystic River in Connecticut. I was lucky enough to spend many of my childhood summers tooling around in kayaks and rowboats, and while I loved sailing, I never truly learned the fundamentals. I recently decided to dive in again on Austin's Lake Travis, starting with dinghy sailing for beginners.

It was always going to happen; the ludicrously high expectations from last 18 ChatGPT-drenched months were never going to be met. LLMs are not AGI, and (on their own) never will be; scaling alone was never going to be enough. The only mystery was what would happen when the big players realized that the jig was up, and that scaling was not in fact “All Y…

Dear Friends, Happy Wonder Wednesday (on Thursday)! I’m just back from a week in Paris, where I have the joy of teaching in NYU’s low-res MFA each summer. The best part is always being with others writers, though savory tarts = close second. As I cruised along the Seine, I found myself blinking at the steel marvel perennially featured in perfume ads. How E…

Hello Friends, We hope you are having a great spring season filled with inspiration! Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter—it’s filled with creative opportunities for you and your writing: our annual Online Poetry Retreat is back; award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield will join us for a Zoom conversation; our Chapbook Prize is accepting submissions; and we have just released a new book in our Wilder Prize Poetry Book Series!

If you find your true voice, bring it to the land of the dead. There is kindness in the ashes. And terror in non-identity. A little girl lost in a ruined house, this fortress of my poems. I write with the blind malice of children pelting a madwoman, like a crow, with stones. No—I don’t write: I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send me…

Last night Symphony Space hosted an evening celebrating Joan Baez’s book of poetry When You See My Mother Ask Her To Dance. We read her poems talked of writing, activism, and the creative process, not without a good measure of humor. No singing, the music contained in her words. When I listened to Joan, a senior in high school in 1964, it never came to…

Today Eden Ahbez would get called a one-hit wonder. That’s how the music business mocks artists who enjoy a brief taste of fame—a short stay on the chart followed by a lifetime of obscurity. In Ahbez’s case, his hit was “Nature Boy.” This odd song, released as a single by Nat King Cole on March 29, 1948, sold a million copies and climbed to the top of th…

Dreamlike is this week’s series of posts. A collection of my inner thoughts on writing, art, poetry. One a day, June 10-June 17. A challenge to myself, a bizarre thought experiment on pretentiousness, an examination of why I do what I do (write like a madwoman).

HEALTH - LIBERTY - HAPPINESS SUPPORT DOC MALIK This is how I feel amongst the medical profession. Please sign up to my paid substack so that I can speak up for your freedom and fight the tyranny. Spotif…

Turkish is my mother tongue. The language of my grandmother, poetry and dreams. The amorphous shapes appearing in the dregs left at the bottom of coffee cups, waiting to be read. The sound of wind chimes. It is the smell of earth after a sudden storm, when you inadvertently search yourself, check your flesh, not sure…

Dear friends, This week was an anniversary of a dear friend, Glenn, who died suddenly in the early days of Covid. June of 2020. The 4th. I got a phone call from his magnificent daughter, and — because I usually get texts, not calls, from her — I wondered if something was wrong. Something was wrong. She had to tell her dad’s friends that he’d died. My go…

Dear authors, I’m happy to be writing you on this final day of Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer – have you been participating in it too? Whether you have (and want to keep the magic going), or not at all, I’m excited to share that our own writing challenge launches tomorrow 15 June.

Seventh Heaven Standing at the Back Door of Happiness: And How I Unlocked It David Roche Harbour Publishing 192 pages, softcover The cover of Standing at the Back Door of Happiness features a startling photo of the author David Roche, the left side of his face mottled by an overgrowth of veins. The octogenarian has lived with the vascular malformation his en…

Hey poets — this bulletin is late, because I’ve been spending time with family, walking in the woods with my dad, stopping for trilliums whenever we find them. We recently found out he has cancer, and the most honest thing I can say is that when he’s not well, I’m not well… We’re sorting out what this means in the near-term, and I’m listening for where …

Welcome to your Wednesday instalment of Londonist: Time Machine. We’ve featured quite a few maps in this newsletter over the past year and… well, here we go again. Today, I’d like to share with you a newly created map of medieval London that is, quite frankly, astonishing in its detail. That’s after…

After thousands of you voted in the Trump Haiku Contest Runoff, we have a winner! This TBR Contest Special newsletter features the winning poem, analysis of the voting, and an exclusive interview with the triumphant poet. Contestants were asked to submit haikus on this theme: “Trump’s innermost musings as he sits in court.”