One month until the disability issue deadline, folks. Keep those poetry submissions rolling in!

micro-season: some rather robust cardinals face off against a flock of impertinent chickadees just ahead of the first snow

Favourite Quebec micro-season:

Dentist chair found poem: let me give you your glasses so you can see your X-rays

“Don’t underestimate direct / experience. Ants know earth. Dragonflies / know air. A cobbled mind is not fatal. / You have to be willing to self-educate / at a moment’s notice…” — Diane Seuss from “My Education” in Modern Poetry It’s taken me too long to get to this book.

Micro-season: vague, fuzzy half-moon; Muppet-song; arachnids.

Crowd-sourcing question: Which songs can you think of (any genre, any style) that reference animals/creatures (any kind, order, size, eco-system, planet). Animal songs: quirky, ridiculous, serious, fun, melodic, dissonant, obscure, popular. Anything. 🙏🏻

Dream job: Poet in Residence at a conservation-minded zoo during feed-pumpkins-to-the-animals season.

“…later much later I saw / that what I had taken to be the song / was in fact the joyous concordance of / moment that would not come again” — Heather Christle, from “Perfect Song” in Paper Crown (Wesleyan University Press, 2025)

Fond MFA memory: interviewing Susan Mitchell about Erotikon for Laurence Goldstein’s contemporary poetry class. Glad to see this new poem of hers. “The kite had a will of its own, and its will / was wind which carried it the way love carries / surrender and forgiveness.” poets.org/poem/wolf-moon

I don't think students should be asked to rhetorically analyze poetry in a class before they get practice experiencing poetry without imagining it as a rhetorical structure. Like, cooking is so much better if you begin by first developing a relationship to the pleasure of food.

Micro-season: Leonard Cohen, barometer drop, waning moon sliver

The performance of reading without having read.

You wonder who they mean, but then you see. Their poison hemlock? That is you. Their brown tree snake. Their killer bee. -Amit Majmudar, 'Invasive Species' #everynightapoem We flower where we flower.

"My skull / felt empty which meant I lacked the words / to describe such emptiness.‪" I can't stop reading this poem in Geist by Sarah Wolfson @sarahwolfson.bsky.social. It gets deeper and deeper every time! www.geist.com/poetry/the-g...

Micro-season: aster on its last legs.

So good. So newly and steadily true.

“I have no quarrel with those who reject my way of writing, nor with those who reject the concept of a way of writing.” — Richard Hugo, from the into to The Triggering Town.

This morning I opened a rare older edition of a book of Robert Frost poems for young people. Tucked inside it was a temporary tattoo of a kale leaf. It’s going to be a good day.

“The sky is the mind and the mind isn’t mine / when it travels the world as ambition. // Get up, girl. / A sun is running the world.” — Fanny Howe, from “5:47” in O’Clock (Reality Street Editions, 1995)

Micro-season: The Magnetic Fields and purple aster frame heightened awareness of Diane Keaton.

Micro-season: ragged, tolerant half-moon oversees lighthearted, aging dancers in the park.

A Louise Glück miniature that appeared in The Threepenny Review in 2023. To my knowledge, it remains uncollected.

So fun reading poems on International Observe the Moon Night at Morgan Arboretum. Thanks to The Royal Astronomical Society’s Montreal branch, the Quebec Writers’ Federation, & Dark Sky Preserve for this literary/musical/astronomical collab. An honour to read with Joël Pourbaix of La poésie partout.

COMING UP: I'm teaching this one-session online class on Sunday, October 12, and I'd love for you to join! "This craft seminar will explore what is possible when we take the light as seriously as the dark."

Tonight! Ce soir! At Bellevue Observatory in McGill’s Morgan Arboretum. I’m told there will be extra telescopes on hand.

A good day so far.

The first poem of mine to be published was “Magnolia,” by Cactus Heart in 2012. In 2010 I had visited the Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington NC where my ancestor had worked as an enslaved plasterer, and I was amazed by the two 150 year-old magnolias flanking the building, trees completely unfamiliar …

Excited to play a small role in this sound, poetry, & astronomy collaboration. I’ll represent The Quebec Writers’ Federation at this bilingual International Observe the Moon Night event hosted by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Montreal. La poésie partout présentera le poète Joël Pourbaix.

Does anyone know of a meta-analysis of ungrading research? #ungrading

🚨 DEADLINE ALERT: The Walrus is accepting applications for two Editorial Fellows until 11:59 p.m. ET tonight. These are remote, paid 12-month positions, with a November 2025 start date. thewalrus.ca/about/careers/

Time to update your Palaeolithic palettes... 🔵 Very proud to share our new research on the OLDEST use of blue pigment! We identified traces of azurite - a vibrant blue mineral - on a stone object around 14-13,000 years old. Why is this so exciting? 👇🏺 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Disability: The Revolution! Special Issue Call for Submissions, Deadline November 30, 2025 If you identify as disabled and would like to answer this call, please submit! We would love to hear from you. See the full call and instructions on how to submit here: thefiddlehead.ca/revolution

No screeners for this issue, folks. I’ll be reading and responding to every poetry submission. If you identify as disabled, please submit!

Giving students thoughtful, personalized feedback and instruction is not a problem that originates from the difficulty for an instructor to generate feedback, it is a problem that originates from institutions pivoting to student:instructor ratios where that dynamic is not logistically feasible.

Christian Wiman

I hereby pledge to bungle reels for all my days.

Micro-season: Wasps donate their yellow to the leaves. Moon Phase: Kurt Vile.

People are talking about The Rapture? I imagine that event in my own strange little way in this poem published a while back in @triquarterlymag.bsky.social : www.triquarterly.org/issue-154/th...

Ah, yes, the five dreaded words: “interlibrary loan renewal request denied.”

“Somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words.” Richard Hugo

The Triggering Town was a game changer for me when I was starting out. This is the passage I always point out to beginners.

Announcing: Our Fall 2025 #WritingWorkshops! 😍 Discover a range of workshops exploring everything from playwriting and poetry to fiction and young adult literature. 👇 Learn more and sign up today👇 qwf.org/fall-2025-wo...

I AM GREATLY HONORED

To be online this week is to believe that you, too, must have — if only you search hard enough — a photo of yourself holding hands with, gazing admiringly at, standing bro-ily alongside of, listening like a disciple to, or lying in on-screen bed with Robert Redford. Grateful for his work and art.

One more by the late great Dean Young

New Absolute Units is live! Join special guest @katrinanavickas.bsky.social as we delve into the commons: the history of shared resources, the historical forces that encroached upon them, and the fight to get them back. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

Kim Addonizio’s best volume yet (and they all knock it out of the ballpark). Each book gets more intense, more purposeful, more effortless, and more capacious than the last.

Micro-season: burdocks in the dog’s ankles.