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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 4h

Lovely. The only other poem I'm aware of containing the word equinoctial is Bishop's "Sestina."

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Don't you see / It's all we can do? John Ashbery

JOHN ASHBERY

RAIN MOVING IN

The blackboard is erased in the attic
And the wind turns up the light of the stars,
Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.
And if somewhere on this great planet
The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,
It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one
Will be better for it, but things can't get any worse.
Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step
Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see
It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires
Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set
And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living
Conspires with it, now that this is our home:
A place to be from, and have people ask about.

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Reposted by phillip crymble

gbclarkson.bsky.social @gbclarkson.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

From far out in the center of the naked lake A loon's cry came-- It was the cry of someone who owned very little. Robert Bly, Fall

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Always made a point of watching regular season and playoff games on CBC. When I lived in Ann Arbor, CBC Windsor was a lifeline. Leafs every Saturday night on basic cable, and over the airwaves. Honestly, one of the deciding factors for me in going to U-M. Criminal that they've clawed it all away.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Winter is coming, folks W.S. Merwin, born on this day in 1927

W. S. Merwin
DUSK IN WINTER

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
goes down believing in nothing
When it has gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i stand up / through your destruction / i stand up Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton

MISS ROSIE

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Still can't quite believe the stars aligned for me the way they did. What a year!

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

One of my most important teachers. Spent the best year of my life learning from her at Purdue in 99/00.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Again and again the leaves / enact their beauty Marianne Boruch

Over the Twilight Street

Fall. And the boys are cold, without jackets the football their milkweed pod
bursting over the twilight street. They jump and release themselves, crying
like birds. Hours from the morning fog
the air is chilled good water
taken from a stream
with a cupped hand. They can barely keep themselves inside their bodies, vivid as light
through leaves, though now the leaves
have their own lifetime to consider
pressing back
into trance: a red brilliance
which listens for no one, an iridescence too complete to translate. I bike by them the football spinning above me,
a blurred planet. Boys who will be men, boys who will be taken by surprise by failure. Again and again the leaves enact their beauty.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?" The sign on the wall in the Time Safari office at the end of Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952)

TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

you hear the word loaded / and a sensory constellation / is lit The Thomas Lux poem I keep coming back to

THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard.
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice.
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer wrote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally--some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirrr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows...
And "barn" is only a noun--no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.

--THOMAS LUX

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Possible. I first learned about aubades in Tillinghast's prosody workshop. So glad this got you motivated to try your hand at one.

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Reposted by phillip crymble

Ian LeTourneau @ianletourneau.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Tonight! Don't forget to sign up to receive the link!

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Reposted by phillip crymble

Kim Fahner @kimfahner.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It’s just so lovely to see so many writer friends and colleagues here in The Fiddlehead’s latest edition, a special issue titled Disability: The Revolution. Kudos to The Fiddlehead & to the editors of this special edition—Amanda Leduc, Reese Es, phillip crymble, Christine Wu, Grace R. Taylor. ❤️✨✍️📚

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Amazing. I didn't encounter Bishop until I read "The Fish" as an undergrad. My reaction was similarly epiphanic.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

In Tim Bahti's seminar, if I'm not mistaken. The outline of the Little Marvel Stove's still there on the floor of the keeping room. I have a poem about the first night I spent there on my retreat back in 2018.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Looking forward to hosting this virtual launch tomorrow. Don't forget to register. Hope to see you then!

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Yes! Got me thinking about clothing-based poems. Just posted one of my favourites.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky Anne Carson

FATHER'S OLD BLUE CARDIGAN

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face--
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Might have to bust out my battle vest for poetry weekend!

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I remember. "Brewers Retail" if I'm not mistaken. Really grateful that you thought to include my work.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A poem for the equinox by Elizabeth Bishop as it first appeared in The New Yorker 70 years ago this month. This one hits a little different if you've spent time in Bishop's childhood home.

SESTINA

September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house were both foretold by the almanac, but only known to a grandmother. The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house. Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the heartless almanac
on its string. Like a bird, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears. She shivers and says she thinks the house feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove. It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. I know what I know, says the almanac. With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

-ELIZABETH BISHOP

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Very kind of you to say, Sarah. Any "deep artfulness," if it's there at all, has been worked on over a lifetime. The "simple utterance," I believe, is culturally genetic, and a product of my upbringing. Seamus Heaney discusses it here in his preface to Beowulf.

Without some melody sensed or
promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the trans- lator's right-of-way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father's, people whom I had once described in a poem as "big voiced Scullions."
I called them "big voiced" because when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf. A simple sentence such as "We cut the corn to-day" took on immense dignity when one of the Scullions spoke it. They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Worth it for "Famous Blue Raincoat" alone.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The epigraph to Kim Addonizio's Now We're Getting Somewhere (2021)

Everybody knows the captain lied.

-- Leonard Cohen

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A Poem from my 2016 collection Not Even Laughter featuring Leonard Cohen, who was born on this day in 1934.

Music for Airports

Up late drinking Polish lager, pulling records
out of Mylar sleeves, stoned on medical sativa,
cuing tracks by Johnny Cash, The Fall, and Nico

on your second-hand Technics. While the D3s kicked
out Jackson, Pay your Rates, The End, and English
Scheme, you chain-smoked Dunhills -- browsed.

the plywood shelves for doubles, poked through
Sealtest crates. One Sunday two years later,
searching listlessly for Astral Weeks, I find the pile

of ring worn albums that you gave to me to keep--
Hot Buttered Soul, a James Last import, Space Age
percussion suites for hi-fis, Brian Eno's landmark

foray into soundscapes, its water-damaged cover
stained and wrinkled -- the disc inside like Leonard
Cohen's shy one -- unplayed and still pristine.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Why do you worry so, / when none of us is spared? Jill Bialosky

ANOTHER LOSS TO STOP FOR

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,

to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

--JILL BIALOSKY

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Came here to say this. You beat me to it, Kateri.

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Reposted by phillip crymble

Derek Pollard, PhD @doc-pollard.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Long before I became Series Editor, the Poets on Poetry Series taught me about inquiry and craft. What an honor, then, that two of our books were nominated for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the @poetry.foundation. Congratulations, @philipmetres.bsky.social and Jason Schneiderman.