A Worm Moon In January

Welcome to A Worm Moon, a poetry newsletter where I, Phoenix Yemi, share what I've been reading and writing through the month.

It's the end of January and this year, in the words of Hilda Dolittle, I have decided that:

I host a night of poetry and live music centred on the power of language as a tool of resistance and self-definition called Black Geographies. On Saturday 3rd February, we're doing an open-mic at Reference Point and I want to invite you to come and listen, to come and share, and to come and just say hello 💌. Here's a link to the Eventbrite and hopefully see you there.

1

A poem for January. ‘Sapling Mysteries’ after ‘Sibling Mysteries’ by Adrienne Rich. The poems are unrelated but the sapling features so heavily in this poem that when I was thinking of a title my first thought was Adrienne. The second one I though of was ‘I Want To Fly’. Do you think I made the right choice?

2

This month I’ve been hosting Poetry Night at Reference Point. I want to share with you the poems I wrote during two of our writing exercises. The first was a kind-of-cento. We were reading from Far District by Ishion Hutchinson and I took a verse from three different poems and asked everyone to write a poem using only the words from those verses. I’ll share the page below and if it resonates, try out the exercise.

We began the latest session writing list poems. I’d been thinking about the poem/song ‘The Things I Love’ by Amina Baraka and the Red Microphone, and the poem ‘Love’ by Alex Dimitrov. What they have in common is love and lists and that motion of taking stock, whether it's for gratitude or how many kinds of cats you can see on your road, you're asking your eyes to be open, to pay attention. After a little editing, this is my list poem.

3

I go back to Adrienne Rich often, and recently I’ve been repetitively reading her poem ‘Nights and Days’ from her collection The Dream of a Common Language. When I read the poem I think about the hyacinths rising like flames as the sky is dotted with stars, I think about the nineteenth-century statues, and over and over in the tone of a whisper I hear “how will we touch”. It was haunting me a little. So I wrote a poem that weaves our voices together. Below is the poem by Adrienne Rich, and the poem I wrote in adoration of her.

4

A blackout poem that began as the first three pages of the novel In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand. Desire floods the first paragraph and the need is loud. I think you can feel that in my poem.