In the postscript to his anthology of masterful translations of Song Dynasty poets, Shangyang Fang writes

Ancient Chinese poets lived in close communion with nature, filling their verses with blossoms, plants, and landscapes.

The poems of the Song era are marked by a lack of articles, prepositions, and other linking words, in a way that’s evidently hard to render into English:

[…] without explicit markers such as “I”, “you,” “it,” or “we,” the distinction between observer and observed becomes blurred, leaving emotions and images to float unanchored. The language relies heavily on juxtaposition and association.1

The natural world thus takes on a heightened significance in these ephemeral verses: not only as a repository of symbolic meaning2, but also as a kind of body unto itself; in some sense, the natural world stands in for the bones of a speaker who is scantly present.

Take, for example, this translation chosen at random from Fang’s book Study of Sorrow:

After dark, coupled wood ducks
drowsing at the pond’s edge. Thin moonlight

cuts through cloud to emblazon the blossoms,
whose small thumbs ply their shadows.3

The blossom’s ‘thumbs’ endow them with a seemingly human agency — even more so than the human speaker in the piece, who engages passively with music and gazing into a mirror. In poems from the Song era, it often seems to be nature which is alive and manipulating and governing the surrounding world, rather than humans.

On Saying Nothing

The poems in Joanna Klink’s latest book, Days & Chances, both ‘speak through nature’ and interrogate the first and second person as speaking voices in the poem. In this sense they strike me as having significant similarities to the Song Dynasty poems I’ve been reading lately.

Like the Song poems, many of the poems in this book seem to be almost incidental, beginning with a description of the external world. For instance “Line From Memory”, which opens with:

Out the door now. In gathering
dusk the bridge lights have come on.

Or “Hospital Interior”:

Snow — a thin veiled wash
across the parking lot.

Or “Sand Woods”:

Returning home. No more
talk of mathematics
and Dutch history.

There is no use of personal pronouns in these openings; the world is depicted with small — almost economical — and precise brush strokes. Drawing our focus to the outer world, the speaker of these poems lives at the nexus of her observations.

But not only is the world keenly observed in these poems — forming a moodscape upon which the action of the poem unfolds — it’s almost as if the speaker is part of the exterior, natural world, indistinguishable from it:

[…] We cloud over
in plastic chairs, we
rattle drinks to cool
our throats. Whole
seasons pass
through us. A fish
leaps from a still pond.
What for?4

The self is conceptualised as a kind of landscape or perhaps a sky — something through seasons can ‘pass’, and which ‘cloud[s] over’. This is heightened, in this particular extract, by the somewhat ambiguous ‘we’, which almost seems to invite the reader into the poem.

In Klink’s new poems there is a constant play of juxtaposition; a constant restless shifting between inner and outer. This reminds me very much of Fang’s framing of the Song dynasty poems, which I cited above.

For instance, I can’t help but feel that the line ‘A fish / leaps from a still pond’ in the extract above is somehow a commentary on the preceding ‘Whole / seasons pass / through us’. Like the ‘seasons’, the fish passes from one medium (water) to another (air) and back again; it is an image of transition or motion. But its power as a metaphor (if it is indeed that) is gained purely through juxtaposition — its position within the poem, one line adjacent to another.5

IYou

Fang describes the use of pronouns in the popular ci poetry of the Song era thusly:

“I” pretend to be “you” so “I” can speak to “me” […] the “I” must first be abandoned to speak and be heard.

This idea of abandoning the “I” seems to me to be central to Klink’s poetic project. In her essay on Celan, Klink describes how a Celan poem “travels from I to you, where the you is the source of the real”6. It is from the encounter of the “I” and “you” in a poem that, writes Klink, “a world begins to emerge, to be witnessed.”

The speaker of Klink’s poems often seems to address herself in the second person, for instance in the second stanza of “Age At The Beginning of Knowing”:

Those friends and strangers, they were more
you than yourself. Now blood moves
like mist within my veins, my legs
tenuous against the dirt. Gray trees
glowing sticks bleached from winter.

Here, friends and even strangers too are “more / you than yourself”. And this encounter seems to make something happen in the poem: “[n]ow blood moves / like mist within my veins…”, writes Klink, as if the recognition in the previous sentence has caused the blood to start moving in the “tenuous” legs of the speaker; as if this encounter with the outside has itself caused life to happen. Suddenly even “[g]ray trees” are “glowing sticks bleached from winter.”

In Song-era ci poetry, the poem was a straightforward form of ventriloquism: frequently composed by men who desired other men, these poems were intended to be sung by women. They were a way of one man communicating his feelings to another in a way that was socially acceptable, at a time when public displays of homosexuality were forbidden. In Klink’s work, the play of pronouns seems to be part of the poet’s project of locating a self which she describes in “Two Trees” as “[…] always / unsure. Merely in attendance / on the good days.”

Stepping Away

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve recently been reading a lot of Song Dynasty poetry whilst simultaneously thinking about Joanna Klink’s poetry that I’ve noticed the similarities between pieces of art created over a thousand years apart. But poetry is weird, particularly poetry which really tries to probe at the essence of what it means to be here, now. What’s interesting is that Song-era poetry came about in the way that it did in part because of a specific cultural context, very different from the world we inhabit in 2026. Trying to think about that context and why it led people to craft poems in the way they did can perhaps offer useful angles on understanding a contemporary poet whose work can sometimes seem evasive and unclear, who is trying to use her craft to get at the essence of being.

Recently I’ve been reading my first Ada Limón book, Bright Dead Things. I’d wanted to read Limón for a while, in part because she’s a name which crops up quite often when listening to contemporary poets talk about poetry or discuss their favourite poems, and in part because I heard a great podcast featuring Limón, who speaks intelligently and sensitively about what it means to be a poet. I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about.

Bright Dead Things was published in 2015, and was Limón’s first published book written after she moved from New York City to rural Kentucky in 2011. A lot of the book’s poems seem to deal with this transition, which was closely associated with Limón’s marriage; many of the poems also deal with this transition in terms of/as a part of marital life, for instance “The Last Move”, which opens with the lines ‘It was only months when I felt I had been / washing the dishes forever.’ Or “Down Here”, which opens with an observation on rural stillness:

The dog does this beautiful thing,
it waits. It stills itself and determines
that the waiting is essential.

I wanted to write about “How far away we are”, a poem from towards the beginning of the collection which made me turn back for the first page to check the book’s publication date. I wasn’t surprised when I discovered that it was published in 2015, and wanted to try and articulate some of what that intuition was about.

‘We could be in that same safe place’

From the vantage point of 2026, consumed as we are by debates about AI, seemingly surrounded by war, a sense of doom when it comes to climate change, historic youth unemployment (the list goes on!), 2015 seems almost quaint. In 2015 I had only just graduated university. Brexit and the first Trump Presidency were still a year away; Covid and its lockdowns — half a decade.

“How far away we are” seems to emanate from this different, more optimistic era, when conversation still offered the possibility of a kind of communion.

So we might understand each other better:
I’m leaning on the cracked white window ledge
in my nice pink slippers lined with fake pink fur.
The air conditioning is sensational. Outside,
we’ve put up a cheap picnic table beneath the maple
but the sun’s too hot to sit in, so the table glows
on alone like bleached-out bones in the heat.
Yesterday, so many dead in Norway. Today,
a big-voiced singer found dead in her London flat.
And this country’s gone standstill and criminal.
I want to give you something, or I want to take
something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
and the ear holding on to it. Maybe we could meet
at that table under the tree, just right out there.
I’m passing the idea to you in this note:
the table, the tree, the pure heat of late July.
We could be in that same safe place watching
the sugar maple throw down its winged seeds
like the tree wants to give us something too —
some sweet goodness that’s so hard to take.

It’s funny that this poem’s title seems to preempt a reading of it as a description of a time and place which ‘we’ are now ‘far away’ from. Almost as if Limón somehow knew that this moment wouldn’t last, or perhaps the poem was already mourning something which was on its way out.1

The poem opens quite baldly with the line ‘[s]o we might understand each other better’, stating its intention that the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ of the poem — roughly, the reader and the speaker — will reach a place of mutual recognition. That is the purpose of this poem.

Then there is a straightforward, almost brusque articulation of the stakes, right in the middle of the piece: ‘I want to give you something, or I want to take / something from you.’ The play of understanding, at heart, involves just this — giving and taking.2 And the poet wants to suffer it; she wants ‘to feel the exchange’.

But it’s the last line of which I love most of all, with its dual readings: ‘hard to take’ in the sense of, ‘difficult to bear’, but also ‘hard to take’ in the sense of ‘difficult to steal, to remove.’ And that it’s the ‘winged seeds’ which are ‘throw[n] down’ — something which has wings — and should thus rightly fly — being given to us, ‘throw[n] down’ almost like a gauntlet.

This ending reminds me of the final lines of The Duino Elegies, where Rainer Maria Rilke writes of

the
overwhelming benediction
of happiness descending.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies (trans. Robert Hunter)

Although “How far away we are” does contain an underlying note of threat — the meeting-place of the table is ‘like bleached-out bones in the heat’; the ‘white window ledge’ / picket fence is ‘cracked’; threatening news arrives from far-off places in the world — there’s a kind of gentle resoluteness to the voice throughout, a certainty that the poem itself can at least make a consistent through-line of thought; argue its way through to the end.

Or at least the idea of that certainty is felt.

This post started as an attempt to figure out the similarities between writing software and writing poetry, but I quickly realised that would make for too long and complex a piece. Instead, I decided to focus here on one dimension of that original post: the way logic and argument works in poetry — one of poetry’s qualities which I think makes it, strangely, a distant cousin of software engineering. This post analyses one poem in particular to understand its argumentative structure, and show how argument contributes to the feelings evoked by the poem.

People who know me as a software engineer are often surprised when I tell them I write poetry in my spare time (sometimes the surprise goes the other way, too). I think this is because, on the face of it, software and poetry seem as if they couldn’t be more different: whilst poetry seems to have something to do with, amongst other things, expressing one’s emotions and ambiguity and beauty, software engineering seems to be something cool, logical and dispassionate.1

However, I think that the two disciplines have more in common than they might seem to at first glance. In this post I want to sketch out how logic or argument works in poetry, which is one of the qualities I think a well-made poem shares with a well-crafted piece of software.2

Argument

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following definition of argument:

a coherent series of reasons, statements, or facts intended to support or establish a point of view3

An argument must be coherent, involve the chaining together in series of a set of statements, or facts, and its end goal is to establish a point of view. I think this describes quite well one of the main goals of poetry: to effectively communicate the poet’s worldview.4

Take this short piece by Li Qingzhao, a well-known Song dynasty poet:5

Last night, the rain was sparse,
the wind sudden.

Sleep did not dissolve
the last of the wine.

When asked, the girl
rolling up my curtains
says the flowering crab apples
are still 'the same.'

But don't you know? Don't you know?
The green will thicken and the red thin.

The first two stanzas present the poem’s opening facts. We are told that the speaker was either watching harsh weather or outside in it. We know that she was drunk, or had at least been drinking, and slept badly as a result. We know that she is reminiscing (“Last night”), which establishes an almost elegiac framing for the piece. The subtext of these facts is that the expected effects of sleep — to wipe one day away in favour of the next — has been disturbed; the speaker is still affected by the events of the previous night, whatever they were.6

The content of the first stanza seems significant to me: the world described therein is not a friendly one — the wind is ‘sudden’; the rain, although definitely present, is ‘sparse’. What we are being told, I think, is that this is a cold and unpredictable world where even something unwanted (the rain) cannot be reliably found. This contrasts with the mood of the second couplet, which seems to imply companionship (a drinking companion?). The poem is making subtle opening moves to juxtapose the human and the natural orders.

But it’s the third and fourth stanzas where the poem’s argument is really revealed. In the third, the speaker asks a servant about the state of some crab apple blossoms outside her window: she wants to know if the scene has changed; perhaps if the flowers are gone, blown away by the previous night’s harsh wind. The servant’s response — that they are ‘the same’ — seems to distress her. The implication here is thus that the speaker had expected the scene to have changed; that she knows that time has moved on, and she expects that to be reflected in the natural order of things. Her distress arises from the conflict between this expectation and its (reported) reality; that nothing has changed.7

The fourth and final stanza synthesises the poem’s argument and takes the whole thing in a new direction: looking forward, to future time that will pass fleetingly:

The green will thicken and the red thin.

Such is the movement of time, it’s almost as if the future is over before it has arrived. Indeed, in the mind of the speaker, it already has arrived. Her appeal seems to leap right off the page, directed towards the reader rather than the servant, lending these lines emotional force.8 The closing stanza almost operates as a kind of inversion: it’s not the natural order that advances time, but rather human expectation.

In my view, this is the central argument of the poem: the passing of time is inescapable (it is part of the natural order), yet it is also our human fear of its passing which grants it its power over us; its capacity to arouse emotion. In preempting or anticipating the passing of time, we almost seem to bring it about.9

Conclusion

It’s not often that I’ve heard poems discussed in terms of their logic or argument, and it might strike some as a strange thing to do, but I think it’s the argument of a poem — and how well-built that argument is — which gives a poem its sense of ‘journey’. Although they may be non-linear, and rely heavily on imagery, poems are definitely ‘a coherent series of reasons, statements, or facts’. We know when we’ve gotten to the end of the argument because we can feel it in our bodies: a moment of understanding why we’ve been engaging with the thing we’re engaged with. And it’s when that argument has been fully played out that we see the poet’s ‘point of view’. A well-argued poem makes us look again at the world and reveals something new to us.

Joanna Klink is an unusual poet by the standards of 2026: she has a vanishingly small public presence and doesn’t use any social media. In a 2023 interview with Holly Amos, when discussing the internet, Klink states that “we don’t need it”, and that, in spite of its benefits, “it’s also harmful”, which perhaps explains her reluctance to build an online presence.

When I first became interested in her work, around ten years ago, there were only one or two interviews with her available online: it was very difficult to get much of a sense of who Klink was, beyond what was happening in the work itself.

Personally I find this somewhat refreshing: it’s easy to get a bit cynical about the world of contemporary poetry, which seems very focused on social media presence and the personality (constructed or otherwise) of the poet behind the work. It can easily feel as if we’re all more interested in gossip or biography than the words on the page1.

I wanted to write this post to introduce Klink — a poet I’m a great fan of — to a wider audience, and share a couple of the things I find distinctive about her work.

Late Summer, Childhood

The initial motivation to write this post were two new poems published by Klink in issue fifty-eight of The Adroit Journal, “Late Summer, Childhood” and “Footings”. To my eye, both these poems exhibit familiar traits of Klink’s voice.

“Late Summer, Childhood” opens with the lines

August, listless. A glaze
of heat on skin. The slow
smear of roads
below thick air. [...]

The opening of the poem with a brief phrase loosely — almost curtly — situating the reader in a moment and a mood, is typical of Klink’s work. Compare the beginning of the earlier “Aerial”:

Scissors     embers     misnomers     Are you this

loneliness of hands     Do you burrow past kindness

In both poems, the opening details are at once particular and spare: scissors, embers, misnomers, August, listlessness; a mixture of concrete and abstract. For me, they give a sense of something remembered: blurry, with a few specific details picked out.

These openings feel both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’, building up a dense, material world infused with human mood and emotion; yet with lots of room for ambiguity. They both situate us but also leave us with a sense of drifting or floating in the world of the poem; at once anchored and loose.

Similarly to “Aerial”, “Late Summer, Childhood” follows its opening remarks with a series of questions:

[...] What is it
in the luxuriant trees
that drapes onto lawns.
What in the sun
rippling through a glass of
ice. [...]

Once again, the details in this opening are once again both sparse or anonymous — but also rich with description (e.g. the wonderful “drapes” and “luxuriant trees”). This twofoldness is a hallmark of Klink’s technique.

It’s also interesting to consider what the questions seem to be asking. Both are directing the reader to look at something which isn’t quite present — something “in the luxuriant trees” or “in the sun” (emphasis mine). We are told that this thing “drapes onto lawns” or “rippl[es] through a glass of / ice” — in other words, whatever it is, it seems to be defined by transit, by passing-through.

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Furthermore, the lack of question marks — very common in Klink — lends a kind of body to the questions — we know they are questions, yet we are not sure if the speaker actually wants an answer to these questions, nor who the questions are addressed to.

What does it mean to pose a question which doesn’t really want answering? They seem at once destined for the reader but also travel beyond us, too.

Klink seems to be pointing towards something numinous: at once out of reach, but simultaneously appreciable if a “luxuriant” attention is paid to the objects of the physical world; a glass of ice, a tree on a lawn.

The remainder of the first section of “Late Summer, Childhood”, closes out Klink’s argument:

We cloud over
in plastic chairs, we
rattle drinks to cool
our throats. Whole
seasons pass
through us. A fish
leaps from a still pond.
What for?

What I’m particularly interested in here is the use of the first-person plural “we”. Who is this “we”? Who does it encompass, who exclude? Does it perhaps just denote the speaker herself (a kind of ‘royal we’), or is this a gesture intended to bring the reader into the poem?

As before, there is a sense that this “we” or “us” is something through which other forces transit: “Whole / seasons pass / through us.” Are “we” like the aforementioned “glass of ice”, or the “tree”, then — not in fact the subject of the poem, but an entity that the poem stages in order to talk about something which cannot otherwise be adequately rendered in direct experience?2

Klink often uses the ‘we’ in her poems as a way, it seems to me, to broaden or soften the speaker into the wider landscape of her poetry. I think she is asking us to broaden her view, look up from our phones; to zoom out or blend in.

Second person singular

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
time returns to the shell.

In the mirror is Sunday,
in the dream we sleep,
the mouth speaks true.

— Paul Celan, “Corona”, trans. Pierre Joris

In her 2000 article You. An Introduction to Paul Celan, Klink both defends Celan against the charge of hermeticism — writing poetry that is inaccessible, inherently closed-off — and also writes, significantly, “The IYou relation is the irreducible structure in Celan's poetry, the condition of possibility of anything happening at all within the poem.”3 .

In other words, Celan’s poems attempt to relate the ‘I’ of the speaker to the ‘you’ — an addressee, who may be absent, lost, or not yet arrived.

I think this is why I frequently have the sense that the speaker in Klink’s poems is using ‘you’ to talk to herself, as one would — for instance — if one wanted to calm oneself down; that what Klink most wants with her poems is to break through to herself.

Two poems which I think illustrate this quite well are “Apology”, from Klink’s second collection Circadian, and the more recent “Elegy”, from The Nightfields.

Apology

“Apology” opens with a direct address to a second person:

Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me
and I believe you.

Although softly-spoken, this is a demanding opening line-and-a-half. Is it the speaker or the ‘you’ who is “disturbed”? What is it, exactly, that the speaker “believe[s]” of the you?

I think the most we can glean here, before proceeding, is that the purpose of the “you” in this poem is to present a challenge to (and perhaps interrogate) the “I”. Or, to put it in the terms of Klink’s essay on Celan, the “you” represents “something [...] broken-through-to”.

“Apology” continues by sketching the outlines of a debate:

[...] How could I not feel
you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass,
or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving.
If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you.
It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant.

The imagery in this passage is that of absence or perhaps death: “books stacked clean on glass”, “surfaces grow[ing] so distant” and, of course, “the snow”. As before, this imagery is both specific and also filled with emptiness; transparency.

But it’s the syntax of these lines which is most curious: from the opening question-which-is-not-a-question — which almost feels broken off before it is definitively asked — to “outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving”.

On the one hand, the speaker is probing for something: she wants to know (“How could I not feel”, she asks). On the other, there seems to be some ambivalence about the prospect of knowledge: the speaker is herself incomplete; “still arriving”.

If the speaker of the poem is herself somewhat uncertain or porous, there’s a sense that this instability or doubt extends to the addressee, too.

There are two key moments in the poem which I think illustrate this. The first occurs roughly in the middle of the piece:

And if you mean me, I believe you.

The chiasmus-like structure of this end-stopped line — coming as it does after the poem’s meandering opening section — seems to gently imply that the addressee of the poem — the person being apologised-to — is not in fact another person, but the speaker herself.

For me, this takes me back to the end of the first line: “you stay trailing in me”. The poet seems to be suggesting quite strongly that the “you” being addressed is entwined in the body or voice of the speaker.

The next moment which illustrates Klink’s use of “you” occurs in the second half of the poem:

and should you fold into me—trackless, misspent,
too much arranged—I might believe you
but swiftly shut, lines of smoke rising through snow,
[...]

Klink seems to be clearly articulating here that the ‘you’ can really become part of the ‘me’, the speaker of the poem. It is this ‘folding’ which gives rise to the possibility of belief — fully trusting in the existence of another — before this is retracted (“but swiftly shut”).

Like smoke and snow, then, the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of “Apology” will both continue on their drift as vague, nebulous presences — but not join.

The final statement of the poem seems to suggest, paradoxically, the possibility of recognition via dissolution:

In these hours when snow shuts, it may be we empty,
amounting to something. How could I not
wait for those few words, which we might enter.

It is when “we empty” that we could “amount[…] to something”. Rather than ‘folding’ into one another, it is language which provides a meeting place — a place “we might enter”, in spite of everything.

Elegy

The more recent “Elegy”, to my eye, presents a clearer picture of the “IYou” dynamic which is nonetheless similar to the one depicted in “Apology”. In some sense, I read “Elegy” as a re-articulation of “Apology” by a poet who has matured and has gained an understanding of her subject matter.

Traditionally, an elegy has three phases:

1. Sorrow, despair, loss.

2. Reflection and remembrance.

3. Acceptance or consolation.

Klink’s elegy follows this structure quite cleanly, opening with a description of a collapse, thematically linked to the kinds of disasters which affect the natural world:

I saw you fall to the ground.
I saw the oaks fall.  The clouds collapsed.
I saw a wildness twist through your limbs
and fly off.

The phrases here are short and declarative; definitive. The repetition of “saw” lends a forcefulness to the lines, which I think solidifies the boundary between the speaker-I and the subject-you.

The final phrase describes the “wildness” as if it’s birdlike; as in “Late Summer, Childhood”, humans are portrayed as beings possessed by other elemental, animalistic forces. The loss we suffer is out of our control.

The moment of elegaic reflection or remembrance comes at almost exactly the halfway mark, on line eight (the poem is eighteen lines long):

You left that night and we stayed,
our arms braced with weight.  What power
there was was over.  But I switched on the light
by the porch to see if anything was falling—
and it fell, a few glints in the air,

In particular, the beautiful “What power / there was was over” lifts the elegiac mood to its full potential: the force has gone out of something (it’s not clear if this is due to a bereavement or injury or loss), and yet the characters in the poem must go on (“But I switched on the light…”; I wanted to see).

One aspect of Klink’s skill that I greatly admire is her ability to convey the full emotion of the poem without giving us biographical details or really relying on narrative. This makes the poem both more universal (these speakers could be any of us, they are not tied to a specific time or place), and also more devotional.

It is at this moment of emotional crisis in “Elegy” that a “we” is brought in (“and we stayed”). On the one hand, ‘we’ seems quite clearly to denote the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ brought together (“our arms braced with weight”); on the other, it’s complicated: how could there be a ‘we’ if the ‘you’ has already “left”?

One way of reading this line — similar to the moment of dissolution at the end of “Apology” — is that the possibility of communion arises when the characters let go of their egos. That is, I can see a reading of the opening “You left” as ‘the person that you had been, you with your ego’ had left, giving room for a new “we” to emerge.

Or perhaps what’s being described here is a genuine absence, and the ‘we’ is pointing towards memory — ‘what we once were, together’4.

Or perhaps there are three characters in the poem, and the “we” is gesturing towards a couple left over when a third person has “left”.

Similarly to “Apology”, the moment of consolation or acceptance in “Elegy” is brought about by the snow — another kind of falling, echoing the opening of the poem, where the falling seems clearly to be that of a human. The single long sentence in the second half of the poem, with its drifting phrases, seems to embody the movement of falling snow:

and it fell, a few glints in the air,
catching sun although there was no sun,
and the long descent over hours, all night,
seemed like years, and we buried our faces
in what came to rest on the ground
or moved our feet over it, effortless,
as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.

The faces “buried” in the snow evoke of course the burial that awaits all of us in death; a moment of renunciation. And the span of the snowfall comes to stand for “years”: a moment where geological time and human time are brought into close contact.

In true fidelity to the elegiac mood, the last line of “Elegy” brings about a new understanding of what has been lived through: the snow’s falling is “effortless, / as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.” We have gone through an experience and learned something about our lives.

“After all these years, the visions continue”

In recent work — from The Nightfields on — I’ve detected a new concern in Klink’s work, around aging. The poems feel in many cases more brittle and doubting than her earlier work, as if the process of growing old is one of scattering and dissolution, rather than consolidation.

There is also more anxiety about what the meaning of a life dedicated to poetry might have been. As a way of closing out this piece, I’d like to consider what is beautifully and somewhat devastatingly put in the second section of “Late Summer, Childhood”:

[...] What is it, Joanna.
After all these years, the visions
continue and I can’t make
out who I’ve been, and is it
a fault I tell myself
what I want most is to be
helpful? I watch my parents
work to sustain the day
when their legs won’t
brace them, their eyes
packed with clouds.

There’s so much I could say about these lines.

Once again, there is a sense of the reader placing questions like seeds — not to be answered, per se; but instead to echo and inform the course of the poem. Questions which open us, rather than close us (by having a ready answer).

Then there is an almost distressed evocation of the poetic project — “the visions / continue” yet the speaker “can’t make / out who [she has] been”. It’s as if poetry’s promise of understanding or depth or awareness hasn’t been fulfilled5.

Finally, the speaker turns outwards again: towards her parents, working against the failure of their human bodies.

Their “eyes” being “packed with clouds” (I take this as an allusion to cataracts) is a wonderful final image of the natural world reclaiming their bodies, all the while directing the eye of the reader to the sky — the realm of birds and angels, of the immaterial soul.

It is an image that’s ambivalent in a way that’s typical of Klink: there’s no promise of redemption here — no world other than the one in which we live — but the force of the image itself, and the music of the words, really serves to stop the reader, I think, and make us look at what the poem is showing us. It makes us look up and pay attention.

Joanna Klink’s new book Days & Chances will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026.

Yesterday, Ben published a recording of me reading this poem on the 14poems Instagram page. I thought I’d repost it here, for any followers who don’t use that particular form of social media.

You can find a copy of Klausenpass below.

Kombucha is a new project I’m trying out: to publish my diaries — or sections of them — in public. To share my inner world, such as it is, with the outside: with both those who know me, my dear friends, and also anonymously — with the wider internet. Aside from occasionally obfuscating names, I will otherwise try to be extremely sparing in my edits to these entries. If you continue to follow these entries, my intention is that you will be seeing them ‘raw’, as I first put them to the page1.

I came to this idea when I realised recently that the most exciting and radical writing I was doing was occurring in the pages of my journal. I think this is, at least in part, because I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I wasn’t writing a “poem”. I didn’t have any particular audience in mind. I was writing for myself, writing because I needed to write. I was — I am — trying to think through the things which were troubling me — which are troubling me. These are things which I have a visceral need to think through; both on the page and with my body. Because I had this need, I didn’t try to make the ideas presentable, to dress them up. And so they came into the world naked, like we all do…

There is both a personal and cultural history to this project. Perhaps it goes without saying, but: we live in an age of unprecedented moral and cultural disarray, of constant war and destruction, and the planetary-scale rape of ecosystems. We are probably on the cusp of a fearsome and godlike kind of intelligence — artificial intelligence — whose inner workings we won’t be able to understand, and whose disposition towards us as a species is at best unknown. Many people — and I do not exclude myself from this camp — might argue that we have already in fact achieved this new kind of alien intelligence. And all the while we as a collective seem to have learned nothing, and the blood continues to flow…

I don’t think the human body evolved to deal with such constant states of agony and extremity. Perhaps saints are evolved to deal with such states — or demons. But most of us are neither of those things. And while we are certainly not the first peoples to have faced a crisis of meaning, there is something about the scale and voracity of what we’re face to face with today that feels new; uniquely ferocious, uniquely millennial. Haruki Murakami has written about how there was a certain ease to things in the nineteen-sixties; one felt that it was still somehow possible, he says, to have an impact upon the world, in some tangible, material way. If one thing defines our current era, I feel it’s how much to the opposite of that we are: the possibility of something like revolution strikes us — me — as almost quaint. As something beyond impossible, belonging to the realms of fiction.

At the same time, this is a personal journey for me: I started writing when I was a teenager, around the time when I came of age, which coincided with the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It was a moment when the material certainties which had underpinned my childhood world seemed to be falling away, or were — at the very least — being called into question. Many lies that we had collectively been told — that we had told ourselves — were suddenly in the public eye and visible to all. The reasons we had for living the lives that we were living no longer made any sense, began to come undone. It was, as Jack Kerouac might describe it, a “naked lunch” kind of moment.

And it was and is an event which has had reverberations throughout the culture — particularly in the part of the world where I live, in Western Europe — right up to the present moment. It is not an understatement to say that the crisis of 2007-2008 has shaped the culture, at least from where I stand. And my response to this was to start to write.

It goes without saying, but I don’t know how this project will work out. I honestly don’t. And I must confess that it scares me, it deeply scares me. I’ve never tried anything like this before, and perhaps I’ll find that I can’t do it; or, specifically, that I can’t do it in public: maybe there’s something inherent to the privacy of journal-writing which gives that particular document — those documents — their force. Something which just doesn’t translate into the public domain. There are certain things in this world which need to be kept a secret, after all, in order to function, in order to survive; that’s just how it is. And I know this. And a small, scared, and vulnerable part of me almost evilly wishes that such turns out to be the case with this project. Because it would spare me from finding out where such honesty might lead. It would mean that I could return to my private world perhaps unchanged, or unscathed.

Actually what I hope — what a better part of me hopes — is that doing this in public will make it a sharper blade. A sharper, more precise way to cut back against the layers of pretension, hypocrisy, deeply-entrenched self-flattery, vanity, and moral decay that we all — to some extent or other — must engage in to get by. The rot which surrounds and engulfs the contemporary heart. A rot that perhaps poets must engage in, more than others…

I’ve got this friend who calls me coca-cola. He says I’m his favourite fizzy drink. Kombucha is a fizzy drink too, made from fermenting tea with sugar and live bacterial cultures. It is effervescent and slightly sweet. You can make it from green tea and black tea although black tea is most commonly used. It probably originated in China but is now a global business worth somewhere over a billion dollars, popularised in the West as a kind of feel-good health drink, an alternative to alcohol. I was drinking it as I wrote this article and that’s where I got this name from. This strange, alive, fizzy drink contains bacterial organisms which are thought to be good for your gut, for your digestion, for that other part of us that “thinks”.

A note on how this will work

You can get a free week’s worth of Kombucha when you subscribe. After that, I’ll charge a nominal fee of £3/month, which will give you access to all my posts. Whilst I’m not doing this to make $$, it is important to me that I know my audience is committed. And that means: willing to part with something.

This may change in future, of course, if nobody signs up… :-)

Click the button below if you’d like to come along for the ride.

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