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phillip crymble
@phillipcrymble.bsky.social
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poet | phd | umichwriters alum | fiddlehead poetry editor | record collector | author of not even laughter | one-armed bandit | he/him
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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 12d
One month until the disability issue deadline, folks. Keep those poetry submissions rolling in!
fiddlehd.bsky.social The Fiddlehead @fiddlehd.bsky.social · 12d
For our Summer 2026 issue, Disability: The Revolution! The Fiddlehead has brought on a team of amazing editors! Our final genre editor almost needs no introduction. The well-loved Phillip Crymble, one of The Fiddlehead's very own poetry editors, is joining the team as poetry editor! (1/4)
A photo of Phillip Crymble
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Maggie Dietz
November Show's over, folks. And didn't October do A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries Of migrating geese. Low-floating coral moon. Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees. Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage, While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage And gone to shiver in their winter clusters. Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin, Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters. Even the swarms of kids have given in To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure: TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains. The days throw up a closed sign around four. The hapless customer who'd wanted something Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.
November 12, 2025 at 3:05 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
a heartache
edmondsscanner.bsky.social Edmonds Scanner @edmondsscanner.bsky.social · 12h
What would you like in your dream home?

1. basement bar
2. conservatory & planetarium
3. secret libraries within libraries
4. benevolent ghost or two
November 12, 2025 at 4:15 AM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Wallace Stevens
It was when the trees were leafless first in November And their blackness became apparent, that one first Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.
November 11, 2025 at 5:53 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Howard Nemerov
A Modern Poet Crossing at rush hour the Walt Whitman Bridge, He stopped at the Walt Whitman Shopping Center And bought a paperback copy of Leaves of Grass. Fame is the spur, he figured; given a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he'd buy a Ford.
November 11, 2025 at 12:32 AM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Charles Wright
On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking about Tennessee It's dark now, the horses have had their half-apple, mist and rain, Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow. I stand in front of the propane stove, warming my legs. If the door were open, I'd listen to creek water And think I heard voices from long ago, distinct, and calling me home. The past becomes such a mirror--we're in it, and then we're not.
November 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Joe Brainard
I remember being surprised at how yellow and how red autumn really is.
November 9, 2025 at 8:46 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Mary Ruefle
Haworth Literature is steep, changeable, and solitary - like this day, there is a tomb, a debt, a crumb, and intertwined overhanging limbs in the damp green gloom of the overgrown graveyard. For which there is no vocabulary. So a rook drops a feather. But only after his screed. See that broken sunray yonder? A moth has gotten into my soul. The sad, gritty stuff of life - flowers freeze, children drown, she died on the sofa - but see that broken sunray yonder - who can tell the difference between ocher and umber? No one, I am glad.
November 9, 2025 at 3:54 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Charles Wright, with a word of warning
November is dark and doom-dangled, fitful bone light And suppuration, worn wrack In the trees, dog rot and dead leaves, watch where you're going . . .
November 8, 2025 at 4:58 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
A new poem by Rae Armantrout from this month's issue of The New York Review of Books.
No Promises If I know you now at all it's because I know what not to say in your presence. If I remind you of something you once said or did you'll scoff, "That scrap of the old phantasm!" * It was awful when my mother pulled at things I said, making them bigger or other than they were, snatching them out of a context that I wouldn't— really couldn't—share, it was so nebulous and crowded
November 8, 2025 at 2:24 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
One of the three Forrest Gander translations featured in the autumn issue of The Fiddlehead.
Indelible Radiance Translation of Jeannette Lozano Clariond It is perfectly itself, the tree fixed in your eyes. Poplar and blood. An image beaming its silver undersides: indelible radiance seeping out through little holes in the tracery. Leaking across the lake, the image advances toward you. But what remains beyond reach is the Word.
November 8, 2025 at 12:00 AM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Such a great song. Maybe her finest.
November 7, 2025 at 6:22 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
eased of / the jagged sky and all / its petty imageries

William Carlos Williams
Design for November Let confusion be the design and all my thoughts go, swallowed by desire: recess from promises in the November of your arms. Release from the rose: broken reeds, strawpale, through which, from easy branches that mock the blood a few leaves fall. There the mind is cradled, stripped also and returned to the ground, a trivial and momentary clatter. Sleep and be brought down and so condone the world, eased of the jagged sky and all its petty imageries, flying birds, its fogs and windy phalanxes . . .
November 7, 2025 at 2:26 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Another Robert Bly miniature. Really feeling the presence of his old friend James Wright in this one.
AFTER LONG BUSYNESS I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk. Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars, not a trace of light! Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field? Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.
November 6, 2025 at 3:01 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Robert Bly
LOVE POEM When we are in love, we love the grass, And the barns, and the lightpoles, And the small mainstreets abandoned all night.
November 5, 2025 at 2:35 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
What a poem!
Buying The Whore BY ANNE SEXTON You are a roast beef I have purchased and I stuff you with my very own onion. You are a boat I have rented by the hour and I steer you with my rage until you run aground. You are a glass that I have paid to shatter and I swallow the pieces down with my spit. You are the grate I warm my trembling hands on, searing the flesh until it's nice and juicy. You stink like my Mama under your bra and I vomit into your hand like a jackpot its cold hard quarters.
November 4, 2025 at 3:21 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
"the ruin of our garden / in the early dark of November"

Jack Gilbert
HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day. Harm and boon in the meetings. As heart meets what is not heart, the way the spirit encounters the flesh and the mouth meets the foreignness in another mouth. We stand looking at the ruin of our garden in the early dark of November, hearing crows go over while the first snow shines coldly everywhere. Grief makes the heart apparent as much as sudden happiness can.
November 3, 2025 at 2:42 PM
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David Rivard
TAKE IT ON THE HEEL What's it all for? Sins & good deeds end up equal in eternity- each of them like a sunflower seed reflected in a raven's eye in the moment before it's eaten.
November 2, 2025 at 5:46 PM
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Robert Frost
NOVEMBER We saw leaves go to glory, Then almost migratory Go part way down the lane, And then to end the story Get beaten down and pasted In one wild day of rain. We heard ""Tis over" roaring. A year of leaves was wasted. Oh, we make a boast of storing, Of saving and of keeping, But only by ignoring The waste of moments sleeping, The waste of pleasure weeping, By denying and ignoring The waste of nations warring. 1938
November 1, 2025 at 2:31 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
A Halloween message from Charlie and Ira
LP album cover of the Louvin Brothers' Satan is Real
October 31, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Reposted by phillip crymble
jntod.bsky.social
A Thomas Hardy poem for Halloween
Night-Time in Mid-Fall It is a storm-strid night, winds footing swift Through the blind profound; I know the happenings from their sound; Leaves totter down still green, and spin and drift; The tree-trunks rock to their roots, which wrench and lift The loam where they run onward underground. The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate To a new abode; Even cross, 'tis said, the turnpike-road; (Men's feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late): The westward fronts of towers are saturate, Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.
October 31, 2025 at 4:47 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
For Halloween this year, a sinister elm poem by Alfred G. Bailey. One of Canada's leading modernist poets, Bailey was not only a key figure in the New Brunswick literary scene, he also founded The Fiddlehead. 🎃🌳
Elm Look well upon the elm whose wittol root roams like a hungry rat the eternal damp and sorrowful ground, its gimlet face a clamp upon a purpose as it tools for loot. The faceless mold transmutes a slavering brute to hang in all the wordless aisles of air as green hosannas, tuned to trumpet fare of sun-bedizened light, from claw to flute. What wry design impels the furtive dark to lift up day to wear its gothic pride? Tree-eyed, the inchoate energies embark upon a glory they themselves have died to fashion, heedless of the slurring sound of the blind and pointed faces underground.
October 31, 2025 at 4:03 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
One month until the disability issue deadline, folks. Keep those poetry submissions rolling in!
fiddlehd.bsky.social The Fiddlehead @fiddlehd.bsky.social · 12d
For our Summer 2026 issue, Disability: The Revolution! The Fiddlehead has brought on a team of amazing editors! Our final genre editor almost needs no introduction. The well-loved Phillip Crymble, one of The Fiddlehead's very own poetry editors, is joining the team as poetry editor! (1/4)
A photo of Phillip Crymble
October 31, 2025 at 2:59 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Edward Hirsch
Devil's Night He saw teenagers carrying flammable cans of kerosene and boxes of wooden matches, torching the discarded carcasses of Fords and Chevys, spreading flames through abandoned buildings and unused factories, lighting one-story houses on narrow lots in small neighborhoods. He saw old men standing on their front lawns in bathrobes, holding shotguns and green garden hoses to stave off the burning. A night of TV cameras and wailing sirens, an hour of reckoning, moment of judgment. He saw gas stations exploding like tinderboxes and party stores being looted, and He understood a new ritual of autumn, an annual reaping, a fury that gathered night after night, until it burst forth like a fever in late October. He was one of the bystanders who waited on the sidewalk passing a thermos of steaming coffee and a bottle of whiskey, watching fire- fighters wading into a furnace of buildings. He was there when the blaze finally calmed and the radios quit bristling with static, when the exhausted crowd dispersed and drifted toward home. And He was one of the few who were still awake to witness the sunrise, to observe a smoky disc flaring over the river, charring the rooftops, glistening in the ruins. He closed his eyes and saw darkness visible. Yellow flames brimmed over cinders and ashes. A broken skyline smoldered in the distance.
October 30, 2025 at 11:11 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Emily Dickinson
THE BLUE JAY. NO brigadier throughout the year So civic as the jay. A neighbor and a warrior too, With shrill felicity Pursuing winds that censure us A February day, The brother of the universe Was never blown away.
October 30, 2025 at 1:50 PM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
Another poem by Karen Solie, this one featuring a blue jay
ODE Blue jay vocalizes a clash on the colour wheel, tulip heads removed one by one with a sand wedge. Something in the frequency. Expectations are high. There's a reason it's called the nervous system. Someone in bed at 11 a.m. impersonates an empty house. The sharpener's dragged his cart from the shed. His bell rings out from the twelfth century to a neighbourhood traumatizing food with dull knives. A hammer claws to the edge of a reno and peers over. Inching up its pole, a tentative flag. And the source? Oh spring, my heart is in my mouth.
October 29, 2025 at 1:44 PM