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chaswriter.bsky.social
charlie hensler
@chaswriter.bsky.social
800 followers 1.6K following 140 posts

"Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you"
- John Ashbery

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chaswriter.bsky.social
charlie hensler @chaswriter.bsky.social · Oct 4
Louise Glück, on fall.

"Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?"
Matins | Louise Glück You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?
chaswriter.bsky.social
sun out in november thus a walk in the woods
photo of a trail in the woods. a leaning alder. sun through the trees.
November 19, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
toddedillard.bsky.social
I have a new poem in @havehashad.com that answers the burning question of "what is the opposite of an 'eating poems' poem"

"it's all coming up now,
milkweed and mango..."

www.havehashad.com/hadposts/hei...
Heimlich After I Eat Poetry Too Quickly Again by Todd Dillard
It's all coming up now, milkweed and mango, grandmothers in kitchens with their stoic spoons, crows barking in alder trees, enough dead deer to overflow football stadiums, sad f...
www.havehashad.com
November 17, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
toddedillard.bsky.social
NEW POEM ALERT! got a couple new ones in the latest issue of @lamplitmag.bsky.social. Here's the lamp-iest one :)
The Lampshade At the gates of heaven they said let's review: six snails eaten, but no burning buildings entered to save a child, a puppy, a mother's music box. You splashed into a dozen rivers, but many more you saw and never touched, never thought to touch. And yet, you spent most of your life working on this one species of looking. You'd see a wooden door and make a face from its knots and whorls. You'd find a dead cardinal and would wonder if the dead forget the color red first. Mostly we were impressed with this hat you made one night out of a lampshade. Your toddler laughed so hard he nearly lost his voice. After finishing his bedtime, you turned to go, and he told you to stay. We liked how he pulled an imaginary string dangling out of your nose. How you shut your eyes afterwards and lay perfectly motionless beside him. For years your son believed light is something you become. It's waiting, there, under your skin.
November 14, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
poetrysociety.org.uk
The Poetry Society was delighted to host Diane Seuss on Monday 10th November for the latest in the prestigious Kenneth Allott / Poetry Society Annual Lecture series

The lecture is now available to view on the Poetry Society's Vimeo channel at vimeo.com/1135802263 or see link in bio
November 12, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by charlie hensler
toddedillard.bsky.social
I don't know if people know this but good poems are hard to write
November 10, 2025 at 8:17 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
last of fall around here
late fall foliage in the pacific northwest late fall foliage in the pacific northwest late fall foliage in the pacific northwest late fall foliage in the pacific northwest
November 9, 2025 at 3:45 AM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a fall walk in the park
photograph of a line of smaller maples, across a green park lawn, under a partly cloudy fall sky
November 8, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
theshorepoetry.bsky.social
The Shore contributor Catherine Pierce is now offering online poetry workshops! 🌊🌊🌊

Check it out here: www.studioandcraft.com
Studio & Craft
Studio & Craft is a poetry community offering generative sessions, workshops, and manuscript consultations.
www.studioandcraft.com
November 4, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
grousehollow.bsky.social
Thrilled to have my poem “In Christ There Is No East or West” in the new issue of @antiphonyjournal.bsky.social Huge thanks to editor/founder Ann Pedone not only for accepting the work but for wise, wise edits. For optimum reading due to long lines, turn your phone landscape-wise, or read on laptop.
In Christ There Is No East or West by Michael Metivier — Antiphony: a journal & small press
www.antiphonyajournalandpress.com
November 1, 2025 at 4:31 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a spooky ghost poem I forgot I had written -
Ghost In the late, tilted hours I can find you sitting in a derelict sedan hood in the blackberries, last sun slanting through the dusty glass. I did not choose my absences you will tell me—the days became a parade of ghosts, one introducing the next— one made of tattered newspaper, another colored shapes gliding behind beaded glass. Such presence—you can’t imagine you will say, folding back into your blue silence, lighting a cigarette though you never smoked.
October 31, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
victoriachang.bsky.social
Rest in peace, Ellen Bryant Voigt. You were a force of nature and one of the sharpest people I've ever known. You will be greatly missed.
October 24, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
amsterdamreview.bsky.social
Our Fall 2025 issue is OUT NOW!

Featuring an #interview with Keetje Kuipers and works by Sean Thomas Dougherty, Suzy Eynon, Jason Bentsman, Chelsea Dingman, and many more.

Read here: bit.ly/AmsterdamReview

#poetry #fiction #translations #finearts #amsterdam 🇳🇱
Amsterdam Review Fall 2025 issue is OUT NOW! Featuring an #interview with Keetje Kuipers and works by Sean Thomas Dougherty, Suzy Eynon, Jason Bentsman, Chelsea Dingman, and many more.
October 9, 2025 at 2:49 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Louise Glück, on fall.

"Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?"
Matins | Louise Glück You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?
October 4, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
northamerreview.bsky.social
Our newest issue is out now!! Find it online here: northamericanreview.org/magazine
October 3, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
toddedillard.bsky.social
the unspoken gem of writing a bad poem is knowing it's a bad poem, what a relief, what a gift, what a treasure to know this effort didn't get there and, because you failed to build a bridge the right amount of far, you are that much more aware of where "there" is
September 29, 2025 at 1:16 AM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a late dahlia
Close up of a vibrant red dahlia bloom.
September 25, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
stonecirclereview.bsky.social
“This is how poems happen for me. Bits and pieces, glimpses and strokes, hints and imagistic nudges, and at some almost-accidental moment it all flies together--not to make sense but to induce a feeling. I call these gifts.”

-- Yusef Komunyakaa
September 23, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
havehashad.com
gigantic HAD energy
September 21, 2025 at 2:36 AM
Reposted by charlie hensler
toddedillard.bsky.social
In general, my go-to editing tips/thoughts:

1. Read the piece out loud, preferably loudly. Where your tongue trips is where it's awkward for readers too.

2. Familiar language is bad and is often the result of a familiar tone dragging the piece toward said language. Be different!
September 15, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
poemakontsa.bsky.social
Happy Friday with this gorgeousness by James Schuyler

Song

The light lies layered in the leaves.
Trees, and trees and more trees.
...
The violet hour:
the grass is violent green
September 12, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
tomsnarsky.bsky.social
Molly Brodak
And How Did Your Rapture Turn Out? Once I woke up laughing. Saw the limbs of the pine row and paw. I heard bells, split geologic. Did anyone take a photo of me while I was in the coma? Why, no. No one thought to. Before, the nights froze in acid orange streetlight, and we walked in thin shadows. That was the first time I felt young. There was no future. But I came out on the other side—so your millennium wasn’t like mine, so what. Remember catching that wet rabbit? How did it feel. Like dusk— start at the stars and drop west & the light goes apocalyptic: indigo, ultramarine, cobalt, turquoise, cerulean. I said come watch the bats with me, once. I just kept up. That’s how.
September 10, 2025 at 5:59 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Robert Hass, "To A Reader"
#smallpoemsunday
To A Reader | Robert Hass I’ve watched memory wound you. I felt nothing but envy. Having slept in wet meadows, I was not through desiring. Imagine January and the beach, a bleached sky, gulls. And look seaward: what is not there is there, isn’t it, the huge bird of the first light arched above first waters beyond our touching or intention or the reasonable shore.
September 7, 2025 at 6:07 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Here's one for fall - and thank you @mayacpopa.bsky.social for picking this up in Poetry Today's August poems. 🙏 🙏
Suddenly Autumn, And The Light We have come down from summer pockets empty. The sun tilts low again and the rhododendrons follow, gray-green and chromatic. The boulevard crows, wings folded, contemplate the long shadow just clinging to their tree. How the festival goers have become the color of late grasses and leaves, the balloons gone in the particle wind. Even now the towers are calmly sealed, the disappeared behind the blue glass, heads bent, reflecting. See how the sun skips off the lake, its platinum sheen. Cool in your hand the smooth, flat stone you found at summer’s graveled edge, and kept. - Charles Hensler
September 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
toddedillard.bsky.social
my issue of Threepenny is here! here’s my poem “Present Tense,” I would love for you to give it a read!

“I know this so loudly I don’t
hear, at first, my father’s silence.”
Present Tense by Todd Dillard My father’s telling me about his dog, how it fell into a well when they were walking down a wooded path. His dog ran across some rotted planks, the planks splintered, “And whoosh!” my father says. “No more dog.” I look at the clock and remind my father it’s three A.M. “I’m not finished,” he says. He tells me about the rope he bought, the bucket, how he knotted the rope to the bucket, lowered it down, and yelled for the dog to get in. “But all I pulled up was more barking.” “Dad,” I say. “This never happened.” He says he can’t remember how long he tried to get the dog to shimmy into the bucket. Just that at some point when the sky turned tawny—“Dad—“ as a pitcher of sweet tea—“Dad—“ he decided to give up. “Dad,” I say. “It’s late. I’m tired. And you’re dead.” “Dammit, son,” my father says. “Let me finish!” My father tells me about filling the bucket with dirt and pouring the dirt into the well. And I know what he’s getting at, I know he’s going to tell me bucket by bucket he filled the well and the dog jumped out. He’s going to say something about how the dog led him home through the dark. I know this so loudly I don’t hear, at first, my father’s silence. “Dad?” I say. “Dad, are you there?” I keep lowering the bucket but all I ever pull up are leaves. Red leaves. Lately, some gold.
September 2, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by charlie hensler
janezwart.bsky.social
Thank you to Wendy Lesser for making a spot for "Being and Time" (my poem, not Heidegger's treatise) in Threepenny Review.
Extra happy because my poem gets to hang out with one by @toddedillard.bsky.social.
See a more accessible version at https://www.threepennyreview.com/being-and-time/
September 2, 2025 at 7:45 PM