Substack Poets of Note
Part One
Substack has almost entirely replaced my journal and magazine reading habits. It’s possible to find on here great writers of all types: essayists, scholars, bloggers, diarists, columnists, commentators, polemicists, thinkpiecers, gossipers, archivists, and of course poets.
Yet not being published in journals, except on occasion, they do not have the benefit of evaluation that traditional publication affords, to varying degrees, by virtue of its acceptance and reception. Now the purpose of this newsletter, Poetics, being to develop a deeper understanding of poetry, so that I can the better write and appreciate it, part of that appreciation should naturally extend to those contemporary poets whose work I read on Substack. Therefore I thought it worth mentioning a few of them here, so as to evaluate their skills and draw attention to their work.
J. Tullius of Verdurous Glooms
I first encountered
over a disagreement about Dickinson’s cognitive originality, a claim made by Bloom. He disagreed with Bloom, but after some discussion conceded the point, which I found admirable, and rare, after what my experiences on X had taught me.Tullius excels at, among other things, closure. His endings are always worth the cost of reading, as they elevate everything that comes before them. Often didactic, they’re positively Elizabethan in their formulations. They sum up, offer insight, strike a chord. Their music always satisfies one’s desire for resolution, like the end of a cadence; their sense always fulfills that desire for poetic insight, for 'getting at the thing' a certain way. I enjoy Tullius’s way of getting at things, and his poems always resolve the cadences they begin.
His musicality is evident in the playful and trivial “Band Names”; and in “Multum non Multa” one can see the combination of such music paired with a critical wit. He can also be downright funny, as in “Just a Ronmal Day”, recently published in The Clayjar Review.
His most popular poem on Substack is “The Plague”, a menacing piece about thuggish crows. It’s appropriately the most popular, as it showcases all of his poetic talents used to the utmost of their abilities.
He works best in form. Blank Verse, with its open-endedness, is where I see his limitations, as in “Passing Slowly Through”, and in the free verse “Caffeine” (almost free verse). Here the descriptions are often strained-at, and don’t seem to add up to anything. There’s no sense of resolution, either, which of course is implied in the subtitle to “Passing Slowly Through”: A bit of blank verse. Nevertheless, in such forms one feels the absence of his characteristic endings.
His best poem to me is “Suicide Notes”, whose subject, the suicide of a close friend, plays against his poetic instincts to spectacular effect. Here Tullius is at his closest, most intimate. It so challenges his normal mode and distance that the resulting friction is something like the sparkling glow of a fire within coal. It reminds me of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson, whose verse, fine, opulent, harmonious, was often criticized for being too impersonal, yet in his heartfelt tribute to Hallam he demonstrated that it was not a limitation but a preference.
The sense of resignation in the last two lines of “Suicide Notes” (“So the paradox of language…”) leads us soberly to what wisdom can be gleaned from such tragedy. It is a hard truth, and a cold comfort.
Tullius is an excellent poet. Wise and artful. He writes good religious verse as well, and his prose in
, also on religious matters, is worth mentioning.Peter Whisenant
I met
on Instagram, which you might be surprised to learn is not completely full of insufferable Instapoetry. There are a few good poets who, for some reason, still post there.Peter’s work was a panacea in a social media of shallow quote-pics and adolescent verse. Its form and content perfectly suited to such a medium, yet highly subversive, radical and antagonistic in the way it mocked and rejected, by its very presence, the saccharine attitudes and banal sentiments of Rupi Kaur and her ilk. His work, absurd and ribald and sincerely insincere, exposes and explodes all the platitudinous projects of the most popular poetry one finds on Instagram. Yet in the end, I’m happy he made the move to Substack (I’ll take some credit for that) and ejected from the burning plane that is Meta’s increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant imitation of Tiktok.
In a comment on one of Tullius’s poems, Peter described his own approach to writing in the following way:
My notion of “absurd” is not the nihilistic variety, nor is it the kind associated with French existentialists in suit coats and skinny ties. It has nothing to do with “philosophy” and is in no way analytical or prescriptive. A reckless joyfulness, a joyful recklessness, an almost burlesque gaiety: If there were an avatar, that would be Marcel Duchamp.
The form Peter works most often in is the bagatelle, which means “a trifle” or “a thing of little importance.” These are pieces like “Waiting Tables at Cana” and “Readers are Dicks” and “Beggar”. Clever, strange, and superfluous. There are poems, too, like “Ad for Irish Spring” and “Ad for Reno” which read like linguistic exercises. Just stretching one’s mental muscles. These are surely trifles. But then there are poems like “Words for Mr. Death” and, my favorite, “Words for an Ax” that come from nowhere and strike one unexpectedly with their perfect economy and imaginative power. (Others I’ve seen him post on Instagram have since disappeared, but I hope he’ll post them again.) It’s as if Peter sneaks them in intentionally, hiding them among his trifles. The cumulative effect of his work is to see a mind operating incessantly, meticulously, upon language.
Elsewhere he calls himself “a verbal fetishist living in Philadelphia.” One can see, in poems like “Petting Zoo” and “For the Record”, a fetishistic attention to composition and diction. In the latter, a stanzaic parallelism, in the former, a ponderous thought strung upon a rhyme. Both play with the relationship between prose and poetry. To read Peter’s work is to witness a verbal fetishist fondling and groping language. At times one is seduced, at other times turned off. Sometimes, as in orgies, one cannot quite make out what one is looking at. Either way, they can’t look away. Anyone who loves poetry must love words and language, and Peter clearly does.
Joffre Swait of Word Hoard
is a poet from a different era. He is from a time when students learned the trivium and the quadrivium and poetry was taught side-by-side with rhetoric. A time when an educated man could be expected to declaim about politics and culture as easily in verse as in prose. For Joffre, poetry is the expression of a totality of unified interests. It is one of the skills which a gentleman, properly educated, may make use of to fashion his thoughts and sharpen his mind. He’s interested in topics ranging from the ancient Greek warrior-poet Archilochus to US/Mexico relations. He makes videos on poetics, linguistics, and language. He gives his opinion on controversial political topics. His is currently writing his autobiography in verse, and translating Don Quixote. He is a man of ideas and great passion.His poetry is classical in form and content, and he’s capable of working in a variety of forms. In epigram, “Tough Grapes” and “Ilion”; in lyric, the beautiful “The Song of the Girl and the Apple Tree” and the drumbeating “Thunderhead”; in ballad, the humorous “Why Men Should Not Wear Skimpy Bathing Suits” about a British naval raid on the port of Taranto in WWII. Even his free verse has the dramatic and rhetorical power that easily keeps one’s interest, as in the tragicomic “Boomer at Homosassa Springs” or the much graver “Strange God”, a hermeneutical poem about Moses’ near fatal encounter with God.
But his crowning achievement thus far must be his Women of Greece, a play in three acts. Part masque, part dumbshow, it chronicles some famous myths and legends of Classical Greece—Pandora, the Trojan War, Odysseus’ return, Orpheus and Eurydice—in pithy, finely wrought enclosed quatrains. Choruses process. Characters move downstage to speak their lines. It’s courtly theater, but in a modern language that’s at times staid and regal, at other times bawdy and cynical. Something for those in the boxes and the cheapseats. All the while, Joffre skewers the heroics of a culture that would go to war for the sake of a woman, but would not suffer them to speak. Slave women comb Paris’s luxurious hair. Achilles rides in on a hobby-horse and mimes his death by grabbing his foot and hopping around on stage. It’s a satisfying send up to the pomposity of the ancient world. The fanfare of Greek deeds is deflated until, by the third act, the masculine buffoonery gives way to the feminine, to Divine Love, the pagan gives way to the Christian.
My only criticism of Women of Greece is that the Bard and the Mocker, who offer commentary throughout, are not made into one character, their roles being basically the same. But I encourage people to read it and judge for themselves if I’m right. You can buy a digital copy for yourself for only $3.99.
Kate Bluett of Turn Me Back Again
is perhaps the best lyric poet on Substack. Her background includes songwriting, which is unsurprising. She is prolific, yet works in a singular style which she’s been perfecting the way a bird perfects the song it was made to sing. Her form is the quatrain, even when she uses stanzas of eight lines. Her subject is, to varying degrees and positionings, her deep faith in God.One gets the sense, reading her devotional pieces, of a mind fixed singularly upon that supreme object, that highest ideal. Sometimes it’s laid bare, as in “Mercy” and “Fountain” and “Trinitarian”, so direct in its communication, so prayerful, it seems as if she might’ve been looking up while writing. Sometimes there’s more of a veil, as when she speaks by way of metaphor in “Blossomed” and “Honey”, perhaps my favorite of her modes. Even in her more narrative pieces, in “Neighbor” and “Tornado Warning”, about terrible storms that sweep or threaten to sweep away all, God is there rhetorically, thematically. Such an impetus unifies her art and lends a means of expression, and a deep resonance within the tradition, to all her work.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the poetic tradition, discarded and deconstructed over many decades now, has been preserved and sustained primarily by the efforts of Christian writers. As a consequence, many of the best writers today are writers of faith, as who else would continue to practice something so thoroughly and intentionally evacuated and disemboweled of meaning, except those who truly believed, who had faith in, the eternal nature of the Logos? Indeed, to be a poet today one has to believe that things which are dead may rise again.
Such a theme Mrs. Bluett explores in a recent piece, “Beauty and the Beast”, about a copy of that book passed down within her family. Here is what I mean by deep resonance, as each note struck, of myth, generation, inheritance, together make one chord that sounds allusively down to that Christian resurrection. "Beast rises from the forest floor / where nothing's ever really lost.”
Nor is she incapable of exploring her doubt, as in “Gesthemane”. Here she confronts the tragedy of the Passion, and ruminates on suffering without recourse to salvation, without evasion. In this way her faith seems multi-faceted and fully formed and not only something ornamental or salutary.
It’s easy enough to find new poets nowadays, but difficult to find those that one can return to. These are four poets whose work I look for, and that I can return to and appreciate more deeply upon rereading. They demonstrate technical skill, have a historical sense, are interested in ideas, and seem to have something like a genuine voice. If you enjoyed any of their work, you should give them a follow. There are other poets on Substack worth mentioning, and I intend to in future posts, but I wanted to keep this list rather small and focused.
I would like to point out however, because it’s recent,
’s “The Dunce Song of PJ Frufrufrock” which was wild and rich and very fun to read.
Thanks for this. I have been so turned off by the dreck that I would have
missed these This is a real service
This is not only very nice to see about Substack poets, but also very helpful in understanding the work of poets I already follow and read, beyond the barely-above-layperson's perspective I have. Appreciate the effort that went into this.