What Sparks Poetry

On Some Western Massachusetts Poetry

There are many ways to skin a mollusk.

I could start this piece, which was inspired by a weekend spent in Western Massachusetts (I took the long green road from Pittsburgh to attend Little Mirror’s ‘small press poetry fest’ on Saturday, July 11th, and ‘Blood Fest 2026’ on Sunday, July 12th), by giving an attempt at a rounded accounting of all the beautiful independent projects currently emerging out of the Connecticut River Valley’s rabbit-grass.

I could talk about Ghost Proposal—very dear to my heart—or the historic Factory Hollow, or Slope Editions, or Little Mirror Magazine itself; or I could try to sum up the tangled Amherst histories that have made this little region so important, in so many different eras, to those things we call American poems.

I heard many great young poets read that weekend—Allie McKean and Jennifer Valdies, two of the editors of Little Mirror Mag, as well as Noah Hale, Haley Joy Harris, and Nellie Prior, all of whom restored my faith in imagery—and, if I was more encyclopedic, I might try to write about them all.

I am only one man with three nipples, though, and I think this essay will read best if I keep it focused on those few publishers and poets whose work, over the years, I have come to know best. Some of their poetry I’ve been enjoying for what feels like many years—Timothy Michalik—some of them I’ve been following for two or three—Hunter Larson, Yagmur Akyurek—and some are relatively new discoveries—Ian Fishman, Nick Hedtke, Tuck Ledbetter—who I nevertheless know I will be following for many seasons as they guide me, lantern-fingered, through the hard, poem-less dark.

*

Ian “Fish Maps” Fishman is a very nice young man. As a poet, he is the author of CALM DOWN! from Factory Hollow and Football Rockstar from illicit zines. As an editor, he runs Press Brake—a sincerely awesome publisher of small-run poetry chapbooks, ordered by inquiry—as well as its kind of conjoined-twin side-project Press Break; he is also on the masthead, along with Blake Levario, of Timothy Michalik’s tasty journal/book publisher Copenhagen.

As a person, he reminds me of a pond. (I like ponds.) When he reads, his voice takes on a slow, aquatic quality, like it’s moving upward through still water, looking for a light. At one point, on the lawn outside the old, hot church where the small press fest was held, he started listing all the tributaries that feed into the Connecticut River. I have always liked watery people. This is a trait I can admire in a man.

Shortly after we met for the first time in March, he was described to me as a kind of historian, and archivist, of Western Massachusetts poetry. A native of Northampton, it is my understanding that he is responsible for pulling Timothy, Yagmur, and Tuck, all of whom he met while at NYU’s MFA program earlier this decade, into the greater Western Massachusetts poetry biosphere in which, at least if you ask me, he is currently a major figure.

Ian’s work is very candid. One does not get the sense, when reading it, that it is hiding very much of anything:

How far from a fire hydrant does one need to be
Doesn’t it feel like we’re in Belgium right now
It’s like a thing-in-time-in-essence-of-thought sorta thing
Tired of being people in the world e.g.
Oh my god I love this song
Nighttime really is intensive
This is only because it is see-through
But there is an other side to nighttime
Though the other side is not so kind to everyone

It’s like it’s being spoken by a friend. What about this one?

This is how a full nelson feels to the brain
A feedback looped so heavily it breaks the poem
A flock of average birds rising from a foggy field
It could potentially be better to try to disappear
This fluffy light hovering within the image
One day I might understand something I do not right now
Possibly I could understand many more things
But it is more than possible that I will die
Not knowing

I’m not going to lob the word “confessional” at these poems. I would rather die.

So: how to describe their closeness, then?

On the drive back from that weekend in Massachusetts, I listened to a piece, published in the latest issue of the audio magazine Signal Hill, about Kenneth Koch’s experiments teaching poetry to public school kids in New York in the 60s. Some of the poems those kids produced are very, very good, and some even got famous:

My skin is as red as a white rose
I am as bad as my good brother
I am as hairy as my bald father
The flag is as red, white, and blue as the sun’s reflection
I am as big as an ant

—Marion Mackles, third grader

I don’t think Ian’s poetry is child-like, or even particularly simple. I bring Koch’s kids up here because of the total openness of their imaginations, the sense that you can taste their thinking dew, a quality that I think Ian shares. One could call this quality—one that is, in uneven measures, shared by the rest of the poets discussed in this essay— a sort of imaginative transparency. It feels, I think, like there is very little interference built into the process by which he imagines his poems onto the page. If what Pierre Reverdy said is true, and an image is indeed “a pure creation of the mind,” one gets the sense that Ian’s creations are often purer than those of other poets… that his products, crafted in his metalwork imagination, pass through the hands of fewer middle managers on the way out of his pencil. They are instead—“Around the world there are so many words for please”—handed right to you.

*

I have read a lot of Timothy Michalik’s poems. I think if all the random poets out there ever found out how much I actually know about their work, they would get kind of creeped out.

Anyway, I’ve always liked them. My introduction must have been these few, published in Issue 10 of Afternoon Visitor, but my favorites come from their chapbook Picaresque, published by Ian’s Press Break:

What Disturbs You ?

Tartare, vanitas
The anxiety of the alphabet
In a new script
Physical activities, philology
Um, textual criticism
Gruyere slipping clean off the pan
Bric-à-brac
A great need to be really led
Into a life I’m permissed to live
A small monster born inside a frog
Ristović
Th’ Devil

I met Timothy behind Antidote Books in Northampton, the evening before the weekend’s small press festivities were to begin. We smoked many cigarettes and laughed. We had a lot to talk about; this meeting was a long time coming. I had published Timothy multiple times, in both Poetry Daily and my own individual projects, and Timothy had sent me some of the kindest rejection letters I had ever received in my life.

Like most people from Michigan, Timothy has a vaguely Australian air. Tattoos, spiders in their hair, etc. They have the laugh of a much older person.

They’re very easy to talk to.

Timothy, like Tuck and Yagmur, does not live in Western Mass. However, their record of publishing in a variety of local projects, multiple editorial collaborations with same, as well as their long friendship with Ian, links them fastly to the place. For example:

Timothy’s/Ian’s/Blake’s online journal and book publisher, Copenhagen, is one of the only periodicals I think is actually worth reading front-to-back. I would have missed a lot if I’d never heard of it, though that wouldn’t have been easy to do. Was Issue 5 my introduction to Yagmur’s work? It was definitely my introduction to Hunter’s. Other releases, too, introduced me to many other poets of great talent: Tamas Panitz, Lena Tsykynovska, Bradley King, Daniel Poppick.

I don’t think it’s hard to see why Copenhagen is so popular. I’ve described elsewhere my dissatisfactions with some of the lyric conventions floating around the institutionalized poetry world these days—no, this is not the time—and I think it’s easy to see how Copenhagen’s “house style” feels like a course correction. The poems published there are funny, handsome, a little bit shaggy, full of both real and artificial light. Like bouquets of both real and fake flowers. Like some Chuck E. Cheese animatronics with a few actual rats beneath their fur.

You end up, when you’re done, wanting other journals to resemble it. And what’s the problem with that? Is it so wrong to want more young poets to swim downriver of James Tate?

And that is, of course, one more thing that links Timothy’s own work to the region: how much you can hear the James Tate generation in it.

Here is another poem of theirs, published in b l u s h lit—another great contemporary Western Massachusetts project:

Tomaž

you are pinched between a bright diaper I cough and
there you are little ant on a denim speck I am driving,
falling apart
my hands burned to the wheel
Sorry, you are a genius
you are driving
big lungs in the trees
their hair falls it scrapes the floor
the democratic snow
locking arms you hear it
don’t you crazy
turtle slowly on the run
I’ve tied pink chalk to my string
tied my string to my waist
I walk around like you did
in my bedroom I
gavel pebbles into diamonds
sell the diamonds eat the money
you’re sick and fat and rich
I’ve sucked you through a syringe
and placed you in the video game field
you are not Papa you are Tomaž
listen I am Tymoteusz
I am a typo that is my name
a diamond wrapped in spruce
a million diamonds wrapped in a diaper

Anyone who’s talked to me about poetry knows how much I return to the word “imagination.” Why wouldn’t I? I appreciate Timothy’s poems because of the ways they are not like the world. Isn’t that what poets do? The world enters the poet through the eye. The world sits there, inside the poet, until the imagination walks by. The imagination puts its two hands on the world and changes it. It breaks it down, and shapes it up. The world is now a shapely thing—a poem. This poem is unlike the world. The particular ways it is not like the world are called its “style.” The round sum of the changes made are its “poetics.”

This is how the world ends up with art.

This is why I like Timothy’s poetry. I like the work that their imagination does.

I like the world fine, too, some days. Often, though, I want it to give me much more than it is able. (That’s why I spent a decade doing drugs, I think.) This is, in a simple way, what art can offer me. I am allowed to come across something far other. Another, stranger, more genius, and more Michalik’d world.

*

Yagmur is really good. I’ve told a lot of people that, often in front of her.

She grew up in the far-off land of Worcester, Massachusetts, where they’ve invented many things. She told me once that 80% of all successful political assassinations in US history were carried out by weapons manufactured in Worcester. The more you know!

Yagmur, like everyone else in this profile, is a very kind person. I wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble if they weren’t. She laughs a lot, and is good company on a city-long walk. She knows a lot about the inner workings of audio-visual equipment. She has many hallways in her hair.

Her poems, which I’ve always loved, have deeply cratered surfaces. They are many heavy and alien moons. It takes time, walking across them, to adjust to their specific gravity:

Imago Dei

We would love to know who you are, Steve
We suspect you have an affinity for languages
That you enjoy those old time-y luggages without the wheels
We love wheels, Steve
Going around town delights us
As does your graffiti, the tales of which amuse our rivers
Fish would be honored to hold your hand
Those famous fingers that are so in favor these days
We’d like to tip a cow in your honor
We believe the sounds of mystery should be felt-ed
We wait each week to see what message you will leave on the rock
Yes, we worship you, Steve, as we love that rock
The rock is where we like to sit and have a laugh
It’s where all this fat white light is emitted from
Which means you should be feeling a lot of emotions
Like pride, Steve
Like the most radiant salad has been served
Are you liking your salad, Steve
Would you rather it be something else, and not a salad
Do you ever find yourself on some plank or other, contemplating youth
Have the birds looked at you funny, too
Whose face, there
Which words you choose?

I met Yagmur at the 2026 New Orleans Poetry Festival, after and outside of a reading at which she was supposed to perform. I remember being disappointed, during the reading, when I learned she wouldn’t be making it. (Like Timothy, I had published her multiple times.) She showed up afterward; her flight had been delayed. I was smoking by the main exit when she walked up. I said, “Are you Yagmur?” She said, “Are you Lloyd?”, and we wandered off with a few other poets—shout out Elijah Jackson and Cynthia Chen—to go get drunk on the sidewalk.

She is really into puppetry.

Maybe this could explain the distant voices in her work, the shadows that they cast against the wall. The sense these words were thrown to me from some far distant, outerversal mouth:

ME

The games I play with myself are questions or maybe answers

A puppeteer comes up to only me

He says, a little olfactory plot never hurt anybody

I say, what say you about architectures of thinking?

Every desire has a cousin, tangential and “blue”

I know exactly how to tumble, let me tell you

It starts with forgoing any possibility of pain

I love this poem very much. I love the way it disappears. As soon as one small voice pipes up, one enigmatic puppet’s head, another takes its place. Each line is both quite cool and quite—is this the right word?—colorful. Shaded in by its own strangeness. Purpled by oddity. I feel like this poem, if I looked at it wrong, would follow me into my home.

Yagmur was at the small press fest that weekend, and Blood Fest too, though she did not do any readings. I remember her spending quite a lot of time talking to Ian Fishman’s mom. Her connection to Western Mass lies mostly in her friendships, particularly with Ian, as well as some obvious stylistic overlap with the work this place is famous for. She is the only one in this group without a chapbook from a local Western Massachusetts publisher. (I imagine this might change very soon.)

Her attachment to the land is undeniable, though. At one point, after Blood Fest, when everyone else was milling about, tossing old cigarettes into a bucket, she laid down in the grass, closed her eyes, and let the sun splash onto her for like an hour. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know people still did that sort of thing.

*

Hunter Larson should become a weatherman. I believe there was some talk of him, on Ian Fishman’s porch, being a “child of river people.” One can picture him, quite easily, describing newborn rain.

His poems, too, are a little bit like stormfronts moving in. My favorites are his long, boneless slips which drizzle down the page like water down a window pane:

I love it when

it rains now

it feels like noon

or the idea of noon

is something

proportional to

what I imagine

it feels like to

put the flower of

a memory up

to the cold surface

of the present

shake the doom

back out, this

question of what

it means to be

closer to an answer

I’m trying not to use any more weather figures. There is an actual soft touch to his life-filtered lyrics that sets them far apart, I think, from other work allegedly leaning toward “tenderness.” From the same long poem:

when I die

I’ll close my eyes

and imagine a desert

yeah, a soft pillar

of light to throw

my mind against

Hunter is one of the founding editors of Little Mirror Mag, along with the previously-lauded fellow UMass Amherst MFA alums Allie McKean and Jennifer Valdies, which is “a critical archive & biannual journal of poetry dedicated to the edge of lyrical & inventive poetic thinking.”

They are doing—obviously—great work. Little Mirror is, structurally, exactly the kind of journal that I root for: a deep and deeply cared-for passion project of three friends, one involving both the local poetic fauna and the contemporary international, all of it without the interference of money, non-profit status, or other institutional barbed wire, all of it in service to the freely-given growth of knowledge and the soul.

I am very in favor of that sort of thing.

They’ve published folios on Alice Notley, essays on Stephen Rodefer, James Schuyler, Jack Spicer and more, as well as many essays on/interviews with familiar contemporary figures. They are also responsible for the organization and execution of the “small press poetry fest” held on Saturday, July 11th, where I saw God drinking tap water out of a tea cup made of meat.

Citation needed. I did provably see, though, in that small repurposed church in Turner’s Falls, many great poets who will one day, I think, each be considered a small bright vertebrae in the spinal 2020’s avant-garde.

There were three group readings held at the church’s podium throughout the day. Where the pews used to be, there were about 15 or so small fold-out tables where the various presses/journal in attendance could hawk their wares or, this seemed to be quite common, give them away for free: there was Spiral Editions, Ghost Proposal, Birds LLC, Timothy Michalik’s newest project FOOD, et alia. There was, as well, always a sizable population posted up outside, sitting in foldable lawn chairs, eating the provided little sandwiches, smoking things, buying small drawings from a child, and taking turns with speech.

If you ask me, it’s important to remember that events like this, little free imaginative projects populated by people putting in quite a lot of unpaid evening hours, are the things that make up, and make possible, that thing that the future will be forced to call, for lack of a more specific name, literary history. It happens on the ground, you know. In small apartments in Northampton. It’s the work of working artists, all of whom have names.

I don’t believe Hunter read that day, though I know he read from his illicit zines/ b l u s h lit chapbook American Mystic at Blood Fest the next day. Still, I remember that the air in that church on Saturday, the amount of literal and figurative warmth in it, called to mind for me these touch-lit lines from my favorite poem of Hunter’s, the first of his I ever read:

when we were
younger we
looked like
lights gone out
beautiful and alone
when the stars fell
like snow
into our very
definitive
our very
thin language
what we leave
when we go
back through
the gate of
one another

There’s so much life in poetry, sometimes. I can’t take it. So much of each world. I think that’s the only thing that brings me back to it. I want to see the lights go out. I love it. I want to go back through the gate of you.

*

I don’t know that much about Tuck. I know that he’s from Tennessee and works at a men’s clothing store. I know that on the night of May 11th, 2026, he bought me a PBR. I know that he showed up to the small press poetry festival in a pale blue bucket hat, which he had bought from the Arcteryx store.

I know, too, that he is the only person that writes like he does.

I was first handed his Press Brake chapbook Screen Door by Ian at this past year’s AWP, but I’d not yet cracked it open by the time Yagmur sent me a few slim pieces from it, sometime in April, to publish in a journal that I run.

They were—this is a good thing, and common to all of the Press Brake releases I have read—very far from what I expected. His lines, like some of Yagmur’s, have a kind of placelessness to them, an unidentifiability, like they fell off some passing ghost ship exoplanet only to crash land on his laptop in New York:

Information just ends up places. I lift a morpheme

By the collarbone, but something stops me before I finish.

Instead of new, how about really, really old?

There’s also this one. It seems to be a habit of Tuck’s to treat the present only as a launching pad, a place where he can set his bags before he walks off, backwards, into history:

No one expects their babysitter to become a Marine.

There’s a formula. It’s an old one. The rock cracked in

Two that stayed like that forever.

I met Tuck, having been guided there by Yagmur, in a steamy New York alleyway. I remember his trenchcoat. It all felt very mythical, or something. Like he was Master Splinter and I was going to be turned into the newest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

What actually happened is that we got Chinese food and then went to a bar. We talked about books, publishing, shitty jobs, the places we are from. The two of them also told me some frankly kind of insane stories from the NYU MFA program, which I’m sure, if you aren’t weird about it, they’d be happy to tell you about too.

Tuck, like Yagmur, didn’t do any readings that Western Mass weekend. Considering he took the overnight train from New York and, as far as I could tell, never once took his sunglasses off, I think this was likely fine by him. I do remember that, on Saturday night, he cooked a burger that was so raw it almost poisoned Noah Hale—which I think is its own kind of poem.

Maybe one thing that all the poets in this essay have in common, and which might separate from some of the mainstream epiphanic strains dawdling around the world of lyric poetry right now, is that their poems are, in some way, disappearing acts. Sure, maybe all lyric poems are dramatic monologues—even ones as bent as these. But don’t these feel more like the wind crossing an outdoor amphitheater, or a leaf falling onstage?

Who painted this boat orange? The government?

My friends and I all take turns pissing off the dock.

We name her “Waterloo.”

Looking forward to your first book, Tuck. To end, here’s one more leaf:

My grandfather the orchard mangler. Never could wring

A towel full of orange soda into the deep end of the neighbors’

Pool the first child fell into, and the second, and so forth.

*

Nick Hedtke is a mastermind of the annihilated lyric. He lays his poems in the yard and sprays them with a garden hose, a really big one, until they’re full of shiny holes:

Learning to Fly

all I do now

is think about how

the dark

closed for good

the white & orange

trace soft

I couldn’t see it

until my friends got old

I eat the grass

when it hits

& lay in the water

going to hell

we were sisters

in the moonlight

doing lines

in the Lyft

I’m looking at B&W photos

I’m actually crying

Nick is a current student, now in his third year, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s MFA. My understanding is that, previously, he spent many years working in restaurants and, as was the case for many of us, didn’t really know who or what he was going to end up as. I remember him using the term “burnout” to describe his former self when we were talking about our past lives on—again, this is an important place—Ian Fishman’s parents’ porch.

I don’t want to describe his as a “burnout poetics,” for some reason, but I do want to describe it as a poetics that sits still… one that has seen too much America, one that’s been inside this country for too many years, and now simply lets its images flicker out of his resting eyes onto the page:

John Invents Black & Blue

alt roads

with the sound that comes with them<

sumac & starburst

they write country songs about that

for 30 years

my camera has been recording

I don’t have a filter on

& these are my real eyes

tonight I’m riding horses

through tall grass

around the state line

showers pass

a high school friend

a civil war dress

hangs in the bar

like a banner

Nick is an assistant editor of b l u sh lit (founded by another cool Western Mass guy Jon Ruseski, who I also may have written about in this if I’d read more of his work when I started this essay) which aims “to promote transgressive, irreverent, insurgent, decadent, forward-thinking texts authored from the bleeding edge.”

It also seems like Nick is partially in charge of b l u s h’s sub-imprint illicit zines, which “publishes rogue guerilla transmissions from the American poetry underground,” and which has put out such fine titles as FULL DENIM GIMP SUIT by Zach Peckham, Sentiment by Kai Ihns, Low Ecstasies by Ebs Sanders, etc. Illicit zines is also responsible for the yearly(?) gathering named Blood Fest, a celebration of all of their hand-printed efforts in which some recent illicit zines authors gather to read things and/or chant.

I should take a moment to really talk about Blood Fest. Its full history, to be honest, is somewhat shrouded… I know that Nick opened this year’s occasion with a printed dispatch from the senior members, the first of whom may or may not have held the first Blood Fest under a bridge in New York State somewhere around the time of Woodstock 1969.

Blood Fest 2026 was held in a park under a tree. On Sunday, July 12th, I left the Red Roof Inn in South Deerfield, had breakfast at Texas Roadhouse, and headed over to the park, if I’m remembering correctly, which Ian Fishman used to sneak off to smoke in when he was a little kid.

What I appreciated most about that day, I think, was its actual focus on the work and the people that make it. Sure, there were chapbooks for sale—for like $5—but we were really there to be around good poems, to let each other’s voices curl like heartworms in our ears. There was no thanking of donors and no talk of budget cuts. There was only, and I mean this, some of the most interesting live readings I have ever heard.

My point, here, is that I think it’s for the best when poetry, as an “institution,” if I have to call it that, operates something like this. When it is a playground, free from money’s expectation, and not a playing field.

This is a very interesting time to “be” a “poet.” The reasons for that are dense enough that they would never fit inside this essay, let alone this denouement. (You can probably guess at them yourself.)

All I can do, I think, is advocate for the work that I believe is meaningful. And it seems to me that the most meaning, in 2026, is coming from the smallest of presses, the most particular of scenes, the journals with the very fewest number of—forgive me—totally meaningless awards.

A lot of things happened before I was born. A lot of things happened before I was looking. It is my understanding that Western Massachusetts has been a special poem-place in many different eras; I don’t think it is a stretch at all to say this is another one.

I love Nick’s work a lot. I love that he has found a time and place that lets him offer what he offers. His poems are a little bit like sounds curled up inside of flowers. Anything could change them. Even just a little sudden movement, and they would turn right back into thin air.