Today we are looking at folklore.

Write a poem about the seventh child of a seventh child; a figure steeped in myth and mystery.

Play with your lines. Write seven of them.

Do they walk through storms unharmed? Do they rise in a shattered towerblock whern others don’t?

Do birds fall silent when they speak?

What is their inheritance?

Editorial Note by Max Wallis - exclusive to Substack

What do we inherit when a loved one dies? A silver spoon, a catchphrase, a question left unanswered. In A Scattered Set, Adam Horovitz offers a poignant triptych that spans memory, exile, intimacy, and the legacy of kinship, both personal and poetic. Written in memory of his father, the great poet Michael Horovitz, the triptych traces a physical and emotional lineage through a single, recurring object: the spoon.

Beginning with Maker’s Mark, we are handed not just an heirloom, but a fragment of a refugee’s survival story, etched with history, escape, and maternal vigilance. A child's silent awe becomes an adult’s inherited empathy, a ‘long-memoried terror’ polished into tenderness.

In Are You Still My Friend?, the poem shifts from generational to immediate grief. Friendship between father and son becomes complicated terrain, fragile, necessary, and deeply human. A spoon found behind the sink becomes both a relic and a vessel: tarnished, then shining with the polish of reconciliation.

The final section, Unsung Roundelay, plays with tone and rhythm, echoing the voice of Ivor Cutler from a kitchen radio. Here, the repeated phrase “This your spoon, mister?” morphs from childhood tease to grief-etched echo, a private language turned elegy.

This is a poem about the everyday objects that outlive us. About how loss accumulates not just in grand gestures, but in habits, half-jokes, and gestures we perform without thinking, until we realise they’re all we have left.

Adam Horovitz has written something enduring: an intimate tribute to his father that resonates far beyond the familial. This is a poem to keep beside your own scattered set.

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About Adam Horovitz:

Adam Horovitz, a poet and performer based in Gloucestershire, has published three books of poetry, and a memoir about growing up in Laurie Lee country, and appeared on Cerys Matthews’ album We Come from the Sun (Decca, 2021). His next book, Slow Migrations, will be published by Indigo Dreams in 2025.

https://www.adamhorovitz.co.uk/

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Today, I invite you to write a villanelle, the poetic form that refuses to forget. With its pattern of repeating lines and tight rhyme, the villanelle lends itself to obsession, grief, survival, and transformation.

A villanelle has 19 lines:

* 5 tercets (three-line stanzas)

* 1 quatrain (four-line stanza)

* The first and third lines of the opening stanza return in a strict pattern throughout the poem.

* The rhyme scheme follows: ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA

Think of poems like Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night, where the refrain becomes a ritual of resistance.

Here’s one by me:

You Avoid the News Just in Case

Write a villanelle that captures one small moment of aftermath.

It might be a phone call you couldn’t answer, a bruise that keeps changing colour, a kindness that startled you back to life. Let your repeated lines pulse like memory … obsessive, anchoring, and insistent.

You don’t need to follow the traditional rhyme scheme if that gets in the way of feeling. Just let the form guide the rhythm of return. What wants to be said again? What line keeps echoing?

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Hello everyone,

I’ve got a chesty cough, or potentially a chest infection, and also dealing with the post-event fatigue that comes after I do things publicly these days.

Events take such a toll on me. Not just the preparation, bearing my innards on stage, but also the relief when it goes well. But then there’s the travel and the sheer number of people I’m just not used to these days.

Today, while I’m resting, I want you to write a poem from that space too.

What’s outside your window?

What is your body feeling?

What do you dream of when you can’t get up?

There’s a great history of poets writing poems that declare they’re not poems. From Joyce Carol Oates’ THIS IS NOT A POEM published by the New Yorker:

in which the poet discovers

To Brian Bilston:

Today write a poem that declares itself not a poem but becomes one in the process.

Write a Found Poem using text messages, news headlines, or other words that are there already in real life all around you.

Perhaps words in an anatomy textbook… Or a scrambled AI summary of a voicemail.

Use the words you see around you as a scaffolding for your own poem.

What got you out of bed in the night to finally care for yourself?

I say this with somewhat of a cough and possible chest infection.

Sitting in my hotel room in Ludlow,and thinking about how for so long I was bedbound with PTSD and my parents did everything for me.

And I'm still not perfectly well, but my point is that food can be such a great metaphor in poetry.

You know what?

I'm secretly wanting to read for issue two a poem about someone finally making the best dish they've ever made.

And I'm going to leave that with you for now.

And I would love you to comment or email me or whatever with what you might come up with.

I’m travelling for our event in Ludlow tomorrow evening.

Today I want you to think of a journey. Write it. Push it into fairytale. Where are you going?

Write a poem where every line transforms from the last, like water becoming steam, like wound becoming scar.

Each line must carry over a word, an image, or a breath… but twist it, let it evolve.

Let the last word of one line become the first spark of the next, not by repetition, but through transformation.

Example:Let flame become hunger / hunger open the chest / chest echo with birdcall...

Your turn:Choose your first image. Then follow the metamorphosis… Each turn should feel necessary, intimate, like a spell unfolding in real time.

No backtracking. No breaks. Only link after link. Only forward. Only think about the chain.

Visual poetry uses a shape to speak. Today, that shape is a sash window: Two stacked rectangles. Four lines per pane. A form that holds stillness. A form that holds breath.

When trauma makes the body want to jump or freeze, form can sometimes help us stay. Now, for some, the opposite is actually true. They find the freedom of no-form liberating at a time when perhaps freedom is most needed. But I offer this simply as an alternative.

Prompt:

So - write a visual poem in the shape of a sash window. Use two stanzas of four short lines each. Make each pane hold its own emotional weather. Think of silence pressed to glass… Think of what you see when you can’t go outside. Two panes. One window. Your language inside it.

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