Yum! Stuff that’s provoking + inspiring me (Oct 2025)

I recently learned of a form of poetry called a “Cento” As a collage artist and, having married into a family with a rich practice, love, and history of quilting, I loved learning that a Cento is a poem collaged or sewn together from the scraps of lines of other poems. Listen to Maggie from The Slowdown reading “Cento Between the Ending and the End”, by Cameron Awkward-Rich - a Cento poem about the power of community, and the necessity of friendship for our collective survival, freedom, and joy.

I absolutely loved listening to this conversation between Pádraig Ó Tuama and poet, Aimee Nezhukumatathil - and not only because they both have delightful accents and voice tones to listen to! Amongst other things, they talk about eroticism in poetry (and food!), the beauty of solitude, and letter writing practices. And Aimee reads some of her wonderfully evocative poetry live.

I’ve become a huge fan of On Being’s “Poetry Unbound” podcast. I love listening to Irish poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama, reading and sharing his reflections on other poet’s poems. For me, it’s a total delight when other people’s creative work gives me a little surprise or perspective shift, so I particularly enjoyed this episode on Lemn Sissay’s poem, “Some Things I like”. It had me thinking about my Delight Practice, my current obsession with creating art out of recycled, used, and marked papers that most people would discard, and how very unique the things that delight us can be. And, as Ó Tuama says, “What are the things we were told you can’t like, you shouldn’t like, you shouldn’t be like that? All those imperatives… Lemn Sissay invites us to look at those with a joyous, but also, clear: “I like.”

Look at these colours! I swear I haven’t added a filter or pumped the colours up. And those beautiful eroded textures and lines and brown spots. This is what carpets the path on my daily walks in the park at the moment. “Rotting fallen leaves? I LIKE, I LIKE, I LIKE!!!”

Pure delight.