Early last year I heard from Paul Deane, a theoretical linguist who maintains the website alliteration.net and edits Forgotten Ground Regained: A Journal of Alliterative Verse. Having gotten wind of my long, don’t-care-if-anyone-gets-it poem The Beallsville Calendar, Paul kindly listed me on his site and accepted two of my pieces that might never have landed anywhere else. After writing mostly in isolation for years, I was—and still am—cheered to find a whole online community taking a serious interest in alliterative forms.

“Entreating a Sick Kitten” appeared in the fall 2024 issue, which was devoted to poems of love and loss. My entry is a rare bit of autobiographical dabbling. I hope it’s not what you’d expect from a cat poem, alliterative or otherwise.

Another of my alliterative poems, “Interloper,” found a home in the winter 2025 issue, which focuses on the natural world. When the start-up art center where I’m a board member asked me to contribute to its first poets-and-artists roundtable in 2023, the theme “the nature that sustains us” inspired some lovely writing by the participants. I chose to strike a contrary chord.

Forgotten Ground Regained is a contrarian’s delight. Some of its contributors are committed to modern recreations of Old Norse and Old English forms, while others just want to play with language and sound. Many fancy print journals inspire little conversation, and I often assume their contributors admire only their own pieces and ignore everyone else’s. By contrast, Forgotten Ground Regained fosters a blessedly eccentric community of poets who write and read others’ work with genuine curiosity and enthusiasm, and reading it brings what other journals too often lack: the joy of surprise.

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Speaking of alliterative poetry…

When I moved from the city to the country in 2015, I used this blog to draft The Beallsville Calendar, a year-long poem in monthly installments. Years of on-demand writing for professional clients and paid markets got tiresome, so I wrote this one totally for myself, without worrying about what editors wanted, whether the verse got indulgent, or whether anyone even understood the damned thing. The Beallsville Calendar was inspired by an early medieval poem I hope to publish in translation soon. Blog readers bought a bunch of printed copies, but I don’t actively sell the book anywhere—because who’s clamoring for a long, cryptic, medieval-inspired alliterative poem about sudden immersion in nature?

Dennis Wilson Wise is! Dennis is the editor of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology, which is packed with little-known poems from writers who’ve worked outside the mainstream, with a particular focus on genre fiction and fanzines. To my surprise, he “unabashedly loved” The Beallsville Calendar. I’m grateful to him for the review. He couldn’t have complimented me better than calling my poem “especially American and Walden-esque.”

Connecting with the right good reader is always better than a larger number of ephemeral eyeballs. As corporate social media further ossifies, we’ll all begin looking for each other again, on a more human scale, perhaps not entirely online.