Fifteen holes for a fence
At ten feet spread for every head.
The ground was stiff and tense,
But we were fresh, and so I said,
"Two days of work, or three, I think,
We'll end before the moon can wink."

So we began to dig
With digging irons, spades, and lines,
No simple drilling rig,
Just hands to harrow holes and mines,
Finding roots and worms—a bone!—
And other secrets long unknown.

But worst of all—the rocks,
Rolled by hand in the planet’s birth,
We pried them out in flocks,
Spearfishing in the ocean earth
With heavy weapons like the beam
Goliath bore (or so it seemed).

I mused to dad if he
Had ever thought how long they laid,
These stones that we would see,
If ever man had made this raid
And held them as we held them here,
These creatures of a deeper sphere.

And thinking on the end
When all are raised on Judgment Day,
Their purpose to defend—
Would they be raised in such a way?
And would they say, "They held us here,
Though we were from a deeper sphere"?

At length we put them back,
And stacked them in to brace each post.
The ground was freshly packed
And we were tense, our muscles most.
Good fences make good blistered hands
And many thoughts the earth demands.

This poem features a stanza and metrical structure found in a Richard Crashaw poem, “The Weeper.” I had been recently thinking about how a poem written in a “reverse ballad” stanza would read, where the lines were of lengths 3-4-3-4 rather than 4-3-4-3. This poem contains some of this, though rounding out with a couplet for each stanza.

The poem was written a day after completing a fence with the help of my dad. Many thanks to and for giving me feedback and assisting with a few of the phrases.

As always, you can find this poem on my primary blog, to which you can subscribe to receive all my publications.

Subscribe (primary blog)

Otherwise, if you haven’t, consider subscribing to my Substack as well.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

By necessity, the act of writing requires interaction from other human beings. This is definitionally true: writers write for others to read, just as cooks cook for someone to eat. Yet, this requirement is often difficult for the poet to understand and manage. Most poets are inflicted with a severe level of introspection, one that will typically drive them away from others during the creation process. They often undergo a concerning amount of agony when having their words read by others, especially if one of these so-called “friends” suggests that they read it out loud! Yet, despite these fears and insecurities, the writer is compelled to have their words read by others - they have no choice.

With the internet we’ve been able to soften this trauma by having our words distributed and read in a non-face-to-face encounter. Yet there are many problems in how our current internet communities arrange themselves. This article seeks to highlight one of the core ingredients missing in our online dealings, providing two proposals to remedy them.

As a poet, I am naturally thinking through this discussion through the lens of poetry and the current state of journals and publications. Yet, these principles are broad enough that they could be applied for any form of writing or art-making. So with that said, let’s begin.

The Cost of Community

Any true relationship or community involves some type of cost on the part of the members. In a marriage, there is a strong cost for both participants: they are bound in a life-long contract of exclusive love, committed toward each other’s good in a sacrificial exchange. This cost is so strong that both members fundamentally change because of it.

A larger community also requires some level of cost. Be it a church or a bowling team, a workforce, a family, or even the attendees of a Saturday BBQ, all these interactions involve cost. To be included in these communities you often need to be bodily present for the engagement. You may need to prepare for the event (bring a bag of chips) and you will need to “perform” when the time comes - socialize, laugh, play games, help carry the lemonade from the kitchen to the porch. You are not allowed to be a sour slug and just sit on the sideline, watching the neighbors mow their lawn. If you don’t pay the cost, you don’t belong in the community.

So why do we pay these costs? Well, as obvious as it is, because the benefit is far greater than the alternative. Contributing something into a relationship gives us a feeling of belonging, a mutual attraction that binds us to others. It’s a “putting your money where your mouth is,” investing something of yourself into something other than yourself. The root of this truth smells a little like sacrifice. Be it small or large, sacrifice and cost are a requirement for any community to form.

How the internet avoids this

One of the great tricks of the internet is how it spoofs community without any cost. With social media, you can get all your updates from your “friends” without having to engage with them at all. With a few swipes, you can see their house, their new kid, their new idea, their new (and shocking) haircut. You get all the benefits of a close friendship without doing any of the hard work that it would typically require, all the while thinking that it still counts for “socializing.” What a great lie this is!

In my opinion, we see the same in online blogging and content engagement. On Substack (or any other blogging platform) all I need to do is to click “Subscribe” and I have access to all the writings of that individual. I get their publications fresh out of the oven, delivered to my pocket robot with astonishing speed. But did that cost me anything? Was any real, human bond formed here? Besides the dopamine hit that the author gets when receiving that notification, there’s typically nothing else. There’s no commitment to reading the articles by the author (though we try our best). And even if we do read the article, we can just as easily leave it exactly as we found it, without any trace of interaction. If we’re thoughtful, we may leave a like or a comment. But there is still no community, just a bunch of boats out at night, bumping into each other.

Of course, exceptions can occur and real friendship can begin on the internet. Groups can form that eventually meet in person. Discussion boards can form that allow space for deeper conversation and connection. Comments can be thorough and constructive. But I would say that these are not typically the norm. Do you see yourself still engaging with the same people online in ten years?

For writers, this can be very discouraging, especially for amateurs. All we want is for people to truly engage with our words, to give us good-natured criticism and support. We want to know whether our readers actually liked our poem, or if they just felt obliged to click a button because they were in a friendly mood. This type of engagement is often worth more to us than money. We need a better feedback loop.

With this in mind, I have two proposals that could potentially lead to a better community, each of which have cost as a core ingredient.

Subscribe now

Proposal #1 - Committed Subscription Model

Current subscription models are one-way transactions, where writing flows from the author to the receiver. It’s a good way for the receivers to be informed whenever the author produces something new, and it is a good tool for disseminating an author’s work. But the receiver is not required to give any feedback to the author. For the reader, it is a cost-free interaction.

One solution for this would be to offer a subscription that requires commitment from the reader when they subscribe. When they click that button, they are agreeing to engage with the author’s content when it comes out. This could be anything from a comment, a reaction, or a full review. The reader is required to engage with, say, 3 out of the 6 most recent articles by the author. If they drop this commitment and miss an extended number of articles with no engagement, then they are dropped from the subscription(!)

This may seem a bit harsh, aye? A bit too much of a cost? Yes, it may, and your subscriber counts are going to drop dramatically with this type of model. But, wouldn’t you rather have a few highly engaged subscribers than hundreds of others that never crack open that email?

I believe that this would be beneficial for both parties involved. For the author, they would receive regular feedback on their writing, hopefully both encouraging and critical. And for the reader, they are called to actually commit themselves to something, to not just doom-scroll their brains into chewed-up gum. If I have 6 subscriptions that I’m committed to, I’ll be reading those right away, not scrolling endlessly for something novel.

The implementation of a subscription model like this wouldn’t even be that difficult. As the reader, you could easily get notifications if you are in danger of being dropped from a subscription. As the author, you could easily enable this as an optional subscription tier, in the same way that many offer paid subscriptions with perks. I would be willing to bet that most accounts on Substack would value this type of subscription over a paying one. I know that I would.

Proposal #2 - Poetry Guild

The second proposal is for something a bit larger than a modified subscription model. Many of us are blessed with people who read our work and give us good feedback. These are often people who don’t write poetry themselves, but enjoy reading and have a genuine love for the art. This type of feedback from the “non-poet” is extremely important. Poets tend to get caught up in themselves, so having this feedback is a good grounding wire, keeping up safe so that we don’t build up too much static charge.

Yet this feedback sometimes is lacking in terms of discussion around the craft of writing. Enter the Poetry Guild.

A Poetry Guild would be a group that is composed of members who are all poets themselves, who regularly write and are concerned with growing in the craft of writing. There would be frequent analysis and discussion of the poems that are produced by each member, along with a periodical publication released to the public.

Membership in a guild would entail a strong commitment by each person, along with a series of required “duties.” Each month (or week, or two weeks) each poet would be required to complete a poem and submit it to the rest of the guild. Following this submission, each poet would also be required to review a number of poems by the other poets. These reviews would be thorough, discussing what the poem says, how it says it, and how effective it is. Finally, the review would end with a declaration of whether the reviewer believes the poem is ready for publication. If a poem passes all reviews, it can be presented to the full guild and, pending approval there, can be included in the guild’s next external publication.

This design would have many compelling benefits for the poet. They would receive regular, honest feedback on their poems by other poets. They would get to practice reviewing other poems, exercising their ability to judge the good from the bad (along with how to articulate that). It would create a good bond between the guild members as they all work toward the common goal of excellency.

Additionally, there would be many benefits for the readers of the guild’s publication. First off, the publication is necessary because poets exist for the world, not for themselves. If the group has no output, then it has lost its touch with reality and its reason for existing.

Secondly, this design would decentralize the editing process for the journal. Sifting through poems would no longer be the task for one over-worked editor, but the responsibility of everyone in the guild. Readers of the publication would know that each poem passed the rigor of multiple editors, not the whim or tastes of a single one (as good as he/she may be). They could also be treated with access to the reviews produced for each poem, giving them insight into how to understand the poem and how the guild judges poetry.

This submission, review, and publication would be some of the main mechanics of the Poetry Guild, but there could be many others as well. Every publication, a few members could be tasked with writing a short article. Also, the guild should be meeting regularly, potentially in person depending on the locality of the members. There’s no greater way to build bonds than to see another human in the flesh, to hear their voice, watch them laugh and sneeze and eat a piece of pizza.

It would also be important to establish what the boundaries of the guild would be and how large it would be allowed to get. Are you free or formal verse only? Are you Christian or non-religious? There needs to be good commonality between the members, while also retaining enough difference to allow for good, challenging discussions.

Conclusion

These are all ideas at the moment, so I’d like to hear from other authors if they would find any of them compelling. Creating a guild would likely require the most work, yet I believe it’d be the most fruitful. It is, by far, the idea that I’m the most interested in.

But in summary, whether the modified subscription or the guild ideas are any good, I still believe that cost is one of the true measures of a good community. So don’t be cheap. Give yourself to others, engage, offer (and request) real feedback, send people books, dedicate a poem to someone. If you’re writing for yourself, you won’t be a writer for long.

If you’d like to receive more of my poetry or articles, the best way is to subscribe to my primary blog over at whomadetheeyes.com.

Subscribe (primary blog)

You can also subscribe to my Substack here:

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading! No aspect of this article was written or edited using AI.

Pray for poets, poor old souls,
Who trip on sticks and fall in holes,
Who task themselves impossibly
To fasten clouds to paper trees,
So grandiose, they die for words
But when they're read, they blush as birds,
Who slave to solve infinity
With letters less than thirty-three
(Inflicted with eternity),
Who turn the keys to ancient doors
On houses never built before,
Who give us bodies for our breath
And find in graves much more than death,
Who bleed for us these baubles small,
That gift us with a sweet recall,
To carry, crumpled, in our pockets,
Bound to us in little lockets,
Love and music, lovely lore.
So pray for poets - we need more.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to main blog (preferred)

While Adam slept, his side was cleaved for Eve,
The only woman to be born from man,
As sweetest honey won for his reprieve,
Drawn from a royal body, torn and tan.
So too was Judah’s heir with hanging frame
Found, from which both blood and water ran.
Yet in the trees he later called her name,
Awake, as gardener and groom the same.
She had seen the spear’s piercing plan
To rend his temple chest with Eden’s shame
And she remembered Noah and his clan,
Who hid in him within the water’s weave.
The bride will be so bound to him again,
Cleaved to Christ on New Creation’s eve.

This is my third Sal, a chiastic form that I created a few years ago. Find more of this form here. You can read this poem on my primary blog here:

Original Post

References: Gen. 2:21-22, Judg. 14:8-9, John 19:34, John 20:11-16, Gen. 7:11-16, Rev. 19:6-8

Subscribe now

Subscribe to primary blog (preferred)

Hush, hush, the snow on the brush,
	Alone in the silver hill;
Shuffle, crunch, the powdery bunch
	Now lost in the winter’s will.

The empty trees were stuck in the freeze
	As posts of some old home;
Its roof was white as the cloudy light
	That shone on the snowy foam.

Hush, below, the mumbling flow,
	The shallow, crackling creek;
Through roots and shale it was dug in the dale
And all of its surface was solid and frail
And speckled with prints of a paw or a tail
	Of creatures, hidden and meek.

And feeling the flush, the blood in my blush,
	The shivering warmth in my chest,
I walk with all, the thrush and his call,
	The world, awake and at rest.

You can find this poem and all other published poetry on my blog, to which you can subscribe here.

Subscribe to blog

These last few months I have been working on compiling the content that I have posted to the Who Made The Eyes blog in 2025 (or, more accurately, from Nov. 2024 to Nov. 2025) into a book. The idea began with me wanting to have my poems in print rather than merely on a screen to be scrolled through. From there, it grew into a full anthology of the year, complete with an Introduction, some Articles, my Poet’s Notes (which are normally Patron exclusive), some selections from Poetry Pie, and a few graphics.

And now, Who Made The Eyes But I? - Volume 1 is available for purchase! My plan to is to create a similar anthology for each year operating this blog, creating a series of volumes that just might look good on your shelf.

The book is available for purchase on Amazon, and also directly from me on my WMTE site. Purchasing directly from me has the benefit of (1) supporting me more directly and (2) upgrading the book into an autographed Member Bundle. All members of my blog receive a discount on the book as well. Don’t miss out!

You can find all details, pictures, and purchase links on the following page.

Book Details

This has been my first attempt at self-publishing and the first time ever seeing my own name in print. What an experience! All drafting, design, and formatting was done by myself, which took about as much time as you're imagining... It was challenging, enlightening, and, in the end, quite rewarding.

Discovering this poetry community on Substack has been a highlight of this year. It brings me such joy to know that there are others out there that approach poetry in similar ways as I do. I thank you all for the good influence you have had on me, whether subtly or more directly. I hope you find the fruits of this influence in the pages of this book.

Soli Deo Gloria.

(PS - For you other Substack poets, you should attempt this!! As much work as it required, it was, all things considered, quite easy. In the end, all you need for Amazon KDP to publish is a well-formatted PDF. Submit this and you can have your own book in a week 🤯)

“Take and eat,” the serpent said,
Amid the calm of almond trees.
“You will not die, but see instead,
And so be free from his decrees.”
The tree of good and evil known
That God had grown in Eden’s breeze
Became a cross of curses thrown
Upon the fruit that hung alone.
The dying seed was sown for peace
And there the tree of life was grown.
For he who bled on bended knees,
Submitting to his holy head,
Had led his men at supper’s ease
To “Take and eat my wine and bread.”

This poem was inspired by a quote by Derek Kidner, which you can find on the original posting. To learn more about the Sal form, read this description. To directly receive all poems as they release, subscribe to my primary blog.

Subscribe

Coo, coo, my quiet child,
Do not sleep, but speak to me.
Say those syllables of old,
That ancient language lost to man.
You ought to talk of all your thoughts
And teach me meaning long forgot.
I need your wisdom and your voice,
Your soft, serene soliloquy.
And yet your eyes, they drip and droop -
It is hard work, this dialogue. 
Yes, you need sleep, yet I need you
To coo and keep me company.

~ for the child that we don’t have

This poem (as all my poetry) was originally published on my primary blog where I actively write. If you liked this, consider subscribing over there to receive all my poetry when it is first published.

Subscribe

My rose is often red and often pale
and often do I pray up to the sun
that it would gaze at her without its veil
and warm her shadows back till there were none.
For in her earth she droops her petaled head
and morning dew remains throughout the day
to drip as tears that wet her shady bed,
a poisoned soil, lost to daylight’s ray.
Yet still sustained, I see her, nobly so,
and note how pallor blends her petal’s hue,
how scarlet tinges fringe her folded view
accentented by the creamy earth below;
that so, when looking at the fields in full
I find in her more beauty than the whole.

This poem (as all my poetry) was originally published on my primary blog where I actively write. If you liked this, consider subscribing over there to receive all my poetry when it is first published.

Subscribe to my Primary Blog

I sat outside in sunny Spring
In skirmish with a writer’s thought; 
I fought with words on navy keys,
Unruly troops of thoughts unsought.

When all at once a wind began
And ran to me from Southern clears.
It loosened fleets of flying foes,
The helicopter bombardiers.

They came in rank and flanked my seat
And jammed my keys from rattling.
Smart play, I’d say, to seize the chance
While in my inward battling.

A journalist in hostile land
I ran, rebuffed by their array,
And though so many crashed to earth
They slept as seeds for Summer’s day.

To receive all my poetry, subscribe to my primary blog: whomadetheeyes.com

Subscribe

The Problem

So you’ve worked for quite a while on your poem. You’ve spent weeks agonizing over an astonishingly small amount of words, and finally… it’s ready. Or at least you’ve decided that it needs to be ready (whether it really is or not). Like a dad sending his kid off to college, you get ready to ship it off to the world to see what it can do. You click that “Publish” button and hear your phone ping with the alert.

And then you immediately check that very post on your phone (to make sure you didn’t misspell “unrequited”) and find that something terrible has happened.

Your lines have been wrapped!! (dramatic explosions heard off in the distance)

Due to the size constraints of so many phones (and even tablets/desktops), your lines of poetry will often be too long to fit within the width of the content space. The publisher (in this case, Substack) has only one choice, and that is to wrap that line of poetry onto the next line.

This is a perfectly acceptable solution for almost all types of written content except for poetry. In poetry, the line as a complete, uninterrupted unit is of critical value. In rhymed poetry, the end of the line contains the rhymed word which will audibly (and visually) link to the following lines that rhyme with it. But if that line is wrapped these connections are devastated and the visual presence of the poem is weakened.

See how this type of formatting has almost ruined one of my sonnets (Holy War), which I screenshot off of my phone from Substack.

The visual presence of the poem has been completely ruined… Some lines are wrapped while other ones are not. The same thing would be done to Poe’s “The Raven,” were I to paste the first stanza into a Substack “poetry” block.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
    While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
            Only this and nothing more.”

“The Raven,” written in a hearty trochaic octameter, is a bit of a stretch for any publisher. But I still find that this kind of wrapping happens to about 60% of iambic pentameter lines.

And though I primarily write formal verse, the effects are even worse for the Free Verse poet! Indentation and line breaks are some of the core elements of the free verse poem. But when viewed online, I suddenly have no assurance concerning whether the poet meant to enjamb that new line, or if it was just too plain long for the website to handle.

This is a major problem because, as readers, our eyes subconsciously scan ahead to see what is coming. We can tell how long the line is, how much breath we need to complete the phrase. We can see the shape and similarity of the words, anticipating the punctuation that drastically determines the meaning of the sentence. The poem exists visually as much as it does audibly and in its sense.

The Fix

As far as I’m concerned, there are only two options to fix this, none of which Substack does. The first is a temporary user fix, the second is more serious developer fix.

(1) Turn your phone sideways. This is a nice hack for the reader to give themselves more horizontal space for the poem they are reading. Unfortunately, the Substack (Android) app does not currently support horizontal rotation.

(2) Turn off wrapping and provide a horizontal scroll-bar. In this way, the lines for each poem will never wrap; the user will instead have to scroll to the right to read the ends of each line. I find that this is only a small inconvenience since I am already scrolling with my fingers.

As for point #2, I’ve already implemented it over on my primary blog. This took a bit of effort in creating an HTML block for my poetry, but I’m very happy with the results. To see a direct comparison, using my Holy War poem, follow both links below to see how my site formats the poem compared to Substack.

Holy War (Substack)

Holy War (my site)

I love that Substack already has a dedicated “Poetry” block in their editor. I just think that this could be a great addition to that functionality. If Substack wants to be serious about providing a place for poets to publish their writing, then proper formatting of poems could be a massive selling point. If this post makes it before the eyes of any Substack developers, I would just say, humbly… ever so respectfully… YOU’RE SO CLOSE!

<ahem>

Anyway, please let me know if you agree, or if these concerns are just irrational and I need to take a hike. If you do agree, share it out so that it could potentially get seen by whomever in Substack could make this call.

Share

In the home of my beautiful child
A life, eternal, formed anew,
The craft of hands no man could boast,
The weaving of immortal fingers,
Formed to feel the wind and water,
Made to make, to awake the dawn,
Made to praise with endless breath
The One whose Providence had penned it.
And yet, it fell, carried to death,
A seed unmade in a silent sleep
Before its form could bloom in youth,
Never to hold its father's finger,
Never to sleep in its mother's hand,
But quietly buried with mourning anew
In the tomb of my beautiful child.

The original post on my primary blog can be found here, along with Poet’s Notes for my Patron members.

A swell and a breath
And a sigh lullaby,
A mother and son
In a chair nearby,
Asleep in a morning
That woke with a cry.

Now fed and content
He forgot his old woe
As he rest on the breast
Of his home long ago.

He slept as a sailor
At peace on the sea,
Who trusted the flow
Of the slumbering sea,
The swelling and ebbing
And rhyme of the sea.

The sun tried to peek
Through a window nearby,
Vainly attempting
To open an eye.
But the work - it was done
And the sleeper’s reply
Was a swell and a breath
And a sigh lullaby.

Link to original post on my primary blog.

Arise, O sleeping soul, and seize your sword
For hear that Death has ordered you to "Fold!
Return to sin and love your lord of old.
Yes, taste and see the good my gifts afford."
Yet more and more grip tight that sword, for stored
Within those lovely lies is mold retold
With pretty words, words the Word will hold
For wrath. For none outrun the Living Lord
Nor any beast outlast his steadfast sword.
With fear you see the beast, Behemoth, bold?
Behold! beheaded and behanded, cold
With praise its god, Dagon, had prostrate poured.
So hold His holy sword with feeble hand
And read of Him who holds the Holy Land.

Link to the original post on my primary blog.

He spoke with his immortal sword,
The sharpened tongue of double bite.
Refined in bronze, his feet afford
The fear of lords before his sight.
His lion eyes of fire gaze
On all Creation day and night -
The Son of Man with face ablaze,
Our sacred sun from ancient days.
His lamb-like hair was fairest white,
As silent snow in mountain ways.
With hands that held the hosts of light
He tended to the lamp’s reward.
And in his voice of roaring might
He spoke of Genesis restored.

To read more about the form I invented for this poem, visit this article over on my primary blog: Sal (סל).

My primary blog also contains my Poet’s Notes for this poem, available for Patron members.