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The Stillness Issue / August 8, 2026
Storm's End, Beyond the Self, Tree by Tree, Silent Travel
Today's issue is sponsored by 1440.
Welcome to The Stillness Issue, where the noise finally loses its grip. May this week's issue reward those of you willing to stop moving long enough to hear your own life again.
"Replenish," the poem that opens the issue, arrives in the five minutes right after a storm passes, when nothing has to happen next. Everything that follows keeps circling that same hush, a poet who spent fifty years arguing against noise, a man who planted a forest instead, travelers now paying to hear nothing at all. Sit down. Stay a while. You might recognize something you forgot you knew.
Jason
jasonzguest.com
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Featured Poem
A body finally exhales after the storm passes.
Echoes
He wanted poetry to look outward, not inward.
Testaments
He left Manhattan to plant a forest instead.
Creative Spotlight
Silence has quietly become this year's most fashionable luxury.
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Featured Poem
Replenish
Replenish
By Jason Z Guest
Rest,
The color of pastel-blue hydrangeas,
It happens after a depleted storm of churning determination,
It sounds like the gentle chirp of a songbird from outside your quiet window,
And smells of fresh rain.
Rest.
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Echoes
A Movement Built to Quiet the Self
Dick Allen was born in Troy, New York, on this day in 1939, and grew up near the Adirondack Mountains in the small town of Round Lake, New York. He earned his B.A. from Syracuse University in 1961 and his M.A. from Brown University in 1964, then spent a career teaching creative writing, first at Wright State University from 1964 to 1968 and then at the University of Bridgeport, where he retired as the Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor. |
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Allen became a founding figure of the Expansive Poetry movement by the 1980s, a direct reaction against the confessional free verse that dominated American poetry. He argued that too many poems had shrunk to a single complaining voice, and he pushed instead for narrative, formal structure, and attention turned outward, toward the world beyond the self.
"Expansive is the kind of poetry which tries to go beyond."
— Dick Allen, interview with the Hartford Courant, 2010 Allen went on to win the Robert Frost Prize, the Hart Crane Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, and he served as Connecticut's Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2015. His argument never changed. A poem earns its stillness by looking past the self long enough to actually see something.
Read the essay that started the movement.
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Testaments
Building Silence, Tree by Tree
W.S. Merwin arrived on Maui in 1976 already famous, restless, and by his own account worn down by the noise of Manhattan literary life. He had two National Book Award nominations behind him and a Pulitzer Prize still ahead, but what drew him to Hawaii was not ambition. He came to study under the Zen Buddhist teacher Robert Aitken, and once he arrived, he largely stayed. |
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The land he bought was a failed pineapple plantation, stripped of topsoil and abandoned to scrub grass. Merwin and his wife, Paula, built their home by hand, without a telephone, and began planting palms one at a time. There was no plan beyond the next tree. Over four decades, that patience produced one of the largest palm collections in the world, nineteen acres restored from nothing by two people with shovels and an unreasonable amount of quiet.
The discipline carried directly into his poetry. In the late 1960s, Merwin made the decision to abandon punctuation almost entirely, a choice he described as an attempt to let a poem breathe the way a person breathes, without the interruption of a comma telling the reader when to pause. The absence of punctuation did not create confusion. It created space, and inside that space, stillness became the poem's actual subject rather than its backdrop.
"no trace of regret in the sound or in the stillness after the falling"
— W.S. Merwin, "Garden Notes"
He died in 2019, in the house he built, surrounded by the forest he had spent his life growing. The Merwin Conservancy now maintains both as a place of retreat for other writers, which feels less like an ending than a continuation. Merwin did not write about stillness from a distance. He spent forty years building it, tree by tree, until it was simply where he lived.
Walk the forest one poet built out of nothing.
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Creative Spotlight
Quiet Is Suddenly Expensive
Silent travel is one of the fastest-growing threads in wellness right now, and none of it is marketing spin. Phone-free lodges, no-talking retreats, and guided silent walks have moved from niche to mainstream in the span of a few years, with wellness travelers increasingly willing to pay a premium for less input, not more. |
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"a star twitching its ears at the rain"
— Denise Levertov, "Come into Animal Presence" The naturalized American poet Denise Levertov wrote that line about a rabbit whose hearing stayed tuned to the smallest sound, and most of us have lost that particular skill somewhere between the last three decades of notifications. Gordon Hempton has spent his career trying to win it back for the rest of us. An acoustic ecologist known as the Sound Tracker, Hempton has traveled the globe for more than four decades recording the world's vanishing natural soundscapes.
He cofounded Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit that has spent years identifying and certifying the last genuinely quiet places left on the planet, from an Ecuadorian rainforest to an urban park in London. His argument is extremely well timed. Quiet is not the absence of something. It is its own resource, and like clean water, it can run out.
Find out where the world still goes quiet.
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