Richard Jeffrey Newman's Miscellany

It’s a NY Chanukah! Chag Sameach, if you’re celebrating!

This poem and the turn when it becomes about gun violence:

“That will stop us from wanting to turn to anything under the wide starry sky that is not the green fire burning in the minds of those men or the green

of a blanket America provides & provides without change?”  

Caught my first plagiarist just two papers in. She cut and pasted an entire paragraph from Publisher’s Weekly as her introduction.

This is very dangerous: “In its agreement with the Office for Civil Rights, the university said it would hold a series of community meetings, conduct anti-Semitism training and make clear in its anti-discrimination policy that Jewish students shared a national origin “on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

An interesting article in the Times about a post-social media world. Not stuff I have thought deeply about, but it was thought provoking.

I’ve just sent an email to David, but I am wondering if anyone else here who is using @Blot is having trouble posting/creating drafts?

This tweet made me laugh out loud.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new publication to announce, so I am happy to share that BigCityLit has published three poems from my sequence, This Sentence Is a Metaphor for Bridge.

For her, this is keeping me company while I grade.

I wrote a “craft talk” on rhythm and the line in Quincy Troupe’s work that was published on the blog of AWP’s Two-year College Creative Writing Caucus.

Perhaps the smartest critique of the how-to-fix-masculinity industry—and part of the problem, of course, is that it is an industry—from Iron John till now, that I’ve ever read. Definitely worth reading: Men at Work, by Barrett Swanson - Harper’s Magazine

“Failed Essay on Privilege,” by Elisa Gonzalez - The New Yorker

This Twitter thread from an independent bookstore owner and an open letter to Jeff Bezos.

By the way, that four page poem I posted about a week or so ago is now up to 15 pages and counting. It will no doubt end up being shorter than 15 when I’m done revising, but I am also sure it’s not going back down to 4 pages. I’ve never written even a first draft this long.

Aaaaand…the rejections have started coming in. Ah well…that just means I need to set some time aside to send more submissions out again.

I was 13 months. I remember that teddy bear. He became my toilet training buddy.

First poem in a long time and it’s already four pages long. Sometimes I wish I wrote tightly wrought lyrics…

From Long Guns, by Carl Sandburg:

“Then came Oscar, the time of the guns,
And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,
Unless guns sprang up
And spoke their language.
The how of running the world was all in guns.”

That moment, when you’ve finished one project, you’ve given yourself some time off, and now you’ve got two or three in-progress things to choose from and you still can’t choose.

If you her full size, you’d think she was too big to fit into this box

Recently, I’ve been paying too little attention to sending work out. This month, I decided to change that. I just counted: 18 submissions in September. I know that most of them will be rejected, but the number (in Hebrew it means “life”) makes me happy nonetheless.

A special delivery to keep me company while I’m commenting on student poems.

I’m guessing others here have already seen this, but in case not: Facebook Tests Hiding ‘Likes’ on Social Media Posts

Going to a training session on Turnitin this morning. I’m oddly less worried about my students plagiarizing—my assignments make that difficult—than I am about whether I’ll find accepting, commenting on, and returning their papers digitally more convenient.

100,000 men have been sexually assaulted in the military in the past decades, from The NY Times.